December 9, 2010
Jenny Erpenbeck: The Old Child / The Book of Words
I bought this book early in the year, thrilled to see something out of the ordinary in one of those titchy unpromising shopping-centre branches of Waterstone’s. (There’s someone with taste at their Ballymena branch – not normally a place associated with literary highs. I also bought E.T.A. Hoffmann and Hjalmar Söderberg there). I started reading it in February, only to be struck down – or at least, struck unable-to-concentrate-through-the-pain – with a shoulder injury. I went back to it after reading Michel Faber’s lavish praise for the author’s latest UK publication.
The Old Child (1999, tr. 2005 by Susan Bernofsky) is such a tough little thing that I wonder whether I would have slipped away from it first time around even without an injury to excuse me. It describes a young girl found “standing in the street with an empty bucket in one hand,” who fails or refuses to give any information about who she is or where she came from. “She was so surrounded by nothingness that there seemed, from the beginning, to be something implausible about her very existence.” The girl, who says she is fourteen years old, is “bigger than she should be”, and “hunches as though she were obliged to do so, to hold back a great force that is raging inside her.” She has a “wide, blotchy face” and her body is shaped “like a block of wood.”
This “pale, huge creature” is, or wants to be, “a blank slate.” But Erpenbeck does not succumb to the obvious technique of leaving the girl as pure allegory, or of filling in her character by the space she leaves around her and the impressions others have of her. We do get the girl’s own thoughts: she is taken to a school for troubled children, where she wants to “occupy the lowermost place that no one will fight her for.” She wants “to be given up on.” But she is human, and so full of contradictions. She finds herself pleased to be of use to the other children, but the relationship she attains with them is akin only to “the intimacy between a conspirator and the guards posted before his door.”
Erpenbeck reflects the girl’s central contradictions in the book itself. We are given frequent insights into the girl’s motives, but she remains mysterious. The ending provides us with a clear solution, yet sends the reader back through the pages in search of answers. There are many references to the girl’s past, which obscure as much as they illuminate. Take, for example, the treatment of the girl’s refusal to take sides in classroom disputes:
The place she occupies in classroom hostilities is therefore not always an honorable one, it isn’t really a place for a human being at all, since it forces one to approach zero, all one’s insides must be emptied out like a fish before frying, and only then will there be sufficient space for storing the misdeeds of others, others’ happiness and others’ grief. But the girl already had such a space within her when she arrived at the Home.
Of course it is these very qualities – demanding, teasing – that make the book such a success, enticing while reading and sticky in the memory when finished.
If The Old Child is a long but nourishing 100 pages, the accompanying story in this volume, The Book of Words (2005, tr. 2007), is knottier yet. A first person narrative by a child, it avoids the problems of many child narratives – cutesiness, sentimentality – by being frankly hard work. That is not quite right: certainly there is obscurity here, and translator Susan Bernofsky’s afterword that “the transplantation from German to English obscures certain fundamental points about the story being told” might have been more reassuring as an introduction. However even when scratching my head, I found much to enjoy within each paragraph, despite struggling to locate a larger view of the story. There is lovely imagery: “Where have all the sirens gone wailing off to? They turned into birds, my wet-nurse says. It is sunny and quiet in the middle of our city where the police live.” Sometimes the content seems to shine a dim light on its own difficulty:
Do you know what monsters live at a depth of four thousand meters? We shake our heads. It isn’t possible to know them, the teacher says.
These extracts, it turns out, are key to the central slow revelation of the story: as, probably, is everything else that didn’t seem obvious to me first time around. It does become clear, and the central figures in the girl’s life take on a new quality as the reader’s understanding grows. To say more, as ever, would spoil. It might be sufficient to point out that Erpenbeck grew up in the 1970s in what was then East Germany, and that this clearly (or turbidly) informs her work.
The Old Child and The Book of Words are what might commonly be called ‘difficult’. But they are only difficult if the reader is anticipating from the book a monologue rather than a dialogue: and where’s the fun in that? The language is clear and unaffected, but both stories resist full understanding until they are completed, which means the reader reinterprets them backwards. This makes a pleasant change from many books where we know what they’re about immediately, and what’s going to happen not long after. In The Old Child, the girl receives medical treatment where she finds staff who
are able to relieve a living creature, at least briefly, of the great responsibility of having always to sustain this life that has been given one, always with oneself to rely on, and without even knowing to what end.
The reader of Erpenbeck comes to know this feeling of self-reliance (for the time being “without even knowing to what end”), but here it makes a nice change, and the mind feels invigorated afterwards from the unaccustomed exercise.
December 2, 2010
Antonio Tabucchi: Pereira Maintains (Declares Pereira)
I was saying earlier this year that publishers rarely reissue books in hardback; so, to prove me wrong, here’s another one. This book was previously published in English in 1995 by the redoubtable and much-missed Harvill Press (yes, they’ve been incorporated into Harvill Secker; but it’s not the same, is it?). Back then, it was titled Declares Pereira, a title which has been altered for this new Canongate edition. In the US, the title is Pereira Declares: a Testimony, so we have three titles all from the same translation. (Declares gives the title a pleasing internal rhyme which even the original – Sostiene Pereira – lacked.) The only book I’d previously read by Tabucchi was the novella Requiem, so I was glad of the chance to rediscover him.
Pereira Maintains (1994; tr. 1995 by Patrick Creagh) is a slim, subtle book, quiet but trembling with suppressed energy. The US subtitle (“a Testimony”), though unnecessary, helpfully reminds the reader that this is an account being rendered by the central character, being recorded by – whom? “Pereira maintains he met him one summer’s day,” it begins, and it is a meeting which will change Pereira’s life, and will lead to the present telling of his story.
We are in Portugal in 1938; Pereira is a middle-aged widower who talks to a photograph of his wife, and is in the market for new, stimulating company. He is a journalist on the Lisboa, a Lisbon newspaper, who has recently been put in charge of the new culture page. Still mourning his wife (“perhaps his life was merely a remnant and a pretence”), he reads in a magazine an extract from a university thesis on death, and decides that its author, a young man named Monteiro Rossi, will be perfect for the role of writing obituaries for the culture page. “Imagine if Mauriac were to die tomorrow, how would I manage?” However, he finds that Rossi is a politically committed young man, who produces pieces which cannot be used in the Lisboa.
Two years ago, in obscure circumstances, we lost the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. He was assassinated, and suspicion rests on his political opponents. The whole world is still wondering how such an act of barbarism could have been perpetrated.
The Lisboa prefers to remain studiously silent on the actions of Portugal’s Salazarist regime, to whom “Lorca was a traitor”. Rossi’s girlfriend Marta, equally opposed to the government and its support of Franco in Spain, observes to Pereira: “You know, I bought the Lisboa today, it’s a pity it doesn’t mention the carter the police have murdered in Alentejo.” Pereira’s embarrassed half-apology – “the editor-in-chief is on holiday … I am only responsible for the culture page” – is the first birthing pain of his own political awareness.
Pereira tries to carry on as normal – “the problem is that the whole world is a problem and it won’t be solved by you or me”, he tells Rossi – but finds himself unable to break off contact with the young couple. Perhaps it’s because Rossi is “about the age of our son if we’d had a son,” Pereira tells his wife’s photograph. He doesn’t see “how [Rossi and Marta] can influence me … they’re just two benighted romantics without a future, if anything I ought to influence them.” He longs to speak to his priest, “because to him he’d have been able to confide that he wanted to repent but didn’t know what he had to repent of.” He tries to relax by translating stories for the culture page (stories about repentance), by going to a health spa or visiting an old friend, but the subject he is trying not to think about comes up again. “Public opinion counts for nothing,” his friend Silva tells him. It’s “a gimmick thought up by the English and Americans … we don’t have their traditions … we’re a southern people, Pereira, and we obey whoever shouts the loudest and gives the orders.”
