Eve's Alexandria

The Malevolent Dream of the Cities

The City is alive, of course! [...] Elisa's absent heart swells with love in her absent body. The City, infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, the City with its ever-welcoming womb, the City that has survived all its humans, all its masters.

It's been quite some time since I read Elisabeth Vonarburg's The Silent City (1992; translated by Jane Brierley from the 1981 French original). Ten months, in fact, give or take. But I can't quite bring myself to set it aside without saying something about it here. At just over 250 pages, it's a slim novel - by the standards of today's science fiction, that is - but it has atmosphere and interesting themes to spare.

Inevitably, at such a remove, what I have to offer is more of a series of impressions than a full review. The overriding image I've retained from the book is of the titular City itself: a vast, gleaming sanctuary for knowledge and the knowledgeable, last bastion of civilisation in a post-apocalyptic landscape to offer "clear, clean life that knows neither rust nor rot". As is the way of such things, it is also a sterile, echoing place, whose few remaining inhabitants have, for several hundred years, barricaded themselves away from the Outside, withering into madness even as they force their bodies to stay forever young through a battery of rejuvenation treatments. With nothing left to live for except to have sex and get on each other's nerves, they still grasp - to no avail - after immortality, "the malevolent dream of the Cities".

Or else they conduct strange experiments upon the one genuinely young person left among them: curious, trusting Elisa, the last child born in the City:

It was always a surprise, although the day began with the same strange game. Papa would put a sort of wire hat on Elisa and then cut into the end of her finger. It hurt, but not for long. Anyway, the idea of the game was to stop it hurting and make it get better as quickly as possible. All you had to do was stop the blood and close the cut. He explained it to her, and said she could do it if she wanted to. And she did it. As time went on the cuts became deeper, right to the bone.

There's a twisted fairy tale quality to the cocoon that is Elisa's early life. When Paul (her 'Papa') isn't slicing her skin in the name of science - for reasons that remain opaque to her for many years - he throws a maskerade party to celebrate the progress of his research into her uncanny self-healing ability (that is, to show off to his fellow urbanites, who are consumed with poorly-hidden jealousy at this next stage of immortality). An unwelcome guest promptly turns up to the party and declares,

"I see you forgot to invite me [...] I've a gift for the little princess, nevertheless. When she turns twenty, she'll prick her finger and live forever."

Another, friendlier guest responds by mitigating the curse into a mere 200+ years. Nor does the creepiness of Paul's exploitation of Elisa end with the experiments: as Elisa grows from young innocence to, well, slightly older innocence, the pair become lovers. Elisa initiates this for the time-honoured reason of wanting to feel alive to overcome a brush with mortality - it is framed as a desperate gesture, which she makes to fend off the new realisation that Paul, her whole universe, is ageing and will one day die, leaving her alone. But the issue here, as throughout the book with a variety of characters, is how much autonomy Elisa can possibly have, given the circumstances of her life and upbringing: is she even able to make an informed choice, when everything she is has been so shaped to Paul's ends?

When, inevitably, Elisa begins to discover the extent of Paul's manipulations - that she was not born with her self-healing abilities by chance, but genetically-engineered to be so - she tries to rationalise the lies and betrayal, telling herself that "when they made love, she could feel that he truly loved her. She couldn't have been wrong about that!" But she cannot escape the knowledge that her sole and abiding value to Paul lies in what she represents to him, not who she is:

He had wanted her, after all.

Why? Because she's the subject of an on-going experiment.

It is the seflish side of parenting writ large and literal: Elisa is her father's immortality; she exists because he wants a legacy, some testament of his life in the world for when he has gone. She (ew) keeps him young. Predictable, Paul's response when he realises what she has learned is not remorse but (after initial alarm) complacency. He cannot conceive of her as anything but a child, as his property:

they'll talk about it, she'll understand. He'll make her understand. She's his, he made her, she will understand. No, he won't punish her. She has a right to know it all.

The rest of the book follows Elisa as she flees the City (and Paul) for Outside, and the choices she makes that lead her ultimately to repeating the abusive patterns of her own childhood on a larger scale. After the unobtrusively but totally controlled environment of the City, Outside is abruptly, shockingly tactile for Elisa ("The air is hot and stifling, the atmosphere of fear palpable"), and a large part of her story from here on is concerned with an exploration of physicality and in particular of Elisa's bodily autonomy. Elisa's ability to rejuvenate herself extend, she learns, into complete physical transformation: she can utterly alter her appearance, including her biological sex.

