Eve's Alexandria

Strange Times to be a Jew

Goldy is wearing his polar-bear jammies, the height of retrospective chic for an Alaskan Jewish kid. [...] Snowflakes, yes, the Jews found them here, though, thanks to greenhouse gases, there are measurably fewer than in the old days. But no polar bears. No igloos. No reindeer. Mostly just a lot of angry Indians, fog, and rain, and half a century of a sense of mistakenness so keen, worked so deep into the systems of the Jews, that it emerges everywhere, even on their children's pajamas.

Books that should have been on the Clarke Award shortlist, part 1: Michael Chabon's hugely enjoyable noir alternate history, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), about chess players, messianic conspiracies, and a washed-up detective named Meyer Landsman - is there any other sort? - in "Jewlaska".

(I mean, just look at that cover! What's not to love?)

In this version of the world, Jewish refugees and migrants after WWII did not form the state of Israel, but were expelled from the Holy Land in 1948. By way of a strictly temporary refuge, the United States granted the Jews the right to settle in Sitka, Alaska - another land with existing inhabitants, the Tlingit in this case, far from happy about the sudden, dominant population boost - for sixty years. (Other aspects of Chabon's world's alternaity surface only as glimpses - there is a reference to the President of Manchuria, for example - since the focus is entirely on Sitka and its inhabitants, and perhaps also because things are not all that different. And there is a strong implication that a reversion to our status quo is certainly not unimaginable.)

This period of sort-of grace is now coming to a close. A sense of time running out, of rootlessness, thus pervades the novel, threading through both the plot - the suitably noirish (i.e., shady, elaborate and essentially nonsensical) conspiracy that Landsman* sets out to unravel centres on efforts to bring to an end the need for the Jews' wandering - and the characters' reflections and reactions:

The wind carried a sour tang of pulped lumber, the smell of boat diesel and the slaughter and canning of salmon. According to 'Nokh Amol', a song that Landsman and every other Alaskan Jew of his generation learned in grade school, the smell of the wind from the Gulf fills a Jewish nose with a sense of promise, opportunity, the chance to start again. 'Nokh Amol' dates from the Polar Bear days, the early forties, and it's supposed to be an expression of gratitude for another miraculous deliverance: Once Again. Nowadays the Jews of the Sitka District tend to hear the ironic edge that was there all along.

[* I can't imagine that's an unintentional pun.]

As the title implies, the linguistic (and cultural) weight in Sitka lies with Yiddish rather than Hebrew, for reasons never really explained (at least within the novel): the text, both dialogue and character viewpoint-led narration, is peppered thickly with Yiddish slang (shtinker, shammes, dybbuk, shkotz - the latter, a quick Google informs me, being a specifically American Yiddish formulation - and, most prevalently, yid as a synonym for man). It's a fast and effective way to build up the texture of an unfamiliar world.

But then, the various layers of the setting saturate the punchy, present-tense prose throughout. To pick one concentrated example, there are the descriptive similes used for different characters' facial features, drawing liberally upon or resonating with the forbidding Alaskan climes ("his eyes are close-set and the color of cold seawater"), the lurking American presence ("a complexion tinged with green, like the white of a dollar bill"), or Jewish scholarly practice ("His skin is as pale as a page of commentary"). Elsewhere, the noir mood is evoked, just as effortlessly: "In the street the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat."

Landsman is the archetypal filmic detective: wry, acerbic, emotionally sealed-off (so as to hide his pain, of course), shabby of appearance, and wedded to the job ("But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead") because he doesn't really have anything else:

"I hate to wake you, Detective," Tenenboym says. "Only I noticed that you don't really sleep."

"I sleep," Landsman says. He picks up the shotglass that he is currently dating, a souvenir of the World's Fair of 1977. "It's just I do it in my underpants and shirt."

Landsman has lived in a fleabag hotel - site of the untimely death that launches Landsman's investigation, his room in which has "a view of the neon sign on the hotel across Max Nordau Street" - since becoming estranged from his wife, the brisk, capable, no-nonsense Bina (who, despite being a detective herself and Landsman's new boss to boot, gets entirely too little screentime; the way she is sidelined near the end was particularly disappointing). As we might expect, Landsman's attitude to her is composed of equal parts yearning and self-pity, enough to make us suspect that he has become enamoured of his own wretched defeat:

Landsman watches her walk across the dining area to the doors of the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria. He bets himself a dollar that she won't look back at him before she puts up her hood and steps out into the snow. But he's a charitable man, and it was a sucker bet, and so he never bothers to collect.

Landsman also has the requisite physically imposing but infalliably good-natured sidekick in the shape of Berko Shemets, son of a philandering Jewish father and a Tlingit mother, who has long struggled to fit in and find his identity, but who nonetheless juggles the elements of his life rather better than our lead, who notes with characteristic fatalism:

Unlike Landsman, Berko Shemets has not made a mess of his marriage or his personal life. Every night he sleeps in the arms of his excellent wife, whose love for him is requited, and appreciated by her husband, a steadfast man who never gives her any cause for sorrow or alarm.

As the tone in these two passages would suggest, the noir stylings of the novel are not only present in the surface narrative of world-weary cop and twisty murder mystery. The wry, defeatist self-deprecation of the narrative voice, Landsman's quiet conviction of fighting an impossible battle against overwhelming odds - but doing it anyway, one case at a time, albeit in a way often fogged by alcohol and/or concussion from being beaten up - expresses much of the mood of Sitka at large. There is despair, but it is laced with sanity-saving irony.

Furthermore, Sitka itself is frequently presented as shabby, a soggy cigarette-end of a place:

Night is an orange smear over Sitka, a compound of fog and the light of sodium-vapor streetlamps. It has the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat. The lamps of the Jews stretch from the slope of Mount Edgecumbe in the west, over the seventy-two infilled islands of the Sound, [...] Landsman can smell fish offal from the canneries, grease from the fry pits at Pearl of Manila, the spew of taxis, an intoxicating bouquet of fresh hat from Grinspoon's Felting two blocks away.

This especially applies to the Sitka of Landsman's usual haunts, which is to say the dives and joints and run-down diners of just such a detective. Chabon never stints on the offputting but enriching sensory detail:

The place is as empty as an off-duty downtown bus and smells twice as bad. Somebody came through recently with a bucket of bleach to paint in some high notes over the Vorsht's steady bass line of sweat and urinals. The keen nose can also detect, above or beneath it all, the coat-lining smell of worn dollar bills.

