Eve's Alexandria

Magical Realism

The faery handbag: It's huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.

Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it's true.

Kelly Link's second collection of short fiction, Magic for Beginners (2005; due out in the UK next year), has been something of a phenomenon since it appeared from Small Beer Press (co-founded by Link herself), winning much adulation together with Locus, Nebula, and Hugo awards.

Of the nine stories here, most are set in the everyday world, weaving fantastical elements – zombies, shapeshifting, magic – through ordinary human joys and pains: troubled marriages, sibling bickering, first loves, generation gaps, growing pains. The fantasy is not the focus; it is a prism, a special effect, a slant upon the world, and we rarely learn the how or why of it. The nature of the random hauntings and the army of rabbits (!) that afflict the protagonists of 'Stone Animals', for example, are never explained; they might be real, they might be products of the children's imagination, they might simply be expressions of the stress suffered by a young family moving home and coping with infidelity. Either way, the effect is to both spice up and reinforce the emotional realism of the tale – to make it more universal, perhaps, by making it more bizarre.

Link's strength lies in her acute insight into what makes us, and our relationships, tick – and in her use of whimsy, dream logic, pop culture and warm humour to explore such issues. In 'The Faery Handbag' (available online here), the formidable Zofia ("She looked like a spy or ballerina or a lady pirate or a rock star. She acted like one too") embarrasses her daughter and inspires her granddaughter with her eccentricity and her tales of the old country - a familiar enough scenario (certainly struck a chord with me...), except that Zofia's homeland is a place named Baldeziwurlekistan, her handbag is like the TARDIS as imagined by the Brothers Grimm, and her tales are odder than most:

The Baldeziwurlekistanians used their tiles and board to communicate with the people who lived under the hill. The people who lived under the hill knew the future. The Baldeziwurlekistanians gave them fermented milk and honey, and the young women of the village used to go and lie out on the hill and sleep under the stars. Apparently the people under the hill were pretty cute. The important thing was that you never went down into the hill and spent the night there, no matter how cute the guy from under the hill was. If you did, even if you only spent a single night under the hill, when you came out again a hundred years might have passed. [...]

Every once in a while, a woman from under the hill would marry a man from the village, even though it never ended well. The problem was that the women under the hill were terrible cooks. They couldn't get used to the way time worked in the village, which meant that supper always got burnt, or else it wasn't cooked long enough. But they couldn't stand to be criticized. It hurt their feelings. If their village husband complained, or even if he looked like he wanted to complain, that was it. The woman from under the hill went back to her home, and even if her husband went and begged and pleaded and apologized, it might be three years or thirty years or a few generations before she came back out.

It is Link's willingness to take her themes and ideas – ranging from brief, witty tangents to story-length conceits, like the haunted appliances of 'Stone Animals' – and run with them to their gleefully (il)logical conclusions that makes Magic for Beginners such an infectious, moving, and often quite unsettling reading experience. This is storytelling at its most exuberant and crafty: plain-spoken weirdness, postmodern artlessness. Link finds the dislocation in the everyday, rendering the fantastical in deadpan matter-of-fact prose, addressed to the reader as much as it is broadcast live from its characters’ heads. Take, for example, the neon-drenched daze (and charm) of 'Hortlack', about a convenience store whose workforce (numbering two: naive Eric and wacky dreamer Batu) decide to make the shop into an entirely self-sufficient home, and whose patrons are mostly zombies:

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you. But when you looked closer, you saw they were from some other place, where things were different: where even the same things, the things that went on everywhere, were just a little bit different.

At other times, the authorial directness is a feint, a way of calling attention to – and discomforting us with – what we don't know. Stories like 'Some Zombie Contingency Plans' – in which a man with a murky past gatecrashes a teenager's parent-free birthday party – work their slow-burn creepiness to a substantial degree through understatement, partial reveals, and the gaps we are invited to fill in ourselves:

It's not his name, but let's call him Soap. That's what they called him in prison, although not for the reasons you're thinking.

What initially appears to be a throwaway remark, here, soon blossoms into the engine driving the story. "Soap" takes up and sheds names (and thus identities) like the drunken party-goers do their inhibitions, and for all the backstory his ruminations give us, the disorientating effect of his unnaming – so contrary to what we might expect from a third-person narrative that so flaunts its omniscience – ripples through the story, robbing the reader of firm ground and keeping his motives shadowed until the final bait-and-switch (and beyond).

Finally, Link occasionally shows us what is going on by cheekily invoking the exact opposite – thus, of course, putting both images in our heads:

She leaned forward and kissed Jeremy and then she wasn't kissing him. It was all very fast and surprising, but they didn't fall off the roof. Nobody falls off the roof in this story.

The simultaneity jars our expectations – and, arguably, produces a kind of double-vision, one that makes us both observers and experiencers, jolting us with the unexpected in narrative technique just as the characters are jolted with the unexpected in their emotional lives.

That last extract comes from the real triumph of the collection - the title-piece, 'Magic For Beginners', which is stunning right from its charming opening hook:

Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. But she will be, soon. She's a character on a television show called The Library. You've never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.

But if we're drawn in by the quirky narration – which cheerfully wrong-foots us, then addresses us directly – we stay for the characters, for the almost unbearably close (if always slyly amusing) reading of adolescent friendship:

The Library made Jeremy and Karl and Talis and Elizabeth and Amy friends. No one else in school is as passionately devoted. [...] They all live within a few blocks of each other, in run-down Victorians with high ceilings and ranch houses with sunken living rooms. And although they have not always been friends, growing up, they've gone skinny-dipping in lakes on summer nights, and broken bones on each others' trampolines. Once, during an argument about dog names, Elizabeth, who is hot-tempered, tried to run Jeremy over with her ten-speed bicycle, and once, a year ago, Karl got drunk on green-apple schnapps at a party and tried to kiss Talis, and once, for five months in the seventh grade, Karl and Jeremy communicated only through angry emails written in all caps. I'm not allowed to tell you what they fought about.

