Category: Literary criticism

Lies of Silence by Brian Moore

Brian Moore Pic
Northern Ireland born Canadian writer BRIAN MOORE (1921 – 1999)

This review does not contain spoilers.

With Islam tearing itself, and most of the Middle East, apart at the seams because of denominational, ideological, and doctrinal differences it is easy to forget that Christianity has had it’s own experience of hatred, violence, bloodshed, and the corrosion of legal governance because of similar differences, and not that long ago: Northern Ireland; and the fact that the current conflict contains a large dose of post-colonial revenge doesn’t make it more different, it makes it more the same, just on a larger, international scale.

Brain Moore (1921 – 1999) Northern Irish born Canadian novelist wrote much about his homeland, the Troubles, and in no uncertain terms placed most of the blame on the Christian teachings – on both sides – of hate, entitlement, and rightness. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen: Intent to Kill, The Luck of Ginger,  Coffey, Catholics, Black Robe, and most notably The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987) starring Maggie Smith. He also wrote screenplays, some based on his own prose, but also, among many, Hitchcock’s Torn Curtin (1966). Graeme Green always liked to cite Moore as his favourite living novelist which was flattering but also, according to Moore, “a bit of an albatross.”

His 1990 and Man Booker Prize nominated novel Lies of Silence (he was nominated three times) is set squarely in the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland. Michael Dillon, a failed writer, now successful hotel manager in Belfast, is forced by masked IRA house-invaders to commit an act of terror or his wife will be killed. This in itself is a strong set-up but Moore raises the stakes. On the night of the house invasion he plans to tell his wife he wants a divorce, he has fallen in love with someone else and plans tomorrow to leave with her for London, but instead of the truth his wife’s insecurity about her looks and job prospects, and his guilt no doubt, causes him to try and bolster her lack of self-confidence and instead of the truth he is forced to let her believe that she is a woman a husband would never leave. They sleep. He will tell her in the morning but he never gets the chance. It’s a page turner; but more so because of the additional drama supplied by themes of religious hypocrisy, cowardice, faithfulness, loyalty, love and dishonour.

I thought all Booker Prize nominated novels were high on character, low on plot. Not this one; in fact plot takes pride of place but character isn’t neglected; it is effectively painted through, among other things, dialogue; heartening since there is a modern trend, particularly in Australia, where dialogue is looked down upon as a novelistic tool. Moira, Dillon’s beautiful wife, more beautiful than his mistress, Andrea, is cleverly painted through what she says and how she says it. She is no shrinking violet; she is ballsy, determined, and sassy – she stands up to the IRA home invaders – but at the same time insecure, bulimic, and frightened. Dillion’s ‘Soloman’s Choice’, makes for a great plot-driver: the terror target is his own hotel and the possible dead, by his hand, would include his staff, guests, and a right-wing preacher who is in fact the actual target of the attack. Dillion hates him but in the ‘will I/won’t I save my staff or my wife’ his duty to his staff and guests – hundreds of them – is compromised by the fact that if he saves them he also saves the preacher-arshole, who he believes deserves a bomb. I’m not spoiling it for you; this is just the set-up.

After reading and blogging about A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara – a tome the size of a first-issue mobile-phone – remember them? – I raced through Moore’s and not just because of its normal paperback size: it was hard to put down. In the current reader-esque universe of keeping-up-with-the-latest-work-of-your-literary-heroes it’s very likely that you may have missed Brian Moore, I did – there’s so much to read! – but Moore is worth searching out if only as a relief from the intense literary fiction of today.

In his obituary in the Guardian (1999) the writer succinctly described Moore’s literary output as continually testing “even further the unremitting search of humanity for certainties in a remarkably unreliable universe. Almost two decades on and in another century that universe is, unfortunately, still remarkably unreliable.

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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara Pic
American novelist Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life was short-listed for the 2015 Man-Booker Prize

This is a novel about friendship; no, it’s more than that, it’s about love-ship. It’s a solar system of people, with planets, Willem (an actor), JB (a painter), and Malcolm (an architect), and their hugging friends who hover like moons as they all circle in ever-decreasing orbits around Jude (a lawyer), the sun-like centre; where a career is as important as sex, where sex is fluid and non-defining, where who you think you are can be a million miles away from who others think you are, and where desire is unhinged from the brain and is a simple bodily necessity.

Yes, on one level it is a hymn to this love-ship but it is also a harrowing account of the affects of child sexual abuse and “how far a body will go to protect itself, at all costs. How hard it fights to live. But then the fact is,” she suggests, “our bodies don’t care about us at all.”

Yanagihara puts omnipotence back into the qualities of the third-person narrator: her narrator is fluent in the intricacies of pure math[s] – zero must exist but has it been proven to exist; the legal arguments that define the difference between what is fair and what is right; the architectural pitfalls of urban interior design; the sexual ambivalence of well-heeled twenty-somethings as opposed to the sexual certainty of the under-educated; and the life-threatening aspects and the psychological roller-coaster ride of a physical and emotional retard whose depths of self-loathing are bottomless, but who is, by every account, the most intelligent of the lot of them. This character, Jude St Francis, whose little life this book is about, is the emotional heart of this group of friends living in and around New York City, and we are not spared any of the tragic, horrific, and dehumanising aspects of his existence and upbringing and it is all due to Yanagihara’s skill that his life is so enthralling. She makes it very clear that intelligence can overcome even the most debilitating consequences, while at the same time proving that, in regards to the self, intelligence has very little traction.

