Eve's Alexandria

Turning Pain Into Words

If it were up to me, I would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream. But the Victory Tour makes that impossible. Strategically placed almost midway between the annual Games, it is the Capitol's way of keeping the horror fresh and immediate. Not only are we in the districts forced to remember the iron grip of the Capitol's power each year, we are forced to celebrate it. And this year, I am one of the stars of the show. I will have to travel from district to district, to stand before the cheering crowds who secretly loathe me, to look down into the faces of the families whose children I have killed.

Around this time last year, blogging about Suzanne Collins's YA phenomenon The Hunger Games, I noted that it was "not, by any objective standards, a particularly well-written novel [...] But goodness me it's compulsive reading." Spoilers: I'm going to say much the same about volumes two and three in the trilogy - Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010) - which I read last November and this March, respectively. (NB While I don't intend to discuss the plots in much detail, there will be spoilers for both books throughout, so don't read if you don't want to know key events.)

After Katniss' triumph over both her opponents and the Hunger Games system in book one, Catching Fire and Mockingjay examine the way her act of defiance sends ripples through the oppressed districts of Panem, shaking the eeeevil dystopia to its core. There is some thoughtful stuff here, although as in the first book it's often better in concept than in execution. Collins builds on the most interesting thread of The Hunger Games - the effect of the Games being televised on the way they're played, and in particular Katniss' smart, resourceful manipulation of her all-too-public image and narrative in order to save her and Peeta's lives - by focusing on how Katniss' image becomes both strength and liability once she emerges from the arena.

Over and over again, the books come back to the questions of who gets to control Katniss' story, and what the nature of that story is. In one of the trilogy's least plausible scenes, evil overlord President Snow comes to visit Katniss at home to explain why he's Very Displeased with her:

"After that, there was nothing to do but let you play out your little scenario. And you were pretty good, too, with the love-crazed schoolgirl bit. The people in the Capitol were quite convinced. Unfortunately, not everyone in the districts fell for your act," he says. [...] "This, of course, you don't know. You have no access to information about the mood in other districts. In several of them, however, people viewed your little trick with the berries as an act of defiance, not an act of love. And if a girl from District Twelve of all places can defy the Capitol and walk away unharmed, what is to stop them from doing the same?" he says. "What is to prevent, say, an uprising?"

Yes, he visits her to tell her this - as opposed to, say, calling her, or having her brought to him at the Capitol, seat of his power, all the better to intimidate her with - because this is Young Adult fiction, the world revolves around our plucky young heroine, and a dictator has nothing better to do with his time than pay a housecall to a minor rebel whose importance his apparently trying to play down. And because Collins continually feels the need to anticipate her readers' objections, and answer them as clumsily and directly as possible, he also explains why she's still alive:

"I believe you. It doesn't matter. Your stylist turned out to be prophetic in his wardrobe choice. Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, you have provided a spark that, left unattended, may grow to an inferno that destroys Panem," he says.

"Why don't you just kill me now?" I blurt out.

"Publicly?" he asks. "That would only add fuel to the flames."

"Arrange an accident, then," I say.

"Who would buy it?" he asks. "Not you, if you were watching."

Unfortunately, this sort of laboured infodump only points up the shaky logic of Collins' world: would it matter if some people didn't believe it was an accident? And why can't the forces of the Capitol just disappear Katniss with one of their magic teleporting hovercrafts, as we saw them do to runaways and trouble-makers in the first book? Picking at the trailing threads just makes the whole thing unravel; better, surely, to let readers happily suspend disbelief, and not bring the matter up at all. (Or else do some more coherent world-building.)

Implausible underpinning or not, the central consequence is an intelligent and compelling one: Katniss' life is no longer just her own. She's a celebrity, whose moments of privacy are rare, and snatched, and precious - and soon interrupted. Even swimming in the lake beyond the District 12 fence where she used to go with her father, a place so private she never took her lifelong friend Gale there, she's not entirely alone ("Even underwater I can hear the sounds of commotion. Honking car horns, shouts of greeting, doors banging shut. It can only mean my entourage has arrived"). It is now her job to be dressed, and redressed, for the cameras: her every expression scrutinised, the details of her 'love' life poured over.

In remaking herself for the arena - the girl who was on fire, the girl prepared to die to save the boy she pretended, for the cameras, to love - Katniss became a symbol of everything that was wrong and inhuman about the Games and the oppressive system of which they're a key part. She was supposed to symbolise abnegation - the way the regime has such a complete hold over its subjects' lives that it can force their children to fight each other to the death once a year - but instead the tradition of the Victory Tour through the districts has become a vector of danger. Her scheduled public appearances are routine, but potentially subversive because she has Peeta by her side: two victors, where there should only ever be one. Snow warns her that she must maintain the narrative she created for herself; as long as she and Peeta present themselves as helplessly in love, her rebellion was romantic, not political.

The personal is political, of course, and it's not clear to me that it matters whether the vaguely understood 'public' realise Katniss was making it up or not: the point is that she defied the Games, and got away with it. Still, she is now a symbol of resistance, whether she wants to be or not:

What happens next is not an accident. It is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison. Every person in the crowd presses the three middle fingers of their left hand against their lips and extends them to me. It's our sign from District 12, the last good-bye I gave Rue in the arena.

If I hadn't spoken to President Snow, this gesture might move me to tears. But with his recent orders to calm the districts fresh in my ears, it fills me with dread. What will he think of this very public salute to the girl who defied the Capitol?

The full impact of what I've done hits me. It was not intentional - I only meant to express my thanks - but I have elicited something dangerous. An act of dissent from the people of District 11.

For this act of dissent, the gathering is brutally quelled. Katniss and Peeta try to up the ante of their story in various ways - including a public marriage proposal (Katniss' idea), and pretending they're expecting a child together (Peeta's) - but to no avail. Although things remain calm in the Capitol ("There is no danger of an uprising here among the privileged, among those whose names are never placed in the reaping balls, whose children never die for the supposed crimes committed generations ago"), the people of the poorer districts begin to suffer for their investment in, and inspiration by, the symbol that is Katniss.

Katniss is in some ways liberated by the realisation that she cannot win if she plays by Snow's rules ("if desperate times call for desperate measures, then I am free to act as desperately as I wish"), and vows to take a more active stand, in a wonderful moment that I can't wait to see Jennifer Lawrence perform. "I'm not going anywhere," she declares, having just dived in to save Gale from further punishment at the hands (whip) of the Capitol's police force; "I'm going to stay right here and cause all kinds of trouble." Reader, I cheered. (Inside.) It's a shame much of the rest of Catching Fire is essentially a less-good rerun of the first book, with Katniss back in the arena facing many of the same story beats again.

Even as Snow and the regime attempt to use Katniss and her romantic narrative as a circus to distract Panem (I see what you did there, Collins), other forces want to co-opt her more rebellious implications for their own ends. Suspicion grows during Catching Fire, and then takes centre-stage in Mockingjay, that the apparent good guys might not be much better than the regime they plan to overthrow, in terms of their attitude to collateral damage - and that they're every bit as willing to manipulate and hurt Katniss if it serves their cause. Said good guys are centred mostly on the mysterious District 13, long thought bombed into oblivion by the Capitol, but in fact struggling on in vengeful, repressively militaristic secret:

Now the citizens live almost exclusively underground. You can go outside for exercise and sunlight but only at very specific times in your schedule. You can’t miss your schedule. Every morning, you’re supposed to stick your right arm in this contraption in the wall. It tattoos the smooth inside of your forearm with your schedule for the day in a sickly purple ink. 7:00—Breakfast. 7:30—Kitchen Duties. 8:30—Education Center, Room 17. And so on. The ink is indelible until 22:00—Bathing. That’s when whatever keeps it water resistant breaks down and the whole schedule rinses away. The lights-out at 22:30 signals that everyone not on the night shift should be in bed.

Once again, the picture of dystopia is comically exaggerated - the magic ink of repression is a particularly funny touch - and once again, Collins' point is better made through the relationship of D13's authorities to Katniss. Reeling from the crackdown that greeted her further defiance in her second appearance at the Games - District 12 was razed to the ground - Katniss reluctantly agrees to be the resistance's Mockingjay, the figurehead of the next phase of their struggle, as a way to appease her guilt over the deaths she feels responsible for. While Gale is sucked into designing bombs for the rebels, causing Katniss some disquiet ("'So, it'd be easy for you? Using that on people?' [...] I don’t know what to tell him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you"), Katniss herself spends more time getting made over for the cameras - this time, as a star of short propaganda films.

Collins does a good job with this process, both because she writes some stirring lines for Katniss - whose doubts are worn down as her anger at the regime's violence increases - and because her writing is at its best when it reads more like a film script than a novel, stripped of the rather clunky first-person editorialising, showing rather than telling. Here, for example, are Katniss and Gale being filmed wandering among the ruins of their former home, District 12:

My fingers encircle a blackberry and pluck it from its stem. I roll it gently between my thumb and forefinger. Suddenly, I turn to him and toss it in his direction. "And may the odds—" I say. I throw it high so he has plenty of time to decide whether to knock it aside or accept it.

Gale’s eyes train on me, not the berry, but at the last moment, he opens his mouth and catches it. He chews, swallows, and there’s a long pause before he says "—be ever in your favor." But he does say it.

Cressida has us sit in the nook in the rocks, where it’s impossible not to be touching, and coaxes us into talking about hunting. What drove us out into the woods, how we met, favorite moments. We thaw, begin to laugh a little, as we relate mishaps with bees and wild dogs and skunks. When the conversation turns to how it felt to translate our skill with weapons to the bombing in 8, I stop talking. Gale just says, “Long overdue."

By the time we reach the town square, afternoon's sinking into evening. I take Cressida to the rubble of the bakery and ask her to film something. The only emotion I can muster is exhaustion. "Peeta, this is your home. None of your family has been heard of since the bombing. Twelve is gone. And you’re calling for a cease-fire?" I look across the emptiness. "There’s no one left to hear you."

Ah, yes. Peeta. In the confusion at the end of the second Games, in Catching Fire, Peeta is captured by Snow's regime, which parades him on TV pleading with Katniss to surrender before more people get hurt, and in a particularly vicious twist brainwashes him to think that Katniss is not really herself, but an evil muttation Katniss instead, then lets him get rescued by the rebels so he can hate Katniss at close proximity. Cue much angst from Katniss, who's been having intermittent, confused moments of kissage with Gale. Yes, the love triangle of book one is back in two and three in spades. I couldn't really care less, to be honest; I was more intrigued by their relationship when it was walking the difficult line between being fake-smiles-for-the-cameras and the intense fellow feeling of two people who've shared the shattering experience of the Games (we even get a "I love you"/"I know", with Katniss in the Han Solo role!), and when, in book two, Katniss was thinkingly strategically about why it would be better if Peeta survived the second Games and she didn't:

I will be more valuable dead. They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally people than anything I could do if I was living. But Peeta would be more valuable alive, and tragic, because he will be able to turn his pain into words that will transform people.

Still, there are a few quite sweet scenes between Katniss and Peeta as she tries to help him remember what's real and what isn't. The fractures in her relationship with Gale, meanwhile, are much more interesting when they're about Gale and Katniss as people, rather than whether she kinda likes Peeta too; and in the nature of the growing conflict between them lies the big thematic concern of the third book. In short, Gale embraces District 13's violent methods of resistance - something foreshadowed in book one, where he talked frequently of the need to fight - while Katniss is more and more repelled by them ("Back in the old days [...] Gale said things like this and worse. But then they were just words. Here, put into practice, they become deeds that can never be reversed").

The actual event that drives them apart - and, ultimately, Katniss to Peeta - is painfully contrived, but the resolution itself makes sense. Katniss is fearless and capable and will do what is necessary: in book three, I particularly liked the way her first thought on seeing Capitol planes bombing a hospital is not to run, but to find a good vantage point from which she can return fire, and in book two there's no doubt that she enjoys some aspects of the attention and cachet related to being a Hunger Games victor. As she and Peeta are paraded before the Capitol crowds during the preparations for her second Games, she catches sight of them in the video screens, and reflects that, "we are not just beautiful, we are dark and powerful. [...] We are unforgiving. And I love it. Getting to be myself at last."

