October 27, 2011
Magnus Mills: A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In
When I was younger, it used to drive me mad when friends (or, more often, family members) would knock music by artists I loved, saying: “All their songs sound the same.” What they meant, I thought, was that their songs don’t sound like anyone else. So it is with Magnus Mills: all his books sound the same, in a sense, because they don’t sound like anyone else.
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, therefore, is in a sense business as usual for Mills. It places us in the usual nonspecific but familiar setting, and gives us the unnamed narrator, the bluff blank dialogue, the sense of circularity, and expectations of frustrated progress (both the characters’ and the reader’s). What we also get is Mills’s trademark representation of the world of work and labour, which has occupied so many of his novels. He is most interesting when approaching it at an angle rather than head-on. All Quiet on the Orient Express, where a man “spills a tin of green paint and thereby condemns himself to death”, for example, is a chewier stew than the more directly work-related Scheme for Full Employment or Mills’s last novel, The Maintenance of Headway. With A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, the oblique title confirms that we are in sideways territory again, and sure enough, the result is one of Mills’s most ambitious and satisfying confections.
Our hero – why not call him that? – is a naïf finding his way: the rules of the world are explained to the reader as he discovers them. This is not to say that the reader ends up enlightened, or running ahead of the narrator: correspondences in literature and history suggest themselves, but remain inchoate. The Empire of Greater Fallowfields, for example, where the book is set, looks very like Britain (it has “the only flag that could be flown upside-down without anybody noticing”), or rather like a cross between a fairytale reading and a media interpretation of it. People appointed to high office have no idea what they are doing, there is a general loss of purpose, like in Vonnegut’s Slapstick, where people “had to believe all their lives that they were perhaps sent to the wrong Universe, since no one has ever bid them welcome or given them anything to do.” Now that they have been given something to do – Postmaster General, Astronomer Royal, Pellitory-of-the-Wall – the characters are defined, literally and psychologically, by their roles. Their personalities are not ruled by the usual qualities in fiction: ambition, envy, passion; instead we get humanity writ small: pedantry, bossiness, passive-aggressive needling. When one complains about unfair treatment, another points out that “unfairness is what keeps the world going round.”
The narrator’s role is Principal Composer to the Imperial Court. He takes up residence in the ‘cake’, the building where the orchestra practises and the conductor Greylag composes music which will be credited to the Principal Composer. He may not know much about music, but our man at least knows more about the stars than the new Astronomer Royal (“They’re all fixed, are they? Well, that’s definitely a fact worth knowing. Thank you”), who can’t even get his telescope to work – though he will once he finds a use for the universal sixpence stipend which none of the court officials is otherwise able to spend. Meanwhile, they are treated with surly compliance by the workers – “serfs” – of Greater Fallowfields, and they are required to rehearse a play which has parallels simultaneously with Macbeth and with their own predicament. Petty bureaucracy is never far from hand: “It’s treasonous to interfere with the postal service,” says Wryneck to Garganey (all the names are like that). “Even to make improvements?” “I’m afraid so.”
Analogues and connections spring up, but scatter as the mind settles on them. Is it a parallel for Nazi Germany, or postwar Germany, or the drifting United Kingdom? The people of Greater Fallowfields believe that the world envies them, when in fact it is passing them by while they remain caught up in their own affairs. They take notice only when the outside world becomes a threat as a neighbouring country builds a railway into Fallowfields. So concerned are the empire’s noblemen about their neighbours taking over (“the customs of the east,” says Smew. “We don’t want them here”), it doesn’t initially occur to them that the greater threat might be from their own people leaving. They are complicit in their own downfall because they are tied to the past and comfortable in their own limitations (“I’d have liked to have been able to award Greylag and the orchestra with a day off in recognition of their valiant efforts, but unfortunately this was beyond my gift”) - even though those limitations, the roles they hold, were only recently new to them. ”Progress doesn’t bring improvement,” one of the noblemen says. “It just makes people think they’re cleverer than they actually are.”
As with most Magnus Mills books, the best approach is to forget about pinning it down and simply enjoy the slipstream. A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is sparklingly sad and seriously funny. It tells us about loss and power and control and authority and things that more literal and realistic books would not address half as directly. It reminded me most of all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpiece The Unconsoled; like that book, like life, here all the characters can do is “try to carry on as though everything was normal.”
October 13, 2011
Deborah Levy: Swimming Home
Swimming Home is one of the launch titles from And Other Stories, a new publisher headed by alumni from Serpent’s Tail (Stefan Tobler) and Dalkey Archive (Sophie Lewis). Such a provenance immediately made me want to read this novel (a quote on the back from Jeanette Winterson and an introduction by Tom McCarthy sealed the deal).
You can read my review of the book for the Guardian, here.
October 6, 2011
Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
This is one of those books that I would happily have ignored as ‘not for me’ (indeed, I happily had) but for a friend urging me to read it in the strongest terms (“one of the best books I’ve read all year”). Does it matter, I tentatively wondered, that I barely know of Edward Thomas at all, and certainly haven’t read his poetry? “Absolutely not.”
Now All Roads Lead to France may be encumbered by a clumsy (albeit relevant) title, but the subtitle is unarguable. It relates, season by season, the last four years of Edward Thomas’s life, before he died on the Arras battlefield on 9 April 1917. The previous day, a dud shell had delivered him a lucky escape. Then, after a successful Allied assault, Thomas leaned into a dug-out to fill his pipe when “a shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart. He fell without a mark on his body.”
Matthew Hollis follows the old principle that you should begin a story as close to the end as possible, and his book is all the better for it. In a life of thirty-nine years, where Thomas didn’t even begin writing poetry until a little over two years before his death, the risk of boring the reader with childhood and early life would be great. Instead Hollis fills us in briefly with what we need to know, and concentrates in detail on Thomas and his surroundings and influences.
