Horses - Keith Ridgway

Amongst the folds of tension and intensity that Ridgway builds there is something hiding.

pp. 83

Published: Faber and Faber, 2003 (1997)

You could describe it as a crime thriller, though I can’t imagine a more reductive categorisation. Horses is one of those rare texts that has a taut, compelling plot alongside an enduring literary stance. The plot acts as the foundation upon which Ridgway builds his exploration of the complexities of grief, human relationships and criminality, and he does so with an impressive and shattering insightfulness into humanity.

We enter the narrative after a number of arsons have left an unnamed Irish town in a state of turmoil. The last of these fires has resulted in the death of three horses belonging to Helen Brooks, the daughter of Dr Brooks. The priest, Father Devoy, while offering refuge to the developmentally challenged Mathew, discovers that Mathew knows the identities of the arsonists, and when Mathew turns up later on having been the victim of an attempted murder, it becomes suddenly a matter of vital importance to find the culprit. All of this takes place in the midst of a soul-destroying storm that intensifies even the smallest of actions. 

Probably the highest achievement of Horses is its characterisations. The priest, the doctor and the policeman are fantastically drawn, each tackling their own personal issues surrounding the arsons and the attempted murder of Mathew. The priest suffers quietly with his faltering faith; the doctor maintains his moral certainties in the face of his daughter’s grief; and the policeman tries again and again to reconcile his methodical, investigatory cynicism with the events that unfold right beneath their feet, rendering him helpless. The stretches of dialogue are finely tuned to each character’s personality and state of mind.

But the devastatingly childlike Mathew steals the show. Caught up by chance in a series of events much larger than he is capable of comprehending, he is the novella’s overwhelmingly sympathetic character. Like a child, he is frightened by his central position in the events that unfold. Yet he is infinitely more interesting than we could have imagined, given his intelligence. It is said by a periphery character that, like ‘no other town in Ireland … our village idiot is a genius’, and this is the way Mathew is seen by the townspeople, who feel ‘protective and proud’ when it comes to this young man. He is homeless and he talks to walls, yet the things he talks about are intellectually challenging points of history (‘’It was a good century for the church’ he had been saying, ‘but not a good one for God’’), and Father Devoy ruminates that there is ‘a good mind in there somewhere’.  

Horses is one of those texts whose opening promises so much, and delivers on most of that promise. But it doesn't ever quite seem to reach its true potential. It seems that amongst the folds of tension and intensity that Ridgway builds there is something hiding, something deeper and more vital to the reader. The author never quite manages to locate this vague and indefinable thing, which is a shame. The work is, nevertheless, a strong debut from a skilled writer. 

   

In Between the Sheets - Ian McEwan

He sets us up for some fairly rewarding glimpses into the unconscious mind.

pp.134

Published: Vintage, 2006 (1978)

In his days as a writer of short stories, Ian McEwan’s now familiar style – the restrained clarity, the sensitivity, the subtlety – was in its adolescent phase, had an altogether sinister quality to it. One can see why he was accused of merely trying to shock readers. Yet the stories in his second collection, while frequently trembling on the edge of sensationalism, are rescued again and again by some unfathomable psychological depth which will leave the reader dumbfounded.

The one story for which this last remark does not hold true is actually the first, ‘Pornography’. Comically following the day-to-day shenanigans of O’Byrne and his porn-shop-owning brother Harold, the piece deteriorates into a sexual castration fantasy when O’Byrne’s two girlfriends discover that he has been cheating. The denouement is pure over-indulgence in horror with virtually no literary ambitions.

Conversely, the other stories seem thoroughly well-crafted, and put the reader on more purposeful ground. We must therefore read the opening piece as a kind of plunge into the freezing waters of the young McEwan’s overactive and frightening imagination as he sets us up for some fairly rewarding glimpses into the unconscious mind.

The stories most worthy of mention are ‘Reflections of a Kept Ape’ and the title piece, ‘In Between the Sheets’. In the former, a pet monkey with an extraordinary level of sentience is taken as the lover of a female novelist, Sally Klee, who is struggling with the follow-up to her first-published novel. This strange narrative deals with their short sex life, where ‘the friction of our bodies brought her out in a rash, and … my alien seed … was aggravating her thrush’, through to the ape’s maddening sense of loneliness and rejection as Sally Klee struggles with her writer’s block. When the ape discovers what she has been writing all this time, interesting questions are asked about what the creative process actually means and what its purpose is. The latterly mentioned title piece has a depressed ex-husband and father, Stephen Cooke, at its core. When his daughter comes to stay with him for the holidays, she brings her friend Charmian, who is a dwarf and who has a strange allure for Stephen, though it is not clear what the nature of this is.

It has to be said that the story with the most familiar McEwan voice (familiar to us now, looking back from so late on in his career), is ‘Two Fragments: March 199-‘. In this, a politically and socially desolate future world is the setting in which Henry lives with his daughter, Marie. Marie is a very funny and realistic depiction of an inquisitive child, and together they witness a horrifying spectacle. Henry visits an old lover, Diane, in the second part to this piece, and they reminisce about ‘the old times’ and argue about the usefulness of collecting things. Henry’s oblique contact with a Chinese family at the end is difficult to place within the rest of the narrative. Nevertheless, this piece has a particularly subtle quality that sets it back from the rest of the collection, and demonstrates shades of the later, more mature McEwan.

McEwan’s second published book is largely a success, with some slightly deflating features which indicate a lack of maturity, a lack of the refined, surgeon-like skill of his later work. In Kafkaesque manner, these stories are insular, floating free of any historical or political context. It is an important collection, interesting as a retrospective look at the early part of the author’s career, and in its own right as a detailed exploration into the more depraved areas of human existence.   

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories - Don Delillo

Delillo’s style – sparse, precise, analytical, understated – flourishes in the short form.

pp.211

Published: Picador, 2011

There are a few novelists I would place in the exclusive category of ‘genius’. Beckett, Joyce and Dickens jump instantly to mind. I think an important aspect of the criteria for this group is an obsession with one facet of existence: for Joyce this is language; for Beckett it is the lack of language, creating silence out of words; for Dickens it is an obsession with the class divide, with physical and emotional suffering, often perpetuated by financial difficulties. These are themes that each writer has pursued ceaselessly throughout their lives. While these are immensely simplified summaries of the authors’ bodies of work, it is clear to see that when they were writing they were intensely preoccupied by certain ideas and that they explored them trenchantly.

  

Don Delillo works in a similar way to these authors, hammering incessantly at his own preoccupation – the divide between the real and the imagined. And I feel that he works best in the short story format, as this collection clearly demonstrates.

The author often places us in an extreme setting in order to heighten the psychological issues that surround us from day to day. This is most noticeable in the second story, ‘Human Moments in World War III’. Set in space, it follows the musings of two astronauts confined on an orbital mission above the earth, alone. Though the narrator wishes to limit their discussions to what he calls ‘human moments’ (the small, prosaic details that bring them down to earth, so to speak, like a photograph of a family member), the ‘engineering genius’ Vollmer is determined to talk about the impending war, mass consciousness, and the flickering, fickle nature of health and happiness. The narrator is mostly reduced to thinking his replies, rather than saying them out loud, and is very much a victim of thoughts that are too desolate and intense for him to contemplate.

