Just William's Luck

I'm Never Coming Back - Julian Hanshaw

2012-05-24T09:22:00.002+01:00

'start simply'

A quick little post this one to take a look at the latest book from Julian Hanshaw whose The Art of Pho came out about 18 months ago after he had first won the Observer/Cape Graphic Short Story Prize in 2008. I loved the artwork of that book even if I wasn't satisfied by the narrative and so I was intrigued when his latest popped through the door. I'm Never Coming Back functions like a collection of short stories but, as he mentions in this Director's Commentary on the piece, these are 'stories brushing against each other', linked like the various parts of Robert Altman's Short Cuts. Hanshaw again works with themes of 'loss, food and travel' taking the reader from the 'sound mirrors' on the coast of Denge, as featured in his award winning short (which can be viewed here), to the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, via Berlin, Christchurch, Tucson and Heathrow. Again, we are not going to be satisfied by any grand narrative here, these are vignettes, some of which will give more joy than others, but the artwork is again beautiful throughout and the book as a whole has a pleasingly surreal tone.

It's tempting to suggest that the inclusion of Sand Dunes and Sonic Booms, the two-page piece that won Hanshaw his award, only highlights the strength of that short piece in comparison to some of the others on display here. But that might be a little unfair. Another sequence on the coast of Winchelsea provides one of the book's highlights as we follow a chap called Martin as he starts a new job in the kitchen of a beach cafe whilst trying to maintain a long-distance relationship through postcards. It is a local character in the shape of a man who sits everyday on the beach in a deep-sea diver's helmet who provides the enigmatic focal point of this story of communication, loneliness, tentative friendship and change.

There is also something satisfying about the story that takes place in Truth or Consequences which melds dreams and distance with tasty food and human connection. What is also interesting are the different colour palettes in each separate location. As I said, Hanshaw's work is consistently a visual treat; when he combines that with a strong narrative then his work will be irresistible.

Dr Haggard's Disease - Patrick McGrath

2012-05-22T09:27:00.205+01:00

'She cannot fade'

It's nice every now and then to read a book which isn't new, isn't a debut, hasn't been pushed by a publicist but rather brought to your attention by another avid reader. I've rewarded myself with a few of these recently and this novel by McGrath is one that John Self over at the Asylum has been going on about for years. It's always nice to start a book with the feeling that it's an almost surefire winner. Even nicer to finish it and feel the same way (It's worth mentioning however that I also finished this book feeling somewhat traumatised!).

From the very first page, the very first paragraph even, this book exhibits its main strength: a distinctive, engrossing and characterful narrative voice. In fact I shall be a terrible cheat I give you that first para to show what I mean.

I was in Elgin, upstairs in my study, gazing at the sea and reflecting, I remember, on a line of Goethe when Mrs. Gregor tapped at the door that Saturday and said there was a young man to see me in the surgery, a pilot. You know how she talks. "A pilot, Mrs Gregor?" I murmured. I hate being disturbed on my Saturday afternoons, especially if Spike is playing up, as he was that day, but of course I limped out onto the landing and made my way downstairs. And you know what that looks like - pathetic bloody display that is, first the good leg, then the bad leg, then the stick, good leg, bad leg, stick, but down I came, down the stairs, old beyond my years and my skin a grey so cachetic it must have suggested even to you that I was in pain, chronic pain, but oh dear boy not pain like yours, just wait now and we'll make it all - go - away -

There is so much information skilfully crammed into those few lines. Already we can see our narrator Dr Haggard looking exactly as his name suggests, we can visualise that descent down the stairs within that house dramatically close to 'black rocks and a churning sea'; we even have a reference to Goethe that hints towards the Gothic. Why is he old beyond his years, who is this pilot, who is Spike? We simply must read on to find out. Hats off to McGrath, it's a great beginning. Dr Haggard is a man given to reflection, a man who cannot stop thinking in fact about his affair with the wife of a colleague during his time as a trainee surgeon. This brief but cataclysmic affair is what drove him to this coastal retreat and life as a general practitioner and the arrival of the pilot, James, son of his ex-lover Fanny allows him to indulge even further his overblown obsession with the definitive relationship of his life. The novel's unsettling strangeness is hinted at in that trailing last sentence above, under what circumstances is this novel being recounted? The full horror of that won't be revealed until the final page but one of the great joys of this novel is the way in which that caring narrative voice of Dr Haggard's will be slowly transformed into something much darker, fitting much better with the gothic surroundings of Elgin.

It is at a funeral that Haggard first sets eyes on Fanny, who will later become his lover, a few glances at each other 'and I think you might say from that point forward I was done for. I was lost.' Their private exchanges about passion at a dinner party lay the groundwork for a fast-developing affair and the rational medical man Haggard is soon transformed by the love he conceives for her; 'where before there was only the dark force of nature, with its absolute imperative of disease, suffering and death, now there was grace.' That idea of a love conceived is worth noting. The naive Haggard enthusiastically embraces Fanny's notion of passion as 'the best we’re capable of' and it is with an almost religious zeal that he commits himself to their

Love, for me, is not ephemeral, it is not a transient emotion, a passing state, a passage or flight into madness or ecstasy; I see it, rather, as an exalted or even sacred condition, a condition in which all the highest and best of human faculties are exercised. Your mother had said to me the night we met that passion was not a sickness, not a disease, but was, rather, the best we were capable of, civilized human beings. Ironically, it was I who came to embrace the idea, while she -

Another trailing sentence there that hints at the end of the affair and we know that an awful lot happens in a period of a few months to send Haggard to Elgin, a broken man. He might have done well to remember that biblical phrase, 'Physician, heal thyself' (in one important way he does, far too literally), but the crumbling Elgin becomes an extension of his own ravaged body, haunted by her memory, her spirit 'more in possession of the house' than he is; 'a museum of nostalgia.'

Oh what are you doing? I asked myself. Isn't there something ridiculous about all this - you feed your obsession with this woman with morphia until you're unable to think of anything else, you can't sleep, you can't even stay in the house - as though Elgin were your own head, your own mind - as though by escaping Elgin you can escape the thoughts and feelings and memories that roil and turn endlessly, endlessly in that mind - it's not romantic at all!

McGrath unveils the story of Haggard's passion masterfully. The language is pitch-perfect for the 1930's and 40's period and the slow build of the novel's gothic atmosphere helps transform it into something else entirely. I cannot stress enough the perverse pleasure of seeing things become darker and darker. I say perverse because as much as we must recoil towards the novel's conclusion we have to accept that all along this has been a book about compassion as well as passion, and of love and humanity. Dr Haggard is an extraordinary fictional creation, one that helps make a novel that entertains and terrifies in equal measure. If you fancy a book that challenges those notions I have mentioned above, a book written brilliantly and structured like an escalating nightmare, then I have no hesitation in recommending this one. And don't just take my word for it.

The Watch - Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

2012-05-15T09:00:00.000+01:00

'in flames I reside'

I am here to bury my brother according to the tenets of my faith. That is all there is to it.

The Hogarth Press was founded in 1917 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, named after their house in Richmond from which they hand-printed the imprint's first titles. It remained an independent name until 1946 when it came under the banner of Chatto & Windus. Now they, in partnership with Crown in the US have relaunched Hogarth as a fiction imprint with 'an accent on the pleasures of storytelling and an awareness of the world.' Their launch title embodies both of those principles taking the tragedy of Antigone and moving it to modern-day Afghanistan. At one point in the novel a Lieutenant hands a copy of Sophocles' play to his Captain saying, 'It's about as cogent an analysis as anything you'll find about where we are today.' In looking at a conflict that many of us hear mentioned almost every day and yet which few of us probably know much detail about Roy-Bhattacharya could be said to be attempting to do the same. How well does he succeed?

A quick recap on Sophocles' Antigone first. After the civil war in Thebes that pitted two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, against each other and which ended in the death of both, Creon emerges as the new ruler and decrees that the body of Polyneices will be left unburied on the battlefield as carrion for wild animals. Grieving sister Antigone tries to enlist the support of her sister Ismene to help her bury their brother, but she refuses, fearing the death penalty that would result if they were caught. Antigone acts alone and comes up against Creon who orders her to be buried alive in a cave. As you might expect from a Greek tragedy the play is littered with corpses by the end: Antigone joining her brothers and Creon's son and wife also taking their own lives. Creon is left cursed by the end, still king and with order preserved but at what cost?

In Afghanistan, after a fierce fire-fight in and around their compound, a group of American soldiers lie depleted and exhausted but victorious. The body of the man who led the attack against them lies ready to be transported out so it can be paraded on TV but whilst they wait for that transport a woman appears at the perimeter claiming to be the sister of the dead man. She has come to claim his body so that she can bury it according to her faith and will not leave until that has been achieved. Opinion is divided amongst the various soldiers as to how to proceed. Is the woman genuine or a potential suicide-bomber; is she in fact a woman at all?

Roy-Bhattacharya presents his narrative from several viewpoints with each chapter narrated by a different character. The first chapter, Antigone, is narrated naturally by the woman who approaches the compound, having travelled from many miles away using just her hands to propel herself on the wheeled platform that supports her legless body. She was left in this state after an attack that devastated a harmless gathering and it is this attack that provoked her brother to lead his own assault on the American base. We will hear later from a Lieutenant (Nick Frobenius) who majored in Classics at university, a medic who has learnt a lot about Afghan culture whilst posted there, an Army interpreter who sides very closely with his employers for personal reasons and other members of army personnel with differing viewpoints.

Most interesting amongst these characters, particularly when pursuing the Sophoclean parallels is Frobenius. His interest in the classics makes him an unlikely military man but whatever his reasons for joining the army he now finds himself disillusioned and referring back to the story of the tyrant Creon to understand the machinations of the American military/industrial complex. After defending the military as the last bastion of the ideals that made the USA great ('Think courage, endurance, integrity, judgement, justice, loyalty, discipline, knowledge.') and lamenting the fact that it is power-crazed politicians and profit-hungry business men who now dictate 'what we do and how we can do it' he is forced to confront his Captain with their own complicity.

We're in Kalyug, Captain. It's the age of Creon. 'Cept that he's here, there and everywhere. He's the government and the corporations and everything else that matters, and he's totally faceless. He's a machine, a system, he has his own logic, and once you're part of that, it doesn't really matter if you're a grunt or a general: you're trapped in a conveyor belt of death and destruction. And that's the saddest thing. The saddest thing is that we're part of Creon. We're all compromised and there's nothing we can do about it. It's like losing your virginity. You can't get it back once it's gone.

Frobenius also met his wife whilst working on a production of Antigone at university and we get flashes back to this relationship which is now destroyed by his repeated tours and what she sees as the unsurmountable changes that he has undergone. These flashbacks are something of a feature of the novel and they risk becoming repetitive, especially when they are of the 'and it was all a dream' variety (although to be fair this technique also helps to get something of the visionary-exhaustion the soldiers suffer across to the reader). Where it does work well is in the chapter dedicated to First Sergeant Whalen. He reminisces of home and images from there and the battlefield meld together seamlessly as when the music that their Antigone plays one night in the desert reminds him of his girl at home.

Just before I reach the bend round which I'll catch my first sight of the houseboat, I hear Camille playing her twelve-string guitar. I rest my oar and sit there with my head bowed, listening to the long notes thrumming over the water. It's the sweetest sound I've ever heard, and it fills my soul. The war falls away and all the fighting and the dying seem very far off. I hold on to the moments for as long as I can. Eventually the music stops, but I continue to sit there, lost in its spell. Nothing stirs, and no one seems to want to be the first to break the silence. In all my years with the Company, I've never seen the men remain so still and for such a long period of time. Long moments pass before they begin to drift away one by one without a sound, until I finally look up and realize that I'm the only one left. The bright band of the Milky Way is like a luminous river across the sky. The night is cold and crystalline, and there's a frigid wind blowing down from the mountains....This haunted land is so completely different to where I'm from that, even after multiple tours of duty, I'm still not clear about who these people are and what they really want.

That final confusion is all over this novel. Most of the soldiers have little knowledge about different tribes, languages or cultures; to them everyone is Taliban and therefore a threat (it is the medic who notices the black turban worn by their prize casualty that marks him as Sayyid, a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad). Even their interpreter (whose chapter is tellingly named after Antigone's sister Ismene) comes from an entirely different culture to the woman whose words he translates and as I mentioned has his own axe to grind with the Taliban that sees him supporting his employers wholeheartedly. A corrupt Afghan government that many in the country don't support, tribal factions, differences of opinion and operation within the overseeing military; it is a situation dominated by confusion and conflict with many innocent and ignorant people caught up in the dangerous front-line. Roy-Bhattacharya shows himself adept with descriptive prose and the build-up to the fire-fight is brilliantly realised. His dialogue is often filled with points of view and part of me wondered if it might be better suited to a decent television treatment of the subject. Also always lurking in my mind was the thought that despite the hard work that has clearly gone into this novel, transposing the story of Antigone to a modern conflict, the same effect and insight might have been achieved simply through a well-directed performance of Sophocles' original play that utilised the Afghan conflict for its design and focus. Greek tragedies, like the plays of Shakespeare, have been used time and again to illuminate modern conflicts and feuds, that is the power of plays with such universal themes. As Frobenius said, when it comes to the theatre of war, the observations of thousands of years ago are as relevant today as they were back then.

Waiting For The Barbarians - J M Coetzee

2012-05-08T09:03:00.000+01:00

'the black flower of civilization'

I was determined not to leave it too long before tackling another Coetzee and it was only a question of which one. As I've said before, I'm a little scared of his more recent output and felt on much safer ground looking at his back-back catalogue. A few were recommended by other novelists (social networking has its genuine uses you know) and I decided to plump for this allegorical tale of oppression, control and personal morality. I always sensed that Coetzee was a writer who needed to be read, I can only reiterate my pleasure in discovering that he is a writer who demands to be read and to whom one willingly submits, each completed book increasing the chance of picking up another.

Waiting for the Barbarians was originally published in 1980 and not only picked up the James Tait Black and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes, and was picked by Penguin as one of twenty Great Books of the 20th Century but was even turned into an opera by Philip Glass. The allegorical nature of the novel makes it perfect for that kind of adaptation and a worthy recipient of all its praise because it reads like an immediate classic, a novel that whilst clearly inspired by the brutal Apartheid regime in Coetzee's South Africa can also be applied universally to the ideas of Empire, control, torture and resistance. Names aren't important in this tale, our first person narrator is known only as the Magistrate, 'a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire... When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette. I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times.' Those quiet times come to an abrupt end with the arrival of Colonel Joll and his soldiers of the Third Bureau. This far-flung outpost of the Empire is at risk from attack from the barbarian hordes that allegedly lie out there in the wilderness and are joining tribal forces in order to strike back at the Empire. A brief sortie by Joll and his men brings barbarian prisoners back to this frontier town and the Magistrate witnesses in part the brutal methods of the Third Bureau in their quest for the truth.

'First I get lies, you see - this is what happens - first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth.'

Once these interrogations are over and the men departed the Magistrate takes personal care of a barbarian girl whom he nurses back to health, the two enacting an odd, intimate and yet not sexual relationship. He wants to know what happened during the interrogation that left her partially blinded but she is reticent, leaving him with the certain knowledge that 'Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.' The Magistrate is an interesting character for all sorts of reasons but his morality is primary amongst those. A man who has clearly used his powerful position to enjoy the company of women in the past he is left stymied by the curious nature of his relationship with this barbarian girl. He even manages to find a parallel between his odd desire for her and the work of the recently departed torturers.

I cannot even say for sure that I desire her. All this erotic behaviour of mine is indirect: I prowl about her, touching her face, caressing her body, without entering her or finding the urge to do so. I have just come from the bed of a woman for whom, in the year I have known her, I have not for a moment had to interrogate my desire: to desire her has meant to enfold her and enter her, to pierce her surface and stir the quiet of her interior into an ecstatic storm; then to retreat, to subside, to wait for desire to reconstitute itself. But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave like a lover - I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her - but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.