Things are different on the ultra-Orthodox, insular enclave of Verbov Island ("A stolen BMW in every driveway and a talking chicken in every pot", as one character puts it), but it is precisely this shiny optimism that arouses Landsman's suspicions: clearly they are up to something. As, of course, it proves; the community is, indeed, connected with the apparent suicide of the chess player in Landsman's hotel, in ways I won't spoil, and with a much more bizarre scheme involving a possible-saviour, gone wrong ("A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment").

There is undoubtedly a sense in which Yiddish Policemen's Union is a much less significant and transformative work than Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It is a very different type of book, though, a tightly-focused portrait of a damaged individual and a damaged society told through the lens of a claustrophic genre. It lacks the impact of its masterly predecessor, but it is nevetheless beautifully executed and a thoroughly enjoyable read. It is difficult to imagine many other authors who could combine the virtues of grimy fatalism, deadpan humour, uplifting tenacity and stylish prose quite so well as Chabon.

Landsman considers the things that remain his to lose: a porkpie hat. A travel chess set and a Polaroid of a dead messiah. A boundary map of Sitka, profane, ad hoc, encyclopedic, crime scenes and low dives and chokeberry brambles, printed on the tangles of his brain. Winter fog that blankets the heart, summer afternoons that stretch endless as arguments among Jews. Ghosts of Imperial Russia traced in the onion dome of St Michael's Cathedral, and of Warsaw in the rocking and sawing of a cafe violinist. Canals, fishing boats, islands, stray dogs, canneries, dairy restaurants. The neon marquee of the Baranof Theatre reflected on wet asphalt, colors running like watercolour as you come out of a showing of Welles' Heart of Darkness, which you have just seen for the third time, with the girl of your dreams on your arm.

~~Nic

(who feels obliged to tsk over the slip of historical detail re. the architectural topography of Jersualem: it was the Umayyad dynasty who first built over Temple Mount, not the Abbasids, even if one of the Abbasid Caliphs did have his name inscribed (badly) over the top of 'Abd al-Malik's. Unless this is another little alt-history nod, in which case I feel a bit silly and pedantic. But still, y'know, with a little glow of history geekery, nonetheless.)

I'm in heaven...

...because I bagged five books (yes, five!) for just £4 (yes, £4!) from my university library's duplicate book staff auction.  And what wonderful, expensive books they are.  I calculate that they would have cost me at least £150 if I had purchased them all online.  The two hardback volumes of The Novel, edited by Franco Moretti, are worth £65 each! I'm so happy I could cry.

Aren't they beautiful?

~~Victoria~~

Don't be Smart

It is difficult for me to write that I don't like Patricia Wood's debut novel Lottery.  It is such a sweet, generous, kind-hearted book, with such an inevitably happy ending, that saying you don't like it is a lot like saying you don't like puppies, or cookies, or sunshine.  You're apt to sound cynical at worst, disingenuous at best.  But, here goes. I don't like it.  Or, I do, but only because it is cute. I like it against my will.  It has tricked me into liking it with narratorial whimsy and a simplistic moral view of the world in which the bad guys are always punished and the good guy always gets the girl.  But I can't bring myself to like in a deeper, more meaningful sense, because it doesn't sit comfortably in the company of great novels and I don't think Wood ever meant it to.  Lottery is novel writing at its most innocent and optimistic - the fictional enquivalent of a hot water bottle and a glass of milk.  It wasn't written with literary prizes in mind and, having read it, I find its place on the Orange shortlist frankly bizarre.* 

The book begins as it means to go on.  That is, with a glib, witty abruptness that Wood uses as a function of character:

My name is Perry L. Crandall and I am not retarded.  Gram always told me the L stood for Lucky.

'Mister Perry Lucky Crandall, quit your bellyaching!' she would scold, 'You've got two good eyes, two good legs and you're honest as the day is long.'  Se always called me lucky and honest.  Honest means that you don't know any better.

Thus we are introduced to our hero and narrator, a 32 year old man with learning difficulties who has lived his whole life with his delightful battle-axe of a grandmother.  Abandoned by his mother and father as a baby, and estranged from his 'cousin-brothers' John and David, he has grown up entirely in the glow of her love and educative influence.  And, as she says herself, she hasn't made a bad job out of him.  Although Perry is 'slow' (his IQ is 24 point below average), he is clever in his own way -  often eloquent, always understanding and innovative too.  By the time the novel opens he has independently maintained a job at a marine supply store for over fifteen years. He has a long-established routine. In the mornings he eats his oatmeal, learns five words from his dictionary under Grams' direction and then cycles to work; at lunch time he eats 'fake crab' sandwiches and goes to the marina Handy Mart to moon over Cherry, the punk checkout girl; in the evenings he cooks a meal by following Grams' close instructions.    He isn't without friends.  His boss, Gary Holstead, is an old acquaintance of the family and very kind to him, while his colleague Keith is a constant companion.  A war veteran who has turned to drink, Keith is the quintessential diamond in the rough - a geezer with an old drafty truck, who belches, farts and curses his way through life meanwhile possessed of a heart of gold.  He drives Gram and 'Per' (as he, infuriatingly, insists on calling him) around on errands, and joins them for spaghetti nights and to play drafts.  All in all, Perry's is a happy, pre-lapsarian existence.   

The Fall comes (of course!) with his grandmother's sudden death, which leaves him essentially orphaned and victim to the whims of his uncaring natal family.  They swoop in to steal her assets out from under him (against her express wishes), selling the only home he has ever known and then abandoning him to his fate with nothing but a £500 cheque.  Luckily - because he is always lucky - his friends come to the rescue.  He moves in to the flat above Gary's store, and lives frugally, missing his Gram but maintaining the routine she had spent so many years instilling in him.  And then, he wins the $10 million dollars on the Washington State Lottery.  Gram had always bought a ticket, and so he does too.  What happens after that is inevitable: his mother and brothers realise that they always loved him after all, and all the people who ever rolled their eyes at him for being slow, or looked away when he talked, want to be his best friends.  Perry finds himself endlessly writing cheques, with more zeros than he can fit in the little amount box, just to make them all go away.

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Lottery is, essentially, a book founded in its plot.  Structurally linear, although with some well integrated flashbacks, it revolves around its sole big event - the lottery win - like a carousel that you can't dismount.  There is no denying it: it is mentioned on the first page, and then on nearly every page thereafter until the end.  After a while you realise you're passing the same landscape time and time again, and that nothing is really happening or changing.  Events are just repeating, over and over. It is obvious that Perry will be taken advantage of and, time and again, he is; it is inevitable that Perry will be happy nevertheless and he is; it is clear that his friends will continue to love him, as much because of his disabilities as in spite of them, and they do.  There are no great moral revelations on offer, no astonishing insights to speak of.  What we expect is what we get.