Now the five are inseparable; invincible. They imagine life will always be like this - like a television show in eternal syndication - that they will always have each other.

We know (because we're told, and because we've probably been there) that Jeremy Mars and his friends have in common, at first, is their fandom – for a TV show that sounds like exactly the type of thing we remember inventing with our friends (and, in my case, occasionally even filmed...) - and their neighbourhood. Still, all the usual shared experiences bring them together, and all the usual teen problems threaten to drive them apart: parents' marital problems, growing up, secrets not kept, and of course hormones:

"Elizabeth likes me?" Jeremy says.

"Apparently everybody likes you," Karl says. He sounds sorry for himself. "What is it about you? It's not like you're all that special. Your nose is funny looking and you have stupid hair."

When Jeremy's mother decides to head out on an extended road trip to Las Vegas – due to a combination of an unexpected inheritance and a particularly bad row with his father – she elects to take Jeremy with her. The portrayal of Jeremy's response is pitch-perfect, embodying all the anxieties of the adolescent worldview. What if everything is different when he returns? What will he miss out on? How will his friends and their relationships shift while he's away? Again we have the double-vision, although of an emotional variety this time: as readers, we are aware that he will only be away for a matter of months, that change is necessary, and so forth... but the inner teen empathises with every agonised protest.

Alongside this, the lead character of The Library - the "funny, dangerous, bad-tempered, flirtatious, greedy, untidy, accident-prone, graceful" Fox, played each episode by a different actor but always recognisably herself (even when the actor is a man) - begins to pop up in Jeremy's life. He gets phonecalls from her, asking for his help. Fox is a mixture of hormone-awakener, imaginary friend, and fantasy symbol of those perfect childhood summers that seem like they'll never end (but do):

And she's always beautiful. Every episode you think that this Fox, surely, is the most beautiful Fox there could ever be, and yet the Fox of the next episode will be even more heartbreakingly beautiful.

In sum: a gorgeous, glorious coming-of-age story. That left me all misty-eyed (with nostalgia, and appreciation).

"Call me Mars instead."

"Mars," Fox says, and it sounds exotic and strange and brave, as if Jeremy has just become a new person, a person named after a whole planet, a person who kisses girls and talks to Foxes.

~

My review of the anthology Salon Fantastique is up at Strange Horizons.

This will almost certainly be my last post until 2007, so I'd like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. :-)

~~Nic

Half a Dozen of the Other, or The Least Liked of 2006

I don't like to say I 'hate' a book.  It seems hasty, even somewhat vitriolic, and sounds like the worst kind of hyperbole.  But quite often I meet with books I don't like very much, or don't appreciate, or want to throw against a wall.  These are my six for 2006:

    

• On Beauty by Zadie Smith - I don't think my feelings about this years' Orange Prize winner are much of a secret.  When I read it I thought it was pretty rubbish - unoriginal, pretentious and sloppily written - and I said so, loud and clear (...perhaps with some of that hyperbole that I shy away from now?)  In the fullness of time, my honesty provoked a comment from Zadie Smith herself, and a smattering of discussion in the blogosphere about the critical role of a reviewer or litblogger. Incidentally, something else I've learnt during my first year as a litblogger is how many authors, including the great and the good, 'google' themselves.  I find this both amusing and disillusioning.  Could it be that world-famous novelists are human beings, always hungry for praise, ever fearful of censure?
• Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones - I very much enjoyed writing this post about what I thought was a thoroughly ridiculous novel.  Crushed by its own verbiage and solipsistic to a fault, it epitomised my ever troubled relationship with contemporary fiction. As a 'genre' (if it is such a thing) it often walks a fine line between meaning and silliness; Dreams of Speaking is waaaaay over that line, almost as far west as the Realm of Farce. To be fair to Jones I've heard that her first novel, Sixty Lights, is much better balanced and that Dreams of Speaking is something of an aberration in comparison. Not that I'll be rushing out to try it.
• How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide by John Sutherland - Almost immediately after I'd finished reading this poor excuse for a reading companion the name Sutherland was made infamous in litblogging circles by this article about web-reviewing (which appeared in the always-conservative pages of the Daily Telegraph).  Safe to say my disliking his book has nothing to do with this display of extroadinary snobbery, although it confirms my first impression of him: Sutherland writes as though he, and only he, were an authority on reading.  Assuring his (more than likely well-read) audience that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover (except when you should)? A tad condescending methinks.
• Prep by Curtis Sittenfield - I know that I stand almost alone in disliking this novel, which was hailed far and wide as a fine, precise debut, but nevertheless... I'm indisposed to enjoy novels that glut on teenage angst and then go nowhere; I can observe them as 'portraits' but get little more than that. (I disliked that great classic of teenage alienation, The Catcher in the Rye, too. Ugh.) It's evidently one of reading blindspots.
• Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates - Another blindspot perhaps? As I explained in my post on this book, I don't particularly like single issue/diatribe novels; they seem to negate the strength of the form itself, which is to provide various thematic angles.  I also found the vigilante ethic very distasteful.
• Finally, Seven Lies by James Lasdun - A short novel, with a spot on the Booker longlist, that bored me so thoroughly and impressed me so litte that I never got around to blogging about it.  As it is I remember only the saliant points: a man and his wife escape East Germany and arrive in America masquarading as radicals. Man has not really earned radical credentials; man feels bad; man takes action against his own badness.  I dragged myself to the end because it was so short, but was glad I only borrowed the hardback from the library.

And then there are the two books that might well have made the list if I'd had the strength of will to read them to finish them: Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, which inspired me to put it down after only 50 pages, and Claire Allen's Poppy Shakespeare, which is on the Guardian's First Book shortlist, but left me cold after half a dozen chapters.