The thin thread of Pereira’s story unwinds beautifully, the recurring people and events – exchanges with his caretaker, omelettes aux fines herbes at the Café Orquídea – lulling the reader into believing that nothing will really change. Just as the regime censors dissent, Pereira’s testimony limits our knowledge of his interior torments. We are, of course, reminded that this is a partial account by the refrain – he maintains (or he declares for readers of other editions. A find-and-replace fail in the Canongate edition has left one ‘declares’ in place).
Pereira fell asleep almost at once. And he dreamt a lovely dream, a dream of his youth. He was at the beach at Granja, swimming in an ocean for all the world like a swimming-pool, and on the edge of the pool was a pale-skinned girl, waiting for him and clasping a towel in her arms. Then he swam back, but the dream went on, it was really a beautiful dream. But Pereira prefers not to say how it went on because his dream has nothing to do with these events, he maintains.
‘These events’ are revealed by the end of the book, but to whom is Pereira giving his account? The repeated riff of ‘he maintains’ conveys an attempt to persuade us that his version is true, and as such creates uncertainty. Is the uncertainty suggestive of deception, or merely the uncertainty of memory? Pereira’s story is told in the present describing the past – but what is yet to come? The reader, shamelessly engaged with our hero, can only hope when we learn that “he felt this deep yearning, for what exactly he cannot presume to say, but it was a profound yearning for a life that was past and for one in the future, Pereira maintains.”
November 25, 2010
Judith Schalansky: Atlas of Remote Islands
Here is one of those books which defies the current bookworld gloom: the gloom which asks, does anything interesting get published any more? And, are ebooks going to consume us all? It is a beautifully-produced, expensive title which has become a talked-about, or at least cooed-over, favourite (on my Twitter timeline anyway). High concept; slim volume.
Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands (tr. Christine Lo), subtitled Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will, is that rarest of things, a coffee-table book which is actually worth reading. It combines elegant pointillist illustrations of fifty of the most remote and hostile islands on earth with fable-like narratives of their histories on the facing page.
One point of comparison here would be Calvino’s Invisible Cities, though Schalansky assures us in her introduction that “all the text in the book is based on extensive research and every detail stems from factual sources.” However, as “I was the discoverer of the sources … I have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.” This is just as it should be: “only that which is written about really happened,” and Atlas of Remote Islands is a vivid persuader that truth is larger than facts.
For me, into whom the Google Earth homepage drives a chill of dread, these faraway, isolated places seem initially frightening, so distant from what we think of as civilisation, so detached from what supports our way of life; so alone. In fact many of the smallest or most polar are uninhabited, such as the volcanic Semisopochnoi, where “the earth mutters to itself,” or Howland Island, where Amelia Earhart was expected to refuel in her equatorial circumnavigation in 1937 but never arrived, disappearing “just beyond the date line on a flight into yesterday.”
Some of the islands are inhabited only temporarily, by researchers or the military. On Ascension Island, midway between Africa and South America, there are over one thousand residents manning satellite dishes and transatlantic cables, “eavesdropping on the continents, listening to the world.” St Kilda, beyond the Outer Hebrides, was evacuated in 1930: before that, “the island’s future is written in its graveyard. Its children are all born in good health, but most stop feeding during their fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh day, their palates tighten and their throats constrict. [...] Between the seventh and the ninth day, two-thirds of newborn babies die.” (The mystery is unresolved in the text; only in the timeline above do we learn that these babies were dying from neonatal tetanus.) On Amsterdam Island, site of a meteorological station in the southern Indian Ocean, the district chief proclaims, “There is no such thing as isolation. Even on Amsterdam Island, we are cogs in a huge wheel; here, too, we receive signals that tell us who we are.” That, perhaps, is a theme of the book: people are incorrigible, however far you go to find (or avoid) them.
The permanently inhabited islands are easily identifiable at a glance: the images contain a few orange lines – roads, a runway – and a vibrant splotch or two near the coast (a settlement! – leading to more wonderment than ever. ‘People live there?’). The initial disappointment at the omissions of a full history of each island – a silly demand, as it wouldn’t fit, and anyway that’s what Google is for – is assuaged by the charm and precision with which Schalansky tells her stories. On the Pacific island of Rapa Iti, all we get is the bizarre tale of Marc Liblin, who in 1954 at the age of six begins to be “visited by dreams in which he is taught a completely unknown language” – which turns out to be the tongue of this remote Polynesian island, to which he decamps in 1983, having married a native speaker. It has the symmetrical perfection of a fairy tale.
The delicate shading of the drawings, showing perfectly the topography of the lands, looks disappointingly pixellated up close, but this doesn’t prevent the reader from marvelling at the unpromising forms which will support human life. If the book has a recurring thread, it is of humanity’s brave thirst for knowledge of every square kilometre of land on earth, and of its folly in believing that it can or should always be turned to our advantage. Many of the islands are atolls, fragile circles of coral, where the British forcibly deported five hundred native Chagossian families (Diego Garcia), or France tested its first hydrogen bomb (Fangataufa): afterwards, “nothing remains. No houses, no installations, no trees, nothing. The entire island is evacuated because of radioactive contamination. No one is allowed to set foot on Fangataufa for six years.” For Pitcairn Island, we get an interpretive account of Marlon Brando’s death scene as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty. Only the closing line (“But the island’s story is far from at its end”) hints that Pitcairn’s greatest notoriety is yet to come, with the rape trials of the many descendants of Christian in 2004. In the introduction, Schalansky observes that sexual permissiveness is “a classic theme of the literature on the South Seas.” In Pukapuka, in the south Pacific, a recent immigrant from the USA finds that there “sex is a game, and jealousy has no place. [...] A word for ‘virgin’ does not even exist in their language.”
The limits of space and resources on these tiny spots of land means that many of them are further advanced than most of the world in today’s urgent issues, such as population growth. On Tikopia, a 4.7km² island east of Papua New Guinea,
the chiefs of the four clans preach the ideal of zero population growth. All the children in each family must be able to live from the land it owns, so only eldest sons can start families. [...] A couple stop having children when the eldest son is old enough to marry. This is when a man will ask his wife, Whose child is this, for whom I must fetch food from the field? He decides whether the baby lives: The plantations are small. Let us kill the child, for if it lives, it will have no garden. The newborn is left on its face to suffocate. There are no funerals for these children: they have not participated in life on Tikopia.
More significantly, it is the spectre of climate change which strikes the reader when looking at these fragile lands. What will happen to the low-lying islands of South Keeling, Tromelin, Napuka, Taongi (reciting the names in these pages gives another layer of aesthetic pleasure, like listening to the shipping forecast) when the sea levels rise and cover the coral atolls? The subject is touched on in the entry for Takuu: “The beach is narrower after every storm. Entire pieces of land disappear overnight. The sea is gobbling up more and more of the land. It is now covering the roots of coconut trees and turning the groundwater brackish, so the taro plants are withering and meals are too meagre to stave off hunger.” The inhabitants do not believe it, or refuse to think about it. In this, they are perfectly human.
Perhaps it would have been apt for Schalansky to close her Atlas with the story of Easter Island, well known as an exemplar of man’s rapacity toward his habitat. “The twelve tribes of Easter Island compete against each other: they make bigger and bigger monoliths, and secretly topple their rivals’ statues in the night. They exploit and over-cultivate their pieces of earth, chop down the last tree, sawing off even the branch they are sitting on.” As an ironic counterpoint, she adds that today, “the airport’s landing strip is so enormous that a space shuttle could touch down on it in an emergency.” So if the book began – for me – with fear of these unreachable places, so far from us, it ends feeling like an elegy. “The end of the world is an accepted fact, and Easter Island is a case in point with its chain of unfortunate events that led to self-destruction; a lemming marooned in the calm of the ocean.”
