Category: Book review

Milkman by Anna Burns

Anna Burns pic
British writer from Northern Ireland, Anna Burns.

The very first line begins,

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to by breast …

and it made me feel I was in safe hands; a safe writer’s hands. She could’ve used the simple word, somebody, but the capital letters and the Mc told me where she was and also her attitude to this person, it could’ve been one of many people from the place she comes from. Guns are rife. Even if you hadn’t read the Booker Prize announcement or the publicity it generated, or the back of the book itself and discovered Anna Burns is from Northern Ireland and always writes about the Troubles you could work it out: the use of Mc tells you it’s either Scotland or Ireland but the prevalence of guns tells you it’s probably Northern Ireland given it’s history which any reader must remember.

When one uses an article in front of a noun it gives information about that noun; “a success” means something different from “the success”: the former means success in general, the success of anything; the latter means  a particular success, the one we’re talking about. If there is no article the meaning is different again; it means the quality of success, success-ness. Anna Burns omits the article of the noun, brother-in-law; as in …

…there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, …

… which suggests there is such a thing as brother-in-law-ness. The insinuation is that she has a lot of experience with brother-in-law-ness since this one is just the first one. It’s like a job – all plumbers are the same type, just like all brother-in-laws. And she doesn’t like them.

No one is named, but they have names. She calls her mother ma,  her name is ma; ma calls her middle daughter, she calls him maybe-boyfriend, and him, third brother-in-law, and her brothers, thingy, thingy, and thingy; she calls him, milkman. Not the milkman, just milkman; no article, so no name but with a name, milkman. Even though he has nothing to do with milk, not even its distribution, he has milkman-ness: he knows where everybody lives, especially daughters, and what they have for breakfast. Ah, but this is not to be confused with real milkman. This is a man of a rare kind.

The stream of consciousness can be daunting: each page is densely packed with words; direct speech, brief though it is, is imbedded in the paragraph, there is little page-space. It gives the impression of dense weight.

Yes, there is a narrative in the traditional sense. Let’s call this the plot. But the plot is sparse. The narrative is really inside her head; this young innocent girl trying to live a life in a war zone, but a war that isn’t an official war, but therefore it’s much more dangerous, because even the language is full of weapons, bullets, and grenades.

As regards this psycho-political atmosphere, with its rules of allegiance, of tribal identification, of what was allowed and not allowed, matters didn’t stop at ‘their names’ and at ‘our names’, at ‘us’ and ‘them’, at ‘our community’ and ‘their community’, at ‘over the road’, ‘over the water’ and ‘over the border’. Other issues had similar directives attaching as well. There were neutral television programmes which could hail from ‘over the water’ or from ‘over the border’ yet be watched by everyone ‘this side of the road’ as well as ‘that side of the road’ without causing disloyalty in either community. Then there were programmes that could be watched without treason by one side whilst hated and detested ‘across the road’ on the other side. There were television licence inspectors, census collectors, civilians working in non-civilian environments and public servants, all tolerated in one community whilst shot to death if putting a toe into the other community. There was food and drink. The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal. There were ‘our shops’ and ‘their shops’. Placenames. What school you went to. What prayers you said. What hymns you sang. How you pronounced your ‘haitch’ or ‘aitch’. Where you went to work. And of course there were bus-stops.

The narrative inside her head, which the above quote gives you a taste of, is relentless – as thoughts are – and in the midst of all this danger – 80% of the book is this danger –  there is the simple plot: a much older man, milkman, is stalking her, and even if she doesn’t reply and just stands there letting him talk, even with her arms folded, not engaging with him, wishing he would go away, she doesn’t like him – she likes maybe-boyfriend – but he won’t go away – and when he does go away it’s as secretly and silently as he arrived – but he’s there long enough for them to be seen together. That is enough for chins to wag and tongues to spit. They were seen together so she, daughter, must be having an affair with milkman, and it must be true because Mrs Someone and Mrs Thingymabob said.  Even ma doesn’t believe her. What’s a girl to do?

Did I enjoy this novel? To start with, yes; but as it progressed it felt repetitive and over-written. The Man-Booker judges have, in recent years, favoured the experimental voice to the detriment, I believe, of story-telling and therefore of their readership. Although a stream-of-consciousness novel, James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late won in 1994 the past four years have seen more experimental novels taking the prize. New writing doesn’t necessarily mean better writing.

Here is a very short video of Anna Burns after winning the Man-Booker and talking briefly about the writing of her novel. She seems overwhelmed by the media attention, which given its intensity is understandable. I apologise for the god-awful and too loud backing music.