On one level, after so long at Paul's mercy, in which her Papa's control over her was regularly (if temporarily) inscribed on her skin, this explosion of possibility is liberating for Elisa. But Outside, it is less freeing than it might be, because the regressive post-apocalyptic culture that has developed in the Outside is - with regional variations - deeply and viscerally hostile to women, who are blamed for the genetic mutations that have blighted the human population. Men have been particularly badly hit, such that they are now scarce; women, numerous and hated, are little better than slaves. Paul, when he realises this new twist in Elisa's abilities, delightedly crows that,

"The problem has vanished, Elisa. Your very existence has annihilated it. Woman, man - there's no problem now. People will become what they want."

But he misses what Elisa and - later - her offspring know in their bones: in this world, who would choose to be a woman?

She would have liked to let them choose the sex they preferred for going Outside, but they'd had to admit there wasn't really any choice. They'd agreed that they didn't genuinely want to be girls on the Outside. "We couldn't do anything except have babies until we are worn out. [...] If we want to change something Outside we have to be men."

In raising her rejuvenating brood, Elisa falls prey to all the same paternalistic assumptions and abuses that Paul did. She loses her sense of the children as individuals, seeking to use them for her own ends (to transform society Outside) and drip-feed information to them so that she might control their lives and purposes for as long as possible. Again, the locus of the book's thematic interest, and of the characters' conflict, is their physicality; Elisa seeks to shape the children's identities by regulating their bodies, enforcing scheduled sex transmutations despite the growing wishes of some individuals to remain in the same body (and the same gender) beyond the time limit. The disturbing implications of Elisa's obsession find expression in, for example, her eldest child Abram's decision, once firmly entrenched in his masculinity, to change his appearance so that he looks like ... Paul.

As an examination of sex, gender and the body, then, it's rich and fascinating - even if, being nearly thirty years old, it's rather briefer and a little 'thinner' than an sf book with a comparable amount of plot would be today. Some of the battle of the sexes stuff Outside can be clunky, but when the novel concentrates on Elisa's Freudian project, on the meeting of her physicality and her interiority, it has plenty of food for thought, and some primal imagery besides:

One hand had tirelessly unravelled what the other had tirelessly woven.

For twenty years, with each child, I have unceasingly given birth to myself, opened the womb, cut the cord, torn myself from the City. It was an act carried out in a dream, the sort of dream that is so difficult to escape, the dream that imitates reality.

~~Nic

16 down, 4 to go...

The Orange Prize award ceremony fast approacheth.  Just 17 days to go (if I'm counting correctly), and I think, I really do think, that I'm going to make it and finish reading the longlist by the deadline.  Which boggles my mind - when I said I was going to read it in full back in the distant days of April, I didn't actually believe myself.  It never occurred to me that I might actually succeed.  First, because 20 books is a lot of books to read in two months, even if you do have a headstart by having already tackled two of the longest ones.  Second, because I've been teaching in the evenings this term, and trying to tie up my archives course at the same time, and so reading time has been limited. And third, because I'm generally not very good at finishing things.  I adore setting myself reading plans, and drawing up lists, and having a strong sense of purpose; but nine times out of ten this is fleeting and I get distracted from one plan by the next plan and before I know it I'm hot on the heels of another project while its predecessor gets put back, and then put back some more, and then quietly forgotten.

If I'm honest that has almost happened with my longlist reading: an idea for a summer reading project has been bubbling away at the back of my mind for a couple of weeks and it has taken all of my will-power to keep the horses from bolting the stable.  I have had to give myself a firm talking-to and focus myself on the remaining Orange books, and have managed it so far.  The same cannot be said for my blogging.  I may have read (or very nearly read) 16 of the Orange longlist but I have managed to blog about a measly seven of them. Shame on me. This is not for lack of opinions but rather a surfeit of them.  I have wanted to write full length posts about all the books, and particularly about two of the shortlisters - The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver and The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey.  But the time has simply never presented itself, and when I have had a few hours to spare I have invariably spent them reading.  In the knowledge that it is rather unlikely that I will manage to write about all the books in full (although hopefully I will manage at least the shortlisters), I am going to write some shorter thoughts on three of them now, in the name of catching up a little.

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I read Small Wars by Sadie Jones in the interstices of some very busy days, back now at the end of April.  At first I found it quite disconcertingly slow, with none of the dark, verbose emotionality that I had admired in The Outcast.  It could have been a novel by a different writer altogether.  When I wrote about Jones' debut two years ago I made a lot of the way she strung long sentences together with the barest of connective tissue, and how well she used this to create pace and tension. I assumed at the time that this would become her trademark; that it wasn't so much a narrative choice as a full-blown writing style.  But Small Wars couldn't be more different in that respect.  It's plain, clipped sentences are less rambling hedgerow and more neat box hedges, at least at first.  In context this makes sense, as the point of view characters here are two straitened, extremely English adults - Hal Treherne, a major stationed on Cyprus in the 1950s, and his young wife, Clara - rather than troubled teenagers.  They are, if you like, the upstanding people that Lewis and Kit could have been, had they not suffered so terribly at the hands of their parents.   Like I say, at first I found it positively soporific: the heat of Cyprus, the inevitability of the couple's stifled and conventional marriage, the slow unwinding of Hal's peace of mind in the face of atrocities commited by and against the island's nationalists.  It all seemed rather obvious and, at times, too much like a thinly veiled analogy with Britain's more recent struggles with extremism and guerilla warfare in Afghanistan, with some marital angst thrown in.  The narrator is painfully earnest about this on occasion:

'How is the Emergency this week?' and 'What should be done?' were the endless circular discussions at dinners from Government House to the mess at Episkopi, and never a solution and never, like the conflict itself, a final truth you could point to and say, 'There! A solution,' because what is a solution? History doesn't end. Places that are fought over are always fought over, and will always be fought over, and there will never be an end to it, and each conflict is just adding to the heap of conflicts that no one can remember starting and no one will ever, ever finish.

Then, unaccountably, the story gained momentum at the mid-way point and the book became something altogether different and unexpected as Jones' changed key, tapping deep into Hal and Clara's repressed emotions.  Again, there is nothing particularly revelatory in it - like The Outcast, Small Wars follows a well-trod thematic path - but Jones' is so good at drawing out the subtleties of the relationship between the couple, that it is impossible not to invest in them.  The issue of Hal's conscience, and the growing conflict he feels between his duty to his uniform and his duty to humanity is particularly moving and well-explored.  By the end I felt that Jones' had done it again: written an extraordinarily accomplished and powerful book in disguise.  Not shortlist material perhaps, but definitely worthy of a longlist place and a wide readership (which no doubt it will get).

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I have had a cursory dabble in Clare Clark's work before.  About a year ago I picked up her first book, The Great Stink, and read about twenty pages of it before I set it aside with a lack of enthusiasm.  I thought it had a stodgy, verbose and staged beginning, and that turned me off.  So, although the synopsis of her third book Savage Lands caught my interest - twenty-three young women are shipped off to Louisiana as 1704's answer to the mail-order bride - I was uncertain about it.  I feared that Clark was one of those historical novelists steeped in research who never quite manages to breath human life into their scenes; these fears, I'm glad to say, were utterly groundless.  By the time I finished Savage Lands I was a complete convert to Clark's (admittedly unusual) charms.  I wasn't always so enthusiastic about it thought.  I almost gave up on the book twice, at the 50 page mark and then again at 100.  It wasn't that the writing was bad; on the contrary Clark's prose is dense but deliciously rich, like a good, bitter dark chocolate. She excels at describing objects, and tactile experiences, and places.  Her descriptions of Louisiana seen through the eyes of our headstrong protagonists, Elizabeth Savaret and Auguste Guichard, are a total immersion experience.  Will you excuse a quote at length?  Here is Clark describing the Mississippi river:

It eased through the throttle of swamp and forest like a great yellow snake, languid and muscular, exhaling the thick reeks of fertility and decay.  In La Rochelle the frontier between water and land was sharply drawn, marked out by the perpendiculars of cliff and castle wall.  The savages' river knew no such boundaries.  It sprawled tideless in the sleeping waters of creeks and bayous and seeped into the swamps and forests, where its dark quiescence gave the illusion of solid earth.  Everywhere a frenzy of vegetation erupted from its skin, propelled by a fierce and vulgar prodigiousness.  Even in winter the curves and plans of the landscape disappeared beneath a dissipation of trees, bushes, vines, canes, mosses, ferns and flabby fungi.  Roots and branches twisted over one another, coiling and clasping in a thousand sinuous embraces... On warm days the air throbbed with the shameless fecundity of it.

Powerful stuff, and enjoyable too.  But I cannot live on the sensual pleasure of description alone, or at least not over the course of 376 pages; the problem was that I didn't connect with either Elizabeth or Auguste for the first third of the book.  This is partly, I think, because the narrative is fragmentary, and leaps between the two of them leaving huge gaps in our knowledge of their lives, emotions and motives. We barely have chance to get to know them, so that they appear dwarfed by the magnificent and terrifying surroundings in which they live.  In one chapter we are with Elizabeth as she revels in unexpected and intoxicating lust for her new husband, Jean-Claude Babelon; in the next we are with fifteen year old Auguste, who has been left amongst the Ouma tribe by the colony's commandant and charged with learning their language.  He too falls under Jean-Claude's spell when Babelon visits the native village in his capacity as an ensign.  Barely a chapter later the three have been brought togther, and years have past; Elizabeth has had several painful miscarriages, and Auguste has become a man. 