He begins to question everything about his position, struggling with 'the story' of empire and the barbarian hordes that lie out there somewhere ready to attack the civilized way of life. But he also struggles to see how such an attitude might be wiped away for how do you eradicate contempt, 'especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid?' From being a staunch defender of empire he begins to wish that the barbarians would indeed rise up and teach the ruling power to respect them and their history, they after all viewing the empire builders as nothing more than transients in the grand scheme of things.

If his relationship with the girl weren't enough to get him into trouble then his foolhardy journey beyond the frontier to return her to her people surely is and when he returns (without her, despite having asked her to return with him of her own free will - and after finally consummating their relationship) to the town he is summarily arrested and imprisoned. And what does he feel when he finds himself on the other side of the law? Elation, at having broken the bonds of his alliance with the Empire.

I am a free man. Who would not smile? But what a dangerous joy. It should not be so easy to attain salvation.

For what is it that he actually believes in, where does this sense of opposition come from? He is subjected to the same cruel treatment that previous prisoners have suffered but he uses his knowledge of the settlement to effect an escape from his confinement only to realise that there is nowhere for him to run away too. A prisoner of civilization itself he is able to look clearly at his oppressor whilst we the reader enjoy the same opportunity to examine our own civilization and what it is built on.

Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.

We all know the language of fear and how governments of the free world use it to justify attacks on today's 'barbarians'. As well as exploring the machinery of control through that fear, especially when combined with brutal suppression of any opposition, Coetzee dares to look at the thoughts of those who might actually wish to see those held up as the enemy triumph in order to assuage their own guilt. As the novel enters its final section, the Imperial forces seeming to have suffered terrible losses in their encounters with the barbarians, and the threat of being overrun more real than ever a strange limbo is achieved. The Magistrate, once an extension of the Empire's grip finds himself a voice of optimism, not in spite of impending doom but because of it.

Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise?

Skios - Michael Frayn

2012-05-03T09:25:00.266+01:00

'phoksoliva?'

With Noises Off, Michael Frayn wrote one of the most perfect plays you could ever hope for. A farce that had me laughing so hard I genuinely feared I might wet myself, it is a masterpiece of structure and design, not to mention comedy (I haven't seen the most recent production at the Old Vic but I understand that it proves that a perfect play doesn't always mean a perfect production - with something as technical as farce everything has to be right or it just doesn't deliver to the heights). For that alone he deserves a knighthood but he also happens to have churned out some cracking fiction in his prolific career; Headlong is a hugely enjoyable novel, Spies another, and I was even fascinated by his relatively recent non-fiction tome, The Human Factor. You always get the sense that Frayn is a jolly clever chap who could turn his hand to just about anything and do a decent enough job but there's no doubting that the man has serious skills when it comes to organising the mechanics of farce. His latest novel brings those to the fore and provides some perfect summer holiday reading. If you're looking for some entertainment whilst you lounge in the sun somewhere then this book could be perfect. Reading can just be fun sometimes.

On the Greek island of Skios lies the Fred Toppler Foundation. Now overseen by his widow Mrs Fred Toppler (formerly known as dancer Bahama LeStarr) the Foundation is dedicated to bringing great creative and scientific minds together each year in an event which culminates in the Fred Toppler Lecture ('They had had lectures on the Crisis in this and the Challenge of that. They had had an Enigma of, a Whither? and a Why?, three Prospects for and two Reconsiderations of.'). This year Mrs Toppler's PA, Nikki, has organised the guest lecturer, a Dr Norman Wilfred, expert in Scientometrics, or the scientific management of science. Nikki may be 'Discreetly tanned, discreetly blond, discreetly effective and discreetly nice' but she is also ambitious and this year she is making her play to succeed the Foundation's other director, now ageing and reclusive, and if everything goes according to plan then she will emerge triumphant. But of course everything does not go according to plan. And thank goodness.

It doesn't take much for the wheels to fall off but the skill with which Frayn sets up his pieces is a huge part of this novel's enjoyment, especially as we await the big payoff at the end. I shall attempt to give a basic precis without giving too much away. Imagine a baggage carousel. Dr Norman Wilfred has adopted the perfect position at it to retrieve his bag as soon as possible (years of worldwide travel on his lecture tours have taught him this much and more). It will be easy to spot with its red luggage label (another trick he's learnt) except that there is another man at the carousel awaiting a similar case with an equally distinctive red label and a moment's inattention from Wilfred will send each man away with the other's case and the two men will end up swapping not just cases but even identities. That other man is Oliver Fox, a chancer whose 'tumbled dish-mop of hair was a blond as blanched almonds, his soft eyes as brown and shining and dates.' He has come to Skios to enjoy a dirty week in the sun, or more likely out of the sun, with a girl he's met for just five minutes in a bar somewhere. Except that she's been delayed and Oliver, being the chancer that he is, finds himself unable to resist the opportunity that presents itself when Nikki asks whether he might be Dr Norman Wilfred. His only reply - 'I cannot tell a lie' and that is enough for him to head towards the Foundation worrying little about delivering the keynote speech and more about consuming some champagne and having a little fun with Nikki before his date finally arrives. The real Dr Norman Wilfred meanwhile, expecting to be picked up from the airport, has had a rather confusing conversation with one of the taxi drivers there but is soon whisked off to his accommodation, a surprisingly swish set up which looks more like a holiday villa. Get the idea? Oliver's date manages to get another flight and arrives at the villa to find what she supposes is her bit of fluff asleep in the bed, where she soon joins him. Oliver in the meantime gets confused about which exactly of the little apartments belonged to Nikki as he creeps about in the night.

There are plenty more characters to arrive and it really is like watching a grand master place his chess pieces on the board. The two main men are diametric opposites; Oliver always going with the flow as a firm believer in Chance, Norman a rational man who has a 'Newtonian faith in causality'. Will one's hubris lead to his humiliation whilst the other's pomposity is punctured?

But how endlessly uncertain life was! Things might be like this, or might be like that, or might be like nothing anyone could imagine - and it all depended upon the endlessly shifting sands of who was who and when they were and where.

As a setting for such deceptions the Foundation is perfect. Built from the ground up (previously there were just two rusty sheds where they gutted fish) the foundation may look respectable and as ancient as the temple to Athena that lies next to it but it is as phoney as the woman who helped to create it. Bahama LeStarr was of course devastated to lose her elderly and fabulously wealthy husband so soon after they tied the knot, the creation of a Foundation in his name was the least she could do, no matter what it took.

'We had to fetch our own temple from Zakynthos. It was dedicated to Aphrodite. We changed her name, the way I changed mine. Now she's Athena. The agora came from Pelion. The church from Samos.'

In such an environment, as the other guests assemble to wine and dine with the star speaker, it is little wonder that they don't tumble that he knows nothing of what he is supposed to be speaking on. At one point, so easy does he find the deception, he even tries to tell them - 'Perhaps I'm not Dr. Norman Wilfred.'

'So here we are - we're making it all up as we go along. It's like a random mutation in a gene. If I tell you the truth, that I'm Oliver Fox, then consequences follow from that. No one sits here listening to me. No one even lets me through the gate. So the world goes on its way without my being here saying all this.
'And if I say I'm Dr Norman Wilfred, then the world goes another way. Oliver Fox - Dr Norman Wilfred - what does it matter? Heads/tails. Strawberry/vanilla. But who knows what the consequences will be?...We're all in this together. I said I was Dr Norman Wilfred. But you believed me. So between us we have determined the whole future course of the universe.'

Frayn does include a little discourse on Causality v. Chance but this book is more concerned with tickling your sides than your grey cells. Dodgy dealings, twin taxi-driving brothers, ill-fitting clothing, sun, sea, sex and . . . erm, Scientometrics: what more could you ask for? It's a joy.

HHhH - Laurent Binet

2012-05-01T09:18:00.000+01:00

'infranovel'

translated by Sam Taylor

I was very excited about this book. Not just because it was the winner in 2010 of the Prix Goncourt in France, but perhaps more importantly because it was placed in my hand with the same enthusiasm (and by the same person) as one of my favourite books last year, Lazarus Is Dead. The two books don't just share a publisher, they also have something in common stylistically. Both take factual events, real characters and seek to retain veracity whilst also resolutely remaining works of fiction. Both authors speak directly to the reader about the process of writing the book and include references to other artistic treatments of the same subject. But, and it's a big but for me, whilst they may appear to be from the same stable, the two books are very different beasts. Whilst the approach and delivery of Lazarus made it feel like an inventive piece of fiction Binet's 'novel' feels like a piece of non-fiction with too much authorial intervention and not nearly enough invention.

Binet tells the story of Operation Anthropoid, the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich who was at the time the Nazi regime's Deputy Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It was a story related to Binet when young by his father and one which he has always been fascinated by. Determined at last to try and find his own way of telling it he begins researching and writing his definitive account and we read this novel which is part-history, part-fiction, part-memoir, part-notebook.

I just hope that however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story, you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind.

Heydrich was an almost archetypal Nazi. In fact when looking at the higher ranking members of the party you don't tend to think of Aryan supermen. The diminutive Goebells, the swollen Goring, even the wildly gesticulating Hitler himself; none of these men were visions of the superior race they aimed to be the architects of. Heydrich however, was. Tall, slim and blond, he looks ruthless in his uniform and his CV is an impressive haul of Nazi atrocities. The man at the head of the SD, the intelligence service charged with rooting out and destroying resistance to the Nazi party, one of the organisers of Kristallnacht, instrumental in The Night of the Long Knives, Head of the Gestapo, Chairmen of the Wannsee conference at which the Final Solution was discussed and created, the kind of man who gained nickname after nickname: "The Hangman", "The Butcher", "The Blond Beast" and - this one given by Hitler himself - "The Man with the Iron Heart." The novel's title (the author having been warned away from the 'too sci-fi' Operation Anthropoid) comes from a saying within the SS: Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich - Himmler's brain is called Heydrich. A ruthless, intelligent and enthusiastic architect of the Nazi machine; Hitler didn't admire many men in his administration but you get the impression that a small smile appeared on his face every time he thought of Heydrich. Another fine orator, he never shied away from vocalising the harsh realities of Nazi policy

I think Heydrich enjoyed verbalizing the incredible, the unthinkable, as if to give substance to the unimaginable truth. This is what I've got to tell you - -you already know it, but it's up to me to tell you, and it's up to us to do it. The orator, dizzy from speaking the unspeakable. The monster, drunk on the thought of the monstrosities he heralds.

But this isn't just a portrait of Heydrich, some focus goes to the two men who would spearhead the operation to remove him Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš; a Slovak and a Czech respectively who trained in Britain after having fled Czechoslovakia during the war.

Their government in exile along with the British Special Operations Executive helped plan the operation which would see them parachuted behind enemy lines, primed and ready to strike at the heart of the Nazi regime.

But that's enough fact for the moment. Let us get back to the book in question. Binet comments on the book he is writing as he writes it. What kind of book should it be, how best to tell the story; should he perhaps ape the detail of Victor Hugo in order to set the scene - 'I remember one interminable digression in The Hunchback of Notre Dame on the workings of the judicial institutions in the Middle Ages. I thought that was very clever. But I skipped the passage.' Perhaps not then. We learn about his disdain for another winner of the Prix Goncourt, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (apparently a further twenty pages criticising it were excised at the request of the editor - and can now be read online), the frustrations of writing fiction based on fact ('I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality') his frustrations when those reading some of the factual details assume it must be made up by the author ("But no, it's all true!" And I think: "Damn, I'm not there yet . . .") and we too are then duped by a chapter that seems to fit in with the factual approach of the book only to be followed by this.

That scene, like the one before it, is perfectly believable and totally made up. How impudent of me to turn a man into a puppet - a man who's been dead for a long time, who cannot defend himself. To make him drink tea, when it might turn out that he liked only coffee. To make him put on two coats, when peraps he had only one. To make him take the bus, when he could have taken the train. To decide that he left in the evening, rather than the morning. I am ashamed of myself.

All of this is kind of interesting, but only up to a point. I kept finding myself frustrated. Just when a section of non-fiction was beginning to really grip an authorial intervention would break the spell. At exactly the moments when you might hope writer of fiction would fill in the gaps in his research he does exactly the opposite.

I'd like to spend my days with the parachutists in the crypt, reporting their discussions, describing how they live from hour to hour in the cold and the damp, what they eat, what they read, what rumours they hear from the town, what they do with their girlfriends when they visit. I would like to tell you about their plans, their doubts, their hopes, their fears, their dreams and thoughts. But that isn't possible, because I know almost nothing about any of it. I don't even know how they reacted when they heard about Heydrich's death, although that ought to make one of the best bits of my book.

This, of course, is the point of the book. Binet wants to raise the themes of truth, storytelling, authorship and the very process of writing itself; but my honest reaction to reading that was often to think "this theorising is all very well but I wish you'd just get out of the way and tell the story". Binet is not nearly as interesting as Binet thinks he is, and even if that was the very thing he wanted to communicate in his exploration of the writer's place in the telling of 'true stories' it isn't a point that needs much repetition before it becomes stale. This view probably makes me sound very old-fashioned (interesting when last week I criticised another author for the very same fault) but perhaps part of it stems from my enjoyment of the book I mentioned at the top of this review. Richard Beard's approach to the telling of the Lazarus story breathed genuine life into something which had become moribund, and never did I feel that he was trying to insert himself as a personality into the proceedings.

This doesn't mean that the book is without successes, only that they were limited for me. Binet's descriptions of the horrific massacre in Babi Yar, the assassination attempt itself and the thrilling standoff and shootout that followed when the assassins where cornered in a Prague church are compelling. Gabčík and Kubiš only ever remain sketches, it is Heydrich who dominates the book, and in the sheer cataloguing of his ruthless creation and organisation of the police state this book shows quite clearly how influential this man was. You want him to be stopped, and you can't help but want his assassins to get away with it, so whatever it's shortfalls this novel (with its short chapters helping things to zip along - 257 chapters in 327 pages) certainly engages the reader. But (yes it's that but again) we cannot simply call it an accessible history because the author himself is such a strong presence, we cannot call it a successful fiction because the author resolutely refuses to invent too much; Binet himself calls it an 'infranovel'. Whatever that actually means.

The Book Of Life - Stuart Nadler

2012-04-24T09:13:00.000+01:00

'where my heart belonged'

I'm going to be brutally honest here and say that I read Stuart Nadler's debut story collection from cover to cover and enjoyed it (not without qualification, there were a few points I knew I would want to make when it came to writing my thoughts up, but in the meantime I set the book down and begun the next one on my list) but when I picked it up again a month or so later to write this post I realised that I could actually remember very little about the seven stories contained within. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I am a forgetful chap, that's the whole reason why I started writing this blog in the first place; and secondly Nadler has produced a very polished set of stories which share certain themes and traits and their very proficiency means that they lack distinction from each other. In a collection where infidelity, Jewishness and familial relations loom large there is a tendency for the male characters in particular to all seem very similar (even when doing very different things - I think this might be because the dialogue isn't sufficiently different). There are even some moments of actual repetition, like for example the awkward kiss that results from one party going for the mouth and the other for the cheek. Whether these are supposed to be artistic echoes or not the effect is of reading a young writer who doesn't realise that he's repeated a trick in more than one story. Ok, that's the hard bit over (sorry Stuart) let's get on with looking at the actual stories.

There is a distinct whiff of Cheever about the collection as a whole with its suburban families, kids in college, crumbling marriages and infidelities. In fact that feeling is so strong that I had to remind myself that these stories were set in the modern age rather than the 50's and 60's of Cheever. Opening story In The Book Of Life features a man who takes the young daughter of his best friend to bed only to discover that his best friend has been conducting an affair with his wife. Winter On The Sawtooth finds one husband actually cohabiting with his wife's lover but who finally finds the confidence to challenge that after his son visits from college, having found not only love but a new connection with his Judaism. The Moon Landing does actually look back to the ticker tape parade that followed Armstrong et als return to terra firma in 1969, as two brothers clear the house now left empty by the death of both their parents in close succession. Unfortunately for Nadler I had recently read Karl Ove Knausgaard's incendiary novel which uses a similar device and frankly blows this story out of the water.

