Eve's Alexandria

Stepford Seal-wives

It's a slow week at Alexandria, perhaps related to the fact that Vicky, Esther and I spent much of the bank holiday weekend together, talking about books, drinking wine, and exploring Bowness and Windermere (including but not limited to the utterly, utterly wonderful Fireside Bookshop). In the absence of fresh reviews, here's a selection of things I've written recently (ish) for other venues.

At Strange Horizons: By Light Alone, by Adam Roberts

At SFX: Intrusion by Ken MacLeod

And finally, another SFX review, which only appeared in the print edition: of Margo Lanagan's Brides of Rollrock Island.

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Margo Lanagan has been publishing young adult and children’s fiction since the early 1990s, but she only garnered widespread attention outside her native Australia with the harrowing but superb World Fantasy Award-winning (and Hugo- and Nebula-nominated) short story ‘Singing My Sister Down’, which appeared in her collection Black Juice in 2004. Since then she has published two more collections of short stories and – a badge of honour for any self-respecting writer – managed to outrage the Daily Mail with her gruelling 2009 fairytale of child abuse, Tender Morsels.

A new Lanagan novel, therefore, is an event to be met with both delight and a faint dread: it’s likely to be excellent, but it’ll also put you through the emotional wringer. And Brides is indeed not a cheerful tale, but it is a richly nuanced one. Set on a remote island and told in Lanagan’s trademark pared-back, lilting style, the novel traces the shattering consequences of an abused and outcast woman’s decision to summon a selkie (a seal transformed into a woman) into her community. Soon every man is bewitched by the desire for a seal-wife – beautiful, obedient and sad, powerless as long as their real skins are kept hidden away – of his own, and their deserted wives and daughters are heading for the mainland in droves.

Framed as a series of first-person accounts, fragments of vivid lives, Brides is a bleakly beautiful, highly atmospheric be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale.

~~Nic

Bel Dame Sans Mercy

Some days, Nyx was a bel dame - an honored, respected, and deadly government-funded assassin - other days, she was just this: a butcher, a hunter, a woman with nothing to lose. And the butcher had a bounty to bring in.

Lesson for lit-blogging life: never read a book you know you're really going to want to write about on the eve of starting an all-consuming new job in a brand new city. It can only end in tears. That, and a seven-month wait of missed opportunities and lost momentum, of you and the book crossing paths at the wrong times, of watching everyone else say everything you wanted to say about it, and then - worst of all - moving on to other things* while you're still carrying the notes you wrote around in your bag, ever the optimist.

[ * Although I noticed just after writing that faux-gloomy sub-clause that some people are, like me, only just writing about it. So I'm not alone in being late to the conversation. ]

The novel in question is God's War (2011) by Kameron Hurley, a punchy, pacy science fictional thriller (with all sorts of deliciously knotty thematic goodness) that has the sort of opening you don't forget in a hurry:

Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.

Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jaks, and lost it two rounds later when Jaks hit the floor like an antique harem girl.

Nyx lost every coin, a wad of opium, and the wine she'd gotten from the butchers as a bonus for her womb. But she did get Jaks into bed, and - loser or not - in the desert after dark that was something.

Three short, snappy paragraphs in, and I'd already fallen hard for this book. There's the bold gut punch of the first line (wait, she sold her womb?), followed up by the viscerality and attitude of the second (the blood, the alcohol, the swaggering stagger of our protagonist pushing her way into a bar just after major surgery): this will be a story about gender, and embodied experience, and a heroine whose toughness is honed in large part through her own talent for getting into tight spots. (Okay, that last part comes more in retrospect: there's an air of the Indiana Jones about the way Nyx talks her way into getting sucker punched on a semi-regular basis.) Then we have the build-up and the bathos of the boxer going down like "harem girl", the qualifying adjective "antique" signalling that - for all the mention of deserts and the almost-familiar Middle Eastern-shading-into-Central Asian ring to the place names - this is not going to be some pseudo-1001 Nights image of Islam, or of Muslim women. Finally, we have the queering of boxer and harem girl alike, as Nyx takes the sexual intiative and "get[s] Jaks into bed".

A few pages later, I realised that Hurley also gives good townscape: vivid, faintly snarky (the second sentence here), and richly suggestive of far-future tech, bustling commercial life, and alien ecology:

Faleen was a port city, the kind that took in the ragged handfuls of off-world ships that sputtered into its archaic docking bay every year looking for repairs, supplies, and usually directions. Faleen wasn't the sort of place anybody off-world came to on purpose. Most of the ships that rocketed past Umayma were so alien in their level of technology that they couldn't have put into the old port if they wanted to. The port design hadn't changed much since the beginning of the world, and most everybody on Umayma wanted to keep it that way.

They drove past women and girls walking along the highway carrying baskets on their heads and huge nets over their shoulders. Bugs were popular trade to the magicians in Faleen. Professional creepers caught up to three kilos a day - striped chafers, locusts, tumble bugs, spider wasps, dragonflies, pselaphid beetles, fungus weevils - and headed to the magicians' gym to trade them in for opium, new kidneys, good lungs, maybe a scraping or two to take off the cancers.

The novel does, from time to time, pause to catch its breath - particularly when we're sharing the viewpoint of the secondary protagonist Rhys, of whom more below - but the delight in the act of imagining the world and its larger-than-life characters, which I find in both the quoted passages, is ever-present. Some of the reviews I linked above found the onslaught of new! fun! stuff! and the kitchen sink too! a bit much, but I revelled in the energy of it. The headlong dash of a pace does stumble on a couple of occasions, notably over the (ill-advised) structural tripwire of following up the breakneck opening adventure with a One Year Later time shift after 50 pages. But on balance, God's War more than lived up to its early, in-your-face promise, and ended up being one of my favourite reads of last year; not least, because Hurley does such intriguing things with gender.

As I read on from that opening scene, following Nyx through the morning after the womb-selling night before, it dawned on me that virtually everyone with whom Nyx interacts, in any capacity, is a woman: cops, generals, traders, mechanics, guards. Her cultural reference points, too - when they aren't about something related to the desert (one character's distaste is shown when her face "scrunche[s] up like a date") - position women, not men, as the measure against which things can be judged; "every woman worth her weight in blood", she reflects, knows how to do basic repairs on the local equivalent of a car.

For generations, Nyx's homeland, Nasheen - one of several states carved out of the dusty, inhospitable surface of the planet Umayma - has been embroiled in a bitter war of attrition with neighbouring Chenja. Both countries have been shaped by the conflict: specifically, by the vast price paid in young men's lives, which has utterly distorted their demographics, and the way their respective religious traditions (both variants of Islam) have developed to cope with this. In Chenja, the response has been an entrenchment of patriarchy: rigid segregation of the sexes in public life, a host of finger-wagging restrictions on women's demeanour and behaviour, and endemic polygamy (the ceiling on the permissible number of wives having been raised significantly from the traditional four of Islamic law); I also got the impression that men in certain classes and professions - perhaps heads of families? - were excused from military service.

Nasheen, meanwhile, has been force-grown in a matriarchal direction: it is ruled by a queen and an almost exclusively female military and political elite, while virtually all men serve on the front until they turn forty or die, whichever comes first. Generally, it's the latter. Like the veiling of Chenja's women and its exaggerated practise of polygamy, this, too, is an extrapolation of Islamic law, honed to brutal extremes by science fictional cirumstance. Although the term jihad is never used in the book, as far as I can remember, arguably the idea - hotly debated for centuries - that warfare for the defence and expansion of the community is a fard al-'ayn (an individual obligation for all Muslims, or all Muslim men, as opposed to a fard al-kifaya, something that can be carried out on their behalf, say by a professional army) is at the root of Nasheen's implacably callous treatment of its boys and men. It is also the reason for the state's employment of people like Nyx to enforce the policy:

A clerk the color of honey had given Nyx a bel dame's note for a boy named Arran nearly three months before after he'd deserted his place at the front and sought refuge in Chenja. His officer had called in the bel dames because she believed he'd been exposed to a new Chenjan burst, a delayed viral vapor that hid out in the host for up to four months before triggering an airborne contagion capable of taking out half a city before the magicians could contain it. Nyx had gone into the bel dame office and been inoculated against the latest burst, so all she had to do was bleed on the boy to neutralize the contagion, then cut off his head and take him home. Even clean, the penalty for desertion was death. Boys either came home at forty or came home in a bag. No exceptions.

This was Nyx’s job.

Some days, it paid well.

The result is two radically different understandings of gender, born from the same set of cultural and religious traditions, which repeatedly throw each other into relief in all sorts of creative and interesting ways. These understandings clash most directly and frequently in the respective forms of Nyx, the hard-drinking, brutally-competent bounty hunter, and Rhys, a deeply pious (but in his own way rebellious) Chenjan refugee with a taste for poetry. For the first half of the novel, Rhys is our fish-out-of-water, his disapproving but thoughtful gaze showing us Nasheen - and Chenja - through the contrasts he notices:

He remembered how strange it was to see her eyes at all. He had heard that Nasheenian woman did not wear veils, but he still found her vanity surprising, decadent. Chenjan women could submit to God and wield a rifle with equal ease, but Nasheenian women had allowed their propensity for violence to pollute their beliefs. Wielding a rifle, they believed, made them men in the eyes of God, and men did not have to practice modesty or submission to anyone but God. Nasheenian women had forgotten their place in the order of things.

To Rhys, newly arrived, Nasheenians are "godless women who murdered men and bred like flies"; later, he reflects pityingly that, while women in Chenja always have "husbands and brothers or sons who were responsible for them, even if those husbands looked after forty or fifty wives", Nasheenian women "all came to adulthood with the terrible knowledge that they had to fend for themselves in this terrible desert". Nyx, by contrast, notes with (not unambiguous) relish that "Women in Nasheen didn't grow up looking for husbands. They grew up looking for honor and glory".

The gendering of the interactions between Nyx and Rhys is fascinating: variously exhilarating and thought-provoking in its subversiveness. Nyx regularly fixes on aspects of Rhys' physical appearance that are coded feminine (we're told he has "pretty, dark eyes with long lashes", for example); when Rhys - much later in the story - finally comes to pay explicit attention to the physicality of Nyx, it is her strength he focuses on:

"Nyxnissa," Rhys said, opening his eyes. He saw the sweat beading her forehead, her glistening bare arms. The gun was heavy, and as she stood against the window frame in her breast binding and knee-high trousers, baldric too tight, he saw the power in her arms, the muscle under her flesh. He had felt it when she pushed him to the floor, the weight of her.

She turned to them, outlined in the blue haze of the coming night, and in her face - the hard jaw and suddenly flat, fathomless eyes - he saw the woman who had burned at the front. He was breathless.

I like this passage a lot. Nyx is not unsexed, here - the reference to breast-binding arguably draws attention to her womanhood, rather than implying a denial of it - and her attractiveness is a powerfully embodied thing. Yet there is also no sense in which she is an object, even when viewed through male eyes; and in this description she is, as in much of the novel, carefully controlled and difficult to read, in contrast to Rhys' passionate sensitivity.

This off-kilter gendering is equally pronounced when Nyx and Rhys talk: Nyx tends to be blunt and abrasive, prone to completely misjudging Rhys' mood; Rhys tries to make conversation for its own sake, and rather than reacting with aggression when Nyx blunders into offending him, Rhys internalises his bewildered hurt ("He looked down into his lap so she could not see his face. Sometimes he wondered how two people could work together for so long and still know nothing about one another") or meets her lack of tact with wounded dignity:

"Just make it look good, all right? It's bad enough you're Chenjan."