It is also partly because the narrative wrong-footed me, and led me to believe that Jean-Claude Babelon was the driving force of the book.  It is an easy trap to fall into - he is the lode-star of both Elizabeth and Auguste's worlds, a bright and beguiling thing to cling to in the face of undeniable hardship and loneliness.  It was only after it became clear to me that he was nothing but a cog in the machine of the plot, and that it was the relationship between Elizabeth, Auguste and Louisiana that mattered, that I began to connect with what I was reading.  It turns out that this is not really a novel about love, but a novel about the limits of human endurance, and our capacity to survive life sustained by determination and persistance alone.  It is a story deeply rooted in the historical period it describes, and also in the colonial mentality.  I have a feeling that, if I had been a judge reading it for the second time, it would have found its way onto my shortlist.  Which is quite a turn-around from my nearly giving up on it entirely.  I'll definitely be digging out my copy of The Great Stink and taking a second look. 

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It isn't often that I read something as determinedly experimental as Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal. It is the kind of book that opens your eyes to how timid and conventional most contemporary fiction has become.  Catton isn't Virginia Woolf but while I was reading her debut I was reminded of reading Jacob's Room for the first time, and that electric shock of originality, when you realise that stories can be told in entirely new ways.  I can see why the cover of my paperback is covered with plaudits: 'wholly different from anyone else writing today', 'astonishing', 'formidable talent'.    Here we have a story about the development of a play by a group of first-year drama students, who decide to take as their subject matter a sex scandal at the local girls school.  This scandal may or may not have happened; and the play may be about it or may be it. 

Basically it is told in two strands, alternating chapter by chapter.  The first follows a group of school-girls in the aftermath of the sex scandal, all of whom take music lessons with a morally ambigious and unnamed 'Saxophone teacher'.   There is Isolde, whose older sister Victoria may or may not have had sex with the Jazz band conductor Mr Saladin; and Bridget, who tries too hard to impress and wishes she was Isolde; and Julia, who is older and is (probably) struggling with lesbian feelings for Isolde.   The second follows drama student Stanley, one of only twenty hopefuls selected to join the local Institute for actors, as he and his fellow students prepare their end of year show, taking the affair between Mr Saladin and Victoria as inspiration.   Each section is carved up into slices headed with days of the week or months of year, but the narrative is not linear, so that the story is fragmentary and circular, often returning to continue scenes begun several chapters earlier or cutting off and never returning.   It is told in such a way as to confuse reality and artifice, to the extent that there is no point in trying to sort out who is acting and who is genuine.  In the world of The Rehearsal there is no such thing.  All the characters respond to life as though they are taking invisible cues, and facing an imaginary but constantly present audience; they speak exactly what is in their minds, no matter how inappropriate, and often articulate their sub-conscious or unconscious feelings in frankly bizarre exchanges.  From the beginning it is clear that the characters - or should I call them actors? - are talking to us, the audience, rather to each other.     

It is playful and very clever, but also terrifying, as the meaning and motives of the characters' actions are questioned and steadily eroded until what we are left with are vacuous performances.  As the Head of Movement at the Institute tells Stanley:

'Every year there's someone like you, Stanley,' he said. 'And someone just like you will come along and fill the hole that you leave when you move on. Every word that comes out of your mouth - they're just lines.  They're lines that you've learned very carefully, so carefully, you've convinced yourself they are yours, but that's all they are.  They're lines I've heard many times before.' The Head of Movement tossed his head suddenly and snapped, 'Why don't you see me when you look? I could ask that of all my students.  All my selfish cookie-cutter students who troop in and out each year like a dead-water tide.'

It accumulates into a powerful statement about our increasingly performative society, in which it has become normal to 'perform' an experience for an audience at the same time as experiencing it personally.  So we tweet and blog and update our Facebook profiles, acting out our lives at the same time as living them, to the point where the act of communicating an action validates it, gives it meaning. At the same time it offers a sickening glimpse of the vulnerability and pretentiousness of teenagers, of their confused yearnings and hyperactive imaginings.  All this and Eleanor Catton is only 25 years old.  It is a very impressive performance from her too.

But having said all that, I'm not sure that I enjoyed the book.  This, I know, is probably as much about my impatience with the manipulation of teenagers in literature - from Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye to Curtis Sittenfield's Prep - as anything else.  It is not as if we're supposed to connect with any of the characters, but I found myself to yearning to pin them down to some concrete emotions.  Julia's nascent fumblings with Isolde, and the intimations of the Saxophone teacher's own lesbian fantasies, left me feeling unfulfilled; and, although the untimely death of one character was a masterful stroke, it also felt a little unearned.  There is also be an element of fear; The Rehearsal made me feel afraid.  Afraid, that is, of the tenuousness of meaning in our lives, and the impossibility of objective experience.  Not, I think, one for my personal shortlist, although I remain thoroughly, if fearfully and disquietedly, impressed by its postmodern virtuosity.   