Perhaps the most effective story about infidelity is Catherine and Henry. At the prompting of a friend, Catherine hires a woman to pose as a model in order to test the fidelity of her artist husband, Henry. She has been made suspicious by finding dozens of paintings of the same woman - 'and in Henry's work she found a new sense of attentiveness that discomfited her. Part of this, surely, was that Catherine believed these paintings to be his best work.' So torturous is the whole sting for her personally that she believes she might be able to forgive him if he fails - 'What she isn't sure she is capable of doing is negotiating her own envy. Absolution, she figures, is what comes after forgiveness.' He doesn't pass the test, the relationship ends and when she goes to visit him two years later, to see whether they might be able to rekindle their romance, she finds a man who has aged more than seems possible in so short a time, whilst she remains deeply affected by the guilt of having set a trap for him.

Characters often know that they feel something that might be called love but like the narrator of the final story, Beyond Any Blessing, 'What I didn't know was whether there was a way to quantify the love I felt in my life. I wanted desperately to find some graph to plot my feelings upon, where I could find inarguable proof of where my heart belonged.' Nadler writes with maturity and insight about the complications surrounding love and relationships, finding great mileage in the many different ways that we can mess them up and continue to make the wrong choices even after having apparently learned from our mistakes. But the shadow of those writers Nadler clearly admires looms a little large in this debut and when coupled with those repetitions I mentioned earlier takes something of the gloss off. Nadler is clearly a writer of promise but it may be his next book (a novel) that truly shows us what he's capable of.

The Chemistry Of Tears - Peter Carey

2012-04-17T09:00:00.004+01:00

'a clockwork Taj Mahal'

My first Carey. Why this one? I don't know. I've never been desperate to read any of his novels but something about the mention of an automaton on the back cover intrigued and how comparisons between this and human emotions might in turn have something to say about what exactly it is that makes us human. As Catherine Gehrig, the narrator of this twin-stranded novel, notes -

But really, truly, anyone who has ever observed a successful automaton, seen its uncanny lifelike movements, confronted its mechanical eyes, any human animal remembers that particular fear, that confusion about what is alive and what cannot be born. Descartes said that animals were automatons. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings.

Catherine is a horologist who works at the Swinburne Museum in London as a conservator. Both her father and grandfather were clockmakers so she has always seen it as a soothing occupation - 'For years I thought clockmaking must still any turmoil in one's breast. I was so confident of my opinion, so completely wrong.' Coming in to work one day she discovers that her colleague and lover for the last thirteen years has died. She is sent reeling into grief, a grief that must remain as secret as their affair, but perhaps luckily for her they were never quite as discreet as they imagined and her boss is well aware of what happened between them. He gives Catherine a special project, the restoration of an automaton modelled on 18th-century inventor Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. That device supposedly ate, digested and then excreted grain in front of a live audience but, with the droppings prepared in advance, hoodwinked its audience slightly. Catherine's project is slightly different and amongst the boxes of machinery she discovers several notebooks, each 'densely inscribed in a distinctive style. Every line began and ended at the very brink, and in between was handwriting as regular as a factory's sawtooth roof. There was not a whisker's width of margin.' These are the journals of Henry Brandling, son of a railway entrepreneur who leaves his loveless marriage and travels to Europe in order to effect the construction of a replica of de Vaucanson’s duck, to aid the recovery of his consumptive son. Along the way he falls in with characters who may intend to help or hinder him, he is never really in control of the project he finances and as Catherine obsessively reads his account she wonders what exactly he hopes to achieve with it anyway.

I could not doubt Henry Brandling's real desire to keep his promise to his son. But he did not seem to have imagined what would happen when the duck was finally made. Did he really expect his wife to fall in love with him again? Or was he, without knowing it, building some mad monument to grief, a kind of clockwork Taj Mahal? Or was that me?

I found my interest waning in Brandling's story with each successive page I'm afraid but Carey's portrait of a grieving lover is far more engaging. Catherine medicates herself with alcohol and sedatives, stumbles into work where rather than commit fully to the restoration she trawls through her old email exchanges, lost in remembrance. She is even assigned a young assistant cum spy to keep an eye on her, an 'overenthusiastic' young student who is the counterpoint to Catherine's technophobe. Often hooked up to her 'frankenpod' and glued to web images of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as it unfurls live, it is she who cannot bear to watch Catherine mooning over her inbox and downloads all the messages to a USB stick for her to take away. Catherine meanwhile becomes immersed in the notebooks, the slow reconstruction of the intricate machine, and the deconstruction of her own life to its most basic elements, so that she too becomes almost machine-like, echoing de Vaucanson’s duck once again as she struggles to keep herself together near the novel's conclusion - 'Ingest, I thought, digest, excrete repeat.'

It's an enjoyable enough read but my enthusiasm for turning the pages towards the end came more from the prospect of finishing it rather than wanting to know how it finished. The book doesn't seem to have the fastidious construction I had expected from a Carey novel. As I said, one half of the book is much weaker than the second but it is also in the very obvious ways in which themes are linked between the various narrative strands that one starts to notice the machinery rather than the art. A little like looking at an unconvincing automaton. I suspect this is not one of his best books, or that if it is then Carey is probably not for me.

Seven Years - Peter Stamm

2012-04-10T09:09:00.000+01:00

'together and always separate'

translated by Michael Hofmann

Oh my, what a beautiful book. Opening the envelope in which it came I had no idea what was inside, but once it was in my hand I almost didn't care. With its tracing-paper like dust-jacket and monochrome photograph cover image printed directly onto the boards I was smitten immediately. The white text revealed an author I hadn't heard of previously but underneath that the very well known name of translator Michael Hofmann. Flip to the back cover and there's some nice quotes from Zadie Smith amongst others who is moved to profanity in her praise for this novel that makes you 'doubt your own dogma.' I was intrigued. The icy coldness of the book's outer shell is replicated inside with Stamm's clear and uninflected prose and the emotional detachment of the characters. This definitely won't be a book for everyone, female readers in particular may find the male narrator far too off-putting, but it is a brave and unsettling read that questions how we relate, feel desire and find fulfilment.

Alex and Sonia seem to be the perfect couple. He is good looking, she beautiful; both of them architects with a successful firm and a luxurious lifestyle. The only thing missing from their life is their first child and it is the strain of trying to achieve that final piece of the picture that threatens to disintegrate the foundations of their marriage. It's slightly more complicated than that of course but the idea of marriage as a construct is very fitting for this couple. Alex chose Sonia as a fitting mother for his children, a woman who seemed to ooze success and the promise of a good life together. Looking back on his marriage many years later he realises that 'Sonia was a project ... No sooner had we reached one goal than the next loomed into sight, we were never done.' What is crucial is what came before this logical decision to marry Sonia.

The second woman in Alex's life is Ivona, a plain Polish woman whom he met when she simply made up the numbers on an evening out with friends at college. With a 'docile and long-suffering manner' she gives 'the impression of a natural born victim' something that makes Alex feel both sorry for her and hugely irritated by her. But she seems devoted to him, something very different to 'the usual back-and-forth, the game of trying to seduce a woman.'

I had the feeling Ivona was giving herself to me, and I had absolute power over her, and could do whatever I liked with her. I felt utterly indifferent to her. I had nothing to lose and nothing to be afraid of.

Their strangely chaste affair takes place in her dorm room amongst the soft toys, romance novels and cheap jewellery that mark out her emotional immaturity.

The pokiness, the untidiness, and the absence of any aesthetic value only seemed to intensify my desire.. Thre was nothing there to inhibit me, by reminding me of my life and the world. It was as though I became someone else in that room, an object in Ivona's chaotic collection of treasured and neglected knickknacks.

Then he meets Sonia, 'the absolute opposite of Ivona', a woman who intimidates him and gives him 'the feeling of having to try to be better' than he actually is. But for all her beauty, charm and social ease 'Sonia would never say to a man that she loved him, the way that Ivona had said it to me, as if there was no other possibility.' Perhaps it is this that draws him back to Ivona when he encounters the seven year itch and he conducts an affair that contains passion but not attraction in 'those sluggish hours we spent together in her overheated room, stuck to one another, crawling into each other, together and always separate.'

Her unconditional love for me, however purely random, drew me irresistibly to her and, by the same token, repulsed me the instant I was satisfied. Then I would feel the need to hurt her, as if that was my only way of breaking free.

It feels very much like an addiction: illogical, dangerous, destructive and yet something towards which he is irresistibly drawn.

At the same time his relationship with Sonia deteriorates. In his opinion she had always been inhibited by her beauty, incapable of passion, Alex sometimes with 'the feeling she was watching herself while we made love, to make sure she kept her dignity.' He too is an observer to their intimacy and in this novel of construction it is a moment in their new apartment together that shows just how detached they have become.

We stood next to each other in the bathroom and looked at ourselves in the mirror. Two beautiful people in a beautiful apartment, said Sonia, and laughed. I turned and kissed her, and thought of the beautiful couple in the mirror kissing as well, and that excited me more than the actual kiss itself.

I won't go any further in describing just how destructive and messed up this love triangle becomes except to remind you of the element missing from that perfect marriage. Alex's behaviour is a mystery to himself, he never seeks to investigate his motives or actions, and that selfishness and solipsism may be hard to stomach for some readers. He is an unsettling guide through the novel and even when his marriage and business are ruined not to mention the well-being of Ivona, he is unrepentant, finding solace in a line he remembers from a film (Adaptation) - 'you are what you love, not who loves you.'

It seemed to me that everything had just happened to me, and I was as little to blame for it as Sonia and Ivona. I wasn't a monster, I was no better and no worse than anyone else.

Plenty of readers won't be so quick to let him off the hook but however you feel about Alex personally he is the perfect unsettling guide to this ice-cold examination.

A Death In The Family - Karl Ove Knausgaard

2012-04-03T09:00:00.412+01:00

'life's a pitch'

translated by Don Bartlett

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.

It was this article in The Guardian that alerted me to Norwegian writer Knausgaard. Towards the end of last year apparently, a new Norwegian translation of the Bible sat at the top of the bestseller lists, selling nearly 80,000 copies in less than three months. However it wasn't that book I wanted to read after finishing the article but the only book to beat it to the number one spot in that period. Enter Knausgaard who has published two critically acclaimed novels but achieved real fame and notoriety with his six-volume series of autobiographical novels entitled My Struggle (or Min Kamp in Finnish. Yes - just like Hitler's own memoir). Harvill Secker have published the first of these under this new title and part two will follow next year. I can only hope, pray and if necessary demand that they publish the following four books, all 3000 pages of it, after finishing part one. Knausgaard's writing is beautiful, ugly, honest and true and whatever you feel about the 'Faustian bargain' he has made by achieving such success by writing about his friends and family in such an exposing manner there is no doubt that he does so with incredible skill. In yet another book in which very little actually happens I found myself increasingly fascinated as I went along and impatient for the next instalment by the time I reached the final page.

I should mention straight away that after a couple of hundred pages I was far from convinced. In fact I was a bit bored by parts of the book and a little bewildered as to where it was going. But about half way through, when Knausgaard changed locale and focus, I found myself gripped and even able to better appreciate what had come before. You could argue that the speed-writing approach (all six volumes of this series appear to have been written in about three years in total) makes for a slightly unsatisfactory reading experience in places but I found that once my brain had clicked with the book I was happy to follow Knausgaard's flighty train of thought anywhere it wanted to take me and it wasn't just the quality of the writing that pleased me but the bravery and power of it which rendered the few books I read afterwards tame by comparison.

We are invited, naturally, to think of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Knausgaard has a similar disregard for chronology, his interest lying more with microscopic details, digressions into the place and purpose of art and a desire to conquer the greatest fear/fascination of all: death. If you want plot then look elsewhere. All that really happens in this book is a teenage boy drinks and goes out with the wrong girl and, when a grown man, clears the house in which his father died (and his grandmother still lives). Having 'nigh on imbibed' Proust's masterpiece himself and spent much of his life thinking about the past Knausgaard finds himself on marriage number two with a young family and barely thinking about it at all - 'I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: ask me what I did three days ago and I can't remember.' Perhaps that too is why time no longer seems like a linear journey and why this book follows a different structure. In searching for an image to illustrate this different view of time he alights on a a boat being raised in a lock - 'As time seeps in from all sides our life is essentially the same with only he details changing, and the wait is for the moment when the sluice gates open and real life moves on.'

Domestic family life has also robbed him of his most prized creative resource: solitude. He craves great swathes of it in order to write and is still driven by 'the ambition to write something exceptional one day', his recent attempts to grapple with his father's influence frustrated by form.

For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had got nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form...Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called 'writing'. Writing is more about destroying than creating.

And so we have this melding of memoir and fiction. How much of it is either of those two things is impossible to tell, although the vast majority of what we read would seem to be based very much in fact. Ignoring the sensation with which the books are accompanied (and given that most of that comes from his writing about his ex-wife who barely merits a mention in this first volume) what we seem to have at the beginning is a writer writing about the process of writing, whilst we read what he has written. But Knausgaard the writer drops away from the foreground and what we have really is Knausgaard the rememberer. Looking back on an adolescence of experiment with drink (alcohol looms large in the book as a whole and the contrast between the youthful excitement around it and the degradation it causes in later life is sharp), fumbles with girls, embarrassing attempts at making music, there is something a bit directionless about the first half of the book. One thing I did pick up on was the way the adult Knausgaard is now able to appreciate when looking back to his childhood how different his days were to his father's.

While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and when every opportunity filled me to the brim, in a way which now is actually incomprehensible, the meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms. "Family...career..."

Their family is soon split, his parent's separation announced matter-of-factly whilst dealing with a shopping list. The time that Karl Ove spends alone with his father is painfully intimate at times, as when he catches his father in moments when he thinks he is alone. Returning home early for example to find him nursing a bottle of wine (and making plenty of noise as he enters in order to announce his presence so that his father can clear it away) or another occasion when even his attempt at a noisy entrance cannot rise above the loud music to which his father is listening; eyes closed, head moving to and fro with the music, cheeks wet with tears. Young Karl Ove walks out unnoticed and leaves the house immediately. His father eventually removes himself to his own mother's seaside home where he slowly drinks himself to an early grave. It is the cleanup after his death which dominates the second half of the book and it is a truly stunning piece of writing that takes squalor and destruction and turns it into art.

Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

Joined in the cleanup by his brother Yngve, a graphic designer whose control only serves to heighten the manner in which Karl Ove has been sideswiped by his father's death, we watch Knausgaard stumble through the filth and detritus, weeping uncontrollably, trying to piece together exactly what had happened in the years of his father's self-imposed exile. One extraordinary realisation is that his father had actually spoken of suicide several times; his belief that statistics didn't show that many car accidents with single drivers were deliberate attempts to end a life, his thoughts on the various methods; but all of this had seemed nothing more than a topic of conversation, Knausgaard unable to see it as anything else, his father having imprinted his image of himself so clearly in Karl Ove's mind that he was 'always engaging with the person he had been' rather than the one he had become. On of the lowest points is related by his Uncle Gunnar who tells both boys about the time when their father had broken his leg but remained lying on the living room floor, attended by his mother, rather than calling a doctor.

"He's crapped his pants. Can you imagine? He'd been lying on the floor drinking. And she'd served him. "This is no good," I told him before the ambulance arrived. "This is beneath your dignity. Now pull yourself together. And do you know what your father said?" "Are you going to push me even deeper into the shit, Gunnar? Is that why you've come, to push me even deeper in the shit?...He destroyed everything. This house, her, himself. Everything. Everything."

Even more painful perhaps as they clear the house of its broken and ruined furniture, its soiled clothing, the smell of waste everywhere, working around their gaunt, wan, dementia-suffering and incontinent grandmother is the dawning realisation that she suffers from the same alcoholism that killed her son. Her innocent enquiries as to whether they'd like a drink in the evening (and her abstinence when they refuse) suddenly take on a different hue when the boys realise her plight. And when they finally relent and give her what she so clearly needs they watch the transformation as the glint returns to her eyes, colour to her cheeks, 'like a vampire that had finally got a taste of blood...life was returning to her, filling her limb by limb. It was terrible, terrible.'