Perhaps the most significant story of the collection is not in fact the title piece, but a story from the final of three sets, ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’. Here we have the most intensified, internally-directed story of the bunch. Two students walk the streets, talking, arguing, when they begin to wonder about the life of an old man they continually see wandering in the cold fog. As they create an imagined existence around this vague and mysterious figure, from his nationality (‘Middle Europe … Eastern Europe’) down to the finest detail, such as the fact that ‘he has very little feeling in his extremities’, the narrator’s, Robby’s, strange professor becomes vital to their creative process. By the end, Delillo leaves a shadow of uncertainty as we wonder whether an imagined version of a person is as real as the real version.

The final story explores very similar concepts, though it captures with greater impact the disparity and the odd kind of conflict between the real and the imagined. A cinema-obsessed man begins stalking a woman who similarly frequently attends movie showings. He creates a life for her in his head as he follows her between cinemas and home. Their confrontation in the bathrooms at one of the theatres is mystifying and frightening. 

If these stories come across here as overly intellectual, or abstract even, then I can assure you that they aren’t. They are oddly grounded and relevant to our times. They contain compelling plotlines and use these to look deeper into the everyday. Delillo’s style – sparse, precise, analytical, understated – flourishes in the short form. These stories are quick yet finely-tuned surgical incisions into the psychological complexities that surround us. I cannot recommend this collection highly enough. It is a perfect panoramic view of the author’s career from the first story, written in 1979, to the last, 2011. And yet they each develop further Delillo’s obsessions as a writer.

Read the bewildering 'Midnight in Doestoevsky' here - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/30/midnight-in-dostoevsky

  

Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac

A young boy’s imagination is absolutely wild and stormy, and this novel depicts it exactly

pp.207

Published: Harper Perennial, 2006 (1959)

In 1958, Jack Kerouac penned his thirty rules for writing spontaneous prose, which included: Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind; Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition; and Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better. All of his rules encompass his literary mantra – ‘first thought best thought’ – the concept of which is that revision of a manuscript merely serves to obscure the true intended meaning of that very first thought. In the wild and disjointed narrative of Doctor Sax we can see these principles at their poetic best.

The novel follows parts of Kerouac’s youth in such a delineated and hectic fashion as to be like a dream. And indeed, dream and fantasy are employed as techniques by the author in portraying the inner life of the young boy. Whole swathes of the novel are mere fantastical imaginary scenes that have no bearing upon the overall narrative direction. A number of entire chapters are taken up with the exploits of the vampire Count Condu and the strange figure of Doctor Sax, in a weird aside that is the boy populating his childhood with characters and games. This can be irritating at times as their are many instances where the narrative thread is completely lost and the reader left adrift, but the overall sense that this erratic style gives us is that of a rambling, energetic, playful mind.   

The mysterious phantom Doctor Sax is ever-present in this novel which bursts with dark happenings. Sax does a lot of lurking at the periphery of the boy’s imaginings, first seen by us in the woods, ‘stalking with the incredible Jean Fourchette’, and is said to be hiding ‘around the corner of my mind’. Later on, this devastating presence prophesies a flood as he stands ‘on the dark shore, a ledge above the waters’. The flood becomes the crescendo of the book in a section that is highly descriptive and lyrical in its depiction of the catastrophe.

What makes Kerouac’s spontaneous prose style work so well is that he has a natural ability with the written word, so that his hurried sentences are actually very well formed even as they rush onwards with no heed of grammatical accuracy. As is common with most of his novels, the full stop is largely replaced with a hyphen, which tends to send the reader reeling, tumbling through the narrative helplessly and without a life preserver. Reading Kerouac is a real experience. Doctor Sax is an incredible read, particularly to those fans of his who might be surprised by the oddly sinister current running, darkly, through it. A young boy’s imagination is absolutely wild and stormy, and this novel depicts it exactly. 

Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith

Smith’s piece asks us again and again what a human right truly is.

pp.161

Publisher: Canongate, 2007

As part of the Canongate Myths series, Girl Meets Boy is a modern retelling of the myth of Iphis, one of Ovid’s ‘cheeriest metamorphoses … one of the most happily resolved of its stories about the desire for and the ramifications of change’. Girl Meets Boy is a novella which blurs gender, sexuality and identity to form a humanistic narrative on love and what it means to be human.  

Smith’s contemporary metamorphosis concerns Anthea and her sister, Imogen, as they each react to the exploitative and inhumane company that they work for. ‘Pure’ is a distributor of bottled water, greedily exploring marketing strategies and exploiting areas of poorer countries by blocking their access to fresh water. Smith’s piece asks us again and again what a human right truly is, despite racial differences, despite gender differences, despite differences in sexuality.

Alongside, and indeed informing, this part of the narrative is Anthea’s love affair with a female human rights activist. When Imogen finds out that her sister is gay (a word ‘worse than the word cancer’), her inner monologue as she comes to terms with this fact is funny and shocking. She tries desperately to overcome a homophobia deeply embedded within her consciousness by the social norms of the time. She considers moving house because the neighbours might know. The oblivious gay jokes that Imogen suffers at the pub from her friends Dominic and Norman turn her on the defensive, and from there we can see that she is sympathetic after all. This contributes to Imogen’s social awakening at the end of the book, where she becomes aware of the corruption that surrounds her.

Ali reworks this myth intricately and bravely, tackling very modern concerns with her succinct and compulsive writing. Whiz through this short book and enjoy an intelligent literary mind at work, as it weaves our contemporary concerns into a classical narrative.      

Reasons She Goes to the Woods - Deborah Kay Davies

Everything will come crashing down.

pp.249

Publisher: Oneworld, 2014

Told in a series of single-page lyrical vignettes, with the title of each vignette on the facing page, Deborah Kay Davies’ latest novel is a tightly drawn and impressive read. It is about a strange young girl, Pearl, growing up amid the internal fury of her family home. Her erratically behaved mother is often struck down by a mysterious illness that confines her to bed or results in her acting violently towards Pearl and The Blob (an unaffectionate nickname Pearl gives to her younger brother). Pearl’s disdainful behaviour towards her mother in return creates a significant division through the family, and when Pearl becomes overly affectionate towards her father and tries to get her mother out of the picture, their world very quickly collapses.

Pearl is one of the most fascinating characters I have come across this year. She is tremendously cruel and vindictive. Upon meeting a girl called Honey, Pearl wrestles her to the ground, tells her to open her mouth and ‘gathers spit with her tongue and allows it to fall in a series of slow bubbles into Honey’s mouth. Now swallow, she tells her, or else.’ This is a rite of passage Pearl puts the girl through in order for them to become friends. There seems no end to Pearl’s pointlessly cruel antics, and yet very occasionally she shows traits of kindness (particularly to her brother), deep yearning desire (directed at her father), or deflated regret (at suddenly ending the relationship with her boyfriend, Will).

It is easy to find oneself hating Pearl and then feeling a quick pang of sorrow or sadness for her. In the section entitled ‘Shed’, there is a particularly heart-breaking image painted of the girl looking after her brother during one of her mother’s manic breakdowns. Pearl steals food from the kitchen and she and her brother sit eating in the shed in the garden. Their mother bursts out wielding a knife and Pearl shields her brother, waiting for their father ‘to come and save them’.

A risk Davies takes with the form is how she can make all the separate parts of this novel cohere, yet she manages it elegantly. The progression from beginning to end is tense and interesting. As we try to work out the meaning of Pearl’s cruelty, and of the little skeleton girl she sees from time to time, we suddenly realise that Davies is building up to something intensely moving, a denouement where everything will come crashing down.

Easily read in one or two sittings, this short novel will compel you to read just another section, and then another, and then another. It is beautifully written as it portrays the arc of a girl’s childhood as she struggles with the dark reality of the family unit.      