~~Victoria~~

Interregnum

Teaching has been eating both my time and my brain lately; hence the lack of new posts from me. Luckily, I have a few things in reserve, so here's one I made earlier: a review I wrote for SFX magazine of The Poison Throne (2010), book one in Celine Kiernan's Moorehawke Trilogy.

(Yes, it has a talking cat, but don't let that put you off!)

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First published in 2008 by Dublin-based O’Brien Press, Celine Kiernan’s debut young-adult fantasy comes to a wider audience courtesy of Orbit. It fully deserves the exposure. Told with great assurance and attention to detail, this is an exciting, fast-paced story – almost astonishingly so, given that it all takes place in and around a single royal palace.

After a five-year absence on royal business, 15-year-old Wynter and her father Lorcan return to their homeland, in the south of an alternate medieval Europe where ghosts walk and cats talk. But Wynter’s happy childhood memories of the place contrast sharply with the oppressive reality that greets her: a paranoid king, a missing heir, and a precarious power shift. Wynter’s awareness of the gulf between past and present is a neat device that illuminates both character and world without need for heavy-handed infodumps.

This is very much a story anchored in the fears, loyalties and vulnerabilities of its sympathetically drawn characters. It makes for an absorbing read but at times an overwrought one, as Kiernan dials up the emotional intensity at every opportunity. Although the royal court is supposed to be so cutthroat that you must guard your every glance, for fear of what you might reveal to enemies, the main characters are all surprisingly demonstrative. Not a chapter goes by without at least one yelling, weeping, throwing punches, or having abrupt collapses under the weight of emotional tension.

There is a danger of it becoming one-note – every event is a crisis, every conversation filled with handwringing – but Kiernan’s plotting keeps the pages turning nicely. In quieter moments, she shows an acute sense of how to build tension, and when to twist the knife.

~~Nic

Orange Segments, # 4: On the Spectrum

It is very difficult to dislike Roopa Farooki's novels.  They are as eager to please as puppies, and who doesn't like puppies, at least hypothetically?  The Way Things Look to Me, her third novel, may be quite different in subject matter to her first Bitter Sweets (which was shortlisted for the Orange New Writer's Prize in 2007) but it has the same feel to it: a playful, boundless energy and a firmly positive outlook.  The synopsis might not read that way - young woman with Asperger's syndrome decides to take decisive action to relieve her family of the burden of looking after her - and as the book opens its main characters are sunk in a state of melancholia.  But read just fifty more pages and you'll see what I mean.

Asif Murphy is 23 years old, an accountant and sole guardian to his younger sister Yasmin.  Every night he arrives home at precisely the same time; every morning he gets up and prepares a breakfast entirely composed of yellow food; he makes no sudden decisions or changes to his routine.  All this because Yasmin is on the autistic spectrum and requires that her life (and his) follow strict undisturbed patterns.  No doubt the self-denial and selflessness it requires contributes to his last of confidence: I am what I am, he muses, not special or flawed or creative, just unimpressive, dull as dishwater, little old neutral  old nothing old me. 

Asif doesn't just compare himself unfavourably to Yasmin, with her powerful memory and ability to see music as colour, but also to his other sister Lila.  They couldn't be more different.  Whereas Asif has toned and shaped his life to fit to Yasmin's requirements, Lila has wilfully misshapen hers to offend them.  Living in virtual squalor in a tiny flat, drifting from boyfriend to boyfriend and from one dead-end job to another, she turns up at the old family home from time-to-time intent on invading Yasmin's personal space.  She is disgusted by Asif's willingness to accept their sister's 'condition', believing that she is nothing more or less than a spoilt baby who cruelly manipulates those around her for attention.  While Asif's response to living with Yasmin is self-abnegation and a burning desire to please, Lila's is spitting fury.  Both are haunted my memories of their overshadowed childhoods, of the ways in which Yasmin stole their parents, and their innocence, from them.

These polarised responses, fuelled by loss and anger, are brought into sharp focus when a documentary maker approaches the family to make a programme about Yasmin's 'talents'.  The filming is an unexpected catalyst for change in all three siblings, bringing an unexpected romance into Lila's life and a newfound sense of independence for Asif.  Yasmin too is changed by it, inexorably, as she is forced to confront the world around her and her place in it.

I suppose you could describe the story that follows as 'heart-warming', although the word is probably a disservice. Farooki is a confident stylist, and  while her characters always have the flavour of stereotype about them, her writing and narrative voice is so blythe and honest that it is impossible not to be swept along by it.  I'm not one for quirky romance, but I found myself invested in the burgeoning relationship between the spiky, confrontational Lila and Henry, the blind TV researcher; and I'm not one for simplistic personal revelations either, but I still wanted Asif to realise his self-worth by the end of the book.  I ploughed through the pages of my large-print library copy (the only one they had) with merry abandon, only occasionally wanting more than what was on offer. 