"I didn't ask to go along. If you take offense at the—"

"It's your fucking accent I can't stand." Something roiled up in her, something old and twisted. She hated it even as the words slipped out. She pressed her fist to her belly.

He shut his book and stood. "Excuse me."

"Sit down."

"I signed an employment contract with you," he snapped. "You did not obtain a writ of sale. I’ll be in the dining car." He rolled open the door. It banged behind him.

Nyx rubbed at her face. The worst of her troubles always started with what came out of her mouth.

(This exchange wouldn't be out of place in a screwball comedy, only Rhys is Katharine Hepburn and Nyx is Cary Grant.) All of this makes Nyx and Rhys alike fascinating characters to spend time with. Rhys' faith is sensitively drawn - the way it shapes his reactions, the comfort it offers him - and his nuanced, bookish insight means he is a welcome change of pace, a still centre at the heart of the novel's often chaotic whirl of action and colour; but it also makes him stubbornly, wilfully ignorant and deeply vulnerable to the challenge to his gendered identity that Nyx poses. Nyx deepens and to some extent problematises the kick-arse heroine archetype: her attitude and her aptitude for violence make her mesmerising company, but the prickly pride and the rashness that go along with the mindset needed to survive in her world mean that she puts characters we care about in danger, repeatedly and often with fatal consequences. Towards the end of this instalment - God's War is the first in a trilogy - it becomes increasingly explicit that Hurley is using Nyx to explore the costs and limitations of the very violent heroism that makes the novel such a bloody-minded joy to read:

Nyx had wanted to be the hero of her own life. Things hadn't turned out that way. Sometimes she thought maybe she could just be the hero of someone else's life, but there was no one who cared enough about her to keep that close. Hell, there was nobody she'd let that close. No one wanted a hero who couldn't even save herself.

The gender dynamics go beyond Rhys and Nyx, although they're particularly pronounced in their case. Rhys is propositioned by women more than once, with an openness he finds both crude and bizarre. "Ah, the shit I'd like to do to you", says one, prompting Rhys to reassure himself that he can't possibly be a sexual object, since "Chenjan mullahs taught that men's bodies were clean, asexual [...] Women, real women, were not stirred to sin at the sight of men."

More generally, boys and young men are fetishized and coddled for their utterly involuntary sacrifice in service of Nasheen, in a way that is reminiscent of the infantilising pseudo-awe bestowed upon women for bearing and raising children - and remaining virginally 'pure' until such time as they're able to do that in the sanctioned setting of marriage - in the more patriarchal segments of western society today (hello, purity balls and crisis pregnancy centres). 'Good' boys are placed on pedestals and treated as if they're fragile - at one stage Nyx gets out of a rickshaw and holds out her hand to help Rhys down - until they can go to the front to die, while boys who fall through the cracks become prostitutes, or are executed as deserters. The birth of a boy is a time of grief for his mother, because one way or another she is likely to outlive him.

To cut a very long-winded story short, the examination of gender supplies much of the attitude and energy of the novel. The fact that it is overwhelmingly women who do the posturing and the violence is undeniably a part of what makes it such refreshing fun to read: it's there in the way Nyx recruits her dirty-dozen team (there's a running joke about one woman she lures away from a rival team by promising her "a bigger gun"); it's there in her enemies, like this former bel dame sister:

Rasheeda kicked one of the chairs around and sat backward on it, folding her arms over the headrest. Luce slouched in the chair next to her and let her burnous fall back to reveal the ivory hilts of her pistols.

The other aspect of the novel of particular interest to me (given my professional interests as a historian of the Islamic world) was Hurley's effort to imagine Islam - or rather, Islams, plural - in space. The planet Umayma is home to a number of different communities, all variants of one of the three Abrahamic religions (and in at least one case possibly a synthesis of them), but the focus in God's War is on the future!Muslims. Naturally, this means quite a bit of Arabic, which I will now geekily catalogue for you. Feel free to skip the rest of the review and just go straight to buying the book. ;-)

The name Umayma itself sounds like the diminutive form of umma, 'community' (historically, a way of referring to the Muslim community as a whole, above and beyond political/linguistic/sectarian/etc boundaries), and thus conveys very neatly the sense that this is an offshoot, a colony world. Overall, it is evident that, to the extent that Nasheen's cultural roots are Arabic, the language itself has long since developed into something only distantly related to today's fusha or the Classical Arabic of the Qur'an. (I vaguely got the impression that Chenja might have a more Iranian heritage, not least because the letter/sound 'ch' exists in Persian but not in Arabic.) As Ian Sales has noted, for example, naming practices seem to have gone awry, with several female characters sporting male names like Husayn and Reza. 'Yah' has morphed from the vocative particle (a word you put in front of the name of someone you're addressing, sort of a cross between 'Hey' and the 'O' of archaic English, as in "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou...?") to being an honorific title, accorded only - as far as I can tell - to the small class of people who are trained as magicians.

Terminology more directly related to religious practises, as may be expected, hews closer to usages familiar to me: at one point "the waqf" is mentioned in passing (it's glossed as "the dole", which seems a logical development; historically, waqfs were private endowments created to support the upkeep and staffing of family mausoleums, schools, hospitals, etc; here, the term seems to signify a form of state-organised social security). To 'collect the zakat' (an obligatory tithe on personal wealth that goes to the poor), however, seems to have taken on a slang meaning along the lines of 'pay the piper'.

The Nasheenians' holy book is called the Kitab, the meaning of which represents an interestingly symbolic drift (for all I know unintentionally so). The name 'Qur'an' comes from the verb meaning 'to read aloud' or 'to recite', reflecting both the tradition that the Prophet Muhammad was illiterate (and thus a blank slate for the revelations he received), and the long-standing emphasis in Islam on orality: on learning the holy text by heart rather than having to consult a written copy, and experiencing it through communal worship, something that is read or recited aloud. Calling the Qur'an - or possibly a future!Qur'an - the Kitab (literally 'book', from the verb 'to write'), on the other hand, suggests that the text is now something accessed at a remove rather than committed to memory, and highlights the fact that the language in which it is written is now archaic, no longer a spoken, living thing.

End geeking. Go read!

~~Nic

The Girl Who Was on Fire

"Let's give a big round of applause to our newest tribute!" trills Effie Trinket.

To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps. Possibly because they know me from the Hob, or knew my father, or have encountered Prim, whom no one can help loving. So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.

I'm not sure there's much left to say about Suzanne Collins' bestselling young-adult novel (and now box office-smashing film) The Hunger Games (2008). Abigail Nussbaum has collected a profusion of links over at the Strange Horizons blog, which between them dissect the story as shown on both page and screen in terms of its portrayal of violence, gender, race, reality TV (something Abigail has looked at in more detail in her own reviews of book and film), and more, together with fascinating meta-discussion of how The Hunger Games was marketed and the problems of selling female-fronted action film to Hollywood.

Coming to the phenomenon late - I read the book only last month, having rescued it from the TBR doldrums so I could read it before going to see the film - I was struck by two things. One: It's not, by any objective standards, a particularly well-written novel. Two: But goodness me it's compulsive reading, even so. Not since Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy (the first two volumes of which I wrote about here last year, and the last here) have I gobbled down a story with such alacrity. For three days in a row I found myself counting down the hours until I could go home from work, because being home from work would mean being able to read more of The Hunger Games.

At an unspecified distance into the future, north America has become a terrible, horrible, no-good dystopia named Panem - yes, 'bread' - in which freedom has been banned and the government controls food. (Hat tip, YA dystopia story generator.) After an unsuccessful uprising against the evil regime some generations back, most of Panem's population now lives in twelve Districts, subject to varying levels of deprivation and close police supervision. The people are forced to supplement their starvation-level diets with state handouts, which are earned by sending their teenage children to fight to the death in an arena during the annual, televised Hunger Games.

Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch — this is the Capitol's way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. "Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen."

For this, as on several occasions, the film does a better job of conveying the story's backdrop than the novel does. In the film, the history is presented semi-satirically, in a jaunty little propaganda film that is played each year before the ceremony in which the 'tributes' - the children to be sent to the arena - are selected by lot, and the audience is left to assume that things are probably more complex. In the novel, we must make do with the dour, earnest omniscience of our narrator (I'll come back to what I mean by this in just a moment), Katniss Everdeen, who becomes a tribute for her District.

As a setting, Panem is almost comically vague in its doominess and oppression: genetically modified 'mockingjay' birds allow the state to eavesdrop on its subjects, anyone stepping out of line is scooped up by a surprise!hovercraft that appears instantly from out of nowhere, and once we reached the privileged Capitol whole feasts materialise the instant they are thought of. (There is a good thematic reason for the latter, at least; having spent most of her life unsure of where her next, inadequate meal is coming from, Katniss obsessively catalogues what she eats whenever she has the opportunity, and derives real joy from simply being full. It's one of her many endearing character traits.) When Katniss embarrasses an arrogant judging panel during the build-up to the Games - shooting an arrow through the centrepiece of the elaborate buffet feats they're ignoring her for, in a moment of pure, in-your-face awesomeness - we get the sort of hand-waving haziness over consequences that reminds me of nothing so much as the essay of an undergraduate trying to bluff their way past a point they clearly haven't thought about at all:

"What about my family?" I say. "Will they punish them?"

"Don't think so. Wouldn't make much sense. See they'd have to reveal what happened in the Training Center for it to have any worthwhile effect on the population. People would need to know what you did. But they can't since it's secret, so it'd be a waste of effort," says Haymitch.

(Why would anything specific need to be revealed? Why would punishment for Katniss' disobedience need to have an "effect on the population" - as opposed to, y'know, on Katniss - and what does that phrase even mean? Above all, what use is absolute arbitrary power if you don't exercise it?)

Anyway, it all makes no real sense, but in the heat of the story it doesn't really matter. And the heat gets underway almost immediately: we begin in District 12 on the day of that year's pre-Games ceremony, the reaping. Twenty pages later, the name of Katniss' beloved waif of a sister, Prim, comes out of the reaping pot, and Katniss is pushing her way forward to volunteer in Prim's place. It's a striking gesture, both in-world - volunteers are vanishingly rare, except in some of the richer Districts where children are trained and fed for years to prepare for the Games - and for the reader, too: the impulsive, steely determination of Katniss to protect her sister sings through.

Taciturn, closed-off Katniss has been the family's literal bread-winner for years, illicitly hunting in the woods beyond the boundary fence using her late father's old bow and arrows, and swapping or selling her extra kills for grain and fuel. She has no patience with weakness in herself or in others. Her mother, who seems to have had a breakdown after their father's sudden death in a mining accident, is treated with distance and sometimes even outright contempt by Katniss:

One time, my mother told me I always eat like I'll never see food again. And I said, "I won't unless I bring it home." That shut her up.

Here we must head into one of the novel's major stylistic and structural weaknesses, though, because despite this unfair but understandable (given how young she is and how much much strain the situation has placed on her) frustration with her mother, Collins cannot resist having Katniss editorialise with an emotional insight beyond her damaged years, explaining to us how we should read these emotional tangles: the precise roots of this reflexive dislike ("some small gnarled place inside me hated her for her weakness, for her neglect") and how she knows she's not being fair, and so on and so forth.