Yanagihara’s prose is informal and chatty (conjunctions often begin new ideas, just like a chat with your neighbour), dense (a paragraph can contain the past, the future, and the present – she loves dashes and brackets), and of course her characters are flawed (after-all there are no novelistic perfect characters) but her description of them is pure, true, but non-judgemental; unlike her characters’ descriptions of each other.

And even though it is difficult at any given moment to understand where the narrative is on its own timeline there is a feeling of moving forward; that despite the rich characterisation and back-story anecdotes a narrative is unfolding. She pulls no punches so even as you are enjoying a moment of happiness in Jude’s chaotic, damaged, but professionally charmed life, there is a dread in your guts that it could all come tumbling down disastrously, on the next page. Sometimes you feel like you want to skip a bit, so detailed and horrendous are the descriptions of moments in Jude’s life but the skipping moment is always voyeuristically delayed and finally when the dread is over you can feel that lump in your throat slowly melting away and you can breath evenly again.

Hanya Yanagihara is an American writer and editor of Hawaiian extraction and currently works as the deputy editor of The New York Times Style magazine. Her first novel, The People in the Trees, was considered one of the best in 2013.

I wrote my second novel, A Little Life, in what I still think of as a fever dream: for 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else … but if the actual writing of the book was brief, it’s only now that I realise that I had been thinking of this novel for far longer. I began collecting photography when I was 26, 14 years ago; and when I actually began writing, it was these images I returned to, again and again: they provided a sort of tonal sound check, as it were … Now that the book is done, I realize that these images are now so inextricable from the book — and my experience of writing it — that looking at them again is somehow jolting: they’ve become a visual diary of that year and a half, and I find myself unable to look at them without thinking of the life of my novel.

Hanya Yanagihara (http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/how-hanya-yanagihara-wrote-a-little-life.html)

Yanagihara is not interested in marriage; it is not for her, nor for her friends, nor for her characters. A Little Life makes us aware of the meaning of the word, family: how we create them, keep them, succour them, honour them, even when there are no blood-ties, the lack of which seemingly makes this family stronger, truer, safer, more honourable.

This is the first book I can remember reading that made me cry (there are also a lot of laughs, mainly of recognition) well before the half-way mark; it is however, despite the title, a big book. If you find the first fifty pages just a blur of dense information persevere, it is very much worth it.

A great book!

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The Search Warrant by Patrick Modiano

Patrick_Modiano_pic

French writer and 2015 Nobel Prize Laureate, Patrick Moldano.

When you watch a movie it is important to understand, not only that decisions have been made about every thing in every frame: the glare from the wet tarmac, the broken zinnia in the vase of otherwise perfect flowers, or the dreadful yellow hat on the third boy from the right, but that even if something is missed, like the broken flower; if someone has not done his or her job well, or even if simply there was not time or money to re-shoot the scene or re-dress the set – so we will just have to live with the little boy putting his fingers in his ears moments before Eva Marie Saint ‘shoots’ Cary Grant in that now famous blooper from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest – we have to acknowledge that what we see is what is meant, and the person ultimately responsible for this is the director, because he or she has allowed his or her name to be put on it.  Just like a name on the bottom of a painting: the person is taking responsibility for what you see. It says, I did this; what you see is what I want you to see.

What the viewer thinks it ‘means’ is something completely different and has nothing to do with the creator but everything to do with the viewer.

Similarly with a book of fiction: what we read is what the writer wants us to read and the writer employs various techniques – tricks – to make us think – believe – in a particular way. Most writing is about wanting the reader to believe that what is written is true; and just like ‘the suspension of disbelief’ that audiences in the theatre and cinema have to do to become emotionally involved is what they are watching, so too does a reader: a young girl is fleeing her convent school and suffering the dangers of occupied France. This is what the writer wants us to believe is true, but it is only the appearance of truth, and there’s a glorious word for that: verisimilitude; but what is really true is that I’m sitting in a nice chair with good light and a cup of ginger tea.

This particular ability to mentally put ourselves in a description of something (using words, paint, dance, light, stone, sound) made by someone else is a wonderfully human characteristic and is the sole reason we have something called art.

One of the tricks writers use to make us believe that what is written is true is detail, and ironically, unknown detail (“I don’t know what the figures 20998 and 15/24 stand for”) makes that belief stronger: writers, creators, don’t usually use words or numbers that have no known meaning. Why does he tell us this? Because it is true; so goes the logic.

The Search Warrant, or as it was originally published in France, Dora Bruder, is the 1997 novel from this year’s recipient of The Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick Modiano. The story is sparked, so he tells us, from a missing-person ad in the magazine, Paris Soir, dated 31 December 1941, which reads,

“PARIS

Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.”