You can buy the kindle version here.

by Categories: Book review, Literary criticism, Man Booker PrizeTags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

American-Iranian writer, Ottessa Moshfegh (O te zar  MOSH feg) 

I love page 1. This is what I learned from page 1. The female unnamed first person narrator sleeps. When she is not sleeping she slips out of her apartment whenever it might be, day or night, and picks up coffee (stimulant), trazadone (anti-depressant), Amdien (sleeping pills), and Nembutal (more sleeping pills) from a 24-hour bodega. She takes them all, along with animal crackers, while watching movies until she falls asleep. When she thinks of it she orders Thai take-away. Sometimes she hears her phone messages which are, mostly, confirmations of  appointments for spas or salons she has made in her sleep. She cancels them. She hates talking to people.

This all sounds like she’s on a slow slip to depression and eventual suicide. But no. I find out on page 7 that her attempt at hibernation is quite the opposite: self-preservational. She hopes that while sleeping all her cells will re-new themselves, re-align themselves – every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant foggy memories –  so that after a year she will wake up a whole new person with none of the hang-ups, fears, denials, hatreds, annoyances, incapabilities, sensitivities, regrets, and pain of the old one. 

There are other characters too, her best friend Riva, her on-off-on-off boyfriend, Trevor, and her psychiatrist, Dr Tuttle. All, like the protagonist, are bonkers. Or are they just typical Manhattanites in the 21st Century?

By the end of chapter 1 everything is set, and set up. 

At the beginning of chapter 2 we’re back to the beginning of the project. She feels excited, hopeful, and fully prepared for her great transformation. 

Of course, this being a narrative our first person protagonist often wakes up and the narrative consists of her methods of getting back to sleep again, all drug fuelled. Exercise? Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could get back to sleep again. She also wakes to visit her psychiatrist, Dr Tuttle, who’s also mad as a cut-snake and writes down our narrator’s nightmares, which are all a pack of lies and mainly cobbled-together-fragments of bad movie plots, all intended to get more, and stronger, prescription drugs. Actually all her answers to Dr Tuttle’s questions are lies. 

“I was wondering if you could prescribe something a little stronger for bedtime. When I’m tossing and turning at night, I get so frustrated. It’s like I’m in hell.” She lied. 

“Hell? I can give you something for that.”

Her growing armoury or medication, prescriptions and samples from Dr Tuttle, have names like the siblings in second-rate Greek tragedies: Solfoton, Infermiterol, and Zyprexa. 

Not only do we find out what she does when she wakes up, but we also find out what she’s been doing when she’s been asleep: going out for coffee and drugs; ordering Chinese takeaway; rearranging her furniture; buying multiple tubs and multiple flavours of Häagen-Dazs ice cream which she forgets to eat or put in the freezer; booking Brazilians and fake tans; and chatting to guys on dating websites and getting, in return, closeups of their genitals. Thankfully, she too thinks this is going too far and gets her ditzy friend Riva to change her AOL password to something random and confusing so she won’t remember it. She hates Riva, especially when she talks. No, that’s not true, she really loves Riva. Well, actually, she hates her. Erm …

She’s obsessed with Whoopie Goldberg and old movies with predicable plots.

With all these pages of finding numerous ways to fall asleep they are surprisingly entertaining. It’s a hoot! But if you want your fiction characters to be nice and normal, don’t read this book. I wouldn’t want any of them at my lunch table. Nor would you. Trust me!

In fact, one of the attractions that kept me interested was what gross and/or outrageous thing was I going to read next? One day she wakes up in a new fur coat, the smell of which gives her the odd suspicion that she’s had sex with someone; and with a bunch of roses … on a train. 

Of course, the narrative of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is actually what she does between bouts of sleep, she even goes to Riva’s mother’s funeral. A book about sleep would be very thin, this one isn’t.

Moshfegh came to the attention of the literary world with her 2015 novel, Eileen, which won the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Man-Booker Prize; however, The Irish Times reviewer hated it. Erin Cressida Wilson, who adapted Paula Hawkins’, Girl on a Train, for the screen will tackle Eileen for film producer, Scot Rubin. 

Here’s a short interview with Moshfegh talking about My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

You can buy the book in various formats, including the kindle version, here. 

 

by Categories: American literature, Book review, Literary criticismTags: , , , Leave a comment

Not a Virgin by Nuril Basri

Translated by John H. McGlynn

Nuril Basri pic
Indonesian writer, Nuril Basri

Nuril Basri has worked in many itinerant jobs including as a waiter on cruise ships. However, writing is his passion. He has several published works in Indonesia and Malaysia. This translation from the Lontar Foundation is his first in English.

 

This  book is surprising. It deals with masculinity, and sexuality – not subjects I expected to read in a book written by a Muslim –  set in the sub-culture of modern male youth on the fringe, literally and figuratively, of Jakarta, the sprawling capital of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country. Machete-wielding vigilantes, Islamic religious teachers, transgender hairdressers, rapists, drug dealers, indifferent parents, gay clubs, and drag queens populate this story of religion, youth culture, gender identity, and sexuality.

The tone is light-hearted, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic and written in the first person as Ricky, a displaced teenager tries to find an identity and family to call his own. He stumbles into the dark playful culture of the cross-dressing beauty salon community who speak their own language: gayspeak, Queen’s Speech, or Salonese as a way to isolate themselves from the mainstream which only harbours for them ridicule, ostracisation, and violence.