Nonetheless, she is scarred by her involvement in violence, plagued by guilt and a level of post-traumatic stress. "No wonder I won the Games," she thinks at one point, berating herself; "No decent person ever does." Katniss fights because she believes to not fight is to allow violence to be done to her and those she loves ("Prim ... Rue ... aren't they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done to them is so wrong, so beyond justification, so evil that there is no choice?"). But at length - and having been sidelined for much of the final battle, in a rather disappointing authorial cop-out - she decides that combatting violence with violence isn't actually a constructive way out:

"We blew up your mine. You burned my district to the ground. We’ve got every reason to kill each other. So do it. Make the Capitol happy. I’m done killing their slaves for them." I drop my bow on the ground and give it a nudge with my boot. It slides across the stone and comes to rest at his knees.

"I’m not their slave," the man mutters.

"I am," I say. "That’s why I killed Cato… and he killed Thresh… and he killed Clove… and she tried to kill me. It just goes around and around, and who wins? Not us. Not the districts. Always the Capitol. But I’m tired of being a piece in their Games."

The deck is stacked in favour of her reaching this decision, with a number of rather clumsy plot lurches, and Katniss is able to implement her own solution and make everything better with remarkable ease because, well, she's the heroine of a fun but not very good YA trilogy. But I read the books compulsively, even so, and I look forward to watching the films.

(And not just because Jennifer Lawrence is awesome.)

~~Nic

The Dampness and the Dazzle

We all went down to the tar pit, with mats to spread our weight.

Ikky was standing on the bank, her hands in a metal twin loop behind her. She'd stopped sulking; now she looked, more, starey and puzzled.

Chief Barnarndra pointed to the pit. "Out you go then, girl. You must walk on out there to the middle and stand. When you picked a spot, your people can join you."

So Ik stepped out, very ordinary. She walked out. I thought - hoped, even - she might walk right across and into the thorns the other side; at the same time, I knew she wouldn't do that.

Margo Lanagan's stories get under your skin. They seem to slide in sideways, exploiting gaps you didn't know you had, lodging themselves in the recesses of your mind.

Take 'Singing My Sister Down', the first story of Lanagan's collection Black Juice (2004), whose opening is quoted above. The story's action consists entirely of a condemned young woman sinking to her death in a tar pit, watched by her blood-family (who have accompanied her onto the tar), her family-by-marriage (sitting "prideful" on the bank), random gawkers, plus some witnesses of standing in the community (the chief is also on the bank, we're told, where he "sat in his chair and was fanned and fed"). It's a horrible, inexorable, and very public death: a death to set an example, a death to give the satisfaction of revenge to the wronged, a death aimed in part at Ik's family ("we had to go out, and everyone had to see us", the narrator, Ik's younger brother, tells us; it is "like us being punished, too, everyone watching us walk out to that girl who was our shame").

Through the eyes and emotions of Ik's younger brother we, too, are forced to bear witness. Her family do their best to make Ik's final hours celebratory: "it did feel a bit like a party", the narrator says as they set themselves up for a picnic on the tar, with good food ("May as well have the best of this world while you're here", Ik's mother tells her, as she feeds her) and even some dancing. But nothing can get away from the fact that Ik is dying, as the tar claims her, inch by inch: closing over her feet, oozing up her legs, compressing her chest so she struggles to breathe.

Around midafternoon, Ikky couldn't move her arms anymore and had a panic, just quiet, not so the bank people would've noticed. "What'm I going to do, Mumma?" she said. "When it comes up over my face? When it closes my nose?"

We never learn exactly what was Ik's crime that condemned her to this fate; references to her husband's angry family, and to an axe handle, suggest this was domestic violence of some kind ("I always knew you'd be too angry, once the wedding glitter rubbed off your skin", says Ik's mother at one point), but we're told nothing else of either circumstances or motives, or of who Ik was before she was scared and sinking. The story lives in the moment, in the inescapability of death; there are no recriminations from the family she has brought to this pit, only the urgency of time running out ("I wished I had more time to think, before she went right down; my mind was going breathless, trying to get all its thinking done") and the need to see her off, as privately as they can on the community's terms, being "watched so hard".

The stories collected in Black Juice - eleven in total, although I'm only going to discuss a handful here - are, by and large, about communities. They're about families, whether biological or chosen, good or bad, nuclear or extended; they're about individuals struggling to work out their place within their communities, or to extricate themselves from communal identity, or to return after too long an absence; and they're about the land these communities are a part of, the often fierce, unforgiving land they live in and labour on, and whose unpredictabilities shape their lives.

Many of the stories, too, are told from the perspective of young people: adolescents learning their worlds, with one foot in the imagination and fears of childhood, and one poised to take them in search of wider horizons. Dot in 'House of the Many' is just such a character, growing up in a dirt-poor subsistence-farming village where behaviour is carefully constrained, according to rules that appear terrifyingly arbitrary from a child's-eye-view. An episode that stands out is when a boy breaks out into spontaneous song, within earshot of the tent of Bard Jo, the village's spiritual authority and keeper of male mysteries:

Then one day, when spring was on the way and they were all excited for the coming plenty, this boy threw back his head and sang... nobody knew who, but if Viljastramaratan had had four sisters and five brothers, dancing together, they might have brought these sounds out.

To the children listening, this is a marvel ("World upon world opened at their ears, worlds of lawless noise and play"), but to the boy's mother is to be feared and silenced. She is not quick enough, however; Bard Jo emerges from his tent, and, as the boy's mother "bent and swayed, holding her head, grinding her eyes", he takes the boy inside, and beats him so badly that "after that day no-one heard a sound out of him". When Dot gets older, he and his friends are initiated into the way of village manhood by Bard Jo, who explains the immutable importance of the structures of village life ("the working mothers, the fathers steady at the centre with all the wisdom"), feeds them drugged tea, and terrifies them via an encounter with some extremely noisy spiritual power.

Dot runs away from the village and finds new purpose and freedom, and all the knowledge he could ever dream of wanting, in the anonymity of urban life; but where a different sort of story might end things here, with Dot's happy escape, Lanagan has him return to the village, at length, to face the fact of how much harder he made his widowed mother's and his disabled sister's lives by his leaving. In this context, one person's new opportunity is another's crushing burden made even heavier.

There is a more positive, life-affirming departure and return - and coming of age - to be found in 'Rite of Spring'. With his mother too sick to carry out "her important business" of a mountaintop ritual to aid the season's shift from winter to spring, the task has fallen to the son she's long derided, impatiently, as too slow and "thick" to follow in her footsteps. So the narrator's journey is laden with family pressures - an unfavoured son long in the shadow of an over-achieving elder brother - but also with the expectations of a whole community on his shoulders, for his rite carries with it the hope of spring for a people living on marginal land, at the mercy of the elements:

The wind doesn't shriek or moan - nothing so personal. When the river took Jenny Lempwick last spring and half-killed her while we watched, it was doing what the wind's doing now, racing so strongly that a little thing like a person was never going to matter.

Like 'Singing', this story has essentially one thread - and most of that is the extremity of the journey, with very little about the rite itself, beyond the boy's fear that he will live down to his mother's expectations, and forget the words. But it is grounded - and given grandeur - by imagery drawn from the natural world; the narrator can do nothing as straightforward as speak, under the circumstances, but rather, as he puts it, "I carve the words out of the icy air with my snow-blown lips". The return is triumphant, but quietly so, bathed in "all the dampness and the dazzle of the first day of spring".

A more pungent strain of natural imagery pervades the creepy 'Earthly Uses', which draws particularly strongly on a child's point of view - with all that implies, in terms of seeing things adults choose not to, but understanding less - for its effect. The boy in question lives an unhappy life on a tiny, remote farmstead with his Pa ("He's an old man and cranky, but he's all I've got, so I must put up with him, mustn't I?") and his increasingly sick Nan ("so small and grey and quiet [...] like a cooking and housekeeping part of him, not really her own self"). Pa sends him out to try to make contact with one of the angels that live in the hills and "stink like potatoes and death", or - as the narrator puts it, in more vivid detail than is strictly necessary - like "having mouldy dung forced so far up your nose it starts tearing out the back of your throat". The hope is that the angels might offer a way to heal Nan.

At first the boy, wandering deserted wooded paths alone, shares Pa's folkloric fear of the strange beasts:

"And their eyes - you look in and there's no-one in there that's like a normal man - they're just bright and bright, and empty."

I didn't see eyes that day, and didn't want to. Even walking here through the angel-less darkness, the power of not-wanting-to-see-eyes makes me swerve and shake my head.

I love this: the way "bright" is made sinister, the way the boy's fear-but-fascination is drawn, creating a sympathetic itch of not wanting to look round at the back of my neck. Gradually, fascination wins out, though, because the angels seem to offer something different, something more, than a return to the cottage in the woods ("their smell was like crushed mint to my brain, breathing open new spaces there that I'd not the faintest notion how to fill"). When an angel does not cure Nan, but gives her the peaceful release of death, lifting her "up out of her own bones into its dark, dirty, soft, soft breast" - the softness of leaf mould, of mud, of decay? - the boy is set free, to leave home and seek a new community in one of the towns on the plain, far below the bitter spaces of the family farm.

By contrast, 'The Point of Roses' sees supernaturally-inflected nature bringing a family back together. Once again, Billy is a boy being raised by his grandparents - there's something very fairytale about this, as a recurring motif - although the setting this time is more small-town, or suburban. (There are no explicit markers of place, but it feels much closer to our world, and our present, than most of the other tales' settings.) Once again, the protagonist has a difficult relationship with an emotionally distant grandfather.

Here, though, the boy isn't the centre of the story. Although Billy is the (current) bone of contention between his grandparents, Corin and Nance, and it's Billy's boyish dabbling in magic, using one of Nance's roses, that sets the story in motion, the emotional focus lies with Corin and Nance. At issue is the way Corin's resentment of their children - the way they steal her attention from him ("He had fumed and raged against each pregnancy, and snarled and boiled and beat at the children as they grew, and railed at her for enslaving herself to them") - has caused the slow, drawn-out failure of their relationship:

It seemed to Nance that they had held each other in a death-clasp all these years, meanly squeezing until every scrap of colour was gone from skin and hair, until their voices held no juice and their eyes too much.

The torrent of "rose-ness" Billy's magic inadvertantly unleashes ("His lungs struggled, his skin dissolved, his thoughts turned to vapour as the rose essence passed through, roaring") proves the catalyst for the self-examination and reconciliation of his grandparents. There is some wonderfully idiosyncratic confessional dialogue ("being angry was a kind of paint [...] and I splashed it all over everything, and everything looked the same"), and finally a confrontation and frank discussion of the problem.

It's all done with considerable emotional resonance and generosity,  and ending with a calm, achingly well-judged moment of quiet acceptance, in which Corin potters around the kitchen, "for the moment, in this house, in this room, moving from here to there gathering bread, gathering cheese and sausage and pickle, knife, board, plate". He is preparing a plate of food for Billy, just returned home, "though he was not, himself, in any way hungry at all"; learning, at last, the contentment of a selfless, loving act.

The final story I want to discuss, 'Red Nose Day', centres on a rather less conventional community - a chosen family, built on past abuse, and present warfare - and carefully walks a line between horror and absurdity. Adolescent soldiers are hunkered down with their rifles, making nervious conversation while they endure the seemingly endless wait for their targets to emerge from a dilapidated old theatre. The narrator asks his older, more experienced companion, Jelly, about their mission; Jelly replies that they will have fulfilled their goal, "When we've made a dent in the programme. When there's enough gone to give us a warm fuzzy feeling."

When the enemy appear, they are "so close, I could see the sweat beading through their pancake". They are, you see, clowns.

That would be the absurdist bit I was talking about. This is a society in which clowns are every bit as strange and disturbing as you always suspected; in which clown-ness (clownitude? clownality?) occupies the top of the social hierarchy, but is perpetuated at the expense of child abuse (the stars of the clown world get their pick of children in state orphan homes) and affects those involved in a way that resembles drug addiction. A small, bitter guerilla army is fighting back against the clowns, and "the people who keep the world running: riggers and sweepers, ticket-sellers and physio-therapists, with a sprinkling of top hats and tailcoats".

