Eve's Alexandria

Gone Into the Woods Forever

 

I read about the death of Robert Holdstock, author of Mythago Wood, with great sadness this morning.  He passed away suddenly in the early hours of Sunday morning, aged 61, of an E-Coli infection.  Reading the Guardian's hastily written tribute, I was overwhelmed with fond memories of reading his most famous novel as a teenager, at a time when I was just becoming interested in English folklore.  It seems a shame to me that his work wasn't more widely read outside the sf community (and I'm included in this, as I never read beyond Mythago Wood), despite its incredible historical and spiritual resonances.  His website is here and Nic has reviewed two of his more recent books on Alexandria, The Hollowing and Avilion, if you want to read more about him. 

~~Victoria~~ 

That Ferocious Wind

(Milford Sound, Fjordland, NZ - 27th October 2009)
 

So, we're back from New Zealand.  In body if not in spirit.  Ever since we landed at Heathrow, nearly two weeks ago now, it has been nothing but lashing rain and that ferocious wind.  The day has barely been with us, at its best in the very early morning when the winter sun is theatrical and everything looks stark and backlit.  On the other side of the world it was late spring, turning into summer, and we were lucky with the weather; it was blue skies when we needed them, and if it rained it rained at night or when we were travelling from one beautiful place to another.  We had some extraodinary experiences: flying over Fjordland in a tiny Cesna Caravan; cycling across the Maniototo; standing on a beach on the Otago Peninsula in a perfect dusk watching yellow-eyed penguins come in from the sea; sailing Lake Taupo on a yacht once owned by Errol Flynn; trekking 14 kilometres through native bush on Waiheke Island, just Esther and I all alone, just to paddle on a glorious, deserted golden shoreline.  It was, and probably will remain, one of the most wonderful and impulsive things I have ever done.

While I was there I learnt several things about New Zealand.  First, it is true what they say about the sheep - sheep, sheep, sheep, everywhere you look in their ruminating millions - and the mountains.  You look up and there are mountains; if not mountains, volcanos.  Every town has a mountain range for a backdrop, even Christchurch which stands on the edge of the notoriously flat Canterbury plains.  If you take in a vista without a peak or two you feel a strange sense of emptiness.  Second, it is a young country.  For Europeans, a very very young country.  Permanent white settlement of the islands only really began in the mid-nineteenth century, by which point the Maori had been there perhaps 800 years at most.  When William the Bastard was conquering England in the eleventh century the Land of the Long White Cloud was nothing but birds, bugs and trees.  This has the effect of making New Zealand's history very intimate, uncanonised, like a breath on the back of your neck.  It is also very manageable, but no less mysterious and compelling for it.  In Dunedin we visited the Otago Settler's Museum and spent a fascinating hour in a room filled from floor to ceiling with photographs and portraits of settlers who arrived on the first ships in the late 1840s, mostly from Scotland.  It was a potent experience, to think of their long journey across the sea and their prospects of building a new life on completely alien and strangely inhabited shores.  They tried to bring home with them in the form of animals and plants, to transform what they found.  The legacy of it is everywhere you look - every hillside in Otago is sown with gorse and broom like a Scottish hillside; today's farmers spend hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to uproot the stuff.  (Because sheep can't eat it.)  Not to mention the devastation wrought on native bird species like the kiwi and flightless wren by introduced predators, like stoats and cats.

(Flying over Queenstown, NZ - 27th October 2009) 

Another thing about New Zealand: books are very expensive there.  Very expensive.  A regular paperback will set you back $25 NZD, about £11.00, while a hardback will cost anything up to $50 or £35.  And so I didn't buy any, not a single one.  I could have bought dozens; NZ seems to have a flourishing trade with lots of independent bookshops to inspire impulse buys, but alas alack the cost and weight stopped me.  I am determined to read some Janet Frame now though, and more Katherine Mansfield.  To my surprise I read surprisingly little while I was there, even on the flights there and back.  When I wasn't sleeping (on the flights, I mean), I was being plyed with plasticated foodstuffs or watching movies or wandering up and down the aisles.  I flicked through a couple of magazines; read a couple of hundred pages each of Shirley and Acacia but was never seriously in danger of finishing either of them.  Shirley I finished this morning; Acacia, dare I say it, is still stuck around the three hundred page mark.

It isn't that I haven't enjoyed what I've read of David Anthony Durham's book so far.  It is all well and good, and the world-building is solid.  But solid, perhaps, at the cost of its spark.  Acacia puts its feet firmly in the grooves worn by others that have gone before it - decaying Empire, devastating secrets, betrayal, the fate of the world on the shoulders of children.  And there is something missing in the characters for me.  I can't put my finger on it yet; I am simply not convinced by them.  If I want to read on and (and at present I do want to) it is because of a primitive desire to find out what happens, to see through the endgame, not to spend more time in Durham's world with the individuals of his making.  They haven't become enough of themselves yet to warrant being of interest in their own rights.  This is precisely opposite to the way I have felt about Shirley (and note, I'm pretty sure this is the only time and place in the world you will see these two books compared).  From very early on in Bronte's novel I knew what the end would be.  The end is inevitable, and all the gentle twists of the plot are visible a mile away through mist, but the desire to read on was strong.  The difference was that I wanted to hear the characters speak and think and interact again, and then again.  They were their own reward, entirely predictable in action but thoroughly unpredictable in personality - one minute witty, the next obtuse; one minute arrogant, the next vulnerable, like real people moving about.  I feel I know Durham's characters because they are familiar to me from the dozens of fantasy sagas I have read before; I feel I recognise Bronte's characters because, like individuals in the flesh, they are barely knowable at all.  Their convincing realism, and what makes them so compelling, is the sense that we do not and cannot perceive them in their entireties. 

~~Victoria~~

The Best Possible Name

Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realise, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

Jhumpa Lahiri's first short fiction collection, The Interpreter of Maladies (2000), was one of the best impulse purchases I ever made: each subtly wrenching story was a small revelation of measured prose and luminous insight. Thanks to my chronically over-stuffed TBR shelves, it took me a little while to get round to reading her debut (and, to date, only) novel, The Namesake (2003), but I'm glad I did. On balance, it isn't as successful as Lahiri's short fiction: she is at her most effective when exploring, in detail, short periods of her characters' lives - quiet emotional crises that bubble up over several weeks, that is, rather than the (unavoidably soap operatic) ups and downs of decades; there is also, perhaps not unsurprisingly in a novel, more incident, not all of it satisfying. Yet this remains a sensitive and illuminating work.