This failure of will when it comes to the first-person narration - this inability to let Katniss be a character who expresses only herself and her feelings rather than being a clumsy mouthpiece for the author's preferred characterisation of others, or to let readers work out the omissions and ignorances and half-truths for themselves (or not) - became a recurring frustration for me as the novel wore on. For a taciturn, emotionally-damaged teenager, Katniss is almost preternaturally perceptive about motive, unless there is a specific plot reason for her not to be. Almost as soon as a character appears, Katniss has to tell us that they're a Good Egg really, as if somehow we aren't trusted to form our own judgements. Take this exchange, for example, between Katniss and the stylists assigned to give her a makeover when she arrives in the Capitol (appearances being everything in the quest to attract support, and thus sponsorship, during the build-up to the Games):

The three step back and admire their work. "Excellent! You almost look like a human being now!" says Flavius, and they all laugh.

I force my lips up into a smile to show how grateful I am. "Thank you," I say sweetly. "We don't have much cause to look nice in District Twelve."

This wins them over completely. "Of course, you don't, you poor darling!" says Octavia clasping her hands together in distress for me.

"But don't worry," says Venia. "By the time Cinna is through with you, you're going to be absolutely gorgeous!"

"We promise! You know, now that we've gotten rid of all the hair and filth, you're not horrible at all!" says Flavius encouragingly. "Let's call Cinna!"

They dart out of the room. It's hard to hate my prep team. They're such total idiots. And yet, in an odd way, I know they're sincerely trying to help me.

Strangely enough, I had worked that out, in fact: maybe it was the "distress", maybe it was the "encouragingly", maybe it was the fact that they're too silly and fluttery to be hateful? Who can say. And would it have mattered enormously even if I'd read them differently?

The only character whom Katniss consistently misinterprets is, of course, the love interest, her fellow District 12 tribute Peeta. Peeta is a bit of a charisma vacuum, frankly; tiny District 11-er Rue makes much more of an impression during her brief flowering of (manipulatively) endearing page-time, although apparently not enough of an impression on some readers that they noticed that she's repeatedly described as having dark skin, and thus it's not, in fact, political correctness gone mad that a black actress was cast in the film to play this innocent little girl who rouses Katniss' protectiveness because her delicacy and vulnerability remind her of Prim. (Sigh, world. No, really, sigh.)

But Peeta, however dull in his own right, is central to the novel's most interesting aspect. I don't mean the Games themselves. The Games are, as many others have said, basically just a watered-down version of Battle Royale, lacking that film's gruelling physical and emotional brutalism. It's clear from the outset of The Hunger Games that not only is Katniss not going to die, but also she's not going to have to kill anyone who doesn't deserve it in some way (trying to kill her, trying to kill someone else who's nice, generically evil). No; what kept me turning the pages so convulsively was a) Katniss herself, who - irritatingly over-explanatory narration aside - proves a smart, tough and resourceful heroine, and b) wanting to see how Collins was going to Houdini out of the narrative locked box she'd set up for herself. Sure, Katniss wasn't going to kill, but how would Collins get round that? There can only be one winner of the Hunger Games, and you only win by being the last child left alive.

The twists and turns of Katniss' adventures in the Games arena - her struggles to find enough water to keep herself alive as much as her brushes with more violent death - are entertaining. But what impressed me was the emerging theme of how the Games are played out: not just through killing and avoiding being killed, but also by playing to the vast unseen television audience, watching the selective feeds from the arena's omnipresent cameras. Before the Games, Katniss gets a crash-course - semi-successfully - in how to perform for the crowd: primped and preened and dressed in fabulously ridiculous but eyecatching outfits by her chief stylist Cinna, she and the other tributes are paraded through the Capitol, and interviewed in a flashy TV studio before an eager audience.

Remember, heads high. Smiles. They're going to love you! I hear Cinna's voice in my head. I lift my chin a bit higher, put on my most winning smile, and wave with my free hand. I'm glad now I have Peeta to clutch for balance, he is so steady, solid as a rock. As I gain confidence, I actually blow a few kisses to the crowd. The people of the Capitol are going nuts, showering us with flowers, shouting our names, our first names, which they have bothered to find on the program.

The pounding music, the cheers, the admiration work their way into my blood, and I can't suppress my excitement. Cinna has given me a great advantage. No one will forget me. Not my look, not my name. Katniss. The girl who was on fire.

Win the crowd, and you win tangible support in the arena: gifts of food, weapons, first aid supplies. Fail to entertain, though, and you're in trouble, as Katniss finds when she spends the first few days of the Games just hunting for food and hiding from the other tributes a couple of miles away on the other side of the arena (her strategy for much of the novel is simply to find enough resources to survive while everyone else kills each other, although she has a couple of very enjoyable moments where she puts her smarts and her survival skills to more pro-active uses). One morning she awakes to a forest fire, which drives her back towards the action, the Games' controllers (she realises) having decide to push her into doing something that will excite the viewing public a little more. Before she goes into the Games, Haymitch - a washed-up former winner of the Games and the the District 12 tributes' chaperone and advisor in the Capitol - teaches her something that will prove to be the key to her survival:

"All right, enough," he says. "We've got to find another angle. Not only are you hostile, I don't know anything about you. I've asked you fifty questions and still have no sense of your life, your family, what you care about. They want to know about you, Katniss."

"But I don't want them to! They're already taking my future! They can't have the things that mattered to me in the past!" I say.

"Then lie! Make something up!" says Haymitch.

"I'm not good at lying," I say.

"Well, you better learn fast."

Delight the viewing public enough - give them surprises, give them pluck, give them someone to root for, give them a story - and you might be able to tip the scales in your favour. Katniss gradually discovers that she can use Peeta's very public declaration of affection for her - stammered out between blushes during his pre-Games TV interview - to her advantage. Audiences lap up the drama of, as she puts it, "Poor tragic us", the star-crossed lovers who cannot both survive the arena. And so Katniss plays along, performing desperate heartbreak for the cameras as she protects the badly-injured Peeta and plots her survival.

Impulsively, I lean forward and kiss him, stopping his words. This is probably overdue anyway since he's right, we are supposed to be madly in love. It's the first time I've ever kissed a boy, which should make some sort of impression I guess, but all I can register is how unnaturally hot his lips are from the fever.

The conflicting layers of Katniss' emotions - her play-acting, her (entirely baseless and plot-convenient) conviction that Peeta is play-acting too and out to kill her, and her inexorably growing feelings for him regardless - are sensitively and subtly drawn, and as a sideways looks at both the artificial narrative arcs of reality TV and the performative self-identity and lack of privacy of the internet age, it's very effective indeed, with Collins juggling the ambiguities and painful compromises required by the situation extremely well:

"Either that or he's got very generous sponsors," says Peeta. "I wonder what we'd have to do to get Haymitch to send us some bread."

I raise my eyebrows before I remember he doesn't know about the message Haymitch sent us a couple of nights ago. One kiss equals one pot of broth. It's not the sort of thing I can blurt out, either. To say my thoughts aloud would be tipping off the audience that the romance has been fabricated to play on their sympathies and that would result in no food at all. Somehow, believably, I've got to get things back on track. Something simple to start with. I reach out and take his hand.

So, yes: recommended, with reservations. Because it hooks, and it won't let go.

~~Nic

An Avalanche About to Slide

Women, even quite young women, had a disconcerting habit of falling in love with him. Or imagining love. He would not have minded so much if he himself were not susceptible to sexual longings as some individuals are susceptible to pollen even as others are immune.

Seigl was sexually susceptible: less so emotionally susceptible. He'd had a number of love affairs since late adolescence but had never wanted to marry nor had he been weakened, or flattered, by another's wish that he marry. "Intimacy, on a daily basis. Hourly! How is it accomplished?"

I don't imagine that The Tattooed Girl (2003) will be the last Joyce Carol Oates novel that I read - any writer as lauded as she is surely deserves more than one chance - but it certainly didn't turn out to be a great place to start. There are some excellent passages in this potboiler about an author, his domestic help, and her lover, but ultimately I never really felt like it rose above the exaggerated flaws of its central trio - pedantic, petty, and almost childishly lurid, respectively - to become something larger and more subtle. (I note that Vicky's first outing with Oates, way back in the infancy of this blog, didn't go terribly well either. Can anyone make a recommendation?)

The first of our trio - of whom we're told that he "wasn't a vain man"; I refer my readers to the excerpt at the head of this post and ask, oh really? - is one Joshua Seigl, a half-Jewish author primarily famous for writing a Holocaust novel. He is a fussy, prissy mass of neuroses, "a large bewhiskered gregarious-seeming man who in fact prized his independence, even his aloneness", and much of those sections of the novel that are told from his point-of-view consist of him overthinking things to the point of paralysis, or remembering how he has overthought things in the past. What do his fellow residents of the exclusive Carmel Heights district think of him? Is his spare room clean enough? Should he take a teaching post at a university to support himself? The answer to that one, inevitably, was no; he fears "the powerful attraction of teaching, as an emotional substitute for writing".

I imagine it was Oates' intent to present Joshua as his own worst enemy - perhaps if he stopped procrastinating and gave up some of that much-prized solitude, he might become a bit more interesting, if only because he'd have to vary his topics of conversation a little after a while - but he makes for pretty tedious and rather caricatured company. He is "an avalanche about to slide", who walks with a cane, clings to railings as he descends staircases for fear of falling, and decides to employ an assistant - not as his secretary, you understand, more as his executor. He romanticises himself and his privileged existence with every faltering, emotionally-palsied step he takes:

The subject of finances embarrassed Seigl, and made him restless. His Marxist sympathies arouse him to a self-disapproval and yet: receiving an income freed him from any obsession with money-making. There was a purely romantic, unworldly quality to Seigl, his discomfort at being paid for his writing, for any expression of his "spirit". For wasn't writing a spiritual endeavor, in essence? It was conceived in the privacy of a man's heart, and therefore had to be pure, uncontaminated by greed.

He is also, we discover a little way into the novel, all of 38 years old.

Despite having all the lust for life and self-possessed spark of a particularly timid septugenarian, however, Joshua still appreciates the visual stimulus that is Alma Busch, the young woman upon whom he impulsively bestows the office of his assistant. (The phrasing is deliberate; 'bestowing' is more or less exactly how Joshua conceives of his relationship to her, and he is almost entirely oblivious to the damaging power imbalance this creates.) It's not quite that the sight of her enables him to cast off the shackles of his self-imposed aura of premature age - he mentally puts her in the box he marks "sexually attractive young females", which seems a bizarrely detached way for even a midlife-crisising man to think - but he definitely finds her hot. Hot, that is, in a really, really patronising way: after reflecting on her "beautiful thick-lashed eyes, moist and yearning", he proceeds to think of her as an animal:

Yet he smiled down at this awkward buxom girl standing so passively before him. Like a young farm creature, a sleek young calf for instance, waiting to be herded in one direction or another.

Alma is, I think, the most interesting character in the novel, in the sense that she's the one who feels closest to a human being. We mostly see her through the eyes of the other two protagonists - more on the third in our trio, Dimitri, in just a moment - but on the occasions when we are party to her thoughts, she's a fascinatingly vivid creation, all longing and rage and inarticulacy:

And Alma made sure he wasn't creeping up on her like he did sometimes (without him knowing she saw him in the corner of her eye) and she was prowling restless and hot Hate hate hate both of you Jew kike bastards and her heart was pounding like she'd sniffed the purest coke straight up into her brain and she watched seeing her hand open a glass-fronted bookcase in Seigl's study and from a shelf she pulled a book that made her smile almost, small as a children's book, which was what she thought it might be, the title sounded like a children's fairy tale, Anna Livia Plurabelle, but when she opened it and tried to read the tiny print swam in her eyes, fucking words made no sense like they were not English or any kind of English she'd been taught and her heart kicked in resentment and fury and her hands yanked the covers of the little book back until she heard the fragile spine crack and she smiled with childish satisfaction like a boy yanking a frog's legs apart tearing the frog into two pieces. There! Fucker.