In fact, this is not just a book about Edward Thomas, but about the cultural life of England in the early twentieth century, and the opposing forces who wanted to move poetry on from its Edwardian stagnation. In one corner were the ‘Georgian poets’, so called for their inclusion in anthologies edited by Edward Marsh and published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop between 1912 and 1922. They included, behind the survivors like Rupert Brooke and John Masefield, thickets of poets each of whom regarded himself as the greatest poet in England, all now more or less forgotten: W.W. Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, W.H. Davies. The Georgians were, said Monro, a ‘forward movement’ in poetry, and he probably didn’t intend faint praise when he described their verse as something “the general public could appreciate without straining its intelligence.” To others, the Georgians, with their innocent, pastoral poems in sing-song rhythms, were beneath regard. As T.S. Eliot put it, not intending any kind of praise, “the Georgians caress everything they touch.” Squared up opposite were the Imagists, including Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Richard Aldington, but most prominently Ezra Pound, and whose manifesto required direct treatment, pared language and a relatively free verse. They were, as Hollis says, “modern, forward-facing, trim,” and exemplified in Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’.
I didn’t know Edward Thomas’s poetry at all when I started this book, though I enjoyed the first few sections so much that I quickly went out and bought his Collected Poems. The first glance of them seems to park him with the Georgians: the bucolic concerns, the looking down and looking in, the frequent recourse to rhyme. In fact what Hollis convincingly shows us in the first half of the book – before Thomas had written a single poem – is that he was persuaded of the need for a new cadence or tone in poetry for years before he began writing it. This conviction was shared by the man who more than any other shaped Thomas’s approach to poetry and who is here so thoroughly presented that he becomes the second subject of the book: Robert Frost.
The names are coming thick now: Frost, Pound, Eliot, Brooke, Yeats too. Hollis’s biography quickens an entire lost world, and is a rounded recreation of the sort of literary life which has always seemed just out of arm’s – or time’s – reach. It seemed out of reach to Thomas too, who by 1913, at the age of 35, was a busy critic, editor and biographer. He had published more than twenty prose books and more than 1,500 signed book reviews (with plenty more printed sans byline). But his prolific rate did not mean low standards: he was “the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry,” according to a letter in The Times, and Walter de la Mare praised his unswerving commitment to distinguishing rich crop from fallow field:
For the true cause, he believed, is better served by an uncompromising ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ than by an amiable ‘All are welcome’.
(De La Mare also said, perceptively and presciently, that “any reviewer who uses the word ‘genius’ should be fined for the benefit of a literary fund.”) Thomas, busying himself with scrappy literary work, had suffered from depression since before going to university, and found no happiness in family life. In reading of his breathtaking disregard for the needs of his wife and children, I was reminded of John Cheever, who “loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown.” Thomas spent as much time as possible away from his family, and made them miserable when he did return for brief visits. When his wife Helen was pregnant with their second child, she wrote to a friend, “I have prayed that I and my babe may die, but we shall not, tho this would free Edward.” Thomas himself acknowledged that “What I really ought to do is live alone” (which he more or less did, given his frequent weeks-, even months-long absences) but was not above absurdly passing the blame, or at least failing to take it upon himself. “But I can’t find the courage to do the many things necessary for taking that step. It is really the kind [Helen] and the children who make life almost impossible.” Since Thomas had no considerate person in his life to tell him to shit or get off the pot, he continued this selfish behaviour until his death. Was the unhappiness he brought his wife and children worth it for the poems it gave us?
It is not, of course, a biographer’s job to pass judgment on his subject, but at times Hollis seems almost to be writing a narrative account from Thomas’s own viewpoint, with all the identification that implies. There is only a little of the marriage problems from the standpoint of Helen, the wife who put the long into long-suffering. He implicitly criticises a poetry editor, who knew Thomas well, for returning poems to him unread (even though Thomas had submitted them as the work of another, anonymous, poet, so the editor couldn’t know they were Thomas’s own). And he offers no comment on Thomas’s embarrassing renunciation of his early – farsighted – praise of Ezra Pound, apparently to save his critical career in the face of outrage from London’s literary cliques. However, these are the only weak points I could find in an otherwise exemplary (half-) Life. If pushed, I could also complain about the choice of tired photos – so ubiquitous they’re invisible – of several of the main players: I only have to say the names W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke and I guarantee you will know exactly which photos are used to depict them in the short eight pages of illustrations. However I presume these – school of Google Image search, page 1 – were not Hollis’s choices.
Ah yes: back to Robert Frost. He dominates much of the book, and his poems are written about here with such sympathy and understanding that I immediately wanted to read them instead of Thomas’s. He was Thomas’s greatest friend and mentor, and the two independently came up, then supported one another in, the notion of “the sound of sense”: a new acknowledgement of poetry as carrying the rhythms and tones of natural speech. This was, to use a terrible phrase, a third way which challenged both Georgian ornament and Imagist minimalism. It came from a belief that “words exist in the mouth, not in books.” Simultaneously acknowledging and challenging his antecedents, Frost declared that his own verse “dropped to an everyday level of diction that even Wordsworth kept above.” For Thomas’s part, he eschewed the forcing of rhyme where none naturally existed, warning himself against “any future lenience to the mob of gentlemen who rhyme with ease.” Hollis’s careful unpicking and assembly of Thomas’s and Frost’s theories of ‘the sound of sense’ is thrilling and brilliant; we see Thomas gradually and then suddenly become a poet, erupting with a white heat of creativity in late 1914. (“Did anyone ever begin at 36 in the shade?” he wondered.) For him this was a natural development, fuelled by Frost’s empathy, of his thinking since the turn of the century: “the best lyrics seem to be the poet’s natural speech,” he wrote in 1901, or as Hollis more formally puts it, this was “the overlaying of variable speech rhythms upon the strictures of conventional blank verse.”
She found the celandines of February
Always before us all. Her nature and name
Were like those flowers, and now immediately
For a short swift eternity back she came,
Beautiful, happy, simply as when she wore
Her brightest bloom among the winter hues
Of all the world; and I was happy too,
Seeing the blossoms and the maiden who
Had seen them with me Februarys before,
Bending to them as in and out she trod
And laughed, with locks sweeping the mossy sod.