November 18, 2010
Geoff Dyer: Working the Room
Geoff Dyer’s Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures (1999) was such a reliably diverting volume that I rushed into this new collection of ‘occasional pieces’. (‘Frequent pieces’ might be a better term, given Dyer’s restless ubiquity in reviewing, introducing and afterwording.) The title comes from his essay on Susan Sontag: “Critics are always working the room. The way they do so changes over the course of a career. Young critics like to disparage and tear down. Later, when they write about the heavyweights, it is not so much the subjects as their own ability to go toe-to-toe with greatness that comes under examination.” How well does Dyer – at 53, surely no longer young – stand up to this demand?
Working the Room: Essays and Reviews 1999-2010 (the misadventures are missing this time, at least in the title) seems a less eclectic volume than its predecessor. This is because, as he notes in the introduction, in the last ten years Dyer has become the go-to man for editors looking for a certain type of essay: personal but analytical, rigorously reflexive, loose around the edges. He is in demand – his working title for the book My Life as a Gatecrasher had to be abandoned as he is clearly part of the literary establishment – and many of the pieces here are quite firmly categorisable, despite Dyer’s protests at the outset.
We know from The Ongoing Moment that photography is one of Dyer’s passions (perm three from photography, jazz, Burning Man, DH Lawrence, John Berger and travel confessionals to make your own Geoff Dyer book), and my decision to read Working the Room straight through gave me pause when I realised that the first fifteen essays were on photographers, fourteen of whom I hadn’t heard of. (Martin Parr, take a bow.) I needn’t have worried. Dyer is at his best when communicating enthusiasm, striking a lovely balance between basic facts for the uninitiated and acute analysis of the works. Each photography essay is accompanied by one monochrome or colour image, which Dyers uses either as a focus for discussion or a springboard for wider reflection. So writing about Richard Avedon’s 1960 portrait of the famously scrotal-faced W.H. Auden leads to the following:
[In the 19th century], according to [Walter] Benjamin, everything about the elaborate procedure of having one’s picture taken ’caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on past it; during the considerable period of the exposure the subject as it were grew into the picture’. In these pictures, ‘the very creases in people’s clothes have an air of permanence’. Avedon, of course, worked with split-second exposure times but the results were in some ways even more striking: the creases in people’s faces have an air of geological permanence. There is the sense, often, of a massive extent of time being compressed into the moment the picture was taken. ‘Lately,’ he said in 1970, ‘I’ve become interested in the passage of time within a photograph.’ So, in one of his most famous portraits, Isak Dinesen looks like she was once the most beautiful woman in the world – about two thousand years ago.
There is recurrence in these essays of thoughts previously given form in The Missing of the Somme, of photographs as memorials. Ruth Orkins’ ‘VE Day’ shows a crowd in Times Square “arranged in a way that has since become widespread in that its purpose was, partly, to be recorded”. Or for Enrique Metinides, “if something terrible happened, [he] was there with his camera, recording not just the wreckage but the way such incidents became sites of instant pilgrimage” (producing – in a clever wordplay also typical of Dyer – images that were “not so much film stills as still films”). His most obscure subject – I hope – is Miroslav Tichý, the ‘stone-age photographer’ who “put as simply as possible … spent the 1960s and 70s perving around Kyjov, photographing women.” Tichý’s work simultaneously displays a “kinship [with] Benny Hill” and offers a moving eroticism because it “gaze[s] longingly on a world from which he is excluded.” These essays show Dyer at his best: enquiring, enlightening, entertaining.
The corollary of this is that the essays that dealt with subjects I was more familiar with were less interesting to me. Primarily these are the literary ones – D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Salter, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. (Though it may just be that I’d read some of them before, so they surprised me less. Certainly the Salter piece was one I knew.) Still, there are delights here too – marked, sure enough, by their unfamiliarity, such as his essay on The Goncourt Journals (perhaps the only diaries to contain the words: “A ring at the door. It is Flaubert”) and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (“an awkward tome whose identifying quality is a refusal to fit”). Prime among these pieces however must be Dyer on Ryszard Kapuściński, which I read in a bookshop cafe and which rendered me unable to leave without buying my first book of Kapuściński’s reportage.
These essays also reveal perhaps more of Dyer than he – never slow to make guest appearances in his own writing – would intend. Kapuściński is, he says, “the victim of a received cultural prejudice that assumes fiction to be the loftiest preserve of literary and imaginative distinction.” Writing about Susan Sontag, he asks, “To what extent is it possible to be a great prose writer without being a great writer of fiction?” Of Rebecca West, he notes that:
[she] is considered a major British writer. If she is not regarded as a writer quite of the first rank that is largely because so much of the work on which her reputation should rest is tacitly considered secondary to the forms in which greatness is expected to manifest itself, namely the novel. … Her best work is scattered among reportage, journalism and travel – the kind of things traditionally regarded as sidelines or distractions.
What can he be getting at, this author famous for books “whose identifying quality is a refusal to fit”? He sees it too in John Cheever, whose “principal claim to literary survival” for Dyer rests not with the stories, novels or letters, but his journals. (Not perhaps such a controversial principle, as Gabriel Josipovici similarly argues that it is not Kafka’s novels or stories, but his aphorisms which “form [his] most sustained meditation on life and death, good and evil, and the role of art.”)
The weakest pieces in the book are those where Dyer cannibalises himself entirely, perhaps not recognising that the tangents into his own life are charming in the other essays because they are based upon a stronger foundation. That is to say, the final section of the book, ‘Personals’, is largely dispensable. Similarly, the most egregious will-this-do pieces are little more than gagfests about fashion or the Olympics. The jokes are good (one couture show “was Priscilla, Queen of the Desert meets Mad Max, a combination that might one day result in a co-production called Back-combed to the Future“), but they’re just jokes. Real comedy needs more.
Still, even when he’s not on form, Dyer is a reliably generous source of aphorisms from other writers: his essays are peppered with the quotability of others. Who can consider time wasted reading an essay that quotes Maxim Gorky’s “Life will always be bad enough for the desire for something better not to be extinguished in men”? Or Philip Larkin’s assertion that holidays “are essentially a kind of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one’s daily life”? Or Søren Kierkegaard’s journal entry from 1836:
I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me – but I went away – and the dash should be as long as the earth’s orbit ————————————————- and wanted to shoot myself.
One of the most interesting aspects of reading a book of essays like this straight through is that we get to see what we might call the ghosts, that is, the figures who recur in Dyer’s writing but who don’t – here, at least – have a place of their own. Walker Evans, Walter Benjamin, E.M. Cioran, Miles Davis, Robert Frank, Keith Jarrett, Friedrich Nietzsche and others are threaded through the essays like totems or mascots of Dyer’s cultural life, absent and present at the same time. After the teasing references to them, any full treatment would probably be disappointing, just as I fear that reading my new Ryszard Kapuściński book will be less enjoyable than reading Geoff Dyer telling me about it. Writing on Susan Sontag, he recalls how she “cattily dismissed” a famous story of Lorrie Moore’s, which Sontag said “you don’t respect yourself for finishing.” Dyer, while full of admiration for Sontag’s critical work, cats back with the observation on her novel In America, that “I respected myself so much for finishing it I felt I deserved a prize.” Dyer’s book – the “distractions” that make up a life of letters – at its best combines both: pleasurable enough to feel guilty about, but sufficiently filling to make finishing it a source of both satisfaction and regret.
November 11, 2010
Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles
“Bruno Schulz”, says the author page of this book, “was one of the most gifted writers to have come out of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.” Considering the others who qualify for this description, that’s no small accolade. Like many of them, he was Jewish, and like too many of them – that is, any of them – his career and life were cut short. Jonathan Safran Foer’s foreword gives us the horrible details: Schulz, a talented artist (the cover illustration below is his), was protected by a Gestapo officer named Felix Landau; Schulz painted murals for his son’s bedroom. In November 1942, Landau shot dead a Jew favoured by another Gestapo, Karl Günther. Later, Günther exacted revenge when he came across Bruno Schulz in a forbidden Aryan zone in the town, and shot him in the head. “You killed my Jew,” he told Landau, “I killed yours.”