Her inarticulacy, in particular, makes her stand out: in a novel filled with people who spend a lot of time telling eloquently plausible half-truths or downright lies about themselves, Alma is someone who is oppressed by words. Her struggles to explain herself - to name herself - are so often suppressed and stunted by others' abuse and condescension, or her own fear and incomprehension, that she repeatedly resorts to physical, (self-)destructive ways of expressing herself: the damaging of one of Joshua's books, here, or the use of her body to keep people (men) interested:

Saying now, to make Dmitri who was sullen and sulky and disgusted with her love again, as in high school she'd tried to make boys love her who'd gone out with her once, twice, three times then dropped by saying weird wild things that flew into her head, anything to snag their straying attention, "Guess what? He said he had some sickness. 'Medical condition' he said. This cane he has..."

Even, here, when she does use words, they are desperate and scattershot things that "flew into her head", rather than tools she can marshall to regain control of a situation or express her thoughts.

Alma's lover, Dmitri, is a much less nuanced portrait: a villain at whom we can readily hiss, but not much more than that. Even his own point-of-view describes him as a "predator", and when we're told that he feels "a thrill of pity" for Alma when he first sees her, it provokes a shiver of misgiving. Here is an example of where I'm determined to try Oates again, because 'thrill' is a wonderful choice to combine with 'pity', offering a beautifully concise shock of Avoid! This! Man! - who gets excited by a fellow human being's vulnerability, except someone skin-crawlingly creepy? - without overplaying the hand. It's a shame, then, that Oates doesn't stop there, instead piling on the evidence of Dmitri's wrongness with each fresh page. Exhibit A:

He was feeding her now, watching her eat. [...] Sometimes watching females gorge themselves disgusted him but Alma was different. A beautiful soft fleshy goose you wanted to fatten. Stuff her milky white face and throat with the richest foods till her liver swelled, ripened, burst.

Ick ick ick I do not want to spend an entire novel in this man's company get me out of here.

Dmitri hates Jews (or at least the Jews like Joshua that his confirmation bias lets him see): they're rich, he's not, thanks to their "cunning and conniving" natures and/or "possibly a gene". But most of all he hates women, and likes to spend as much time as possible musing on how his abusive, manipulative and eventually violent power over Alma makes him feel more like a man, and how if he were only as rich as Joshua he'd be sleeping with some desirable woman rather than "slut white trash" like Alma.

A human punching bag, this Tattooed Girl.

Every guy needs this, sometimes.

Her mouth was bleeding. Her nose. Handfuls of hair yanked out. A tear in one of the soft, dopey-looking nipples.

Alma is 'the Tattooed Girl' because of a tattoo on her cheek. Superficially, the difference between Joshua and Dmitri can be seen in the divergent ways they respond to their first sight of this tattoo: Joshua's impulse is to try to brush it away, as if it is a temporary blemish, whereas Dimitri sees it as a target that he might aim a fist at. But is Joshua's dreamy musings on the female form and his comparison of Alma to "a sleek young calf" really different in kind, rather than degree, to Dmitri's imaginings of her as a goose for fattening?

Neither of them credit her with much of a mind of her own. Joshua thinks of her as a "simpleton" and a "child"; her likely virtues as an assistant, he reflects, will be that she is, "Not very bright, maybe. But steadfast, dependable. Likely to be loyal to her employer. And never critical", and once she is working for him he tells himself that "[s]imple repetitive household tasks that would have been maddening to Seigl seemed to be consoling to her", blissfully ignorant of the fact that she is stewing in unfocused anger at him. To Dmitri, she is a sexual being without self-awareness or possibly even self; she is a "slattern", who has "a look about her like she wasn't wearing any clothes but didn't know it". To Alma herself, she is helpless:

For the Tattooed Girl was the first to concede her weakness for adoring any man who refrained from kicking her in the gut, as she adored any man who did kick her in the gut, out of a craven need to adore any man.

This is, essentially, the novel; I haven't mentioned Joshua's unbearable sister Jet, who swoops in periodically to tell Joshua what a genius he is, strike dramatic poses, and talk a lot about how having Jewish heritage on one side of the family gives her the right to annexe other people's genuine suffering to the grand and terrible project of being a spoiled rich girl with bugger all to do. It's possible she's mentally ill, as it happens, but goodness knows Joshua doesn't stop gazing at his navel long enough to notice. What develops is a sort of Gothic novel: we duly wallow in luridness, hatred, and Joshua's pompous self-absorption:

Seigl had intended to begin with his manuscripts. Clearly, this was urgent. Yet, faced with the prospect of seeing what he'd accumulated over the past fifteen years, and of needing to reread so much, he felt weak, defeated beforehand. To be a writer was a moral commitment, maybe he hadn't the strength. The tragic grandeur of his subjects mocked his feeble talent. [...] he lapsed into a sudden, stricken silence.

As I wrote in my notes on this book at several points, frustrated: YES, IT'S SO HARD TO BE YOU.

So: moments of wonderful insight and skill and subtlety, lots of dreary histrionic silliness to wade through to get to them. Please, point me towards some better Joyce Carol Oates, because on this evidence I would love to discover her work.

~~Nic

Our damn consolation

I've said hardly anything about the Orange Prize so far this year.  I've been sitting back and watching from the sidelines, resisting the lure of the longlist and staying out of the perennial dogfight about sexism.  But now the shortlist is out and I'm back on board with a read-along.  I prevaricated about doing it, but then a colleague at work asked me if I would like to host an Orange Prize reader's day with her in June and how could I resist?*  Obviously this would mean reading the six books, and I couldn't resist that either.  This year's shortlist has grabbed my attention.  After a slightly lacklustre showing in 2011, I'm excited to see how cerebral this year's list is.  I'm sad and slightly outraged that Ali Smith has been omitted (again!), but thrilled to see The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller there (I already read and reviewed it in November last year). I haven't read any Anne Enright since The Gathering won the Booker Prize but I loved that book and am keen to read more; Patchett, Ozick and Georgina Harding have all be on my TBR for a while.  

Which leaves Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. Of the shortlisted books, this was the one about which I felt ambivalent.  It has been sitting on my book shelves for almost 12 months, since last year's Orange Prize in fact.  It arrived from Serpent's Tail during the longlist readathon and got pushed to one side.  Then it was Book at Bedtime on Radio 4, and then on the Booker shortlist, and then the Giller shortlist, but I still didn't read it.  Why? Because it's set during WWII and it's about jazz.  As you may remember, I have a very low tolerance threshold for war books.  I could go a very long time without reading yet another novel set in Nazi-occupied Europe.  Last year's Orange longlisted The Invisible Bridge very nearly did for me.   And jazz?  I just don't get it.  My ear isn't tuned in right; all I hear is randomness and twiddling.  I understand that what I'm listening to is pure musicality, improvisational genius, but I still don't get it deep down. So the motivation to read Half Blood Blues wasn't ever very strong. It was the first of this year's shortlisted books that I picked up after the announcement simply because it was sat ready on my shelf.

I've read it quickly (by my standards anyway) in just four days, expedited by a day off sick. What a strangely compelling reading experience it was; not exhilarating exactly, but exciting because of Edugyan's accomplishment.  The plotting is achingly simple and the rest is all character, character, character.  The book stretches out the personalities of its principles like taffy.  Edugyan makes them so thin at times you can see right through them; and then she gathers them back into themselves to make something rich and unfathomable. Afterwards they squat and grow in your mind.

Our narrator is Sidney Roscoe Griffiths - Sid to his friends - an octogenarian double bassist, recounting the story of his experiences in Nazi Berlin and occupied Paris from the vantage of fifty years hindsight. He was in Germany during jazz's golden age in the 1920s and early 1930s, playing with the Hot-Time Swingers.  Sid's oldest friend 'Chip' Jones was the drummer - they were both from Baltimore, the African-Americans needed to 'sex up' the German band.  Their manager Ernst played the clarinet, and there was Big Fritz on sax. Jewish Paul Butterstein played their piano.  And then there was 'the kid' on the trumpet.  Hieronymous Thomas Falk: twenty years old and an absolute prodigy, one of God's golden few.   The Nazi regime forced the group underground in the late 30s, and in 1939 they fled Berlin for Paris under the auspices of Delilah Brown and her patron, Louis Armstrong.  They settled down to cut a record - the record that will make them famous - only for the 'Boots' to invade less than a year later.   1940 finds them waiting anxiously for the arrival of the visas that will allow them to leave the country, but a reckless early morning visit to a cafe leads to Hiero's arrest for 'race pollution' and the dissolution of the band forever.  (That isn't a spoiler; Sid recounts the arrest in the opening chapter.)

Falk is a rare thing in 1930s Germany: a 'Mischling' or half-blood 'but so dark no soul ever like to guess his mama a white Rhinelander.  Hell his skin glistened like pure oil.'  His status in 1930s Europe is increasingly difficult and uncertain.  In his native Germany he has been stripped of his citizenship; in Paris he is the enemy. He stands out everywhere and doesn't belong anywhere: 'When Hiero'd cut in with his native German, well, [they] would damn near die of surprise.  Most ain't liked it though.  A savage talking like he civilised.'  Sid is the opposite; he can fit in anywhere.  He is 'so light-skinned folks often took me for white.  Son of two Baltimore quadroons, I come out straight-haired, green-eyed, a right little Spaniard... this given me a softer ride than some.'  Like his bandmate Paul - Jewish, but blond haired and blue-eyed - Sid can 'pass' in a prejudiced society.  His difference isn't stamped on his features, although this leads to a problem of a different order: 'we passed, sure' he remembers, 'But there was passing, and there was passing.  Sometimes it seemed we'd passed right out of our own skins.'  Like Hiero, Sid doesn't always know where he stands in the world or, rather, what he stands for.  'Passing' compromises his sense of identity.  Occasionally there is a note of envy in his descriptions of Hiero, of his grave face and 'majestically bony' physique, his blackness 'like a starless night'.

Sid's relationships with those around him are the threads that hold the book together.  Following them, untangling them, stepping back and reappraising them is what makes the novel such an intense pleasure.  They are fiendishly difficult to riddle out.  Chip, for example, is Sid's oldest friend - the pair are still close in 1992 - but he's a player, a hard drinker, an inveterate liar and, on more than one occasion, downright cruel.  Their relationship is ambivalent, sometimes hostile, always unequal.  Sid characterises it as more addiction than affection:

Don't know what it is about that man.  He's like a weakness for me, even seventy years later.  I ain't a stupid man, no more than most. And he ain't that damn charming. But it seems we is friends to the last.  Why I don't know.  The best I can say is that it's like some rundown part of me.  I just got this broken switch in my brain, can't say no to Chip Jones.