It seems likely that this book will be read predominantly by those who already know Thomas’s poetry. For me, the result is an enlightening and peculiarly tense read: wondering whether he will actually get around to writing all that verse as the end grows nearer and he heads off to war – or, more seriously, feeling the anticipatory fizz as I awaited the unveiling of the work. (Beginning in his mid-30s and knowing so much about poetry before he began means that Thomas has almost no apprenticeship material: his gift springs from the womb fully formed.)
The corollary of that is that once Thomas gets going, and once he goes off to war and his death comes closer, the book seemed less urgent to me. His desire to go to war was not so relaxed as Rupert Brooke’s (“Well, if Armageddon’s on, I suppose one should be there”), and Hollis suggests that it came from a fear of seeming unmanly, deriving most strongly from one incident where he failed to back up Robert Frost in a dispute with a gamekeeper. Also, the money was welcome: he could earn more as an officer than he did from his writing. The last third of the book becomes almost literally a life in poetry: Hollis quotes generously from Thomas’s work as his poems transmute his daily lived experiences into art. This is welcome, though it remained the case that the first half of the book triumphed over the second: because the most extraordinary aspect of Thomas to me is not what he did with his poetic gift, or how the world lost it so quickly, but that he managed to get there in the first place.
September 22, 2011
John Burnside: A Summer of Drowning
Reading two books by one author in the same year is rare for me, but how many authors present so many different forms to us as John Burnside? A poet, novelist and memoirist, his acclaim in all three areas would be sickening if it weren’t so thrilling. As noted previously, I had given up on his fiction after the diminishing returns of his first three novels, but his first memoir A Lie About My Father had me agog a few months ago, and keen to read his recent stuff. The impulse was supported when I read that Burnside himself now regards the second and third novels which lost me as “disastrous”. Time to come right up to date then, with his latest.
A Summer of Drowning suffers, in my view, from a troublesome (hardback) cover. (The printed version is much darker than the image above.) Even as an interested party, I saw it and thought, what were they thinking? As it happens, my scepticism was unjustified: the cover shows the painting Fisherman’s Cottage by Harald Sohlberg, which is significant in the story. Indeed, as I became more and more delighted and disturbed by this exceptional novel, I took to contemplating the cover in wonder in between bursts of reading. But a cover which attracts only after the reader has begun the book could still look like an own goal.
It is narrated by Liv, a twenty-eight year old woman who lives with her mother on Kvaløya, a small island in the Arctic Circle. Liv tells us how ten years ago a local boy, Mats Sigfridsson, drowned off the island: “I like to think that the sea took pity on the puny child it had killed, and was in the process of carrying him home.” Not only that, Mats’ brother Harald died the same way ten days later, and a visitor to the island, Martin Crosbie, went missing shortly afterwards. Normally it would be blogging etiquette to emphasise that this is not a spoiler, and here you may be doubly reassured: not only does Liv tell us all this in the prologue, but the book doesn’t really go into much detail about the events when the narrative does catch up with them. This is one of those tricky volumes where the first task of the reader is to determine exactly what it’s about.
It’s about, at least in part, Liv and her mother, Angelika Rossdal. She is a painter who, having gained fame, appears to reject it by withdrawing to the frozen north. I say appears to because she continues to welcome journalists who want to interview her, and to hold court for a group of men Liv refers to as “the suitors” and whose interest, whatever form it in fact takes, her mother clearly finds satisfying. (Liv never knew her father, though she discovers that he was her mother’s opposite: a campaigner and ideologue who wanted to change the world by engaging people with it.) Liv has been in her mother’s shadow for so long that it is hard to tell who the thoughts belong to when she says something like this, concerning her mother’s withdrawal:
To turn away from the busy world is interesting, up to a point … but to refuse oneself is exemplary. To become nothing, to remove yourself from the frame – that is the highest form of art.
She is not just talking about an artist’s work. Mats and Harald Sigfridsson, in drowning, may have removed themselves from the frame, and become nothing. Liv herself, solitary and unclubbable, has refused herself in relation to many aspects of society in the ten years since the boys died. “I chose to become invisible. … I have remained in these meadows, where I have always been, and I have done nothing at all.” Her only significant human contact is Kyrre Opdahl, a man who has lived in the area for as long as anyone can remember, and who “was my own personal storyteller, someone who charmed and frightened me, in more or less equal measure, all the time I was growing up.” Kyrre rents out a cottage, or hytte, to tourists each summer, and tells Liv about the huldra, a wild spirit who takes the form of a beautiful girl and lures men to their doom. (“First she brought him a little happiness, then she killed him.”)
Liv’s mother has a great gift in her painting, which means that her lack of interest in people is accepted, even viewed as selfless: she had to remove herself from society to fulfil her potential. The reader may not be so convinced. The myth of Narcissus is related in the book, and referred to in an epigraph. It’s typically remembered as a simple warning against self-regard, but Liv is reminded by one of her mother’s suitors, Ryvold, that it goes deeper. Narcissus didn’t know to begin with that it was himself was seeing in the pool.
He had thought he was alone, looking at a world separate from him, a world of other things, and then, all of a sudden, he sees that he is in that world. [...] And it’s only when he discovers the truth, and sees that his self is an object in a world, like all the other objects, that he becomes a painter. Because, for the first time, he is part of the world, and art is his way of confirming that. A way of saying that he is in the world, in the world and of it.
Angela Rossdal’s self-denial, her “gift for refusal,” is not so humble as it seems. And she has not prepared her daughter well for living in the world by allowing her to believe herself not to be a part of it. (One might say that this story of erasure is just one psychological drama after another.) Where Angela’s fame and talent get her far, Liv has no such collateral with the islanders to justify her own isolation. What must they think of her? That appears to be something else the book is about, though I wasn’t entirely satisfied by this aspect. From the start we get hints of Liv as being somewhat unusual, unreliable even (“I have very few memories that I would be prepared to call my own”) and as the story proceeds, the clues build up. She spies on Kyrre Opdahl’s guests in the hytte: “It was because I wanted them to be happy”. This may be her best attempt at matching her mother’s careful negotiation of observation and distance. She becomes obsessed with the notion that the demonic huldra is a local girl called Maia (the only other female we meet on Kvaløya: Liv and her mother are surrounded by men). Burnside wants the book to be ambiguous – “The Turn of the Screw, set in the Arctic Circle” – but it already is, and is also rich and sinister, even without making Liv such an obvious object of suspicion for the reader.