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If I don't post again until after Christmas (more than likely), I hope you enjoy the holiday season, whether you celebrate a religious festival or not: eat far too much, be merry and get massive piles of books for presents. :-)

~~Victoria~~

Six of One....

It’s that time of year again, time for the critics and lit-bloggers and authors to mount their podiums and declare the ‘Best Books of 2006’.  The Guardian had its two-part feature on Saturday; The Observer joined in on Sunday; The Times has their 10 Best as well as Erica Wagner's round-up.  The TLS had a special Books of the Year issue, which you can sample here, and The Economist had a very interesting selection.  The blogging world, not to be outdone, has been gearing up to the recommendations too - Danielle at A Work in Progress offers a round-up of interesting links. (I particularly liked Sandra's 'Dirty Dozen', a list of the books she wished she hadn't bothered opening in 2006.)

I thought I might offer a not-very-original variation on this whole theme: below is a list of the six books I loved best in 2006 (and a few others that deserve honourable mentions), while tomorrow I'll post the six that I liked least.  They're in no real order within their groups, and not all of them were published in the last 12 months, although some of them were...

Six of One, Or the Books That Made Me Tingle:

• Disobedience by Naomi Alderman - I thought this debut novel (March, 2006) was thoroughly wonderful, and that it absolutely deserved to win the Orange Prize for New Writers.  Set in the conservative environs of Hendon, the heart of London's Orthodox Jewish community, it explored divisiveness, sexuality, religion and identity in a crystal prose and with moving aplomb. 
• The Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes - I don't read enough poetry; it's a habit I've never quite gotten in to, even though I nearly always enjoy it when I do.  This collection of poems, Hughes' last, acts as a lyrical gloss on his tragic and controversial relationship with Sylvia Plath, both during their marriage and after her death.  Of all this posts I wrote this year, this was my favourite to work at.
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - Robinson's long awaited second novel is a subtle, yet incisive study of love and prejudice in 1950s America; couched in a meandering, affable first person narrative it works in mysterious ways.  I thought it should definitely have been on the Orange Prize shortlist.
• The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett - In January this year I had my first taste of The Lymond Chronicles, a series of vastly superior historical novels centred on an arrogant and irresistable young Scotsman. I never got around to writing a post about either of the installments that I read, but Nic, a fellow acolyte, praised the fifth installment.
• The Accidental by Ali Smith - The book that, in my opinion, should have won the Orange Prize, hands-down, no real competition (although I would have happily seen Sarah Water's carry it off for The Night Watch...).  I loved its post-modern assurance and its stylistic virtuosity- a truly innovative novel from a very lovely lady (and a lesbian too! Woohoo!).
• Finally, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - My first experience of Ishiguro and a reading assignment of the very best kind.  I read it for this review at Emerald City and was left with a strong sense of my own mortality, and its cost. Also, I cried like a baby at the end.

Honourable Mentions

This is the point where I remember all the books I wish I could fit on my list. [Links to my posts...] To name but a few: Vikram Chandra's wonderful epic of Indian history, myth and legend, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, which barely looks epic at all by the side of Vikram Seth's gargantuan politico-parlour drama of marriage and post-partition tension, A Suitable Boy.  Also, Kiran Desai's Booker Prize winning The Inheritance of Loss, which was thoroughly deserving, as was my other Booker favourite Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk.  Then there was Olga Grushin's surprisingly moving The Dream Life of Sukhanov and Nicole Krauss' unexpected triumph, The History of Love.  I'd be remiss to forget Susanna Clarke's short story collection - The Ladies of Grace Adieu - which I reviewed here.

I also read a number of excellent sf novels and short story collections this year, of which the best were: China Mieville's The Scar (a tighter novel that Perdido Street Station and better for it), Ellen Kushner's Privilege of the Sword (swashbuckling bildungsroman don't get any better than this!) and L. Timmel Duchamp's collection of metaphysical romances, Love's Body, Dancing in Time. 

I'm certain I must be missing things (my memory is sieve-like) and I'm also sure that there will be books I read before 1st January 2007 that deserve a mention. I'm confident, for example, that Guy Gavriel Kay's new novel Ysabel (reviewed here by Nic but not due till Jan-March 2007, depending where you live) would have been one of my 6 best if I had quite finished it, and I still have Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and Mary Gentle's new novel Ilario waiting close at hand.  It's been another wonderful year in books...

~~Victoria~~

"In his eyes you saw yourself staring back."

Let me tell you about the city: The city is sharp, the city is a cliche performed with cardboard and painted sparkly colors to disguise the empty center - the hole.

A horror-fable set in (or rather, under) a decaying futuristic city, Veniss Underground (2003) was the first novel of seasoned short story writer Jeff VanderMeer. It is a tale of descent into the underworld, anchored in the terrible experiences and tangled interrelation of three central characters - twins Nicola and Nicholas, and Nicola's former lover Shadrach - as they lose, seek, and find each other (not necessarily in that order) in the deepest, darkest levels beneath the city streets.

The novel is split between the three successive viewpoint narratives, each framed to fit the personality and story-role of the character in question, and each adding further layers of detail to story, theme, and world. First of all, bratty Nicholas, the artist, speaks to us in chatty, self-absorbed first-person; he follows up the thumbnail sketch of the city quoted above by hammering home his role in the description's creation, and the import of his perspective: "That's mine - the words. [...] Let me tell you what the city means to me." His interest lies in what he calls Living Art - art that uses, and discards, life, shaping living tissue for temporary effect (but with permanent, terminal consequences for the life).