In of itself this isn't a fault, but it does mean that the book is sadly lacking in tension. It is clear from the outset that Perry is never in any real, sinister danger.  At one point Wood hints that his brothers' are contemplating killing him for his lottery winnings, but this could never actually happen, or even nearly happen, and the reader knows it. Lottery simply isn't that kind of novel.  Keith will always turn up in time; or Gram's memory will always stay Perry's hand.  The book deals in 'home truths' - it seems wrong to call them cliches, but I suppose that is what they are - rather than in death blows.  It doesn't help that Perry's family are the worst kind of caricatures - John, the grasping, sweet talking lawyer; David, the business man faintly embarrassed by his greed; Louise, the mother, a feckless, aging slut.  It is difficult to take them seriously.  They may as well all have twiddly black moustaches.  They're Bad with a capital 'B', like the villains in Victorian penny dreadfuls.

One of Perry's defining characteristics is that he is inert, and for me this is the novel's real downfall. His lottery win is a thing that happens to him, but it doesn't change him. It can't, because he hasn't the imagination to be changed by it.  He understands that it changes the way other people perceive him; in this he is (as Keith puts it) 'F**king wise for a slow guy':

'It's just that, before, people didn't like me when they didn't know me. Then other people decided they didnt like me even when they did know me.  Now its just the opposite. People like me and they don't even know me at all.  Sometimes they haven't ever met me and they like me.'  I am thinking about all the letters I get now.  All the letters that people write asking me for things. 

'It is the same thing, only opposite of before,' I say. 'The opposite of before.' 

But he doesn't have a character trajectory. He is essentially the same at the beginning of the novel as at the end, and so Lottery ends up telling us a dead-end and obvious story.  The moral message, the one we can all see coming from a mile away - something along the lines of Money Isn't Everything, or Money Doesn't Buy You Happiness - is made flesh in him, and becomes leaden. Perry doesn't learn the book's 'message' from experience.  He is just being what he is: honest and carefree, because he doesn't know any better. When, eventually, he gives most of his winnings away, he explains it in his usual charming manner:

'You gave it to them? Why?'  Her mouth is open.  She does not look like she believes me.

'Because they asked, because it was fair, and because they were my family,' I say.  'Because people should get what they want.'  Those are the reasons.  Then I say something she does not understand. Not one bit.  Nobody does. I have to say it twice.

'Because I didn't need it,' I say.

'Because I didn't need it, and they did.'

Such earnestness tells us nothing about being rich and human that we haven't already grasped from reading Enid Blyton or watching Blue Peter and Sesame Street as children.  I'm not fond of novels with a 'message' as it is; I'm not in the habit of reading fiction for explicit moral improvement. If morality is to be part of fiction's remit, and I think it can be, then it must be dealt with subtly and deftly.  In this case I think Patricia Wood is in danger of idolising innocence and sanctifying simplicity, rather than actually confronting what it means to a) have learning difficulties, and b) be selfless.  When Perry, sagelike by the closing chapter, extols his views on truth I felt I'd lost touch with the narrative altogether and stumbled into a Coelhoean nightmare:

Truth is many things.  Sometimes truth is what we want or maybe what we have.  It may be what we choose to believe.  Sometimes it is something real.  Something echt.  Something genuine.  Sometimes you know the truth when you speak it.  I am slow, but I know this.

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But I'm beginning to sound more critical than I feel, and am in danger of disparaging Lottery for not being what it was never meant to be.  I should mention, for example, that Patricia Wood has done a fine job of capturing Perry's narratorial patter - the way he explains difficult words; the way he mixes his own expressions with those of him Gram and Keith - and that the novel is often witty and funny as a result.  Take, for example, his reporting of Gram's lectures on alcohol:

'I swear if you [Keith] give my grandson any alcoholic beverage I will lambaste you from breakfast to Sunday!'  Whenever Gram called me her grandson in front of Keith, we both knew she was serious. Lambaste means beat up. It does not have anything to do with lambs or with cooking.  I do not drink alcoholic beverages because they taste like crap, Gram said.

And because Gram was full of natty maxims, so is Perry:

If you drink too much and are rich, then you are an alcoholic.  If you drink too much and are poor, you're a drunk. Being an alcoholic is a disease and being a drunk is because you're weak and have regrets. Our friend Keith is a drunk.

Overall the voice is convincingly done and Perry is many of the things Wood seems to want him to be.  Infuriatingly loveable; irrepressable; charismatic.  Admittedly, at times he sounds more autistic than slow, with his encyclopaedic memory for words and his love of patterns, and I would imagine that he is partly inspired by the likes of Mark Haddon's brilliant The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. At other times he is terribly frustrating.  Repetition and reiteration is one of Perry's most annoying tics and thoroughly infests the novel.  Throughout there is a sense of deja vu as Perry repeats certain words and phrases - 'I listen. I am an auditor' or 'That is so cool' or 'Don't be smart!'   It starts to wear after a while, but in a realistic sort of way.

I find it particularly hard to rationalise Lottery's place on the Orange Prize shortlist now that I am reading Lauren Liebenburg's The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam. It was also on the longlist, and is a debut.  And it is twice the novel that Lottery is.  A striking, gorgeous and dangerous book that also uses the voice of an innocent to explore corruption, it has none of Lottery's thematic flaws.  Why wasn't it on the shortlist instead?  Once again, the Orange Prize judges have me stumped.

~~Victoria~~

*Of course, that means that it will probably win.

A Modernist Summer

I'm not even half way through my Orange Prize reading yet (4 down, 5 to go!) and I have my first Archives assignment due in 3 weeks, so this may not seem like the best time to start making summer reading plans.  But we have just had our first week of glorious sunshine here in the UK ... and I can't help myself.   I love the anticipation of setting myself a challenge, and I think it can work very well as a focusing tool, even if I don't always stick to it to the letter.  I'm very pleased with how my 'Victorian Winter' turned out, for example - I managed to read all four of the period novels I set myself, plus 3 of the non-fiction books and one of the contemporary fictions.  The only area in which I utterly failed was the poetry. Must prioritise that next time.