Like the stories in Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake is concerned with the experiences of first- and second-generation Bengali immigrants to the US - specifically, with their experiences of East Coast university towns. The first part of the book focuses on Ashoke Ganguli, a graduate student at MIT, and his young, pregnant wife, Ashima. It is 1968 and they are recently married, and are still getting to know each other even as they're setting up home together in a new country. Ashoke has his work and his colleagues to ease some of the shock of transition. He also has something of a new lease on life, having survived a vividly-depicted train crash - and resultant serious injuries - seven years before. His salvation came mostly through the workings of chance; he was reading Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman at the moment of the crash, and was spotted in the wreckage because he had a page from the book clutched in his hand, which caught the rescuer's search lights:

None of this was supposed to happen. But no, he had survived it. He was born twice in India, and then a third time, in America. Three lives by thirty. For this he thanked his parents, and their parents, and the parents of their parents.

Ashima, though, is adrift, abruptly bereft of the extensive support network of family and friends she has been raised to expect:

"We are expecting a perfectly normal delivery, Mrs Ganguli."

But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen months, ever since she's arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. It's not so much the pain, which she know, somehow, she will survive. It's the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land. [...] She is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no-one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.

This and other passages struck a chord for me, recalling tales of my late grandmother's early experiences as an immigrant to the UK - specifically, her experience of going into labour alone in the flat she shared with my grandfather (on a long shift in the mines), lacking both access to a telephone, and enough spoken English, to even call an ambulance. (Her landlord eventually roused an ambulance; the paramedics arrived to find the job already over, and my grandmother lying exhausted beside her firstborn, whom she'd wrapped in the bed cover.)

When Ashima's son is born, she feels pity for him ("She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived"). One symptom of this deprivation is that the new child cannot be named immediately, as Ashoke and Ashima are waiting for a letter - long promised, and, it becomes apparent, long lost in the international mail - from his great-grandmother, which is to advise on what the name should be. He can be given a pet name,

daknam, meaning, literally, the name by which one is called, by friends, family, and other intimates, at home and in other private, unguarded moments. Pet names are a persistent memory of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too that one is not all things to all people.

But he cannot yet be given a 'good name', the formal name by which will be known to the world ("on envelopes, on diplomas, in telephone directories"); for this they must wait, because any link with the family so far away is too precious to abandon. Back in India, this delay would be less of a problem ("It wasn’t unusual for years to pass before the right name, the best possible name, was determined"), but in the US the customs are different, of course, and the child's pet name becomes, by default, his official name.

Thus their son is named Gogol. This is chosen by Ashoke, and even amid her loneliness and dislocation it brings Ashima some joy, as she recognises this very personal gift for what it is: "the name stands not only for her son's life, but her husband's". As he grows up, their son, of course, does not:

For by now, he's come to hate questions pertaining to his name, hates having constantly to explain. He hates having to tell people that it doesn't mean anything "in Indian".

It comes to stand instead - not least because Ashoke doesn't actually tell him the history behind the name - for the lack of communication between father and son, which only worsens as the years go by and that early promise of a bond between them, greeted with such pleasure by Ashima, is lost. When Ashoke gives his son a copy of his namesake's short stories, it means nothing to Gogol, and the gesture goes painfully unremarked.

But the name also stands, more broadly, for the gulf of expectation and experience that separates US-born Gogol (and his younger sister), desperate to fit in and live a 'normal' American life, from his Indian parents, who feel each step towards acculturation as a lost part of themselves. Ashima and Ashoke feel the separation from their families in India more keenly with the passing years, as their own parents' lives disappear at the other end of crackly, borrowed telephone lines, the deaths events reported from another time zone, not shared or relieved by the presence of relatives. Although they can occasionally afford to visit home, it only increases their loneliness when they return ("in spite of the hundred or so relatives they've just seen, they feel as if they are the only Gangulis in the world").

This, again, put me in my mind of my own grandparents: my grandmother, who came to England at the age of 18, had neither money nor leisure time to visit her family for several years (by which time she was already married, and had the aforementioned child); my grandfather, who came from the Ukraine, had even less chance to go home by the late 1950s, of curse. While I still find it hard to imagine the scale and finality of this utter removal from all that is dear and familiar, or the notion of going through so many life changes without being able to share them with my parents, reading The Namesake gave me some insight.

Of course, the experience of being a white granddaughter of immigrants in a majority-white country is very different from that of Gogol, in the novel - from having a heritage and a skin colour that forever mark you out as different in the country where you were born and raised. Ashoke and Ashima do adapt, in some senses, to their surroundings, even though doing so entails loss:

And yet to a casual observer, the Gangulis, apart from the name on their mailbox, [...] appear no different from their neighbours. [...] They learn to roast turkeys, albeit rubbed with garlic and cumin and cayenne, at Thanksgiving, to nail a wreath to their door in December, to wrap woolen scarves around snowmen, to color boiled eggs violet and pink at Easter and hide them around the house. For the sake of Gogol and Sonia they celebrate, with progressively increasing fanfare, the birth of Christ, an event the children look forward to far more than the worship of Durga and Saraswati.

Nonetheless - as we come to see increasingly through Gogol's eyes - they can never completely 'fit in' in the white, middle class suburbia that Ashoke's career opens up to them. Small slights accumulate, and Gogol becomes aware that his parents' identity is at odds with, and viewed with hostility by, their adopted home:

For by now he is aware, in stores, of cashiers smirking at his parents' accents, and of the salesmen who prefer to direct their conversation to Gogol, as though his parents were either incompetent or deaf.

The racism, and its internalisation, is subtly portrayed, but pervasive. Gogol's inevitable period of teenage rebellion becomes focused on kicking against the things that make his parents (and himself) different. He resists their efforts to maintain a measure of Bengali culture in their American home. They speak Bengali to him, he speaks English back; he sighs, as only a teenager can, over the festivals they "force him, thoughout his childhood and adolescence" to celebrate (as he recalls it later); he resists pressures to date Indian and Indian-American women, and occasionally goes out of his way to shock his father with his choice of girlfriends. He even, albeit with his parents' blessing and not without a "twinge of sadness", changes his name (to Nikhil).