The Gar Diaries - Louis Bourgeois

Certain images will sit with you for a while after reading, their impact deeply felt and difficult to get rid of.

pp.263

Published: The Other Publishing Company, 2014

(This book was given to me for free in exchange for an honest review)

A gar is a fish commonly found in the waters of Eastern North America. It is a fish that has great significance for Louis Bourgeois in its frequent appearances throughout his childhood, particularly in the one-page story ‘Epilepsy Has a Cause’, which attributes his recurrent epileptic seizures to his very first sighting of a garfish. In The Gar Diaries, Bourgeois offers a series of quick glimpses into the world of his youth, a world of poverty, class separation, brutality, abuse and loss.

Some of the pieces in this collection will disturb the reader. Certain images will sit with you for a while after reading, their impact deeply felt and difficult to get rid of. The south-eastern Louisiana setting provides a rich backdrop for some very strange and vivid occurrences.    

One thing concerning me about this book is not an aspect the author can have any control over. But one critical comment on the cover attests to the poetic nature of the prose inside. What struck me, conversely, is the book’s lack of poesy, considering it is written by a poet. The prose is distinctly clear, simple and lacking in frills. The narrator’s voice is intensely sober and laser-sharp. It is disappointing in this sense, however the content often takes over any concerns about language or form, and one is taken away with the plot. There is one identifiable purpose in the author’s no-nonsense attempt to illuminate his youth, and it is just that – to set before us, without judgement on his behalf, his youthful days as he remembers them.

There are stories that will have you sympathising with Lucas, the narrator, and stories that will have you hating him. Yet the two extremes fuse well in this array of short pieces. Sometimes nostalgic, often cold and indecipherable, the author does not try to redeem or uplift. He does not try hard to find beauty or ugliness, but only portrays what is there. And this is another aspect where Bourgeois lacks poesy, and not in the bad sense. He does not try to be poetic, but unequivocally honest. His earnestness and integrity are striking.

Aside from the occasional puerile and ridiculous opinion, such as the idea that people who have children are ‘not courageous to face life alone’ or that they lack ‘the discipline to keep their pants on when they should be concerned with doing great things in the world’, this is a very reasonable book in its depiction of the author’s childhood. At times it suffers from an inflated sense of ego as Bourgeois purports to be placing its characters into the annals of history merely by mentioning them. I don’t think this book will be wide-reaching or significant enough to warrant such noble opinions of itself, but nevertheless it is well worth a read. The very short stories inside that build up a picture of the American Deep South are unrelated yet they complement each other well.

A common thread running through these stories is the author’s keen sense of class separation. He has an affinity with working class people as he grew up amongst them. In the story ‘Party’, for example, a four year old Lucas ruins a lawn party by defecating in his pants and then staring at a war veteran’s fingerless hands. The closing line of the piece is one of sorrow for the working class partygoers – ‘Poor working class people, I didn’t mean to do this to you.’ As the book progresses, Lucas’ hatred for the middle classes borders on brutality, and seems wildly unjust in its indiscriminate nature.

A book of great characterisation, fascinating events and horrendously honest narration. Brief moments of egotism and even juvenility on the part of the author often destroy the illusion of narrative aloofness but nevertheless this remains an interesting group of stories.    

      

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear McBride

As a reader one kind of falls into the next sentence, and the next and the next.

pp.203

Publisher: Galley Beggar Press, 2013

It is easy to see how Eimear McBride’s novel has won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is a stylistic explosion in the relatively tepid contemporary fiction scene. It is the debut novel of an author in impressive control of voice and direction.

As the hectically narrated story unfolds, we understand that the protagonist’s brother has been diagnosed with a brain tumour. The girl is bullied heavily at school along with her scarred brother, which pushes her towards gaining control over her situation by sleeping with as many boys as possible. Her days away from home at university prove to be even more debauched as she becomes an alcoholic, drug-taking slut. After her brother takes a turn for the worse and is given a few weeks to live, she comes home to discover that the family dynamics have shifted radically, and as she deals with her dying brother’s condition, she also must deal with the uncle by whom she was ‘abused’ as a child and with whom she has more recently begun a love affair.

The plot arc is actually rather disappointing in its simplicity, its repetitiveness. It doesn’t cover new ground, but relies on its originality of method to explore already-charted territory more fully. Rough and violent sex becomes so commonplace in these pages that it starts to lack the impact it is supposed to have, as well as becoming tiresome and cloying.

However, the novel is all about style. McBride often cites Joyce as a big influence on her writing, and indeed she has produced here a Molly Bloom for the modern age. She has, though, made the stream-of-conscious narrative her own, the way the sentences are short and clipped rather than immensely long. Nevertheless, they are sentences of breath-taking beauty and intricacy. In differing from the Joycean method they actually achieve the same end – a hurried, tumbling rush towards the final word, much like the disjointed rush of thoughts.  

An interesting aspect of the novel is how easy it is to read, despite the liberties it takes with grammatical and syntactical coherence. As a reader one kind of falls into the next sentence, and the next and the next, until a general feeling is formed. Consequently the book is filled with intense streams of emotion and anguish that burst from the page.

This is certainly a well-felt novel. What it lacks in narrative ingenuity it makes up for in the energy and cleverness of its style. It makes my list of must-reads for the fact that it stands utterly alone amongst its contemporaries.  

Burial Rites - Hannah Kent

One can feel hopelessly isolated at times

pp.330

Published: Picador, 2013

In 1830, Agnes Magnusdottir, sentenced to death for murder and arson, was the last person to be executed in Iceland. Many accounts of the crime for which she was condemned and of the execution, as Hannah Kent points out in the author’s note, ‘hold a common view of Agnes as ‘an inhumane witch, stirring up murder.’’ Kent’s version of the story reimagines the events from the perspective of the maidservant herself, as well as the family forced to take her in as a prisoner while she awaits her death. As the family struggle to come to terms with the killer in their midst, Kent delivers a thoroughly sympathetic portrayal of the character.

From the very prologue we are given a sense of the novel’s attitude. In the line, ‘They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine,’ there is the suggestion of injustice, of a false accusation. In the space between ‘they said’ and what has actually happened, Kent writes over three hundred pages, all of them vital, urgent, and necessary in reshaping the emotional investment of the characters in Agnes’ struggle with the truth.    

The way that this is achieved is through a striking combination of official documentation, third person narration, and monologue. It slowly builds up a precise picture of the events. The cold, factual information contained in the trial reports and letters combines well with the sentimental, charged passages written from Agnes’ perspective. The third person allows a shift in perspective, so that we can see how others react and are altered by what they learn through the course of the book.

Kent’s writing is intelligent in that its pacing is that of a high-grade thriller, intense and plot-driven, whereas the novel also has a compelling literary quality. This author has the ability to write sentences of enormous emotional power and deep metaphysical and social value. The book is equally an entertaining journey and a relevant exploration of the treatment of women and suspected criminals in an era and country not very well-equipped to deal with crime of this magnitude. Be prepared to be morally outraged.

Agnes is introduced to us as an animal, held in the store-room of a farm at Stora-Borg, sometimes with her legs tied together like ‘the forelegs of horses, to ensure I will not run away.’ As she is taken to  Thristopar to await her execution and begins working as she used to on the farm, and then further on as she makes significant impressions on the family who have taken her in, we begin to love her and to feel sorry for her. In retelling her story either to the Reverend, to herself, or to Margret, we get a sense of her utter loneliness, her unluckiness to have lived a life so devoid of sympathetic human contact. She describes in one passage the period of time she spent with Natan, the man she is supposed to have killed: ‘I had no friends. I didn’t understand the landscape. Only the outlying tongues of rock scarred the perfect kiss of sea and sky – there was no one and nothing else. There was nowhere else to go.’