The Street of Crocodiles (1934, tr. 1963 by Celina Wieniewska) is an object lesson in the effect which expectations have on our reading of a book. Although the title of my edition (above) clearly states The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, I had it in mind that The Street of Crocodiles was a novel, and that the ‘other stories’ were the additional ones collected here, from Schulz’s second book, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. I was right and wrong: what we have is clearly more than a collection of discrete stories. Equally it is not quite a novel; it is more a story cycle, with recurring characters and themes, where the end and the beginning are arbitrary, and the potential seems infinite.
Discovering Schulz is like reading Kafka or Robert Walser for the first time: my reaction was something like, “Well. Here is a new way of looking at the world.” (Kafka is also recalled in details: the end of ‘A Hunger Artist’ in one story, the opening of ‘Metamorphosis’ in another.) The writing is vivid and violent, the imagery superabundant, the imagination unfettered. This is partly because the settings are notionally mundane: Schulz’s subject matter (there is no distinction drawn between him and his unnamed narrator) is his home town – then in Poland, now Ukraine – and his family. Typically for great writing, the subject is secondary to (inseparable from) the treatment.
The way in which the stories rub up against one another, cross-pollinating and seeming to merge, is a result of Schulz’s powerful literary vision. It is this sense of a unifying intelligence which makes them more than ‘just stories’, and suggests a greater whole. Sound and vision is turned up to maximum: “thistles crackled in the fire of the afternoon”; “the golden field of stubble shouted in the sun”; “in the thick rain of fire the crickets screamed.” But where nature is high-contrast and brightly illuminated, the people – Jews of 1930s Europe – are presented otherwise. Uncle Mark, “small and hunched, with a face fallow of sex, sat in his grey bankruptcy, reconciled to his fate.” When cousin Emil sits down, “it seemed as if it were only his clothes that had been thrown, crumpled and empty, over a chair. His face seemed like the breath of a face – a smudge which an unknown passerby had left in the air.”
Of all the family members Schulz details, his father holds his fascination the most; he is the central character of The Street of Crocodiles, as far as it has one. (Cynthia Ozick also made Schulz’s father the protagonist of her novel The Messiah of Stockholm.) We first meet Father in the second story here, ‘Visitation’, “slowly fading, wilting before our eyes … shrink[ing] from day to day, like a nut drying inside its shell.” But he behaves eccentrically: he “climbed on top of the wardrobe, and, crouching under the ceiling, sorted out old dust-covered odds and ends,” and spent “hours rummaging in corners full of old junk, as if he were feverishly searching for something.”
We became used to his harmless presence, to his soft babbling, and that childlike self-absorbed twittering, which sounded as if they came from the margin of our own time.
He begins to disappear. “Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us; point by point, he gave up the ties joining him to the human community.” By the end of the story, we have enjoyed a stimulating tragedy in seven pages. But in the next story, ‘Birds’, having “finally disappeared … as unremarked as the grey heap of rubbish swept into the corner,” Father is back, behaving oddly in new ways, importing and hatching birds’ eggs. “We did not yet understand the sad origin of these eccentricities, the deplorable complex which had been maturing in him.” This complex comes to the fore in ‘Tailors’ Dummies’, when Father expounds his theory of matter (“I shall attempt to explain [it] with due care and without causing offence”), where he proposes the ability of man to create golem-like creatures and the interchangeability of all matter, which brings conceits both disturbing -
All attempts at organizing matter are transient and temporary, easy to reverse and to dissolve. There is no evil in reducing life to other and newer forms. Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence which have ceased to be amusing.
- and absurd:
“Am I to conceal from you,” he said in a low tone, “that my own brother, as a result of a long and incurable illness, has been gradually transformed into a bundle of rubber tubing, and that my poor cousin had to carry him day and night on his cushion, singing to the luckless creature endless lullabies on winter nights?”
These passages convey the surprising, eccentric and sobering qualities of this extraordinary book. Time itself does not behave: “demented and wild, [it] breaks away from the treadmill of events and like an escaping vagabond, runs shouting across the fields.” People in The Street of Crocodiles are retreating or escaping into other worlds and other lives. At night, “there open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets.” Reality, just one of many options, “is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.” Of all these, Schulz’s own transformation is most impressive. He took the grim reality of life in eastern Europe and exchanged it for the strangest fiction; he evaded his brutal death by escaping into literature.
November 4, 2010
Andrew Rawnsley: The End of the Party
Almost ten years ago, I read Andrew Rawnsley’s Servants of the People, his account of the first term of Tony Blair’s Labour government. What impressed most, other than the sheer addictiveness of it, were Rawnsley’s impeccable contacts. When he reported the details of a conversation at which only Tony and Cherie Blair were present, it didn’t take much to work out that his sources went right to the top. For the sequel, he waited until the New Labour project was gasping its dying breaths, and gave us a clangingly obvious title.
The End of the Party is a massive undertaking, for writer and reader (and this review, I’m afraid, will be too): the expanded paperback edition runs to 900 pages, including a 40-page index, a 160-strong bibliography, and more than 4,500 notes. Verifiability is important to Rawnsley: he points out that he has omitted some incidents from the book because he could not obtain satisfactory independent corroboration. Even without these assurances, it is clear that his account is to be preferred to the autohagiographies of the main players – Mandelson, Blair, no doubt Brown soon to follow – simply by virtue of its independence. Rawnsley may be political correspondent of a broadly pro-Labour paper, but he is a critical friend and there is nothing to suggest that he has glossed over ugly details.
The book opens in what now seems like several geological eras past: Tony Blair’s second landslide election victory in 2001. “You may never be as strong again as you are now,” Blair is warned by the Cabinet Secretary. (Civil servants, as permanent fixtures in the machinery of government, tend to have a longer view of things than mayfly prime ministers seeking “eye-catching initiatives.”) In any event, Blair – determined in his second term to be bolder than in his first, where the primary aim was to get re-elected – did not get much settling-in time. Three months after the 2001 election, he was thrown into a forced but willing partnership with George Bush (remember him?) which would define the rest of his premiership and, in all probability, his future legacy.
Blair did not expect Bush to become US president in 2000. He “was looking forward to working with [Al] Gore, hoping it would be a continuation of his relationship with Bill Clinton but without all the embarrassing bits.” Although in September 2001, Blair “was already embracing America’s crisis as his crisis,” he had no natural affinity with Bush. His first phone call with the new president had been a toe-curling affair, “basically consist[ing] of Bush talking about various places in Scotland where he’d got pissed when he was young and asking Tony if he knew them and Tony not knowing what to say.” But Blair was determined to show loyalty after September 11, even though an early warning sign appeared when his statement committing the UK to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with America was considered too “poodling” by his adviser Alistair Campbell. Blair in fact was worried that the Americans would, in the words of Blair’s ambassador to the US, “go thundering off to Afghanistan and nuke the shite out of the place” (a fear not without foundation), and wanted to be close to Bush in order to “stop [him] doing something silly.” It was too late: when advised by Donald Rumsfeld that the use of force was not permitted for retribution, Bush’s response was, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” (A sentiment inherited by his officials in the rebuilding of Iraq a few years later.)
Blair went to Washington, where he was “seduced, as most British Prime Ministers are, by the relationship.” His response to the crisis was governed by two personality traits which were hallmarks of Blair’s premiership. The first was his “messianic tendency,” leading to a weakness for promising more than he could deliver and oratorical hyperbole (“The tough and tender third way will rule from Kinshasa to Kabul”). The second was his desire always to find points of agreement with his interlocutor, never to leave someone feeling that they had not got what they wanted. So Bush got what he wanted, and Blair got to feel “pivotal to historic events”, “eager to effectively become Ambassador at Large for Bush. ‘Tony is in his element. He loves this stuff,’” said one senior aide.