It is in this context that he really begins to feel what his parents have felt since they moved to the US: the same nagging conflict between past and present, between his upbringing and the life tries to make for himself:

[H]e doesn't feel like Nikhil. Not yet. Part of the problem is that the people who now know him as Nikhil have no idea that he used to be Gogol. They know him only in the present, not at all in the past. But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential. At times he feels as if he's cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different. At times he still feels his old name, painfully and without warning, the way his front tooth had unbearably throbbed in recent weeks after a filling.

What Gogol/Nikhil comes to realise, as we follow him through (the unsuccessful relationships of) his 20s and beyond, is that his parents' identity and heritage, the one marginalised and viewed with suspicion by the society around them, is shared by him. He cannot simply deny that part of him (not least because the American culture surrounding him will never let him forget that he is different); nor, at length, does he wish to. But their Bengali identity is not the whole story of who he is, either, because his experiences growing up in another country have shaped his expectations and selfhood in all sorts of difficult ways; this he discovers in a separate process of realisation and growing up, and another unsuccessful relationship. There are no straightforward answers here.

Ultimately, it seems, Gogol is unmoored, partaking of several worlds but never (allowed to be) entirely at home in any. In the end it seems his displaced, accidental name may indeed be the best possible one for him.

~~Nic

Enlargement of the Imagination

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows - only hard with luminous edges - and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe": but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.

In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that there should be anything of what you call a "solid" kind; but I dare say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight the Triangles, Squares, and other figures, moving about as I have described them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible, to us, except Straight Lines.

It's an ingenious set-up: a first-person account of a two-dimensional world. Flatland (1884), by Edwin A Abbott (1838-1926), is a slim, fascinating little fable: part social satire, part musing on the limitations of human perception, and all inventiveness.

The book is couched as a description of the ways of Flatland, for the benefit of an audience in another world, glimpsed briefly and with the force of revelation by our narrator: Spaceland, where three dimensional shapes are the norm (i.e., our own world). The narrator is a Square, which - in a society where an individual's status rises with the number of their sides - makes him (self-consciously... it is a Victorian novel, after all) lower middle class. Herein lies one of the book's pleasant surprises: for the lead figure in an allegorical tale, whose role it is to channel the themes, our Square is an unusually complex and interesting character.

Much of the time, he presents a conservative, rather priggish image of himself - as when he explains, for example, the hierarchical structure of his society in terms of the essential qualities of its inhabitants. One's disposition depends upon, and can be readily predicted by, the acuteness of the angles one presents to the world: thus, for example, triangles are reckless and violent (all the more so if they are of the isosceles variety...), and are fit only to be soldiers or the lowest of labourers.

By extension, he is firmly convinced that the number-of-sides hierarchy is fundamentally a Good Thing, although he does condemn the hazardous, rather cruel ways that ambitious upper-class parents seek to improve their children's standing - by fracturing their young sides repeatedly to increase said sides' number. (As if hothousing them at some horrific boarding school wasn't bad enough...)

Nonetheless, he considers efforts to offset/undermine the hierarchy, by the introduction of colour into Flatland, to be "diabolical", since "the road would then lie open for a total destruction of all Aristocratic Legislature and for the subversion of our Privileged Classes". People whose sides are of irregular lengths, moreover, are a threat to the fabric of everything, because - the horror - one cannot easily judge who they are and where they fit into the hierarchy simply by examining their angles:

[I]t does not need much reflection to see that the whole of the social life in Flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that Nature wills all Figures to have their sides equal. [...] if no one could calculate the Regularity of a single figure in the company, all would be chaos and confusion, and the slightest panic would cause serious injuries, or - if there happened to be any Women or Soldiers present - perhaps considerable loss of life.

He considers irregularity to be a condition (analogous to physical or mental disability, or perhaps more broadly to simple non-conformity) that must be remedied by "the art of healing" with "compressions, extensions, trepannings, colligations, and other surgical or diaetetic operations"; or, if absolutely necessary (!), euthanasia.

The reference to women's violence in the passage above stems from the fact that women, in Flatland, are not shapes but straight lines, and thus the pointiest of all:

If our highly pointed Triangles of the Soldier class are formidable, it may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our Women. For, if a Soldier is a wedge, a Woman is a needle; being, so to speak, all point, at least at the two extremities. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive that a Female, in Flatland, is a creature by no means to be trifled with.

It is the familiar rhetoric of misogyny: women, by their very nature, are dangerous to men (not to mention devious); since it is their nature they cannot be trusted to do any better, and must be confined to special quarters and follow certain social rituals to minimise the harm they might cause to men. If there is a social hierarchy, women are always at the bottom of it. He is splendidly deadpan about the more extreme consequences of the arrangement:

On the whole we got on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times indescribable disasters. [...] The result is massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population, and nipping Revolution in the bud.

(I especially like the combination of the dry, detached tone with near-hysterical words like "massacre" and "Revolution", here, and "the Thinner Sex" also made me chuckle; in places, Flatland is very funny indeed.)

But women are one topic on which our Square clearly entertains doubts about the wisdom and justice of the status quo; he anticipates, and agrees with, his audience's belief that the condition of women in Flatland is "truly deplorable". But what he deplores must surely have carried a ring of familiarity for the book's Victorian readers (as indeed it still does today):

About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief Circle that, since women are deficient in Reason but abundant in Emotion, they ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive any mental education. The consequence was that they were no longer taught to read, nor even to master Arithmetic enough to enable them to count the angles of their husband or children; and hence they sensibly declined during each generation in intellectual power. And this system of female non-education or quietism still prevails.

He goes on to note how many of the assumptions about differences between men and women are essentially in the eye of the beholder, and that ideas and actions which are considered irrational and silly in women become perfectly correct and admirable when they are done or felt by men ("'Love' then becomes 'the anticipation of benefits'; 'duty' becomes 'necessity' or 'fitness'; and other words are correspondingly transmuted.") He also notes how the language of chivalry - special regard for, and protection of, women - hides contempt:

Moreover, among Women, we use language implying the utmost deference for their Sex; and they fully believe that the Chief Circle Himself is not more devoutly adored by us than they are: but behind their backs they are both regarded and spoken of - by all but the very young - as being little better than 'mindless organisms'.

This particular passage ends with a restrained but heartfelt plea for the education of women that seems very clearly aimed as much at Spaceland as it is at Flatland.

Whether or not he always had such doubts about the inherent rightness of his world, as he narrates this account Square has undergone something like a religious conversion or a conceptual breakthrough. Towards the end of the book, the Square describes how he was, for a brief time, exposed to the world of three-dimensionality. He recounts his encounter with a Sphere, who urges him to "proclaim the Gospel of Three Dimensions to your blind benighted countrymen in Flatland" - something that lands him in prison, assumed to be insane, once he is back home.