Lanagan gives us an utterly deadpan and - if you're prepared to go with it - highly effective melding of war story and circus terminology. Our shell-shocked, emotionally deadened narrator is numb to violence ("I didn't care, as long as the painted people were falling"), but sees the world in the language of the big top ("I could read him like a matinee poster"). The deaths they inflict are glimpsed as distant, silent, stage-dramatic tumbles, until the moment where Jelly recognises two of the victims, and suddenly the reality of pain and gore comes crashing in.

But the most horror-struck tones of all are reserved for the slow-dawning reveal of Jelly becoming possessed by the spirit of Clown:

But then.

Jelly brought a foil out of his jacket He unwrapped it too carelessly for it to be drugs. Worse than drugs, a white nub of something glowed in the gloom. My whole body pulled back from it against the tower wall.

He didn't need a mirror. He drew a perfect white oval around his face from hairline to chin-dimple, and filled it in.

It goes on, all revulsion as Jelly adds more make-up, and his demeanour gradually shifts ("that terrible pretend childlikeness they have. The face dipped and floated as he stood, ooh!, surprised to find himself, why, here!"), for all the world like he's in a surrealist zombie film. I don't think I've ever been so creeped out by the appearance of a red nose before. Superb!

~~Nic

Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon

I read for 14 hours straight yesterday, or pretty much. That's a lot of hours, even by an avid reader's standards.  I so rarely get the time to give myself over completely to a book.  It's the first time since I was sick in January that I've read for more than an hour or two in one go, and it was good.  Now I feel all loose and relaxed and balanced as though I've done vigorous physical exercise, when the exact opposite is true.  Many of you already know that I wasn't alone on this reading marathon, yesterday (and a bit of today) being the bi-annual Dewey's Readathon where participants all over the world spend 24 hours communally reading and live-blogging about it.

This post is rather belated, as the etiquette and norm of the Readerthon is to blog during the event.  But I decided to join in at the last minute and, to be honest, I didn't feel like writing so much as reading at the start.  So instead of doing what I should have done and sitting down and writing a quick post that I could update like many of the bloggers I follow, I did a big fat nothing at the start.  Once I was reading I didn't want to loose the momentum and so followed along mainly on Twitter and on other blogs.  I'm a bit sad about that now, hence this post to catch up with the reading I did. 

Leading up to the Readathon lots of bloggers were posting and tweeting photos of their book stacks and snacks. (Snacks are clearly a big thing for readathon-ers, I'll have to be better prepared for that part in future!)  When I got up on Saturday morning and decided, what the hell, I'll throw everything else to the wind - it was such a blustery and grey day here - I gathered together a neat collection of my own.

Some of these were books I'd already started, like Lord Jim, A Storm of Swords and Africa: Biography of a Continent (I've been reading the latter for over a year), and others were highly anticipated, like Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell and How Fiction Works by James Wood.   Then I picked up a couple of wildcards from the TBR, Arabella by Georgette Heyer (for some light relief) and The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu (for something unusual). A nice mix of fiction, non-fiction and short stories.

Then I set myself up with a reading corner, which ironically involved getting as close to the TV as possible.

The window - for the light - and the fire on low - for toasting my chilly-spring toes - seemed like an important combination and the TV stand was handy for my cup of tea, fruity snacks and little pile of books.  I sat down at 10am, a couple of hours before the official UK start time of 1pm because I knew I couldn't stay up through the night as I had a driving lesson this morning.  Starting early was my compromise.  I stayed there most of the day and evening and then into the night, with some interludes for food, until midnight when I curled up in bed for the last two hours.  I finally fell asleep at 2am, although I picked my book up again for an hour after my lesson to finish with all the other participants at 1pm today.  14 hours in one go, plus another hour.  Not bad for my first try.

Because I'm a novice at this Readathon business I didn't keep any stats, like pages per hour or minutes spent reading vs making food or following the social media conversation.  This was partly a conscious choice because, you know me, I would only be page counting and clock watching and judging my progress rather than focusing on the matter in hand.  I started off really well, finishing Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim by mid-afternoon.  I must have read about 200 pages, which might not sound much for nearly 5 hours reading but Conrad takes some parsing and I was flicking back and forth to the notes often.  If not for the readathon it would probably have taken me another week to finish it off.  I will write more about the book when I've properly processed but - spoiler - I loved it.   I read Heart of Darkness at university and hadn't spared Conrad a thought since; he doesn't seem to be a writer much in vogue with anybody.   It was Esther who piqued my interest by raving about her current read, Chance, which is linked to Lord Jim and to Heart of Darkness by Conrad's narrator-cum-protagonist Marlow.  The book uses the darkness and corruption of late nineteenth century colonialism for narrative momentum and focuses on the moral evaluation of a single individual.  It's not exactly pacey, but it is thrilling and exhilirating in Conrad's very own verbose, complex, psychological way. 

I was almost afraid of finishing my first book because that usually signals a reading break for me while I choose something new.  This break can last a couple of hours or a day or longer, depending on the impact of the book I've finished.  Something intense and thought-provoking like Lord Jim would usually need a hiatus of at least a day. So to come down I read a few articles in the Times Literary Supplement - did you know that children and dogs are banned from Antartica? - and then a couple of chapters from Africa about the Portuguese exploration of the west coast.  These were as fascinating as always; I didn't realise that the Portuguese landed in South Africa as early as 1488.  Enjoying the non-fictional vibe I picked up James Woods' How Fiction Works.  I've been reading quite a few of these kinds of books recently, or at least bits of them, with a faint sense of disappointment. I'm waiting to be hit by all new ways thinking about and doing this reading thing that I love so much.  Of all of them I found Wood the most interesting, both on his own stylistic merits and also for the close textual readings he uses to make his points.  The first section is about narrative voice, segueing into a Flaubert love-in.  I've never read Flaubert but the way Wood interrogated his use of free indirect style was so incredibly illuminating that it didn't matter.   I ended up taking several pages of notes.  It was just the invigoration I needed to send me onto my next tangle with fiction: five chapters of A Storm of Swords and two stories from Vampires in the Lemon Grove. 

I've been sitting on Karen Russell's new book of short stories for a while, waiting for the right moment to embark.  I set about the first two stories after my dinner, with the early evening light fading behind me, and was immediately engrossed. The title story is a masterclass in voice and I was well placed to read it after spending time with James Wood.  The narrator is an old vampire, living in an Italian lemon grove with his 'wife' Magreb, and sucking lemons in lieu of blood.   Russell's speciality is this species of fantastic premise, the kind that makes you sit up and smile so that you're amused and predisposed to read on.  And then she takes you down the rabbit hole of her idea until you feel utterly bewildered and almost always non-plussed.    The second story - 'Reeling for the Empire' - was not quite so much to my taste, being a neatly executed but largely traditional piece of horror about women being transformed into silk worms.

I could have kept reading Vampires... but decided against rushing on.  Instead I made myself a vast pot of coffee and flipped open Arabella by Georgette Heyer at about 9.30pm.  This was my light relief read for when I started to flag, and safe to say it was light and it was quite a relief and I read it from start to finish (with sleep and driving lesson in between).  It was pretty obvious from page one that this was perfect readathon fodder, the kind of book that runs on like a gently amusing dream.  Time and the pages flew by.   It's like Patrick O'Brien crossed with Marian Keyes, if such a fascinating union can be imagined; the Regency romance equivalent of Dorothy L. Sayers.  Well-researched and witty, bubbly and bright.  The story was utterly predictable; the characters were utterly predictable; the bon mots were utterly predictable; and I swear that some lines were lifted wholesale from Austen.  But that was exactly what I was expecting, and the execution was better than I was expecting, so a win all round.  When I tweeted what I was reading a flurry of my work followers tweeted back in excitement: Heyer is apparently the escapism of choice for archivists and librarians. 

Now that the readathon is over I find myself feeling a bit lost.  I just want to keep reading, but in that specially intense way that I do when all I'm planning on doing for the hours to come is read more, so my mind is totally on the book and not on the washing I need to hang out, or the pork loin to be stuffed for dinner, or the work email to be sent before Monday.  This is what the readathon offers, and I loved it.  I also really enjoyed the community of it - the organisers have set up a whole infrastructure of support and social media and mini-challenges to keep people talking.  Some readers were also giving money to charity based on how much they'd read: an idea I love.  I will definitely be taking part in the next readathon in October, and hope to drag Esther (and Nic?) into it with me.  I might also set aside a weekend in between for my own personal readathon, just to recapture the enjoyment of it.

~~Victoria~~

Told to the World

It was the first-ever story about a truly enormous natural event that was both about the world and was told to the world. Part of the planet's fabric had been ripped asunder: and part of that same planet, the part connected by cables and telegraphs and with access to newspapers, was now being informed of the event. And the very process of relating the dramatic happenings, especially. In the weeks and months that followed, would enable all who heard, read and understood it to share in the cruel intimacy of the moment.

On paper - or in pixels - it's a damn fine proposition. A pacy non-fiction exploration of the devastating, epochal 19th-century volcanic eruption that utterly destroyed an Indonesian island. Krakatoa's death throes sent shockwaves that were felt around the world. Both literally - the noise of its explosion was heard at least 3000 miles away, and the resulting pressure wave travelled around the globe seven times - and figuratively - via the new-fangled technology of telegraphy, which ensured the news of it was carried further, faster, than of any comparable event before it.

Damn fine. Hard to screw up, really, even if some marketeer did insist on garlanding the back-cover synopsis of Simon Winchester's Krakatoa: the day the world exploded (2003) with the shockingly poor taste line, "In breathtaking detail he describes how one island and its inhabitants were blasted out of existence". (This isn't an action film, guys; between the initial eruption and the subsequent tsunamis, 36,000 people died. Thirty-six. Thousand. Actual people.)

Still, anyone who's read a book, well, ever knows that it's unfair to hold authors to account for the way their publisher chooses to sell their work. And there were a number of things that I enjoyed and admired about Winchester's work. He covers a huge amount of ground in the course of his 400 pages: the politics and culture of European imperialism in the 'East Indies' from the time of Pope Julius II's division of the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence, a wonderfully clear and interesting explanation of plate tectonics and how volcanoes happen, potted biographies of numerous scientists whose observations and theories contributed to our understanding of the aforementioned phenomena, and some startling facts and figures about the eruption itself and the way news of it was received.

Winchester's style is journalistic (thus one early-modern general active in the East Indies is introduce as "a still-infamous-in-Lisbon figure named Don Lourenzo de Brito"), and the prose has a tinge of purple, but his introductory passage - a description of seeing Krakatoa's successor-volcano for the first time in the 1970s - does a decent job of conveying awe at both natural beauty and natural danger:

It was early on a warm summer's evening in the 1970s, as I stood in a palm plantation high on a green hillside in western Java, that I saw for the first time, silhouetted against the faint blue hills of faraway Sumatra, the small gathering of islands that is all that remains of what was once a mountain called Krakatoa. There was a high peak to the left of the group, its pyramid shape cut off sharply by its vertical northern cliff. A couple of low islands hugged the horizon to the right. In between them was one small and perfectly formed, absolutely symmetrical low cone, from which rose a thin wisp of smoke. The smoke left a blackish, greyish trail that first rose vertically and then, as it caught the trade winds a few hundred feet above the darkening surface of the sea, was whisked off to the left, melting away until it became no more than a slow-fading stain against the salmon glow of the sunset. [...] This, I remembered thinking during the endless night of the flight back west, had been a scene of impeccable beauty. And all the more so because it presented a distant prospect of a place where the processes of the world were at work, a place of elemental significance, and a disastrous place once - but these days quiet again, serenely biding its time.

So, blurb aside, why did I come away from the book so disgruntled and disappointed? It began, I think, with this bizarre shortcut through world history:

The Portuguese from the warm and lazy south were slowly driven out and replaced by doughty Europeans from the cold and more ruthless north.

Where I'd been coasting along, enjoying my reading experience, suddenly I found I'd hit a pot hole. What an odd statement. Are the Portuguese not Europeans? And national characteristics determined by the climes, really? Did I fall asleep and wake up in an alternate universe where we still base our understanding of the world and its peoples on Ptolemy?