It feels as if Basri, a young man himself, is aiming his tale squarely at young cisgender people just like Ricky, while at the same time normalising the transgender characters who, like everybody else, are searching for love, a room over their heads, acceptance, work, and freedom.

I’d never thought our relationship would reach this stage, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. Paris was keeping me, after all, wasn’t he? He bought me clothes, treated me to meals, and gave me pocket money regularly. And he had just bought me a very expensive pair of shoes. He had the right to touch me. Though I silently objected, I did realise, deep in my heart at least, that this day would come. I just didn’t know that today would be that day.

The climax of this scene is comic but the intent is clear: the normalisation of sexual difference. In fact, it’s the comic nature of this scene that normalises such behaviour.

To give you a taste of Basri’s style you can read this scene (Chapter 21 of Not A Virgin) as published online in Queer Southeast Asia: a literary journal of transgressive art Vol. 1. no. 1, October 2016 here.

The Lontar Foundation promotes Indonesian literature and culture through the translation of Indonesian literary works. It was established in 1987 and is still the only organisation that promotes Indonesian culture through literary translations.

You can buy the book directly from Lontar here.

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The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

Vita pic
Vita Sackville-West (1892 -1962) British poet, novelist, gardener, free spirit. “I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.”

Book’s narrators – who are they? where are they? why are they telling me this? why do they care? – always interests me. It can often be a character in the story; it can sometimes be the protagonist themselves; but it is usually some nameless god-like know-all. There are many ways to tell a story so why did the writer pick this particular way to tell it? This interest makes the first page of a novel so informative. Sackville-West makes it very clear in the opening of The Edwardians that it is no-one but her, the writer,  who is telling me this story. This is rare.  She begins:

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

And ends the first paragraph with:

The arbitrariness of choice has already been made sufficiently evident, and no further justification is necessary to explain why we irrupt into the life of our hero (for so, I suppose, he must be called) at the age of nineteen, and meet him upon the roof a little after midday on Sunday, July the 23rd, nineteen hundred and five.

As you can ‘hear’ by the language it is written English from another time, but not so far away. Sackville-West had The Edwardians published in 1930, less than a hundred years ago.

The story is set at Chevron, a country house of the aristocracy lorded over by the widowed Dowager Duchess of Chevron but owned by her son, Sebastian, the current Duke, but who ‘hasn’t yet attained his majority’, hence his mother’s stewardship until he comes of age. Summer weekends at Chevron are weekends as they always have been: house parties, where the landed rich, and some hangers-on who may not be wealthy but have other necessary attributes, lavishly dine, drink, play bridge, and have affairs. Sebastian, soon to be initiated into a sex life by his mother’s best friend, Lady Roehampton, and his sister Viola, overlooked but who surprises everyone, try to follow their hearts and their belief in the inevitable; but tradition is strong and exerts itself the most on dutiful sons soon to be heirs of age and pensive daughters branded for an appropriate marriage. However, an interesting ‘adventurer and sailor’, Leonard Anquetil, not of anyone’s set, but one who went to Siberia in search of mammoths and who had lived in a hut near the South Pole was deemed amusing enough to be invited to the Chevron’s house party. His intrusion ultimately leads the two children to see their own paths, and possible destinies, independent of their social standing. Just what they needed .

Dialogue has always been an efficient painter of character, and Sackville-West is a master of  it but with children and maids hovering around the Duchess as she dresses for dinner it’s a monologue that paints her character so precisely:

Now, Button, haven’t you nearly finished? Don’t drag my hair like that, woman. Give me the tail comb. Don’t you see, it wants more fullness at the side. Really, Button, I thought you were supposed to be an expert hair-dresser. You may think yourself lucky, Sebastian, that you were born a boy. This eternal hair, these eternal clothes! They wear a woman out before her time. Oh there you are  Miss Wace. This plan is all wrong. You must alter it. Do it here, as quick as you can. Sebastian will help you. And Viola. Come in, Viola; don’t look so scared, child. I can’t bear people who look scared. No, I don’t want you now, Button; you get on my nerves. I will call you when I want you. Get my dress ready. Children, help Miss Wace – yes you too Viola; it’s high time you took a little trouble to help your poor mother – and do, all three of you, try to show a little intelligence.

This book was incredibly successful in 1930 at the beginning of the depression. The reading public, when austerity was beginning to bite, craved this story of extravagance, selfishness, and a doomed social order. It is set in 1905 at the beginning of the WW1 when an earlier social order was under threat. It was Vita Sackville-West who saw in the young an understanding of the transition that both her readers and characters were going through, but the older generation could not see it; they saw nothing but what had never changed and so could not believe that it ever would. The book was so successful that she and her husband, the diarist and diplomat, Harold Nicholson, bought Sissinghurst, an estate that resembled a pile of rocks at the time, for just over twelve thousand pounds and turned it into the most famous garden estate in the land, and certainly Kent.