 As a reader, one accepts this. I can comfortably say that no reader is going to spend the time and effort researching copies of Paris Soir, and in particular the issue from New Years Eve 1941, to verify if this ad is true. It does not matter if it is true or not; in the world that Modiano creates between the covers of this fiction, it is true; we believe this, and to assist us in this belief Modiano includes a footnote (footnotes are also very useful in creating verisimilitude), giving the title of the column in which the ad appeared (“D’hier a aujourd’hui” – “From Day to Day”).

Modiano is obsessed with the past, and in particular, the German occupation of France and the French resistance during World War II even though (or because of it) he was born the year the war ended, 1945. “The plot too is the recognisable one [all Modiano’s plots are markably the same] as a search into the past of a first-person narrator.”*. It is a work (some, like Kawakani, say not a novel) that infuses memoir, (auto) biography, detection, and memory. The reader finds out much more about the narrator (the writer?) than he does about Dora Bruder. The narrator knows the address of the parents, 41 Boulevard Ornano; it is next door to a cinema he visited as a child. He, like Dora, and his father, like Dora’s father, Emile, are French jews and subject to the whims and prejudices of the German occupying forces that involve lists, registers, travel documents, curfews, identification badges, suspicion, and intimidation. There are many questions in this book, almost every chapter begins with one; questions about Dora Bruder that Modiano cannot answer, so he answers with details of others; police reports, timetables, journal entries, and memories of writers of the period; and if one of these writers once slept in the same room as he, or Dora, all the more reason for including it. These glimpses of many lives still add up to the shattering truth of Dora’s; at least one which Modiano wants us to believe.

The autobiographic detail is fascinating – what a surreal time and place to be in where what authorities think you are can cause alienation, deportation, imprisonment, death – and the mystery of Dora pulls you along, but memory as we all know can be treacherous.

(I have a friend, let me call her Gillian. Every time I poach tamarillos I have a vivid memory of Gillian showing me how, in the kitchen of someone else, let me call him Harry. Gillian, however, has no recollection of this, not of ever eating poached tamarillos, before I fed her some on a recent visit, or of ever being in Harry’s kitchen. Did this event happen? I believe it did. She believes it did not. What is true?)

As I’ve said before, somewhere**, fiction is all about truth, but to make it clear, one has to lie about it a little.

On his Italian father’s side he is descended from Sephardic Jews from northern Greece; his mother, was a Flemish actress, “a pretty girl with an arid heart“; Flemish is Modiano’s first language as he was raised by his maternal grandparents: his father, a black-marketeer,  was interned, his mother on tour. His younger brother Rudi died at the age of 9. Moldano wrote a memoir about his childhood and called it Un Pedigree: “I couldn’t write an autobiography, that’s why I called it a ‘pedigree’: it’s a book less on what I did than on what others, mainly my parents, did to me.” He is married with two daughters.

 He writes about “the pull of the past, the threat of disappearance, the blurring of moral boundaries, the dark side of the soul“*** ; his art “is the art of speculation“****.

Whatever this book is it is a fascinating way (‘postmodern!’ I hear someone screaming) to tell a story. His novels are only now starting to appear in English, spurred on, no doubt, by the Nobel Prize. Search them out and let me know what you think.

-oOo-

*Kawakani, Akane; 2000, A Self-conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool

**In a soon to be published autobiographical fiction called Johnny William & the Cameraman.

***Schwartz, Alexandra, The New Yorker Oct 9 2014

****Schwartz, Alexandra, The New Yorker Oct 5 2015

 

 

 

 

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In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut

 

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The South African writer, Damon Galgut

It is about a South African man called Damon; it may be Damon Galgut, or it may not.

“He is only passing through … he doesn’t carry any abstract moral burdens, but their absence is represented for him by the succession of flyblown and featureless rooms he sleeps in, night after night, always changing but somehow always the same room.”

 He is a walker, a little lost, a little directionless, a little uncertain of his own motives; a sojourner. He is walking in Greece where he meets, on the road, an enigmatic, and attractive German, Reiner – “He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly”. They travel together but the relationship never grows beyond the casual, despite the sexual tension in the air. Galgut is good at sexual tension. Yet even the casual becomes a disaster.

His second journey, Lover, involves meeting a mixed bunch of people, Jerome, Alice, Charles, and Rodrigo and following them over half the African continent. He doesn’t know why. He sometimes is surprised at what his legs are doing, at what direction they are taking him. Jerome seems interested in him but Damon does nothing. He leaves them, regrets leaving them, plans to follow, but doesn’t then eventually does. This ‘action’ is by no means boring; it is the most intimate of prose, deeply interesting, deeply personal, almost uncomfortably so at times. “It is a story of what never happened, the story of traveling a long way while standing still.”

 The third part, Guardian, is concerned about his traveling companion, Anna, on a trip to India. She is teetering on the edge and threatens to drag him over with her. She relies on a trove of pills which, if taken as directed, will reboot her life but if taken all at once will take it away, and what’s he to do in India with a corpse?

