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.