But it is the triangular relationship between Sid, Delilah and Hiero that focuses the novel's tension.  Hiero is always 'the kid' to Sid, and an object of hatred, jealousy, compassion and (almost certainly) love.  Unlike everybody else Sid is not convinced by Hiero's musical genius:

He sounded broody, slow, holding the notes way longer than seemed sane.  The music should've sounded something like a ship's horn carrying across water - hard, bright, clear.  The kid, hell, he made it muddy, passing his notes not only over seas but through soil too.  Sounded rich, which might've been fine for a older gate, but felt fake from him...there wasn't no grace. ... He wailed. He moaned. He pleaded and seethed.  He dragged every damn feeling out of that trumpet but hate.  A sort of naked, pathetic way of playing...  I hated it.  It felt so damn false, so showy.

When the enigmatic Delilah Brown comes onto the scene, showering Hiero with attention and praise while Sid languishes lovesick for her, his jealousy is towering.  He oscillates between feelings of rage and envy, and unexpected flushes of sympathy.  The sympathy is a response to Hiero's innate tragedy as a nationless, family-less outcast, gawky and unloved.  His desire to be loved, and to be needed, is echoed by Sid's own.

The wild swings of Sid's attitude to Hiero are indicative of his general nature.  He feels things powerfully in black and white.  He peppers his narration with portents; feelings of darkness and light wash through him in waves and he characterises suspense simply as a 'blackness' hovering over him or sitting in his stomach.  It is difficult to tell whether he is trying to create an effect for the story, or whether he actually experiences life in this yo-yo fashion.  Either way it signals what an interesting narrator he is.  Not because he isn't trustworthy - we surely know by now that narrators can never be trusted - but because he is so very transparent.  He is telling the story the way he thinks he wants us to hear it, but he isn't hiding anything.  So, although Sid is apparently oblivious to it, it is clear that Hiero adores him, looks up to him, wants to be him or to be with him. (I felt there were some moments when Hiero was being coded as gay, but perhaps I was over reading?) 

Edugyan does such a beautiful job with Sid, and Hiero, and the rest, that I didn't yawn my way through the WWII setting.  It was a good fit, and almost beside the point.  I was almost disappointed that I still didn't like jazz by the end, because I wanted to feel what the characters were feeling about it.  But I sort of understood why they liked it, why it was (as Chip so eloquently puts it) a 'damn consolation' for everything that goes wrong in their world.  I also understood - and this is why Half Blood Blues has been nominated for all those prizes I think - why it was no damn consolation at all. 

 ~~Victoria~~

*If you live in the York area and would like to join us, information here: www.feelinginspired.co.uk

Another Kind of Light and Life

The logical thing is to do as he's asked: to think about it. Indeed. Write it down. Remember it, re-imagine it, gather it together.

Because it'll be proof - won't it? - proof that you really are doing what you want. Proof that I, Jessie Lamb, being of sound mind and good health, take full responsibility for my decision, and intend to pursue it to its rightful end.

I underline my name on the pad. The question is, where to begin?

Jane Rogers' Booker-longlisted and Arthur C Clarke Award-shortlisted The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011) has attracted distinctly mixed reactions during its brief lifetime. (Here is a representative selection of comments from reviewers and critics I read regularly, most of whom I agree with much of the time: two for, two against, and one not completely convinced either way.) For my part, after some initial scepticism, I found myself utterly won over. Here's why.

The novel tells two parallel stories. In one - the framing story - protagonist Jessie sits alone in the small room where she has been imprisoned by her father. Armed with a pad and pen, she tells us the second story: the tale of how her relationship with her father deteriorated to the point where he decided to hold her captive. You see, with a teenager's keen sense of urgently idealistic melodrama, Jessie is planning to sacrifice herself for the sake - as she sees it - of the human race.

The first few chapters sketch out the dilemma: it's five minutes into the future, and humanity's continued existence lies in the balance on account of a fearsome new illness called Maternal Death Syndrome. It's exactly the sort of improbably over-the-top, instantaneous super-plague that literary writers dabbling in science fiction love: an unholy union of CJD and AIDS that infects every woman, everywhere, and is triggered by pregnancy, effectively turning conception into a death sentence. It makes very little sense at all, but it proves a potent allegorical and emotional lens to bring Rogers' concerns into focus: how, in such a scenario, does a young person like Jessie envision her future? Can individual sacrifices matter - let alone make a difference - in the face of such overwhelming odds?

It occurs to me, having written that last sentence, that in some ways Testament is a climate change novel. Not in the sense of literally being about climate change, although certainly that is an element of its setting; rather, in the way it examines the powerlessness of individuals - even really, really green ones - to combat a global problem effectively through their own actions. Like many teenagers, Jessie is passionate about, as she puts it, "living on the planet in a less greedy destructive way", and is convinced that anyone who isn't confronting the problem Right This Instant is wallowing in a typical adult "cynical, complacent, couldn't-care-less" attitude. She starts meeting with a group of young would-be activists, who all agree that the older generation is the problem, that MDS is really just a long-overdue punishment, and that even now adults are responding with proper urgency:

"The point is, a bad thing was ready to happen. The ground was prepared."

"Not by us," I said. "By our parents. And their parents. They're the ones who've messed things up."

"Right. But now this has happened everyone can blame someone else. Instead of being mad at the government for giving scientists money to make hideous weapons, or at themselves for polluting the entire world, they can put all the blame on some unknown monster. [...] People always think there's enough time left to change."

"Well, they're stupid."

Inspired by her friends, Jessie tries to reduce her impact on the planet, but is doomed to be frustrated when her parents don't quite share her zeal ("Dad went yes yes you can plant veg in the garden, yes we can stop the supermarket run, if you've got time to go to the market. Transferring the effort to me, and then niggling if they thought I hadn't spent long enough on my homework") and outraged when she catches them committing such dreadful sins as booking a holiday abroad.

As a reader, it's hard to escape the knowledge that even if she did manage to convert them to growing all their own food, one family - or even a whole town of families - is never going to be enough to overcome climate change. For Jessie, though, I imagine this objection would be beside the point; I imagine this fairly securely, because I recognise so much of my own adolescent self in the way she writes her world.

For Jessie, individual actions do change the world - they have to, because the political is personal, everything is urgent, and the alternative is that you have no control over your environment whatsoever. Jessie and her peers are obsessed with control, because as teenagers still living at home they're inescapably aware of how little autonomy they have. When a fellow climate change activist blurts out, one day, "'We shouldn't have to live with adults [...] We can look after ourselves. [...] Why should we be kept like - like pets? By them?'" - and, with a healthy dose of dramatic irony, goes on to compare being raised by one's parents to 18 years of "imprisonment" - she's expressing, naively but utterly sincerely, what everyone else is thinking.

Likewise, when Jessie is attacked by a group of boys one evening, her response is to blame herself:

He and Mum must have been as shocked about the gang as I was, because they became ridiculously protective, and offered me lifts all over the place, until it finally sank in to their heads that I had given up car travel. I knew I'd been attacked because I had stupidly walked straight into something; if I kept my eyes and ears open I could avoid trouble.

She has to preserve (an illusion of) control: if she just follows the correct behavioural formula in the future, it can't happen again.

Many young people who feel so acutely their inability to control their own lives develop anorexia as a tragic coping mechanism. Jessie, though, has a different - if no less self-destructive - option open to her, because her father is a research scientist whose laboratory is investigating MDS. A vaccine has been developed, but since absolutely everyone in the world is already infected with the virus that causes MDS (bow down before the super-plague, puny humans!), it can only be given to a gestating foetus. MDS-immune children can be produced, therefore, but only if there are women willing to do the gestating - using frozen embryos stored before the advent of MDS - and die of melted brains in the process; indeed, the only way a woman can be kept alive long enough to bring a pregnancy to term is by being put in a coma. You can see, I suspect, where this is going.

The scenario is simultaneously grim and ludicrous - the biochemist in the room confirms that by the time such a foetus had developed an immune system of its own (necessary for the vaccine to work), it would have been infected with MDS by its mother anyway - but plausibility isn't Rogers' point. Her goal is to give idealistic, desperate Jessie the ultimate chance to take control of her life: by ending it in the cause of something much bigger than herself. As "a stream of girls started to volunteer" to be 'Sleeping Beauties', as they're dubbed, Jessie is, unsurprisingly, inspired. As she explains, looking back:

You could see why they did, even then. They were following Ursula Johnson's example. They did it for their husbands, or their families, or their religions. They did it for the future. What better single thing could a person do with her life?

But naturally people fussed and objected like they always do when someone tries to do something positive.

She just about acknowledges that perhaps not everyone who becomes a Sleeping Beauty does so as an exercise of healthy free choice, but she is resolutely convinced that anyone who expresses concern over the idea is just a cynical, complacent couldn't-care-less enemy of all that is hopeful ("OK there are bad things, like the Chinese who sold their daughters to clinics - OK - but because there are bad things does it mean nothing new should happen? That nothing can be done?" Ah, yes, it's always China...). For Jessie the narrative of sacrifice, the personal act, is the point. When her dad mentions that eventually the Sleeping Beauties won't be necessary, because research on artificial wombs has been accelerated, she doesn't want to know, presumably because it lacks heroism:

"What are artificial wombs?"

"Incubators. Machines babies can grow in."

I thought it sounded disgusting.

(Yes, Jessie. Disgusting. As opposed to actual women living their final months in comas while their brains slowly liquefy.)

This is where Rogers' use of a snippet from Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis as an epigraph for the novel ("Another kind of light and life / Are to be mine...") comes into focus. In most versions of the story, the Greek king Agamemnon's blood sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, to ensure a fair wind to Troy, is all about him: it is demanded of him by the gods, it is his decision to make, and ten years later Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, places the blame for her bereavement squarely on him when she kills him for it. But in Euripides' play, Iphigenia - although initially a helpless, tricked pawn - ultimately chooses her own fate, and in doing so she specifically frames it as a heroic death. She is presented as a paragon of female virtue and bravery, in implicit contrast to the faithless Helen, whose desertion of Agamemnon's brother Menelaus is the reason(/excuse) why there's a massive army of Greeks standing around waiting to sail to Troy, so they can mooch around on the beach outside the city walls for ten years and bicker about slave girls.

On one level, Iphigenia's self-sacrifice is a pointless act of self-delusion, a story she tells herself to give meaning to her surrender to the inevitable; the only way you get out of a situation like this alive in Greek drama is through a deus ex machina, and on this occasion the gods aren't playing, because they want you dead too (although in another of Euripides' plays Iphigenia is secretly spirited off at the last moment by Artemis, and an animal magically disguised as her is killed in her place; the Greeks did love messing with their myths). On another level, though, it is an act of agency, however warped and tragic: faced with a situation she can't hope to escape, Iphigenia takes control in the only way she can, by choosing death before it can be forced upon her.

So Jessie is Iphigenia, although in her case she believes she is saving life rather than enabling a war. She has already convinced herself that she has no future:

"Our lives won't be worth living if we know there's no future."

"Why? There's no future for anyone beyond 80 years or so. Everyone dies."

"But we always know there'll be more people. We know it'll all carry on."

Looking back from her makeshift cell, Jessie describes how she felt oppressed by her inability to do anything in the face of such bleakness ("I was powerless. I had to find a way out"), and also how the Sleeping Beauty programme offered hope ("Scientists had found a way for us to survive"). We get glimpses of the scheme's reception in the world around Jessie: the first Sleeping Beauty, aged 15, gets a funeral at Westminster Abbey, but the participating labs are picketed daily, especially after secret filmed footage of the young women in comas is smuggled out. When her friend Sal, horrified, shows Jessie the footage, she is characteristically dismissive, refusing to make the connection between the heroic act of sacrifice she imagines and the ugly reality:

The point about it is they don't show the women like people you could care about, they show them like animals, in disgusting states, naked, puking up.