The thrill of A Summer of Drowning comes from being in the presence of a writer on form and attacking his subject from all angles. (The style of the book, like an oral telling, makes the reader’s awareness of the teller – whether Liv or Burnside – central.) A sense of excitement began to stalk me from around the halfway point, a suspicion of horror internalised and unacknowledgeable, perhaps even coming from the reader himself. It was connected to Liv’s inability to be in the world and to accept the others who exist in it: she dreams of “some inconceivable Before,” when people did not yet exist. “I regret that lost state.” To bring about this sort of engagement with a book – hard to put your finger on but impossible to stop thinking about, even when you’re not reading it – is a rare achievement. Liv, in a sense, is the most frightening character I’ve read in a book in years. When she speaks of another character’s “immense, dark calm” and how, after an awful event, “she had started to relax – but she was relaxing into something terrible, and she was going about the world in a state of complete indifference to whatever might come,” it’s ominously clear what she’s really talking about. “Stories are really about time,” Ryvold tells her. “They tell us that once, in a place that existed before we were born, something occurred – and we like to hear about that, because we know already that the story is over.”
September 15, 2011
Jill Dawson: Lucky Bunny
I’ve reviewed Jill Dawson’s new novel Lucky Bunny for the Guardian. You can read the review by clicking here.
September 8, 2011
Julian Gough: Jude in London
I had praise for Julian Gough’s last novel, Jude: Level 1, a barmy, barnstorming satire on boomtime Ireland in which “realism doesn’t get a look-in but reality is ever-present.” That book has now been retrospectively retitled Jude in Ireland, to match this second volume in a projected trilogy (Jude in America is still to come). But one of my concerns for the first book was how, even at 180 pages, it risked straining the reader’s patience for its antic comic style. How then will we fare with the sequel, fully twice the length?
Jude in London might have better been titled Jude: Level 2, as this is no Patrick Hamilton or Iain Sinclair vision of London (“a city to fill the visible world”) as a central character in the book. Indeed, as a misguided Victoria Wood character once said of Fawlty Towers, “It could have been set anywhere.” Even Jude, our innocent abroad, isn’t quite sure where he is to begin with (or often thereafter). He alights on land after an eventful swim across the Irish Sea. “I looked down at the alien shore with great interest. So this was England! Or perhaps Wales.” Jude has crossed the sea to follow his double quest: to find the secret of his origins hinted to him at the orphanage in volume 1; and to find his true love, Angela. No matter that Angela has not expressed much reciprocal affection. Like most quests, the journey is all-important and the destination incidental, or rather the journey is the destination (the blurb gives away most of the plot on the back cover).
The plot is a structure around which Gough can do what he does best: knock seven bells out of certain aspects of contemporary society in a charming and hyperreal yarn of bonkers comic brilliance. (Even the copyright page is amusing without being annoying.) The storyline is a sequence of set pieces, where the characters are the satire and the satire is the action: the elements are inseparable and indistinguishable, and the scenes are constantly funny and constantly serious. Followers of Gough’s blog will know that he predicted the credit crunch with uncanny accuracy 18 months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and so it’s no surprise that large chunks of Jude in London deal with financial folly. (“The Celtic Tiger died long ago. In agony, after getting its goolies caught in the credit crunch.”) Two superb scenes show Gough at his best on this territory. First, former property speculators down on their luck try to build a wall using one brick and their old principles (“Brendan’s word is his bond. … Sorry, I should have said, as good as money in the bank. …Ah, yes, I meant, safe as Houses”). Second, there is a beautifully absurd analogy for the property crash rewritten as the Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble (first published on its own in 2003, and which you can read here). In these pieces, Gough pursues flights of fancy with ruthless logic. The perfect symbiosis he achieves between language and subject means that the comedy is a vehicle for the ideas at the same time that the ideas are a vehicle for the comedy.
It must be said that some of the targets of Gough’s satire – property developers, bankers, Young British Artists – have been softened up pretty well already. He shows more teeth when he tackles the Irish literary establishment, though curiously, I felt that this was where his satire seemed less well directed. “Ours is the first generation in three hundred years in which the Novel has made no progress,” we are told. Yet the authors he specifies – Johns McGahern and Banville, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín – seem among the least culpable for what Gough considers an excessive devotion to lyrical realism in the Irish novel. (Didn’t McGahern pretty much invent that form? Haven’t the others been innovators, now developing their style?) At its weakest, this section of the book devolves into a self-referential ding-dong with John Banville over waspish comments he made about Gough last year. But even while I queried its purpose, the scene of Jude recalling endless Irish novels of people attending funerals in the rain was very funny – and the words of one writer he encounters (“You can tell that we are Good Irish Writers, because the English give us prizes”) have a definite sting to them.
There’s a sense when Gough says that he wants “less good taste, more ideas, less melancholy, more va va voom” (and so on) in Irish fiction, that he’s making a virtue out of a necessity, and proclaiming those to be the desired qualities because that’s the way he happens to write. Shouldn’t the work speak for itself? But then, he does have these qualities and an ability to deploy them to good effect. Indeed, a shortage of ammunition is not one of Gough’s weaknesses. The book is both exhausting and invigorating. It has so many cultural references (from song lyrics to literary motifs) that reading it is like keeping track of the film homages in Shrek. It has things to say about economics, quantum mechanics, literature, even skincare (“a biro’s inner, ink-filled plastic tube is your only man for removing a blackhead”). It has an obscene villanelle. It has a surfeit of what J.B. Priestly called Komic Kapitals and too many silly jokes to count, including perhaps the worst forced pun I have ever read. (And I don’t mean the bit where Tracey Emin and Eminem join forces to fight for women’s rights and call their cause feminemineminemism. I am referring to a punchline bringing together Dylan Thomas and a colourblind pornography cameraman.) Sometimes, what seemed like a nice throwaway conceit in the last book (such as Jude having surgery to look like Leonardo DiCaprio) now seems like a millstone that Gough must forever keep his eye on: and then again it can spur him into greater inspirations of creativity. Gough has not so much killed his darlings, as filled the book with them.