Those that write purely as an act of catharsis often produce terrible work. I've read far too many plays by people who should really have been having that conversation with the person involved (or a therapist) rather than pretending that it was ever a good subject for drama. But this book, which so clearly serves a double purpose (to conquer the shame instilled by a father who belittled his son from a young age and to conquer an even grander foe: the fear of death), somehow manages to claim its position as a work of art whilst also being an act of confession, a personal memoir and also a piece of fiction, a book hard to categorise and even to enjoy at times but one which despite its meandering makes other books seem spineless afterwards. One that succeeded in helping Knausgaard to deal with his father's death, one can only wonder whether it worked the same magic on his legacy.

And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks inn the wind, a jackets that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

Hope: A Tragedy - Shalom Auslander

2012-03-27T09:07:00.003+01:00

'the past is the present'

Oh, what joy to read a book and laugh. And laugh. And laugh again. Just the title alone of Auslander's previous book, the memoir Foreskin's Lament, was enough to raise a titter but his first novel provides laugh after laugh and has an audacious but simple concept at its heart: a man discovers an old woman living in his attic. She claims to be Anne Frank. He obviously wants her out of his house but who wants to be the man to rat on Anne Frank? Especially if you're Jewish! That man is Solomon Kugel, a man who has moved his wife, two-year old son and ageing mother out of New York and into a farmhouse in the anonymous rural town of Stockton, a place 'famous for nothing' (although a spate of arsons recently threatens to undo that), in order to protect them all from the horrors of the modern world. He is a man who makes note of the famous last words of others in his constant search for a fitting bon mot for his own demise, a man whose mother, despite being born in America the year after the Second World War ended, believes that she is a survivor from the Nazi concentration camps, a man who will find himself neglecting his own family in order to protect the old woman in his loft who has subsisted on a diet of rodents whilst also relieving herself in his air-vents.

It's a brave idea, to make comedy from the Holocaust's poster girl ('Thirty-two million copies..that's nothing to sneeze at!') but the sheer audacity of it, not to mention the confidence with which he sees it through, means that Auslander gets away with it. He's not the first writer to imagine Anne Frank as a survivor, Philip Roth did so to great effect in The Ghost Writer (his first Zuckerman novel), but to imagine it with such black comedy is the mark of a brave humorist. Frank has remained captive in that loft for good reason of course, those thirty-two million copies didn't sell because of a happy ending, and her agent has very simple advice about the best way for things to continue: "stay dead". Up in the attic she remains, working on her next book, the pages piling up around her. Kugel too is trapped by the situation, whether that woman in the attic really is Anne Frank or not, the weight of history means there is very little he can do.

Pity was a funny thing: it would be easier to throw out the real Anne Frank than it would be to throw out a Holocaust survivor so fucked up by the Holocaust that she thought she was Anne Frank. Can you imagine the headlines?

Kugel's experience of the modern world provides plenty of genuine belly laughs whether that be the American obsession with getting bigger and bigger cars ("it was no longer a matter of keeping up with the Joneses; it was a mater of not getting crushed by them") or the increasing fad of foods free of one harmful thing or another, and somehow being more expensive as a result, conjuring a nightmare scenario when followed through to its logical conclusion:

A box of nothing - free of poisons, toxins, pesticides, a box that needed no warnings, no list of possible side effects and adverse reactions, a box that didn't harm unborn children or require checking with your physician before opening, a box of fucking air - would require a second mortgage.
Staying alive was costing them a fortune.
What kind of monster brings a child into this world?

And this of course is a world peopled by the survivors of previous tragedies, a better world, one in which the hope remains that we can improve things for our children. But as Kugel's therapist, Professor Jove , makes clear, hope might just be the most dangerous thing of all, the guiding force behind the previous century's greatest monster.

Hitler was the most unabashed doe-eyed optimist of the last hundred years. That's why he was the biggest monster. Have you ever heard of anything so outrageously hopeful as the Final Solution? Not just that there could be a solution - to anything, mind you, while we have yet to cure the common cold - but a final one, no less! Full of hope, the Fuhrer was. A dreamer! A romantic, even, yes? If I just kill this one, gas that one, everything will be okay...Here's a good rule for life, Kugel, no matter where you happen to live or when you happen to be born: when someone rises up and promises that things are going to be better: run. Hide. Pessimists don't build gas chambers.

Wincing slightly? Auslander doesn't pull his punches. 'Anne Frank' is a decaying woman driven to depravity, infuriating her host to the point where he can think the most appalling things ('Six million he kills, thought Kugel, and this one gets away.') and we cannot stop ourselves laughing. But his greatest creation is Kugel's mother. Every morning she wakes the house screaming (having read somewhere that this is something Holocaust survivors do), and her conversation often ends with the muttered phrases 'ever since the war' or 'those bastards.' Kugel himself has long ago learnt not to challenge her on her status as a survivor. The lampshade that she placed by his bed as a child and which she claimed was his grandfather was impervious even to young Solomon's observation that it had 'Made In Taiwan' stamped on the bottom - "Well, they're not going to write Made in Buchenwald, are they?"

There is a slight problem with a novel like this however and that's that it needs to progress. The slow disintegration of Kugel's life is great to read (similar to that of the protagonist in Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets) but perhaps Auslander felt that he couldn't just keep making Holocaust jokes and so the injection of plot inevitably comes and it is only partially successful. That is a small quibble however and if the worst thing you can say about this book is that it is merely an entertainment then it seems to me that that is not such a bad thing at all. Few books in recent memory have been so entertaining and none have managed to combine that with the puncturing of the pomposity of those who would use the Holocaust or survival as currency.

Pacazo - Roy Kesey

2012-03-20T09:00:00.431Z

'always hope'

A pacazo is an uncommonly large iguana. Just in case you were wondering. Let's move on. Pacazo the novel is large too, over 500 pages, and whilst I'm not the kind of reader to be put off by bulk I have to admit that it was this that led me to put aside a proof some time ago and forget about it. But then voices start to be heard recommending it (real voices I hasten to add, I haven't lost my mind) and a bit of enforced bed-rest provides just the kind of opportunity required to read a book like this and I found myself bringing it down from the shelf. Carefully.

Kesey's novel is set in Piura, Peru in which we find the corpulent American John Segovia. Attracted to Peru by his love of its history, by stories of conquistadors and Incas, he managed to find work in the University teaching English and there continued his historical research. It is a city well suited to this sizeable fellow, food plays an important part in the culture and the varied dishes and drinks are well described by Kesey along with the 'eternal heat' that leaves John drenched in sweat for much of his day. When he met Pilar and fell in love the major problem was her being a student of his and there were plenty of voices warning him off, including that of his friend Reynaldo.

Perhaps I would have listened if he had said, She will alter what it means to be in the world, she will go late to the outdoor market to buy mangos, she will peel them and cut them in slices, she will allow you to run the slices across her bare stomach and thighs and between her shoulder blades, the juice will become one of her many scents and flavours, and four weeks after giving birth to your child, she will be taken into the desert, will be raped, strangled, left for dead, will regain tortured delirious consciousness, walk the wrong direction, and die of heat stroke the following day.
And this will be your fault.

Sorry to land that on you rather abruptly but Keysey doesn't tend to take the sensitive route so neither will I. John is therefore a widower with an infant daughter, a man consumed by grief and guilt. From the very first page this novel doesn't give the reader a chance to find their feet very easily. In fact this is a classic 'hard to get into' novel, oh how many times I longed to close it for good and move on to something else but something made me persevere, maybe the perseverance of the narrator. John's obsession with the history of Peru invades the very text we read, '...threaded through the history I came to research is other history still happening, times and tenses washing over me.' Within the same paragraph, sometimes the same sentence, Kesey switches from modern Peru to its past and we follow Spanish conquerors laying waste to Incan forces and vice versa; heat, sweat and hard work linking both.

The nearest building, sharp white. I close my eyes. There is the smell of decomposing leaves, of heat and wet and grass. I have been this tired before but do not remember when and a ship drifts south along the coast toward the mouth of a river. A shout goes up. The men gather at the port gunwale. There is a Tallan mending a net on the bank. He is the first human they have seen in two days, perhaps of use. The men drop anchor, lower the skiff, go to get him.

The frequency of this switching comes and goes and how much it really adds to the novel is up for debate. Pacazo is one of those novels that I wished had been pruned whilst I was reading it but I'm sure plenty would argue that to take anything away from it, especially something so intrinsic to the style as the time-switching narrative, would be to take away from the experience of the book. John is obsessed with finding the man responsible for his wife's murder, the taxista who drove away with her to the market. With an image in his mind of the man's face, a memory of his voice and the fragments of a licence plate he scans the streets each day as the taxistas drive by and woe betide any whose plate begins with a P and ends with 22.

He searches also the site of her ordeal, finding significance in anything he picks up and also adding a stone to the cairn he has created in her memory each time he visits. All he can allow himself to want is the 'true story of a single night, less than a night, of a few hours only.' But that single desire is enough to run roughshod over his work and his ability to be as good a parent as he could be. On more than one occasion his daughter suffers, most obviously when he takes her with him on one of his trips out into the desert. There's stark contrast in his efforts to do the right thing, applying sun block assiduously in order to protect her, and yet subjecting her to an awful ordeal in the heat of the desert. And yet one of the remarkable things about this book is the way it marries a man willing to beat a stranger in the street based on a hunch with a man willing to spend hours singing to his daughter and dancing with her about the room in order to get her to sleep. Grief and guilt have warped him in many ways and yet when his daughter hits him on the head with one of her empty milk bottles and laughs he thinks immediately 'of calling in sick today, every day, waiting to hear that laugh again...'

As well as anger there is sadness, rivers of it (Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo is quoted at one point: 'Sadness is prohibited.' That sentence for John, 'either magical or dictatorial. I hope soon to decide'). In a book as bloated as its narrator it is surprising how many times the real blows to the gut come from a single sentence or image. As it approaches another anniversary John takes to the streets, hanging flyers asking for any information and he casually mentions that at first it used to take him hours to do, 'Then I learned the secret of not looking at the photograph any more.' The ways in which his friends look out for him, or his long-suffering boss at the University accepts another shortfalling, or his (one-eyed) nanny Casualidad is asked to do a little more than she intended, all go to show how much love there is for this man and how much they want him to move on with his life, convinced that enough time has passed for him to grant himself that release. Mother Nature intervenes in the shape of El Niño, torrential rains swell rivers, cause floods and wash away John's evidence, much of his research and almost precipitate a paradigm shift in his thinking. But the desire to know is too strong.

But it is something else too and when John is questioned at one point about why he doesn't believe in God, showing how he and those of a religious bent use the same tools in the face of death but only achieve different results, we get an insight into the novel's great theme.

We beat death back with narrative...Biologically each of us is pointless. And we cannot bear being pointless. So we create a point by placing ourselves in stories that grow ever longer... and death is the anti-narrative. It is the story not even ending but simply stopping. If the story never ends, death loses.

This is why John cannot let go of his wife's death, this is why John's father told his son about being distantly related to a conquistador called Juan de Segovia ('What a load of shit. But helpful shit, yes? The very best kind. Made me strong. Made me angry and so very strong.'), this is why the conquistadors themselves cut through the undergrowth of this novel to make their own appearances time and again. But our personal narratives can be hard to keep true and as the novel finds its legs in the second half, a new series of murders opening up the prospect of John finding his killer once again, even John knows that he is losing grip of what he once held as facts in his search.

I see him daily, he is every taxista, every shopkeeper, every janitor, his thin dark face dark hair dark eyes. He is every cook every plumber every passenger on every bus and my eyes, the differences...

How can a man hope to chance upon another he has glanced only for a moment in a busy city? We could return to lizards once again and the one that John accidentally stands on and kills, 'there is nothing less likely than this death, not given their speed and agility, so there is hope, always hope, always.'

Pure - Andrew Miller

2012-03-13T09:00:00.000Z

'What is hidden'

Attempting to cure myself of my recently developed historical fiction aversion I decided to cheat slightly. Andrew Miller may have chosen to set some of his novels in the eighteenth century but I think most people would call him a literary novelist before calling him a historical one. The fact that this novel had recently won the overall Costa Book Prize (has any literary award ever sounded so cheap thanks to its corporate sponsor?) also meant that it met the stringent criteria of being a 'well-written, enjoyable book that [the judges] would strongly recommend anyone to read.' Snarking aside, I knew it was high time to read this author and I can say that after finishing this book and 'enjoying' it I will be keen to read what many regard as his best book: Ingenious Pain.

Pure is set in the pre-revolutionary Paris of 1785, a city where discontent is whispered rather than shouted from the rooftops. Into the city comes a young, 'but not very young' engineer by the name of Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Summoned to the court of Versailles he has been charged with the onerous task of clearing the centuries old cemetery of Les Innocents in the district of Les Halles and destroy the church that adjoins it. The cemetery and its environs are choked with the smell of decay, something that seems to pervade the very breath of those that live around it. The symbolism is clear. The past needs to be cleared away for Paris to make a fresh start; you can't destroy history and even burying it only lasts so long before it contaminates the present. Hundreds of years of dead bodies must be removed and interred elsewhere, the ground made fresh again for new seeds to take root.

The novel actually contains a fair few characters but they are all easy to keep hold of. Baratte stays in the house of the Monnards near the cemetery under the watchful eye of their maid Marie (thanks to a small hole in the floor of the room above his where she sleeps). Their daughter Ziguette is a haunting presence, keen to impress upon their guest that to dig up the cemetery is to dig up her own childhood. Each night he prepares himself for sleep with a repeated mantra designed to help him keep his focus.

'Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in Normandy. What are you? An engineer, trained at the Ecole des Ponts. What do you believe in? In the power of reason...'

To aid in his labours Baratte calls upon the services of an old friend, Lecour, with whom he used to work at the mines of Valenciennes. He brings Lecour and a gang of Flemish labourers to the city and they bring with them their own ideas of progress and the future, ideas fashioned by years of back-breaking and life-threatening labour. Both he and Lecour used to be idealists, once even made plans for a utopian city and it is soon clear that Lecour has lost none of his original passion.

'...tonight, everything is as it was. Mind speaking to mind, heart speaking to heart. The fountain of youth in our breasts . . . bubbling! You know what distinguishes one man from the next? His willingness to remain unspotted while the other, out of a kind of idleness, lets his mouth fill up with soil. Grave-dirt.'

In the church by the cemetery the organist Armand still occasionally opens the stops but is also another advocate of 'the party of the future' ('It has no meeting place, no subscriptions, and yet it exists as surely as you or I. The party of the future. The party of the past. There may not be much time left to decide what side you are on.') and along with a group of fellow conspirators he dubs Baratte with a new name, Bêche (French for spade). And finally (for you, for now: there are even more characters than this) a pair of doctors are detailed to document the bodies being lifted from the ground, one of them a certain Dr Guillotin.

There's a fair bit of plot too. Revolutionary slogans appear on the walls of the cemetery, the name of Bêche now a weapon of change; Baratte is attacked and almost killed in his bed; an act of violence in the cemetery threatens to be the catalyst to undo the entire project. So there's a lot going on but rather than feeling like a historical novel burdened with detail it actually reads more like a thriller. Those of a literary bent will find most satisfaction in the figure of Baratte himself rather than the plot and characters that surround him. The way in which he wrestles with his ideas of reason and progress, his battles with desire, loneliness and responsibility; the oppression that he feels from the authority figures around him and even 'his own weakness and confusion.' There is always something that clouds his thinking, makes it hard for him to reach any clear conclusions; the stench of the cemetery, the head injury after he is attacked and the 'word blindness' that afflicts him afterwards.