There is something about this book that I must tell you; it is the most unusual fiction, although thrilling too, I have ever read. I was in two minds about telling you about it; it may put you off, I can think of two people that it would put off, but it is so essential to the tone of it, the flavour of it that I could not not tell you. It is told in the third person, and begins, “He sets out in the afternoon on the track that has been shown him….” and very soon he sees a figure in the distance walking towards him. Eventually they approach each other; both watching each other. The figure is described, all dressed in black; “Even his rucksack is black”, and then at the bottom of the first page, there is this, “What the first man is wearing I don’t know, I forget.” I felt a jolt. What? There is the walker, and the man dressed in black, and now another man? “I”? I read the first page again; maybe I had missed something. No I had not missed something. I read on and peppered sparingly are these first person references, and I realised that the third person narrator is referring to himself: the ‘he’ and the “I” are the same person, Damon; so, yes, maybe Damon is Damon Galgut. The writer is his own character. This is a little alarming only if you aren’t prepared for it; hence my telling you. Galgut is also free with punctuation especially of conversation:

“Where are you from. He has an improbable English accent, very overdone. South Africa, goodness me, how did you get up here. Through Malawi, my word, I’m off to Malawi in a few days. Look around, yes please, be my guest. What did you say your name was.”

My same two friends would be equally put off by this, but it is surprisingly clear; or maybe it is only a thought of conversation, an expectation; a fictive chat.

Despite the title of the book what action there is takes place as far away from a room as you can get: the open road. Whether it be Greece, Malawi, Switzerland, India, or Kenya he is a traveler and his life is about the people he meets and journeys with, but the drama of this book is in the man himself, the ‘he’, the ‘I’ and in a sense this is a stronger form of autobiography: Galgut (I) is standing apart from himself, watching himself (he), describing his actions, trying to work out what it is about himself. “I am writing about myself alone, it’s all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life. He sits in the empty room, crying.”

Lines like “I don’t remember what they do for the rest of that day” meaning ‘what I did for the rest of the day’ give the feeling of truth; ironically the admission of no action makes it all the more believable.

“In the morning his actual departure will be an echo of this one. He has already left, or perhaps he never arrived.”

Yes, in the first two parts of the book the action is languid, undefined, unimpressive; where the drama is all internal: a personal journey to try and work out why Damon is like he is; fascinating it its novelistic skill. Part three begins as expected but suddenly a life hangs in the balance and Damon is forced to act. The pace is frenetic, the action white-hot, and Galgut doesn’t pull any punches. It hits you in the guts just like it did him, and I read and read ’til the end, redefining the term ‘page-turner’. His skill at internal drama is eclipsed with his mastery of fast-paced action. It’s head-spinning stuff!

I wait with heightened expectation for Galgut’s next work.

 

 

 

 

 

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The South by Colm Tóibín

 

Colm Toibin 1987
A young Colm Tóibín 1987

For a woman who, at any given moment, doesn’t quite know what to do, Kathleen Proctor, the protagonist in Colm Tóibín’s The South, has accumulated a raft of major decisions by the time she hits forty: she has abandoned her husband (just like her mother had done), son, and country; moved almost penniless to Barcelona, said yes to her mother’s financial support; taken up painting, taken a lover for his looks and attention; moved with him to the top of an isolated mountain in the eastern Spanish Pyrenees; and had a daughter. She just can’t decide if she should stay or go.

Tóibín’s attitude to, or fascination with, motherhood is a flavoursome ingredient in a lot of his work: it’s foremost in his first Booker Prize nominated novel, The Blackwater Lightship (1999) – about three diffident mothers; it underpins the decisions of the protagonist in Brooklyn (2009), she runs away from hers; The Story of the Night (1996) opens with a dying one; it is pivotal to his latest novel Nora Webster (2014) when a mother finds herself a widow and reclaims her life as ‘hers’, not ‘theirs’; & Jesus! how mother-obsessed can you get when you write a lengthy, grumpy, but redemptive speech for the mother of God, The Testament of Mary (2012). Here in his first published long-form fiction it is something that the protagonist, Kathleen Proctor, is ambivalent and confused about: children get in the way, children make a mother out of a woman and if it’s a woman you are trying to be, being a mother seems like a second choice, and she lets it happen, twice!

 “I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the [Farrera de] Pallars, especially an area between the village of Llavorsi and the high mountains around it. Until the late nineteen-fifties, the eight or nine villages in the area were cut off from the outside world, with only a footbridge connecting them to Llavorsi; there were some mountain passes, but no roads into France. I loved how enclosed it all was. For the past twenty years, I have spent a part of every year there.”

Colm Tóibín The New Yorker, February 24, 2013.

 Tóibín worked as a journalist in Barcelona and wrote many short stories, including explicit autobiographical tales; a journalistic book about the city itself, Homage to Barcelona came out in 2002, and also this, his first novel, published in 1990.

It establishes Tóibín’s style; stark, formal, where the language is simple but clear – you never have to rush to the dictionary:

Isona was playing on her own in the garden. Katherine picked her up and took her into the house. Miguel was in the kitchen. Katherine put Isona down. There was hot water on the gas; she washed out the jug and poured in the milk from the bucket.                                                                                                               The South, p 141.

 Like frames from a film where the reader supplies the action between each one; the movement between frames. The action seems mundane but the drama is in what the characters may be thinking or feeling but not saying.