Admittedly I was disappointed with Farooki's portrayal of Yasmin, who is little more than a cardboard cut out of a person with Asperger Syndrome.  The alternate chapters told in her first person voice were the clumsiest parts of the book, and frankly discomforting in their predictability.  By that I mean, Yasmin had no individuality.  You could have swapped her out of the novel and replaced her with the protagonist of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. No-one would have been any the wiser, probably not even Asif or Lila.  The most interesting thing about her is what others think of her - Lila's long-held belief that she is a 'faker', or Asif's vision of her as a fragile, vulnerable child, or Henry's perspective on her special gifts.  She acts most successfully as a mirror and amplifier for the other characters' emotional uncertainties, self-doubts and fixations.  On her own she ends up being what most autistic or Asperger's characters are in fiction and film: an eccentric, with a disjointed turn of phrase.  This is a real shame, and detracts from the power of the novel's ending.

Having said that, I have to come back to those puppies.  I don't think I could ever bring myself to write overly critically about Farooki.  My head tells me this is against my better judgement - that The Way Things Look to Me could be easily picked apart - but my heart isn't in it.  There is something so irrepressible about its forward drive, something so decidedly pleasant about the experience of reading it, that I would feel disingenuous.  I would feel ungrateful for the momentary pleasure it had given me.  Which is why, even though I wouldn't have put it anywhere near the Orange shortlist, I'm glad I've read it on the longlist.  A heart-warming glow isn't nothing.

~~Victoria~~

Orange Segments, #3: Secret and Lies

I'm glad now that I couldn't track down a paper copy of Laila Lalami's Secret Son at the local library.  If I had I would never have found myself listening to the audio version while I walked the familiar route to work and back again over the past two weeks. I know (although I'm ashamed to admit it) that I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much in the more usual format.  I can imagine that on paper I would have torn through it at speed, because of the clean and unadorned prose and the languid plot, and would not have taken the necessary time to get to know it.  It wouldn't have buried so determinedly under my skin, and I wouldn't have felt or envisioned it half so keenly. I feel sure that I wouldn't have appreciated it for what it is either, which is a beautifully paced and thematically subtle piece of work that constantly wrongfoots your expectations and draws strength from the time it takes to tell a deceptively simple story of truth and lies.  It is a lesson in why not to be a hasty reader.

Meet Yousseff El Mekki, walking down the street with his hands in his pockets, wearing the confidence of youth.  He is the illegitimate son of a phenomenally successful business man, but he doesn't know it yet.  At eighteen years old, he is fit, healthy and about to start a degree in English Literature at college, his future a giddy dreamscape pieced together from old American movies and teenage boast-talk.  Never mind that he lives in one of the most notorious slums in Casablanca, or that his country of Morocco is full of eager young men just like him, hopelessly unemployed and scrabbling for menial jobs.  Never mind that his neighbourhood has been abandoned by the state, or that his friends hang about on street corners for want of anything better to do.  He doesn't have much, but he has this: he believes he knows who he is.  He thinks he is the son of a hard-working widow, an orphan herself, and that his father was a schoolteacher who died when he was just a baby, in a freak accident while helping to hang fairylights on a neighbour's house.  This identity gives him a place in the world, somewhere to call home.   So you can imagine that when his mother confesses to him that his father is in fact still alive, and  has been living in Casablanca all along, with his real wife and daughter, it as though Yousseff's anchor has been cut.  Waves of anger, ennui, despair and shame combine with a fierce but directionless determination to make a place for himself.

He looks about him on his college campus and sees students of different religions, cultures and tribes snug in their cliques, but feels that he belongs nowhere.  He tries protesting against corruption, but only gets broken ribs for his trouble; he tries loosing his virginity to a rich girl but only ends up cheap and used.  Meeting and getting to know his father gives him some temporary comfort, as does the companionship and support of members of 'The Party', a partisan religious organisation that has sought replaced the government in his slum home.  But it is not easy to find a place to belong when nothing around you is what it seems, when there are ulterior motives behind every kindness, and messy sectarian politics driving the simplest actions and exchanges.  This, I suppose, is a story that could be told the globe over - disaffected youth seeks meaning in all the wrong places.  But what Secret Son does so well, and with such aplomb, is to marry its political backdrop with the personal story at its heart, to ground Yousseff's entirely believable turmoil in what are often shocking and terrifying contexts.  Thus Lalami juxtaposes young men downloading Jihadi propaganda on the same internet cafe computers that they use to view free porn and discuss the relative  sexual merits of the local girls.  It at once captures the tragic irony and the, well, the dreadful mundanity of extremism.  She shows how easy it is for charismatic leaders to manipulate a person's reasonable desire for meaning in their lives into something twisted and lonely.  None of which is really new, but the insight is so deftly handled here that it feels new.