This idea of entrapment by landscape is prevalent throughout the book. Bare open expanses. Storms often raging through the country, cutting districts off completely from one another. The loneliness inherent in such a world and in such weather is a ubiquitous feeling in Burial Rites. One can feel hopelessly isolated at times.

No wonder, then, that the novel was written from Kent’s own experiences of isolation as an exchange student in Iceland. Her feelings of alienation feed the lonesome passages of the book like the plaintive moan and whistle of a cold wind. It gives the energy and drive necessary to power such a beautiful lament as this. And while the landscape is lonely, it is nevertheless poetically, vastly gorgeous. Something about the narration suggests that the author is compulsively attracted to the country, to its mysterious, almost holy beauty, despite its long echoes of the void.    

This is a valuable story that will often be read quickly, as its tensions are maintained throughout. The reader’s opinions about the murders, and about the nature of Agnes Magnusdottir, that inhumane witch, are changed drastically by the end. And the denouement, which comes as no surprise but as an irrevocable inevitability, is charged with an astounding emotional force.    

The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds

A veritable maze of humanity

pp.259

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2009. 

The Quickening Maze follows the lives of the poets John Clare and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and of Matthew Allen who runs High Beach Private Asylum, where Clare and Tennyson’s brother Septimus reside. Amongst Clare’s attempts to gain freedom and Allen’s plans to design a machine that mass-produces furniture, along the way getting Tennyson to inject money into the scheme, we also follow Hannah, Allen’s daughter, who is intensely pre-occupied by thoughts of courtship and marriage.

All the individual characters meld in a unique way in this book’s portrayal of how different forms of insane behaviour can affect lives. Matthew Allen’s mania becomes the most pathetic portrait of the book, as he struggles with his impecunious past, fleeing into a future much the same. Tennyson is the larger-than-life poet at a time when poets were a curiosity, when to compose poems could be a revered profession, noble and gentrified. He is an isolated figure, slightly tormented by his isolations, suffering with the critical rejections of his work. The girl who falls for him, Hannah, is young and naïve, anxious to impress and embark upon a woman’s life.

But John Clare, as intended, steals the show. He is a fascinating study of a mind crumbling from delusions and intense, unfulfilled desire. His quest is for freedom in the natural world, for his ex-wife, and for his home. There are gaps in the narrative that reflect the gaps in his own existence as he begins to believe, alternately, that he is a boxer called Jack Randall or the poet Lord Byron. We are flung into a tumultuous confusion as these names come and go without explanation, and as he demands again and again to see his wife who has not been his wife for some time.  

These delusions are substantiated when he comes into contact with a group of gypsies and when he believes one of the other inmates at the asylum to be Mary, his wife (and duly sleeps with her in one frantic, disturbing passage towards the end of the book).

Foulds’ writing in this novel is exceedingly capable, refined to the point of perfection.  His multiple perspectives circle one another expertly, with the pertinent imagery of the asylum at their centre. Perhaps more could be done, in that it is a novel of vaulting ambition and does not quite fulfil its potential. But it is nevertheless a veritable maze of humanity.  

All the Birds, Singing - Evie Wyld

A tense and moving plot which explores deeper meanings behind the haunting past

pp.229

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2013

Evie Wyld is a fearless writer. The first sentence of All the Birds, Singing reads, ‘Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.’ She is unafraid of violence, of the horrifying, of monsters and what they represent, and yet much of her prose is lyrical, poetic, beautiful. Gorgeous in places. This dynamic novel contains the subtle and it contains the heavy-hitting punches of a viscerally disturbing piece of fiction.

Her technique is to have the running narrative pursued by flashbacks of the past which move backwards in time, slowly and heart-achingly, digging deeper and deeper, unveiling more and more. In this respect, the plot is very skilfully drawn out for us, much like a genre fiction novel. Cliff hangers aside, though, this is a novel with literary aspirations, a tense and moving plot which explores deeper meanings behind the haunting past, the past which never leaves us.

Jake Whyte lives alone on a farm in the British Isles, tending to her sheep and denying herself the comforts of human interaction. The reason for this slowly becomes clear as we are dipped into her past again and again until we understand exactly how she has got to where she is. It is a past of prostitution, bullying, homelessness and sheep shearing. As something begins killing off her sheep in the night, Jake’s backstory circles in on the true purpose of her solitary existence.    

This method of telling the story backwards gives us the sense of the protagonist becoming more and more naïve. In developing the character, Wyld works towards a kind of anti-development, or a backwards development. As such it seems, to the novel’s detriment, that the denouement, the big secret in Jake Whyte’s past that she is running from, is a bit of an anti-climactic revelation as it works against the image of her up to that point. However, the author cleverly maintains our sympathy in Jake despite what takes place, which one can tell from the very beginning of the novel is going to be a difficult task. It also makes us consider how a moment of madness can change our lives forever. Yet the redemptive quality of the novel is striking.

All the Birds, Singing is about isolation, inner demons and desperation. It is also funny in places. It is a novel full of empty spaces that sit hauntingly amongst the narration, allowing the reader to fill them.      

The Mirror - Richard Skinner

These two well-researched pieces create two interior worlds of torment

pp.320

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2014

The two novellas of Skinner’s book are tightly written meditations on two opposing kinds of life, one being a life of religious devotion, the other a life of selfish, uncompromising creativity. Nevertheless, they both explore eternality with an emphasis on the physical reality of the world – experiences, memories, hopes. The novellas follow the lives of two single-minded people pursuing with all their strength what they believe to be the overriding truth of existence.

In the novella from which the book gains its title, The Mirror, the author works in the confines of a Venetian convent, where the young nun Oliva’s world is shaken first by a portentous earthquake and then by her faltering belief in God and the life of abstinence she leads. The timid girl is tested further when she is forced to sit for her portrait with the painter Signor Avilo, who uses a mirror ‘to put perspective in [his] picture’, a mirror being an instrument of vanity and therefore of the devil. Along with the presence of the mirror, Signor Avilo’s atheistic monologues confuse and worry Oliva. Talking about the so-called devoutness of the nunnery, the painter states that ‘in the end, you will find the same things on the inside that you have left on the outside.’

   

Such a supposedly prophetic statement is shown to be quite true, given that Oliva’s friend Ottavia runs away from the cloister to pursue a love affair with a man, and when the priests ransack the nuns’ cells for evidence of complicity, they find ‘the most beautiful and valuable dresses, shifts, gloves, jewellery, rugs, tapestries and altar cloths’. They even find stockings and silk underwear. Such worldly luxuries and vain materialism are a shock to behold for the infuriatingly naïve Oliva, as they show the hidden sins of greed and lust amongst the sisters.

   

The piece builds to a shocking denouement as grief, sorrow, confusion and anger seethe within the young pliable Oliva. Her faith is stronger than we think, though she totters on the brink of corruption.

In the second piece, The Velvet Gentleman, the composer Erik Satie must choose a single memory from his life to take with him into oblivion. In the post-death limbo in which he finds himself, he searches through his lifetime for a memory worthy of keeping forever. It is a clever technique that Skinner uses to fictionalise his biography of the man. Each episode that Satie explores of his past is filled with poignancy because of his quest.

Each memory, as well, is rich with Satie’s personality. Skinner develops a very convincing, eccentric voice in bringing the composer to life. A funny, very nearly insane man, a man not only willing to walk ten kilometres a day to work, and to live in a single room so small that his two pianos have to sit one on top of the other, but convinced that these aspects of his life are vital to the art of his composition.