He also spends short introductory paragraphs describing the weather, the place; something he no longer does.

Surprisingly the book opens with a first person narrative, by Katherine, of her first few disorientating days in Barcelona, alone and poor, after her abandonment of Ireland and her family. I’ve always been disquieted by works where the gender of the story-teller is different from that of the author (a publisher who turned it down thought it was written by a woman) but Tóibín’s honest prose appeased my initial objection via a detailed description of a potential molestation, in the dark, on a train, and I forgot all about gender; more about this later.

The South is a story of wish fulfilment even though Katherine doesn’t know quite what the wish is. However she takes up painting because she moves in painterly circles and it becomes her wish: to be a painter. Her development as an artist, and growing confidence, is reflected in the size of her canvases: small bits of paper at first but eventually to formats so big that they have to be left outside covered in plastic. She disappoints her husband and child by leaving them but picks up with two disappointed men in Spain; one she sleeps with, the Catalonian, the other, the Irishman, she doesn’t. Her life in Spain is about passion, sexual and artistic, the former she learns to do without, the latter she concentrates on but success is not what interests her. She doesn’t care, she is doing what she wants. Even tragedy becomes part of the passion: a rich and full life, albeit a penniless one.

As the book begins with a departure, it ends with a return; she faces the consequences of her youthful, and selfish determination, and learns to live with the forgiveness, of sorts, that is offered to her.

Although Tóibín’s featured characters are usually women, their gender isn’t what interests him. If a man had squeased two children out of his own body, born of love, necessity, acceptance, resignation or simple lust, and was then expected to care for them even if he didn’t want to; even if doing so made him feel less of a man; this is what interests him. This is what feeds his novelistic brain: human beings coming to terms with, not coming to terms with, fooling themselves, berating themselves, celebrating, manipulating, cursing, damning their own biology.

There are hardly any women at all in The Master (2004), arguably his masterpiece, but that’s exactly what it’s about too.

Oh, and by the way, The South doesn’t appear on Tóibín’s website; there’s not a mention of it. However in the new edition I have just read (Picador Classic Series) – my first copy was lost with my entire library in 2010 – there is a charming Afterward by the author where he talks of it with some affection and also surprise that he managed to finish it.

One day, when I had no idea how to proceed, when no new images came, when I felt I was blocked with the book, I remembered what Barrie Cooke had said. I made a mark. I decided that I would write the first thing that came into my head and then make it stick. What came was: ‘The Sea. A grey shine on the sea.’ I was surprised by this and began to work with it.

Colm Tóibín’s,  Afterward, 2015.

Colm Toibin 2015
Colm Tóibín 2015
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The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín

Colm Toibin
Colm Toibin

In 2009 in the US state of Illinois two siblings, Steven and Kathryn Miner, began a lawsuit against their mother, Kimberly Garrity, for ‘bad-mothering’, suing her for $50,000 for ’emotional distress’: the mother had sent her son an ‘inappropriate birthday card’ that did not contain any money; called her daughter to come home early from a ‘homecoming’ event; and threatened her 7 year-old son with the police if he did not put his seat belt on. Two years and two courts later the case was thrown out. The fact that one of the sibling’s lawyers was their father, Garrity’s ex-husband, only adds fuel to the farce. What is bad mothering? What is good mothering? How do mothers learn to be mothers? Today there is a wealth of information on the internet, as well as publications and TV shows but for baby-boomers, people born in the decades after World War II, there was no such help; mothering was assumed to be innate.

Colm Toibin’s fourth novel, The Blackwater Lightship (1999), which earned him his first appearance (the first of three) on the Man-Booker Prize short list, is about just that: mothering. It is a story of Helen, a young mother of two boys, her mother, Lily, and Lily’s mother Dora. All mothers. These three women are thrown into a crisis when a man called Paul, the best friend of Declan, Helen’s much-adored brother, visits her with awful news. Declan is in hospital. He has AIDS and he has had it, unknown to his family, for a long time. He is dying and he wants to be taken to his grandmother’s house near the sea, and he wants Helen to break the news to their mother, Lily. The husbands of these mothers are either dead or away: Helen’s husband has taken their two boys to visit his family in the west.

All this is most difficult for Helen, who has been estranged from her mother, and grandmother, for more than ten years: over-mothering is what Helen would describe as the reason. However Helen does as she is bid. She re-arranges her busy life as an education administrator, breaks the news to her mother in her mother’s new and expensive house, a house Helen has never seen before and they take an emaciated and very sick young man to his grandmother’s house on the coast where he remembers boyhood summer visits with affection; but two of Declan’s friends come as well: Paul, of course, and another gay man called Larry.

The three men sit in Declan’s bedroom with the door shut, talking and giggling, while the three women sit around the kitchen table trying to think of something to say to each other; what they have in common is only the past, and the past is thwart with danger.

Transience is everywhere. Grandma’s house is falling down and in a few decades it will probably fall down the cliff and into the sea, just like the house down the road where only a back wall remains: the coast is moving inland, time is winning. Declan can remember the lighthouse from his childhood, the Blackwater Lightship, but it is no longer there, replaced by a modern electric one, its moving beam washing over the house and everyone in it

Three diffident mothers and two confident and self-assured men haggle over mothering rights. The men win because the men know what to do. All Declan wants from these women in his life is for them to love him. Unconditional love is something all three women know very little about.