If you hadn't already guessed it, Secret Son is not a book about happy endings. It is brutally honest for a novel of its kind. There is no last-minute rescue here, no escape; Yousseff is too tangled in the legacy of secrets and lies propagated by his parents, his country and 'The Party' to be the master of his own fate.   When it comes the final betrayal he endures is gut-wrenchingly realistic.  It literally stopped me in my tracks half way across the staff carpark. 

Except, maybe there is some hope to had, if of a depressingly realistic kind.  Lalami introduces a new point-of-view character  over half way into the novel: Amal, Yousseff's legitimate half-sister.  She has grown up in luxury, believing herself to be her father's only child and enjoying all the benefits of his wealth: the best schools, the best clothes, fancy cars, holidays abroad and a prestigious degree from the USA.  But while in America she has met and fallen in love with Fernando, a freelance photographer who definitely does not constitute a suitable partner in the eyes of her parents.  Forced to choose between Fernando and her father's expectations, and then confronted with the existence of Yousseff, she is not blown off course as thoroughly or as permanently as he is.  She is his liberated twin, what he could have been if he had been given the tools - the confidence, the sense of entitlement - to extricate himself from his fate and form himself a new and independent identity.  What he could have been if he hadn't been so poor and so ignorant.  In this sense Secret Son is also about social class, and the vast gulf that divides the people who can get to a better life only in their dreams and the people who can fly there on an aeroplane.

Lalami is also a short story writer, and like many short story writers she works the reader hard.  The power of her work is in its unspoken implications rather than in the bones of the story itself or the flaunting of the prose.  I feel as though I had to stew it a while before I got the flavour out. Which is why listening to the Audible reading in 30 minute segments, with forced pauses between, was hugely conducive to appreciating its subtlety. I find myself a real and unexpected admirer, and I look forward to reading Lalami's short story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. 

~~Victoria~~

A Chance Visitor

I had a plan for my post on Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You.  It was a good plan; it was a kind plan.  I was going to give it all the benefit of the doubt I could muster. I thought it would be unfair to hold it up and measure it against the likes of Mantel and Kingsolver and Waters.  So I was going to judge it by a different standard, for the gentile love-story that it is, and not as a serious contender for the Orange Prize.  But my plan has been foiled by the judges, who have chosen for better or for worse to put it on their shortlist.  Now I have no choice.  I have to put this book squarely alongside Wolf Hall and The Lacuna, and see how it measures up.  I can't help thinking that the judges have done Rosie Alison a disservice with their decision, because her book doesn't fare well by this comparison. I feel like I have to be honest and say, with no desire to be cruel: There is no way that The Very Thought of You is the best novel written by a woman between April 2009 and April 2010.  It just isn't in the same league as the three other shortlisters I have read thus far, not in terms of plot, or theme, or prose, or sentiment. And I don't think it ever aspired to be.

Anna Sands is eight years old and her world is small.  She loves her mother, Roberta, with a bright-eyed devotion, and she likes her new shoes; a knickerbocker glory in the roof-top restaurant of a department store is the utmost of her desires.  But it is the 31st August 1939, and everything is about to change, for the world and for Anna.  Like thousands of other children she is to be evacuated from her London home to the countryside, leaving behind her mother and exchanging the city streets of the capital for the leafy environs of Ashton Park in Yorkshire.  The park's childless owners, Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, have decided to transform their country house into a school for evacuees for the duration of the war.  A patriotic act, yes, but also a last-ditch attempt to fill the gap in their lives (and their marriage) where their own young family should be.

Ashton Park seen through Anna's eyes is a brave new world.  She misses her mother, of course, but the grand house and its grounds are a revelation to her:

...Anna saw the glory of autumn for the first time. Great avenues of trees towered with colour. Wide lawns glinted with ripe conkers, and gusts of wind swept down leaves in fiery drifts. The weather reached right through her fingertips and deep inside her, until she felt different and new.  

She likes her teachers too, especially grave, gentle Mr Ashton and her quiet English teacher, Miss Weir.  The other children are not so impressed by her, and she doesn't make friends easily; she 'tiptoes across the unknown territory of other children's affections clumsy with self-doubt.'  But she doesn't mind being alone with her thoughts.  She is a preternaturally thoughtful little girl, as though she knew that she was the heroine of someone's novel.  Which, I suppose is why I find it so difficult to believe in her.  But I'll come back to that.