Sissinghurst-Overall
Sissinghurst Castle. Her later home and famous garden

Here, her description of one particular Edwardian set:

Their solidarity was terrific. They had a way of speaking of one another which reduced everybody else to a mere petitioner on the doorstep. Too well-bred to be arrogant, too uninspired to sneer, they were simply so well convinced of their unassailability that the conviction required no voicing, but betrayed itself quietly in glances, in topics, in the set of shoulders, the folding of hands, and in the serene assumption of certain standards and particular values as common to all. They moved all together, a large square block in the heart of English society, massive, majestic, and dull.

You have to re-read some of her sentences just for the joy of them; she criticises everyone but with wit, style, and a masterful use of biting words. The scenes in her story are always there for more than one reason. Like the boisterous Christmas party for the tenant’s children presided over by Sebastian, his sister Viola, and Sebastian’s guest, Teresa, Mrs Spedding, the doctor’s wife. The innocent parlour games they play with the children are full of adult manipulation and intrigue: Sebastian, against his better judgement, to ensnare, tantalise, and seduce the innocent and fragile Teresa; she in knots of fear and delight at his attention; and Viola who sees and understands everything, but cannot save her, nor stop him.

Sackville-West was a fascinating woman. A peer’s daughter married to a knight of the realm, Vita was a pillar of the Establishment but, like her husband, had affairs with her own sex; but she bore him two children, and became a best-selling author, poet and gardener. Eleven years after her death her son Nigel Nicholson had a book published about his parent’s relationship under the title of Portrait of a Marriage. In it he chronicled his mother’s tempestuous sexual relationship with the author and socialite, Violet Keppel (1894 – 1972). Vita also, famously, had an affair with Virginia Woolf who used her as inspiration for her novel Orlando,: the adventures of a man who lives for three centuries but who changes, mid-life, into a woman.

In The Edwardians, apart from the extravagant world of ‘above stairs’ – emeralds, gowns, white-tie, champagne, Canard à l’orange, port, and gossip; there is also the greyer, but equally fascinating, world of ‘below stairs’ – hatpins, aprons, bracers, beer, shepherd’s pie, sherry, and gossip. Such stories in such settings have recently become popular again: Robert Altman’s 2001 film Gosford Park, set in 1930, and the many series of ITV’s Downton Abbey (2010 – 2015), set a little earlier, but both written by Julian Fellowes and both sharing cast members. If you liked Downton Abbey you’ll find The Edwardians equally as entertaining but with a sting in its tail.

And what better climactic scene to highlight all that Sebastian loathes about his prisoned live than a coronation: that of George V, in 1910. The ending comes a little quickly but it’s unexpectedness is novelistic and provides an out for poor privileged Sebastian (and for independent Viola). A great read!

vita1955
Vita Sackville-West 1955 – straight from the garden

You can find the ebook of The Edwardians here.

Two short stories, A Tale of Mr Peter Brown and Chelsea Justice in the one volume, plus some poetry can be found for free here from Gutenberg Press.

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A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

John Boyne pic
Irish writer, John Boyne.

This is a masterful work as well as a bloody good story. Boyne uses several narrators, first person, third person, even second person to tell the blackening ambitious story of Maurice Swift, handsome, clever, manipulative, ruthless, and fiercely driven to be a writer. The only problem is his talent is limited, very limited; but this doesn’t stop him, although at great cost to those around him. At each section you wonder, ‘where is Boyne taking me now?’ It’s exhilarating to let yourself go, to totally trust the writer to never let you down; to give you insights into his literary world, and into the mechanisms of novel writing itself.

John Boyne is an Irish writer of some experience. He writes for young readers and for adults. His greatest success was his young-adult novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006). I discovered him via his previous novel for adults, The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017 ) another accomplished work of tragedy, love, and humour. He’s great with the comic, laugh-out-loud stuff. Check out my blog post on this remarkable book here.

Every book, by anyone, has its own universe. Most of the time the universe of the book is exactly the universe of the reader: our universe. However, this is not always the case. In ….Pyjamas, the central relationship is between the son of a Nazi Concentration Camp Commandant, and a prisoner-boy on the other side of the fence, the boy in the striped pyjamas. Some critics have accused Boyne of inaccuracies: in German death camps during WWII inmates would never come into contact with the families of the staff, as Boyne describes, even given a fence. This may be so in our universe, but in the universe as created by Boyne it is what happens. It is a universe of a different internal and external geography. Similarly the same criticism could be dished out to Boyne here, in Ladder … , but Boyne makes it easy to trust him. In the heady atmosphere of reading fiction there is an element of suspension of disbelief, exactly in the same way as it works in the theatre; as readers we need to let ourselves be beguiled. One of the signs of bad writing is when the writer does not do this. Good writing will always set you up effortlessly to allow you to boldly go where you have never been before; where you accept what may be unacceptable, or unknown, in your own universe.