It is not surprising that Blair wanted to spend much of his time on international issues (to coin a euphemism). His home relationship with Gordon Brown was going from bad to worse. “Gordon is stronger because he doesn’t care whether people hate him and Tony does,” said one “very senior civil servant” (a term I take to mean one of the handful of cabinet secretaries who served through the New Labour years). Their relationship was poisoned because Brown believed that Blair had committed to standing down after the first term to make way for him. Probably they both believed what they said. “Tony is a great one for saying what he thinks the other person wants to hear. Gordon is a great one for only hearing what he wants to hear.” Blair was so intimidated by Brown – frankly, frightened of him – that he even sent the Chief of Defence Staff to argue a point with Brown about the defence budget which Blair should have handled. Except among Brown’s closest allies, there was no appetite among MPs to replace Blair (who, after all, had won them two thumping victories in general elections): if Brown became PM, the cabinet was divided between “those who feared they would be shot that night, and those who knew they would be shot that night.” Brown’s Treasury was not only “a government within a government, but an opposition within a government.”
Anyway within months of the September 11 attacks, Blair had bigger plans. He “made a general commitment to regime change [in Iraq], and told Bush so, a full year before the war started” – that is, by March 2002. “He was concerned about how to handle domestic opposition,” but “about the merits of having a war, he raised no objection at all.” Like Macbeth, Blair was softened up for further conflict after earlier ventures: Kosovo and Afghanistan. “It’s easier, having done it once, to do it again,” noted Blair’s army commander. Even Colin Powell, who wanted to rely on the UN to deal with Iraq, was frustrated at Blair’s unwillingness to stand up to Bush. “As soon as he saw the President he would lose all his steam.”
Blair’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein from power led to the famous dossiers promoting an invasion of Iraq, each dodgier than the last. One of these cost the BBC its Director General and Chairman, after a Radio 4 reporter said the dossier had been “sexed up” by the government to enhance the case for war, and Lord Hutton’s subsequent inquiry exonerated the government almost entirely. If this looked like a whitewash then, it’s even more blinding now. Rawnsley reaffirms that “in the frenzied September [2002] days leading up to the dossier’s publication, it was intensively reworked, each edit hardening up the claims within it. [...] The propagandist Campbell supervised the spinning of thin, dated and flaky material to make the threat look new, real and urgent.” Moreover, the key problem was that the dossier was commissioned in order to prove the case for war – not to investigate whether or not there was such a case. The terms of reference made it ‘sexed-up’ before it had even been started.
The intelligence services were not coolly and disinterestedly sifting through their thin material and then making their best estimate of Iraq’s capabilities and intentions. They were scrambling under intense pressure to come up with material to support a pre-cooked conclusion that Saddam was a growing menace.
Let alone what came after, this might be reason enough for Blair to have earned his fate as an ex-Prime Minister who, rather than spend time in the country he led for ten years, “preferred to fly the world in private jets and first class cabins [as] he felt he was accorded much more respect abroad than he received in his home country.” (That is one way of putting it.)
It would be unfair, however, to pretend that Blair sailed through Iraq and the preparations for war smoothly. He was in fact “utterly shattered by anxiety” over the issue, though never enough to change his mind. “He looked drawn,” a family friend observed. “He wasn’t sleeping. He hadn’t been eating properly.” He was opposed in the cabinet. Jack Straw told him: “If you go [to war] without a second [UN] resolution, the only regime change that will be taking place will be in this room.” His advisers told him, “This could be the end of you.” When he had to go on TV to announce to the British people the commencement of the invasion in March 2003, Alistair Campbell mockingly suggested he begin, “My fellow Americans…”
Iraq and the aftermath takes up almost 200 pages of The End of the Party, including the miserable story of the death of Dr David Kelly, named as the source for the ‘sexed-up’ allegations. Rawnsley coolly cuts between contrasting moments on 17 July 2003: David Kelly’s last moments alive, alone in the woods of Oxfordshire, and Blair’s speech before US Congress, where he received a standing ovation before even opening his mouth. (“After all the negativity, it made my heart sing.”) By the death of Kelly, Blair was again shaken and shocked. His wife had “never seen him so badly affected by anything.” At a news conference with the Japanese PM, he was asked, “Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister?” As Rawnsley puts it, Blair “stood there in staring silence for several seconds until Japanese officials stepped in to end the news conference.” His response, or lack of, is not surprising, given the details Rawnsley shares of how Blair’s spokesman had briefed against David Kelly, calling him a “Walter Mitty” fantasist in an attempt to destroy his reputation for having dared to expose the government’s dissembling over weapons of mass destruction.
After all this, where the reader at times feels soiled by the indirect contact with the people who populate these pages, the book’s coverage of the remainder of Blair’s years seems somewhat trivial. There is a good deal more of ‘the TB-GBs’, as colleagues referred to the perpetual state of war between Blair and Brown, and of Blair’s wobbles toward resignation, which never came to anything until Brown’s loyalists finally forced the issue in 2006. Blair’s very human desire to cling to power once he had it is in contrast to his lack of interest in how that power worked. “The truth was that a lot of government bored him,” said his second cabinet secretary. His third added that, “Tony thought that if you said to someone ‘reduce crime’ or ‘improve the health service’, they would just go away and do it.” Too late, he came to understand toward the end of his second term that “real delivery is about the grind, not the grand.”
Blair won a third term – or at least the opposition lost it – but much weakened, both in parliament and in his ability to put off the accession of Gordon Brown. But again within months, “he once again bound himself to a hugely unpopular position taken by George Bush for no obvious purpose or gain other than of cleaving to the White House.” In this case it was his refusal to call for restraint or a ceasefire in the bloody battle between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006. Blair’s former Secretary of State for Health, Frank Dobson, observed that “there were only three countries in the world against a ceasefire. Israel was one. The United States was another. And we were the third. People were nauseated.” Blair insisted to his inner circle throughout his tenure that he needed to stay close to Bush in order to maximise his influence on him, but many observed ruefully that he never seemed to exercise this power.
The Brownite coup which finally displaced Blair – by making him commit to a date for his departure in 2007 – might almost have come as a relief after the years of attrition between Chancellor and PM. One unqualified good that Blair could point to, however, was his success in Northern Ireland, securing a lasting (so far) political settlement out of the least promising elements (albeit ones that had been laid in place by John Major). Nonetheless, “there was something repellent about the eventual outcome of the peace process: the power was going to be carved up and the glory enjoyed by the two parties [Sinn Fein and the DUP] who had most fed the hatreds that fuelled the Troubles. They got to enjoy the rewards of the efforts and sacrifices of moderates who had dedicated themselves to peace for far longer than the extremes.” It was a major achievement nonetheless.
The British had had an Irish problem – or perhaps it is fairer to say that Ireland had a British problem – since the Earl of Pembroke landed at a rocky headland near Waterford in 1170. A settlement of peace and justice had eluded kings and prime ministers ever since. The problem defeated William Gladstone and beat David Lloyd George. A resolution to the gruesome and apparently eternal cycle of sectarian violence that broke out in the 1960s was beyond Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Peace in Northern Ireland was Tony Blair’s crowning claim to have achieved something of enduring and historical greatness with his premiership.
In June 2007 Blair left, with his all-shall-have-prizes hatred of personal conflict, and Brown, the “psychotic thug,” took what he believed to be his long overdue right. Paddy Ashdown predicted that the handover would be “Camelot converted to Gormenghast. Owls will hoot as you go up Downing Street.” In fact, the differences between Blair’s and Brown’s styles of government were not so great. Both were presidential, and both obsessed with headlines. Brown quickly learned, with the floods crisis that engulfed parts of the country shortly after his accession, that he could get an easy headline with “PM chairs COBRA” – the dramatic-sounding acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, where special meetings were convened to deal with urgent matters. Brown micro-managed everything: “if Blair was a control freak, Brown was the control freak’s control freak.”