But while Square is awestruck at the sight of solid shapes in Spaceland, he is inevitably led to wonder whether there are not further dimensions beyond the ordinary perception and comprehension of Spaceland, just as Spaceland is beyond his own; the Sphere, predictably, scoffs at the very notion:

I. And even as we, who are now in Space, look down on Flatland and see the insides of all things, so of a certainty there is yet above us some higher, purer region, whither thou dost surely purpose to lead me - O Thou Whom I shall always call, everywhere and in all Dimensions, my Priest, Philosopher, and Friend - some yet more spacious Space, some more dimensionable Dimensionality, from the vantage-ground of which we shall look down together upon the revealed insides of Solid things, and where thine own intestines, and those of thy kindred Spheres, will lie exposed to the view of the poor wandering exile from Flatland, to whom so much has already been vouchsafed.

Sphere. Pooh! Stuff! Enough of this trifling!

Abbott - a theologian, philosopher, and mathematician - was undoubtedly interested in the realms of imagination and thought that lie beyond our experience, and the ways in which such realms might call into question the things in our social order that we take for granted as 'natural' and 'correct'. For all the fun of the scenario, this is a book that punches above its weight; nineteenth-century postmodernism, anyone?

Still, the end result for our visionary Square is not a cheerful one; whether or not he is ultimately correct, being right in a cosmic sense isn't necessarily much help when faced with the daily realities of social expectations, which don't take kindly to either reformers or holy fools:

It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless fabric of a dream.

~~Nic

Actual Conditions of Life

The thick light of night stuck to our bodies. We moved slowly and with effort. At such times you had to save your strength to hold out for the end of the story, for death, or for whatever else.

Following on from The Foundation Pit, here's a tale about the end of Soviet collectivisation: Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia (1995; English translation 2003), a nicely put-together little volume from Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press. (Twisted Spoon is a nifty small press specialising in translations, particularly from Eastern European languages, and I picked up the book in a Prague bookshop, while visiting my fellow Alexandrian Jo there some years ago.)

Tales of Galicia is a collection of short stories, all set in and around the same fictional village, in the same period (1989). Each tale is recounted by the same anonymous, first-person narrator, who assumes the detached tone and method of an ethnographer, but who cannot quite resist a certain emotional involvement in the exchanges he recounts. (Or a certain wordiness - for the most part the prose is fine, but several descriptive and analytical passages go on a few sentences too long.)

There are a number of shared themes: social fragmentation, looming change, boundaries and their transgression. But as you make your way through the stories, connections begin to emerge. This is slow at first - a glance of a character met in a previous tale, return visits to the village pub - and then more obvious - family members are met, personal histories are explored from other angles - and gradually pieces of a larger story can be seen.

It's never all tied together (and is all the better for it), and this larger story certainly never resolves into a linear plot; but it makes for a neat and reasonably effective sort of meta demonstration of how people's lives, even the lives of those who barely know each other, are entwined within the broader current of life in the village. This blurring of the lines between short form and novel is matched by a breaking down of the boundaries between observer-narrator and subjects: he goes from being the unobtrusive, unseen interlocutor listening to an old man recount how the area has changed over the generations (in 'Blacksmith Kruk'), to getting drunk with one of the villagers ('Lewandowski'), and ultimately in the final story to sharing a character's reflections as she lies alone on her death bed ('The End').

That said, the narrator undoubtedly begins with an agenda, or at least with an expectation about what he will find in a village emerging from collectivisation: people stripped of their identity and community by would-be altruistic values ("to each according to their needs" etc.), values that collapse when exposed to the real world. It is a reading of the situation that he pushes early on:

Certainly, those values are beautiful, but too abstract and inadequate to withstand the actual conditions of life. The system's logical and mechanical, as well as abstract, structure shattered to pieces because Jozek and his brothers and sisters lived in it - a legion of all those who had been disinherited and liberated from the harsh dictates of morality, religion and memory. Surrendering themselves to instinct, listening intently to nature's murmured temptations, they became a mass that the most ingenious structure could not contain. (--'Jozek')

But over the course of the book we, and the narrator, are presented with a number of challenges - if never a complete refutation - to the notion that the villagers are "a mass", without "morality, religion or memory". It could hardly be described as wildly optimistic, but nonetheless there are signs of hope, signs that humanity has not been wholly obliterated by the horrors of collectivisation.

Certainly, people's lives are grim (although not noticeably grimmer, I have to say, than the accounts of Russian peasant life in some of Anton Chekhov's stories, like 'Peasants' (1897) and 'In the Ravine' (1900), which at times reach wrist-slitting levels of despair'; but then, Chekhov was a much more powerful writer). Still, Stasiuk's descriptions repeatedly emphasise the monotonous, cold decay of the village and its surrounding landscape, in a way that melds pathetic fallacy with an explanation of the way of life that has developed there:

A few buildings like heavy barges, lichen-covered and dilapidated, taken on a journey to nowhere, motionless on a giant white wave. Sheds for wood, shelters for hay. Clothes on lines buffeting against each other, smacking like pieces of frozen meat. The wind from over the mountain pass laden with clouds of snow. That is how Jozek's world looked. (--'Jozek')

Even where the events of the stories are not explicitly linked, life on this iron-hard, unforgiving land entails many a shared - indeed, in some senses collective - experience for its inhabitants, and for the most part these experiences are difficult and draining. In places, reading about the experiences induces a similar feeling in the reader; much like the narrator, it was not until the final few stories (in particular those centring on 'Grandma' and her family) that I found myself really engaging with the characters.

Everything revolves around hard physical labour (predominantly agriculture and mining), unremitting cold, drink, and the ending of things. Alcohol is an escape primarily for the village's men, a framework to their lives as fundamental as the church ("It was a safe and familiar legacy, the limit of their patrimony, their christening, their Sunday mass and their graveyard", is how it is described in 'Janek'). Women who drink are questionable, difficult, and ultimately pitiable figures ("She started to hang around the pub even though, you know, around here that's not a place where women just stop by", we're told of the title character in 'Maryska'). The pub is a space for men, although women "sometimes showed up on payday to get their hands on the earnings" ('Janek'), because of course women are killjoys who have the strange idea that families can't be fed on their patriarch's vodka fumes alone.