So this summer I'm setting myself the task of reading three novels, two of them decidedly Modernist and the third from an (arguably) Modernist writer.  For some reason Modernism feels right for the season - what could be better than streams of consciousness on hazy, blue-sky days? I'm being a little ambitious, however, since the first and fattest of my choices is a book that has already beaten me twice.

1. Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce

I want Ulysses to be to 2008 what Don Quixote was to 2007. That is: a revelation.  I'm going to read it, all 1040 pages of it, no matter how slowly.  I don't care if it takes me till Christmas. And what's more: I'm going to understand it and, if at all possible, enjoy it. (Colleagues at work assure me that it's 'very easy once you get into it. Really', although I can't decide whether they're just being smug because they've mastered it and I haven't.)  My plan is to start it at the beginning of June, probably after the Orange Prize announcement on the 6th, and to read it slowly, with commentaries, while making notes and posting on it regularly.  No doubt the latter will fall by the wayside, but I'm determined to try my best.  I'm also going to arm myself with an annotated guide to the book's many allusions and references (can anyone recommend a good one?).

I wonder if anyone would like to read along with me? I don't mean in an official kind of way - I won't be starting a seperate blog or setting myself a schedule, because I know how useless I am at keeping to those kinds of things.  But perhaps there are other people out there who're daunted by Joyce, but would very much like to read him in company? 

2. Pilgrimage (Part One, containing Pointed Roofs, Backwater and Honeycomb) by Dorothy Richardson

I've had a Virago copy of this book loitering around the shelves for a number of years, but have never picked it up.  I was reminded of it recently when Carmen Callil (founder of Virago) mentioned it in the Guardian Review - apparently her mother is the only person she knows who has read all thirteen 'parts' of it.  Which is a little disheartening, I suppose, but I'm fascinated nevertheless.  Pilgrimage (published between 1915 and 1967) was Dorothy Richardson's life work and tells the story of Miriam Henderson, a young woman in search of her identity.  The first installment (Pointed Roofs, 1915) innovated the technique known as 'stream-of-consciousness', and once upon a time Richardson was considered amongst the most important writers of the early twentieth century, up there with Joyce and Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. My edition contains the first three books (which aren't very long), and I'm planning on reading them all, probably alongside Joyce.  I thought it might be an interesting comparison: the great male author of stream of consciousness up against its female innovator.

3. Night and Day (1919) by Virginia Woolf

This is the only Woolf novel I haven't read, and I've been saving it up. I have to admit that I'm slightly afraid of it.  I love almost everything else Woolf ever wrote; she has been my favourite writer for a number of years.  But, I keep thinking, what if I don't connect with this novel, her second and most traditional?  I imagine I'm just being silly as the synopsis sounds right up my street: a young woman realises that a life spent paying calls, drinking tea and serving her middle-class parents isn't her idea of living at all and decides to study mathematics instead.  I'm hoping that it will be the highlight of the summer, a perfect remedy to any Joyce related weariness I might feel.  I would quite like to combine it with reading Alison Light's Mrs Woolf and the Servants, which I impulsively bought in hardback and still haven't read.  And perhaps I should also read a more general book about modernism in literature - relevant Cambridge Companions are always worth a look. 

In other news: I may just have landed both volumes of Franco Moretti's The Novel for £4.  The library at work has had a duplicate book auction, with ridiculous starting prices and hardly any interest.  No other bids at the end of today, so, fingers crossed, they should be mine by the weekend. Joy!

~~Victoria~~

Bright Surface, Gleaming

I started reading Charlotte Mendelson's third novel, When We Were Bad, when it first came out in hardback in May last year.  After twenty pages, I put it aside.  I was in the middle of the Orange shortlist '07, and had just finished Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which I'd found difficult to read (the less said, the better), and something about Mendelson's book - the domestic pitch, the glib neatness? - made me squirm.  Picking it up again, I was initially surprised at my last-years-self.  I thought: could this possibly be the same book I discarded?   I didn't remember it being so witty, or so smooth, or half so compelling.  I was giddy and hooked for a hundred pages at least.  But then, around the midway point, I felt the enchantment beginning to wear off; another hundred pages and I was positively weary.  By the end I'd mostly lost my taste for Mendelson's witty flirtations with style and substance, and was desperate for something solid.*

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The novel centres around the Rubins, a liberal Jewish family headed up by the charismatic, history-making Rabbi Claudia, a woman whose ambitions, and ego, know no limits.  As the novel opens, in the spring of 2001, she is about to execute a social triumph - the marriage of her eldest son, Leo, which has been too long in coming - and is revelling in her element:

She shines amongst them, caramel-skinned, narrow-eyed, with a brain women envy and an opulent, maternal, fuckable body which makes men weak.  Those guests who do not know her well mill cautiously in her direction, hoping for their moment.

So popular is the Rabbi, so extroadinary, so gifted, so motivated, that she is almost obscene. She is a superwoman; a shining example of over-achievement, of whom a little goes a long way.  Her husband, Norman, is a brown mouse in comparison - even his name is a dull disappointment.  A retired academic with an unprofitable penchant for minor poets, he shuffles about the family home like the dethroned patriarch he is.  At Claudia's extravagent dinner parties he tells tired, self-depracating jokes about his failure and fends off the hungry envy of his wife's admirers.  Also at these dinner parties are their four children, put out on display as the perfect brood: the aforementioned Leo (successful lawyer, check), Frances (married, with baby, check), Emily (soon-to-be discovered as an actress, check) and Simeon (whose-book-will-be-out-some-day-soon, check).  They are 'attentive, affectionate, as close as a family can be.'   The blaze of glory that emanates from them on Leo's wedding day is almost too bright to look upon. And so on, and so forth.

Of course, they're about to tumble from the pedestal; nothing is ever perfect for long. You'd have to be daft as a bat not to see the fall coming.  As Mendelson puts it in her prologue: 'If this, the few minutes before the wedding, could be frozen and kept unsullied by the future - the Rubins in their heyday - their happiness would be complete.  But it cannot be frozen. Things happen.'   In the moments that follow Leo balks beneath the wedding canopy and abandons his bride for Helen Baum, the 40-something wife of a rival Rabbi with whom he has been having a turgid affair.  Running out of the synagogue hand-in-hand with his mistress, he leaves his family in utter disarray.  The patina of harmony quickly begins to peel away from them.  Frances admits to herself that she doesn't love her husband and is a terrible mother; Emily begins a rebellious affair with a woman; Norman reveals a long-kept secret (which turns out to be quite a happy secret after all) and Simeon hurtles from one feckless binge to the next.  Meanwhile, at the centre of the unravelling web, Claudia tries to bring them back together again for one final moment of glory on the publication of her new book on family values.