Death by a thousand cuts followed: once Winchester has unleashed the flow of lazy stereotypes, it cannot be stopped. Chinese people are all polite and hardworking (then and now!), the early-modern Dutch have an "easy-going arrogance", and Islam is and was a religion of "rigid formalism", the domain of "desert-dried Arabs". An anti-colonial Muslim rebellion in Indonesia that killed 24 people is an "orgy of bloodletting", whereas the Dutch authorities' response (which killed 30 people) is described in much less emotive terms, with only the Dutch troops' weapons (repeating rifles) getting to be "terrifying". Non-Western places where the sound of the volcano was heard are "exotic". Modern-day Jakarta is dirty, and crowded, and has "the kind of cheerful hugger-mugger mayhem that marks many a modern Asian city", in contrast to the "queenly" splendor of its European imperial incarnation, Batavia. Your guess is as good as mine as to what 'hugger-mugger' means. Later it becomes clear that what he means by Batavia's "golden age" is actually 'golden age for the people who lived in the "gigantic park" on the hill, profiting off the labour of the people who lived in the actual working city down below'.

Then there are the simply nonsensical statements. Of a successful Chinese restauranteur in Jakarta, we're told that

He remains blissfully unaware that he made his fortune in a town that had once made other outsiders, the entirely dissimilar burghers of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, extremely wealthy too.

How can Winchester know the restauranteur is 'unaware' of this, unless he asked, at which point presumably the restauranteur became... aware? (Or could it be Winchester is just assuming a Chinese man in the catering trade won't know any history?) Later he informs us, regarding the Muslim identity of Indonesians, "All of its [Indonesia's] people are either converts or descendants of converts." Wait, what? Are there any religious communities of which this isn't true? Do Christians just spontaneously discover Jesus in the womb? How else does one become the adherent of a religion, if not by converting, or being born into a family with converts somewhere back in its generations?

Some sign of what's going on begins to emerge as Winchester guides us through his history of 19th-century science. His heroes were, to a man, tragically misunderstood and ignored by their peers. Ornithologist Philip Lutley Sclater published an article about zoological regions of the world that is "all but overlooked by most biologists today". (Why would they consult it? Does a chef need to know how the oven got invented? Do budding journalists read up on Linear B before they start churning out copy?). Alfred Russel Wallace had his idea about natural selection totally co-opted by that Darwin guy. (Apparently, however, "There are not a few who believe..." that Wallace deserves all the credit really; Winchester doesn't say who, in what must be the pop-science version of the lurkers supporting him in email, preferring to insinuate that there is a bastion of true believers holding out against some vast pro-Darwin conspiracy.) Alfred Wegener was "vilified and, most cruelly, denied his deserved academic reward" for the "heresy" of thinking new thoughts.

I'm not disputing the fact that the history of science - like the history of, well, everything - often exaggerates the contributions of some individuals, and downplays the work of others. I'm not disputing that Wegener, in particular, had a chequered career because many colleagues in influential places weren't interested in hearing a word he said since he challenged their understanding of the world so fundamentally. But by the time Winchester launches into a diatribe about how, "Scientific specialists, who still today guard jealously their own fields of research, attacked him roundly for daring to invade their territories", it's all starting to feel a bit like a conspiracy theorist at work. Not everyone whose ideas are challenged or ignored is a brave maverick within an unfeeling, conservative system who will one day be vindicated; not everyone who rejects a 'daring' 'new' theory is just protecting their turf. Sometimes, you really do need to know some background in a given field before you can wade in and tell everyone already there that they're doing it wrong, or else you risk missing the point or reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, you've unwittingly overdosed on the Dunning-Kruger effect.

I can't judge Winchester's accuracy or plausibility in all or even most of the topics he touches on in this book; my understanding of things like plate tectonics doesn't stretch beyond GCSE Physics, and I have at best an interested lay-person's knowledge of 19th-century science. In areas that I do know a little bit more about, however, I find Winchester so wildly off-base that it is difficult for me to trust his presentation of the rest, although given his training in geology I assume he knows what he's doing with regards to the volcano itself.

Winchester's dilettantism becomes abundantly clear - and tripped up this reader repeatedly - when he starts commenting on Islamic history. (Although for the record, I'm a medievalist, not a modernist, so take what I say with a pinch of salt, too!) For Winchester, early-modern Islam, it seems, consists entirely of "the far-away mullahs of Araby" and "a home-grown, locally brewed version of the creed" that is "gentler" than the "rigorous" Islam of the Arabs. (Googling these sentences, I note that Winchester's judgement has been quoted approvingly elsewhere, as if he's an authority on the matter.)

In Winchester's vision of the world, even in the early-modern period Islam was something the Arabs did to other people, all centrally directed by scholars in 'Araby' who apparently cast spells over unwary pilgrims with they get to Mecca. The vast world empires of the Mughals (a Persianised Turkic elite ruling over the many peoples of India), the Safavids (Iranians and Central Asia), and the Ottomans (Turkish rulers, largely Greek state apparatus, multi-ethnic subject population, one portion - but by no means the majority - of which was Arab) didn't exist, or had no cultural weight; Mecca was in no way a meeting-point for Muslims from across the world; Islamic scholars didn't exist everywhere Muslims do, only in Arabia; and there weren't multiple interpretations of even Sunni Islamic law and practice, just "orthodoxy" and nice, syncretic, doomed Indonesian Islam. The fact that the anti-colonial movement he discusses talked about perang sabil - as opposed to using an actual Arabic term like jihad - is clearly proof that the Indonesians were indoctrined into the perfidious (and no doubt dusty) Arab way of the hajj.

This is not to deny that militant forms of Islam were and continue to be a transnational rallying cry for anti-colonial movements, or that militant forms of Islam have caused and continue to cause huge amounts of suffering today. But Winchester's presentation is all so teleological, and black-and-white, and frankly every bit an exercise in lazy kneejerk stereotyping as his comments on the Portuguese. (Dutch colonialism, meanwhile, is merely "not very kindly".)

In some ways this is understandable: the book was published in 2003, so it was presumably written in that period when plenty of more learned writers, who ought to have known better, were consumed by the notion that history was primarily important for the ways it could be read to prove the inevitability of 9/11 and the eternal violence of Islam with regards to 'the West'. And indeed, Winchester's bibliography lists Karen Armstrong, VS Naipaul, and Bernard Lewis' later, wackier output (including one from the period when he became a shill for the US invasion of Iraq), but contains little evidence of wider reading from more specialised, historically-informed scholars. Winchester, it seems, knew what his conclusion would be going in: that the eruption of Krakatoa led to the bombing of Bali, do not pass go, do not collect £200:

They [=the colonial authorities] did not stop to wonder where these people [=those communities devastated by the volcano] might eventually look for sustenance and succour.

Perhaps they should have done. For it turned out that not a few of these unhappy, dispossessed and traumatized people eventually looked to the west, to Mecca, and to the benevolent power of the Islamic religion to answer their needs.

Sometimes history really does repeat itself. And sometimes it's just that writers of history are desperate to see themselves reflected back in it.

~~Nic

Such Private Things

"This book," says Natalie Zemon Davies at the start of stranger-than-fiction popular history The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), "grew out of a historian's adventure with a different way of telling about the past." Her telling concerns a wonderfully odd little legal case from 16th-century Languedoc, centred on an imposter named Arnaud de Tilh. De Tilh successfully posed as a missing man named Martin Guerre for several years - even living in Guerre's house with Guerre's family - until Guerre's wife Bertrande one day denounced him for fraud, took him to court. Bertrande was then reunited with her lost husband, when the real Martin Guerre turned up out of the blue at a climactic point in his replacement's trial.

While working as a consultant on a film dramatising these events - although 'dramatising' feels like a curious word to apply to an already pretty cinematic story - Davies found herself inspired by the questions that the process of film-making threw up, notably in terms of the motivations of those involved:

Watching Gerard Depardieu feel his way into the role of the false Martin Guerre gave me new ways to think about the accomplishment of the real impostor, Arnaud du Tilh. I felt I had my own historical laboratory, generating not proofs, but historical possibilities.

Watching actors play various interpretations of these fictionalised people gave Davies the opportunity to arrange and rearrange the real people in her head: Why did Martin leave in the first place? How might de Tilh have gathered the information he needed to 'play' him? Was Bertrande fooled by de Tilh, or did she go along with the deception for her own reasons, related to her difficult status as a young not-widow in a gossipy village? The detail of a single case like this holds much allure for a historian: it opens up the possibility of a window on a world and worldview that is rarely glimpsed on an individual level. While economic, social and cultural history can open up general images of lives lived outside the chronicles and letters and diaries of the educated elite - the cultural practices, the trends and priorities expressed by marriage patterns and consumption and shared ritual - pre-modern non-elites, being unaccustomed and/or unable to communicate their thoughts and reflections in written form, have left us few traces of themselves as distinct individual people.

Davies also itched to explore both the uncertainties of historical reconstruction, and the wider cultural context for the legal case, that a fictional narrative necessarily left out. What she has to say in the book about Martin's Basque roots offers possible insight into his actions and family life. When Martin was a boy, his parents moved to the village of Artigat from Labourd, a predominantly Basque region of France (while retaining their valuable estate back home in Labourd, which Martin would one day be in line to inherit). The shift was, Davies explains, probably jarring, and never complete:

To be accepted by the village they had to take on some Languedoc ways. Daguerre became Guerre; if Pierre had used the Basque form of his name, Betrisantz or even Petri, he now changed it. Sanxi's wife probably continued to carry baskets of grain on her head, but she restitched her headdress and the decorations on her skirt so as to fit in with her neighbors.

The clash between local and Basque attitudes to the buying, selling and inheritance of land is crucial to Davies' ideas regarding the conflict between Martin and his father that drove him to leave home in the first place, and the story's eventual resolution.

But then in 1548, when the infant Sanxi was several months old and Martin in his twenty-fourth year, [...] Martin "stole" a small quantity of grain from his father. Since they were both living in the same household, this theft probably reflected a struggle for power between the two heirs. But in any case theft was unpardonable by the Basque code, especially if done within the family. "The Basques are faithful," Judge Pierre de Lancre was to write; "they believe that theft is the work of a debased soul, of a low and abject heart; it bears witness to the demeaning neediness of a person." Martin Guerre had now placed himself in an imposssible situation. "For fear of the severity of his father", he left - he left his patrimony, his parents, his son, and his wife - and not one word was heard from him for many years.

But such details would have slowed the pace too much. Moreover, a film could not easily acknowledge, she notes, "the 'perhapses', the 'may-have-beens', to which the historian has recourse when the evidence is inadequate or perplexing". [Although now I find myself wondering about the possibilities of an undergraduate history class that juxtaposed The Return of Martin Guerre, film and book, with I, Pierre Riviere...]

Davies account is itself inevitably somewhat fictionalising. The trial records themselves don't survive; we have only the judge's retrospective narrative of events, published shortly after the trial, to give us access, second-hand, to the various historical actors' self-presentation at the trial. This can be seen in the passage quoted just above the previous paragraph, which gives some sense, I think, of Davies' approach to her source material. The trial over which the judge presided was itself, of course, a performance and a reimagining of the decisions made during the years under investigation - something that Davies perhaps doesn't make quite enough of. So when she says, "What I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past", it must be taken with a pinch or two of salt. But that, of course, is part of her point, and her reason for laying the process open in such a way: all history-writing is necessarily an act of interpretation, of re-presentation, and of imagination.

Her understanding of Martin's wife, too, is the product of just such an act of imagination. Combining the judge's account of Bertrande's testimony and actions during the trial - together with the testimony of the around one hundred and fifty (1) witnesses who took part in the trial at various stages - with her wider knowledge of gender norms and social practices in early-modern southern France, Davies attempts to layer into her account some suggestions as to Bertrande's (often conflicting) desires and expectations.