Initially, at least, this is not a world that has much space at all for women's experiences. But around halfway through the book, female characters begin to appear, and even to speak. We begin to see that men and women share the hardships of labour and borderline survival, if not the vodka:

But raising grain was by this time art for art's sake, and probably just force of habit, since he had to do something else besides haymaking and potato farming. And thus, abundance will always assume the shape of lesser or greater poverty. (--'Wlodek')

Afterwards, Grandma wrapped herself up in an old quilt, huddled in a corner of the wooden shed, and fell into a shallow doze. The night's luminosity was airy - nothing like the day's massive brightness that her body had to make an effort to get through, bent over, creaking and animated only by the hope of eternal rest in darkness. If it was September, hoarfrost would cover the ground before dawn. (--'Maryska')

There is little comfort here. Death, too, haunts everyone. Literally, in fact, for while we see a number of characters die (including Jozek, in the very first story, and Grandma at the end), some of them return later in the book to interact with the living. Another boundary transgressed. (The village, I should note, is itself located on a borderland.)

I can't help but wonder, indeed, whether part of the fear of death doesn't stem from a fear that it won't be the end - that dying will be no escape:

The men would wake up and sober up in the same place, the place where they would resume their labours. Because life was round, it moved in a circle, and if someone did manage to tear himself away from it, then someone else would immediately appear to take his place. (--'Janek')

Is this a place, then, lost to morality, religion, and memory? One story ('Place'), discusses the removal, by anonymous external forces, of a local church (it is apparently taken brick by brick to a museum); hard to deny the symbolism of that, although the narration of its loss is intercut with an account of its founding and memories of its role in the community. Several characters are indeed morally repulsive, Grandma's abusive son-in-law, for example ("he worked, he drank, he fought, he slept", he locked his mother-in-law in the attic while she lay dying... the final story really does pack an emotional punch). Yet towards the book's end we meet a man who comes back from the dead, no less, to report the truth of a crime he witnessed and thus free an innocent man, which seems above and beyond the call of neighbourly duty ('Confession').

In terms of memory, the monotony of daily life clearly takes its toll:

Then there came a morning, maybe Monday, maybe Thursday. It was hard to tell, because as usual, yesterday's day had fled from memory, and today's trembling hands weren't any different than they had been the week before. (--'Janek')

But the narrator finds no shortage of people to tell him what life used to be like in the village, even if largely so they can contrast it with the uncertain present ("everything is changing so much now you wouldn't recognise it a week later", 'Blacksmith Kruk' notes). Indeed, the further into the stories we go, the more we encounter not "a mass" but a host of distinct individuals, from the violent Kosciejny (described in a fantastic thumbnail sketch: "The two fiery substances in his body - blood and alcohol - made him resistant to seasons and to weather") to the irrepressible Lewandowski, who meets a woman "who was as essential and accidental as he was, and he married her and started to build a house". Each is shaped by his or her own, various memories; Grandma, in the final story, provides the most vibrant, vivid imagery in the book as she sees and remembers the village in a light new to us:

Grandma was lying on her back on the white, bony bed, which had likely wandered its way there from some hospital. Through her half-open lips she breathed in the past, which blossomed out in her head like tissue-paper flowers in a magician's hand, exploded like fireworks at a village fair and lasted for just as short a time. She saw the sky, tinted deep blue with the sweltering heat and the reddened crest of the grassy hill. (--'The End')

The Soviet era has left deep scars on the village, and the changes it is undergoing look set to leave more; Stasiuk is clear-eyed on this, without belabouring the point. But some changes, at least, have produced outcomes both rich and strange, as in the transformation of a "penitentiary fiefdom" (former prison camp):

That time was long gone. The prisoners married the jailers' daughters, and even though barbed wire was still hanging here and there, the windows didn't have bars on them any more. The doors were knocked out between the cells, and a mixed breed of the guarders and the guarded was maturing in the two-room apartments. (--'The Pub')

~~Nic

All Talk

Time for another reprint SFX review; I wrote this one for issue 187, of Karen Miller's The Prodigal Mage (book one of the Fisherman's Children series). On balance, I found it quite an annoying read, but in a way that hasn't put me off trying something else by Miller in the future; when it's good, it's really very good. Its main problem, as so often with high fantasy, is excess.

--

"I'm his father. What I say goes." Parents. They never learn, do they?

Miller's latest - first in a follow-up series to her debut duology - is packed with fathers (and occasionally mothers) making a mess of parenting. With breathtaking obstinacy, short-sightedness, and (almost) always the best intentions, her adult characters manage to find exactly the wrong thing to say or do in any given situation. Bold, brash son getting overly curious about dangerous magic? Refuse to let him learn to use it safely, hide the spellbooks, and if all else fails don't bother to explain your reasons, just shout - louder and louder as he gets older. What could possibly go wrong?

Naturally, the magic of said son, Rafel by name, may be the key to saving the kingdom of Lur from the evil power that is steadily draining life from the land. But Lur is as divided and fractious as Rafel's family; social tensions between the Olken people and their former overlords the Doranen hamper every effort to take action.

Miller is clearly a very talented writer: her characterisation is a masterclass in nuance and sensitivity, and she has a visceral way with action. But the race against time to save Lur is off-puttingly slow, consisting largely of people discussing what is to be done - and why they absolutely will not let their loved ones do it - in ever shriller tones. These dialogues are well-crafted, but get wearyingly repetitive. It's frustrating, because when the plot gets going (from page 200, in fits and starts), it's so good: a compelling portrait of a blighted world in the company of flawed,
fascinating people.

~~Nic

A Garden of Forking Paths

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary upon them.

There can't be much left to say about Jorge Luis Borges' (1899-1986) slim, astonishing collection of short stories, Fictions (1944) - nor many people who haven't already read it. It's now about six months since I read the book, and I've lost my notes in the interim, but it seems appropriately Borgesian to offer some rambling observations despite all this... :-)

The collections comprises 14 stories, written between 1936 and 1944, plus (in the second edition) 3 additional stories from 1952-3. The ones that I found most compelling all come from the first half of the book, subtitled 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (originally a separate collection, 1941). All of them are fantastical, or told in a fantastical register, infused with love for the imaginary, and a playfulness that merges the real and the surreal at every opportunity. There are portraits of invented worlds, lengthy discourses on fictional authors and made-up languages - even reviews of non-existent books:

It would be impossible to trace the adventures of the remaining nineteen chapters. [...] The story begun in Bombay continues in the lowlands of Palanpur, pauses for a night and a day at the stone gate of Bikanir, narrates the death of a blind astrologer in a cesspool in Benares, conspires in the multiform palace in Kathmandu, prays and fornicates in the pestilential stench of the Machua bazaar on Calcutta, watches the day being born out of the sea from a scribe's stool in Madras

(--'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim')

One story, 'The Library of Babel', contains an entire library of such imagined books: everything ever written, everything that ever could have been written, and every other combination (however nonsensical) of letters besides. "In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible", the narrator tells us, and so the library is unimaginably vast: "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries." No single inhabitant of the Library can ever begin to encompass its contents, of course, or even comprehend their scale, and so they tend to die unfulfilled, decaying amid the "endless" shelves without ever having made much of a dent in their TBR pile this vast repository of possibility. Definitely how I'll go!