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For a while Mendelson's sharp, clean style brings all of this together successfully.  She manages to pull off a 'fusion' novel - the biblical saga of the Jewish household meets soap opera meets contemporary fiction - with humour and panache.  Certainly, she is a writer in full control of her art.  You can feel the skill in every well-turned sentence, and each one slips down perfectly - a smile here, a touch of tragedy there.  The conflict of Leo's lust, for example, is succinctly, deftly, expressed:

He is a rabbi's son whose family needs him; the house on which they all depend is crumbling; his grandfather is made and frail in the Home for Aged Jews; and even as he prays, a battering ram of an erection, a teenager's hard-on, is thumping against his desk drawer. 

And she has a beguiling way with metaphor, even if it does sometimes verge of the edge of the ridiculous:

Frances's words echo all the way up St. John Street.  Should she apologize?  Her blush heats the air around her: she is Jonathan's travel-kettle element, not a suitable Saturday night companion for Jay.

Mendelson winks and nods her way through a dozen whole chapters before you realise that you don't quite like the taste of what you're swallowing.  The premise is claustrophobic and self-limiting - it is difficult not to groan at the outset of yet another novel about familial breakdown, with nothing more to break the tedium, even if the family have the added interest of being liberal Jews.  The scenarios are repetitive - Leo is conflicted; Frances is conflicted; Norman is conflicted, and so on and on and on - while the characters are often bloodless or cartoonish or downright silly.  Worst of all, the narrative voice is vacuous - highly polished but with no depth to the grain.  A little, perhaps, like Claudia herself.  There she sits, the spider at the centre of the web, replete and gleaming, but giving no real sense of what lies beneath.  Norman expresses it well: Nothing can be straightforward with her.  Over the years he has learned that her apparent openness is simply a bright surface.  Mendelson seems to envision her as a latter day Mrs Dalloway, as she would have been if she and not her husband had been an MP, planning the party of the decade as her life ekes away.  But she is bound to fail; clever turns of phrase don't get that kind of thing done.  It requires something else, a sense of something which When We Were Bad is sadly lacking.  Restraint, perhaps, or subtlety. 

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The only character with whom I felt any sympathy was Frances, Claudia's sad, frumpy eldest daughter.  Her situation in life is so dismal, and so common, that it is difficult to actively dislike her; admittedly she also makes it hard to actively like her but nevertheless. Ambivalently married, with two young step-daughters and with a new baby of her own, Frances finds it impossible to speak in complete sentences.  She begins them, chock full of the urge to say something, only to watch them putter to nothing.  Her husband drones on about nutritional values, and road safety, and new shoes for his girls; and her mother orders her to buy chickens, get candles, be on time; and her younger siblings demand she comfort and care for them, while she feels a horrible detachment from everything:

Other people are warm right the way through, thinks Frances: full of love and interest and involvement , with tiny healthy wisps of annoyance.  But I am freezing cold inside, burning and brittle on the surface.  Could I be turning into baked Alaska? What is wrong with me?**

She even doubts her ability to love her own child; she feels un-natural. In some ways she reminds me a little of those women from Arlington Park, who piqued my sympathy last year with their coffee mornings and double buggies in the hallways.  There was something torturously mundane about their despair which Frances shares.  Or, at least I can imagine she does.  Really, though, When We Were Bad doesn't go in for the mundane tragedies - it prefers despair of the high-octane, complete weird-out variety - and, like her siblings and her mother, Frances eventually becomes a parody of herself. She wanders around the park dressed like a lonely cat-lady, and cries in the bath, and disappears for weeks only to return in a flurry of wide-eyed concern.  In time she realises that she is desperately attracted to her younger sisters' girlfriend and, well, you know where that kind of sexual revelation can lead.  Just imagine the cliche. 

Like her brothers and sisters, Frances is still, essentially, a child, tied to her mother's successes and failures, needs and demands.  (In an interview I read recently Mendelson joked that she would like to have called the book '50 ways to leave your mother'.)  She simply has no idea of what to do with herself, aside from to please her petulant, egotistical relatives and keep on waiting for better days:

Then it occurs to her.  What does she want? She cannot tell.  She understands 'ought' and 'should' and the subtle arts of delayed gratification, but reading her own heart comes less naturally, if it ever comes at all.

It becomes clear that the novel is about choosing when, and if, to make the break and leave the family unit, only the Rubins are decades behind the usual timeframe. When Leo makes the decision to elope with his mistress he is in his mid-30s and only finally severing the umbilical cord that holds him to the sacred mother.  In time, Frances takes a similar trajectory, but the younger siblings react with horror and disbelief:

'So why can't we do what we want, too?  Does she have to be, you know, the centre of everything?'

'Yes!' says Em, outraged. 'How can you even say that?'

'But we... aren't we grown-ups?... But don't you want things? Er, you know: affection, outside interes-'

'Are you mad? I don't want a bloody hobby. She's our mother! You can't just treat her like an ordinary person...'

The problem with all of this, the difficulty I have, is that it is simply untenable that four children could have gone away to university; could have gone to work daily; could have lived in the world, and yet continue to be so thoroughly shackled to their mother.  It is a pathetic scenario.  Aside from Frances, they all still live at home.  Without Claudia, they can barely feed themselves.  They whine and cry and breakdown at the slightest hint of difficulty or disturbance. They can barely make an emergency phonecall. When Leo runs off, they immediately start to bewail his inevitable death.  I find it impossible to believe that such a family, so patently lacking in survival skills, could have been cushioned from breakdown for so long.  Honestly.  The blurb tells me to expect an 'ordinary' family, experiencing 'ordinary' problems.  Instead I find a group of infantilised adults, cloistered like monks in the familial home, and dwelling under a gross illusion.  I marvel that the histrionic meltdown took so long.  I catch myself viewing the Rubins with distrust, as a gaggle of strawmen who couldn't possibly function outside of the narrative Mendelson has created.  They have been set up and manipulated only to be knocked down again. 