And with so many narrators the reader is rewarded when the narrator becomes Maurice himself, but … beware! … you almost start to like him!

You won’t forget Maurice Swift for a very long time, but don’t get him confused with Highsmith’s Ripley; it could be easily done.

You can read a Q&A with John Boyne about this new book here.

It was released in many countries, including Australia, in August, 2018.

You can buy the ebook here.

I am keen to read whatever Boyne has written, and will write. I need to make some room on my shelves.

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Life & Times of Michael K by J M Coetzee

Coetzee pic
South African born writer, John Maxwell Coetzee, relocated to Adelaide, South Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. 

J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and for Disgrace in 1999. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

Life & Times of Michael K is a short novel in three untitled chapters: a long one, a short one, and an even shorter one. It is literary, not in the writing, which is simple, stark, and unadorned, but in its ideas.

The first long chapter begins with a very short description of Michael K’s undistinguished birth and the subsequent disappointment of his mother because her baby has a cleft lip. It is told in the third person by an unnamed and omnipotent narrator. Michael K’s early life is uneventful and he works in a mediocre job as a gardener. It is clear that the novel is set in a very violent and war-torn South Africa with curfews, gangs, and uncertainty. It seems to be always raining. His mother is desperate to leave Cape-town and return to her hometown of Prince Albert many hundreds of miles to the north. Without money, or the necessary papers – unattainable for Kafkaesque reasons – he attempts to push his mother in a homemade pram all the way north to Prince Albert. His mother dies on the way but Michael K finally manages to arrive at what he believes to be the farm, now deserted, where his mother was born. He tries to live off the land; for his own security he learns to sleep in a hole during the day and to work in his garden at night. He grows pumpkins. He is discovered and abused, escapes to the mountains where he tries to live without leaving a trace. He is hijacked to work for a road-gang, is interned in a work-camp, escapes and is taken to a hospital where he sparks the interest of a doctor.

The second chapter is told in the first person by this unnamed doctor and we see how Michael K, now identified as CM (coloured male ?) but referred to as Michaels, is seen by others. He is an enigma. He refuses to eat, talk, or co-operate. The doctor is tormented with the urge to help him but to no avail. The doctor comes to think that Michaels may have the real answer to living in this particular country at this particular time: living in order not to exist. The doctor is eventually thwarted in his kindly efforts as Michael K escapes.

The last, and shortest chapter, is a return to the third person narrator. Michael K eventually returns to the building in the city where he and his mother used to live. He is befriended by a group of nomads; one of the women has sex with him and he thinks he might even like her, but he continues to reflect on his time in the wilderness; all he would need in the wilderness was his garden, a shaft in the ground, and a teaspoon and string with which he could gather water. Then, “he would say, one can live.”

A happy and fulfilled life need only be concerned with what it is you need to survive, and nothing else. Life isn’t so bad if all you are doing is marking time.

This book is bleak, fascinating, frustrating, but ultimately rewarding – if you stay with it   – but a very different book to the mainstream literary works of today.

“Coetzee,” says the writer Rian Malan, “is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.”

J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus and Late Essays: 2006-2016 are now available from Viking.

by Categories: Book review, Literary criticism, Man Booker Prize, South African LiteratureTags: , , , , , Leave a comment

The Gathering by Anne Enright

 

Anne Enright pic
“None of the Irish writers I know are afraid of the pleasure of the sentence.”

If you read the blurb on the back cover you’d get the idea that this is a book about a family gathering for a funeral;  and, like me, you’d think you know what it’s about – it seems such a cliched reason for a book – but the actual ‘gathering’ doesn’t happen until Chap 30 (out of 39) and a lot of fabulous stuff happens before chap 30. This book has been unread on my shelf for four years because I thought I knew what it would be like. I was wrong.

Enright has employed this same idea recently in The Green Road, although in that book the event is a house-sale;  but still a family gathers. Anne Enright is big on families.

And this is Anne Enright on big Irish families:

There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is over invited. There is a mysterious sister. These are just trends of course, and, like trends, they shift . Because our families contain everything and, late at night, everything makes sense. We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them – at least I do. The imponderable pain of my mother, against which I have hardened my heart. Just one glass over the odds and I will thump the table, like the rest of them, and howl for her too.

Both these books, The Green Road and The Gathering are similar in structure. She places an event at the nut of her tale and weaves around it threads of people, their plights and joys, pasts and presents until you have something like a doily of a story. A weave of narratives around a perfect whole. In one masterful chapter two of her characters, Ada Merriman, the narrator’s grandmother, and the man, Lambert Nugent, who has always loved her, and who she should’ve loved, but didn’t, touch. She a hand on his shoulder, he a hand on her hip; and the narrator, a writer, the granddaughter, Veronica, who admits to writing all this down, describes what might have happened had both their hands moved a little further, a little more truthfully until they were on the floor with him inside her. The reader certainly wants this to happen and Enright, having us in mind, gives it to us. It’s satisfying. It didn’t happen in the story, only on the page, but satisfying nonetheless.