His antic style tests the reader: a little silliness goes a long way, but Gough explores what happens if you carry on regardless, and often makes it out the other side. For many – sometimes for me – the book will be read in a condition of perpetual frustration at its seeming aimlessness, its constant threatening to disappear into chaos. But the chaos of real life replicated in the page might after all be a welcome change from the artificial order of so much contemporary literature. And once or twice, Gough shows that his reach extends beyond the comic. One otherwise predictable scene where Jude, at a Turner Prize exhibition, innocently ‘tidies up’ a series of famous artworks (and, more predictably still, earns the approbation of art critics in doing so), ends with a two-page passage where Jude contemplates Damien Hirst’s installation A Thousand Years with a straight face. It’s respectful, affecting and impressive, and one of the only moments where the book becomes serious at the level of character as well as ideas. In a blizzard of serious points made in silly ways, a serious point made in a serious way comes like a punch in the gut to the reader. More peace and pathos like this would have been welcome.
In all, Jude in London must be considered a success on its own terms. It creates a vision – or extends one from its predecessor – and runs with it. In one sense that might be all we can ask from a novel. As Jude himself says: “I brought the living book closer to my eyes so that it replaced the world entirely.”
This review previously appeared in a shorter form in the Irish Times
September 1, 2011
Italo Calvino: Mr Palomar
Italo Calvino is one of those authors – like Graham Greene – whose works I devoured in my early twenties, and haven’t read much since. Calvino in fact has continued to publish new work regularly since his death in 1985, from the bran tub of unpublished and uncollected writings his relatives keep dipping into. I think it is safe to say that none of these will overturn the major works - If on a winter’s night a traveller, Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, Marcovaldo, and so on. Then there is this book, which I recently remembered I didn’t finish first time around.
Mr Palomar (1983, tr. William Weaver 1985) was the last book Calvino published in his lifetime. From that you might assume that this innovative author, forever progressing and never writing the same book twice, was at the apogee of his ingenuity. You would be right. It is a series of short pieces – twenty-seven in 111 pages – describing moments in the life of the title character. What to call these pieces: stories? Vignettes? Essays? Meditations, even? They do not really have storylines, but they do move forward, or outward, from the initial moment. The character of Mr Palomar is crucial, yet sometimes seems little more than an observer from to which to hang the observations made in the piece. The best way of defining this book – beautiful, perfect, unique, challenging – for the wary browser would be to categorise it on the back cover as Fiction/Philosophy.
This is a book of attention to everything. (Suddenly Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, published five years later, doesn’t seem so novel.) Calvino’s comic lightness of touch is evident early on, from ‘The naked bosom’, where Mr Palomar is at pains to avoid looking at a young woman’s breasts as he walks along the beach. However, he realises that “my not looking presupposes that I am thinking of the nakedness, worrying about it; and this is basically an indiscreet and reactionary attitude.” He passes her again, worries more and tries in different ways to avoid looking, and to avoid avoiding looking. Eventually Mr Palomar has walked past her so often that the woman covers herself up and makes off, “as if she were avoiding the tiresome insistence of a satyr.” Elsewhere, Mr Palomar observes two tortoises mating, and wonders if their lack of sensory stimuli might “drive them to a concentrated, intense mental life, lead them to a crystalline inner awareness”?
Inner awareness is what Mr Palomar wants, and he hopes to achieve it by increased consciousness of his surroundings. But he looks so hard that sometimes he cannot see what matters. Rather than enjoy it, he feels guilty when he cannot identify the bird a song belongs to. He feels he “must go and look at the stars … because he hates waste and believes it is wrong to waste the great quantity of stars that is put at his disposal.” Looking down as well as up, he contemplates his lawn: “the lawn’s purpose is to represent nature, and this representation occurs as the substitution of the nature proper to the area with a nature in itself natural but artificial for this area.” (Yes, there are many sentences in Mr Palomar that you need to read twice. Really, it is a book that you need to read twice.) He watches the daytime moon, “porous as a sponge”, solidify as night falls into a “lake of shininess … brimming in the darkness with a halo of cold silver.” As he considers the world around him, questioning everything he sees, he reflects that “perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe.” He extends his discomfiture to mankind generally: to think as he does is to bring on unsettling uncertainties. Ignorance is bliss, if only he could see it.
This is a book too which challenges understandings of what is important. In ‘From the terrace’, Mr Palomar looks at his city from the viewpoint of the pigeons, who see only elements of the upper layer, a lovingly imagined list of which Calvino provides over almost a full page (Calvino loved lists). “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” Mr Palomar concludes, “that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.” The same might be said for the book itself. The pieces are arranged precisely and Calvino explains their almost geometric structure in an index at the end of the book. I’ll leave it to him:
Viewing the index itself, then, we can see that the pieces in the book move from the purely visual and descriptive of natural forms (“1.1.1. Reading a wave“) to a fully speculative meditation on the relationship between the self and the world (“3.3.3. Learning to be dead“). Each intervening story moves a little closer from the external to the internal.
This is what we get in terms of character development. Mr Palomar may begin the book fully formed, as a man who needs order in a chaotic universe, but his personality, his curiosity and his innate sadness are gradually peeled down as we read more about him. His need for meaning is frustrated when he visits the ruins of Tula in Mexico. He knows that “in Mexican archaeology every statue, every object, every detail of a bas-relief stands for something that stands for something else that stands, in turn, for yet another something.” He knows that “every translation requires another translation and so on … to weave and re-weave a network of analogies.” (My own search for meaning made me wonder if this paragraph was a sly reference to Calvino’s longtime translator, William Weaver, with whom he collaborated on his English language translations. “I had problems with Calvino,” says Weaver, “because he thought he knew English.”) Yet he overhears a school teacher assuring his class, visiting the same ruins, that “we don’t know what they mean.” By this time in Mr Palomar’s story, we feel like smiting the teacher ourselves. Our hero, ever enquiring, never certain, is far slower to state his conclusions.