Miller is also a writer who knows how to use contrast in his writing to great effect. This novel contains moments of violence and great tenderness, death and new life, friendship and enmity, terror and beauty. In much the same way that a forest fire can destroy but also bring new life, fire always threatens to be the agent of purification as well as providing one of the novel's more beautiful images as it sweeps across blades of grass 'each tip a delicate flower blooming only for a second or two.' Moments of beauty are few and far between however in this novel of decay and destruction. No matter how noble the aims, the desire to make things pure is always combined with a ruthless disregard for anything that stands in its way.

Abbott Awaits - Chris Bachelder

2012-03-06T09:22:00.228Z

'stunned by the real'

The TLS Books of the Year edition often involves an awful lot of skimming over non-fiction books you haven't the faintest interest in, lots of academics and critics chummily gushing about books written by their academic and critical friends and usually consensus about a book or two which you were already well aware of. Or is that just me? Anyway, this year under the dependable name of translator Michael Hofmann was a slim American novel published by Louisiana State University Press. Two things to prick the ears up there: Hofmann first (and recommending an American novel rather than something in translation) and then the publisher. LSU Press were of course the people to originally print John Kennedy O'Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning tour de force A Confederacy Of Dunces. This is a press willing to take a risk or two. Seeing also that the author of Hofman's recommendation was Chris Bachelder, whose name I recognised from my McSweeney's-reading past, and that the subject of this book was a father's musings whilst his wife is in the third trimester of their second pregnancy, I was busy hunting down a copy before I'd finished the paragraph.

And it's brilliant. If you have had a child, buy a copy. If you've had two I can only presume you've already done what I did and gone online to find a copy before moving on to this paragraph. If you haven't then do it now. Right, have you all got one ordered? Then, I'll continue. Abbott is a university teacher on summer break. He and his wife are expecting their second child and we follow Abbott through June, July and August as they prepare themselves for the new arrival. There is a chapter for each day, many just a page, some only a paragraph, and each comes with its own title such as: Abbott Visits the Pet Store, In Which Abbott Is Surprised by Artifice, and Abbott's Imaginary Letter to an Imaginary Nationally Syndicated Childhood and Parenting Expert. Anyone who is a parent knows that day to day life isn't about any of the grand things or big events, it is about the bits in between. Whilst there is a page for each day it is often the smallest or most innocuous part of that day in which Abbott reflects on his life or has what one might call a moment of clarity. Bachelder knows that it is whilst cleaning the vomited raspberries from your daughter's car seat that a father can suddenly realise "The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life."

Abbott's life is filled with paradoxes like these. Here for example is an extract from the chapter Abbott and the Paradox of Personal Growth:

Abbott approaches sleep with an ineffable sense of relief that he did not know, before having a child, what it was like to have a child - did not really know what it was really like - because if he had known before having a child how profoundly strenuous and self-obliterating it is to have a child, he would never have had a child, and then, or now, he would not have this remarkable child. Abbott's wife, were she here, might say that it doesn't quite make sense. Abbot might rub her hip lightly with the back of his hand. "That's the thing," he might say.

Even the smallest paradoxes are like moments of illumination. Abbott knows for example that his daughter's nap time is the perfect time to do housework, run errands, rest or read and yet he, like all parents, spends a huge portion of it waiting for them to wake up. WHY? The domestic chores that fill this novel lead Abbott to compare his lot to Hercules at first before realising that a more accurate comparison would be Sisyphus, whose task wasn't impossible but endless in its repetition. Taking out the rubbish, cleaning gutters, mowing the lawn, doing laundry, caring for daughter, dog and wife, Abbott finds new ways to fail at the most basic level on each and every day but also finds moments of triumph in the most unlikely places too.

There will be particular joy for fathers in reading this book, mainly because there will be several moments of recognition. That isn't to say that mothers won't enjoy it, on the contrary, if you want to understand a little better the mindset of the anxious father, or to understand that his clumsy attempt at intimacy came about not because he's some kind of animal but because even asleep in the back seat of the car with mouth open and nylon seatbelt bisecting those wonderful breasts of yours, you were quite simply a thing of beauty and the only wonder is why contemporary art isn't filled with more breasts bisected by nylon straps ('Where are the songs and poems, the sculpture, the oils on canvas?'). There will doubtless also be moments of joint recognition across the sexual divide.

Like many others before him, Abbott discovers, once married, that marriage is a battle - clinically, a negotiation - over possession of the Bad Mood. A marriage, especially a marriage with children, cannot function properly if both its constituents are in a foul temper, thus the Bad Mood is a privilege only one spouse can enjoy at a time. Who gets to be in a Bad Mood? This is the day-to-day struggle. In the Perfect Union, the Bad Mood is traded equitably, like child care or household chores. There is joint custody of the Bad Mood...In a typical marriage, however, one spouse tends to possess the Bad Mood disproportionately. This is called Hogging The Mood.

Any novel that can begin a chapter 'Fucking Thoreau' before going on to point out that Abbott 'could, for his part, happily do without the post office. Leave it to the childless to be complacent about the mail. You put a toddler in Walden and you'd get a new philosophy' (the mail being important because in its regularity 'It not only signals the blessed arrival of mid to late afternoon, it also offers the promise of surprise and wonder') is alright by me. This novel is filled with moments to make you laugh out loud, moments that take your breath away with their simple beauty or truth and the whole book is written with an easy wit and intelligence that will make it possible for even the most tired parent to glide through it. In fact I worry that I'm making this sound too much like the kind of humorous book you'd expect to find in the loo of a middle class house. Be assured that Bachelder is a poet of the ordinary, the short chapters and their short sentences are beautifully put together so that you get that sensation as when...

A cloud covers and then uncovers the sun. Campus is distant and theoretical, like a galaxy or heaven. There is something beyond tedium. You can pass all the way through tedium and come out the other side, and this is Abbot's gift today. he picks up a pinecone, puts it in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. The girl's eyes grow wide and she laughs. She reaches for the pinecone, says, "Pinecone."

This is yet another novel this year with no real plot. Another book whose short chapters could almost be read as separate short stories. Another book that makes a virtue of brevity. Another brilliant book that knows that sometimes the most important thing you might do in the day is simply look out the window.

The window is divided into twelve panes, four rows of three. Abbott imagines that each pane is a framed photograph. He studies the composition of each of the twelve panes. He moves along rows, left to right, beginning with the upper left pane. A cloud of leaves and a single red brick. A squirrel on new shingles. Sky with faded contrail. There is not one pane that is not beautiful.

We The Animals - Justin Torres

2012-03-01T09:00:00.001Z

'a fistful of seed'

With the very first line of Anna Karenina Tolstoy asserted that 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Like Wilde's epigrams it is one of those pithy sentences that sounds wise and true because it is so neat. There is of course something a little patronising about it and I'm not sure I know any of these 'happy' families, everyone's insanely stressed nowadays, aren't they? Anyway, I mention it because this is already my third book this year that shows just how different those 'unhappy' families can be (see The Misfortunates by Dimitri Verhulst reviewed here and This Is Paradise by Will Eaves reviewed here). Torres' slim debut is packed full of memorable images, scenes and moments that describe beautifully the unique trials of a family, and it is the sheer concentration of those into so few pages that helps to elevate it above the other two in terms of achievement. There are occasions when it too obviously shows off the arrival of a 'new voice' but each one of those is balanced out by moments of truly brilliant writing that deserve all of the accolades this book has already earned and will go on to achieve.

The book itself has an interesting format. The contents page shows several titles and their page numbers so that it first resembles a story collection. In many ways that is what this is, although they are all linked; we might accurately describe these as vignettes of childhood. Now I gave Verhulst a tough time for pulling the same trick in his book but there's something about the brevity here that makes sense of it. Many are just a page or two and in that manner Torres gives us a whistlestop tour of his, ahem, I mean his narrator's childhood. About to turn seven at the outset he has two brothers, Manny the eldest and Joel between them. Paps is Puerto Rican, Ma is white, both are from Brooklyn but had to marry in Texas in order to do it legally when Ma first got pregnant at 14 (and Paps just 16). The three brothers, as the title suggests, are often depicted like animals as they hurtle through childhood, beginning as birds in the opening chapter We Wanted More.

We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching heads, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.

When it's cold they huddle together for warmth, when their father comes home and beats them they take it together, and when they play it's rough or involves them hunting together like a pack. Their mother works graveyard shifts at the local brewery, often getting confused as to what time of day or even day it is. The boys learn not to correct her after a while, it being easier than the time she tried to send Joel next door at midnight to get butter so she could make a cake for Manny

"Ma, you're crazy," Joel said. "Everyone's sleeping, and it's not even his birthday."
..."I hate my life," she said.
That made Joel cry, and Manny punched him hard on the back of the head.
"Nice one, ass wipe," he hissed. "It was going to be my fucking birthday."
After that, we went along with whatever she came up with; we lived in dreamtime.

Ma is also a victim of abuse. On the morning of our narrator's seventh birthday she has been holed up in bed for a couple of days with swollen purple cheeks, the result the boys believe (because their father told them so) of a visit to the dentist ('that's how they loosen up the teeth before they rip them out'). What she's really upset about however is that her baby boy is turning seven, the age at which her other two changed, no longer happy to sit on her lap and be cuddled, far more interested in wrestling and smashing things. This whirlwind of a novel has a pretty quick tempo on the whole but every now and then there are moments of suspension so that we can notice something tender, something beautiful, something cruel or something heartbreaking.

Ma could hold tears on her eyelids longer than anyone; some days she walked around like that for hours, holding them there, not letting them drop. On those days she would trace a finger over the shapes of things or hold the telephone on her lap, silent, and you had to call her name three times before she'd give you her eyes.

These moments aren't always as sad as you might expect. Whilst their father is clearly a man of brutish strength and quick temper he also has moments when he shows not just tenderness but insight too. When he takes his youngest son on an errand up to Niagra on one occasion he leaves him alone in a museum of curiosities for a while. Our narrator watches a film about the daredevils who tossed themselves over the famous Falls in barrels. Alone in the room and seeing the film projection on his body he begins to do a dance for himself and only notices his father watching from the doorway when he finishes. His father says nothing until many hours later when they pull onto the road that will lead them to their home.

"I stood in that doorway, watching you dance, and you know what I was thinking?...I was thinking how pretty you were," he said. "Now, isn't that an odd thing for a father to think about his son? But that's what it was. I was standing there, watching you dance and twirl and move like that, and I was thinking to myself, Goddamn, I got me a pretty one."

This tight family experience it all together, the three boys witness to their parents lows and even, in one eye-opening scene for them, their highs. Even the possible life-changing moment when Ma bundles boys and a few hastily grabbed possessions into the new truck she so hated her husband buying (it being a totally impractical bit of posturing without even enough seatbelts for the family) ends with them all returning at the end of the day, having experienced worry that she might actually do it, excitement at the change and finally as they drive back up to the house 'when it was safe to feel let down, we did.' Outside of the home the boys know that their best hope for survival is together and they tend to roam about as a pack. As they grow older their wish to escape is tempered by a sense of how dangerous and difficult the world around them is. Manny's increasingly religious talk leads him declare, after another abortive attempt at flight, that "God's scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me and Joel, we're nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We're on our own."

But we always sense as they approach adolescence and young-adulthood that this bond, however violent and punishing, will not be able to hold and it is naturally our sensitive and bookish narrator who will become separated. The way in which his sexual awakening is used to finally break that tie is perhaps a little predictable and neat but there is no doubting the power of the final few chapters and the very real pain of this family. In the same way that we all recall just flashes of our own childhood's Torres' novel selects those enlightening moments, not like photographs as such because nothing about this book is static, but Kodak moments nonetheless, the paper now tinged and dirty, colours still vivid and yet somehow not true, and all of it passed by rather than past.

Absolution - Patrick Flanery

2012-02-28T08:46:00.000Z

'the long tail of the root'

After reading work by Damon Galgut and JM Coetzee that deals with the 'new' South Africa, work which ranks near the very top of the contemporary fiction I have read since starting this blog, it is to Patrick Flanery's credit that his debut novel should hold its own against those two, especially as he doesn't have the advantage of being South African himself (Born and raised in America he has recently gained UK citizenship - making him eligible for the Booker...). Not only does Flanery dare to grapple with South Africa's sensitive politics but he also adopts a tricky and complex structure for his novel which some readers may struggle with at first but which is perfectly suited to a novel with themes around truth, buried secrets and the slowly emerging significance of the past.

There are four strands to the story the first of which, under the chapters titled 'Sam', concerns an academic returning to his native South Africa to write the biography of Clare Wald, a successful writer with a complex personal and family history. Then we have the strand from which the novel takes its title, and which we later learn is a 'fictionalised memoir' written by Clare about a break-in at her house and its aftermath. Then comes a first-person narration about Clare's daughter, Laura, who has been missing for many years. And finally a flashback to 1989 told from Sam's point of view. Weaving these strands together Flanery does a good job at holding back information to keep even those readers who cannot help but puzzle-solve as they go through occupied until the final chapters.

With that in mind of course it's hard to know what exactly it is safe to reveal in this review without spoiling the fun. Clare Wald strikes a formidable figure, declaring herself 'a terror' on only the second page, and the relationship between biographer and subject might be interesting on its own but with the immediate suggestion that the two of them have some kind of shared past the cat and mouse games of their interviews together are given a real frisson of something dangerous. Sam has met her previously at an event in Amsterdam but Clare shows no signs of recognition. She does actually recognise him, half-recognised him back in Amsterdam in fact and slowly 'learned to trust [her] memory of him.'

Her work is of interest in large part because she operated as a writer during the era of apartheid, an era dominated by censorship for those hoping to survive under the regime. Some were unable to adapt and opted to flee the country when the 'life of their work' or perhaps even their life itself was placed in 'mortal jeopardy.' Clare learned to adapt in order to keep herself and her family alive (at least that was the rationalization she applied at the time) and speaks of the closeness of her relationship with the authorities in unflinching terms - 'I came to know my molester as intimately as I knew my husband - perhaps more so.' What she makes clear is that the terror of censorship is in some ways enough on its own to wield power over the artist. How can any writer or other artist truly create with any sense of freedom when they know that whatever the make will be submitted for somebody else's approval. Every word is written with them in mind (Clare even personified her 'censor'), self-censorship a natural result of the system.

This is just one of the ways in which we get a sense of Clare as a prisoner. She also feels like a prisoner in her own home (the one she now shares with her help, husband having left for another woman, daughter disappeared, son living elsewhere) with its high level of security, a feeling only intensified by the home-invasion chapters. But Clare has also exiled herself. It is as though nothing outside the walled perimeter matters to her anymore; it is only her memories, her ghosts and her need for forgiveness that preoccupy her now; it is as though these will be her only companions until death finally comes. There are two relationships at the centre of this, the first with her daughter Laura who, as I mentioned earlier, has gone missing.

You are entirely within me now, voice echoing always, a million different voices, all you, borrowed from moments when I heard you as you wanted to be heard, moments you did not realize anyone was listening, perhaps in particular me. These are no substitute, they are all that I have, those million necromanced fragments of you, summoned around the pit of fire yawning between my ribs.

As interesting as the politics of Clare's life as a writer are it isn't the official Truth and Reconciliation committee that really drives her sections but the portrait of a mother desperate for forgiveness and absolution from her daughter, her wish to 'prostrate herself in the name of reconciliation and love.'

Outside the house itself is her garden of course and this is worth mentioning because it picks up on something that Galgut used in his novel The Impostor. It could be seen as a possible metaphor for the new South Africa, or even the abilities of whites and blacks to co-exist at all but the cultivation and teasing of life from the soil and Clare's power struggle with her gardner Adam are just some of the ways in which horticultural references illuminate the politics of everyday conversation. It may only be a disagreement about whether to grow vegetables or not but it seems to be loaded with so much more.

It's not a bad thing. It is merely different. You will see. And if you are right, then I shall see. But you must let me grow what I want, Adam, otherwise we will only come to grief....give them a chance. See if they will flourish.