When Jessie goes to the lab and signs up to be a Sleeping Beauty, again her desire to control her life, however much harm she does herself in the process, is at the forefront; she describes her relief at feeling that she is "doing something" at last as "the beautiful sharp knife of my secret". The imagery is, if you'll forgive the pun, pointed: The Testament of Jessie Lamb is not the pro-life tract that some have suggested (well, I have no idea how Rogers intended it, but it doesn't have to be read that way), but a novel about a teenage girl finding the ultimate way to self-harm. And through that self-harm, she feels fully in control for the first time:

Mum and Dad don't understand. They think it's something awful. If I could make them see that actually it's making me happy; that deciding what I'm going to do, and setting that in motion, is giving me power; that for the first time in my life I feel safe and in control - if I could make them understand that, surely they wouldn't be upset?

It probably doesn't help that her father - at least in Jessie's presentation of him - is nauseatingly up-beat about the whole thing, in the days before he realises Jessie plans to join in. When Jessie's mother expresses horror that the Sleeping Beauties are "'expected to give up their lives for alien genes'" (it's not clear to me how that is worse than dying in the same way for your own genes, but I imagine I'm in a minority on this), he replies, "'But the girls who do this will know they're helping the survival of the whole race.'" Thanks, Dad!

Jessie squirrels away these moments, and unearths them, later, when he flatly refuses to let her do the same, and locks her up in an effort to stop her from returning to the lab to begin the process. I found the contrast between the gung-ho dad of the past and the implacably opposed dad of the narrative's present to be rather forced, but we can perhaps put this down to Jessie being selective in her retelling.

And yet, she is convincing. Not in the sense of getting me to agree with her decision - dying for the sake of the human race's future breeding potential, rather than to save actual living human beings now, is much too abstract and woolly a goal for me, especially when even within the novel it is presented as potentially unnecessary - but in the sense that I was convinced by the end that this was her decision. It's self-aggrandizement, it's self-harm, it's something she might have thought better of, had she waited a year or two: but it is absolutely and without doubt her choice, passionately made and claimed as such. And if you believe in a woman's inalienable right to choose what she does with her body - as I do - then that also involves supporting women who make choices you wouldn't.

"But you lose me here, Jess. I can't buy it - this destiny stuff, this thing I need to do. You're a free agent. You can do anything with your life."

"I know. Listen. Let me explain. Because it is freedom. That's what it is."

Like Iphigenia, Jessie chooses to embrace a self-abnegation that achieves, objectively, nothing except grief for her family. Like Iphigenia, she makes me believe that doing so is a measure of her agency.

~~Nic

The TBR resolution, Week 13

I've been having a little reading slump recently.  This hasn't manifested itself as a lack of reading - I've been ploughing onwards regardless - but as a lack of interest in whatever comes to hand.  I've not had a great deal of success with Philip Hoare's Leviathan, despite loving the first 20 pages, and I've been sleep-walking through A Dry White Season by Andre Brink, utterly failing to appreciate what an interesting novel it actually is.  In desperation I've been grazing my shelves, plucking books out, reading half a dozen pages, and then listlessly discarding them around the house like a trail of bookcrumbs.  It's a dangerous mood to be in when you're under a book-buying edict.  The desire to find something to read is very strong but I'm so stupidly uninspired that my TBR seems barren, all 450 books of it.  A lapse was inevitable.

Before I knew it I was browsing in Little Apple Bookshop in my lunch break yesterday and - shock, horror! - buying two books on impulse.*  The books in question? Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill and New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (trans. by Judith Landry).  The irony of breaking my TBR resolution by buying a book about Susan Hill's TBR resolution added to the pleasure of the purchase.  The Marani has been on my radar for months, after Nicholas Lezard's high praise in the Guardian, and buying a small press word-of-mouth success from an independent bookshop felt as much like a good deed as an indulgence. 

I should have known that I wouldn't be able to stop at two.  Foolish, foolish book-buying addict that I am.  I was in the library in the afternoon for work, and would you believe they were having a book sale?  Paperbacks a £1.  I was in there like a flash, dizzy with lust.  Three more books into my bag:  The Gift by Vladamir Nabokov and From A Crooked Rib by Nuruddin Farah, both Penguin Modern Classics, and Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker.   I know the latter is a big favourite in some parts of the blogosphere (particularly with Simon), and it sounded so light-hearted that I couldn't resist.  The Nabokov I bought because a) it's £10.99 new, and £1 is bargain! and b) more importantly, after Jenny's review of Pnin I've been wanting to read beyond Lolita.   And From a Crooked Rib hooked me in with the blurb - a young Somali woman tries to make her own destiny - and the happy surprise I felt when I realised it was written by a man and published in 1970.  As the introduction points out, that's a rare bird in African fiction.

After this lovely book buying I felt refreshed and a little bit guilty, only to arrive home later to a parcel from Sort of Books, with a copy of Kathleen Jamie's new collection of nature writing Sightlines inside.   I cracked it open, read half a dozen pages and then, for the first time in a week, kept on reading. And on, and on.  Jamie has lifted the slump right off me.  What a wonderful writer she is, whether the subject is Artic tourism or gannet colonies or the special February light that heralds spring.  I can't get  enough of her reflective, poetic style; poetic but still muscular and toned, not whimsical at all. 

Look how long this post has got now!  I was going to write about book podcasts and book magazines too, but I should probably leave it for another day.  I'm off now to 'The Hvalsalen' with Kathleen Jamie - I've no idea what or where that is, but from the first paragraph it looks like Norway will be our destination.  I'll leave you with a little extract from Sightlines about the quality of silence in the Fjords:

Behind the ship, the far side of the bay rises to a low brown ridge similar to this, and beyond that ridge is arranged a row of white pinnacles - the tips of iceburgs grounded in a hidden inlet.  Westward rises a range of brown jagged mountains, and beyond the coastal range there are hints and gleams of something I thought at first was a band of cloud, but it's ice, maybe the edge of the inland icecap.  The air is extraordinarily clear.

That's what we see.  What we listen to, thought is silence.  Slowly we enter the most extraordinary silence, a radiant silence.  It radiates from the mountains, and the ice and the sky, a mineral silence which presses powerfully on our bodies, coming from very far off.  It's deep and quite frightening, and makes my mind seem clamorous as a goose.  I want to quell my mind, but I think it would take years... I know only that I'd never heard anything like it, a silence that could dismiss a sound, as wind would dismiss a feather.

~~Victoria~~

*In my defence I'd also had a Very Bad Day.  An important funding bid had gone AWOL in the post, meaning that we missed the submission deadline.  Given all the work and effort that went into it, and the things riding on it, I wanted to run straight home for a good cry.  I bought the books to comfort myself, which is better than getting blind drunk or taking hard drugs, and went back to work instead.

Quarry Awaiting a Hunter

Absolution by Patrick Flanery is one of this year's Waterstones 11, and my first new release read of 2012.  I've managed to last three months reading from the TBR alone, but when Flanery's debut popped through my door on the same day that I finished Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country it felt like a sign.  From a classic of apartheid fiction to a freshly printed look at South Africa post-apartheid (although written in this case by an American from Nebraska).  The transition from one to the other was slightly bumpy.  Whereas Paton is a lyrical writer, of landscape and raw emotion, Flanery is distinctly formal, his approach very literary and his tone a little chilly.  It was as though the South African sun had just gone down on me and left me in a shivery twilight.  This is not a problem, just a shock. I should put it another way: Cry, the Beloved Country is a book that made me feel, Absolution is a book that made me think.

It is one of those literary puzzles: spot the symbolism, follow through the thematic thread, watch out for mirroring and parallels, count the number of inter-textual references, guess the theoretical approach.  Flanery plays with four voices - from first person, to the third person, to a rather sticky and disconcerting second person - and pace.  It goes without saying that none of his narrators can be trusted.  Sometimes it's as though he sat down and planned out what students could say about his book in English seminars.  No doubt one day they will say it all.

Sam Leroux is a man with no fixed abode, an English professor without tenure; born and raised in South Africa, but lately resident in the US.  The opening chapter of Absolution finds him back in Cape Town in the presence of his literary idol, the great South African novelist Clare Wald.  Wald has agreed to let him write her authorised biography and, because he studies her work and for other reasons too, Sam is eager to fulfill the commission.  But she is ungracious and he is nervous.  As they talk , Sam narrating to us the discomfort of their encounter, they circle around each others secrets.  Neither trusts the other.  It is an unexpectedly negative dynamic between a great writer and her most avid reader.  In a later self-narrated chapter Clare muses:

He is my guest and I his hostage.  I have invited him into my life because I was curious, because I thought, foolishly, that on my terms meant in my control.  But he is always coming from more than one direction.  He does not himself know what he thinks of me.  I suppose there is a kind of power in that, but I am too exhausted for an exercise of power... He is like a beast that feigns vulnerability to put its prey at ease.

Sam's power over Clare is not unlike the power of the reader over her texts. (Barthes: check!)  As the novel unfolds it emerges that Sam and Clare are more closely connected than the average author and reader.  Clare's daughter Laura, who was involved in the militant anti-apartheid movement and who may or may not be dead, was a significant figure in Sam's childhood.  His own parents were killed while plotting a bomb attack on a police station, and Laura saved him from a terrifying and chaotic childhood with his abusive Uncle Bernard.   Both he and Clare are desperate to learn what happened to Laura.  Both have their speculations: one of the other narrative threads is a long letter that Clare writes to Laura's ghost, fictionalising what happened to her before she disappeared; another is Sam's boyish perspective on the last days he spent with her in the late 1980s.  Their stories converge and diverge and converge again. Laura never speaks for herself. 

There are so many angles on Laura's story: she died, she lived; she was for or against apartheid; she cared for Sam or abandoned him; she was a hero or a murderer.  Neither Sam nor Clare is an impartial witness on her life.  Sam was just a child when he knew Laura, and his memory of events, places and people from that time are fuzzy, blurred by distance, trauma and (probably) some conscious forgetting.  There are several hints that Clare is not only addled by guilt and regret, but also suffering from the earliest stages of dementia.  Add to that the general atmosphere of paranoia and fear in the book, and what you have is a maelstrom of possible narratives, outcomes, histories, all of them more or less true and false.

It's very fitting that there should be no clarity in the matter.  Flanery's South Africa  is a place where it is impossible to parse out the rights and wrongs of the past without stumbling into the great gaping abyss between black and white.  The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is name-checked many times in the novel, it's job having been to air the grief and trauma of apartheid human rights violations and to help the country come to terms with its past.  Clare has looked for her daughter's name in the record.   It appears in many forms, further destabilising her identity: 'Lara, Lora, Laure, even Laurie, only sometimes Laura.  Welt, Wal, Wereld, World, and finally in the last one I read, Wald, and sometimes, even in that one, Waldt and Weldt.  Often your name is not there at all...'   Just as the TRC never gets to the bottom of Laura's fate for Clare's sake, so it doesn't get to the bottom of the South Africa's bigger tragedies.  Sam is faced with the reality of returning home to a country in which affluent families (predominantly white) live in gated communities, protected by multiple gates and electrified barb wire with panic buttons in every room and even on the inside of cupboards, just in case they find themselves backed into a burrow like a rabbit. 