   

In terms of the man’s art, we get a picture of a kind of Beckett-figure of music composition, striving to ‘reduce music so that it aspires towards the point of zero’, as Beckett sought to do the same with words, reducing them to ‘complete silence’. Satie’s expositions on his work are the most interesting parts of the story, as well as how his ideology is built into his way of living. This is an interestingly executed fictional study of a very interesting character. And the memory Satie finally chooses is wonderfully befitting of a man who has lived by his passions and principles, who has lived for his art.

These two well-researched pieces create two interior worlds of torment, one building to a horrifying climax and the other to a beautiful, visually pleasing one. Well-crafted, original, excellently told, they often seem oddly confined themselves, and whether this is a clever trick of narration or an unintended side-effect of their precision it is hard to tell. Erik Satie, though, in particular, is one of those compulsively drawn characters who will stay with you for quite a while after reading.  

Listen to Erik Satie's Gymnopedies and Gnossienes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtLHiou7anE 

Summertime - J.M. Coetzee

An autobiography like no other

pp.266

Published: Harvill Secker, 2009

A Nobel Prize laureate, J.M. Coetzee is a fascinating creature. Known as a mysterious, reclusive man, a decade-long colleague has seen him laugh just once, and acquaintances have been to dinner parties where Coetzee hasn’t opened his mouth to speak all eveniBoyhood, Youth and Summertime.  

ng. He is monk-like in his behaviourisms, the South African writer Rian Malan stating that ‘he does not drink, smoke, eat or sleep’, and writes every morning without fail. What an inner life this man must lead, and how fascinating would it be to glimpse how he relates to the world and to the people in it. A good job, then, that we have a trilogy of memoirs from the author –

Summertime is number three in the trilogy of fictionalised memoirs. It follows the writer through the years 1971-77, ‘a period when he was still finding his feet as a writer.’ It is a novel constructed under the postmodernist guise of a biography of Coetzee after his death, as though he hadn’t lived long enough to write this third instalment of his own memoirs. We are presented with a series of five interviews, each interviewee being a person who had some impact on Coetzee’s life, however seemingly small, parenthesized at the beginning and the end by fragments purportedly from the notebooks of the man himself. By treating himself as a character Coetzee gains a certain cold distance from the subject, and as such it seems to increase the reliability of the text. He has freed himself from the constraints of subjectivity, of passion, and created a novel as self-deprecatingly honest as it is experimental.  

The pervasive image that is drawn of Coetzee is of an awkward, distant, bookish man whose shyness is often misunderstood. He is, according to the last of the so-called ‘interviewees’, a writer whose work is ‘too neat, too easy … Too lacking in passion.’ As a lover he is deficient also, his sex inadequate and his emotions almost non-existent, at least as far as they are displayed outwardly. In other words, Coetzee is scathingly negative about himself, and yet the pathetic and degrading image we are presented of him seems in no way comic or deliberately, hyperbolically absurd. We get the impression of true earnestness on the part of the author. He is pictured as an uncaring son, a cerebral man thoroughly uninterested in much of the life around him. There is no sensationalism, no bragging in this depiction of the man. It is a clear, honest, sober portrait.

His dislocation from family, friends and his homeland are linked inextricably with the racial tensions of the time in South Africa. The manual labour he busies himself with at the beginning of the book causes him to be viewed strangely by locals, for manual labour was considered the work of the ‘lower’ race, the blacks, the farmhands.  And when Coetzee and his cousin are out walking, they keep well clear of ‘the cluster of cabins that house the farmworkers’. There is a distinct, insidious sense of segregation and hatred seething under the surface of the novel, as is the case with much of Coetzee’s oeuvre, while on a personal level much the same thing is taking place. The women in his life seem all to contain some hatred of the man. The novel is rife with vendettas, big and small.

This is an autobiography like no other. It is a postmodernist manipulation of the form that seeps authenticity and candidness as it simultaneously plays with its own artifice. Coetzee portrays himself as no other would dare. He puts himself completely at the mercy of an outer reality – for the ‘interviewees’ can have no clue what was going on in the man’s head – and as such Coetzee forgoes the opportunity to defend himself. This man is a brave artist. This book is worth a read.  

Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon uses the novel as his playground

pp. 477

Published: Jonathan Cape, 2013

Well, well. And where do we start? Depending on the kind of reader you are, the sheer elusive quality of Pynchon’s latest novel will either attract or repulse you. You will either adore the author or you will hate him, for his inimitable style has so much personality, so much (dare I say it?) sass, that at times it can be nothing more than an imposition on the narrative, confusing and distracting as it is.  

We have Maxine as our lady protagonist, a fraud investigator doing business illegally since her license was revoked. Through the course of the novel she is looking into the questionable dealings of Gabriel Ice and his computer security company Hashslingrz, while also living her life as a mother of two, and with an ex-husband who has been quite prominently back in the picture recently. Somewhere in the middle of the book Maxine’s investigations begin to tie in vaguely with the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre.

And this is all I can really say about the plot per-se, given that, typically for a Pynchon novel, not a lot seems to make sense. Everything comes together so intricately, minutely, slowly, strangely that it would probably require more than two or three readings to fully make sense of the narrative, and more than a short thousand word review to explain properly.

Needless to say, though, the purposely vague plot is not the only allure of the piece. The increasingly out of place humour is mostly endearing, low brow as most of it is, and not condescendingly either but playfully. There is an abundance of outdated and clichéd Jewish jokes, which really are just a bit of fun rather than meaning to be taken seriously. It can at times become rather tiresome, though, especially when the humour is deployed outrageously when Maxine and her connection/one-time lover Windust are being shot at in the street. Maxine’s first reaction after they have ducked quickly behind cover is to say, ‘”I knew I should’ve worn the Kevlar outfit today.”’ What proceeds is a series of back-and-forth banter-style comments that seem far too easy and lazy on the part of the author.

References to late Nineties and early Noughties pop culture also abound, and give the sense that in the physical book itself we are holding a rich relic of an era that is becoming increasingly remote. Music of the time is played in the background occasionally, such as Nelly’s ‘Ride Wit Me’, which sends this reader reeling back into his childhood. Films, computer games and technological developments among other things are referred to or appear directly in the narrative, skilfully utilised by a writer incredibly in tune with the zeitgeist, and with the way these things have had an effect on our outlook.

But in a novel lost so inextricably to humour, contemporary pop culture and specialist computer terminology, the chances of finding a character well-developed and loveable are pretty slim. In Bleeding Edge we are kept at a rather complicit distance. Pynchon does not seem to want us to get too close, or to get too close himself

, so we have to struggle to find the humanity that can make a lengthy novel like this worthwhile. And if you do look, you will find it, little episodes huddled here and there like timid children. One such example, and a beautiful example it is, concerning the death of Maxine’s lover, for whom she has shown mixed feelings previously:

       Later, back in the apartment, in a widowlike observance, Maxine finds a moment alone and switches off the lights, takes the envelope of cash, and snorts the last vestiges of his punk-rock cologne, trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless and inaccountable as his spirit …

Pynchon is capable, as shown here, of rending our hearts in two, everything about his prose in this passage being perfect, even down to that final, breath-taking ellipses.