Bertrande's actions appear confused and confusing to the modern reader, as indeed they seem to have done to those around her. Bertrande and Martin were married young - around the age of fourteen, which is unusual for the time and social milieu (with the exception of the upper elite, most pre-modern Europeans married in their late twenties) - to create an alliance between their ambitious, relatively wealthy families. But it seems - by the trial accounts - to have been unsuccessful union, which went unconsummated for some eight years. Nonetheless, Bertrande strongly resisted her own family's efforts to persuade her to end the marriage. Davies explains her refusal to escape as follows, seeing in her actions the seeds of what was to come:

Here we come to certain character traits of Bertrande de Rols, which she was already displaying in her sixteenth year: a concern for her reputation as a woman, a stubborn independence, and a shrewd realism about how she could maneuver within the constraints placed upon one of her sex. Her refusal to have her marriage dissolved, which might well have been followed by another marriage at her parents' behest, freed her temporarily from certain wifely duties. It gave her a chance to have a girlhood with Martin's younger sisters, with whom she got on well. And she could get credit for her virtue.

At length a local wise woman was called in to lift, ritually, what Bertrande later testified must have been a curse on the pair; a child was duly born. When Martin disappeared, Bertrande was left in limbo: neither wife nor widow, she was legally unable to remarry or move on with her life, even after several years. De Tilh, Davies suggests, must have seemed like a way out, however dubious ("Beyond a young womanhood with only a brief period of sexuality, beyond a marriage in which her husband understood her little, may have feared her, and surely abandoned her, Bertrande dreamed of a husband and lover who would come back, and be different"), and indeed Bertrande stood by her new man even when others in the wider Guerre family doubted him, diving in the physically put herself between him and the clubs with which the husbands of her sisters-in-law were beating de Tilh:

"He is Martin Guerre my husband," she is reported as saying, "or else some devil in his skin. I know him well. If anyone is so mad as to say the contrary, I'll make him die."

Of de Tilh, Davies says that he was a clever but dissolute individual, disaffected - much as Martin himself had perhaps been - with the prospects available to him in his home village, who left to join a militia in one of the many local wars, and then washed in Artigat at just the right time. This is at least in part a tale of younger generations attempting to assert themselves against the expectations of family, especially fathers - of young men in limbo (much like Bertrande without either a living husband or news of a dead one) in their family homes, obliged to wait for their parents to die to give them the chance to own their own property or determine what they would do with their own lives.

One of the things I really liked about Davies' account is the way she brings out how the villagers themselves chewed these things over, considering them - both at the time, while wondering if de Tilh was who he claimed to be, and later, going over those doubts again at the trial - as possible motives for the central trio's actions. Undoubtedly, some exaggerated the extent of their earlier doubts, wanting to seem as if they'd always be correct, but what I'm interested in here are the terms in which the doubts are couched: the villagers offer suggestions and rationalisations, seeking to explain events in much the same way as Davies does (albeit often with different conclusions). The villagers appear as people engaged with narrative, prone to speculation, to self-invention, to constructing others' motives and trying to fit them into familiar, common-sensical frameworks. Thus Bertrande herself, for example, speculates at the trial that perhaps de Tilh and Martin had met as soldiers, and that this was how de Tilh could know "such private things about me".

In the event, Martin returned at the key moment, and Bertrande was able to cap her denunciation of de Tilh with her acceptance of the real Martin:

After one look at the newcomer, she began to tremble and weep (this according to Coras, who considered it the duty of a good judge to note the expressions of his witnesses) and ran to embrace him, asking his pardon for her fault, committed because she had been overwhelmed by the ruses and seductions of Arnaud du Tilh. Out tumbled all the prepared excuses: your sisters believed him too readily; your uncle accepted him; I wanted to have my husband back so much that I believed him [...]

Martin Guerre showed not a single sign of sorrow at the tears of Bertrande de Rols, and with a fierce and severe countenance (assisted perhaps by memories of the Spanish preacher she had been among) said, "Leave aside these tears... And don't excuse yourself by my sisters nor my uncle; for there is neither father, mother, uncle, sister, or brother who ought better to know their son, nephew, or brother than the wife ought to know her husband. And for the disaster which has befallen our house, no one is to blame but you." Coras and Ferrieres reminded him that he bore some guilt here, having abandoned Bertrande in the first place, but he would not be moved.

The book raises all sorts of fascinating questions about identity, family life, and people's willingness to believe - or pretend to believe - the implausible, for the sake of finding a way around or through the social strictures that bind us. Interesting stuff.

~~Nic

Stifling Privacy

"Brother Matthew would have prescribed comfrey," she observed.

"And you are amused to find me doing the same?"

"Strangely enough, I think it is consoling. I have a great love of comfrey. And I loved Brother Matthew."

The Abbott felt at that moment that he was the true inheritor, not only of the defunct Brother Matthew's role on the island, but of all the arts and failings of Apollo.

John Fuller's Booker-shortlisted Flying To Nowhere (1983) is the sort of odd, charming little novel - or perhaps more accurately novella, since it's 105 pages long and quite large of print - that it almost seems a shame to say too much about it. It centres on a remote Welsh island, home to a community of monks, a bunch of women farmers, and a sacred well that attracts pilgrims on account of its supposed healing properties. When the healing miracles mysteriously dry up - to the extent that pilgrims increasingly seem not to be returning from the island at all, let alone going home cured - an ecclesiastical agent from the mainland named Vane is sent to investigate. He arrives "standing with one foot on the prow, like a clerk who supposes he is required to be a hero", and that's about the last time anything makes much sense.

Fuller is a poet, I gather, and that comes through in his novel's vivid imagery and gnomic dialogue; in many ways, Flying to Nowhere is less a story than a series of striking tableaux with captions. When the horse accompanying Vane on his boat panics during the landing, and ends up fatally injured on the treacherous coast, the episode is described through the almost inhumanly detached point-of-view of a young, rather pretentious and over-serious novice:

The hooves struggled to keep the body upright, but one leg was already broken from the jump and as the horse heaved, sank and scrambled among the slippery rocks other bones failed him. For a moment it seemed as if the glistening torso might try to move by itself in a series of wriggles and lunges, dragging with it the bunched and useless withers and fetlocks. One rear leg was flattened at an unusual angle from the knee; the other seemed caught between two rocks.

The passage seems set on dismembering the horse before it is even dead; while "horse" as a whole creature gets three verbs attached to it in quick-fire succession, most of the struggles and the suffering here are anatomised as the provinces of individual body parts (all carefully specified): hooves, torso, legs, bones, withers, fetlocks. The detachment of "unusual angle" and "seemed" is so lacking in apparent empathy that it borders on callous.

This is not a young man unaware of the physical. A few pages earlier, we are told of the novices' struggles with their monastic clothing ("The garments of meditation are not designed for the pace of prologue; they walked swiftly, though without urgency. At each step their garments were caught between their legs, tugging and chafing their calves"), and of our novice in particular reflecting on what he sees around him from within "the stifling privacy of his cowl". How stifling the enforced privacy of the monastery proves to be is one of the things the book explores; our novice is not unaware of the physical, but he is terrified of it, and utterly determined to ignore it at all costs.

Ranged against the self-denying, idealistic novices are the women of the island, who are practical and earthy to a - rather cliched, it must be said - fault. When we first meet them, they are engaged in hard physical labour in the fields the novices are walking through; their sweat is lovingly described. Later, one young woman is described as (in the semi-seclusion of her bed in a communal women's dormitory),

holding the flowers of her breasts and filling them in her mind like filling cupped hands with the heaviness of spring water, trickling cool through the fingers.

The imagery is arresting; I like the water's unexpected "heaviness", though not so much the flower-boobs, not least because how exactly do you "fill" a flower in a way that makes any enlightening metaphorical sense when applied to breasts? But it does feed in a wider, rather trying dichotomy of Earth-Mother-women set in contrast to airy-intellectual-men. The women, we're told, enjoy "cheerful shared activity" on account of "the female response to the seasons and to what fittingly belonged to them. It was an absolute virtue of the sex, tested and proved in the full round of life", because women are so natural! and earthy! and in naturally in touch with naturey earthy things while the men think Really Deep Thoughts! As I've noted here before, pedestalling half of humanity isn't much of an improvement over pillorying them, since the end effect is still a dehumanising denial of individuality, and while it might be argued that all this is an extension of the novel's themes about life, body, and spirit - and that it therefore is a deliberate expression of the male characters' rather aetiolated emotional development - the narrative tends to reinforce the view rather than challenge it.

But this is one area where the novel's brevity, and its opacity, work to its advantage; I was absorbed enough over the short page-count to keep the eye-rolling to a minimum, and be puzzled at what exactly Fuller is getting at. A couple of female characters have some wonderfully elliptical things to say, as in this dormitory conversation:

"Are you crumbling away too, Gweno?"

"No, no. It's leaving me pure and new and now I've died and got wings and I'm flying away. Can't you see?"

Her fingers moved in the moonlight, and their shadows moved in the rafters.

"Yes," came several voices. "We can see you flying away. Where are you flying to?"

"I'm flying to nowhere. I'm just becoming myself."

This exchange seems to suggest a combination of bodily and extra-bodily experience, something echoed elsewhere in one character's distinctly un-monastic musing that sex can be transcendant ("Remember that spending with women is a struggle from roots, an attempt to fly"), and in the central debate between Vane and the Abbot about miracles and the well. To call it a 'debate' is to overstate the case somewhat; the two men fence warily at intervals, and mostly manage to talk past rather than to each other. This is about as direct as it gets:

"I cannot arrange cures. Cures are not for sale."

"Are you saying that there are no cures?" asked Vane.

"Perhaps there have been cures, but I do not know in every case what has caused them."

"Dry and energetic" Vane wants straight answers and obedience, and the well back online; the distracted, doubting Abbot (unconvinced, as seen just above, by the well's miraculous properties) is busy secretly dissecting corpses to see if he can find "the private chamber of the spirit", and imagining the books on whose knowledge he has based so much of his identity dissolving back into their constitutent parts:

Could leather be cured of its curing? [...] He would lose first those books bound in vellum, for the bindings would turn back to stomachs and digest the contents. Or the shelves would grow into a hedge and keep out the hand that reached for knowledge.

More earthiness. Amid an increasingly (g)lowering atmosphere, as the investigation seems to hint more and more at foul play, Vane finds himself starting at shadows and wondering who he can trust. Having demanded a meal of meat, his doubts soon make him rue what he asked for:

a plate of meat produced in sly triumph [...] It was dark, sweet meat, three slices of it in a wooden dish, and Vane had wolfed it down as if he had not eaten for a fortnight. Now it lay uneasily on his stomach, like an animal twitching in a nightmare.

Fun, pretty, and full of dark hints. I liked.

~~Nic

Or I wake up, drowned

She turned her attention to her egg, dipping each toasted soldier with military precision.  When the last of the white was scooped out, she quite suddenly plunged her teaspoon through the bottom of the shell, a resounding crack in the quiet kitchen.  Then she reached over, took mine, and did the same.  'So the witches can't sail in them,' she explained.

An intensity of foreboding hangs over each of the 253 pages in Amy Sackville's second novel, Orkney.  It is suffocating reading, almost bare of incident or action. But what there is bristles with disconcerting significance, so that a character eating breakfast becomes a warning, and a pebble collected on the beach becomes malignant, and a lobster the very epitome of either love or perversity, depending on your perspective.

Richard and his two-day wife pitch up in Orkney, at the northernmost tip of nowhere for their honeymoon, apparently at her request .  He is 60, a professor of literature and more specifically of Victorian poetry; she is barely in her 20s, only recently his brightest student and now his bride.  Neither have any family to speak of.  His are dead.  Her mother is somewhere in Northumbria, but her Orcadian father disappeared when she was a child and she left the islands soon after.  She and Richard are an unlikely conjugal pairing, and pre-judged by everyone who meets them - father and daughter is the first assumption, followed by an uncomfortable recognition.  Richard narrates for us, smooth and intellectual, charming in the way that a greying male academic can be, taking great pains to tell a romantic story.   He casts himself as a formerly loveless husk, hollowed out by a bachelor's life, reinvigorated by his wife's sudden appearance in his classroom and now reborn as her husband and lover.   He enjoys the frisson of their relationship, the excitement of their encounters in public.  Early on he recounts the first time they had dinner together, claiming she sucked his fingers in the restaurant after sharing a lobster, relishing how their fellow diners tried hard not to stare.  Later on his erotic version of affairs is called into question, but Richard remains very attached to this 'memory'.