The metaphor is used again in describing the other significant relationship in Clare's past, that with her sister Nora who married into the the right wing of South African politics. This time it used to explain the twisted ethics of the ruling white class and the crucial difference between Clare and her sister.

Nora's soil, the water she drank, the air she inhaled, it was all polluted. And while she and I grew up with the same conditions, more or less, I had a higher tolerance, natural immunities against the environment that tried so hard to twist our growth to its own malign purpose. But not Nora. She was always susceptible. She was weak.

As we follow Sam, the once native boy returning to a country he barely recognises, we see through his eyes the dangers in every interaction and every waking moment. Even the shortest journeys must be undertaken only by car if at all possible, all houses and offices are encased in several layers of security, every visitor is treated with suspicion and kept at a distance no matter how innocent they may appear. There is also the burden of guilt that comes from being a white South African. His friend Greg tries to show him the ropes, how money must regularly leave his pocket and enter the hands of those less fortunate, and Sam's constant conversions from rands to dollars show how small the amount often is that he kvetches about. But as always with this novel it is the personal dimension that really engages and the most cathartic thing about his return is the way in which it forces him to confront the reasons why he left, the history of his own life that 'keeps coming back like a chronic illness', the secret he has kept hidden from even his own wife.

We often talk of unearthing memories or those things we have kept hidden. Both Clare and Sam in their professional interviews know that there is something personal the two of them need to lift from the ground, 'the long tail of the root, clinging to its earth of history,' and the skill with which Flanery constructs the novel around those details makes this a rewardingly adult read, much like the similarly complex Great House by Nicole Krauss. That book found a place on my books of the year roundup last year and whilst it's too soon to say whether Flanery's will appear on this year's I can certainly confirm it deserves any attention it receives as part of the Waterstones 11 and heralds the arrival of another new writer to keep an eye on.

Open City - Teju Cole

2012-02-23T09:16:00.001Z

'aimless wandering'

I became aware of a torrent of praise for this novel well before the end of year lists were published in papers, periodicals and magazines but the sheer regularity with which its title appeared again and again made it a must-read novel by the year's end. Acclaimed by many as a debut it is in fact Cole's second book after the novella-length debut Every Day Is For The Thief (published but seemingly unavailable from Cassava Republic). But whether it's his first, second or third book it remains a frighteningly accomplished piece of work particularly when you consider that it refuses to use many of the standard tropes of the novel like plot for example.

The narrator, Julius, is a psychiatrist in the final year of his residency in New York. Having grown up in Nigeria we find him enduring a bit of a tough time in Manhattan; estranged from his German mother, recently dumped by his girlfriend, and struggling with the strict routine of his work. And so he walks in the evenings around the streets of New York, an 'aimless wandering' during which he ruminates on his past in Nigeria but far more often allows his intelligent and erudite mind to dwell on the present. He has conversations with random people he meets, much later in the novel he has a picnic with some friends, and he is mugged. That, apart from a short trip to Brussels, is all you get in terms of plot. And yet I can't remember enjoying the actual process of reading so much in quite some time. I enjoyed it so much that I spectacularly failed to make the usual notes and page markings that I would normally make in order to pull quotes and make observations. This is also partly due to the slightly hypnotic quality of the writing. Julius literally wanders from topic to topic, covering a dizzying array of subjects: art, music, politics, history, with an ease that surely hides some painstaking work as valuable as any conventional plotting in a novel and which results in a book that performs a labour of historical excavation whilst seeming to glide through the reader's mind with contradictory ease. One feels like they are being taken on a tour of the city that ends up becoming a tour of Julius' mind and whilst he occasionally strays into smart alec territory or risks losing the less erudite amongst us (points finger at self) he remains on the whole a witty, charming and fascinating guide. All of which makes an event near the novel's conclusion all the more chilling.

New York itself is drawn afresh, you will find no cliched shortcuts like steaming manhole covers here, Cole's eye as a photographer himself is keen for the focus-pulling detail. But Like Sebald, whose writing I was immediately reminded of, this is also a kind of psychogeography. This is a city where Julius can say he sits alone in 'the great cave of the theatre No, not alone exactly: in the company of a hundred others, but all strangers to me.' A place where the Carnegie Hall might have served as the backdrop to a scene or romance or revelation in another novel but whose fire escape serves as the location for one of the novel's standout scenes. Simply exiting through the wrong door leaves Julius balanced precariously, high up on the side of the building in the rain, the door locked behind him. He makes slow, perilous progress down the fire escape which appears to end before reaching the ground and it is with relief that he finds a door to lead him back into the concert hall.

Before I entered the door, holding it open with relief and gratitude, it occurred to me to look straight up, and much to my surprise, there were stars. Stars! I hadn’t thought I would be able to see them, not with the light pollution perpetually wreathing the city, and not on a night on which it had been raining. But the rain had stopped while I was climbing down, and had washed the air clean. The miasma of Manhattan’s electric lights did not go very far up into the sky, and in the moonless night, the sky was like a roof shot through with light, and heaven itself shimmered. Wonderful stars, a distant cloud of fireflies: but I felt in my body what my eyes could not grasp, which was that the true nature was the persisting visual echo of something that was already in the past. In the unfathomable ages it took for light to cross such distances, the light source itself had in some cases been long extinguished, its dark remains stretched away from us at ever greater speeds.

The novel's title comes from the declaration made by a city under imminent threat of attack that it is not defended or occupied by military forces and therefore cannot be bombed under international law. It is this that saved Brussels from becoming 'another Dresden' but the title also has some relevance to New York, particularly in the wake of 9/11. It is telling that Julius finds himself at the site of the World Trade Center attacks completely by accident and whilst staring down into the bowels of the empty site sees the site as 'a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten...I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories.'

The place had become a metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how he could get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones.

New York is also an open city in terms of its welcoming of people from all over the world, the traditional land of opportunity. Julius' conversations with Farouq, the man behind the counter in an internet cafe are fascinating not only because they show the intelligence of a man who seems to be doing a job that requires so little (he is in fact studying to become a translator) but also because they deal with the problem of how exactly people of different races and religions can live together, his shop a microcosm of what might be possible on a larger scale. Farouq genuinely wrestles with it, how to preserve difference and uniqueness whilst also becoming part of a larger society. On that trip to Brussels I mentioned earlier Julius asks the woman he dines with about Farouq's trouble living as an a Arab in a so-called open city like Brussels. She however has little patience for those who complain - 'if you're too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.'

And what of Julius' suffering? What does he achieve with all his wandering and wondering? The novel itself almost follows a stream of consciousness but what does he learn from looking back?

We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity.

Perhaps Julius' need to walk isn't in order to achieve any great insight about his past. We never learn why exactly he is estranged from his mother, what really happened within his recently ended relationship, we still know next to nothing about any friends he might have until that picnic near the end of the book and it is after that that Moji, a woman he knew when she was just a girl back in Nigeria, delivers something of a bombshell to the book as a whole. Whether what she says is true or not we cannot help but notice how masked a view our guide may have given us after all. All that walking may not have been towards something after all but away from it. I don't want to make it sound too much like a twist, it is left open for us to decide whether it is true or not, and in fact it risks destabilising the whole book. I thought it added something really interesting but would have found the book quite brilliant without it. With it however, an already complex and absorbing read becomes something altogether more dangerous and we the reader have been complicit all the way.

Montana 1948 - Larry Watson

2012-02-21T09:06:00.295Z

'the awful duty'

I love it when trusted bloggers get enthusiastic about books that may have been passed by and when a book is picked by not just one but two of them then my card details are usually just a click away. With its very title Larry Watson's short novel aims to evoke both a time and a place and it is one of those books that succeeds in doing just that; a short read that contains a vivid portrait of a part of America and a neat story that leaves the reader utterly satisfied from start to finish. It is also another piece of corroborating evidence in my case to prove that any novel of childhood is always improved by being narrated from the point of view of the child now grown up and looking back. You can have all of the unique insight with none of the irritating child narrative voice.

So it is we hear from David Hayden who looks back forty years to the summer of his twelfth year, a time from which he carries 'a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them.' These images are listed at the beginning just as they were in Julian Barnes' novel of memory, A Sense Of An Ending.

A young Sioux woman lies on a bed in our house. She is feverish, delirious, and coughing so hard I am afraid she will die.
My father kneels on the kitchen floor, begging my mother to help him. It’s a summer night and the room is brightly lit. Insects cluster around the light fixtures, and the pleading quality in my father’s voice reminds me of those insects — high-pitched, insistent, frantic. It is a sound I have never heard coming from him.
My mother stands in our kitchen on a hot, windy day. The windows are open, and Mother's lace curtains blow into the room. Mother holds my father's Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun, and since she is a small, slender woman, she has trouble finding the balance point of its heavy length.

He offers them to us in chronological order whilst acknowledging that 'the events that produced these sights and sounds are so rapid and tumbled together that any chronological sequence seems wrong.' We should imagine instead 'a movie screen divided into boxes' or 'the Sioux picture calendars in which the whole year's events are painted on the same buffalo hide.' This last image is important, for David grew up in Bentrock, Mercer County, a town of less than two thousand people amongst which his family holds an elevated position: his father the sheriff (as his father was before him) and his uncle a doctor and respected war hero. There is also a Native American community, held by many (including David's father) to be second-class citizens. The Hayden family have a housekeeper from the reservation in neighbouring North Dakota, Marie Little Soldier, a statuesque woman young David is wonderfully in thrall to. When she becomes ill with a fever that might indicate pneumonia the family's natural reaction is to send for David's uncle, Dr Hayden. Marie however absolutely refuses to be seen by him and when David's father dismisses this concern as native superstition about modern medicine and calls him anyway he sets into motion the string of events that will send seismic shocks through the Hayden family and the larger community.

As a portrait of small town life we can see the obvious things like the casual racism directed towards the Native American community, we learn once again that 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' so that David's grandfather clearly abused his position as Sheriff (as the deputy points out, being a peace officer in Montana 'means knowing when to look and when to look away'), still exerts an unhealthy influence over the town, and that David's father still struggles to emerge from the family shadow. This is where the portrait gets really interesting of course because by focusing on the family, with its own politics and divisions, Watson can make some beautifully nuanced observations. What is it like to marry into a family like that for example and how strong are the different types of family bond when an event happens that threatens to break them all?

Through David's narration we learn how the smallest things can make all the difference to how a story will pan out. A decision by him for example to eavesdrop on a conversation between his parents makes all the difference in the world.

If I had gone back into the house - to the kitchen, to my room, out the back door, if I had left the porch and followed Frank's steps down the front walk - I would never have heard the conversation between my father and mother, and perhaps I would have lived out my life with an illusion about my family and perhaps even the human community. Certainly I could not tell this story....

I don't want to tell you any more about the story, only to mention again the joy of an adult looking back on childhood. A child can express how frightening the sight of watching his mother load a shotgun is, 'but also oddly touching. She was so clumsy, so obviously unsuited for what she was doing that it reminded me of what she looked like when she once put on a baseball glove and tried to pay catch with me. I wanted to rush over to her, to help her, to relieve her of the awful duty she had taken up.' But only an adult looking back can realise how time passes differently from childhood to adulthood, how what we measure it by will alter, how soon it can speed up.

Young people are supposed to be the impatient ones, but in most cases they can outwait their elders. The young are more practiced; time passes slower for them and they are constantly filling their hours, days, moths, and years with waiting - for birthdays, for Christmas, for Father to return, for summer to arrive, for graduation, for the rain to stop, for the minister to stop talking, for girls to stop saying, "Not now, not yet; wait." No, when it comes to patience, even the enforced variety, the young are the real masters.

And one final quote, indulge me please: the child can sometimes sense when a conversation is important, even when it seems to be innocuous, but it often takes the adult to realise just where the importance lies. It also takes a writer of great skill and reserve to leave some room for the reader to make their own adult intuitions, to make their own connections. It is in this way, as much as its subject matter or brevity, that I was reminded of William Maxwell's masterpiece of a final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow. Both books read and satisfy easily but also distill a lifetime's experience so that they become a much richer read. I heartily recommend both.

"We're going to have to paint the house," he said. "But before we do, we're going to have to scrape it and sand it right down to the bare wood. Then prime it good before we paint it. And we might have to put two coats on." He picked off another paint chip. "It's going to be hard work. Think you're up to it?" . . . Then as if it really were houses and paint he wanted to talk about, he turned back to the wall. "Though if it was up to me, I'd probably just let it go. Let it go right down to bare wood. If I had my way I'd let every house in town go. Let the sun bake 'em and the north wind freeze 'em until there isn't a house in town with a spot of paint on it. You'd see this town from a distance and it would look like nothing but firewood and gray stone. And maybe you'd keep right on moving because it looked like nothing was living here. Paint. Fresh paint. That's how you find life and civilization. Women come and they want fresh paint."

The Brothers - Asko Sahlberg

2012-02-16T09:07:00.004Z

'the malestrom of time'

translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah

The war has been waged, but here we may yet have corpses.

Where should one turn after giving up on a book? Is it best to try something completely different, and should it be different in terms of style, length or in some other way? After 300 pages of a Danish seafaring epic hadn't even brought me to the halfway stage and exhausted my interest I was left becalmed in a sea of possible books but it was this slim volume that arrived in the post that very morning and which ended up becoming my next read. This is because the theme adopted for Peirene Press's latest selection is The Series of the Small Epic. Does an epic novel have to have a page count that helps it double as a doorstop or can the same sense be achieved with something that can be read in an evening? Sahlberg's novella, translated from Finnish, contains just 122 pages but is described as a Shakespearean drama. What that means isn't immediately obvious (you'd think that the breadth of plays he wrote would make it difficult to make his name synonymous with any one style) but it certainly manages to cram in enough history, passion, envy and buried secrets for a drama on a much bigger scale.

In 1809 Finland moved from under the control of the Swedish kingdom to become incorporated into the Russian Empire after war between those two countries. Two brothers, Henrik and Erik, fought on opposite sides and with peace now declared they return to the snow-covered farm where their mother still lives. Despite being the eldest brother Henrik was never interested in taking over the farm and so it was Erik that became the master and who married Anna. Why then has Henrik returned and what is he after? Sahlberg chooses to narrate the novel in the separate voices of each of the characters involved. Short sections from each distinctive voice prove to be an incredibly effective way of cramming in all the backstory and as this is a novella of revelations it also works very well as secrets begin to be revealed.

There is clearly bad blood between these brothers but where does this conflict come from? It is the Farmhand who provides us with his own theory early on.

It all began with the horse. So little is needed for a man's life to go wrong. At first the horse was a colt. This colt lived on the neighbouring. The day Henrik laid eyes on the colt, and saw the horse it would become, the fate of this house was determined. Henrik was born to understand horses. In any other man, such an understanding would be a gift. In Henrik's case, the gift proved a curse. He didn't see in the horse a future work-horse or even a mount. Such a vision was not enough for Henrik. Was he looking for something in animals that he did not dare to look for in humans? I was sharpening my scythe at the edge of the field when I heard Henrik's breathless voice behind my shoulder: 'I'm going to get a horse.'

It certainly has something to do with a horse, and also with a woman, but perhaps most of all with the way in which the two brothers are so different. The farm may be covered in snow but there is nothing bright and reflective about what we read. It often seems to be dark, with lamps or candles providing the only light; conversations happen in moments of stolen privacy and much of what we learn comes from people observing others. The sense of impending doom and the fear that underpins it is well expressed by Anna.

A man's fear of a man must be different from a woman's. Probably it is colder, like water newly drawn from a well compared with water that has long been standing in a jug.

Perhaps this is what is meant by Shakespearean. If this were a castle rather than a farm then the themes of power, succession and revenge would be every bit as Shakespearean as any of his histories or tragedies. The dark atmosphere and some of the language helps keep it that way which is just as well because with all the plot twists a less accomplished writer might have you expecting to hear the distinctive drums that come at the end of an episode of Eastenders. Something was famously rotten in the state of Denmark and that atmosphere pervades quite literally here in Finland as Henrik remarks on his return.