Anna is only one of several point-of-view characters in a narrative which leaps at will from the interiority of one mind to another, and from backstory to present action.   Thomas Ashton has a key role to play as the unlikely romantic lead.  Once a diplomat in Europe he is now approaching middle-age, crippled by polio and turned Classics teacher, struggling daily with his disappointments: his failing marriage, his loneliness, his weak body.  The children and his new vocation give him some comfort but his wife Elizabeth's descent into alcoholism and their raging rows are barely contained beneath the surface.  In her turn Elizabeth longs desperately for a baby, flinging herself headlong into petty affairs in an attempt to conceive, and punishing her husband for what she knows to be her own barrenness.  Into this seething mess comes mousy Ruth Weir, a clergyman's daughter with no pretensions to romance, so unassuming and plain that nobody notices her. Until Thomas that is.

What follows is a pretty straightforward love-story, albeit adulterous - the stilted conversations, the misunderstandings, the doubts, the yearnings, and then the confessions that follow have a cloying inevitability. The narrative trajectory is never in doubt, mostly because the reader sees the blossoming affinity between Ruth and Thomas from both sides.  The omniscient narrator is everywhere.  The characters may know nothing of each other's hearts, but we know everything.  Joining us on the periphery, as constant a voyeur as we are, is little Anna, observing and witnessing more than she should between Thomas, Elizabeth and Ruth, but barely understanding what she sees.  The comparisons that have been made with L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between are apt in this sense (although this is nowhere near as subtle), with the child acting as an unwitting accomplice in the politics of adulthood.  On the back of my copy allusions are also made to similarities with Sadie Jones and Ian McEwan (I assume they're thinking specifically of Atonement), as though pointing out that The Very Thought of You is about emotional repression, thwarted love and the limited understanding of children in a country house setting will elevate it to a standard set by these two authors. 

It won't though; it can't.  It isn't the fault of the prose as such.  Alison can string readable words together; and there is nothing to make you sigh or roll your eyes apart from the occasional sad cliche.  It isn't great but it isn't bad, which at least makes the book readable sentence-to-sentence.  It isn't the story's failing either, or not really.  There is something to be said for the basic premise: a young girl, thrust into a new environment, witnesses the reckless passions of adults and is left reeling in their wake for the rest of her life.  It isn't new ground, but there is some richness left in the soil.  I thought that in the last third of the novel, when we fast-forward in time and meet Anna again in her middle and then old age, to witness the repercussions of her wartime experiences, it was momentarily possible to see how complex and subtle it all could have been. How Anna's experiences could have been married to the experiences of her whole generation; how Thomas, Ruth and Elizabeth's actions and inactions could have said something powerful about a world beyond Ashton Park.  The potential is definitely there.

It is the narratorial voice that kills it stone-dead for me. Alison's narrator is all-seeing and excessively controlling, to the extent that there are no characters, there are only puppets having their strings pulled for them.  There is also no reader either, or at least no need for one. I have never met with a book that made me feel so utterly redundant a participant in the reading process. The narrator knows exactly how everyone in the books thinks and feels, and precisely what everything means or will mean; nothing is ambiguous.  The characters very rarely speak at all.  Instead the narrator speaks for them, telling us rather than showing us what is going on inside their most private selves. When a character does speak, in a moment of rare dialogue, the narrator quickly and often needlessly glosses their words so that we won't wrongly interpret what they mean.  This leaves no room for the book to breath or speak for itself.  The characters have no thoughts except those which are assigned to them, and the reader has nothing to do. For me this takes away the true pleasure of reading, which I conceive as an intellectually, emotionally and morally active sort of activity rather than the exercise in passivity that The Very Thought of You makes it.

I think this problem may be symptomatic of the way The Very Thought of You was written and conceived of.  It is obviously a very personal book for the author - some of the more peripheral characters are Rosie Alison's real-life ancestors, and the model for Ashton Park is a place she has visited and been inspired by - and you can see how every detail of every moment and exchange has been imagined by her and revisited over and over until she has it exactly right.  So she wants us to experience each scene as she experiences it, rather than experiencing it for ourselves, and this is why she stuffs the book with narratorial directives. Just in case you didn't get it when Anna says this she feels like that, or when Thomas does that he feels like this.  The problem is that there is no room for me in there.  This is a book that doesn't want to play with others; it doesn't engage in a conversation.  It is someone else's story; it belongs to her completely and it will never be mine.

'What happens to the Annas of this world?' Thomas asks Ruth at one point, during one of their stilted conversations; 'They find it hard to meet anyone who will take life as seriously as they do,' she replies.  It is just about the truest and most interesting thing anyone says in the course of The Very Thought of You, and because the narrator is focused on choreographing the flourishing romance between Thomas and Ruth, they let this insight into Anna and her future stand for itself.  There is no clumsy interpretation or forced rhetorical question to follow. We are allowed to consider the implications at will.  What a blessed relief after being poked and prodded and forced through the whole course of the book. 

~~Victoria~~