Hovering above for most of the book, like a drone, is the little mystery Enright, (Veronica?) tells us in the very first line: something happened in Ada’s house when Veronica was eight and her brother, Liam, the corpse at the centre of this doily, was nine. Something happened that little Veronica shockingly saw.

The Hegertys are a big clan: the nine surviving children, there were more births than survivors, gather for the funeral of one of their own and Veronica needs to bare witness to an uncertain event. She remembers it but as something so improbable – she was very young -way outside her, then, experience that now, as an adult, it’s entirely possible, she thinks, that it might not have happened at all.

the Gathering Booker pic
Pleased as punch; and rightly so.

The Hegertys were “dragged-up”. They were entirely “free range”. But this is all pre-80s, pre-parenting, pre-how-to books, pre-child murders, pre-4-wheel-drives to school; pre-dry cleaning plastic as death-bags: pre-fear, when us baby-boomers were all “free-range”, and all “dragged up.” If you are over 50 you probably know what this is like. 
Anne Enright writes sentences chock-full of meaning, or insight, or revelation; and even her linking sentences between chock-full sentences are chock-full. But then she throws in a little doosey: It is like Christmas in Hades, and I laugh and think she is going to suck the universe dry of all the good lines leaving us in her wake scrabbling for left-overs.
She uses dialogue to re-assure us that these people are complicated, but real:
‘Thanks,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Thanks for staying with me.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘No. Really.’
‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
and prose for more meaningful and ‘under-the-surface’ revelations:
I thought about this, as I sat in the Shelbourne bar – that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go ‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn’t seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.
The doily book, The Green Road, was written in 2014, and it’s a book Enright calls “more of a proper book” insinuating that the other doily book, this one, The Gathering, written in 2006, is not. I know what she means. The Green Road is tighter, neater, more confident, and adventurous, the pattern more stable; this one is loose, equally compelling and recognisable, but free-range and at the same time narrow in its world; but for lovers of contemporary literary fiction, so rewarding.
So, yes, a lot happens to Veronica, the narrator, before the point of it all; and near the end the mystery is revealed; then the gathering itself; but Enright keeps a little ‘gasp’ to send you off into the last little chapters when, by the end, you realise it was all, not about a family, but about a woman, coming to turns with hers:
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love but love all the some.   
I’ve never read another author’s work back to back before. I have another Anne Enright book on my shelf: The Forgotten Waltz (2011); that might be next. It’s turning into a little Anne Enright Reading Frenzy. Read her yourself and see why.
You can find The Gathering in various formats, including audible and audio CD, here.
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The Green Road by Anne Enright

Anne Enright pic
Irish writer, Anne Enright, won the Man-Boooker Prize for The Gathering (2007)

After the last page is turned, after you’re full to overflowing with this book you’ve just read, Anne Enright writes an Acknowledgements page, and she starts it like this: Thanks for the information used and cheerfully misused in this book are due to: and she lists a whole swag of people. That is the branding mark of a writer: once she knows something, then and only then, can she choose to change it.

With the very first sentence she grounds the story in the domestic:

Later, after Hanna made some cheese on toast, her mother came into the kitchen and filled a hot water bottle from the kettle on the range;

but it’s the very first word ‘later’ that made me jump: what?, this uncertainty, tension; something happened before the cheese on toast and the filling of the hot water bottle. But what was it? What?

And then on the 2nd page, this

He took them for rides in fast cars, up over the bridge, bang, down on the other side.

It’s the word, ‘bang’ that hit me this time. With that one out-of-place word, not a word, a sound; no quotation or exclamation marks, nothing but surety about the picture it conjured: a too-fast car, over a bump, where you hit your head on the roof and the sound of the car bouncing back to earth with the woop and cheer of kids, out where they shouldn’t be. Such a big picture from such a small sentence.

I smile to myself and think: I’m in the hands of a master, and I breathe a little sigh of relief: a very good feeling at the start of a read..

But then Chapter 2 opens 11 years later in the East Village, New York, with a gay male narrator among gay men torn between their right to be promiscuous and a stalking, discriminating death.

What Billy wanted was big, shouty unafraid sex with someone who did not cry, or get complicated, or hang around after the orange juice and the croissant. Billy was across the threshold and cheerfully out and he wanted men who were basically like him; sweet guys, who lifted weights and fucked large, and slapped you on the shoulder when it was time to swap around.

 Where did an Irish 50-something mother of 2, who looks like a little housewife from Central Casting, find authentic language like that? I was now severely impressed with this writer; and she can do that relaxed but spiky gay table-talk; sassy, arch, and funny.

