The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

There is compassion, empathy and pity in its pages.

pp.109
Published: Triad/Panther Books, 1976 (1952)

We all know about Hemingway’s style, anyway, so I won‘t dwell. This is no major exception from his other work in that sense. It is shorter than his novels, reading more like one of his longer short stories, but the simple sentence structures and straightforward narrative are all recognizable as stalwart features of Hemingway. So too is the ostentatious courage and ‘hard-man’ quality of the protagonist, the eponymous ‘old man’, who really lacks any complex characterization, Hemingway preferring to create simple, ‘elementary’ characters, as the NY Times put it in the ‘50s, who symbolize a particular belief or way of thinking or way of life.
 
The immense feat of physical endurance is all predictable Hemingway, as our old man attempts to pull in the biggest fish of his life after eighty-four fruitless days of fishing in his little humble skiff. The matter-of-fact violence of the fish’s death and of the subsequent shark attacks on the boat are Hemingway through and through.

But the deviation in style is perhaps the reason for this novel’s mention by the Nobel Prize Committee two years later when Hemingway received the award. For there is compassion, empathy and pity in its pages. There is a meditative feeling, despite all the violence and physical exertion, that all things in the natural world are one. The old man talks to his fish, even as it swims metres below the surface of the ocean attached to his fishing line. He croons ‘Come on, fish,’ and ‘Don‘t jump’. There is a brotherhood between hunter and hunted. ‘I have killed this fish which is my brother’, says the old man, certain of the divine comradeship.

He is similarly enamoured of the bond he feels with the sharks, even though they follow the scent of his long-fought-for catch and they mean to eat it, to take his prize, and indeed his pride, from him. They are ‘beautiful and noble and know no fear of anything.’ He is impressed by their courage, which he shares, and by the courage of the fish, which had put up such a gallant fight in the first place. In other words, he empathises with their struggle, with their courage in the face of death, which is what life is all about.
 
Empathy is what propels this novella above much of Hemingway’s work, or, in Faulkner’s terms, it is the fact that Hemingway found a God, a creator who ‘made them all [the characters] and loved them all and pitied them all’. It is beautiful in its understanding attitude, and despite the artificiality of the old man, who speaks often in worn clichés and with a lack of affect, it excels on numerous levels. It is atmospheric, vast, and potent as an allegory of the human condition. This is the Hemingway we know and love, yet a Hemingway distilled and refined, as much as is possible, into a necessary work of a length that suit’s the man’s writing.

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.