At this (rather critical) juncture it would be well to say that When We Were Bad does gesture at some deeper themes: what it might mean to be the first woman Rabbi in Britain and how a Jewish family might adapt to this development; the balancing of risk and desire in the modern world; and the increasingly late age at which children become independent.  But mostly they're squandered, and any conclusions feel slight and unearned. It is difficult to get away from the fact that the Rubins are too daft to sympathise with.  However, there is some success in Mendelson's treatment of the Holocaust.  As might be expected in a novel about London's Jews, it is always an elephant in the room, the unmentioned unmentionable that subtly overshadows everything.  Sideways allusions to the deaths of extended family members rate amongst the novel's most successful moments, and a picture of Claudia's parents tells a more meaningful story than the central plot:

There is another, older, picture in the corner of the mirror: a family not yet at ease with their foreignness.  Here are Gerald Simon, ne Jaroslav Schulz, the handsome charmer with too much Brilliantine, his dead brother's pocket watch casually displayed; Valerie, nee Veronka, wearing a high-necked blouse and an air of chilly withdrawal...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fundamentally When We Were Bad doesn't know what kind of book it wants to be - the 'fusion' wasn't so successful after all. It is constantly changing key, from farce to satire to earnest pathos; sometimes, all the keynotes are present at once. It has the disconcerting and sickening effect of passifying reader.  If you don't know whether you should laugh, or cry, or sigh, or roll your eyes, you end up doing nothing - sitting back, letting the clever prose slide off you, disconnected and increasingly ambivalent.  It wasn't that I didn't want to care for Claudia or Leo or Norman or Frances (especially Frances, whose dilemma of sexuality was destined to strike a chord with me) but that the novel wouldn't let me.  Just as I would be about to make a connection, just as I was about to decide to fall for them, they would do or say something inane; or Em and Sim would appear; and any reality in their situations would fall away, leaving behind sitcom caricatures.

I dislike the current trend for describing a novel as a 'rollercoaster'.  First, I think it's a silly comparison - reading is a relatively leisurely, thoughtful activity that lasts for hours or days or months, and is nothing like the adrenalin-pumped minute and a half of a themepark ride.  Second, it's a sure sign of lazy reviewing. Just another way of writing: 'This was an exciting novel. Really exciting. Yeah!'   But it occurs to me that reading When We Were Bad *was* a little like my (admittedly limited) experiences of riding rollercoasters: it's all thrill at first, with the initial dips and twists, but then, suddenly, you realise you want  to get off.  You want to stand on firm ground, and breathe regularly.  A little rollercoaster goes a long way. 

~~Victoria~~

*This need is now being filled by Rose Tremain's The Road Home, an old-fashioned sort of novel which I admire more with every page.

** Incidentally, the 'baked Alaska' bit? That's a classic Mendelson moment. You're right there with her, right up to the moment when she tips all the laws governing prose and empathy off the cliff.

Orange New Writer's Award, 2008

This will be the third year in a row that I have read the Orange Prize shortlists, both for the main prize and for the New Writer's Award.  I think it would be true to say that of the two lists, I have found the latter the most challenging, the most consistent in quality and the most satisfying.  Of course, the main lists have had their highlights, but the New Writer's Award has proved itself far more interesting in pushing boundaries and extending the traditional remit of women's writing. Last year's winner - The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly, set in a Burmese prison - was one of my favourite books of 2007; and regular readers will know how much I admired Naomi Alderman's Disobedience, which scooped the prize in 2006.  I conjecture a number of reasons for this, the main being that the award is somewhat below the radar of the mainstream press.  It is easier to nominate books with sharp edges, stylistic quirks and thematic teeth if everyone is looking somewhere else.  At the same time, the choice of judges is edgier - this year they include Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, and Clare Allen, author of Poppy Shakespeare.  And there isn't the same pressure to 'sell' the books to a particular audience - and lets be honest, the Orange Prize is as much a marketing excercise as it is a literary award - or to court the attention-catching controversies.  There is much more of a sense of the books *as* worthwhile books, rather than as statements about the world of women's fiction, at the centre of it all.

This year's list sounds as diverse as ever*: 

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Willie Cooper arrives on the doorstep of her ancestral home in Templeton, New York, in the wake of a disastrous affair with her much older, married archaeology professor. That same day, the discovery of a prehistoric monster in the lake brings a media frenzy to the quiet, picture-perfect town her ancestors founded. Smarting from a broken heart, Willie then learns that the story her mother had always told her about her father is a lie. He wasn't the one-night stand Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. Someone from Templeton.

Now, despite my lack of enthusiasm for small-town tales of familial revelation and the fact that I think calling your heroine 'Willie' is an error of collosal proportions, I'm actually looking forward to this with some anticipation.  I've heard that the narrative is largely magical-realist, and that Groff's novel is the Orange New Writer's equivalent of an X-Files episode, complete with immortals, ghosts and an actual monster.  Which only goes to show that a blurb can be misleading in the extreme...

The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg

Nyree and Cia O’Callohan live on a remote farm in the east of what was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, theirs is a seductive childhood laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Their world extends as far as the big fence, erected to keep out the ‘Terrs’ whom their father is off fighting. The two girls know little beyond that until the arrival, from the outside world, of ‘the bastard’, their orphaned cousin Ronin, who is set to poison their idyll for ever.

Zimbabwe, which used to be known as Rhodesia, is a hot topic these days, and of the three shortlisted books Liebenberg's is the one I would have been most likely to read anyway.  Born in Rhodesia in the 1970s, and resident in South Africa since the 1980s, she is in a good position to write a timely, insightful novel about the state of the region.  The hardback is small, and perfectly formed, and has a delightful first sentence: 'Cia is my sister and I am her leader.' Which is just about as incisive a statement about sibling relations as I have some across.  Also, it wins the prize for most pleasing cover.  Dare I predict a winner so early in the game?

Inglorious by Joanna Kavenna

Rosa Lane is a dynamic journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon soon after the death of her mother, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job – and begins her long fall from modern grace.

This is the least enticing of the synopsis, I think.  As soon as I read the words 'thirties' and 'handsome boyfriend' my brain lurched to a stumbling halt.  Immediately steroetypes sprang to mind - I imagine the heroine ala Bridget Jones, slightly plump and ineffectual and desperate to be loved - but the cover of my paperback edition went some way to dispelling them. No publisher in their right minds would market a sugary chick-lit confection with a picture of a (horribly ugly) ceramic dog.  I live in hope. It is also worth mentioning that while Inglorious is Kavenna's debut novel, it is not her first book.  That honour goes to her myth-inspired travel narrative, The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule, which sounds truly fascinating and which I have added to my wishlist. 