So Pynchon’s abilities as a writer prove to be as elusive, as all-inclusive, as the plot itself. Perhaps there are not enough gorgeous moments that make the slogging worthwhile in Bleeding Edge, which can be frustrating, but nevertheless they are there. This is an impressive read. It will be important to any Pynchon fan, and its fast-paced, tight plot development will appeal to fans of crime and mystery fiction, of which it is a bit of a literary homage. Pynchon is still an unbelievable wordsmith, and uses the novel as his playground. He is having fun in his playground, and invites the reader to join in with him.

If you like this, you might also like: White Noise by Don Dellilo, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. 

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy focuses on the strength of the battered human soul, the immutable desire to survive in a world where ‘nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave’

pp.307

Published: Picador, 2006

Cormac McCarthy, in this post-apocalyptic novel, does everything right. One of his major strengths as a writer is his poetic understatement – which we see in all of his work, from the psychotically violent No Country for Old Men to the beautifully panoramic All the Pretty Horses – and this understatement leaves a mental space for the reader to fill with their own reality, their own sense of horror. With such an oft-tackled and momentous subject as the end of the world, in The Road McCarthy treats the subject differently and is in horrendous control of his readership, capable of shocking us to the core, making us laugh, or leaving us in tears.

The unnamed Man and his son are two survivors in a landscape turned dead and grey ‘like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world’. This is a world laid waste, where ash covers the ground and floats through the air, where trees, dried out and dying, fall down without warning except the cracking of long-dehydrated bark. The Man and the Boy are travelling south in order to reach the coast, with some vague hope in mind that there will be something there for them, although the Man has no idea whether the sea will still be blue or whether it has turned the same dull, senseless grey of everything else.

  

Their journey is fraught with tension. Everything from the search for food and water, to keeping dry, to avoiding contact with the ‘bad guys’ – gangs of marauders travelling around together raping, pillaging and murdering – is part of the epic struggle to reach some ill-defined place that may bring salvation. There are a number of passages that will completely shock you, passages related to cannibalism, suicide, and the desperation of the human spirit under such circumstances. But I will not go through them here for fear they will lose their value.

The individual struggles of the Man and the Boy on their shared journey are rather different. The Man’s preoccupation is with protecting his son, doing anything it takes. He carries a pistol with them and we see that he is prepared to use it. He also covers the boys eyes when they come across any gruesome sights, saying that anything the Boy puts in his memory will be there forever.

On the other hand, the Boy is concerned with the morality of their means to survive. He asks his father again and again whether they are still carrying ‘the fire’, which is a lovely expression of human goodness burning within them. He insists again and again that they should find the ‘good guys’, that they should do nothing bad, no matter how desperate. After a close encounter with one of the ‘bad guys’, the boy is uncertain whether they have done something wrong, whether they have strayed into moral dubiousness by hurting him, and his father tries to reassure him:

             You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

             Yes.

             He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? He said

             Yes. We’re still the good guys.

             And we always will be.

             Yes. We always will be.

             Okay. 

These heart-rending interchanges pepper the narrative, sometimes with humour and sometimes with sadness. They lend an intense humanity that makes the book sing.  

While the bare writing style McCarthy uses substantiates his belief that you shouldn’t have to blot the page up with ‘weird little marks’, it also surrounds the reader in this wastedness, this cold grey environment that gives nothing back, let alone punctuation. His dialogue is free of speech marks, though it is always clear who is speaking; the short sections have minimal paragraphing; and commas, at times, come very close to extinction. But in depicting a world empty finally of any kind of luxuries, how could the author justify using any grammatical luxuries himself? And so he doesn’t, and the story gains a deeper poignancy as a result.

We never learn exactly what has caused the world to be dying as it is in this novel, yet it never once matters, it never once becomes the issue. McCarthy focuses on the strength of the battered human soul, the immutable desire to survive in a world where ‘nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave’. And by distancing us from the details and intricacies of the tragedy it becomes all the more frightening for us, a generation constantly on the brink of war, with climate change a pervasive dread in the public consciousness, and with meteors travelling within a hairsbreadth of our atmosphere. In other words, the distancing paradoxically draws us closer to the disaster portrayed in the book. It is a disaster potentially on our very doorstep, ringing the bell incessantly.

I have read The Road four times since picking it up in 2010 and it has never ceased to alter me entirely as I read it. It exudes a deep sense of humanity, of humanness. It is a kind of parable showing the kindness, ugliness and strength of human nature. It is the novel McCarthy was destined to write, and one that he, and indeed any writer the world over, will struggle to better. 

Hilary Mantel Knighted

English writer Hilary Mantel, whose novel The Giant, O'Brien I reviewed on this blog here: http://as-i-read.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-giant-obrien-hilary-mantel.html, is to become a Dame of the British Empire (DBE) for services to literature.

Stay tuned for a review of her critically and commercially successful novel Wolf Hall some time in the near future.

Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

Overwhelmingly, studiedly joyous

pp. 318

Published: Flamingo, 1993 (originally published 1934)

A wondrous study of life and living, Tropic of Cancer is a picaresque tale about a man living by his principles. Having dropped a comfortable white collar job in America and moved to Paris to pursue his literary ambitions, the first person narrator is determined to be faithful to a life of passion, creativity and bliss. This is his freedom, the squalor and degradation included.

   

There are many other novels of this kind, focusing on the bohemian scene of Paris, the literary capital for modern literature, and the writer’s struggle – most notably Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. And there are even novels based wholly on poverty and the struggle to continue existing – such as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. But Miller’s novel attains something rather different and much more rewarding for the reader than these realist depictions of suffering. He frequently follows his imagery into long, surrealistic ruminations on humanity, art and existence, overflowing with poetic energy. He penetrates deeper into the complexities of his life’s philosophy by weaving his beautiful rants with the story, and of course this works immensely at diversifying the piece.

   

Miller’s first-published novel is overwhelmingly, studiedly joyous. Broadly speaking, it follows an arc where on the opening page ‘the hero … is Timelessness’, and where at the close the contradictory realisation is struck upon that ‘more than anything [people] need to be surrounded by sufficient space – space even more than time.’ The narrator is talking about freedom in these two passages, one idea being that utter freedom is a life without the limits of time, which is a completely theoretical and unattainable object, thus keeping us in ‘a lock step, toward the prison of death’. And yet the other passage, gleaned from experience, is an understanding that one can live freely under the inevitability of death, but that one requires space – environmental, emotional, psychological space. In other words, freedom is achievable. And of course, this is where the joy of Henry Miller lies. That our main character has suffered many torments through the course of his story – the ignominy of begging for food and money, the anguish and the loneliness of creative endeavour, the cruelty of some people  –  and who then towels himself off at the other end with such an optimistic outlook as that is well and truly astounding. What a marvellous lesson to the pessimistic masses!

And, of course, we cannot ignore the kindness, the charity, the beauty he finds amongst the ugliness of his personal freedom. The novel isn’t a catalogue of torment until the end where the narrator finds salvation in his world view, but in fact it is often the opposite. It is a love letter that contradicts itself often, a dance in the muck of existence, a series of gorgeous life-affirming vignettes that are all the more absorbing when we see that they are in fact Henry Miller’s views entirely. Most of his output during his lifetime was semi-autobiographical, Tropic of Cancer being the first of his forays into this exciting new form he developed. His books are like kisses blown into the literary consciousness, kisses which come directly and breathtakingly from the author’s own lips.

Tropic of Cancer’s reputation will always precede it. It is a very sensual novel where the narrator’s sexual encounters, mouth-wateringly candid, caused it to be the victim of a large-scale ban in the United States and in England, as well as an obscenity trial which Miller eventually won. Needless to say, though, the proliferation of sex is nothing but a glaring affirmation of the joy, the lust, the love, the honesty, the purity, the ugliness, the baselessness, the beauty, the loneliness, the exuberance that can be encountered in a life worth living.       