This was the book that introduced me to the work of Colm Toibin. His formal and authorial prose (no contractions) clearly defines the boundaries between these people and his deft handling of the back-stories and the changes and smudges that develop over these boundaries brings a smile to your lips (Larry tells a bemused Grandma about his first sexual experience) and a tear to your eye (Declan’s stark, angry but silent confrontation with his future as he sits by the fire staring into it; the women set the table and chat about the weather not knowing what else to say).

It is a confrontation between the past and the present; a clash of generations; a stark reminder of how far the world has changed in a single lifetime; it highlights the difference between mothering and caring, and it is a wonderful affirmation of the power of literature.

If you don’t know the work of Toibin, and you should, this is a great place to start.

 

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Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent lic

Hannah Kent

On January 12, 1830 in a poor rural community in northern Iceland, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, 34 years old, a farmhand, and Friðrik Sigurðsson, a farmer’s son were beheaded for the murder of two men almost two years earlier. For the months leading up to her execution Agnes was forced to live with a farming family who were extremely reluctant hosts but forced to do so by the farmer’s local administrative responsibilities. The executions were the last in Iceland, for in 1869 executions were outlawed in Iceland under Danish law.

In 2002 Hannah Kent was 17 years old and on a student exchange program, living and studying, in the north of Iceland. She arrived in January when the place was dominated by snow and darkness (for 20 hours a day). She was lonely, socially isolated on the edge of the world, and cold. On a trip around the region, obviously in a gap in the weather, she asked about local places of significance and she was directed to three small hills, white against white, where, her host parents said, a woman called Agnes was beheaded: the last execution in Iceland.

“I was immediately intrigued. What had she done? What had happened? … Retrospectively, I can only speculate that the strange, isolated place of Agnes’s death made me think of my own feelings of loneliness; that I thought of Agnes as a fellow outsider in a remote Icelandic community, and I identified with her in some small way.”

In January 2011 Hannah Kent had to face the task of writing an historical novel as the creative component of a PhD and her discovery of Agnes’s story nine years earlier sprang to mind.

Burial Rites is the result.

The thought of reading an Australian writer’s work with no gum trees (no tress at all actually), no kangaroos and no barbeques was too tantalising to resist. Kent uses two narrative frames: an uninvolved narration in the third person and a more poetic one in the first, as Agnes and so giving her a voice. The landscape, social and familial structures are revealed, not in dense descriptive paragraphs but as a background to the action. The arrival of Agnes at the lonely farm, her ostracisation, her predicament and demeanour are all skilfully drawn as is the family members of her reluctant jailers; and part of the charm of the situation is the slow growing understanding between the doomed woman and her hosts.

Of course the force that drives the plot is ‘did she or didn’t she’ and as the months of summer give way to the always harsh winter Agnes’s position improves and one thinks that the details of her background and crime will emerge in her religious counselling from a very young trainee clergyman, Toti (a rather wasted character). However this does not happen, instead Kent peppers the text with the story of Agnes and the eventual crime of which she is accused, through more poetic monologues from Agnes, part of the first-person narrative, and through dialogues by the fire with the mistress of the house, Margrit. This is a mistake on Kent’s part as she already has an impartial third person narrator that could faithfully serve as a means to dramatise the events rather than through a static duologue of two women sitting down before a fire in the dead of an Icelandic winter. Agnes’s first person narrative is intriguing and personalises the historical figure, which is exactly what a first-person narrative should do; but in the latter stages of the story, when we discover the romantic relationship between Agnes and one of the dead men, Kent’s re-imagining of this relationship descends into soap-opera of the ‘love him-hate him-love him’ kind. Such personal ruminations may be the musings of a lovelorn teenager but Agnes is mature, intelligent, and self-aware so notions of ‘if only I could talk to him I could change his mind,’ do not ring true.

These weaknesses in the text damage Kent’s novelistic authority but in relation to the work itself they are minor. Burial Rites is an imaginative, a mostly well-crafted debut with a wonderful evocation of period and life well within the Arctic Circle, and I look forward to her next work, which I believe will also be set in Iceland.

Burial Rites has won, among others, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award People’s Choice Award, and for Kent she was named the 2014 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist.

Kent co-founded and served as deputy editor of the Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings. Burial Rites was released in Australia, the USA and the UK in 2013 and translation rights have been sold to 15 countries. In October this year she toured Canada as a guest of the Calgary’s Wordfest, the Vancouver Writer’s Festival and the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.

It was reported in 2013 two months after the book’s release that Jennifer Lawrence is scheduled to star, as Agnes, in the movie version of Burial Rites, directed by her Hunger Games director, Gary Ross.

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How Novels Work by John Mullan

John Mullen pic

English writer and academic, John Mullan

-oOo-

Works like this are gleaned from what novels become not how they are made. A more accurate title, if accurateness is what a title should contain, is How Novels Are.