In a time and in a country where everyone goes out of his way to announce opinions or hand down judgements, Mr Palomar has made a habit of biting his tongue three times before asserting anything. After the bite, if he is still convinced of what he was going to say, he says it. If not, he keeps his mouth shut. In fact, he spends whole weeks, months in silence.
If everyone followed such a principle, the world would be a more peaceful place (and this blog largely empty). It is the reader’s empathy for Mr Palomar as he struggles with the universe – and his place in it – which provides the book’s emotional heart. His persistent desire to “live in harmony with the world” leads him to direct all his efforts “towards achieving harmony both with the human race, his neighbour, and with the most distant spiral of the system of the galaxies. To begin with, since his neighbour has too many problems, Palomar will try to improve his relations with the universe.” This is a lovely joke, but also indicates Mr Palomar’s difficulty with people, and his wish to rely on cold science (while forgetting that science reflects chaotic nature, of which people are a representative part). People and the stars are more alike than he would like to think; the universe is other people:
He opens his eyes. What appears to his gaze is something he seems to have seen already, every day: streets full of people, hurrying, elbowing their way ahead, without looking one another in the face, among high walls, sharp and peeling. In the background, the starry sky scatters intermittent flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.
Even when he pretends to be dead, in the last piece, his initial relief at no longer having “to give a damn about anything” is short-lived, when he begins to worry about how he will be remembered for posterity, if at all. Even this “is simply a postponement of the problem, from one’s own individual death to the extinction of the human race.” That line, I hope, makes it clear that there is comedy serious as well as light in Mr Palomar – the terrible comedy of the human condition, which leads his creator to open the final section of the book with the words, “After a series of intellectual misadventures not worth recalling…”
August 25, 2011
Cody James: The Dead Beat
This is a book which came to my attention twice. First, like most bloggers I receive requests (especially from small presses) to review books, and the publisher of this book, Eight Cuts Gallery Press, asked if they could send me a copy some time ago. I declined (as I do to most such requests) because I had too many books awaiting attention already (as most of us do). This month, however, the book was shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize, by public vote. The orgiastic praise for the book on the Guardian review site and Amazon made me curious, and knowing it was short and could be had inexpensively (I paid £2.14 to download it to my iPhone as a Kindle ebook), I decided to have a go.
The Dead Beat is set in 1997 in California, and narrated by a young man called Adam. He’s a slacker, a user, a loafer: a deadbeat. He surrounds himself with like minds. They have “shitty jobs.” Their “laundry situation [has] reached critical mass.” You get the idea. James writes from experience: “three of the characters are me, the fourth was a friend of mine, and all the other characters are people I knew and hung out with.” She wrote the book in five days “and then wound up in hospital on the sixth day on an accidental overdose.” Some of Adam’s friends in the book, such as Sean, attain a distinction as characters, others – Xavi, Lincoln – tend to run and blur. Some dialogue – again like Sean’s run-on ramblings – has a ring of truth to it and chimes with the reader. The exchanges are necessarily banal, but they lack the blank poetry of Tao Lin, the satire of Bret Easton Ellis, or the life and zing of Bukowksi or Fante.
There are heartfelt passages in The Dead Beat, as when Adam rails against Lincoln’s demands of their friendship (“I held our situation in my hands, that breaking thing, cutting me”) – it sounds as though James wrote it from life. The empathy with the characters, the balance presented in their shapeless lives, are the book’s greatest strengths. But art is not made from sincerity. And in particular, when you choose to write about a setting as hackneyed as this, there needs to be some transformative power, some alchemy, which I didn’t detect. This is not to say that there’s nothing to see here. There is an amusing passage on how users of different drugs revile one another, and social observation in how workers in low paid jobs “can’t afford to fuck up” with “sick days or mental health days.” “You screw up, you lose your job. It’s simple. Only rich people are allowed to fuck themselves up. They’re the only ones with the room to fall.” There is even a nice splice of satire and characterisation when Adam watches a TV ad for a spurious health drink as he knocks it back. “The ad ended with an incredibly telegenic old man turning to the camera, blue can in hand, and a caption appeared below, which read, ‘Improve the quality of your life.’ I took a sip, thinking, you and me, old buddy.” And James writes well on Adam’s response to art as he looks at a painting while recalling the soundtrack to I Pagliacci.
The weaknesses in James’s writing stand out clearly. She has a maddening habit of using alternatives to “said” (“he concurred,” “he answered”, “he yelled,” “I sighed”) and of adding adverbs to dialogue description (he commented disparagingly). She hammers home significant points – the significance of the Hale-Bopp comet, repeating plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose several times in a couple of pages (and even translating it), and the same with the phrase “life is beautiful.” This is all first person narrative, so perhaps it’s Adam who is so clunkingly unsubtle, not the author. But there are no other indicators that we should view him at a distance (empathy, as I said, is strong), he’s often articulate, and dullness of mind – or frazzledness of mind – can be portrayed more subtly. The need to over-explain extends to the likes of Adam saying “It reminded me of what my mom used to call ‘nervous laughter’ – laughter at inappropriate moments.” If the book comes from life, then we could compare it in memoiristic terms to John Healy’s The Grass Arena: a book not well-written, but powerful because it brings powerful truth. But The Dead Beat is presented not as a memoir but a work of fiction, a work of creativity and imagination.
How does this all balance out in the end? I don’t regret reading The Dead Beat, but nor do I recommend it. But we are being asked to believe, by Amazon reviewers and those who voted in the Guardian Not the Booker Prize, that this is a masterwork of sorts, and being asked to pay money for it (though the publisher is also offering a free PDF at the time of writing). These claims made for The Dead Beat are the most surprising thing about it. It’s sometimes enjoyable, with some nice moments and some weak ones. But there is nothing remarkable in literary terms. The milieu has been done before, and better, by many writers (as above) and most notably, the brilliant Denis Johnson. There is no deformation of language in The Dead Beat, no structural innovation, no sense of exploration. Next to something like Blake Butler’s There Is No Year (published, incidentally, by a mainstream press), this is Catherine Cookson.