His stay in the pages is brief. At Shadrach's suggestion, Nicholas goes to the mysterious Quin (who makes much commercial mileage out of precisely the techniques Nicholas uses in his art) looking for work - an encounter worth quoting for the author's characteristic mix of pungent description and mordant humour:

I gulped like an oxygen-choked fishee, because I realized then that not only did Quin lean over the counter, he was the counter. I stopped and stared, mine eyes as buggee as that self-same fishee. I'd heard of Don Daly's Self Portrait Mixed Media on Pavement - which consisted of Darling Dan's splatted remains - but Quin had taken an entirely different slant that reeked of genius. (It also reeked of squirrels in the brain, but so what?)

Portrait of the Artist as a slab of flesh.

Next up is programmer Nicola, an apparently mature and capable person, who is nevertheless helplessly in thrall to her wastrel brother, and relentlessly idealised by her ex. Her role in the story is essentially reactive: some time after the events of the first part, she sets out to investigate her brother's disappearance, and uncovers layers of sinisterly-significant detail regarding Quin and his genetically-manipulated minions (chiefly intelligent, talking meerkats). In her turn, Nicola bites off more than she can chew. She appears in second-person present-tense (for more precise reasons that become apparent later on), underscoring both her limited autonomy and her suffocatingly-close self-association with her twin (it is she who, in my header quote, sees herself staring back in his eyes):

You. Were. Always. Two. As one: Nicola and Nicholas, merging into the collective memory together, so that in the beginning of a sentence spoken by your brother you knew the shadow of its end and mouthed the words before he said them.

Finally (the third circle of the descent?), we get our distanced third-person narration from Shadrach, the outsider - to the Nicola/Nicholas pairing, and to the above-ground city itself. Unlike the twins, Shadrach was born amid the dark, clanking industrial nightmare that is below ground; his new life in the open air is purely the result of chance, a lucky break on the regular ballot that, as young man, gave him (but not his family) the opportunity to leave the underworld behind. His love for Nicola stems from the moment of his emergence, when his first sight was of Nicola, then an "orientation officer" posted to help newcomers. As Nicholas half-mockingly observes:

A wall of light and my sweet sister Nicola, and Shadrach ate them both up. Imagine: living in a world of darkness and neon for all of your life and coming to the surface and there she is, an angel dressed in white to guide you, to comfort you. If you had time, I'd tell you about them, because it was a thing to covet, their love, a thing of beauty to mock the cosmetics ads and their lingerie holos...

Shadrach, distraught at Nicola's vanishing and his own indirect role in it, returns to the underground city - despite deep misgivings - to search for her. For company, he has only the head of Nicola's former 'pet' meerkat, glued onto a plate and understandably pissed off and foul mouthed as a result. (Shadrach names it John the Baptist...). This is where the novel comes into its own, as VanderMeer lets loose his descriptive prose. I was reminded, in some ways, of China Mieville - there is a similar sense of the brooding, visceral baroque at work, but at the same time Veniss Underground is earthier, gorier, more playful (and more succinct...). VanderMeer creates his effects not so much with visual imagery as by exploring the physical, aural and psychological sensations that the surroundings inflict upon his characters:

On the other side of the manhole a wet glob of slugs and grubs waited for him; it was their faint mewling cries he heard, the whole of their pulsing, grey bulk waiting for him to come home. The image of a maggoty, sudden dark. The drip-drip of water. The suggestion of massive machinery grinding. The dark. The harsh, spitting sound of holovids flicking green light from behind closed doors in closed off corridors. The dark.

VanderMeer, in a comment upon Abigail Nussbaum's review, described Veniss Underground as, "a Boschian Decadent novel, with dark humor". The print of 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'  - see left for the third panel of the triptych, Hell (hopefully it should get bigger if you click...) - currently hanging on my wall nods in vigorous agreement (or it would, were it not, um, a piece of mashed-up dead tree). In the course of Shadrach's descent through the various levels of its hell, VanderMeer's underworld shares something of the fevered, yet precise, detail of Bosch's work, the rich variety of ugliness and despair.

And gore. Among the delights Shadrach must face in his quest is an enormous surgery/abattoir, whereby forgotten unfortunates serve as spare-part-fodder for a far-reaching, fashionable trade in replacement limbs and organs. (A further level in the motif of the malleability and disposability of life in this society). The centrepiece of the operation is a great cathedral (inspired, according to the author's afterword, by none other than York Minster!):

Where the sculptures of saints would have been set into the walls, there were instead bodies laid into clear capsules, the white, white skin glistening in the light - row upon row of bodies in the walls, the bewildering proliferation of walls. The columns, which rose and arched in bunches of five or six together, were not true columns,  but instead highways for blood and other substances: giant red, green, blue and clear tubes that coursed through the cathedral like arteries.

In the vaults below, Shadrach must dig through a pile of rotting, discarded limbs to uncover Nicola's mutilated, catatonic (yes, still alive) body. All that remains is to revive and retrieve her - and, of course, to face the other things that lurk in the underworld.

[Aside: oddly, just as I started writing this part, the CD playing on my hi-fi offered up some appropriate lyrics - "If I become another / dig me up from under what is covering / the better part of me" (--Incubus, 'Dig'). Ghoulishly amusing, much like the book...]

Shadrach, then, is our Orpheus, going into the Underworld in search of his Eurydice (and, less urgently, her brother). The parallel is clear, but it informs rather than overpowers the story (possibly because it's hard to upstage a cathedral of blood?). The characters, and their voices, are strong enough to carry the tale; their mutual affection and dependence, while cloying and constricting to all three, also inspires them (well, two of them) to selflessness and heroism, and gives the novel a strong emotional undercurrent to offset the horror.