Both he and Clare experience a 'house invasion' during the course of the novel, a crime that seems unique to South Africa, combining the threat of burglary, rape and murder all in one terrifying package.  Flanery's novel does well to show the psychological impact of this high security (and high segregation) society, while also showing how Sam and Clare struggle to uphold their ideals and to live open lives.  Sam gives money to black South Africans in the street, and to beggars in cafes; he feels sympathy for the car parking attendant and gives him a large tip.  Clare pays for her maid's dental care, and her gardener's son to go to school.  But neither trusts a stranger, nor even an employee of many years, if they are black.  Sam is visited by a black student of his aunt's after her death.  He keeps the man standing on the step, with the burglar bars still across, although the man has only brought a condolence card and kind wishes:

Sam wondered why this kind of exchange, which should have been so natural and appropriate, was something he could not bring himself to do properly.  If the man had been white he would not have thought twice about letting him in.  He could not think of himself as a racist, he was sure he was not, but one had to be careful.  Everyone must understand that one had to be careful.

Absolution is about an impossible act of forgiveness for this kind of 'being careful', this seemingly inevitable slippage into racial stereotypes.  Sam and Clare have their guilt about Laura and what she did and what they did to her, but this is just a tiny thing compared to the nauseating and overwhelming national guilt felt by every character in the novel.  It is the guilt of people who were made complicit in the oppression and grinding down of their fellow human beings simply by virtue of having been born white in South Africa.   The problem they are left with in the aftermath is one of belonging: is it enough to have been born in a country to belong to it?  What does it mean to live in a country where you have to live in constant fear of your life?  How do you overcome the barriers of racial hatred and stereotype when an 'open life' is so dangerous?  Sam's friend Greg has experienced two house invasions in an 'open' community before retreating to a gated village patrolled 24 hours a day:

One day while he was at work an intruder beat his five dogs to death.  'You can almost get over that.  At least I wasn't there,' he says. 'But when you face the man who wants to take everything from you because he doesn't have anything himself, and sees us whiteys living like pharoahs.  I don't know how to get over that... I locked myself in the study.  I cried in there, thinking I might die... I was too terrified to confront him. What does that say about me?  I think maybe it says we shouldn't live here any more.  We don't belong here now. But I can't imagine living anywhere else.

For this alone I found Absolution very provoking, although there is much more going on that I can't mention for fear of spoilers.  I can't help thinking how sad Alan Paton would be to see the reality of the post-apartheid world. 

Just one thing about Absolution - it has a completely white perspective.  This is limiting, purposefully so I guess, but limiting nevertheless.  I'm keen to read more South African fiction to round this out, and have picked up Andre Brink's A Dry White Season as my next TBR read.  I really am on a South Africa kick, as I'm also reading Zoo City by Lauren Beukes right now.   Do you have any other South African novels I must try?

~~Victoria~~

A Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West

The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else's rules.

Each telephone call with my parents reminded me of my cowardice and my betrayal. I was at once happy to hear their voices and ashamed to talk to them.

By now - after bestseller status and a rather wonderful film adaptation - Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis needs little introduction, I imagine. It is a brave, funny, thorny and thoughtful story-memoir about memory, loss and cultural identity, which was originally published in French in four volumes between 2000 and 2003 (the complete English translation was published in 2006; I cannot find a name for the translator of the first two parts, but the latter two were by Anjali Singh).

(Aside: Not for the first time, I find myself wistfully aware of how much more interesting the French comics industry is than its English-language equivalent, and also how little I know about where to go next. Can anyone reading this recommend some titles? I don't mind whether they're in English translation or not; I'm comfortable enough reading French, though far from fluent, and it would be good to practice on something other than academic articles.)

Persepolis is told through a combination of strikingly high-contrast black-and-white art and first-person narration, and it centres on a version of the author as she grows up in Iran and Austria before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. While in large part the story Persepolis tells is a charmingly and candidly autobiographical one, it is also an act of witness and remembrance for the people and the history of Iran, too, as Satrapi - who now lives in Paris - explains in a brief foreword. It is, she says, an attempt to offer a contrast to the prevalent external image of Iran as a place of "fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism".

The first half of the book is devoted to Marjane's childhood in Iran. She is the precocious, opinionated, and sheltered child of an "avant-garde" family, given to extravagant fantasies about herself ("I was born with religion. At the age of six I was already sure I was the last prophet") and her family's role in the history of a very old and very proud country. But there is a stark contrast between the cheerful, charming, curved-lines imaginings of her ancestors fighting lions:

...and the grimmer realities of Iranian politics that begin to creep into her young awareness. When she overhears her father talking about how a cinema hosting a protest meeting burned down that evening, its doors locked from the outside to prevent the Shah's opponents from leaving and the fire brigade nowhere to be seen for forty minutes, the three-quarter page image she dreams up is much more jagged:

Through the stories of her relatives, she begins to learn about the effects of the Shah's repression, and to realise that her happy world is a precarious one. Her grandmother explains that her grandfather, the elephant-riding man above, was arrested and tortured as a possible enemy of the regime; in what will become a pattern in her life, Marjane responds by internalising this knowledge and attempting to mimic the situation, so as to better understand it:

(The chap on the left-hand side of the panel is not her grandfather, but God, with whom she has a number of conversations during her early life.)

At the same time - in tandem with the progress towards the revolution of 1979, and in large part as a (perhaps unintended) consequence of her parents' vaguely left-wing politics - Marjane comes to recognise the privileged comfort in which she lives, and develops a naive and unfocused, but nonetheless raw, sense of middle-class guilt.

Despite the suffering of some of her relatives, her family remains a wealthy one (hence, one suspects, their avant-gardeness - it is a fashion statement of the rich). There are other ways to suffer, Marjane realises, besides imprisonment at the hands of the state. In light of this new awareness, she recounts how Mehri, the family's maid, came to work for her parents:

When Mehri develops a crush on a young man next door, it becomes apparent that Marjane's father's egalitarian ideals only stretch so far. Mehri, we learn, is illiterate - despite the fact that she has lived with Marjane's family for over a decade, they have never seen fit to see her educated on even a basic level - and so Marjane innocently offers to help her by writing love letters to her crush. When he learns what is going on, however, Marjane's father puts a stop to things in no uncertain terms: the young man in question is the son of the family next door, whereas Mehri is only a maid and "In this country, you must stay within your own social class."

Marjane is still young, though, and Satrapi makes it clear that her awareness, too, is limited. Partly, this is done by showing Marjane be a bit of a brat every so often; my (morbid) favourite was when, after the overthrow of the Shah and the release of large numbers of surviving political prisoners, she tramples all over the careful, comforting lies one of her friends has been told about the whereabouts of her father. "Don't you know", she tells the other girl loftily, "that when they keep saying someone is on a trip it really means he is dead?" Cue traumatised child and much parental disapproval, to which Marjane's response is not compassion for the upset girl but a march to her room filled with wounded dignity, and the narrated caption, "Nobody will accept the truth."

When the Shah finally gets the boot, Marjane is not the only whose optimism is cruelly trampled. (In all this, Marjane becomes something like an embodiment of Iran, all dreams of past glories, passionate attachment to the cause, and crushing disappointment.) Her uncle has high hopes that the religious authorities' dominance after the revolution of 1979 is only temporary:

 

It is not only hindsight, though, that makes it clear this won't be so. Again, Marjane is the voice of Iran, buffeted by the winds of change and believing what she hears:

The tumble into a new repression is swift, and perhaps not helped by the fact that so many of the mobile elite - the educated and the wealthy - quietly flee the country, leaving the poor and the optimistic to the mercies of the regime.

And then the war with Iraq begins, and things become worse still. Satrapi's words and art offer a moving testimony to the way the war tears up a generation of young men, and leaves everyone else in a state persistent, paralysing horror. As the bombing begins to hit residential areas, it takes on the tenor of a war for survival, and the poor and the young are co-opted to be its loudest supporters and most eager martyrs. The scars, though, run deep; the images Marjane conjures of how she remembers the sloganeering propaganda and the aftermath are eloquently grim:

The poor and the young are co-opted, too, into the enforcement of social conservatism, and the chador-clad silhouettes of disapproving women stalk Marjane like crows eyeing up a meal (click for a larger version of this image):

The final panel's little dig at the liberated western world's own repressions is pointed, and an indication of what is to come; but for the time being the focus remains firmly on life inside Iran. Marjane's parents consider leaving the country, since they have the means, but reject the idea for the time being, knowing that life elsewhere will be difficult in its own ways ("Maybe we should leave too..." says Marjane's mother; "So that I can become a taxi driver and you a cleaning lady?" replies her father).

Marjane, though - with a child's sense of melodrama, if not an unjustified one - sees her future prospects narrowing before her eyes. She longs to follow in the footsteps of Marie Curie, but reflects with alarm that by the time she is the age at which Curie studied chemistry, she will "probably have ten children". Again, Satrapi is not afraid to poke gentle fun at her younger self, even as she makes a serious point:

At length, Marjane's parents decide to send her to school in Vienna; again, their social class and wealth gives Marjane more options and protection that many of her peers enjoy. With trepidation and grief, Marjane leaves Iran and her family behind:

The second part of the book focuses on Marjane's experiences abroad, and her decision to return home, despite everything. The central theme is dislocation: while Marjane is out of step with the behavourial norms that are being enforced - if not exactly embraced by all - in Iran, she also finds herself at odds with much of what she encounters in Europe.

On her arrival, she is greeted by a family friend named Shirin who has been abroad for some time, and Shirin's shiny superficiality (her conversation includes such gems as "This is my raspberry-scented pen, but I have strawberry and blackberry ones, too") is jarring to an earnest adolescent who has left behind a brutalised and brutalising country. It is not hard to imagine that Shirin's bright chatter is as much deliberate displacement mechanism as anything - that she feels some pain over what people she knows are suffering back home, and doesn't really know how to deal with that or what to say about it - but it strikes the first blow of Marjane's disillusionment. (And a survivor's guilt of her own at having escaped.)

Marjane meets many generous and well-meaning people, and is able to exercise her nimble mind through a lot of energising and radicalising books (and some rather less so). She makes friends, gains a boyfriend, and learns to cope - sort of - on her own. But she is irritated by the cynicism she meets: the way many of her oh-so-intellectual friends, cushioned by their privilege just as Marjane herself once was, treat the sorts of things she has experienced as items of abstract interest, to be discussed with studied, rational cool but certainly not something to get emotional over:

The mohawk guy here, Momo, embodies this, delivering pseudo-insightful speeches like, "Life is pain. Pain is everything. Everything is nothingness. Therefore life is nothingness. When man recognizes this hole, he can no longer live like an earthworm, inventing games of leaders and followers to forget his fickleness." When Marjane snaps back, "There are people who give their lives for values like liberty", he sneers, "It's just a distraction from boredom." He, again, is young and naive, but - understandably - it stings Marjane nonetheless to hear Iran's traumas so summarily dismissed.

Marjane also struggles both with overt racism and with a more pervasive sense of not-belonging, of having to constantly represent her country to others. A long awaited visit from her mother is a relief and a haven, soothing aches and pains she had hardly even realised were slowly but surely wearing her down ("It relaxed me to talk to her. It had been so long since I'd been able to talk to someone without having to explain my culture"). She does her best to blend in, to find a middle way:

But the strain of it all sends her spiralling into substance abuse and depression. Naturally, when she returns to the home she has longed for, she finds things no easier for her hybrid self ("I was nothing. I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the west. I had no identity"). But she does at least have the comfort of her family around her, and a cause she can become involved in.