This house is a cadaver. The others are too close to see it, but it has already begun to decompose. I flinch from its decay. It is as if a collection of bones had been unearthed and dressed up in fine clothing to create the illusion of a real body.

It's is difficult to say much more without giving too much of the plot away but if you get the chance to sit down on a cold, dark evening and read the book in a single sitting as I did then it provides a perfect little (and yet epic) entertainment; very much the literary cinema that it claims to be. Think Bergman. And Shakespeare of course.

This Is Paradise - Will Eaves

2012-02-14T08:52:00.188Z

'an invisible companion'

I read and enjoyed Eaves' novel, Nothing To Be Afraid Of, many years ago and can remember very little about it other than it was set around a production of the Tempest in London and involved an earthquake. That's not his fault though, I'm a forgetful chap, so much so that it took me a while to realise why his name struck a chord when I got a copy of his latest novel in the post. The mention of Gerard Woodward in the bumf got my attention. The prospect of finding another novel that deals as brilliantly with family as Woodward's trilogy of novels about the Joneses (August, I'll Go To Bed At Noon and A Curious Earth) is a tantalising one. You have to be careful chasing those kind of thrills however, even Woodward didn't manage to hit the heights consistently with those three novels, and whilst there were moments when I thought this novel might ignite I'm afraid it never quite did for me.

The Allden family live in a suburb of Bath. Don and Emily have four children: Liz, Clive, Lotte and Benjamin, each with their own distinct character although it is the unique Clive who really stands out, apple of his mother's eye despite his difficulties.

The idea of having a favourite horrified her, but there it was. Many years later, when he returned to visit her and she could barely mumble his name - when names no longer meant anything - a part of Emily still knew this, and though by middle age Clive himself fumed with neglect, nevertheless she clung to him. In the chilled passageway beneath the framed butterflies, she turned to her other grown-up children, saying, 'I love this one, I can't help it. It's true.'

That paragraph may well give you an idea of the dizzying effect of Eaves' structure. This is not a linear novel and even when it is it seems to jump about like the stylus on a warped vinyl record. We do follow the family as it grows and develops, see the children grow and mature, witness the strains and struggles for 'A family need witnesses to its adventures to make them real.' But we are also heading towards a future where Emily's mind has begun to deteriorate and the family reassemble around her dementia. I found the sheer number of characters disorientating in the opening third and I'm not sure I ever recovered. Perhaps this is because Eaves was drawing on figures from his own past (and making assumptions about what might be communicated with the scantest details), or because he wanted to mimic the effects of memory itself, but the results remain the same. Boyfriends and girlfriends, neighbours, affairs; maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention but there was so much going on and we seemed to drop in and out of it with such speed that this may be a book to be better appreciated on a second read. We only get one shot at life however and most books I read only get one shot at me.

Amongst all that confusion however there were some sparkling moments. Clive as I said is an interesting character, gifted and unique, burdened with the hopes of not just his doting mother but his family as a whole who make sacrifices so that he may be accorded opportunities none of the others will enjoy. Whilst he grows up to become 'the captive of his promise and his disdain' he also has the insight when young to recognise just what family is, even at its most flawed.

Each of them had failings. Not one saw those failings as Clive did - rationally, dispassionately, fairly. Whether as parents or sibling rivals, they were individually flawed; but together - like a scene of tribal earnestness, a fete or a fayre, glimpsed romantically from the deep cover of the hawthorn that straggled over the garage - they were good, an ideal almost; necessary, and at the same time vulnerable to change. Clive did not like to think about what would happen if they disappeared or moved. If a bomb dropped, or anyone left home.

Don as the philandering patriarch has a fair burden of guilt to carry. He is the kind of man who manages a sort of gentle, insidious cruelty with affairs that are blithely accepted and a general demeanour that takes little account of anyone's thoughts but his own.

...Don's cruelty was no more than the perpetuation, in extremis, of a familiar trait. It was not even cruelty, come to that, which requires a degree of premeditation. It was simply that he could not bring himself wholly to believe in other people. It was a mystery to him that they should think differently about anything, or do anything he wouldn't want to do.

When Emily reaches the stage where she requires real care Don might be said to atone for that past, accepting the burden without question and trying as best he can to care for her. The way in which her illness brings the scattered family back together again is as haphazard as the way in which they lived together. They all seem to find or see something different.

Leaning in close, they found an image of themselves flickering in their mother's eyes and gathered what they could - a whispered word, a shiver - to its flame.

The youngest of them, Benjamin, is the one who works hardest to make sense of their life together, desperately trying to bring some kind of unity from the chaos and draw some wisdom from within it. When he fails he realises the real lesson is that 'you shouldn't go looking for significance: it wasn't ahead or behind. If it was anywhere, it was by your side, an invisible companion.' And perhaps that's why I failed to do this novel justice. Reading with an eye towards drawing a conclusion at the end may well have blinded me to what was happening in the moment.

Light Lifting - Alexander Macleod

2012-02-07T09:00:00.003Z

'a living tension'

Let's get the obvious comments out of the way. Alexander MacLeod is the son of Alistair Macleod whose story collection, Island, I reviewed here last year. We could say therefore that his son has writing in the blood, although by that rationale I would be busy practising medicine somewhere right now instead of dressing up in silly costumes and pretending to be other people for a living. It does hold true for MacLeod Jr however whose debut collection of stories is written with a confidence that comes presumably from not having rushed into publishing his work (at the age of 40 he has been occupied up until now with teaching and family), resulting in a collection which has been nominated for Canada's two biggest literary prizes and therefore gained attention beyond those shores. Most of the stories here are merely satisfying but a couple of them are really great, the 'worth the price of admission alone' variety, so that I finished the book pleased to have been introduced to a new writer and interested in what he might produce next. What more could you ask of a debut story collection?

I'll focus on three of the stories not only because they're the best in the book but because they also illustrate where MacLeod really excells. First off the line is Miracle Mile a story about two childhood friends who have grown up to become professional distance runners. As the Giller Prize judges noted 'MacLeod brings into vivid concrete language the physical experiences that mark us as profoundly as any thought.' By writing about two 'track people' he is able to mark the ways in which their bodies are different to those of most ordinary people, 'designed to do only one thing....We all had our special skills, our fascinating powers and we just barnstormed from city to city, performing them again and again in front of different people....Sometimes I thought it might be better to be able to eat fire, or swallow a sword...'

The numbers meant more than the words and the smaller numbers meant more than the bigger ones. It was like we belonged to our own little country and we had this secret language that almost nobody else understood. Almost nobody can tell you the real difference between 3:36 and 3:39. Almost nobody understands that there's something in there, something important and significant, just waiting to be released out of that space between the six and the nine. Put it this way: if you ever wanted to cross over that gap, if you ever wanted to see what it was like on the other side, you would need to change your entire life and get rid of almost everything else.

We can see their obsession and physical drive back in their childhood together where they would race freight trains through the railway tunnel that runs beneath the Detroit river.

It was one of those impossible dangerous things that only invincible high school kids even try: running in the dark, all the way from Detroit to Windsor, underneath the river. When I think back, I still get kind of quaky and I can't believe we got away untouched. It didn't work out like that for everyone.

The descriptions of this run are frankly terrifying. Danger is present at every stage. At the very outset due to the fixed time that one has to make it through the tunnel before the next train passes through, the peril of losing one's footing due to sleepers or rats beneath, the scrapes and bruises from clashing with the tunnel wall; just look at the picture on the front cover above and say ready, steady, go to yourself without a little hint of panic and you're a braver man than I. The competitive streak in both men is well drawn, as is their almost nerd-like obsession with details about rivals, lifestyle and results. It's a breathless beginning and a great introduction to MacLeod's physical world.

The book may get its cover image from that first story but its title comes from another story of physical labour. Light Lifting looks at a group of building labourers, the blue-collar type you might expect to find in a story by Carver, men who work, drink and occasionally fight. The subtleties of male hierarchy and relationships are well sketched but yet again it is the descriptions of their work that really fascinate. Below for example is an explanation of the collection's titular labour

Any kid can pick up a hundred pounds if they only have to do it one or two times. But it's the light lifting that does the real damage. Maybe it's just thirty pounds and it starts off slow, but it stays with you all day, and then it hangs around in your arms and your legs even after you leave...It used to surprise our summer student kids...One minute they'd be loud and laughing and tossing the brick around like it was nothing and then, all of a sudden, that little grinding pain would wind up and get a hold of them. You could almost see it tightening around them. It was like they got old all at once. They'd hunch over and get really quiet and start concentrating on the smallest things, trying to figure out what went wrong.

My favourite story however is one that picks up from possibly my favourite book of last year, Bastien Vives' beautiful graphic novel A Taste Of Chlorine. Adult Beginner I also uses swimming, or the process of learning to swim, as a metaphor. If Chlorine was about developing confidence and reaching out for what you desire then this story is more about conquering fear and learning to be brave. We follow Stacy as she prepares to jump from the top of the Waterfront Holiday Inn into the Detroit River below (the same spot where the tunnel from Miracle Mile can be found). She is there with a group of swimming instructors, The Tuesday Crew, who have befriended her after she joined classes to finally learn to swim. As she makes her leap the narrative flashes back to the childhood trauma of nearly drowning whilst in the ocean with her parents, the event that kept her out of the water for so long, and then to her first tentative steps with the swimming group under the tutelage of the dependable Brad.

For a moment, she could imagine it: letting go and pushing away, flying toward Brad. She wanted to be chosen and she believed there must be something like a transparent hand that lived inside the water. It made permanent selections and cradled some people, holding them always at the top, but it dragged down other people to the bottom and there was no way to protest

Learning to swim is about overcoming that fear and once she does she feels 'like the last kid who refuses to let go of the tooth fairy' angry at herself herself as 'years of her life had been sacrificed' due to the 'force of her flawed convictions.' MacLeod structures the story brilliantly, deftly switching from one narrative thread to another whilst maintaining a pulse-quickening tension that comes from Stacy leaping at the beginning and us following her descent and fate as the story develops. What it shares with Chlorine is that spirit of pushing oneself to do something one usually can't. In fact the best moments of this collection share that same impulse and MacLeod writes brilliantly about the human body in extremis. There is something hugely optimistic about trying to achieve the impossible and something shockingly grounding about those moments when we realise we are just human.

There is a living tension, a line running between what can be achieved and what we cannot do.

Elsewhere in the book these explorations don't always catch fire. Wonder About The Parents sees a change in style with short declarative sentences following a couple dealing first with head lice infestation from their children and then a traumatic car journey back to Toronto for Christmas. Facts about lice nestle amongst the story like parasites but only distract from what these parents are going through. The Loop follows a pharmacy delivery boy as he delivers medication to those who can't collect it themselves, often housebound as a result of a lifetime of labour, picking up on MacLeod's recurring theme. It is a brief coming of age tale with a few nice touches. In the final story, The Number Three, we see a man in grief after a car accident has killed his entire family apart from one daughter. The rather methodical investigative style doesn't really allow it to land a hefty emotional blow until it's almost too late but there are lovely turns of phrase. We first see him cooking a single fried egg, 'life's loneliest meal', knocking around his house 'like the marble in one of those tilting wooden labyrinths'. The airbags that didn't deploy to save his wife instead sat 'patient and useless, like a pile of neatly folded white towels in a linen closet.'

The Detour - Gerbrand Bakker

2012-02-02T11:36:00.264Z

'till judgement break'

translated by David Colmer

Bakker's debut novel The Twin was one of my favourite reads from last year and also won the Impac Prize, the world's biggest literary award at €100,000 (I think I can guess which of those two accolades he was happiest about). It was a supreme example of what I have found in my limited experience to be a feature of Dutch writing. Prose that for the most part is as flat and uninflected as the landscape of that country so that telling words or phrases poke their heads up for the reader to notice and moments of great drama and tension seem to be waiting for their moment to jump up and grab the reader by the neck. Bakker may have chosen a different terrain and locale for his next novel but there is still something of that style about the writing, this time joined by a faintly hallucinatory feeling and the slight disjoint that comes from placing his heroine in a country where she is forced to communicate in her second language.

A Dutch woman rents a remote farmhouse in rural Wales, paying upfront, and sets about adding some homely touches to a building which still carries the smell of the old woman who had been its previous owner and whose garden contains the ten geese that were once hers. She is on the run from something. Most obviously the scandal of her recent affair with a first year student but also from her work on the poet Emily Dickinson and from something else that she cannot escape, something within that is only hinted at to begin with. She simply packed her car with some clothes, a single mattress and a coffee table and made her way across on a ferry, driving on until she reached Wales. In thinking about the reasons for her flight she is reminded of one of her relatives of whom she was particularly fond.

One day her uncle had walked into the pond, the pond in the large front garden of the hotel he worked at. The water refused to come up any higher than his hips...He must have judged the water to be deeper...Her being here had something to do with that uncle. At least, she had begun to suspect as much. Scarcely a day passed without her thinking of him, seeing him before her in the smooth water of the hotel pond. So far gone that he hardly realised that hip-deep water wasn't enough to drown in. Incapable of simply toppling over. All of the pockets of the clothes he was wearing stuffed with the heaviest objects he had been able to find in the hotel kitchen.

Disoriented enough by her circumstances as well as where she has found herself, little oddities mark her stay. The number of geese slowly dwindles, presumably prey to a local fox; she is bitten by a badger whilst sunning herself nakedly on a rock, an event disbelieved by everyone she mentions it to, even the chain-smoking doctor who attends to her wound. Then a young man literally tumbles into her life and his overnight stay extends from one day into the next until he is cooking and gardening with her and a christmas tree is erected in the house. Meanwhile back in Holland her husband strikes up an odd friendship with a policeman during his attempts to trace his wife and the two men set sail on the same ferry line that brought her to the UK and they make their way (with the annoying assistance of their Dutch satnav) towards Wales.

The peripheral characters remain sketches; the baffled husband, the comedic parents, the threatening neighbour, the loyal and doting young man; it is only the woman who really captures the reader's attention, partly because of that secret she is carrying. It is also because from the very beginning we sense that she is surrounded, by the men who define her life, by the unfamiliar flora and fauna of Wales, prey to the natural order around her. She is also an intensely physical presence and Bakker writes brilliantly about her body; its pains, needs, smells and sensations. When she first arrives into the solace of the farmhouse there is something almost feverish about her, either too hot or too cold, filled with memories and finding comfort with a hand between her legs.

Although there were no neighbours, she kept seeing the dark, uncurtained window and herself lying there. Aroused woman alone fantasising about things long past, things she would be better off forgetting. That unspoilt body, lean and lithe, the powerful arse, the hollows behind the clavicles, the jutting pelvis. The selfishness, the energy and thoughtlessness...[she]thought about him sitting in front of her later, amongst the other students, one of many, with the face of a sulking child. A spiteful egotistical child, and as ruthless as children can be.

The incident with the badger is preceded by her undressing completely to sun herself on a rock like a lizard. In another episode she walks out into the waist-deep water of a pond and 'understood perfectly why her uncle had been so indecisive in that hotel pond: the place itself had robbed him of the ability to decide.'

'Was this it, what Emily Dickinson had done for almost her entire adult life? Had she tried to hold back time, making it bearable and less lonely too perhaps, by capturing it in hundreds of poems?

Like the poet she studies and is in the process of translating she is trying to hold back time, why else run away from home if not to avoid its realities? Having left 'Like an old cat that wants to be left in peace' the farmhouse offers something like a stay of execution both physically and emotionally but we always sense that time is running out. The 'vague but persistent sense of deterioration' isn't limited to just her body but her mind too and there is a small element of suspense as to whether her husband will arrive in time to make a difference or what role exactly her house guest will play. As with The Twin it is those notions and emotions which remain barely expressed that truly intrigue. This novel doesn't quite deliver on its promise and is prone to repeat some its images thus robbing them of their power, but Bakker is a really interesting writer, finding power in repression and creating with great sensitivity a character we cannot help wanting to aid like an animal in peril. One of the problems in pinning a novel on the work of a poet as concise as Dickinson is that even someone as good at writing in spare prose as Bakker can only highlight, particularly to a non-poetry reader like me, just how few words are sometimes required to communicate an idea. Here then is the poem that the woman is translating throughout her stay and that might best encapsulate the novel's themes of solace, escape and peace.