Brown’s premiership is likely to be remembered as short and disastrous. But like Blair with Northern Ireland, he did have one unalloyed episode of success, when he presented the template to the rest of the world which prevented the collapse of the banking system in October 2008. But only weeks before the beginning of the credit crunch in the summer of 2007, Brown made his last Mansion House speech as Chancellor and used it to praise the City’s “modern instruments of finance” (the ones that would bring the world’s banking systems to the edge of breakdown a year later) and praised himself for “resisting pressure” to apply stronger regulation to the banking sector. (His successor as PM, David Cameron, was just as myopic, claiming in September 2007 – one month after the beginning of the credit crunch – that “the world economy is more stable than for a generation.” The Conservatives disagreed with New Labour on only significant point: they felt there should be “even less need for regulation.”) Brown’s laissez-faire approach to regulation was one subject on which he could have agreed with his predecessor: Blair opened a meeting with one group of bankers by saying, “I’ve taken the view all my time in office that I should leave you people to get on with making money for yourselves. …And the country.” Peter Mandelson, the third man of New Labour, famously assured executives in one speech that his party was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich … as long as they pay their taxes.” Brown allied himself with (and arranged an honorary knighthood for) Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve for twenty years and an architect of the 2008 crash, who only when it was too late accepted that his free-market “ideology was not right, was not working”.
Brown’s tenure as PM may have been extended by his handling of the global economic crisis – it avoided an immediate leadership challenge – but his premiership was permanently damaged by the “bottler” attacks which came after he dithered over calling a snap election in the autumn of 2007. He then looked weak when he insisted on his chancellor Alistair Darling (probably the only senior Labour politician to come out of the book with any credit) matching the Tories’ inheritance tax commitment. From then on, his government staggered more or less from one crisis to another: missing data discs, the 10p tax rate (a result of Brown’s “decision-making process [of] almost endless prevarication followed by absolute inflexibility”), and so on. He was embarrassed by President Obama’s official gift to him on their first meeting, of a DVD boxed set of American films. (“It looked like something they’d found in Wal-Mart,” said one of his aides.) He became the headline-chaser that he had so despised in Blair: “in the space of just five days, he popped up in the Sun and on American Idol to promise that he would wipe out malaria; signed up to a Daily Mail campaign against supermarket plastic bags; [and] told football crowds they should be nicer to referees.” He brought his old foe Peter Mandelson back, and tried to destroy his Chancellor after Darling – two weeks before the collapse of Lehman Brothers – said in an interview that economic conditions were the worst they had been in 60 years. (“The only thing I’d change if I had my time over again,” he later added, “is that I should have said 100 years.”)
As if all this were not meat enough for politics junkies, the paperback edition of The End of the Party brings us up to date. This presents the bizarre moment when Andrew Rawnsley appears in the book himself, as in some Nabokovian hall of mirrors, arguing with John Prescott on Newsnight after the first edition of his book sent ripples through Whitehall. Largely this was down to the surely unsurprising revelations that Gordon Brown was a miserable bastard to work for, who regularly took his bad temper out on his colleagues, and even pushed and shoved people. Asked if he had ever been hit by the Prime Minister, Peter Mandelson replied, intriguingly, “I took my medicine like a man.”
The paperback also gives us Blair’s performance at the Iraq War Inquiry, when by refusing to express sorrow for the loss of life in Iraq, the consummate political actor showed that “he had either forgotten how to do empathy or could no longer be bothered to try.” Brown appeared too, later having to admit lying to the inquiry (but not apologising) with the figures for MOD funding he gave. The penultimate chapter is the election which nobody ever thought Gordon Brown would win (except Gordon Brown), and includes the painful preparations for the first ever televised debates in the UK, with advisers spending one whole session persuading Gordon Brown that “Where’s the meat in the pie?” was not going to be a killer line that would slay David Cameron. We also get the aftermath of the election, and the protracted negotiations which led to Britain’s first coalition government in 65 years.
The End of the Party is not a book of political analysis. Rawnsley rarely offers his own comment on the acts of the people involved (he doesn’t need to). It is instead a story of how reactive and short-term politics in the UK is, and how it is the personalities of the people involved, rather than any political philosophy, which primarily determine the policies they enact. It is gripping and horrifying, and sometimes funny (“Where’s the meat in the pie?” is the killer line that slayed me). We can only hope that Andrew Rawnsley is already in confidential conversations with the players of the coalition, collating material for an equally eye-opening book on our new political masters.
October 28, 2010
Kevin Barry: There Are Little Kingdoms
Mainstream publishers have more or less given up on debut collections of stories, and who can blame them? I bought this book from the website of the publisher, The Stinging Fly, a small Irish press, but didn’t get around to cracking it open until I heard that Kevin Barry has a novel out next year (picked up by one of those teasing mainstream publishers). Better get in on the ground floor then, I thought, before googling the title of this book and realising that I am bringing up the rear already.
There Are Little Kingdoms won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in its year of publication, 2007. The Rooney is not widely known outside Ireland but it has a good pedigree: Claire Keegan, Keith Ridgway, Phillip Ó Ceallaigh are all recent recipients. But why rely on literary awards when I can sum the book up in a lazy journalist style? Kevin Barry’s stories: it’s George Saunders meets The League of Gentlemen! In Ireland!
Barry is old enough – 38 when this collection was published – that his debut comes with its voice fully developed. And the voice is a cracker. “There are crisis levels of debt. There is alcoholism and garrulousness and depressive ideation,” he writes of an unnamed town in rural Ireland. “There is the great disease of familiarity.”
These are long, bruised days on the midland plain. People wake in the night and shout out names they have never known. There is an amount of lead insult among the young. The river is technically dead since 2002. There is addiction to prescription medication and catalogue shopping. Boys with pesticide eyes pull handbrake turns at four in the morning and scream the names of dark angels. Everybody is fucking everybody else.
(OK, so he could lose the ‘dark angels’ bit.) That comes from the best story in the collection (with the worst title), ‘Animal Needs’. It reports the horrors that descend upon John Martin, a farmer who has found himself drawn, reluctantly but not without curiosity, into sexual infidelity. “You imagine the whole wife-swapping business would take four decisions but really it only takes three.” The swinging, though, is the least of his problems, as a husband he is cuckolding comes home unexpectedly. The dialogue twines comedy and threat.
‘And tell me, by the way, while we’re at it,’ and Jim Flaherty takes a dainty step back, a little dancing step back, and he blocks off the door with an arm to the jamb, an arm with the reach of a mid-sized crane. ‘Tell me John. Where you parked?’
‘Oh, I ah … I left it down by L_______ Road. Actually.’
‘I see. You decided to park twelve hundred yards away. At a spot that is hidden from the open view. I see.’
‘Listen, anyway, folks, I’ll knock away out of it. I’ll see ye.’
‘I’ll tell you now, John, we can do it easy or we can do it hard. Which way would you want it to be?’
‘Easy.’
‘Good man. So how long have you been sleeping with my wife?’
‘Jimmy!’ she cries. ‘This is crazy talk!’
‘Noreen, love, would you ever go upstairs and lock yourself into the bathroom and put the key out under the door for me? I’ll deal with you in due course. John, you might take a seat by the fireplace, please.’
There is a conflict here because the characters are created meticulously but larger than life; recognisable but cartoonish. This conflict enhances the force of the story: the effect has the coolness of satire but the wrench of emotion (I told you he had the George Saunders thing going on). There is a fictional friction. Also, Barry is a master of what Tobias Wolff (no slouch at the story form himself) calls “a gesture that tells you something particular:” here it’s the “little dancing step” that the dangerous Jim Flaherty takes as he prepares to “deal with” his wife’s adultery.
I said ‘Animal Needs’ is the best story because it packs so much into its 18 pages; there are hidden things that reveal themselves only gradually. Elsewhere Barry is more linear, and directly comical, as in ‘Burn the Bad Lamp’, where a man running a business on its knees encounters a fairytale genie. The genie says things like, ‘How’d you like this for a caper?’ Clearly this sort of distinctive style will not appeal to everyone, and the quips he despatches – sort of drive-by descriptions – might madden some with what can look like glibness. “She came from Tipperary and was the shape and texture of a kiwi fruit,” he says of one character. Another “had a father with a head like a boiled ham” (and there the paragraph ends, to the sound of a cabaret sting in the reader’s head). I found I had a fair tolerance for them, though this may be because the stories are so short (and I do wonder about the extrapolation of Barry’s style to novel length).