Satrapi's portrayal of her/Marjane's whirlwind relationship with the attractive Reza is both clear-eyed and saddening. It reminded me of the melancholy section of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake when her protagonist Gogol gets married, to a fellow Bengali-American. In both cases, the marriage is in some sense an attempt to make peace with the past, and reclaim a heritage that the character has previously betrayed and deserted, and feels lost without; in both cases, this pressure of expectation on the marriage, this collision of identities, causes it to fracture.

For Marjane, too, the marriage is derailed by a conflict between two different measures of freedom, each equally precious to her. On the one hand, being back home means she is once again free to be Iranian, and be among Iranians, without apology or negotiation, without trying to assimilate herself to another culture and rethink her every utterance in another language. On the other hand, she cannot be an Iranian woman in Iran without compromising in other ways: in how she dresses in public, in the opinions she voices, and in the way she interacts with men, including Reza. When you have to worry about whether a strand of your hair is showing every time you leave the house, she reflects, you start to lose your grip on the wider issues like whether you have freedom of speech or a say in government. Life is a constant, low-level harassment that could erupt into more at any time.

The contradiction between the public and the private self becomes oppressive. She and Reza marry in a hurry because it is the only way they can be together publicly; but the rush means that they have no chance to get to know each other properly, and to discover that they are, in fact, deeply incompatible.

What is heartening about Persepolis, and challenging to western assumptions about the lives of women in places like Iran, is the level of accommodation and subversion with which the rules are approached. The veil, for example, does not guarantee meek feminine submission, although its enforcement on a state level clearly seeks that; nor are decisions about how and why it is worn remotely simple (or always coerced) on an individual or even a community level. Satrapi has (wistful) fun showing her younger self flanked by many other girls in her irreverent non-conformity:

But she also repeatedly shows the ways in which adult Iranian woman create and defend spaces of self-expression and self-determination. They are eloquent, they are determined, they are organised, and often they are also un-ignorably loud:

They also - and in this Satrapi's portrayals remind me very much of women I encountered in Syria and Jordan when I visited there in 2010 - stretch and test both the law and wider cultural expectations at every turn, and as far as they can. Even outward conformity can hide a wealth of small rebellions:

~~Nic

Let Dog Eat Dog

Ignorance is at the root of media failure. Most of the time most journalists do not know what they are talking about. Their stories may be right, or they may be wrong: they don't know. [...] They work in structures which positively prevent them from discovering the truth. The ethic of honesty has been overwhelmed by the mass production of ignorance.

Ah, the curse of procrastination. When I finished reading Nick Davies' Flat Earth News (2010) in June last year, it could not have felt more timely. Here was the story behind the headlines: a meticulous but highly readable discussion of the systemic pressures and chronic weaknesses that made something like the News of the World's phone-hacking scandal essentially inevitable. I would write about it soon, I promised myself. Very soon.

Yes. I know.

In the meantime, the subject hasn't exactly become less relevant - the daily feeds from the Leveson enquiry bring ever more fascinating and disturbing details to light, and with each passing week Murdoch's grip on things looks shakier - but it has certainly lost something of its urgency. (I include a link to a Telegraph piece partly because the Torygraph criticising incestuous ties between business and government is always funny, but also for this priceless comment, in which one reader opines that "Corruption and bribery have risen in this country at the same rate that we have allowed in Third World immigrants" - it's like this country's entire quota of stupid in beautiful, horrible microcosm.)

Anyway. Davies combines a number of case studies of when the Press goes bad - including the baseless Y2K panic, climate change denialism, the Observer's support for the Iraq war, the Daily Mail's, well, standard operating procedures - with an authoritative overarching analysis that explains how and why such things happen. He draws on a wide range of insider testimonies, together with quantitative research carried out for him by the Journalism department at Cardiff University, to piece together the steps of his stories. Along the way, he tackles various myths and shibboleths of modern discourse regarding The News: the notion that neutrality is the same thing as objectivity, for example, such that all 'views' on an issue must be given equal weight - even when some of those views are utterly loony fringe narratives (as tackled on a regular basis by the likes of Ben Goldacre), or created out of whole cloth by paid PR firms. Journalists, he explains, have largely abdicated their responsibility to distinguish and discriminate between different versions of events, between reality and its distortion; most of the time, they no longer chase down the truth, or even check facts.

The cause of this is not malice or mendacity on the part of individual journalists (although in some cases that comes into it). Rather, it is about a series of industry-wide shifts in the way reporting is commissioned, edited, financed and presented, together with a downward circulation spiral - which, in turn, threatens the real revenue stream, advertising - that looks unlikely to be arrested. The logic of commerce, of course, is profit for shareholders; and, where revenues are in decline, costs must be cut. In the media, this cost-cutting has seen staffing budgets slashed further and further - even as the space to be filled with copy has tripled. Quality, inevitably, is sacrificed: the complex, multi-faceted stories are pushed out by the celebrity puff-pieces; the long-term investigations make way for near verbatim accounts of speeches a politician will deliver that day, courtesy of the party's press office; local and specialist reporters are laid off in droves, with things like science reporting and stories that take place outside London left to generalists at the centre without the skills, knowledge or contacts to do them justice, if they are written at all.

One example given of the latter is a police raid on a house in Lancashire in October 2006, which uncovered, according to Davies "what was believed to be the largest collection of chemical explosives ever found in the UK". One of two men arrested had strong links to the British National Party. The story was barely seen in national press, however, because the police chose not to do a press release about it - thus offering no ready-made copy to be recycled - and the national papers had no local reporters on the ground. Only one person wrote about it: Wendy Barlow, a freelance court reporter, for the Lancashire Telegraph. The BBC made a vague effort to follow up her story, but lacked the resources to back up such an effort, and soon gave up in favour of items within closer reach.

The central problem, argues Davies, is that the media's apparent neutrality only cloaks other selection processes - processes driven by profit margins and propaganda - that give us a far from objective account of the world. Financial pressures mean that journalism has been progressively "deskilled". Chasing the news has become a "luxury", and a generation of reporters are now largely reduced to "churnalism" - that is, to processing copy pre-prepared for them by the news wire services (themselves subject to the same financial restrictions) and the myriad public relations firms attached to businesses, politicians, celebrities and the like. Davies notes that "on the best available estimates, Britain now has more PR people (47,800) than journalists (45,000)". Research carried out on his behalf at Cardiff University drives home this point. Researchers analysed a sample of two weeks of reporting, chosen at random, in five national newspapers: the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, and the Daily Mail. Their figures are striking. Of 2207 pieces on domestic news, 60% were found to consist wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material; 20% had clear elements of same; 8% were difficult to identify; and only 12% - twelve percent of all the news stories about events in the UK - were wholly written by a given newspaper's own reporters.

A great many of these stories that are fed to the newspapers are run unverified; another cost-cutting measure has been to vastly reduce the manpower and manhours given to fact checking. What we are getting is not neutrality, but propaganda and groupthink: a shill for the views of whoever has the time and money to put out a press release.

Some of these things are, individually, relatively harmless. These are the non-stories created for businesses by PR firms, usually involving an online survey whose results are trumpeted in a press release as 'The Nation's Favourite X'. Another version of this is the utterly bogus mathematical formula. You've almost certainly seen or heard news coverage given over the revelation that a 'scientist' has determined the most depressing day of the year; originally a faux-story dreamed up by a travel agent, Sky Travel, looking to boost sales of package holidays by convincing people they're really sad, this tall tale still turns up in the press with, frankly, depressing regularity. Here's the Guardian joining in the chorus about it yet again last year, followed by a slightly embarrassed arse-covering version a week later, after commenters on the earlier story pointed out that Ben Goldacre had snarked about the phenomenon in its own pages two years earlier. Silly space-fillers, perhaps, but collectively they suck the oxygen out of real news stories, because they're so much easier and cheaper to use, however baseless:

On a single Monday in November 2005, the Guardian ran nine different survey stories on its news pages, and the Sun ran nine others. Some of them are statistically baseless. One PR outfit, acting for a company who wanted to set up a service for finding lost mobile phones, informed the media that 63,000 mobile phones had been left in London taxis over the previous six months. The real figure, according to the Public Carriage Office, was 779. The survey, it turned out, was based on talking to precisely 131 out of the 24,000 cabbies in London. Still, the story got used.

On a larger scale, though, this sort of practice results in non-stories turning into government-convulsing panics, like the so-called 'Millennium Bug', in which the journalistic echo chamber - fed by vested interests benefitting from the money that was poured into solving the imaginary problem, and legions of commentators who lacked the expertise or the time to find out whether there was any substance in it whatsoever (there wasn't) - turned a rumour into a worldwide, rock-solid catastrophe-in-the-making:

This is Flat Earth News. A story that appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true - even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.

In this, as in almost everything else, supply has come to dictate demand. The easy story - the one generating the reams of accessible coverage - goes to the head of the queue day after day, getting the columns inches and the photo spreads that it would otherwise be prohibitively costly and time-consuming to fill.

Sometimes, though, the smokescreen is calculated rather than systemic. Davies devotes a fascinating chapter to the intelligence agency meddling that infects press coverage of Iraq, focusing in particular on the controversial figure of the Jordanian rival of Usama bin Laden, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi. US and Jordanian intelligence repeatedly tried to link al-Zarqawi with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, even to the extent of apparently forging a letter supposedly written by al-Zarqawi - filled with complaints that the insurgents were losing the war due to the heroic efforts of US security forces ("Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. By God, this is suffocation!") - and then 'leaking' it to the media. Some of the press release-fuelled stories coming out of Iraq detailed here really are hilariously stupid; my favourite is one concocted in support of the assault on Fallujah:

One, which was widely used, scored an important point for the legitimacy of the assault by reporting that US troops had found Zarqawi's headquarters in Fallujah. This was described as "an imposing building with concrete columns and a sign in Arabic on the wall reading 'al-Qaeda organisation'. Most reporters simply failed to comment on the profundly surprising idea that the most hunted terrorist group in the world would advertise its presence as though it were a branch of Woolworths (and the worrying fact that, in spite of this open declaration of its whereabouts, this imposing building had failed to be targeted by any of the US Air Force's 'precision strikes').

And sometimes, too, the newspapers are not the semi-innocent victims of evil press releases, but practitioners of outright mendacity themselves. Further commentary on Rupert Murdoch ("He uses his media outlets as tools to secure political favours, and he uses those political favours to advance his business") and his empire is probably unnecessary at this stage. But what Davies has to say about the Daily Mail is quite breathtaking. Not so much in terms of the naked bigotry of the paper's chief concerns - a quick skim of its website makes that clear enough - but of the "spiteful aggression" and bloody-minded, deliberate falsehoods with which it pursues that agenda.

The Mail is the only major newspaper in this country that still comfortably turns a profit - think about that for a moment, and weep - and this enables it to cushion its reporters (/'reporters') from the effects of an editorial strategy that sees Press Complaints Commission investigations against the Mail upheld three times more than the national average. The litany of hate-mongering, political policy-shaping campaigns against anything and everything that threatens lower middle class 'values' - immigration, uppity women, celebrities who refuse to play ball, people who aren't white breathing respectable English air with impunity - really has to be read in full to be believed. One short anecdote will have to suffice, to end this post:

I spoke to a man who had worked for the Daily Mail for some years as a senior news reporter. He said: "They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and her two children who'd been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, 'Come back.' I said, 'Why's that?' They said, 'They're black.'"

~~Nic