If you are interested in such things, Mullan gives you a detailed description of the building blocks that he describes from a considerable collection of novels. Don’t worry if you haven’t read them all; one of the beauties of this book is that it whets your appetite for some of the books you had no intention of reading, such as Underworld by Don DeLillo, which is a novel that sets out to describe the second half of the 20th century via the ownership of a single object: in this case, a baseball. Mullan’s descriptions of novelistic tools also throw some intellectual light on those books you may have recently read that left you feeling a little underwhelmed: in my case Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, a ghost story by Ruth Rendell.

However don’t be fooled into thinking that these tools sit in the novelist’s brain like paint on an artist’s pallet waiting to be chosen. This is not true.  No novelist thinks “Today I’ll begin a romantic mystery via a split-narrative, with a parenthetically obsessed first narrator, in an attempt to personalise her skaz, who cleverly murders the plain speaking (no contractions) second narrator where the clue to the crime rests on an ekphrasis, in the first chapter, that is proven to be false in the last causing the revelation of a huge, but oh-so-clever, coincidence that will have critics falling over themselves to categorise the bloody thing”… maybe I’ve gone too far but I think you know what I mean.

Novelists tend to write what interests them, and, more importantly, what interests them the most is how to write, describe, conjure, and explore something that up until that point they had no idea how even to begin; and there’s the crux of it all: who was the artist that, when asked how do you start a picture? said, “you start with a mark on a white canvas”. Ditto for writing a novel.

John Mullan has been Professor of English at University College, London, since 2005 and is currently head of the English Department. He was General Editor of the Pickering & Chatto series Lives of the Great Romantics by Their Contemporaries, and Associate Editor for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  He is also a regular TV and radio broadcaster and a literary journalist; he writes on contemporary fiction for the Guardian and was a judge for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Since How Fiction Works was published in 2006 two other volumes have hit the stands: Anonymity. A Secret History of English Literature (Faber and Faber, 2007) and What Matters in Jane Austen? (Bloomsbury 2012). He is host of the excellent Guardian book club.

“Symbolism in a novel is risky because it presses meaning on the reader.” This is one of the rare references to the reader and quite an important one. Unfortunately he spends little time discussing the role of the reader; or maybe such investigation has only risen in importance since 2006. There is now a strong literary theory called readers response theory …

“which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to post-structuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them … reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences—reads—it. (www.poetryfoundation.org)

That landscape of Uncle Harry gathering cobwebs behind the broom cupboard or the script in your bottom drawer doesn’t mean a thing until someone has a reaction to it, be it small (it’s alright) or big (Wow! How wonderful!): art isn’t art until someone consumes it.

This idea that there is an active role for the reader in literature is demonstrated by Colm Toibin’s latest novel Nora Webster (Penguin 2014). It’s a moving tale of a recently widowed middle-aged woman, mother of four, in 1960’s Ireland who finds her way back into her own life; one without her husband. No place or person is described. When Nora’s neighbour, an inquisitive old biddy from down the road, comes calling to look about a bit the reader is left to provide his or her own image of an ‘inquisitive old biddy from down the road’. This isn’t hard to do as most of us know of such a character from our past (or present). A grocery store where a bell rings when a customer enters is all that is needed to conjure up in the mind of the reader exactly what Toibin wants; it isn’t important that your ‘grocery store where a bell rings when a customer enters’ may not be geographically like the one in Toibin’s memory, but it’s the idea, the atmosphere, the tone, the times, that Toibin is after; and that the reader can provide.

Of course there are wonderful novelists who describe people and location in great detail but there is something nourishing for a reader when all that is needed is a key (“a belly held in by straining buttons”) that unlocks a memory for a reader and provides everything that is needed for the character (location) to come to life.

I found this book fascinating, despite its neglect of the role of the reader. It almost doubled my ‘to read’ list.

Although Mullan is an academic the prose of How Novels Work is leveled at the general reader but if you are more academically minded try How Fiction Works by literary critic James Wood (Jonathan Cape 2008) who attacks the information, fundamentally the same as in Mullan’s book, but from a completely different angle.

 

by Categories: How Novels Work, How to write fiction, How to write novels, Literary criticism, Non-fictionTags: , , , , Leave a comment

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Paula Hawkins pic

English first time novelist: Paula Hawkins

-oOo-

When a friend gave me this book to read he said, “This is the best book I’ve read in ages.” I know what he means.

However Jacqueline Rose in The London Review of Books September 10, 2015 wasn’t keen to read it, having just read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl “… but I read on anyway, wanting to know more or less from page one why such hatred of women would be so popular.” I know what she means.

The Girl on The Train is about three women, Rachel (the girl on the train), Anna, the new wife of Rachel’s ex-husband, and Megan, a neighbour. All, one or two of them, are self-delusional, unemployed, unemployable, fat, barren, alcoholic, promiscuous, neglectful, possessive, lazy, a bad liar, vain, unwashed, treacherous, adulterous, stupid, flirtatious, misguided, bored, interfering, paranoid, insane, obsessive and one of them becomes a corpse. Collectively they exhibit the above attributes in the never-ending pursuit, entrapment of, and submission to men with the oft-stated, but never achieved, goal of happiness. Even Cathy, sane Cathy, Rachel’s long-suffering flat-mate has been dating her goal, Damien, for over two years without once being invited to meet his mother. We never meet Damien but the other men, real men, the ones these women are fixated on aren’t much better: Tom, Anna’s husband and Rachel’s ex; Scott, Megan’s husband; and Kamal Abdic, a ex-refugee and therapist. Their common attributes are handsome, sexy, successful and only one of them is a liar. If you only like reading books about nice people don’t read this book.