She went first to art school in Leeds, where she discovered no aptitude for creativity, but fell happily pregnant by her free-drawing instructor, Kim, who was kind enough to driver her to Halifax for the abortion, and with a Yorkshireman’s swarthy panache offered to go halves on the cost. (‘Nights at the Gin Palace’)
Despite (because of) the comedy, the deepest current in Barry’s stories is one of sadness. The people are inadequate, frustrated, “prey to odd shudders in the small hours,” pursuing stunted lives. This is William Trevor territory; Barry is the gremlin Trevor keeps under that hat of his. In fact the last story in the collection, ‘The Penguins’, is the earliest in date of writing, and it stands apart from them – not set in Ireland, for one, seeming governed more by its plot than its characters. What it shows is how Barry has found his voice since then, and if I seem to be going on about voice a lot in this review, then it’s because it’s a central part of the writer’s arsenal, and a hot property indeed if that voice is as charming, funny and assured as Kevin Barry’s is. Onward, then, to the City of Bohane.
October 21, 2010
Keith Ridgway: The Long Falling
When I rule the world, the list of authors everyone must read (yes, you’d better start taking notes) will include Keith Ridgway. I’ve read three of his five books; I am rationing them. But you don’t need to buy them from £0.01 on Amazon Marketplace to see how well he writes. His blog posts show it: try him on old Nazis, on honey cake, on rent boys and Metropole, on The Kindly Ones, on Alone in Berlin (covering the last much better than I did). Yet at the time of writing, all his books have Amazon sales ranks – that handily specious guide to success – pushing the one million mark. It’s a world gone wrong.
The Long Falling (1998) was Ridgway’s first novel – after the novella Horses – and won two literary prizes in France, which shows that they have better taste than we do. If Horses was John McGahern with – forgive me – attitude, then The Long Falling, with its depiction among other things of contemporary gay Ireland, must be Colm Tóibín: the Director’s Cut. In fact, the gay interest and the political currents are secondary to a strong portrayal of a woman in crisis, worthy of my old friend Brian Moore. (And that is the last time I will liken him to another writer; Ridgway is gifted enough to be a point of comparison himself.)
Grace Quinn has lost both her sons. Sean died as an infant when a moment’s inattention allowed him to crawl into a ditch and drown; her other son, Martin, left home in the Cavan town of Cootehill after telling his parents who he really is, and getting the expected response from his father (‘I mean that I’m gay.’ ‘Queer?’ ‘Gay.’ ‘There’s no such word. Not that way. It’s queer.’ Then: ‘Your mother killed the wrong fucking one, that’s for sure’). Martin goes to Dublin. Grace is left alone, with a violent husband (what is it about the Irish? Great writers and bastards for dads. Is there some link?) and little sympathy from the locals.
Everybody knew her husband, and everybody knew her. Neither of them was liked. She, initially, because she had come from England, he because of his manner. Now he was not liked because of what had happened, and she because she was his wife.
“What had happened” is that Grace’s husband knocked down a girl with his car and killed her. “Grace could not afford to fix the front of the car. She drove it as it was, reminding everybody. People did not like her for that.” Two deaths, one estrangement, domestic violence (“He would punch, and he would throw me. He could pick me up and throw me”): enough tragedy, right? Wrong: this is literary Ireland. Room for a little more. So Grace hits her crisis, runs into it with her eyes open, and moves to Dublin to stay with Martin.
Imagine falling from a great height. Without panic. Imagine taking in the view on the way down, as your body tumbles gently in the air, the only sound being the sound of your progress. Your progress. Imagine that it is progress to fall from a great height. A thing worth doing. Though it is not a thing for doing. You do nothing, you simply allow it to happen. Imagine relaxing into the sudden ground. Imagine the stop.
We don’t have to imagine it, as Ridgway has done that for us, and gives us Grace’s long falling, her time of “trying not to break open”, in perfect detail, told from different points of view. One reviewer calls it “the Irish Crime and Punishment.”
She is thrown into the life of the city, where the Celtic tiger (remember that?) is just beginning to drag 1990s Ireland into the modern world. Her son takes her to a gay bar (while he visits a bath house alone: “They were all ages, walking to and fro, naked but for their towels, some carrying keys, some cigarette boxes, all with the same look. Just eyes. They looked like men given some terrible task. They wanted it over with”). But Ireland has been backward too long to crawl forward without a fight. There are beggars and drunks all over the place. Everyone in Martin’s liberal, secular circle is getting agitated about the ‘X case’, where the Irish Attorney General obtained an injunction to stop a 14-year-old rape victim from travelling abroad to get an abortion. The case provides a political backdrop for modern Ireland’s birthing pains.
Meanwhile, Martin is fretting about his lover, Henry, and what he might be up to in Paris, even as he struggles to come to terms with his identity in a country still emerging from under the dead hand of religion. “The circumstances of his life had flowed from the way he wished to make love. From that clumsy declaration. I am what I want. I am this.”
The plot in The Long Falling slows down at times and takes tricky turns elsewhere, but by the end the feeling is of an inevitability playing out. It seems like a story you don’t so much read as watch. (Aptly enough, it’s being made into a film. Well: a French film.) The brilliant details and sharp dialogue don’t disguise the tragedy at the heart of the book. The past is not dead: it is not even past. We discover that Grace’s falling began long ago, when she met her future husband, and in the grand tradition ignored her parents’ advice (“Don’t go to Ireland. Do not go to Ireland”). Late in the book, Martin is interviewed by a policeman, who tells him, “You’re going to have to start from the beginning, Mr Quinn, if you don’t mind. I’m not sure I follow you.” “From where?” says Martin.
“The beginning.”
“Where’s that?”
October 14, 2010
Fred Hoyle: The Black Cloud
Penguin’s recent practice of bringing science fiction works into its Modern Classics series is welcome, though it has tended toward softer stuff – John Wyndham, Harry Harrison, John Christopher - with only the occasional harder-edged piece, such as Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse. The latest addition to the series is a curious marriage of the two traditions: the science is very hard indeed (in both senses: it’s got calculus and everything) but the telling of the story has a Wyndhamesque quaintness. Its republication was prompted by the recent volcanic ash incidents, and the new edition has a beautiful cover design, inspired by the 60s Penguin paperback editions.
The Black Cloud (1957) is set in the then near future of 1964-5, though with a framing device from the actual future (2021) which seems needless but ends up adding a piquancy to the end of the narrative. As such, the book immediately provides us with the false comfort of knowing that these things never really came to pass: not that they were meant to be taken literally in the first place. Or maybe they were (and so the only comfort is that they haven’t happened yet): Hoyle was a scientist, and points out in the preface to “this frolic” that “there is very little here that could not conceivably happen.”
The book begins with, as Richard Dawkins points out in his afterword, a realistic example of two methods converging from different sources to make the same discovery. Put simply, astronomers in the UK and USA discover simultaneously the existence of a black cloud in the outer regions of the solar system. They both notice, too, that it appears to be getting closer, and each calculate, independently, that at the present rate it will reach Earth in around 18 months. Gentlemanly panic, tempered by scientific curiosity, ensues when they realise that even if the cloud doesn’t reach Earth, it could block out the sun for a month or more as it passes. Speculation arises: will people be burned by the raised temperature of the atmosphere? Or frozen by the light of sun being blocked? Or will the air explode when the hydrogen in the cloud mixes with oxygen? The central figure, Cambridge scientist Chris Kingsley, observes stoically that “it’s odd to think that every one of us probably only has a little more than a year to live.” ‘Odd’, yes, that’s le mot juste.