It's all done in a style that is at once soaring and densely textured, outlined with a precision that is almost fussy, or would be if it weren't so frequently laconic. Sentence-by-sentence, the prose is packed with information. Perhaps by way of demonstrating his dictum quoted at the top of this post, again and again Borges assembles a wealth of off-beat references (historical, literary, cultural) and apparently tangential detail into bewilderingly rich fantastical canvases. So it is in 'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim', and also in 'Funes, the Memorious', a sort-of eulogy for a chap who spent his life seeing absolutely everything, with the improbable, imaginative accuracy of a poet:

With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compared them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once.

Even lesser stories, like 'The Shape of the Sword', still contain some wonderfully evocative lines in this vein, capturing whole stories in a phrase: "there were scimitars from Nishapur, in whose frozen crescents the wind and violence of battle seemed to be living on".

Many of Borges' narrators - who are often rather dry, unflappable, drawing-room types, like the librarian of Babel - are apt to fuss over these tiny 'facts' of the fiction. All the more when the playful absurdity of a story's concept is greater, and the landscape being painted is vaster and more colourful; they speak with the scholarly authority of the literary critic or the antiquarian, laying out for us the authentically-dusty trail by which they came across this impossible revelation or that high adventure.

Take the excellent opening story, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', which not only gives us one of the collection's best and most characteristic lines ("In life, Ashe was afflicted with unreality, as many Englishmen are; in death, he is not even the ghost he was"), but also introduces us to a fictional land in a fictional world - one that becomes more real the more the narrator investigates it. The whole thing is told retrospectively, the history of a personal scholarly endeavour gone live. Having heard an offhand reference to a place called Uqbar ("a region in either Iraq or Asia Minor", it is suggested), the narrator is spurred to try to track the place down, which appears in none of his books, save one.

He discovers that Uqbar is part of a whole different world, called Tlön, which was invented by a mysterious cabal and whose language has no nouns - one of a number of things that makes both it and its metaphysics fundamentally different from our own world.

At first we though that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible act of imaginative license; today we know that it is a cosmos, and that the innermost laws that govern it have been formulated, however provisionally so. Let it suffice to remind the reader that the apparent contradictions of Volume Eleven are the foundation stone of the proof that other volumes do exist.

But it does, nonetheless, work; and by the end of the story, Tlön and its meticulous rules have been embraced so enthusiastically, by a populace eager to follow any semblance of order (this is, we're reminded, the 1940s...), that it has begun to encroach upon our world. Its triumph looks certain, and our narrator rues the day he ever underestimated its power.

Another darkly mannered tale - my favourite, I think - is 'The Lottery in Babylon' (which, as the author himself notes in his prologue, "is not entirely innocent of symbolism"). Set in a - of course - fictionalised version of ancient Babylon, it describes how the titular lottery grew from a small-scale game, occasionally rewarding those who played with prizes (and then, later, sometimes inflicting punishments), to an inscrutable system that permeates every aspect of life in Babylon. So much so, that no-one even questions its utter dominance anymore:

Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart. Now, far from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment about the Lottery, and about the blasphemous conjectures that shrouded men whisper in the half-light of dawn or evening.

I love that final line, how he gets so much that is suggestive of place and mood into a single phrase. There is such grandeur and strangeness here. The story may be, on one level, an extended metaphor for the operation of chance in human life ("Babylonians [...] obey the dictates of chance, surrender their lives, their hopes, their nameless terror to it"); later, we're told that the "Company" reputed to run the Lottery may not even exist, that the whole "sacred disorder of our lives" may be nothing more binding than tradition, or something as inescapable as random luck. Yet Borges does not stint on the atmospherics or the depths of his thought experiment. And so the world of his story lives:

Like all the men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here - my right hand has no index finger. Look here - through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo - it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel.

Other stories, while still partaking of the characteristic precision and allusiveness - and, often, the dry narrators - discussed above, dive into visionary feverishness. 'Death and the Compass', about a detective investigating a series of murders that seem linked with occult principles, turns the profusion of information into an expression of a mind losing its centre:

An Irishman tried to convert me to belief in Christ; he would repeat, over and over, the goyim's saying: all roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium would grow fat upon that metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, impossible to escape--for all roads, even if they pretend to lead north or south, returned finally to Rome, which was also the rectangular prison where my brother lay dying, and which was also the Villa Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the god that sees with two faces, and by all the gods of fever and mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I have woven it, and it has stood firm: its materials are a dead heresiologue, a compass, as eighth-century cult, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombuses of a paint factory...

Not just a man trying to convert him, but an Irishman; not just a prison, but a rectangular one; not just a cult, but an eighth-century one. All points of reference loop back into the world of the story, and the conceptual world of the narrator, enriching both.

In 'The Circular Ruins', meanwhile, Borges returns to the themes of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' - but this time his viewpoint character is not watching the imaginary infiltrate the real, but actively participating in it ("He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality. This magical objective had come to fill his entire soul.") Like his author, he creates life through imagination, through words - but in more visceral detail than most novelists generally go in for:

He dreamed the heart warm, active, secret—about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-colored thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and sexless; he dreamed it, with painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. Each night he perceived it with greater clarity, greater certainty. He did not touch it; he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps, with his eyes. He perceived it, he lived it, from many angles, many distances. On the fourteenth night, he stroked the pulmonary artery with his forefinger, and the the entire heart, inside and out. His inspection made him proud. He deliberately did not sleep the next night; then he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set about dreaming another of the major organs.

(This story also has one of the other great lines of the collection: "At first, his dreams were chaotic; a little later, they were dialectical.")