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

An important read for any parent, anybody interested in parenthood, or anybody fascinated by the psychological intricacies of deep tragedy

pp. 468

Published: Serpent’s Tail, 2003

A novel that proposes to be about a high school massacre is almost bound by its own premise to fall into the trap of sensationalism, to be grubbing for attention and high end sales by capitalising on the public’s fascination with tragedy. Indeed, We Need to Talk about Kevin has no doubt courted many of its millions of readers because of this very fact, this penchant for the gruesome, for unexplainable and seemingly purposeless violence. But Shriver’s novel is infinitely more than that. As the book builds up to the day of the massacre we become so absorbed in the precision of the protagonist’s (Eva’s) psychological musings that at times we forget all about it. Yet, somehow, we never ever truly forget, because every sentence is absolutely loaded, weighed down, by the hefty bulk of the school shooting and its emotional fallout.

Kevin’s mother, Eva, is the honest and eloquent voice of the novel, attempting to exculpate herself from blame, to scoop herself out of the firing line of her conscience. She wants to find out where it all went wrong with her son by replaying and analysing every major instant of his childhood. She wants to discover what caused him to kill nine of his classmates, the act that caused everything about her life to become ‘precarious’, balanced tentatively between blame and defiance.

The epistolary form that Shriver uses is precarious in itself. A novel put together using a number of epistles usually allows for multiple perspectives on an event, and because we get the feeling of eavesdropping on a private conversation we can often attest to the reliability of what we are reading. However, Eva addresses these therapeutic letters to her husband, Franklin, who conspicuously never writes back. Thus we are left with a one-sided discussion, with merely one version of events, albeit a very convincing and candid version. The fact that later on she admits to being wrong on a couple of occasions, judging Kevin in a harsh light only to have been fooled, suggests that we cannot rely on her testimony as much as we had thought.

One of these occasions involves an incident when Kevin and his friend Lenny are caught by two policemen throwing rocks off an overpass. Kevin lies to his father, asserting that it was Lenny’s idea and that he merely took the blame to save him from trouble. Eva is less than taken in by what she sees as his cunning trickery, since she sees Kevin as the leader and Lenny as a kind of degraded, baseless ‘slave’ to him. After a heated argument between herself and Franklin, who appears to take Kevin’s side on very limited evidence, as throughout the novel (his gullibility a device to draw us onto Eva’s side of their feuds before we are proven wrong along with her), she overhears the two boys talking in Kevin’s room. Her son states that ‘I saved your ass this time but don’t expect a sequel’, and, ‘I don’t like associating myself with that shit. Rocks over an overpass. It’s fucking trite, man. It’s got no class at all, it’s fucking trite’. Her false accusation is an indication that perhaps she has falsely accused him on a number of other occasions, but was not fortunate enough to overhear a conversation that proved her wrong.

And there are more ambiguous events in the novel that cause us to wonder whether we should trust Eva or take what she says as potentially agenda-serving. When Kevin’s sister loses one eye, we wonder if Kevin could indeed be wicked enough to have poured the bleach into it himself, as Eva believes, or whether the girl could have simply gotten hold of the bottle after her mother forgot to put it away in the cupboard. And then there is the incident of the girl who suffers from eczema, and when she is caught in the bathroom scratching herself to a bloody pulp, Kevin is there with her, and we are forced to consider if it was Kevin’s malicious instigation that coaxed her into tearing away at her own skin just to get at that persistent itch.

Do Eva’s inaccuracies cause us to view Kevin in a different light? To be honest, it depends entirely on the reader. Shriver has crafted a novel that expresses perfectly her belief that ‘readers bring imaginations to the table, and contribute additional substance to a book’. Kevin certainly becomes more human throughout the book, yet to what degree Eva’s perspective on events can be trusted is up to the reader to decide. And our ultimate decision is indeed vital to the way we will view the novel at its culmination. Is Eva a bad mother? Is Kevin an innately evil child? Has Eva nurtured Kevin’s ‘evil’ by refusing to see any good? How much can you really blame a teenager's horrific act on his parents?  Are the two of them more similar than we think?

Questions such as these are thrown at us from the beginning of the novel, and whether we have answered them for ourselves by the end or whether they have merely begotten more questions, this book is an important read for any parent, anybody interested in parenthood, or anybody fascinated by the psychological intricacies of deep tragedy. Whether we find out why Kevin decided to commit mass murder is dependent upon how we read the novel. Shriver gives us everything we need to make the decision, and yet simultaneously she gives us plenty of points upon which we can debate for years and remain indecisive.  

  

The English Civil War Part 2 - Keith Chandler

narration offers drive and energy to Chandler's poetry

pp. 92

Publisher: Peterloo Poets, 2008

Chandler’s 2008 collection is a good blend of tragic and comic poetry. The long title poem imagines a modern civil war sometime in the future, bombarding us with images of the violence and devastation that seems to have no end, yet which is above all violently funny. As a man decapitates his wife with ‘one of his baked bean tins / packed with Semtex’, and Eton holds out ‘against a murderous mob / for two more weeks’; as ‘the Scots … / caused trouble where they could around the edge’, and ‘the Irish as usual caught the worst of it, / side dish of horrors, as an afterthought’; as all of this takes place, Kylie, ‘going strong at 60’, is kept ‘off the front page’.

The story of the war is told by an old man over dinner, with the occasional interjection from the frame narrative, such as, ‘(Pass the soup, will you? Same again, I’m afraid - / home made potato … Well, that’s how it is.)’ which really highlights the drive and energy that narration offers to Chandler’s poetry, and which in this instance makes the war appear to be thoroughly silly, told as it is in such a hurry between mouthfuls of soup and amongst the prosaic clattering of cutlery.

The next poem, a long piece in eleven parts called ‘Postcards From Auschwitz’, expertly twists our expectations of the collection, taking us into the concentration camps of the Second World War thick with human bodies and experiences. Reading this piece from our perspective, knowing the true nature of the events, we can see that behind these seemingly innocent ‘postcards’ there is an insidious presence lurking, one which taints the naiveté of such statements as ‘Here is the table / for our postcards. All may be well.’ written by the hand of an optimistic prisoner.

   

The shorter, more autobiographical pieces under the section ‘Looking Myself Up’ are a kind of breather, though not in the sense of the poet’s inventiveness and style, which never slacken, but in terms of their understatement and ease of exploration. It is as though the poet has taken an audible breath, and where the opening two pieces are taut and intensely crafted, these take on an air of the wistful musings one afternoon of a man coming to terms, as we all are, with himself and with other people (usually weird and wonderful people, such as in ‘The Tattoed Man’, ‘At the Cleaners’, and ‘Martin’).

Thickly bracketing these poems on the other side of the book are two more long pieces. ‘The Gap’, based on the reminiscences of a Mr Tom Solomon of the deadly floods in Sea Palling, Norfolk in 1953, is an intensely descriptive piece which once again attests to the narrative energy Chandler infuses into his poetry. It is an immensely climactic poem, the best and most absorbing of the collection, followed, fittingly, by ‘And Now For My Final Trick’,  a clever, self-reflexive trick of a poem about Harry Houdini’s wish to expose spiritualism by failing his final trick – to escape from death.

A book suitable for both readers and non-readers of poetry, because of its fascinating subject matter and the accessible expression of the poet’s ideas.         