Some Amazon reviewers try to second-guess criticisms of the book (perhaps an acknowledgement that such criticisms are not without foundation). One says, “It’s a style that I’d assume will polarise opinion; I’d also assume that the author wouldn’t want it any other way.” Critical considerations don’t get much less relevant than trying to predict what others will make of it. Why would James’s unexceptional style polarise opinion? The same reviewer says “James doesn’t write to please the purists.” How would he know? What purists? Another reviewer rightly says the book is “riddled with adverbitis and overwritten” but then adds (without further clarification) “that is the point, I think.” And another draws the following unforgettable comparison: “A writer to whom she’s arguably comparable is Flannery O’Connor [...]. O’Connor was famous for her Catholicism, and James is a self-avowed Satanist, but both are astute observers able to capture the human condition concisely.” Tastes differ, of course, but these are the sort of orgiastic songs of praise which no disinterested reader can take seriously.
During the nominations phase of the Not the Booker Prize, James’s publisher said that they had sent out copies of The Dead Beat to the Guardian for review and didn’t get a response. They also commented on the difficulties for small presses in getting their books noticed by the mainstream cultural press. Those are problems I have a good deal of sympathy with, believing that small presses are where much of the most interesting writing is appearing these days. But I also believe that publishing books like The Dead Beat in its current form will add to that difficulty rather than alleviate it.
August 18, 2011
Jiří Weil: Life with a Star
Jiří Weil is one of those authors who defies logic and reason. By that I mean that anyone who has read him seems to rate him very highly indeed (now I do too); but few of his books are translated into English, and those that are slip in and out of print. Information about him is so patchy that I have been unable to be absolutely sure exactly when this book was first published. I was spurred into reading this longtime resident of my shelves by the recent reissue of Weil’s ‘other’ novel Mendelssohn is on the Roof. Curiously, the introduction by Philip Roth to this 2002 Penguin Modern Classics edition of Life with a Star is exactly the same as that in Daunt Books’ reissue of Mendelssohn. More curiously, it doesn’t really work as an introduction to either novel, spending only a paragraph on each, and reads as though it was cut from a longer piece by Roth, or simply that he lost interest halfway through.
Life with a Star (1948-49, tr. 1989 by Rita Klimova with Roslyn Schloss) is unlike any Holocaust novel I’ve read. Saying so may be as much offputting as enticing: there must be a part of every reader which thinks, What more can I learn, can I want to know, about this most famous of enormities? Yet this really is something special, partly because it could almost be as good a novel even with the Holocaust removed. How to explain what I mean by that? I could say that, because the book never uses the words ‘German’ or ‘Jew’, it could be considered to have wider application, to be an allegory for difference and oppression. But no, it really is of its time and place: Prague around 1940 as Nazis take control of the city. Instead, it has something to do with the narrative voice and the richness of the central character, his delusions and quirks. He has a story and a style which is winning even without – frankly – the reader feeling pity or fear for him.
The narrator and central character is Josef Roubicek. Or does the centre of the book lie elsewhere? “Ruzena,” he begins his story, addressing his lover, and she infiltrates the pages like a watermark, appearing in the last line too. Her presence serves more than one purpose. Josef (does referring to a character by his forename indicate empathy in the reader?) is telling Ruzena what’s happening to him so that he can tell us. Talking to himself might sever that empathy, or shake the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. Ruzena also gives us an insight into Josef’s character before he became defined by his reductive status as a Jew in a city under Nazi rule. In fact what we discover is that Ruzena is not, as the intensity of his passion would have us believe, his wife or lifelong lover, but another man’s wife, and with whom Josef had only a brief fling before they parted. He tells the reader this, but doesn’t seem to believe it himself: he longs for Ruzena and expects to be with her presently. He is perhaps delusional, though a better way of putting it might be that in his current circumstances, any hope to cling to is better than none. Indeed, it might be humour of a sort that Josef’s greatest gripe against the Nazis is that they have caused his lover to flee and left him alone.
Not that Josef doesn’t have plenty of other reasonable gripes against the regime. The real time of the novel details the progressive restrictions placed on ‘us’ by ‘them’. “They kept thinking up new laws and regulations for us. Maybe it was fear that made them so diligent, but I couldn’t understand their fear, because there were so few of us, and, after all, we hadn’t defended ourselves.” Already at the beginning of the book, Josef has “burned even the bed and the wardrobe … because I have no coal and because I didn’t want to give them anything.” There is an cruel comedy to some of his difficulties: he is not allowed to buy meat, only blood (“I could make a soup out of it; at least it was a little like meat”). But he is also not allowed to shop in the morning, and the butcher is sold out of blood by lunchtime. He is forced to relinquish almost everything he owns (“a messenger came from the Community with orders that I hand over any musical instruments or typewriters”), even when everything has already gone. “They continued to want things of me and I didn’t have anything.” He also endures a series of meetings with officials, summonsed to offices across town (when he is no longer permitted to ride the streetcar), which for the purposes of skirting reviewerly cliché I shall refer to as Kafkaish. His meetings with family and sympathetic figures in the city don’t go much better. Once, when Josef is visiting an old classmate, Pavel, two nameless people come to the door and begin examining the room:
They didn’t say a word. They didn’t look at us; they pretended not to see us at all. [...] They only looked at the objects in the room. They calculated loudly between them the quality and sturdiness of various objects; they discussed how they would move the furniture around. We were already dead. They had come to claim their inheritance.
Running through the account the present day are Josef’s memories of the past, largely involving Ruzena, from their first encounter (“She didn’t look like a married woman; she had very lively eyes”) to their parting. The other love of his life is his cat, Tomas, who must remain a secret (“Don’t you know we’re not allowed to have domestic animals?” asks his uncle). Now that Ruzena is gone, Tomas provides Josef with companionship – and with a figure to whom to relate events, for the benefit of the reader.
Josef is surprised when other people don’t comply with the laws “they” impose on people like him. (“I have orders to be home by eight o’clock.” “Well, if you’re concerned about these stupid orders.”) Their uncrushed spirits are tackled by the authorities with the introduction of the star to be worn by all Jews. (“Wear it on the left side, directly on your heart, not any higher or lower. There are very strict regulations about this.”) This produces the expected effect when Josef next goes out in public.