And then some stories are quite simply bonkers (and funny). 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', is perhaps the apogee of the playful idea, serious execution juxtaposition I mentioned above. In it, he spins an elaborate - and, indeed, encomiastic - account of the eponymous man and his epic/quixotic quest to rewrite Don Quixote. Rewrite Don Quixote, that is, in the exact same words as the original: "Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough - he wanted to compose the Quixote." The idea is, as our scholarly - of course! - narrator is at pains to point out, that being Cervantes and writing Don Quixote in the 17th century was "easy", indeed pretty much an accident of context; whereas setting out, intentionally, to write that precise book again in the 20th century, puts the whole thing in a new light.

Having rubbished Menard's detractors in suitably condescending scholarly fashion, the narrator compares two passages side by side; naturally, they're identical, but the different context in which the second Quixote was produced, in the narrator's eyes, transforms the meaning of the work:

"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of the past, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counselor."

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hands, writes:

"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of the past, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counselor."

History, the mother of truth! - the idea is staggering.

Bonkers. But brilliantly so.

~~Nic

The Flight of a Lifetime

  Did I mention that Esther and I are going to New Zealand in two weeks time? No? Well, I haven't really dared talk too much about it for fear of getting over-excited too soon. We booked our flights in January this year, in quite a drunken state - probably far above the safe limit for being in possession of a laptop and a credit card - and have been planning ever since.  The whole adventure was prompted by Esther's sister, who has been living and working in Wellington for the last year: in the circumstances it seemed silly not to take the opportunity to visit her and see the land of Lord of the Rings into the bargain.  I have always wanted to go, but never really took the idea seriously - its such a long way, and expensive, and I've never travelled beyond Europe.  Even now, with just 12 days to go until we take off, I can't quite believe we took the plunge and booked those tickets. Of course, if we'd known when we pressed the 'Buy Now' button on that fateful travel website how many more times we would find ourselves pressing 'Buy Now' over the next nine months, we probably wouldn't have plucked up the courage to do it.  Since we're spending three weeks travelling in both the north and south islands there has been an inordinate amount of organising and booking of internal flights (four in total - eep), ferries (one, at present), train journies (two), bus journies (two), bicycle hire (in three places), hostels (too many) and B&Bs (definitely too many).   It has been a most stressful and exhilarating experience.  Until now I never really understood the 'travel bug'; I have wanted to go places but I haven't relished the thought of long distance holidaying.  I get it now.  The anticipation, mixed with the uncertainty, mixed with the sense of liberation and adventure.  

Having gestated into a fully-grown, fully-planned trip over the last nine months, the time is almost nigh now.  And I'm in need of your reading advice. As you can imagine, flying from the UK to New Zealand is a truly long-haul experience: 24 hours in the air, plus lay-over time in the USA.  It turns out that choosing which books to take with me is the most difficult last-minute decision I have to make.  I have to take into account weight (not too heavy) and length (not too short, not too long), and I have to choose books that I'm willing to leave in NZ at the end of the flight - since I'll have to buy more books to fly home with, I can't afford to cart back those I took with me.

I've decided that two books, each about 500 pages in length, is my quota. Enough to keep me occupied, but not too much to weigh me down.  I have to remember that there will also be plenty of inflight entertainment. So far I've managed to decide on one of these books.  A few months ago I picked up my first BookCrossing book, left in a local museum, and I've decided it would be fun to pass it along somewhere in New Zealand. It couldn't possibly travel further from York than that!  The book is Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, and I'm just in the mood for it.  But what about the second book?  I've already got a Classic, so I want something contemporary. After an hour of vacillation and browsing I've narrowed it down to three possibilities, and would love your opinion on which I should go with.  The choices are:

1. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz - This is the first book in the Cairo Trilogy and is set in Egypt just after World War I. The blurb describes it as 'a sweeping and evocative portrait of both a family and a country struggling to move towards independence in a society that has resisted change for centuries.'  It introduces the Al Jawad family - the tyranical, hypocritical Ahmad, a middle-class shopkeeping who runs his household strictly according to the Qur'an but dallies with the delights of Cairo; his three, very different sons; and his gentle, oppressed wife and cloistered daughters.  I've had it on the TBR shelves for a few years now and am drawn by the quote from the Independent on the back which compares Mahfouz with Tolstoy or Proust.

 

2. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - I received a copy of the Jan-June 2010 Atlantic catalogue yesterday, and noticed that Powers had moved his new novel and his back catalogue to them. It reminded me how much I want to read this book, which won the National Book Award in 2006.  The synopsis sounds part psychological thriller, part commentary on the nature of the self.  It is about Mark Schluter, a truck driver who nearly dies in an accident on a remote Nebraska road. When his sister Karin arrives in the aftermath to take care of him he becomes convinced that she is not his sister.  Although she looks, acts and sounds like Karin, he is sure she is an identical imposter.  Meanwhile, armed with only a note left my an anonymous witness, Mark attempts to learn what happened on the night of his accident.  Sounds intriguing, yes?  I have read the first paragraph and must admit to being extremely impressed with the prose.

3. Acacia (Book 1: The War with the Mein) by David Anthony Durham - This is probably the most indulgent novel of the three, a high fantasy recommended to me by someone who doesn't ordinarily read fantasy and whose appreciation, therefore, speaks all the louder of its quality.  I won't give the synopsis because fantasy tome blurbs are always faintly ridiculous and this one is as impenetrable as usual, but it is enough to say it is almost certainly My Sort of Thing.  Epic, blah, defiance of conventions, blah, morally ambigious, etc. You get the gist. While there is a part of me that wants to take Powers or Mahfouz because I want to read those novels desperately, and what better time to tackle a long-term TBR shelf resident than when trapped 30,000 feet in the air, there is another part of me that thinks they're too serious and dense (particularly because my other book is Bronte). Wouldn't a fantasy epic be the perfect anecdote to the trauma of flying and jet-lag?

What do you think? Has anyone read these books and loved/hated them? Votes in the comments much appreciated.

~~Victoria~~

 

The Booker Prize Announcement...

UPDATED, 7th October: Justice has been done. Hurray!

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

...is tonight, and I'm sure I won't be the only blogger tuning in to the radio or the television to find out the winner with bated breath.  I've read five of the six shortlisted authors this year, which probably means that the book I've missed (Simon Mawer's The Glass Room) will win.   Personally I think the field is incredibly strong this year, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a historical fiction junkie.  Yes, Mantel, Byatt, Waters and Foulds have written great historical fiction (in Mantel's case, magisterial) but their novels also represent great fiction generally. 