I don’t want to give too much away because there is too much to enjoy about this novel; but it is neatly constructed. Divided in two, the first half assigns a chapter, each with a different narrator, at a different time for each of the four beautiful children of the difficult woman Rosaleen; and at the end of which is the reason that all of them are lured home to Ireland, County Clare, for Christmas in the family home that their prickly mother has decided to sell.

Bring on Part 2.

In a London Review Bookshop interview she describes the first half of the book, a ‘proper’ book, as getting to know the four siblings in a way that none of them could ever know about each other; in a sense this is dramatic irony on a large scale. We readers know more about each of them than any other family member knows about each other. They have gone off elsewhere (New York, Asia, Africa, Dublin) to care for, or sleep with, the lost, the undernourished and come back home full of themselves, their adult selves; but to the childhood home where their mother, Rosaleen, is waiting to be empathised with. That’s all she’s ever wanted. They go off to look after big-bellied African babies, or dribbling disease-ridden men but here she is not being looked after at home … alone. She has a point. The trouble it she doesn’t know how to accept it, or express it.

I foolishly avoided Anne Enright’s books, even though there they were on my bookshelf, and even though I’ve met the woman (twice!), I thought her books were all about families collected together at a funeral, a wedding, a last Christmas, and I thought, yes, I know what they’re like. I’ll get to them … one day. And this book is like that. Exactly like that; but at the same it is so unexpected, unpredictable and therefore rewarding, satisfying, and oh-so wise.

She got her hair done in a place so posh it didn’t look done at all,

and this is one of those rare books where you can believe what’s written on the cover: ‘brilliant’, ‘radical’ – don’t let that put you off, ‘beautiful’, ‘virtuosic’, and ‘hugely readable.’

I sincerely wish this book on everyone.

You can find the book in various formats here.

 

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Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan
British novelist, Ian McEwan

The first thing that strikes you is that McEwan is writing in the first person, as a woman. I used to have a prejudice against this: a writer writing as another gender, but I called myself out and tried it myself. Now, it doesn’t bother me; in fact, it’s one of the things I like about this book. Generally speaking, I believe that people are more alike than not. Gender, sexuality, and up-bringing affect us in profound ways, but also don’t affect us at all. We all experience and react to the range of human emotions and consequent actions: a young homosexual female bus-driver and an old straight rich male banker could react to jealousy, a home-invasion, or a heart attack in exactly the same way. I don’t need to research the work space and tasks of an astronaut when I’m writing about her marriage breakdown, just like I don’t need to study aerodynamics to jump a puddle.

Writing in the third person is the more common format. The third person allows the writer to create a narrator that is god-like, knowing everything about everyone, past present and future. Writing in the first person gives the writer access only to what the protagonist experiences; but this can be useful to the writer who may not want the protagonist to know everything. Hold that thought.

I’ve read almost all of McEwan – I say almost because as yet I haven’t been able to get past page 3 of On Chesil Beach (2007): I find the situation the young couple are in so embarrassing. I must get over it, I know; and I will, just not yet. It’s a tribute to McEwan’s craft that it effected me so strongly.

McEwan’s early work, up until the turn of this century, were generally dark tales with something black, dangerous, or hellish at the heart of each new novel. He became known as Ian MaCabre. However since the turn of the century his style has changed although he still likes to play with the narrative form; as he did with Atonement (2001) – one of his best – by creating a fake ending which allowed the title to be so appropriate.

But, back to Sweet Tooth (2012) set in 1972: Serena Frome (as in “plume”) is a young, pretty, blonde who isn’t very picky about her sexual partners. In fact, she admits her hunger for approval but not her hunger for affection. She is recruited into M15 by an older lover who then abandons her for reasons she, and the reader, only find out about much later. She is placed in a lowly paid clerical job in a lowly department; with a 3rd mathematics degree from Cambridge but an enthusiastic love and ever-growing interest in literature, especially fiction. That is why she is given the job of signing up a new, intelligent, and promising writer – will he win a prestigious prize? – named Tom Haley, for a pension, seemingly from a creative arts foundation, but really as a way for the government to have some control over the culture of the society it governs; not control really but making sure they foster the right creative minds. This interesting idea is at the core of the book. It also leads to some very informative and rewarding discussion of the relationship between writer and reader. She prepares for her undercover work by reading three of his short stories and these stories aren’t presented as complete works by Tom Haley, although I wonder if McEwan actually wrote them out in full; but Serena tells us about them, giving the reader insight into what they tell her about the man she will soon meet.

Serena’s dilemma is how much does she tell Tom. This becomes critical when she falls in love with him, and he with her. As the romance deepens so does her duplicity. The reader can feel the doom gathering as events conspire against her – and then the media get hold of it: headline “HALEY’S SEXY SPY”; and it’s possible that you will have a choice of what you may think will happen. She of course calls him, visits him, but he is gone; nowhere in sight. No matter what you may think will happen when she finds him, I can safely guarantee you will be wrong. Here is an ending like no other, although in retrospect, it’s very McEwan. Only when you read the last page, the last line, do you really understand what happened. Oh, please don’t be tempted to look.