I saw people looking at me. At first it seemed as though my shoelaces must be untied or that there was something wrong with my clothes. In some way I had upset the everyday, accepted order of things. I was a sort of blot that didn’t belong in the picture of the street… I was no longer one of them.
When Josef loses his job in a bank and ends up working in a cemetery, this provides some of the most piercing insights into the psychology of life with a star. Josef becomes unpopular among his new colleagues for objecting to their stories of others being caught and transported. “They felt better when they considered themselves victims, who with the passing of each day had escaped danger once more; they felt better when they decided they had no choice.” The aim of the authorities is simple, as Josef tells his cat. ”Happiness does exist. It’s just now that they’re trying to convince us that it doesn’t and that it never did.” Even he is susceptible to forgetting about the “bright colours” of his old life. One man points out, desperately, that the whole planet Earth was going to die anyway, so what does it matter? “That won’t help us,” another retorts. “Even if everyone dies, we will be the first.”
The humour gets blacker still. Unlike other deaths after transportation, suicides are “rewarded with death notices.” One failed suicide frets that he will be prosecuted for using too much gas when he stuck his head in the oven. “I went over my quota.” As Josef works at the cemetery, he notes that those on burial detail “bragged about their closeness to death because they had to brag about something.” Work in the cemetery gives people a sense of purpose, even if it is based on the cruellest of all feelings, hope. It provides them too with a reminder of what normal life was like, with the camaraderie of the workplace. This too can be cruel even while it consoles. Josef through the rest of the book will have surprising turns of luck – and some unsurprising ones. At some level, acceptance of one’s fate can never take place while it is based on a false premise, that some lives are worth more than others. ”We would never have admitted that our lives were worthless, because they were our lives, our unique and unrepeatable lives.”
August 11, 2011
Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending
I’ve often thought that Julian Barnes is unfairly castigated as a middlebrow muddler of a novelist. (Don’t ask for citations, but it’s definitely a vibe I’ve picked up over the years.) True, he is the author of England, England, one of the worst novels I’ve read, but otherwise, with titles like Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters and Talking it Over/Love etc., he shows some appetite for adventure in form. His last novel, Arthur & George, while a pretty straight story, was a credit to the much maligned genre of literary fiction, and earned him the modern book publicity double whammy: a Booker shortlisting and a seat on Richard & Judy’s sofa. After six years and nothing to show but a disappointing memoir on death (Nothing To Be Frightened Of), I wondered if we would ever get more fiction from him. Then, in quick succession, a new collection of stories, and this slim novel.
The Sense of an Ending is a memoir on death, again, but a fictional one this time. The title, and the sumptuously funereal appearance of the UK hardback edition, suggest that this is a subject on which Barnes has not yet written himself out. That may be inevitable: Barnes is 65 years old, and his former friend Martin Amis observed that intimations of mortality come so thick that after the age of forty, “it’s a full-time job looking the other way.” There may be another reason, indirectly connected to the former friend too, of which more later.
In the book, Tony Webster is looking back on his life, or one particular arc of it, to do with a gifted schoolfriend, a girl, and an everyday tragedy. Tony is an interesting study: retired, particular, clearly somewhat lonely: “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.” His only regular human contact is his ex-wife Margaret, with whom he continues to get on well: indeed, she seems to be his only friend. She, with apparent disinterest, offers him advice on what to do when his teenage experience with ex-girlfriend Veronica starts to trouble him again. Why worry now about something that happened forty years ago? Because it involves death, and Tony is not getting any younger. And because the past is never dead; it is not even past.
What this boils down to is a sort of quest for Tony. He wants to read his schoolfriend Adrian’s diary, which involves first tracking down Veronica and then persuading her. As we might expect from Barnes, all this is delivered in an analytical and discursive style; he moves the story on as an essayist works through his arguments. The clever-cleverness of youth gives way to the agnoticism of middle age. There are regrets, recognitions and renegotiations: “I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.” What begins as a solvable mystery – how can Tony persuade Veronica to release Adrian’s diary? – turns into “something much larger, something which bore on the whole of my life, on time and memory. And desire.” Tony ends up unsure whether “my life had increased, or merely added to itself,” and there is a thick plottiness to the ending, or endings, which is surprising if not entirely satisfying.
The central character of the book is not Veronica, or Adrian, though their actions are central to it. The story is told by Tony and, as a consequence, is about Tony. He throws doubt on his own reliability (which led me to trust him implicitly), questions his own motives, and does his best to honour Adrian’s complaint from decades ago (which I suspect also reflects Barnes’s view): “I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it.”
Reading The Sense of an Ending, a thought kept coming back to me. With the book’s repeated motif of regrettably rude correspondence – such as Tony’s own toe-curling letter to Adrian and Veronica brought back from the dead – I wondered if it might have been inspired, in part, by Barnes’s well-reported rift with Martin Amis. This arose in January 1995 when Amis left his UK agent, Barnes’s wife Pat Kavanagh, and went all-in with his US agent, Andrew Wylie. In response, Barnes repudiated their friendship in a letter which Amis, in his memoir Experience, described as “blunderingly ugly,” and which ended with the words ’Fuck off.’ How’s that for, as Tony describes Veronica’s identically worded email to him here, a “two-word, two-finger response”? (Amis tried to revive the friendship a year later, in vain: “It was said that I turned away – and I don’t do that. I won’t be the one to turn away.”) Could it be that Kavanagh’s recent death – the book is dedicated to her – has made Barnes feel how his character feels on reading his vicious old letter? “Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words.” Could it be? Perhaps, perhaps not; but it added piquancy to my reading.
Still, what cannot be in doubt is that this is Barnes’s most death-pervaded book since, well, his last one. Death, getting close every day, is always personal. In Frank Kermode’s work of literary criticism from which Barnes takes his title, “the sense of an ending” refers to apocalypticism, the end of the world. Barnes’s concern here is far more serious than that.