The only real issue I had with the novel was its brevity, and a certain lack of balance. VanderMeer perhaps tries to do too much in too few pages: structural experimentation, sensory overload, mythic resonance, themes of consequences and taking responsibility, together with the world-changing machinations that lie behind it all. Inevitably, aspects suffer - in particular, I think, the broader picture. The city's underworld is so vivid that it completely overshadows the Veniss above ground, where we spend very little time; the desire (for both reader and character) to return to the surface stems more from fear of the darkness below than it does from anything truly compelling above. We are given precious little background on how or why Veniss came to be the way it is, beyond the back-cover blurb's note that FutureEarth's cities are isolated oases amid a vast ecological desert, and Nicola's reflection:

Once we were close and close-knit, but now we are unmoored islands, each alone, each a separate planet, drifting farther and farther away, content to turn ever inward... This is no idle solipsism; it has taken on the fragile brightness of truth. Cities turned from cities, self-devouring. Governments fragmenting into fragments of fragments. Entertainment become a solitary diversion. Solo adventures.

It is frustrating, and makes the world feel incomplete. This said, however, I suspect it was to some degree intentional. As the title suggests, the focus lies below ground, with the Shadrach's quest and the chilling activities that go on away from the sunlight (the latter of which are, nevertheless, only a dark mirror of what goes on in the sunlight, a world of bioengineered servitors and Living Art). The characters are overwhelmed by the scale and torment of the underground - it seems appropriate that it should also swamp our vision of the world above ground. It enhances the claustrophobia, certainly - but it also, arguably, diminishes the impact of what Shadrach discovers about Quin's plans.

But it's a beautifully disturbing novel, and I'll be reading more VanderMeer.

If you disappear now, Nicholas disappears with you: you are not one, after all, but two, and the city is the only infinite - a maze, a crystal mirror, a shattered toy, a palate of undigested time.

~~Nic

Dawkins on Delusion

Something a little different for this week’s Bible-related post: some thoughts about Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion which I bought and devoured last week, and which has provoked mightily mixed feelings in chez Alexandria.

Let me begin by saying that I find Richard Dawkins a highly entertaining personage; a veritable delight to watch or read. There is just something about his smug, holier-than-thou atheism that fills me with special glee.  It turns me giddy with conflict.  Should I revel in the pure schadenfreude of young-earth Creationists and literalists being beaten with the biological-sense stick, or do I give in to my adult indignation at Dawkins’ many (and often insultingly) flawed statements? Go to his delightfully named website A Clear Thinking Oasis, or visit the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and you’ll see what I mean.  Marvel at his self-righteousness; his self-satisfaction; his conceit. Contemplate for a moment his official title: Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.  Watch this ‘mission statement’ for the RDF and tell me if it doesn’t remind you a little (a lot?), in principle, of this one.  Or, read this snippet from the introduction to The God Delusion:

‘If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! [Yes, indeed!] Of course, dyed in the wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature… But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people out there: people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take’, or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it.  Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether.’ (my emphasis)

Put simply, Richard Dawkin’s envisions himself as a crusader; a preacher; even an ideological martyr. Arguably The God Delusion is his gloss on a ‘Holy Book’ - Darwin is God, of course; The Origin of Species is His ‘Word’.  And Dawkins is, ironically, all the things that he says he despises: a fundamentalist whose ideological position constitutes ‘truth’, who allows no compromise and will admit no reasonable opposition.  Far too often he makes his points like Ted Haggard, or Pat Robertson, or any other fundamentalist rabble-rouser might – he derides those who disagree with him; questions their morality and values; denies their rights to freedom of speech and action; and shouts longest and loudest about protecting ‘children’ from the ‘enemy’s’ nefarious clutches.  Worse than that he repeatedly, and viciously, questions the intelligence of people who don’t agree with him (this despite lauding atheism as the spirit of independent enquiry).  And he does it all so well.  He does it with panache and humour, with earnestness and hope. I can almost see the evangelist’s fire in his eyes, hear the impassioned edge to his voice.  By God, Richard Dawkins is a believer, and I believe in him!

Somewhat. Almost. Very nearly.

But I should backtrack.  The God Delusion is a book about why believing in God is the epitome of silliness, argued from a relentlessly rationalist and scientific position and designed to ‘convert’ believers into unbelievers.  It sets about demolishing 'God' in a number of different ways – first it refutes the traditional arguments for God’s existence (Aquinas’ proofs; a priori arguments, the beauty hypothesis, Pascal’s Wager, etc), then lays down the law in a statistically based argument for the non-existence of God, before moving on to hypothesise about the evolutionary ‘causes’ of religious feeling and impulse.  It goes on to argue for a positive, non-religious morality and spends a whole chapter discussing the conservative stances of Judeo-Christianity as regards homosexuality and abortion.  It finishes with an impassioned manifesto for the atheistic education of children.  (See this petition to stop the ‘religious labelling’ of children.) 

For the most part I agree with Dawkins. Traditional monotheism is beyond my comprehension and I’m as puzzled as he is by intelligent, independently minded individuals who choose to deny scientific evidence and persecute their fellow human beings in the name of God.  The God Delusion does an excellent job of elucidating the logic behind atheism and of arguing against the need for religious morality. Not surprisingly, it also acts as a superb introductory primer to evolution, natural selection and meme theory. All this is to the great good and worth the time and effort of reading it.

But often Dawkins frustrates me too.  First, there is his title: The God Delusion.  But his book isn’t really about ‘God’ at all, not as an abstract idea/ideal. It’s about organised monotheism and directs itself specifically at the beliefs of the ‘Big Three’ – Christianity, Islam and Judaism.  When it addresses theology, it grounds itself here, and embroils itself in issues – like homosexuality and abortion – which are topical, yes, but not universal.  Dawkins sets out to give religion the knock-down, but ends up ignoring the bigger picture. For example, he summarily dismisses polytheistic faiths, like Hinduism and Paganism, which are often far more fluid and adaptable than monotheisms.  Awarding them all of three pages argument (most of which he spends rabbiting on about Catholicism and the Angelic Hosts - *not* polytheism in most senses of the word), he ends thus:

‘How did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such polytheological conundrums? Who cares? Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many.  Having gestured towards polytheism to cover myself against a charge of neglect, I shall say no more about it.  For brevity I shall refer to all deities as simply ‘God’.’