She is nameless, barely describable.  Richard, who of all people should know her best, can only give us vagueries:

I have no photograph.  I say, she is tall, she is thin, she has white hair and green, or bluish, or grey eyes... She has a violet freckle on her hipbone, a bruise; her hands and toes are webbed and the veins behind her knees are green.

The only number on her phone is his.  She bursts into life the two or three times in the book that they encounter another person but only briefly, like a dropped match. 

The novel is punctuated by cycles of waking and sleeping, and by dreams.  She dreams violent nightmares of drowning, of tsumani waves and inexorable tides.   She fears the sea more than anything else and cannot swim, but is drawn to it and spends her days playing chicken with it on the freezing beach.  Richard's answer to nearly all her fears is to have sex, during which she clings to him 'like a limpet and whimpers'.

Richard is working on a book, his magnum opus and the culmination of:

'all the strands of forty years' thought: enchantment narratives in the nineteenth century.  Transformations, obsessions, seductions; succubi and incubi; entrapments and escapes.  The angel in the house becomes the maiden in the tower, the curse come upon her.  Curses and cures. Folktales and fairy-tales retold.  And all the attendant uncertainties, anxieties and aporia.  Do I wake or do I sleep? Fantasy and phantasm.  Beautiful terrible women.  Vulnerable lonely cursed women.  Strange and powerful women.  It's an old obsession.'  

These women - 'Always the women', she says.  I'm afraid so, I say - are his wife's precedents.  With her silver elfin hair, webbed hands and feet and mysterious Orcadian origins, she fits right into his troubling lexicon of femininity.

Or Richard makes her fit, or wants to.  She won't be pinned down like a character in a poem, and he is constantly frustrated by his inability to fix her in place:

She is Protean, a Thetis, a daughter of the sea, a shape-shifting goddess who must be subdued; I hold her fast and she changes, changes in my grasp... But I am no prince and cannot overwhelm her; she will consent to marry but goes on shifting no matter how tight I grip.

Subdue, grasp, overwhelm, grip: Richard's is the romance of possession, in more ways that one.  He perceives that she - this 'tiny, perfect, whittled trinket' - has possessed him, like La Belle dan sans merci.  But as the honeymoon progresses, and his delight in her is darkened by ridiculous jealousies over an adolescent bird-watcher and a urine-soaked tramp, it is clear that he is the posessor and not vice-a-versa.  She bruises easily, he says, ominously, on the third morning of their honeymoon.

Nearly everything takes place out in the open, in the wilderness, with the big presence of the sea and the weather-beaten Orkney landscape.  Richard's new wife is a creature of this environment, standing out on the beach in all weathers, simply watching the sea come in and out.  Richard doesn't join her.  Instead he watches from the house, catching her in the frame of the window, literally fixing her with his gaze.

So I have taken up my station, and she is in her place, looking out.  I glance from the window to the page as I work.  Her view is encompassed by mind; it is not merely the sea that I see, it is the sea that she is seeing.  Something at last takes the empty place at the centre of my perspective... She has brought me the sea and the sky and arranged them around her.  We are quite alone in our little bay.

Impossible not to shiver at that 'quite alone' with its bare hint of threat.

Which is not to say that there isn't a whisper of the sinister about the woman herself. She and Richard tell the story of Vivien and Merlin to one another, a version in which she is 'a wilful scheming vengeful soul who by her sulks and seductions at last deceives a melancholy Merlin into revealing the spell that will confine him' and a version in which it is Merlin who pursues her, and whose 'obsessive love so exhausts her that at last, in a desperate bid to be free of him, she tricks and traps him.'   Sackville leaves it to us to parse out the couple's relative power dynamic, and which if either trajectory is true in this case.  Richard's wife even offers another version, in which Merlin and Vivien really are simply and innocently in love.  Perhaps it is the reader's own prejudice and darkness that makes them unjustly suspiscious? 

Richard's slick narrative sows many seeds of doubt, a myriad of possible interpretations. Is he a lecher or a lover; a gentleman or a brute of barely supressed violence?  Ominous gaps appear in his story as it progresses, literally represented by blank spaces on the page itself.  His wife slips away from him, disappearing from sight more and more.  Is he breaking down, out of his mind at the possibility of loosing the happiness he has found? Or is she running away, in fear of her safety?  And what kind of woman is this wife anyway?  Is she something more otherworldly than a passionate literature student, a selkie or a sea-witch?  Or a troubled young woman looking for escape?  Is she with him by consent, or coercion, or cunning?  Is she even real? 

Orkney is full of the things that make folktales tick. It's dominant notes are love, longing and loss, and it captures the claustrophobia of a folktale world which is both intensely real and unreal at once.  The slightness of the story is a deception; the book resonates longer and more loudly than it would appear to warrant.  I'm disappointed it didn't show up on the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist this month and hope it doesn't get completely lost amidst the shortlist clamour.  This is about as good a book by a woman as you could hope for.

~~Victoria~~

Where Are We Going?

Dr Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer - it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr Kim couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark.

Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

I read Barbara Demick's remarkable Nothing to Envy: real lives in North Korea (2010) during an epic two-and-a-half day train ride across the western and mid-western United States, from Emoryville to Chicago. The further I got into it, the more I found myself cherishing the continual sensation of movement in my little metal world, for the welcome - if sometimes jarring - contrast it offered to the experiences of Demick's interviewees.

The central triumph of Demick's book is the way she puts North Korea's people - specific, individual people - at the front and centre of her account. Too often, whether in the pronouncements of Western leaders, in media coverage, or in supercilious comedic films, the story of North Korea is shrunk down to that of a monolithic, basketcase state and its eccentric Dear Leader(s). Witness the sniggering coverage of Kim Jong-il's death in 2011: North Koreans are all brainwashed, or they're all too afraid to break ranks, or something else, but either way they're all "all" - there are no individuals.

Retelling the recent history of North Korea through the daily lives of six of the North Koreans she interviewed, Demick reminds us of what we should have known all along: North Koreans, like anyone else, are complicated individuals who don't all think alike or respond in the same way to their situations. Indeed, the people she spoke to - each of them after they'd left the country - weren't all in identical situations. Her interviewees include a factory worker (Song Hee-suk, aka 'Mrs Song', as Demick tends to call her), a teacher (Mi-ran), a homeless child (Kim Hyuck), and a doctor (Kim Ji-eun, the Dr Kim whose first impression of China upon her defection from North Korea in 1999 is described in the passage at the head of the post). Some were well-connected, while others were outsiders: Mi-ran was systemically disadvantaged by her "tainted blood" (her father was a former South Korean soldier and prisoner of war forced to settle in the North after the Korean War), while her sometime boyfriend Jun-sang was seen as suspect because he's descended from Japanese immigrants. Some, like Mrs Song, were long-term true believers, while others - like Mrs Song's daughter, Oak-hee - were sceptical about the regime from a young age.

They each have their own lives and loves and hopes - not all of which revolve around the political situation in their country! - as Demick discusses in a tone-setting passage in her opening chapter:

By the mid 1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, malfunctioning. But the imperfections were not so glaring at night. The hot-springs pool, choked with weeds, was luminous in the reflection of the sky.

The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars.

As the young couple would walk through the ginkgo leaves, what would they talk about? Their families, classmates, books - whatever the topic, it was fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.

This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in any East Asian Studies department, people analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this bleak country where millions have died of starvation, there is love.

As noted above, it's not quite an inside view. Foreign access to actual North Koreans living in North Korea is very strictly controlled and regulated by the state; foreigners are restricted to Pyongyang, and Demick notes that only certain "handsome, politically correct" North Koreans are permitted to live there ("the regime goes to great lengths to ensure that its inhabitants make a good impression with their appearance and are ideologically sound"). Necessarily, then, Demick's interviewees are all refugees: defectors who escaped to neighbouring China and South Korea (and this, too, is part of the tapestry of the book: the varying experiences of trying to adapt to - sometimes tough and unwelcoming - life elsewhere), in many cases with their names changed to protect their family members who did not or could not leave with them.

Nonetheless, several of Demick's subjects give a vivid account of what it was like to fully buy into the message, before they became disillusioned. The most heart-wrenching story belongs to Mrs Song, the eldest of the interviewees and once an eager and irrepressible factory worker, who for a long time had no doubts at all that what she was constantly being told was true: that individual suffering (not least her own) was necessary for the collective good, that Kim Il-sung was a superhuman leader, and that the rest of the world was a howling wasteland where life was even worse (this idea can be seen also in Dr Kim's reaction to what she sees in China, quoted above). Demick sums up the ideology the regime promotes through a snapshot of the North Korean film industry:

Under Kim Jong-il's direction, the Korean Feature Film Studio on the outskirts of Pyongyang was expanded to a 10-million-square foot lot. It churned out forty movies per year. The films were mostly dramas with the same themes: The path to happiness was self-sacrifice and suppression of the individual for the good of the collective. Capitalism was pure degradation. When I toured the studio lot in 2005, I saw a mock-up of what was supposed to be a typical street in Seoul, lined with run-down storefronts and girly bars.

For Mrs Song, everything bad was to be taken in stride; and anyone who fell foul of the regime must have done something to deserve it. (If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear, etc.) Six days a week of eight-hour shifts, a daily couple of hours of Party indoctrination, and four young children to care for, were nothing to her; at Party self-criticism sessions, she expressed her anxiety that, even on just five hours' sleep a night, she was not working hard enough. Life was always one of privation, but especially after the mid-1990s economic collapse in North Korea (something whose details and causes were carefully kept from its information-starved populace), food supplies became severely limited, and water and electricity unreliable at best. Nonetheless, for a long time Mrs Song clung to her belief that this was the only way, and looked askance at those who sought ways round the system:

It was a topsy-turvy world in which she was living. Up was down, wrong was right. The women had the money instead of the men. The markets were bursting with food, more food than most North Koreans had seen in their lifetime - and yet people were still dying from hunger. Workers' Party members had starved to death; those who never gave a damn about the Fatherland were making money.

"Donbulrae," Mrs. Song muttered under her breath. Money insects.

In the past, she took comfort in knowing that she and everyone else she knew were more or less equally poor. Now she saw the rich getting richer; the poor getting poorer.

Among the profiteers was the army, a state body that incorporates some 20% of the adult male population, or one million people (making it the fourth largest military in the world), and eats up an estimated 25% of North Korea's GNP. Military personnel - themselves in penury, it must be said - commandeered and sold rice sent into the country by overseas aid agencies.

Only when the 1990s famine took the lives of her husband and her son - along with those of two million other North Koreans - did her belief begin to crumble, but even then she would not give up on her home. Devastatingly, Mrs Song's suffering was worsened by her ideological commitment, by her refusal to cheat the system and - as she saw it - betray her fellow North Koreans by buying food via the black market rather than from state distribution centres. Some of Demick's other interviewees had fewer scruples; both Mi-ran and Jun-sang's families, we're told, did much better during the lean years (if hardly comfortably) because they had fewer illusions. Mi'ran saw her primary school class, however, reduced from fifty children to just fifteen. Even Mrs Song's daughter Oak-hee, who by then had grown up and left home, took to making money to support herself by renting her spare room to a prostitute as a workplace.

Sad stories abound. Mi-ran and Jun-sang, whose families lived near each other when they were growing up in Chongjin, pursued a long-distance, largely epistolary relationship through the years he was at university and then working in Pyongyang, and she was a teacher in a distant village (she herself was unable to get to university because her access to a top school was quietly but inescapably blocked by some layer of bureaucracy within the regime, owing to her father's "tainted blood"). Mi-ran long nursed the desire to escape the country. Jun-sang came to feel the same, though - perhaps because for a time he was successful within the system - his disaffection came more abruptly, something he pinpoints to an encounter with a starving boy singing propaganda songs for money, on a railway platform:

His tiny body was lost in the folds of an adult-sized factory uniform but his voice had the resonance of a much older person.  He squeezed his eyes shut, mustering all his emotion, and belted out the song, filling the platform with its power. [...] "Our father is here.  We have nothing to envy."