However I find Jacqueline Rose’s profiling of women, based on these characters, going way too far. These characters say more about the writer, Paula Hawkins, than about women in general; and anyway profiling is so unPC. If a woman wants to write about dysfunctional women searching for salvation amidst functional men she can.

But, hey! It’s a thriller, a fiction, an entertainment (it’s soon to be a movie) and a great way to spend a hot lazy humid weekend by the pool or under a fan.

What is interesting about this story is the way Hawkins tells it. She uses three first person narratives usually, but not always, in the present tense to tell the story, like diary entries. They are immediate, engaging and at times enthralling. Each section is headed with a woman’s name (Rachel, Megan or Anna), the time, day, date, and year. Keep track of these: note them.  This confessional flavour is attractive in a personal gossipy sense that we all, let’s face it, enjoy. Hawkin’s characters don’t hold back: we hear all about their dreams, fears, desires, failures, fantasies, bad decisions, flights of delusion, lies, and bad bodily maintenance practices. If you are deluded by what they tell you they are deluding themselves as well. Keep this in mind.

Occasionally towards the end you can sense the plot-cogs turning: an authorial problem, and there’s a little soapy taste about the love-hate-love machinations in the minds of the women but it’s a great summer read.

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Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Harper Lee
Harper Lee

In 1993 Joanne Woodward was the narrator in Sorcese’s film of Edit Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Her voice was measured and melifuous, full of American cadences of the time; a formal English suggesting refinement, wisdom, and good behaviour.

I was just over two pages into Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s new/old novel (and if you’re a reader and haven’t heard of it you’ve probably been living on Mars), when I realised the voice in my head I was reading with was that of Woodward’s with the same measurement and melifuousness perfect for phrases like “a family example not Iikely to be discountenanced” and “Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her.”

The mood of life in Maycomb is set by annacdotes of the people in it. Tales of loyalty, family pride, and self reliance pepper the opening pages so by the time I met the aged Atticus Finch I was already steeped in small-town life and flavour. I expected, hoped for, a slow reveal of Atticus Finch but Go Set a Watchman was written before To Kill a Mockingbird and how could the author know what an indelable image her creation would leave on the minds of her readers; not to forget the looks and fatherly masculinity of Gregory Peck, from the 1962 film, that couloured it. Over a million copies have been sold in July: the month of it’s release, on the 14th. It’s been ringing tills all over the world and some critics have sharpened their knives and honed their sarcasm to firmly put it back in the bottom drawer.

It certainly isn’t as good as To Kill a Mockingbird but then no-one really thought it would be as part of the marketing campaign was to explain that the original publisher remarked to a young Harper Lee that the most interesting parts of the book were the flashbacks to Scout’s early years and being a novice, Lee took his advice and went back to her desk and, as we know, wrote Mockingbird, which has become a modern classic loved the world over. What is interesting in this book is its role as the precursor to that iconic text. You feel a sense of privilege to discover the germs of scenes that grew into those we know so well: the courtroom scene, for instance, that forms the climax of Mockingbird is a simple reminiscence Jean Louise (Scout) has when she visits the same courthouse.
However what is a surprise is that her father, Atticus Finch, is not the same man as the Mockingbird hero. In Go Set a Watchman ( from Isaiah: 21, 6) Atticus is a respected member of the Maycomb community but his attitude to race relations is totally different to those of the younger Atticus who Lee portrayed as a hero of tolerance and rational thinking; here he tries to justify racist attitudes as necessary to deal with, and live peacefully within, his chosen home. These ideas confound and horrify Scout, and us. However the climax, the confrontation between father and daughter, is very shallow and under-written with an outcome that has more to do with blood than sincere argument; the threat is weak and the ending is therefore disappointing.
It is remarkable to realise that not only was race still a devisive issue 20 years after the story of Mockingbird but today, in 2015, it is still an open wound on the face of American society: still as raw as a fresh cigarette burn.

As the mature woman Scout realises that her upbringing rendered her colour blind; but how can that be now that the model of her raising has turned against her? or was he always like he is now? If she is to stay in this world she needs a guide, a Watchman, to lead her through this place where she doubts she belongs or understands.
The writing is not as sharp and reliable as in Mockingbird but there are flashes of brilliance that set up images that stay with you; and most of them to do with the flashes back to Scout’s teenage years and before. The third person narrative is of the ‘close writing’ kind that sometimes gets so close to Scout that it often slips into the first person, a device that effectively creates the feeling of personal truth.
Go Set a Watchman as a companion piece to To Kill a Mockingbird is its strongest attribute; it may be thin and embryonic but to those who value artistic endeavour and its evolution it’s a valuable text.

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