Not only is this wrong-headed – not all ‘deities’ work on the same principle as the Judaic God; not all beliefs are incompatible with evolutionary science– but its downright sloppy to brush aside thousands of years of subtle philosophy in so brusque a manner.  If you want me to become an atheist Professor Dawkins, you have to try harder than that!

Then again, Dawkins already thinks he has me covered :

‘Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist’s metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe.  Pantheism is just sexed-up atheism.”

Which has me told.  But what precisely is wrong with pantheism? With tapping into our spiritual impulses in order to express our wonder of the natural world?  Dawkins’ himself seems to quite like the idea, calling this particular chapter ‘A Deeply Religious Non-Believer’, and quoting Einstein with abandon throughout:

‘”To sense that behind anything that can be experience there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and who beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.  In this sense I am religious.”’

Dawkins also, and rightfully, points out that:

‘The metaphorical or pantheistic ‘God’…is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language.’

Which has me nodding my little liberal head vigorously and enthusiastically.  But then, alas, all is lost:

‘But to deliberately confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.’

Our mistake, then, is our desire to express our wonder in the language of the spiritual; use the semantics and symbols of religion and you may as well be cosying up to the fundamentalists! 
I find this a little hard to swallow: if Dawkins can grasp the distinction, and I can grasp the distinction, and since the distinction is made quite plain by the fact that pantheists and Pagans, and anyone else who uses the word ‘God’ metaphorically, don’t believe in the doctrines of Christianity or Judaism or Islam, I don’t think the confusion is at all deliberate.  In fact, I don’t even think 'the confusion' is in the least confusing.

The reason Dawkins thinks its stumper is quite clear though: he has a rather low opinion of people’s capacity to understand concepts more generally.  His philosophy seems to be that most readers, religious or otherwise, are quite incapable of subtlety, so best not to introduce subtle argument at all.  He makes an astonishing number of references to the correlations between IQ and atheism, and spends too much time laughing at the credulous.  Is there a worse tactic for a man aspiring to be an educator?

Which brings me back to Dawkins being self-satisfied and smug.  The real problem with The God Delusion is not specific but general: it is never doing anything but preaching to the converted.  It’s hostile tone, designed to make religious people feel stupid, and its over-weaning sense of superiority, designed to make thoughtful readers feel small, combine to make an exclusionist diatribe.  Ultimately this is a shame, because Dawkins is a fine writer and an eloquent atheist.  He’d make a fine advocate too, if he yielded the pulpit and mixed with the masses.

Still... I can't help but like him. 

~Victoria~~

...And Saw the Skull Beneath the Skin

However it announced itself, the beginning of day in Provence was a gift, celebrated in words and art for two thousand years and more. Somewhere below Lyon and north of Avignon the change was said to begin: a difference in the air above the earth where men and women walked, and looked up.

It is the quality of the light that brings fifteen-year-old Ned Marriner to Provence. More precisely, it is the latest project of his high-flying photographer father (and the absence of his mother, working in the Sudan with Medecins Sans Frontieres) that obliges Ned to leave behind his Canadian high school, temporarily, for an extended sojourn with his father's (photo-) shooting party in southern France. Despite the obvious bonuses of the situation - a private villa with a pool, a vanishingly small amount of homework, and the presence of his father's perkily cute assistant, Melanie - Ned, like any self-respecting teenager, has his (slightly sullen) doubts about the whole thing.

And that's before he finds himself smack bang in the middle of a brutal, centuries-old love triangle. Life, eh?

As the above synopsis would suggest (and as the press releases are making explicit) Guy Gavriel Kay's new novel, Ysabel (available early 2007) is something of a departure for the Canadian writer of intricately-plotted historical fantasies. It is set in the present day, and told almost entirely from a single perspective - Ned's. Correspondingly, the prose style is somewhat stripped down, though not as the previous novel Last Light of the Sun was stripped down (in pursuit of a very particular style); rather, the language is simpler, its observations and concerns more immediate and down-to-earth, than the near-operatic intensity that characterises many of Kay's earlier works. Thus we get scenes revolving around iPods and mobile phones (the latter to very amusing effect), and sentences such as:

For like the fifth time today or something he felt like crying.

The narrative, likewise, is more tightly-focused; the backstory may span the ages, but the action of the tale encompasses one small but significant area of the world, a brief period of time, and relatively few characters.

The tone, moreover, leans towards young adult (and, arguably, the more lighthearted). Ysabel is, fundamentally, Ned's story, a coming-of-age tale in which the catalyst for the first, faltering steps into adulthood just happens to be an involuntary encounter with a blood-soaked eternal rivalry for the affections of one woman, Ysabel. Well, that and, equally pressingly, a budding friendship with an appealing American student, and history geek, named Kate. Even while struggling to find his way through the potentially life-threatening situation he faces, Ned cannot help but be distracted by one of Kate's remarks:

Ned blinked. "What'd you tell her?"

"I said you looked Canadian. G'night, Ned."

[...]

Had it been the same at Pourrieres, where Ned had felt he was drowning in the slaughter? Or was this all so far off base it wasn't even funny?

And what did a Canadian look like, anyhow?