Ample Make This Bed by Emily Dickinson

Ample make this bed.

Make this bed with awe;

In it wait till judgment break

Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,

Be its pillow round;

Let no sunrise' yellow noise

Interrupt this ground.

The Revelations - Alex Preston

2012-01-31T06:59:00.308Z

'into that silence'

Sometimes timing can make a crucial difference to what you read or how it resonates when you do. Alex Preston has been rather unfortunate on two occasions now. His debut novel, This Bleeding City, may well have been written with a timely prescience, being published as the financial crisis really took hold and dealing with the human consequences of boom and bust, but I had just read Adam Haslett's superb Union Atlantic and so wasn't tempted into reading another novel on a similar topic. I was determined not to miss his follow up though, a look at four members of a very modern kind of church and an examination of faith, sex, money and friendship and was very pleased to get my hands on an early proof. The only problem this time was that I happened to read it just after Samantha Harvey's All Is Song, another novel of faith which made a huge impression on me as you'll know if you read my thoughts earlier this month. Perhaps because Preston's novel seems to deal with religion much more head-on it means that it read like a novel written about a topic rather than a novel that manages to incorporate its topic and themes so that you don't realise until the end that it was about so much. This is an incredibly harsh criticism of a really engaging novel and only comes because Harvey's novel made such an impression just before reading this one.

Preston takes a group of friends and shows how the seemingly strong bonds between them can become fragile on closer inspection and that timing here too can have a massive impact on the way our friendships and relationships develop. Marcus, Abby, Mouse and Lee all became friends around university, forming the four person band that gives the novel its title. When the novel begins Marcus and Abby are married and trying for a baby. This process is fraught with stress and worry, Abby having previously miscarried, and Preston's description of their technical lovemaking isn't a candidate for the Bad Sex Award but an excruciating depiction of bad sex with only the end result in mind. The four friends are all part of a burgeoning church which runs something called the Course (naturally we think immediately of the Alpha Course). Overseen by charismatic minister David Nightingale, backed by a wealthy investor known only as the Earl, this is a church to attract the young, the wealthy, the good-looking, the successful; a church that offers as much in networking opportunities as it does in spiritual succour and companionship. This is something of a tipping point for the church who are on the verge of expansion into the huge American market (and yes, that kind of language gives you an idea of the church's priorities) and for the four friends as well who are all acting as course leaders for the first time this year with responsibilities to convert as many of their initial groups as possible.

Pressure is evident everywhere in this novel. Marcus and Abby have their worries about conception, Mouse clearly has an unrequited love for Lee who is battling her own personal demon: promiscuity. All four feel the pressure that comes from Nightingale and the need to convert as many of their charges as possible even the strongest unbeliever ('If they have thought hard enough about faith to have strong feelings in the opposite direction, then they have opened a small gap which will let God in'), a pressure that is expertly described by Preston in the friendly hand on the shoulder that becomes the painful pressure of a thumb pressing down on a collar bone. It is no wonder that the first meeting with the new course attendees becomes something of a boozy-do where Marcus drinks too much (again), Lee wakes the next morning to find one of them in her bed, and Abby suffers loss yet again. These pressures only grow as the novel develops and the bonds that hold these four friends together aren't up to the strain.

When writing about religion and faith how important is it to offer a rounded vision? I ask this because whilst at first it seems that Preston is keen to show both sides including the comfort, support and direction that comes from being part of a religious group it gradually becomes clear that the novel is clearly facing in one direction. Why for example did the friends join the Course initially?

Marcus had started coming to the Course because of Abby. She had made it clear that it was the only way she'd stay with him, and he attended at first in the same way that he'd gone piano lessons as a child...Only slowly did he realise that the church might offer a means of negotiating the fear that shot its bright splinters across his mind whenever he thought of death. In the quiet ritual, the music and, above all, the promise of an existence beyond the grave, Marcus found peace.

Mouse too started attending because of a woman, Lee, and because it captured something of his feeling that all was not right with the world ('Life just seems...it seems unfair at a very deep level. Not just the inequalities in society, but the way that the most successful people also seem to be the most awful.'). Lee as I've mentioned is constantly battling her own personal demons and the Course offered not only the moral imperative she needed to stop finding solace in her brief trysts but also the meditative silence she required. That silence however has slowly become as oppressive as the chaos that came before it.

'Sometimes silence makes things better; sometimes it's where I feel most trapped. Because the most awful things can creep into that silence...this voice starts speaking to me...this voice is very critical, totally unforgiving. It tells me not to be such a goddamn idiot, that it's all my fault, that I need to pull myself together. And it's not my dad's voice, and it's not my mother's. But it's there and it's making me very unhappy.'

There is always the sense that these people only 'believe' because they have to or because it is beneficial. The weakness of the apparently steadfast Nightingale will become evident later and the fraudulence of the Earl should be obvious from his moniker. Combined with the plot itself all of this means that this novel is less an examination of faith than its absence. The corrupting influences prove to be too strong but the most interesting of these in many ways is the glue that holds these friends together. By looking back to the time when they first became friends we see the different motivations to friendship and how thin the line is between one kind of relationship and another. This very human and earthly kind of love is far more fascinating than its spiritual counterpart and Preston brilliantly depicts the complexity of our closest friendships and the jeopardy they might be in with the smallest shift in their make-up.

He is also rather good with the physical geography of the novel. I was reminded of my recent Sebaldian experience with Austerlitz and its use of architecture and place to show character and develop themes. The grand house of the Earl for example is not only dressed with old photographs to help maintain the illusion of his bought title but always in the background is the noise of the nearby motorway, there to remind us that this is not quite the rural retreat it appears to be. There is also the Senate House Library at University College London.

The library had originally been designed to be much larger, with a second tower rising up towards the Euston Road to give the impression of a vast modernist steamship cruising through Bloomsbury. The project had run into financial problems and the building was cut off parallel with the northern edge of Russell Square. Because of the untimely foreshortening of the architect's vision, there were corridors that led nowhere, warrens of narrow passages that culminated in brick walls, rooms with no purpose whose air was never disturbed by human breath. These orphaned spaces were Mouse's realm: it was here that he spent his days, here that he felt at home.

Preston also occasionally locates an image which is not only well-observed but telling. Londoners and those that visit the capital will be used, I'm sure, to seeing rain pelting down on the Thames, or as he sees it:

The rain was falling so hard it was as if the river was trying to reach up to the clouds.

Marcus, Abby, Mouse and Lee would all like to be able to transcend their earthly confines, to be better people, but each of them finds it as hard to achieve that reverse trajectory as each raindrop that falls on the river. Any suggestion that they might be moving upwards is as much an illusion as the image above.

The Tunnel - Ernesto Sabato

2012-01-24T09:32:00.002Z

'a sordid museum'

translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

I can't remember who it was now who recommended this but it sat on the shelf, as any good classic should do, until such time as I fancied it, not sure of course exactly what it was beyond Robert Coover's precis on the cover 'the brief, obsessive, sometimes delirious confession of a convicted murderer' and the appearance of the word 'existentialist' on the back. I do know that my excursions into Southern American literature have always been interesting at the very worst, and sometimes downright exhilarating. I'll place Sabato's first novel at the lower end of that spectrum, a book that has occasional moments of caustic wit, moments where the reader laughs in spite of themselves, but which remains a cold read with a chilling narrator who is not just unreliable but downright deluded.

"It should be sufficient to say I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne", an opening sentence that provides us with perhaps the only certainty in this novel and a clear indication that what will follow is a confessional. Holed up in prison after his trial Castel determines to set it all down so that we (and that includes him) might understand why he killed. But this isn't really a novel about motivation or the application of logic (though god knows he tries), as we follow our narrator on a tour of the art scene in Buenos Aires and his pursuit of the one woman he feels may understand him we also go on a journey into the dark recesses of his mind, a place where anger, jealousy, intolerance and loneliness combine to leave him with no choice other than to destroy his one hope of salvation.

I...would characterize myself as a person who prefers to remember the bad things...I remember so many catastrophes, so many cynical and cruel faces, so many inhumane actions, that for me memory is a glaring light illuminating a sordid museum of shame.

Not perhaps the most encouraging introduction to your guide but it is at least honest (he does also give an early get out clause to those wearied by his dark digressions - 'Besides, anyone who wants to stop reading this account may do so now. He should know immediately that he has my unqualified permission.') and fair warning for what is to follow. To describe Castel as an unsympathetic narrator would be an understatement, in fact he's so unpleasant that it may stop some people from enjoying the book at all. He first sees the woman he will kill at an exhibition of his own work. She spends some time looking at a painting and in particular a detail in one corner of a solitary woman staring through a window at the sea. Then all of a sudden she is gone and Castel is left dejected, miserable and forever altered. Having not taken the opportunity to speak to her how can he hope now to find this stranger amongst all of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. What follows is a rather hilarious section in which he hopes to bump into her again, haunting his own exhibition, hoping for a chance meeting in the street, all the while paralysed by his own insecurity and all the scenarios he has played out in his head. Eventually they do meet again and what follows are a series of tense, enforced meetings where Castel's fervour is always at the highest pitch as he seeks to convey why Maria is so important to him and his work.

...think of the captain of a ship who is constantly charting his position, meticulously following a course toward an objective. But also imagine that he does not know why he is sailing toward it. Now do you understand?

When they see each other more frequently Castel analyses her every move, gesture, smile and silence. One minute he is happy that she loves him, the next he is convinced she deceives him. They argue incessantly and after one such confrontation when he has called he something terrible (we presume 'whore') he weeps, begs forgiveness, berates himself but then becomes suspicious when she no longer shows distress but smiles at him instead - 'No woman should be able to shift moods so quickly; unless there was a certain truth to what I had said.' In another conversation when he speaks with cruelty once again we get an insight into the split in his personality.

Before the words were out of my mouth, I was slightly repentant. Behind the person who wanted the perverse satisfaction of saying them, stood a purer and more compassionate person preparing to take charge the minute the cruelty of that sentence had reached its mark...Even as the words left my lips, that suppressed person was listening with amazement, as if in spite of everything he had not seriously believed the other would say them. And with each word he began to take over my consciousness and my will, and he was almost in time to prevent the sentence from being completed. The instant it was (because in spite of him the words came out), he was totally in control, demanding that I beg forgiveness, that I humble myself before Maria and acknowledge my stupidity and cruelty...While one part of me strikes a pose of humaneness, the other part cries fraud, hypocrisy, false generosity. While one incites me to insult a fellow being, the other takes pity on him and accuses me of the very thing I am denouncing. While one urges me to see the beauty of the world, the other points out its sordidness and the absurdity of any feeling of happiness.

There is a claustrophobia to this relationship which is in direct contrast to the loneliness of the narrator. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that one begets the other. So lonely and isolated is Castel that he attaches undue significance to Maria, deludes himself as to what they share and finally destroys the one person who might have been able to help him. The tunnel of the title is an image that could be used to illustrate many different things, all of which Castel the artist has envisioned. I felt slightly oppressed by it as a reader and perhaps that is because, as he slowly realises, that Castel never really escapes from it.

...it was as if the two of us had been living in parallel passageways or tunnels, never knowing that we were moving side by side, like souls in like times, finally to meet at the end of those passageways before a scene I had painted as a kind of key meant for her alone, as a kind of secret sign that I was there ahead of her and that the passageways finally had joined and the hour for our meeting had come...What a stupid illusion that had been! No, the passageways were still parallel, as they always had been, only now the wall separating them was like a glass wall, and I could see Maria, a silent and untouchable figure...No, even that wall was not always glass; at times it again became black stone, and then I did not know what was happening on the other side...I was even convinced that during those moments...the whole story of the passageways was my own ridiculous invention, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life. And in one of those transparent sections of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had naively believed that she was moving in a tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world...

Julia - Otto de Kat

2012-01-19T08:54:00.000Z

'un-freedom'

translated by Ina Rilke

MacLehose Press are prolific publishers specialising in literature in translation. The problem is that they're so prolific (or have been so generous in making titles available to read and review) and their list so varied and wide-ranging that making a decision about which books to actually read can prove to be almost paralysing. What was it that made me finally opt for this slim novel from former publisher Jan Geurt Gaarlandt? (Otto de Katt is a pen name which to some English readers might make him sound a little like a cartoon character - or is that just me?) Perhaps that it was slim, or that something about it's cover and title immediately drew me in (de Kat himself has described it as the most beautiful edition he has seen of one of his books), or that the word masterpiece appeared on the front. Whatever it was that worked its magic I'm glad that I did finally open it up.

The story begins when Van Dijk, a driver, finds his employer Chris Dudok dead at home. A box of tablets and a bowl of porridge are nearby, 'suicide for the posh' he surmises before calling the doctor who when he finally arrives delivers a verdict of suicide with a single word

"Painless."
Still there must have been a fair amount of pain before getting this far.

The key to that pain is lying on the desk in front of him: a German newspaper from 1942 with a list of names on the front page circled in red. There is also has Dudok's diary, left on the backseat of the car the night before when he asked to be dropped off early so that he could walk the rest of the way home (this in itself might have been a warning sign from a man who would have been driven 'right into his study, had that been possible.') From this end point de Kat then goes back to tell Dudok's story in three different times. We go back to Lübeck, Germany in 1938 where Chris is sent by his father to gain some factory experience before taking over the family business back in Holland. He's sees the native fervour with an outsider's eye.

The spirit of the times seized him by the throat. Crazed masses rallied on a whim, marching and parading with soldierly discipline, Lübeck thrumming with excitement for the leader's new teachings. There was no getting away from the man. He appeared not to be taken so seriously in Holland, as though his ravings were put through a strain at the border. But the artist from Vienna was crafty, in his opinion, barking mad, but very clever. The radio seemed invented expressly for him, forever blasting into people's sitting rooms. Nobody thought to switch him off.

Whilst there he meets a female engineer, Julia Bender, who may be a German but sees the Nazi regime with the same distance as Chris - 'I don't belong anywhere; I have no desire to belong.' - and he falls in love with her. Any hopes of a satisfying love story are delayed by Chris's tentativeness and then interrupted by the provocative actions of Julia's actor brother who enrages the regime, putting them both in danger, at a time when Nazi violence is about to reach a definitive moment.

That night, Kristallnacht. The echo of his own name in the first syllable....it sounded so cheerful, conjuring visions of lavishly decked dinner tables with crystal glasses and burning candles, the epitome of bourgeois gemütlichkeit. A misapprehension. There were flames, but not of candles. Dinner tables, chairs, shops, homes, synagogues, Jews. All ready fuel for the conflagration. The stampede of jackboots in the streets, precisely directed, precisely timed. And the bystanders recoiling into the dumb silence, their passiveness never to be redeemed.

Julia insists that Chris leave Germany and return to Holland, leaving her behind. His desire to please her means that he obeys her order, turning his back on a woman he was only just beginning to know and yet whose feelings he won't bgin to comprehend until many years later. This is to be the action that in many ways defines his life, or perhaps more accurately: his death. In the second strand of the novel we see Chris move into middle age at home, into a marriage that falters, into his enforced tenure at the head of the family firm, a life that seems to follow along a set of tracks as fixed as those that took him away from Germany and from Julia. The third and final strand follows Chris on that walk home on his last night as he gives his life a final reckoning. The way in which de Kat moves between these three separate viewpoints is as seamless and fluid as memory and his prose throughout is spare (as I have come to expect from Dutch novelists of late) but with moments of wonderful poetry. In a novel about freedom and its opposite he helps us to see that though Chris is fortunate enough to be able to escape the growing horror in Germany we have to question how much or in what way he was able to escape it at all.

The un-freedom he suffered from was of a different order. How to free yourself from the happiest months of your life? From memories of life-changing events, and of a parting that robbed you of your soul? How?