I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that Wolf Hall is my favourite to win. I feel quite strongly about it - it feels necessary.  I read an interview with Hilary Mantel in the Guardian in which she described her despair when a particular novel failed to make the Prize shortlist several years ago.  She wept because it seemed impossibly unfair.  I think I would feel the same; although there would be less weeping and more raging on my part.  Saying that, there is no book I have read that I absolutely do not want to win.  I think I would be disappointed if The Quickening Maze took it, simply because I feel Foulds can and should do better.  For the rest, I'd cheer for Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger (her best book to date I think) if it won; and I can see the real merits of both A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee.   But my pleasure would be strained, because I would be thinking of that week reading Wolf Hall and the intense, continuing and probably permanant pleasure it gave me. 

Here are the books I've read in order of preference:

1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

3/4. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt tied with Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

5. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

We shall see if the judges agree with me...

~~Victoria~~

Faded, with a Core of Steel

Celeste's back was curved but, like the Nautilus, she had a core of steel. This building inspired by a spiral shell with a series of air-filled chambers was the fulfilment of a dream.

I read Shena Mackay's Orange Prize-shortlisted Heligoland (2003) quite a while ago - six months, give or take - but my inner completist has never quite let go of the urge to write about it, however distant many of its details now are. It was one of my reading failures this year, and so this brief post is intended as a gesture towards understanding and expressing my frustration with it. (The short answer, of course, is that it's Not For Me; but I want something more than that.) I also suspect more than one of my co-bloggers here at EA would like it rather more than I did, so perhaps they'll find this piques their interest. :-)

The story centres on Rowena Snow, a mixed-race woman (Indian/Scottish) whose life, we learn through flashbacks and reflections during the main narrative, has been more rootless than most: she grew up at a boarding school, a year-round resident of the sort of deconstructed, faintly hippy-ish establishment where children are encouraged to pursue 'projects', get in touch with their feelings, and talk to their teachers as equals. For Rowena, who has very little sense of who she is or where she belongs, it's all a bit of a disaster. After the closure of the school, she drifts into aimless, unassertive adulthood, and ends up working for an agency that provides home carers for the elderly and infirm. Being compassionate and well-meaning, it suits her, but proves an emotional trap for one so self-effacing and naive.

She can see Pipe-Cleaner Man lying in his curtained front room. It's a parallel universe, a world of hospice transport that doesn't turn up, meals on wheels, painful infirmities and indignities. Days lit by low-wattage light bulbs and warmed by one-bar electric fires and measured out in pills and dressings and patent remedies, at the mercy of a procession of strangers earning less than the minimum wage.

Passages like this had some resonance for me, having recently watched my late grandmother struggle against the dual tide of illness: physical suffering, and the slow, poisonous decline of autonomy that accompanies it. But it isn't what the book is about, except as a thematic parallel. As the novel begins, Rowena is shocked out of her life when she is falsely accused of stealing from one of her clients, and summarily fired.

Numb and half-broken, she makes the sort of dotty lifestyle change that people only really do in literary fiction: she packs up her stuff and invites herself to live in the Nautilus, a South London architectural folly (shaped like its underwater namesake) that was once home to a bohemian/utopian community. It was, we're told, "designed as a working community at the heart of the wider community", and Rowena imagines it as a sort of promised land of the self, the Heligoland of which she dreamed as a lonely child. But, left behind by the times, the Nautilus is a washed-up, crumbling shadow of its former self:

age was corroding its complex interior and, by the start of the new millennium, there were few visitors, the ultramarine piano in the Nautilus Bar was dumb and all the original residents but Celeste and Francis Campion were long gone, and ideas and ideologies were broken glass and crumpled paper

The remnants of its community, rattling around its many rooms, are matriarch Celeste Zylberstein, who designed the place with her late husband Arkady, somewhat flaky wide-boy Gus Crabbe, and ageing poet Francis Campion:

The covers of Francis' books, faded to the colour of dusty tea and embossed with the Nautilus Press colophon, enclosed experimental verse and political satire as well as lyric and pastoral poems, but now that the world had gone beyond satire, he saw how his youthful absurdism was but a product of his era, odd-shaped piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

Rowena soon installs herself as cook, cleaner and all-round low-key cheerleader for the Nautilus, finding a certain freedom in her eagerness to please others, if not yet - stop me if you've heard this one before - finding herself. It's an intriguing set-up, and Mackay's descriptions evoke the fading ambience very well; some of her imagery is quite lovely, helping ground the story in its vivid surroundings and its characters' moods (like this, from Rowena's childhood: "The child's response was shaken out of her in a shuddering lamb's bleat as home at last they came to the cottage friezed with icicles").

And yet, as I so often find with literary fiction of this type, the story told in this prose is... dishearteningly banal, and overly familiar. It's another story of mildly-unpleasant people being mildly unpleasant to each other, and eventually reaching mild emotional epiphanies in the "sullen south London rain". It has touches of humour, some mild frissons of peril, and Rowena was well drawn, but above all the narrative often feels smothered in that curious, dissatisfying mixture of voices - character and authorial - that reminds me of something like Arlington Park, by Rachel Cusk. Take this, Rowena's crisis when faced with a potential competitor for what she sees as her place at the Nautilus:

"You must leave at once. Now. Before it's too late."

"How melodramatic! You sound like some ghastly horror film," Izzie titters, but smooths the Elastoplast protectively over her grazes. "What on earth do you mean?"

Rowena can't say that this woman with her crazy radiant simper has hijacked her own initial responses to Celeste and the Nautilus, and poses a threat to the balance of the little family of Celeste and Francis, Gus and Rowena. It is imperative that she remove her netball player's knees from Rowena's territory before they become fixtures.

I love the creative snark of "crazy radiant simper" and the bathos of "netball player's knees" - both feel like Rowena's observations, and have an infectious ring to them besides. But "hijacked her own initial responses" and "poses a threat to the balance" sound too much (to me) like an author interpreting her character for us, leading us to conclusions we'd already reached. Already not really grabbed by the drifting, rather dreary story, I began to feel stifled by the ponderous over-analysis.

There are moments when the obsessive second-guessing works; I much preferred the reflexive but raw self-doubt of something like this (again from Rowena):

"I could tell, from the way she trusts you."

But I'm only pretending to be nice so everybody will like me.

But like I said, maybe it's just Not For Me.

~~Nic