The scientists tell their respective governments about the coming event. The US government is concerned whether any “serious economic dislocation” will result from the cloud’s approach. The UK government’s response is even more neatly satirical: it fudges the issue – “as usual, nothing will be done until the crisis is upon us” – is sceptical of the scientists’ “alarmist” claims, and rounds up everyone who knows about the cloud and detains them in a scientific research centre.
‘Professor Kingsley [...] I need hardly tell you that if this story of yours becomes public, there will be very grave repercussions indeed.’
Kingsley groaned.
‘My dear fellow,’ said he, ‘how very dreadful. Grave repercussions indeed. I should think that there will be grave repercussions, especially on the day that the Sun is blotted out. What is your Government’s plan for stopping that?’
The Black Cloud has several aspects. It is a page-turning story, the tension created by the reader’s desire to know whether or not the people of the Earth will survive (perhaps that’s why I found Shute’s On the Beach, with its foregone conclusion, dull). It is a primer in various astronomical and other scientific principles: the explanatory passages being justified by the conceit that this is a report written after the event (oops, there goes the tension) – so the omniscient narrative voice can take several paragraphs to explain, say, body and atmospheric temperature survival rates. It is also a critique of society as run by politicians – by definition those with no specialist knowledge – while experts such as scientists are “pushed around” by this “archaic bunch of nitwits”. The Black Cloud is a celebration of science, of knowledge – it is the astronomers and the technological men who make the breakthroughs, through emerging technology such as FM radio transmission. There is a delightful parallel in the imbalance between politicians and scientists with mankind’s discovery in the book of its truly limited place in the universe. We also get an exploration of non-human intelligence, albeit one less impressive than in Lem’sSolaris.
The Black Cloud is also an artefact, of interest as much cultural as literary. It connects one fearful time to another, a prime slice of cosy(ish) catastrophe from the Fifties, that fertile era for apocalyptic imaginings. Typical of the time and type, this is a fictional world almost devoid of women, except when used to make, let’s call them ‘historical’ gender assumptions:
‘This is unbearably scientic,’ said Ann Halsey. ‘I’m going off to make tea.’
A quick, thoughtful, provocative book, The Black Cloud might aptly be described – with all the thoughts it inspires of the galaxy, Mars, the Milky Way – as the book you can read between others without ruining your appetite.
October 11, 2010
Andrea Levy: The Long Song
For Andrea Levy I might well repeat my introduction to Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room. I thought her last novel (Small Island) a bizarre omission from the Booker shortlist in its year (2004), but despite my admiration for it, I wasn’t moved to read her new one until it was shortlisted for this year’s Booker. And even then, not until the very last minute.
The Long Song appealed to me less than Levy’s other books because of my previously stated prejudice against historical fiction, and because I wondered how much another fictional investigation of the slave trade could tell me. This second thought cruelly exposes my boneheadedness as I don’t think I’ve even read any other slave trade novels. Perhaps it is better (and worse) put like this: another slave trade novel is like another Holocaust novel. The subject has an inbuilt force and power; how difficult can it be?
Levy makes it look not very difficult at all, because she is a gifted writer whose prose is a pleasure to read. And this isn’t a slave trade novel as such; it’s the story of a life, which happens to have begun in the shadow of the slave trade. To draw a further comparison with Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, the book is narrated in both the first and third person. It is 1898 and the central character, July, in her old age has been encouraged by her son Thomas Kinsman to write her life story; Thomas is a publisher (comparing himself, in a neat in-joke, to Hodder and Stoughton, the parent company of Levy’s publishers). He has also “raise[d] life out of her crabbed script to make her tale flow,” which is Levy’s way of justifying the beautiful writing, though not, I think, a forewarning of unreliable narrative.
To offer equality of opportunity when comparing Booker shortlistees, The Long Song matches Tom McCarthy’s C in beginning with a corker of a birth scene, which July tells twice, once as “ornate invention” and once as the noisy, messy truth. Is this unreliable narrative after all? Only insofar as it is a way for Levy to illustrate the distinction between ‘a good story’ and a true story, what we would like to remember versus how it really was, and it is not the last time in the book that July will be tempted to give the reader a neatly folded scene rather than the loose elements that really constitute a life. A memorable tall tale, after all, sticks longer in the mind (and the historical record) than a dully factual one.
The birth scene is July’s own. She is the offspring of Kitty, a slave, who was impregnated (in fact raped) by Tam Dewar, the overseer of the sugar plantation she works in Jamaica. When it comes to the violent birth, he intrudes on the scene to threaten Kitty with the whip “because I cannot stand the noise. I have a pain in my head, you see, that I cannot remove. So you must be quiet.” The relations between the black slaves and the white owner and overseers are, naturally, central to the book. The plantation owner, John Howarth, is widowed, and is joined from England by his widowed sister Caroline Mortimer. The power dynamic between the parties is never better displayed than in the early scene where Caroline encounters Kitty and her daughter July in the grounds:
‘Oh, she’s adorable,’ Caroline said again.
Her brother, impatient to finish the journey around the estate, called out to Caroline. ‘Well, bring her then.’
Kitty turned to face her master.
‘Come along, Caroline. Hurry. We need to get out of the sun.’
‘Can I take her?’ she asked.
Kitty tried to seize enough air to breathe.
‘Yes, if she’ll amuse you. She would be taken soon enough anyway. It will encourage her to have another. They are dreadful mothers, these negroes.’
‘She’ll be my companion here,’ said Caroline. ‘I could train her for the house, or to be my lady’s maid.’
‘Well, you could try,’ said her brother. ‘But hurry – this heat is getting fierce.’
Kitty stepped to snatch July from Caroline’s grasp. But Caroline slapped at Kitty’s hands shouting, ‘What’s she doing?’
John Howarth raised his whip at Kitty, his face fiercely showing his intent. ‘Be on your way,’ he said, ‘leave the child to your mistress.’
Key here are Caroline’s words ‘What’s she doing?’ – a succinct illustration of a gulf of understanding, and directed to her brother rather than, unthinkably, speaking to a slave, to Kitty, directly. The book is full of such perfect touches. However the greatest strength of the telling of July’s story is in her voice: a lilting patois, intimate, profane, which becomes intensified when she reports the words of other slaves on the plantation, such as Miss Rose trying to console Kitty after the loss of July: “No look so downcast, for your pickney will do her pee-pee ‘pon a throne. In the great house them have chair made of fine wood and them sit ‘pon it – straight back and all and them let them doings drop.”
As indicated above, this is not solely a story of slavery, and life for some of the characters becomes more difficult after the Baptist War of 1831 and subsequent British abolition of slavery. For some though, such as Caroline Mortimer, the most pressing concern when fleeing the plantation (“I am forgot and left only with negroes”) to take a ship back to England is “Will there be dining aboard the ship? Will I need formal attire?” In the event, she remains at the plantation with a new overseer (like ministers of state, they don’t last long), where the story develops into a struggle to modulate slavery into capitalism. We even get a forbidden-love story, with predictable and unpredictable literary twists.
There are only a few false notes in The Long Song. One occurs when the author fails to resist the temptation for a too-clever segue between scenes (the death of one character is followed by a coffin procession, which turns out not to be the expected coffin). And, perhaps inevitably in a relatively short book seeking to take in two big subjects – Jamaican slavery, and a whole life – there are shortcuts. We jump from July’s young adulthood to her old age with no account of the years between; and one significant character (along with two supporting) disappears with no resolution to their story. Both these gaps are acknowledged at the end of the book. July explains the first by recording her desire to give her story “only the happiest of endings” (returning the reader to the questions of truth raised earlier), and by the fact that “I am an old-old woman. And, reader, I have not the ink.” The second omission is discussed by Thomas Kinsman in an afterword to his mother’s story, and even enhances the plausibility of this particular loose end. Levy is clever to anticipate the reader’s objections and seek to head them off at the pass. The Long Song may not quite match up to Small Island, but it is impressive without being intimidating, which is no small achievement in itself.