Given the range of talent on offer it's a shame that the award's remit is confusing, for both the media and it's potential readership. Why is the shortlist limited to three contenders, when clearly there is the scope for more?  Last year the chair of the panel, Jackie Kay, made bold to declare during her speech that the judges had requested permission to expand the shortlist to four, but had been denied.  Why are some debut novels on the New Writer's list, while others are on the main shortlist?  Does this suggest that there is a hierarchy of quality?  It is inevitable that unfair qualitative assumptions will be made in the circumstances.  Could one book win both awards, I wonder?  Why is short fiction eligible for the New Writer's award but not for the main prize?  None of these questions have ever been properly addressed by the Orange committee. I'm sure such confusion is at the bottom of its relative obscurity. 

If nothing else I would love to see it raised on to a par with the main prize and the shortlist expanded to six books. After that it would good to see a clearer definition of eligibility - perhaps debut novels should *only* be eligible for the New Writer's prize?

~~Victoria~~

* This is the point at which I am obliged to mention that I have been sent copies of all the New Writer's Award shortlist by their publishers.  I tried my hardest to come by library copies, but to no avail - York City library budget simply doesn't stretch to debut women novelists.

And the winner of the Clarke Award 2008 is...

Black Man by Richard Morgan

(Gollancz S.F.)

This news in a text message from Nic, who is currently hobnobbing at the ceremony.  I'm sure there will be a full report from her in a few days time, when she has properly recovered from a) the manic review writing of the last few days, and b) the beer she is currently imbibing.

EDIT: Niall Harrison now has some photographs from the ceremony online.

--Victoria--

Arthur C Clarke Award 2008 - a round-up

Since I have to leave in less than an hour to go into London for the ceremony, this will of necessity be a brief post. But I wanted to make a few summary comments about this year's shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction.

I'll deal with the books in my order of preference; links are to my posts here at EA.

Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel

The first of the shortlisted books I read, and it remains my favourite: I loved it the first time through for its sharp, slow-burn tension and that audacious, crazy ending. I loved it even more when I returned to it to write my post, as - flicking through to select quotes for the review, I was struck again and again by how clearly focused and how clever it was. A genius sleight-of-hand trick and a smart meditation on how the modern world might soon look, its central theme - the distorting effect of long-term fear - implicit on every page, in every character act, in every line of dialogue.

Richard Morgan, Black Man

But it was, I will say, a close-run thing. Black Man is a virtuoso piece of work, undoubtedly: a rich and heady dive into the sort of endlessly-fascinating future world that feels authentic in every sharpened edge and worn-down corner. Black Man's scope is much wider than The Execution Channel's. Its cast of characters bigger and more diverse - and much, much more vivid and real - and its vision of the future encompasses everything from work permits to race relations. But it is edged out because it is just a little too big, its structure too uncertain and just a little too subservient to the tropes of this type of story; I preferred the sleek, deadly focus of MacLeod. But I would be very happy to see it win, and can't wait to read Morgan's upcoming fantasy novel, The Steel Remains.

Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army

Again, this book places third only through the narrowest of margins. The Carhullan Army was a joy to read: beautiful and lucid and heartbreakingly clear in its emotional and thematic intent. I was completely drawn in to this world of women living and working together, and alone, in a landscape I love. In both its optimism and its darker undercurrents, this is a thoughtful and insightful novel. It loses out in large part because I wanted more of a good thing: it ends much too soon, feeling to this reader like a failure to follow through the implications of the set-up and the themes. But lovely, really, and deserves a much wider audience.

Stephen Baxter, The H-Bomb Girl

The most purely enjoyable book of the shortlist, and it really ought to be a classic of children's fiction in the future. I would have adored it when I was 12 or 13. I put it fourth mostly because of these things. If all the books are to be judged against each other on the same terms, then The H-Bomb Girl feels unavoidably thin by comparison. For all the striking darkness of its vision of nuclear apocalypse, it isn't really doing much more than a coming-of-age adventure story. Which is great and entertaining and written with a wonderful lightness of touch, but not in the same league as the three books ahead of it. Still, I won't be wrecking the venue if it wins.

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Hall's book has a lot going for it - good prose style, fast pace, fabulously wacky ideas (conceptual text sharks that eat memories!), fun typesetting tricks. And it definitely suits being read in two days, as I've done. But it never rises to the level it sets for itself, being essentially a very simple and simplistic story, with little variety in its emotional notes, wrapped up in metatextual tinsel and artfulness. There is, sadly, nothing much out in those waters.

Matthew de Abaitua, The Red Men

As I said in last night's review, I feel quite strongly that I'm not the intended or desirable audience for this book, and as such I found its tics and weaknesses irritating in ways that I might have been able to ignore had I cared more about anything that was going on. A lot of potential here, but it's too long, too self-indulgent, and lacks focus and - ultimately - narrative coherence. Very funny in places, though, and starts much better than it ends. I'm astonished, though, that this is on the shortlist rather than Ian McDonald's vastly superior Brasyl, which I am reading at the moment and shall review soon.

And now I must sign off for the evening. Other reviews can be found at Torque Control; of particular note are Abigail Nussbaum's two-part review at Strange Horizons, and Adam Roberts' piece at Futurismic. Enjoy!

~~Nic

Purely Conceptual Waters

"A concept wrapped in skin and chemicals," I repeated. "That sounds like a human being to me."

Scout shook her head. "No. There's more to it than that."

I didn't argue - what did I know what human beings were or weren't?

And so to the last of my Clarke Award reads: Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, a rather different beast from its fellow shortlisters. Its devices and designs - "purely conceptual" fish that feed on thoughts, un-space tunnels beneath city streets, an assembly of planks and computers on a carpeted floor that abruptly transforms into a ship on the ocean waves, etc. - are more fantasy than science fiction, and they may not even be 'real' in terms of the story's own world, let alone our own. But as the title suggests - generally I am suspicious of punning titles on anything that is not deliberately a comedy, but this one is at least clever - the novel aims to be a psychological mirror, with what we see reflecting both the protagonist's mind and our own expectations.

We begin with a man, our narrator, coming to on a bedroom floor as if recovering from drowning: choking and gasping for air, vomiting at the shock of sensation and the extremity of his disorientation:

Static behind my eyes bacteria-swarmed dangerously towards another blackout and, snow-blind and and shaking, I pushed my wet mouth down tight into the palms of my hands, [...] Slowly, slowly-slowly, the world began to reappear in sickly greens and thumping purples

It is a visceral, overtly physical way to open a book that is really all about the mind, a sharply evocative piece of writing whose central issue only becomes clear gradually, to both reader and character:

It isn't all coming back to me. I don't know any of this at all.