Overcome with pity, Jun-sang gave the boy a very generous ten-won tip:

It was less an act of charity than gratitude for the education the boy had given him. He would later credit the boy with pushing him over the edge. He now knew for sure that he didn't believe. It was an enormous moment of self-revelation, like deciding one was an atheist. It made him feel alone. He was different from everybody else. He was suddenly self-conscious, burdened by a secret he had discovered about himself.

Both of them dreamed of leaving, and made separate, secret plans to go. Neither ever dared tell the other, for fear that the other was still the believer they pretended to be, and would report them to the authorities (informants, including neighbours, co-workers and even family members, were rife, and presumably rumoured/feared to be even more so than they actually were). In October 1998, after her father Tae-woo died, Mi-ran, her mother and her two sisters all escaped to the sanctuary of Tae-woo's surviving South Korean family, travelling one by one - in a really heart-in-mouth episode, even in the retelling - to reduce the risk they would be caught together. Before she left, Mi-ran destroyed ten years' worth of letters from Jun-sang, in an effort to avoid implicating him should she be caught, or once her disappearance was noted. Obviously, when Jun-sang heard, a few months later, the rumours of where she had gone, he was devastated. The pair finally found each other again in 2005, but by then it was too late: Mi-ran was married to someone else.

Mi-ran and Jun-sang simply could not afford to take the risk of telling each other; defection was an extremely dangerous enterprise. We learn this in particular through the experience of the destitute young orphan Kim Hyuck, who was caught during his first attempt to leave the country, and sentenced to a prison camp for three years. The place slept fifty people to a room, on bare concrete floors; he estimates that two or three people died each week, in his room alone. He finally reach South Korea in a later attempt, in 2001, but struggled for a long time to adapt to life there.

Dr Kim defected in 1999, in large part - she told Demick - because a government agent had "planted the idea and she found she couldn't shake it": she was approached, and warned that she was being watched because she was seen as a likely defector:

"Why would I want to leave?" she protests.

The agent enumerated the reasons. She had relatives in China. Her marriage had broken up. The hospital wasn't paying salaries.

"You! We're watching you. Don't run!"

Increasingly unable to do her job because of dwindling medical supplies - she was reduced to making gruelling hikes out into the desolate countryside on her days off, in search of plants and herbs she could use to treat her patients - and deciding that the listed reasons actually did add up to a good motive to leave, she did so. Like Hyuck, it took her several years to settle into life outside North Korea, however, a process Demick explores in detail.

By contrast, Oak-hee left North Korea not because of disaffection with the regime - she was never, we're told, particularly enamoured of it in the first place, having grown up during the period of its greater privation ("as her family got hungrier, she grew angrier") - but because she was in an abusive marriage. Seeking a divorce in North Korea would mean automatically and completely relinquishing her home and children to her husband, and so for a long while she stayed. But one evening, after a particularly brutal assault, she fled her home still in her night-dress. Her escape was one of the more difficult: lacking relatives or money or the right contacts to help her on her way, and defecting at a time (1998) when security was tighter than it became - both on the North Korean side of the border, and in China, where the authorities carried out periodic raids to deport refugees - she had to use more desperate means.

Oak-hee's only way across, and only way of staying safe once she was across, was to sell herself to one of the many Chinese men willing to buy (and hide) a North Korean bride. This too was risky - in the year 2000, the Chinese arrested 8000 such women in a single sweep, not to mention the risks of further domestic abuse that lurked in these heavily unequal, dependent arrangements - but she was lucky in her buyer. She remained with her 'husband' for two years, before moving, with his help, to a town where she could earn the money to bring her children across to join her. She was arrested and deported, but managed to leave the country a second time (the borders had grown increasingly leaky, and people's desperation ever greater; in 1998, a total of 923 North Koreans had defected, but by 2001 somewhere in the region of 100,000 people managed it - there was a now well-travelled refugee infrastructure). This time, with the money and contacts built up during her earlier stay, she was soon able to arrange to have her mother, Mrs Song, taken to South Korea - under false pretences, because Mrs Song would never have gone voluntarily. Again, Demick takes plenty of time to tell the story of Mrs Song's painful acclimatisation: for a long time she feels angry, bewildered and betrayed. The process of liberating Oak-hee's children took longer: at the time the book was published, Oak-hee had just been able to prise one of her children away from their father, but the other remained in North Korea.

Demick also explores, fascinatingly, some of the ways the regime convinced people like Mrs Song, and kept a lid on the sceptics. The tools of indoctrination she describes are morbidly amusing in their directness, at least to an audience lucky enough never to be subjected to them without alternatives, or to the mechanisms of enforcement that lurked behind them. Children were started young, with messages that ranged from the odd but innocuous:

Whether they were studying math, science, reading, music, or art, the children were taught to revere the leadership and hate the enemy. For example, a first-grade math book contained the following questions: "Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many children are singing in total?"

to the downright sinister:

A first-grade reading primer published in 2003 included the following poem, entitled 'Where Are We Going?':

Where have we gone?
We have gone to the forest.
Where are we going?
We are going over the hills.
What are we going to do?
We are going to kill the Japanese soldiers.

One of the songs taught in music class was 'Shoot the Yankee Bastards':

Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.

Much of the propaganda centred around the personality cult of first Kim Il-sung, and then of Kim Jong-il. The two Kims were utterly ubiquitous, their portraits everywhere and their speeches broadcast and re-broadcast on state TV and radio, voiced by suitably heroic-sounding actors. Speaking to Denick, Jun-sang recalled the first time he heard Kim Jong-il's actual voice, with an illegal aerial he used to pick up South Korean TV: it was disappointingly "old, tinny, and distinctly human". This illicit source of information was also his first opportunity to get any sense of the scale of the 1990s famine death toll, in the form of solid numbers rather than personal impressions of death.

Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were presented as the benevolent fathers of their people, caring for and watching over their well-being. The iconography of the regime was often friendly rather than forbidding - colourful murals would show Kim Il-sung surrounded by adoring children ("Kim Il-sung didn't want to be Joseph Stalin; he wanted to be Santa Claus"). Via Mrs Song, we catch a stunning glimpse of the real or perceived pervasiveness of the regime and its agents, of the degree of its ambition to intrude on private, domestic space:

In Mrs. Song's home, as in every other, a framed portrait of Kim Il-sung hung on an otherwise bare wall. People were not permitted to put anything else on that wall, not even pictures of their blood relatives. Kim Il-sung was all the family you needed – at least until the 1980s, when portraits of Kim Jong-il, named secretary of the Workers' Party, were hung alongside those of his father. The Workers' Party distributed the portraits free of charge along with a white cloth to be stored in a box beneath them. It could be used only to clean the portraits. This was especially important during the rainy season, when specks of mold would creep under the corners of the glass frame. About once a month, inspectors from the Public Standards Police would drop by to check on the cleanliness of the portraits.

Mrs. Song didn't need the threat of an inspection to clean her portraits. Even in the mad scramble of the mornings, rolling up the bed mats, making lunches, hustling the children out the door, she would give the portraits a quick swab with the cloth.

And through Demick's interviewees' discussion of his death in 1994, we get some sense of what it felt - still feels? - like to live within such an environment, where one all-encompassing figure is thought to be the only guarantee of security and comfort in a world that you are constantly being reminded is horrifically dangerous. Again, there was a range of responses. Kim Hyuck was too young to properly understand what was going on at the time, and initially was simply delighted that there was no school that day. Mi-ran recalls seeing a crowd gathered, spontaneously, and hearing "the rhythm of sobbing" and a "heaving sound"; she

was numb. She couldn't understand it. She was a schoolteacher in training, an educated woman who knew that mortals were made of flesh and blood and lived finite lives. But Kim-Il-sung, she thought, was something other. If the Great Marshall could die, then anything could happen.

Jun-sang found himself unable to mourn like those around him - or like the crowds whose images were soon being broadcast constantly on the television - and couldn't understand why (this was some time before his revelation with the boy at the train station). Dr Kim's father simply stopped eating, and starved to death within a few weeks. There were widepread reports of heart attacks and suicides, and increasingly social pressure was brought to bear on the holdouts who were not demonstrating sufficiently hysterical patriotic grief. For Mrs Song, meanwhile, the world seemed on the verge of collapse:

Nothing made sense. She started to scream. "How are we going to live? What are we going to do without our marshal?" The words came tumbling out.

Her husband didn't react. He sat pale and motionless, staring into space. Mrs Song couldn't keep still. She was pumped up with adrenaline. She rushed down the staircase and out into the courtyard of the building. Many of her neighbours had done the same. They were on their on knees, banging their heads on the pavement. Their wails cut through the air like sirens.

Highly, highly recommended.

~~Nic

True Delicacies

March has been a hard month, with ridiculous pressures at work and the unrelentingly cold grey muddy wet weather we have been having.  I have struggled to settle myself down to the final two books of Crime and Punishment and have gadded about like a butterfly, reading to distract myself from the Great Russian Novel looming in the background.  One more nonsensical egotistical encounter with Raskilnikov and I would have foresworn Dostoyevsky for life. So, time to put it down and back away slowly until I'm strong enough to fight another day.  In a way the procrastination has worked a treat, as it led me to read two books and start a third that I probably wouldn't have picked up in that more serious interlude between one properly finished novel and another.  Distraction books are often the books I really really want to read and yet won't let myself enjoy as the main event.  I feel a lot more freedom to be spontaneous when I'm already being a little bit naughty.  Strange I know, and a little bit sad, but true.  

It's why I have finally felt free to crack open A Clash of Kings, the second book in George R. R. Martin's magisterial A Song of Ice and Fire.  I have had it on my reading pile (and in the sidebar over on the left) since I finished the first book in January, but have let it sit untouched, glancing at it wistfully now and then.   Having opened it, predictably, I now can't put it down.  Or rather, can't put my new copy of it down.  I took the actual copy that has been sitting on my TBR to work with great anticipation and promptly spilt my lunch all over it.  Not just a little spill but a big time dousing spill.  Leek and potato soup + paper = a mulchy mix of things.  Thank goodness GRRM is now the most popular bearded writer in all the world. The book shop two minutes from work had several copies of all the books in stock and I was reunited with Tyrion and Arya and Sansa and Jon in 10 minutes flat.  (Along with a copy of Cathrynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making and Karen Russell's new collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove.  Ahem.  I also took the opportunity to evangelise the Song of Ice and Fire series to a startled man loitering around the Terry Pratchetts who had seen the TV series but thought the books weren't for him. 'What?' I cried, 'You are missing out.  The HBO series is good, but you're going to like it a lot more once you've filled in all the gaps.'  He bought the first three.  All in all, a good lunch time for the bookseller thanks to my misplaced soup.) 

I'm so ridiculously excited at the thought of reading the third, fourth and fifth books this year.  My first time through I stopped mid-way into book three, for reasons now completely lost to me - probably author fatigue, as I read them all in a single rush - and after so many years thought I would never get back to them, especially knowing my poor memory and my lack of discipline for rereading.  But 2013 seems to be the year for Getting Things Done.  A Dance with Dragons here I come.

I've also recently snuck in Amy Sackville's second novel Orkney (on which I'm still cogitating, more in a later post) and another YA fantasy book: A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge.   This was an utterly unexpected delight.  Hardinge has been on my radar for a little while, and I actually own another of her books, Fly by Night, which was gifted to me by my friend Niall with the exhortation to Read It.   And I was fully intending to do that - I even pulled it off the shelf and put it on the dining room table ready - but then I was walking past the new fiction shelves at work and saw A Face Like Glass, picked it up, read the first four pages in the staff room and then had to keep going. 

Caverna is a vast underground city, a claustrophobic, disoriented world unto itself.  Its citizens are born, live and die in tunnels without ever seeing daylight or the warmth of the sun or the tug of the wind.  Nobody leaves and people from the surface never come in.  A discrete trade in True Delicacies - the exquisite and dangerous wines, cheeses, sweets and perfumes that the inhabitants of Caverna create - and the import of the ingredients needed to make them are the only contact with the outside world.   It is cramped, dark, breathless; the only light coming from 'trap lanterns', plants that take in carbon dioxide and omit light and oxygen in its place.  Men and women routinely go mad trying to understand the confusion of its geography, of the possibility of a city entirely ringed around by rock.