Ned is torn between the desire to be taken more seriously and allowed to act more independently, and the yawning fear of actually growing up and thus losing the securities and certainties of childhood. He is, however, not quite your average bumbling adolescent boy; as might expected of one who comes from such a talented, overachieving family (and who has clearly learned to hold his own in the banter with the three members of his father's clever young support team), Ned possesses courage and quips in respectable measure. Indeed, he can be quite entertainingly glib, at times, and his thoughts and speech bring a great deal of humour and lightness of touch to the novel (his teasing of Kate, with a feigned interest in her air-headed French roommate, Marie-Chantal, I found particularly funny). Of course, this does not stop him finding himself out of his depth, and frequently - but it does provide a valuable grounding for the quick-witted resilience he displays, even under extreme pressure.

Ysabel is also the story of Provence: throughout the ages, by accident of geography, it has been a beautiful, fertile, desirable land - and a battleground, time and again, for the same reason. As the past - various pasts - erupt into Ned's present, it becomes clear that the long, murderous saga of the love triangle is a microcosm of this land's troubled history, the inescapable ugliness attendant upon its beauty.

Ned thought about it. He remembered the round tower, only a walk from here. Guarding against an attack. People had been calling this place paradise for a long time. You fought wars for paradise.

And for a woman.

As the novel unfolds, we glean snippets of the shared past of Ysabel and her two suitors - epoch-making wars, terrible massacres, general betrayal and deception and ruthlessness - through the investigations of Ned and associates, through tense encounters with the two rivals, and through brief, occasional detours into the men's thoughts. (These PoV scenes, I think, work less well than does Ned's narration, perhaps because the need to keep certain plot elements under wraps creates an excessively elliptical, secretive air, holding the men's emotions at arm's length from the reader). On one level, none of these bloody events are wholly about the three lovers, and yet at the same time they are inextricably linked with and reflective of their struggle ("Two hundred thousand people and more had died in a single battle between these two. What was a Canadian kid against that?").

Ysabel herself, centre of the conflict, symbolises Provence: changing with each successive age into which she re-emerges, but retaining, in some essential, eternal way, the quality that makes her desirable, and desired.

They never change, the two of them. She always does, in small, telling ways. She must be rediscovered, as a consequence, each and every time. Endlessly different, endlessly loved.

This mutability of Ysabel - the way that she is, in certain respects, shaped by the way in which she is loved, and pursued, as well as by the nature of the way she is reborn each time - is signalled from early on. During one of his father's photography sessions in Aix-en-Provence, Ned discovers a sculpture in the cloister of Saint-Sauveur Cathedral: a female figure, mislabelled - as it turns out - and so worn as to be almost unidentifiable. Partly, she has been made this way by natural process:

Pale-coloured stone in morning light, almost entirely worn away. Hardly anything to be seen, as if she were a rendering of memory itself. Of what time did to men and women, however much they'd been loved.

In part, however, her image was indefinable from the outset, as Ned realises:

She had been made this way, barely carved into the stone, the features less sharply defined, meant to fade, to leave, like something lost from the beginning.

Ysabel is defined by the conflict over her - and by the truth that she will never remain, and can never be 'won'. She can only fleetingly be held, and loved - until the next round of the contest, when she will once again disappear, change, and must be re-sought once more. She is beauty at its most damaging, precarious, and utterly compelling. In this, she finds an echo in the sunset, which, as Kate observes, appears so harmlessly glorious to us now - but which in the past meant simply the fall of night, and all the fears and dangers that darkness brings.

The decision to filter almost all the action through Ned's perceptions means that the love triangle is rather less intense - and, indeed, much less the focus - than might be expected, at least for readers (like me) accustomed to Kay's heart-rending earlier novels. There are stirring declarations and charged confrontations, of course - and plenty of those lines, the ones that encapsulate, with economic but poetic clarity, both a character and his or her mythic stature:

He said [to Ysabel], in that voice men and women might follow into war and across mountain ranges and through forests and into dark, "Whatever you are. Until the sun dies and the last wind blows through the worlds. Need you ask me? Even now?"

There is less of this than I might wish for, and in some ways it is a loss. Yet the underplaying is deliberate, and effective (and affecting) in another way. The author's interest lies, for the most part, elsewhere: in the effects of these events upon Ned (and his family), and in how history - whether a private love story or the clash of warring nations, whether two and a half thousand years ago or only a generation past - can linger in landscape and memory, shaping the present. The result works on several levels. It is a (relatively) streamlined, gripping and thoroughly entertaining story - the plot is clever but simple, a sort of scavenger hunt punctuated by episodes of drama and humour, the pace one of continually escalating tension - painted with as many thematic layers as the reader cares to draw from it.

A departure, then, but a splendid and successful one. I leave you with the prologue's closing lines:

Dawn was exquisite, memorable, almost a taste, on the day a tale that had been playing out for longer than any records knew began to arc, like the curve of a hunter's bow or the arrow's flight and fall, towards what might be an ending.

Notes:

1) Canadian cover image taken from the (ever-wonderful) authorised GGK site, Bright Weavings;

2) the book's official website carries a number of the author's photographs of Provence;

3) the header comes from TS Eliot's lines about ghoulish Jacobean playwright John Webster, which have stuck with me ever since I studied The Duchess of Malfi in school - and seemed appropriate, here, given the beauty/ugliness theme: "Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin".

~~Nic

Hardening my Heart, or The Book of Exodus

  In my last post on the Bible I wrote about the God of Genesis as a familial ‘God’, a localised, tribal and even household deity who bestowed his favour only on particular (male) individuals.  Several people who commented on that post asked when this ‘God’ becomes *the* God, or as Jo put it: When exactly was the point that transformed him from a God jealous of the others to one who could admit no others?  Having read Exodus this week, I’m not sure this is exactly the right question to ask – rather it should be: What was the point at which the Israelites, as believers, were transformed into a people who could admit no other Gods?  Because I’m not at all sure that God’s own position ever really changes – he is always a jealous God, aware of the inscrutable lure of other divinities. The most repeated admonition in Exodus is the second Commandmant, 'Thou shalt worship no other God but me", and, of course, there is the famous episode of the Golden Calf (32: 1-29). Rather, it is an act of God's people to forget there are other options; it is an act of their will and a result of the psychological (and mortal) pressure he puts upon them. The Israelites persuade themselves of their Lord’s omnipotence and imminence because he crows so long and so loud, and because he lavishes his time on them. But God? As I read it, part of the drama of Exodus is His overwhelming failure to convince Himself.*

[*When I refer to 'God' and capitalise 'Him' I am gesturing at the Lord as a literary character in the book of the Bible that I'm discussing, not as a divinity per se.]