Three Stories - Alan Bennett

an admirable display of Updike-like insight into the absurdities of modern behaviour

pp. 229

Published: Profile Books, 2003

It often takes a significant event in a writer’s life to make me realise that I have neglected them in my reading. Recently, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s death alarmed me to the fact that I had never, despite intending to on many occasions, read a single word he had written. I quickly rectified this and now have about three or four of his novels under my belt (though shamefully not his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I am still questing after and will probably share with you on here in the next month or two when I finally manage to get my hands on it). A similar thing has happened this last week with Alan Bennett, although the event was nothing so severe as his death. As he celebrated his 80^th birthday on May 9^th, I decided that I would delve into the literary creations of the mind that brought us The History Boys and Talking Heads.
    

Bennett’s 2005 book of three novellas is an admirable display of Updike-like insight into the absurdities of modern behaviour, mixed with some not entirely successful literary liberties that he takes with the narratives, and not to mention some hilarious set pieces.
  

The first story, The Laying on of Hands, about a memorial service for a sexually rampant masseur that goes awry when the congregation are invited to share their experiences with the man, contains some harshly critical satire about the celebrity culture, as when an autograph hunter asks the partner of a soap-star, ‘‘Are you anybody? ... or are you just with him?’’. This piece, beyond the humour, has some interesting ideas about how the dead can be moulded, personality-wise, into anything depending on the fickle and unreliable nature of the memories of those left behind.

The Clothes They Stood Up In is the second story, this one about how a couple reacts when they come home one night to find that the entirety of their belongings have been removed from their apartment. It is a burglary ‘so comprehensive as to have taken in both the toilet role and its holder’. So, literally, everything, except the walls that contained it all (they did take the carpets, though). The questions that are raised as a consequence of this are to do with how we can rebuild our lives without our possessions. How do we define ourselves when the only things we have retained from a lifetime of purchasing, hoarding, collecting and inheriting, are the clothes on our backs.

The inexplicable injection of postmodernism towards the end, however, taints the piece a little for me. Suddenly Mr Ransome is treated self-reflexively as a character who can be manipulated, rather than as a real person, and because this technique has no basis in the rest of the story, it seems a bit like an adopted child of a different race.

I have a similar quarrel with the third and final story in the collection, Father! Father! Burning Bright, which has a dream sequence somewhere in the middle. Here, this technique seems to me to be nothing more than a misused literary tool designed to express a protagonist’s anxieties without having to adhere to the strict limitations of reality that Bennett heeds everywhere else in the book. In my opinion, a writer of any kind of realist fiction should have the skill to express inner character without resorting to ‘cop-out tricks’, and relating the disconnected meanderings of a dream can occasionally come under this category, as I think it does here.

Having said that, this last story is the finest piece of the three. It explores in a humorous and infuriating way how an overbearing father can continue to exercise control over his son from his hospital death-bed. The reader, by the end, is tormented along with Midgley, the protagonist, as his father wins the last battle between the two, which is to prove his son to be incompetent.  

Taken as a whole, this piece has some rather inventive insights into our private and public lives. The significant events that take place in each story act as a springboard for Bennett to explore our relationships with ourselves, our possessions, our families, and with the world at large.            

The Giant, O'Brien - Hilary Mantel

'Mantel is one of few novelists who come very close 

to bridging the gap between poetry and prose' 

The aptly titled The Giant, O’Brien, turned out to be a very good introduction to Hilary Mantel for me. It is, of course, about an Irish giant named Charlie O’Brien, fleeing the cultural squalor of his rural country home in Derry (along with his band of follow-ons) to be exhibited in London by his ‘agent’ Joe Vance as ‘the tallest man in the world’, a marvel of the eighteenth century. His path eventually crosses with a renowned surgeon, a ‘bold experimentalist’, who wants to get his hands on the giant’s corpse, once he is deceased, in order to study the anatomy of the ‘freak’.

In spite of its being ever so lightly based on a true story, Mantel explains in a note at the back of the book that her giant is one out of legend, and that the real man ‘bears little resemblance to the giant of this story, since he probably suffered from a pituitary tumour and may have been mentally retarded’. The Charlie O’Brien of the novel is, on the other hand, a confident and skilled orator, an artist of the spoken word, of the mythological story. His eloquence and perfect manner are endearing. He is thoughtful, empathic and highly intelligent. It is his perpetually growing body that fails him as we progress through the narrative, rather than his mind. His tragedy is in his stature.

The storytelling becomes an important leitmotif through the novel, recurring frequently as a method by which conflict can be avoided. O’Brien himself is described as a bard, and as such, his entourage put great stock in the tales he tells them when tempers have begun to flair out of control. It is a distraction welcomed by all, as like little children they frequently interrupt the speaker to suggest what they think might happen next.

And when storytelling begins to fail the giant, to sicken him in the face of his impending death (which reduces all effort, all hope and faith, to nothing), he tells his friends ‘You know it … Tell it yourself’. The realisation comes finally that ‘stories cannot save him’.

The giant’s decreasing health and his failure to keep on telling stories have a deeply saddening effect on the novel, but Mantel’s sense of natural humour keeps the piece alive and kicking to the end. It is the constant repartee between O’Brien and his cohorts that offers the respite from morbidity. As an example here is a passage where O’Brien and his men are discussing the value to them of purchasing a fortune-telling pig to accompany O’Brien as entertainment to the public (yes, it is literally that absurd):

‘But would you trust your fortune,’ the Giant asked, ‘if it were told by a pig?’

‘Well, I do so think,’ said Pybus. ‘For a pig won’t give you a favourable one, to get a tip.’

‘The boy reasons well,’ Joe said.

‘And if a pig said, beware of a dray coming up fast on your left and mushing you against the wall, well, you’d beware.’

‘But not if a human said it?’ the Giant asked.

‘You see, Giant,’ Pybus explained, ‘the pig wouldn’t have any interest whether it came true or no. But if a human told it you, and the dray came up and dunted in your ribs, you’d suspect that the said dray was driven by the fortune-teller’s uncle. It’s what they call a ploy. It’s to get future money off you.’

‘Well, well,’ said the Giant. ‘You seem wise in the ways of the world, all of a sudden.’

Sophistry fit for a king, and certainly fit for a novel of such intensity.

     

But what of the second protagonist of the piece, whom we have neglected up to now? What of John Hunter, the obsessive surgeon? The man who covets the very flesh and bone of our beloved O’Brien?

I found Hunter to be, in many ways, a more fascinating character than any other. Certainly he is a more interesting psychological study, a fanatical man consumed by his desire for knowledge, a man who seems to believe somewhere deep in his psyche that by gaining knowledge he will be able to bypass the degradation of ordinary mortality, who asserts on the final page that ‘I want more time.’ He is seeking a way out of the laws of physiognomy that he studies so arduously. And what is more exciting than a character as hopelessly flawed and contradictory as that? I found that I began to understand his strong desire for scientific empiricism, and to sympathise with his misguided quest for immortality.

     

Much of the charm of this fairly short novel is in the poesy of its diction. The prose is light, easy to read, yet somehow manages to achieve a deep intensity that makes every sentence worthwhile. Mantel is one of few novelists who come very close to bridging the gap between poetry and prose, screwing each sentence tight yet allowing the space required for the reader to feel that his or her presence is necessary, that he or she is a vital component in the craftsmanship of the novel. I think that in her approach to writing she encourages multiple readings, because you can always find something more, something that was hidden to you the first time around.

Please read this novel, it will not take long (it has only 211 pages). If nothing else, it will teach us the beauty that is possible in misfortune, in decadence, in downright weirdness.