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