I felt that prickling horror, the one that comes when you realise the extent of something bad - if you're dangerously lost or you've made some terrible mistake - the reality of the situation creeping in through the back of your head like a pantomime Dracula.

I did not know who I was. I did not know where I was.

That simple.

That frightening.

The man finds a letter addressed to him - from someone claiming to be himself from before the memory loss, who signs off as "the First Eric Sanderson". Memento-style - and this is not the last place in which Raw Shark Texts has an element of the seen-it-before derivative about it - Eric has left himself instructions on what to do when this situation arises: the phone is set to speed-dial his psychiatrist, Dr Helen Randle, the car keys are in front of him, and there is a map to tell him how to get to her. No explanation, only the slightly-too-glib, "It's very important that you go straight away. Do not pass go. Do not explore. Do not collect two hundred pounds."

Dr Randle tells him that this is not the first, although it is certainly the most complete, of his memory loss episodes; she suggests that Eric's condition is a long-term response (albeit of late presentation) to the shock and grief of losing his girlfriend, Clio, to an unspecified accident while they were on holiday in Greece together. Eric's reaction to this is bewilderment; he remembers nothing, feels nothing, and asks only whether there was anything he could have done to prevent the accident. Dr Randle knows nothing of his family or friends; Eric, it seems, cut himself off from everyone he knew before he came to her for treatment.

Dr Randle also warns Eric not to read any further messages from himself, worried that this will harm his progress. For months, he obeys this, and although new letters and packages arrive each day - sent, as per the promise in the original letter, by some pre-arranged system apparently triggered by the final loss of his memory - he simply piles them in a cupboard, unopened. He potters around in the house that doesn't feel like his, uses money from the well-stocked bank accounts, and feeds the unfriendly ginger cat ("a sort of whirlwind made of blades", in Eric's words, whose collar names it 'Ian') he doesn't recognise. He gets by, trying not to probe too deeply.

These opening chapters are readable and effective - lucidly-written, fast-paced, intriguing and disconcerting - and the links between memory and selfhood explored quietly rather than heavy-handedly. That Hall can write, and in several different registers as the story demands it, is clear. Particularly enjoyable (although rather too rare, overall) are the engaging little snippets like this thumbnail sketch of the psychiatrist:

Dr Randle was more like an electrical storm or some complicated particle reaction than a person. A large clashing event of a woman whose frizzy hack job of white-brown hair hummed against a big noisy blouse which, in turn, strobed in protest against her tartan skirt. She had strontium grey eyes which crackled away to themselves behind baggy lids. She made the air feel doomy, faintly radioactive. You half expected your ears to pop.

Then Eric has another episode, and the story proper gets underway. He is 'attacked', in his living room, by a flood of water (there and then gone, leaving no trace) and some dark thing that lurks at the edges of his vision and seems to disturb the fabric of reality around it. ("The idea of the floor, the carpet, the concept, feel, shape of the words in my head all broke apart on impact with a splash of sensations and textures and pattern [...] I went under, deep, carried by the force of my fall.") This, he realises once the attack is over, is what has left him feeling like he is drowning.

Panicked, he sets about reading the First Eric's letters. He learns about Clio - although still not about how she died - and a little more about who he is, although still he can connect with none of it. First Eric's snapshot of his and Clio's last holiday together is a particularly fine passage, bringing the sunset skies and clear water of the Greek island to life beautifully (and also, along the way, explaining to us why the cat is called Ian - "Un-catlike and inappropriate in a fundamental way, but still confusingly feasible", the name was picked by Clio and him to freak out anyone who asks).

Through First Eric's letters, our narrator also discovers what is attacking him and causing his memory loss, and what he can do to try to stop it:

The animal hunting you is a Ludovician. It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tide of cause and effect. This may sound like madness, but it isn't. [...] The streams, currents and rivers of human knowledge, experience and communication which have grown throughout our short history are now a vast, rich and bountiful environment. Why should we expect these flows to be sterile?

The idea of a conceptual shark, stalking Eric through the waters of his mind - through writing and conversations and ideas, seeking to eat him by stripping away his memories - is a wonderful one. Hall sensibly keeps the shark on the margins for much of the book, making it a half-glimpsed threat, continually pursuing but rarely seen. Even when we do see it, we see its effects rather than any direct description (and arguably, its effects are what it is):

I turned. Less than fifty years behind us and keeping pace, ideas, thoughts, fragments, story shards, dreams, memories were blasting free of the grass in a high-speed spray. As I watched, the spray intensified. The concept of the grass itself began to lift and bow wave into a long tumbling V. At the crest of the wave, something was coming up through the foam - a curved and rising signifier, a perfectly evolved idea fin.

Soon, Eric is on the run from the shark, and following First Eric's suggestion of trying to get in touch with some people who may be able to help him, the "un-space committee" who are equipped to deal with such things. He teams up with a young woman named Scout, who bears more than a passing resemblence to dead Clio (although it takes Eric a long time to spot this) and who is herself fleeing with identity-stealing predators. They travel through a series of tunnels under Manchester to see Dr Fidorous, who comes up with a plan to help capture and kill the conceptual shark.

So far, so fun. Where the book disappoints is in its curious lack of adventurousness. Having set up this scenario, and gestured at the tension between reality and imagination and mental illness in Eric's perspective on the world, Hall has surprisingly little to say. The ideas are interesting, the writing smooth and economical, and the typesetting games range from ploddingly obvious (Eric's desperate running footsteps in an echoingly empty building are represented by a series of "thud"s scattered about a half-empty page) to the inventive and entertaining (a particular favourite was the fifty pages of the conceptual shark, drawn with words, getting bigger and bigger as it swims up on our narrator; the Jaws music was made for such moments). Not necessarily original, but fun.

Yet the metatextual riffs - the various layers of recollection, story, and reconstruction that go into making up Eric and his world, coupled with the way the book, as both vehicle-for-story and artefact, is deconstructed through the typesetting - are nice, but underdeveloped. This latter point is only highlighted by Hall's choice of authors for his epigraphs: Calvino, Borges, Murakami, all of whom do this sort of crumbling-self, crumbling-world thing in much more stylish and fascinating ways. Furthermore, the story itself, and its message, is banal: boy meets mysterious girl, boy sleeps with girl and wakes up with starry eyes, there's a bump in the road because girl has Secrets, but ultimately they realise they love each other and that she was his dead girlfriend all along and that he just had to learn not to blame himself for her death... Even the 'shock' problematising ending comes as no surprise at all.

Sweet, but oddly conventional subject matter for a book striving so hard to be the opposite.

~~Nic