There are no spoilers here; but I will say that the success of the plot lies in the fact that Serena, and you the reader are oblivious to a very important piece of information and it’s crucial that it not be revealed. It’s only when it is that you realise that McEwan really had no choice: it had to be written in the first person.

For lovers of McEwan, this is a gem. So much better than his latest Nutshell (2016); such a disappointment.

You can find the novel, in various formats, here.

The Paris Review’s interview with Ian McEwan – “The Art of Fiction No. 173” – from 2002 you can find here.

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Latecomers by Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner pic
British novelist, Anita Brookner (1928 – 2016) won the Booker Prize in 1984 for Hotel du Lac.

When Brookner’s editor Liz Calder rang her up to report the news of her Booker Prize nomination Anita replied, “I think I shall go out and get a pair of shoes resoled. That will help me keep my feet on the ground.”

Everyone thought J. G. Ballard would win for Empire of the Sun – the odds were 6 to 1 that he would. He didn’t. She did.

Before becoming a novelist – she was always a writer –  she was a celebrated art historian and the first female Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. She wrote 24 novels, almost one a year, from 1981, she was 53,  to 2011. She was an only child of “unhappy” parents who lived with her grandmother. “They were transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood, and I felt that I had to protect them. Indeed that is what they expected. As a result I became an adult too soon and paradoxically never grew up.” She never married or had children.

Fellow British writer and friend, Julias Barnes remembers, “She was witty, glitteringly intelligent, reserved, and unknowable beyond the point she herself had already decided upon. I can’t think of a novelist less likely to write an autobiography. She was fiercely moral without being moralistic, and fiercely truthful.”

With the opening to Latecomers you know you are in the safe hands of an authoritative wordsmith:

Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette. The ensuing mélange of tastes and aromas pleased him profoundly, as did the blue tracery of smoke above the white linen tablecloth, the spray of yellow carnations in the silver vase, and his manicured hand on which the wedding ring fitted loosely, without those deep indentations that afflict the man who has gained weight or age, a man to whom in any case his wedding might be presumed to be an affair of the irrelevant past. 

She then describes Hartmann’s gaze falling on a group of middle-management men and Brookner drops into the second person as Hartmann chastises them for gorging themselves on lobster cocktail and steak and kidney pie:

My dears, you do not look well … your complexions are not clear, your haircuts unbecoming.

It’s the story of two German Jewish immigrants, Hartmann the voluptuary, Fibich the worrier, who, although from the same background and bind their lives together in the same work, are two very different men, marry two very different women, and have, one each, two very different children. The narrator tells us about them. There is very little dialogue, hardly any; only carefully considered sentences almost bursting with detailed information. As you can see from the quote above hardly a noun is allowed to exist without at least one apt adjective. Brookner places a lot of trust and love into her adjectives and adverbs. When my book-fairy brought me this one from Europe late last year I looked at it and said, “Oh, I didn’t know about this one.” He said, “What? Oh, I don’t recall their titles, I just read her, over and over,” and he made a face as if to say, “Well, why wouldn’t you? They’re delicious.” Another apt adjective. Hers is the type of writing that brings you pleasure no matter what the writing is about. Of course, she honed her writing skills as an art historian writing about art, until hers became an art in itself.

Her style won’t please everybody; her focus is on what these people are like, not what they do but on the way you find out what they did, and how they did it, why, and what they felt about it. I often write about the image of a novel’s narrator as an imp sitting on the shoulders of the protagonists having access to what the protagonist not only sees and hears but also what they think; but in Brookner the imp is sitting just behind their eyes surrounded by the cluttered furniture of their hopes and fantasies, feelings and thoughts, and so by telling us all this the characters emerge and she shows us what being human is like.

Although the action is minimal, time passes – actually over 50 years pass, from when the boys first meet at boarding school to their latter years when grandchildren are on the way, mixed with the feelings of love, pride, and even disappointment in what their children have, or have not, achieved. Many critics of Brookner chastise her for her moody, timid, and undemanding characters due, they say, to her never marrying and not having children. However, for a husbandless and childless woman she deftly handles the changing feelings, the stings and shadows, joys and love-bursts of two very different couples for their offspring: one becomes a self-centred and ebullient actor, one a passive and disappointed housewife.

Fibich, the desperately thin and always fearful one, takes a courageous journey back to Berlin in an effort to try to recapture something of himself as a child; some inkling of what home might feel like. His journey is revelatory because of a chance scene he witnesses; something that has nothing to do with Germany, but all to do with memory. It’s Brookner at her best.

It’s a handsome volume and part of the Vintage Contemporaries Series, but don’t take much notice of the blurb on the back: it makes it sound something it isn’t, but then if you take the ebook, which you can find here – and where you can read the first few pages for free – you won’t be tempted.

Anita Brookner died on March 10th, 2016 and an obituary appeared in the Guardian, on Tuesday, March 15 You can read it here.

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