Exodus is dominated (more so than I knew) by the figure of Moses, the first great ‘prophet’ of the Old Testament, who receives and delivers the ‘laws’ of God: most famously the Ten Commandments, but also the nitty-gritty of how he is to be worshipped on a day to day basis (from the correct garments for priests to wear, to the way to burn an animal offering) and how the people are to behave in all sorts of 'practical' ways (e.g. under what circumstances you can sell your own daughter into slavery). 

It begins with the Israelites - the descendents of Jacob - right where we left them (in Egypt) but picks up the narrative after a two hundred year lacuna. By this time Joseph is long dead and his influence along the Nile has been mostly forgotten; a new Pharaoh (certain Biblical scholars have suggested Rameses II, others Amenhotep II) is becoming impatient with the Israelites who, happily ensconced in the most fertile region of his land, are zealously applying themselves to Gods' insistence that they 'be fruitful and mulitply'. His answer is to ‘deal shrewdly’ and enslave them, setting them to work on the great building projects of the New Kingdom; this is swiftly followed by a programme of male-child infanticide.  Moses is born into these sorry days, the son of a Levite mother who saves his life by placing him in a basket and floating him down the Nile.  Plucked out by the Pharoah’s daughter – a prince/pauper scenario if ever there was one! – he ‘becomes her son’.

Now comes a gap of 40 years, which Hollywood screenwriters instruct us to fill with Moses' privilege, power and burgeoning sense of honour.  But we next meet him again in a moment of extroadinary inequity:

‘He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people.  Glancing this way and that and seeing no-one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.’

Again, cinema has eagerly filled in the moral gaps of this murder: when Charlton Heston kills the Egyptian he does so in a spasm of horror and righteousness, on the spur of the moment, and is immediately struck by guilt.  Not the biblical Moses though. His act is premeditated and actively concealed; he feels no remorse, except a concern that he has been found out.  Even the Israelites are scared of him afterwards. The Moses of Exodus is not the stuff Hollywood melodrama is made of.

But then, neither is God.  He has already tricked us into betraying ourselves to sin in the Garden of the Eden, burnt up Sodom and Gomorrah and sent the Flood; he follows up with his own 'murder of the innocents' in Exodus (oh, the irony, r.e. the New Testament. Its enough to make my sides ache).  Threatening Egypt with the twelve Plagues if Pharoah doesn't release the Israelites at Moses' request and allow them back to the 'promised land' (which they left 400 years ago and which is, one would suspect, populated by other peoples by now), God repeatedly makes sure that the Pharoah will refuse.   A fairly stubborn ruler to begin with, it is God who really 'hardens his heart' against the Israelites.  Still, after nine plagues - of gnats, locusts, boils, blood and other nasty things - Pharoah is ready to give in... but God isn't ready to let him. 

'Now the Lord said to Moses, "I will bring one more plague on Pharoah and on Egypt.  After that he will let you go from here... About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharoah, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill and all the first born of the cattle as well.  There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt... Pharoah will refuse to listen to you - so that my wonders may be multiplied in Egypt." ...the Lord hardened Pharoah's heart..." [my italics]

When Herrod orders the murder of the children in the New Testament he is only imitating God, his maker.  And it's not as though God is forced into this reprehensible act of vengeance (how could he be when he is omnipotent?); no, God wants to kill the children because he can.  Now you might gloss it thus: the Egyptians have been complicit in the slavery of the Israelites, and Pharoah has been particularly cruel towards them, so they deserve to be punished.  Leaving aside the fact that murdering children is a terribly extreme form for retribution, this just doesn't make sense.  God has no interest in the abstract immorality of slavery; in fact, he generally supports it, laying down instructions on how the Israelites should treat their own slaves.  It isn't the slavery that bothers God, it is the fact that the Israelites subjection gives him a bad name.  He has to show, big time, that he is all-powerful and that a) those who worship him are in for rewards (and a lot of rules), while b) those who don't, are in for punishments out of all proportion.   As he says himself, he wants to show his wonders - not charitable miracles as performed by Jesus, but gut-wrenching visitations of power and pain. 

This is not a God who is serene in his divinity.  It is a God who feels the desperate need to prove himself; who wants to be venerated, but also to be feared; who wants to head-lock his people to him with ties of obligation and terror.  Like an abusive parent he wants to subjugate his children, confusing a show of love with his fist.

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

In other news: 

• The Costa Book Awards shortlists have been announced.  Once you've recovered from the shock and horror of the Whitbread Award being renamed after what is basically a substandard clone of Starbucks, you'll notice that there are a few surprises there: The Meaning of Night up for first novel award, alongside The Tenderness of Wolves, two books that have had decidedly mixed reviews and Mark Haddon's appearance with what has been an anti-climax of a second novel. Then there are sins of omission: where is Sarah Waters, for example? (For the love of all that is literary, isn't she ever going to win a prize?!) My predictions at this stage? I'm uncertain about the novel categories, adults and childrens, but I'm sure Seamus Heaney has already cleared a space on his mantel piece for his third poetry prize and that John Stubbs has it wrapped up with his biography of Donne. Category winners are announced on the 10th January, and the overall winner on 7th February at what is billed as a 'glittering' ceremony packed with London's 'literati'.

~~Victoria~~