Ordinary maps cannot work in Caverna, and that is not just because the city is not flat.  Directions do not always work as they should.  Compasses spin uncontrollably or shiver into fragments... Things link impossibly, turn themselves inside out, double back.  It draws you in.  You twist your mind into new shapes.

The insularity of Caverna, and the proximity in which its people live, demands a stratifed, tightly structured society.  Power is held entirely in the hands of a small number of families, Court artisans who create the True Delicacies and battle each other in an intense cycle of dynastic struggle.  Meanwhilehile their water is pumped and their tunnels are dug and the trap lanterns that keep them alive are fed by the Drudges, a vast underclass of people who live and die in nameless obscurity. 

In nameless and in faceless obscurity as well.  In Caverna facial expressions do not come naturally to babies.  They do not smile or frown or screw up their eyes in distaste.  All children are born blank as slates. Each 'Face' or expression has to be taught and learnt.  Beyond the five basic expressions taught to the Drudges - to give them the Faces for expectantly awaiting orders, politely carrying out a task, a smile of gratitude, humility when they have erred - Faces also have to be bought.  The more Faces you have the richer, the more privileged you are.  The richest can buy Faces for all conceivable occasions, from 'ranges' designed for them by coutour Facesmiths, from the evocatively named No 29 - Uncomprehending Fawn Before a Hound to the puzzling No 64 Violet Trembling in Sudden Shower.  But no matter how many Faces a person has they cannot be spontaneous in their smiles or scowls.  Their emotions and their expressions are disconnected. Suitable Faces are chosen to fit a situation 'like a card from a deck.'  In Caverna 'lies were an art and everybody was an artist, even young children.'  It is a highly developed system of artistry that facilitates the complexity of Caverna's political intrigue and, literally, masks its climate of repression.

Into this world bursts a little girl called Neverfell.  Her origins are shrouded in mystery and she has spent her childhood hidden away as an apprentice to the reclusive cheesemaker Grandible.  When she accidentally leaves the safety of his tunnels at the age of 12 - by following a rabbit not down a hole but up one - the people of Caverna cannot believe their eyes.  Neverfell has no Face.  Or rather, she has a face but of a kind they have never seem before, 'a face like glass' that shows everything she is thinking or feeling in a never-ceasing flicker of change.  She is naturally (or, rather, unnaturally) and intuitively expressive.  It is horrifying and tantalising, an abomination of the rules of the city that puts her first before the Enquiry - Caverna's answer to the Inquisition - and then into the hands of Maxim Childersin, a scheming aristocratic vintner, and then finally into the presence and service of Caverna's ruler, the Grand Steward himself. 

Neverfell is the very definition of a catalyst, a fizzing, popping irrepressible thing bound to cause a reaction or explosion once introduced.  This is true both at the level of her exuberant, unconstrained personality - she is a 'skinny, long-boned tangle of fidget and frisk, with feet that would not stay still, and elbows made to knock things off shelves' - and because of what she represents.  She embodies a free flow of creativity, emotion and intelligence that threatens the tightly clenched world of Caverna.  In a city where personality is well and truly eroded and erased through training, facial discipline and physical constraint, she is a firework in an enclosed space.

There is very little honesty and trust in Caverna - how can there be when no one can read anything into the look on someone's Face? - and very little fellowship.  Political power is gained and lost in an endless round of assassinations and betrayals, a culture embodied in the person of the Grand Steward who has fossilised himself into an unassailable and miserable position:

Even the continual battle to stay alive, to avoid assassination by the hungry and ambitious, no longer made him feel slive as it once had...Now there was only a cold and heavy dread that death would bring not release but an eternity of greater monotony, that he would find himself trapped in a lifeless body, with a mind that was fading mote by mote, blind, deaf, dumb, number and powerless against the march of grey.

Seeing Neverfell for the first time he tastes life again, sees colours, smells scents, through her.  She is a kind of prism that brings the world into focus at the same time as knocking everything out of kilter.  The people of Caverna can't bear to look at her, but at the same time can't tear themselves away, and she inevitably becomes a piece at the centre of an almighty and long-running plot to change the city forever.

The story is long - just short of five hundred pages - and races along at a clip, and there are some disconnected moments, and sometimes one event follows another a little too much like beads on a string, but overall the book plays out a great, rounded successful story.  There is invention on every page, and Hardinge is always ready to give the unexpected flesh and density with her grin-from-ear-to-ear delight in metaphor and simile.  A rabbit is a 'quivering, docile dollop' that turns into a 'wild white halo of fur, claw and tooth' when touched; the rooms Neverfell is given in the palace are 'like hutches for pets that are never allowed to run around.'  Hardinge has that rare and precious gift for showing you that one thing is like another in juxtapositions that you could never have imagined yourself. 

Better still, there is lots to think about, and in this way the book reminded me of Seraphina.  I sense that Hardinge could very easily be an imagination run amok, with fantastical creatures and places and magics popping up like mushrooms, but A Face Like Glass keeps it channeled into its Big Themes of trust, honesty and justice.   The lynch-pin moment of the book, almost smack bang in the middle, is when Neverfell decides not to be pawn but to play her own game instead.   She sees a little girl like herself, a Drudge, fall to her death following a pointless order; and she sees the other Drudges looking on with blank, untouched Faces.  It fills her with anger and confusion.  Why don't they cry or shout or at least look sad?  It is only later that she thinks to look beyond their limitations.

How had she been stupid enough to think that these people were not grief-stricken or cold or weary or angry?  They just did not have the Faces to show any of these things.  They had always been denied such expressions... How could the Drudges rise up against bullies like the foreman?  Rebels needed to look at each other and see their own anger reflected...

Here she learns the lesson of cultural coercion, and understands herself as an individual force and the force of the masses as opposed to the force of the status quo.  And she also understands for the first time how she can change things.  It is significant important stuff, as well as about ten ordinary book-loads of fun at the same time.  You can't lose.  

Next up on my YA adventure, Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity which promises to be just as good.

~~Victoria~~

Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles

A sentry came down the corridor, stopped for a moment, spat on his boots, then walked on; from the other side of a door came the snores of weary convicts; a mouse gnawed at a feather; crickets beneath the stove tried their best to outchirp one another - and Katerina Lvovna was in seventh heaven.

But ecstasies tire, and prose always follows.

Number three in my thus-far pretty irregular series of reviews of Russian novellas (previous instalments here and here) concerns punchy melodrama Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865; translated by Robert Chandler, 2003), by Nikolai Leskov (1831-95).

Mtsensk has minimal plot, but what there is of it is both eye-catching and blood-splattered, played out in bold emotional strokes by larger-than-life characters. It comes as no surprise to learn that it was adapted into an opera, by Shostakovich, in the 1930s; it's that sort of tale (a google image search on the title brings up numerous photographs of recent stagings). In essense, it's about a repressed young woman, driven to utter distraction by the boredom and privileged captivity of her loveless marriage. Add a manipulative clandestine lover, stir, and stand back and watch the bodies start hitting the stage. I mean, ground.

The Shakespearean title is not quite the straightforward signal of the story's trajectory that it might appear, though; for a start, it is not simply the author's gloss on things, but, we're told, the local gentry's reading of events. Originally a "light-hearted quip", it stuck, because the woman in question was "the centre of a drama so terrible". This is a literate tale, inside and out: on several occasions, the narrative highlights its generic nature, describing the trial of the murderous lovers as a "scene", and noting that Katerina is simply "acting her role in the drama of Love", as if she is powerless against the force of her character arc. She even gets her own "Out, damned spot!" moment; when she and Sergei attack and kill her husband, Katerina's exhilerated shock in the aftermath is expressed by her efforts to clean away the evidence, and hide her fear by castigating the dead man from bringing this on himself:

Only in two places on the painted floor could she see spots of blood the size of cherries. Katerina Lvovna scrubbed them with the bast, and they disappeared. "Creeping up on me like a thief, spying on your own wife - this'll teach you!" she said, standing up again and looking down towards the storeroom.

"That's it then," said Sergei, trembling at the sound of his own voice.

But this is not the whole story. Both the narrative's and the local gentry's literacy is misplaced, or misrepresentative; deliberately so, I think. For all the occasional, lofty statements about how Katerina's emotions are entirely typical of all women - such as her lover Sergei declaring he wants to marry her being "a desire that always pleases a woman" - her actions and reactions frequently contradict the narrative's assertions, even to the point of ridicule. If anything, Sergei has the Lady Macbeth role: he cajoles and manipulates, but it is Katerina who takes the lead in the actual murders.

Katerina ("not exactly a beauty") is described as a woman "fiery and exuberant by nature", who is "accustomed to simplicity and freedom" before, at the age of 24, she is "given in marriage" to Zinovy Borisovich Izmailov, whose family owns profitable orchards and "a fine town house", and trades flour. "She did not, however, love him or feel any attraction towards him", we're told; "it was simply that he had asked for her hand and she, being poor, could not afford to be choosy". Five years into the marriage - which, like Zinovy's first, is childless (Katerina, of course, is blamed: "A barren woman should remain a spinster!", she's told, although it's not clear how said barrenness could be determined without marriage, since women are also expected to stay virginal for their husbands) - we meet Katerina stewing within "a boredom so profound that, as people say, it makes even the thought of hanging yourself seem like fun".

In "a state of depression bordering on stupor", Katerina's eye falls upon handsome farmhand Sergei while her husband is away. Although a convenient nearby foreshadower warns her off him because he's "a devil for the lasses" and "fickle" (interestingly, since that's usually an adjective that gets stuck on women), barely three or four pages have passed before she's wrestling (!) with him and then being expertly seduced by him. And Leskov makes no bones about the fact that Sergei gives her access to something life-affirming her marriage with Zinovy denied her (she is "released into the full breadth or her expansive nature") - even though, yes, Sergei's an utterly amoral waste of space and Katerina responds to her father-in-law's rebuke when he discovers what's going on by, um, poisoning him:

Before going to bed, Boris Timofeyevich had some buckwheat kasha with mushrooms, and soon afterwards he began to suffer from heartburn. All of a sudden he was having spasms in the pit of his stomach; he vomited terrible, and toward morning he died, dying exactly the same death as the rats in his barns, for whom Katerina Lvovna used with her very own hands to prepare a special dish containing a toxic white powder that has been entrusted to her for safekeeping.

On this first occasion, the narrative is rather arch about what's going on; at no point does Katerina overtly resolve upon murder (although it must be entirely her idea, because Sergei is locked up in a storeroom at the time), and we get no more direct statement on the matter than this sidling up to the truth. Thereafter, things get much less circumspect, as Sergei wheedles and whines Katerina into expanding her killing spree. The next victim is her husband, whom she essentially goads into what has the ring of habitual spousal abuse, and then retaliates with the reckless glee of the newly liberated:

"Like that, is it? I'm well and truly grateful. I was waiting for something like that," Katerina Lvovna cried out. "Only now, my dear friend, I'm the one who's in charge here."

In a single movement she pushed Sergei out of the way, jumped at Zinovy Borisovich from behind, and, before he could reach the window, grabbed him by the throat with her slender fingers and threw him to the ground like a sheaf of newly cut hemp.

Then there's a young nephew, Fedya, who stands to inherit the greater part of the Izmailov estate, who is marked for death after Sergei says that the thought of the boy "upsets me", "Because my love for you, Katerina Lvovna, makes me want to see you live like a real lady, not the way you've lived until now." Again, Katerina takes the lead in the violence, after Sergei persuades her to it. Fedya's death is met with a suitably Jacobean bout of world-upside-down special effects:

"He's dead," whispered Katerina Lvovna. Hardly had she got to her feet to put everything in order when the walls of the silent house, that had witnessed so many crimes, were shaken by deafening blows; windows rattled, floors shook, and the chains of the hanging icon lamps sent fantastic shadows flitting across the walls.

Once they're caught, and sentence to a camp in Siberia - once Katerina, in other words, has no more wealth to tempt him - Sergei drops Katerina with indecent haste; while she imagines that "with him beside her even the road to Siberia would flower with happiness", he's off sleeping with other prisoners. But she gets the last - completely deranged - laugh by leaping off the side of a boat and taking his new lover with her. The last we see of her, she's dragging her new victim down "like a powerful pike attacking a roach", and hello, opera. Splendidly bonkers.

~~Nic