Eve's Alexandria

Protest Songs

'There is nothing to be done with the memory of violence, as there was nothing to be done with the violence itself, except to endure it without becoming it, which is his most important work in the cage; his way in, his way out. It is strange that sometimes, when the beating is very bad, his anger is not so intense... He feels tenderness towards his own vulnerable, hungry body... He would not do to Handsome what Handsome has done to him.  He knows this. And that knowledge is also a kind of tenderness.'

On the 1st June, 6 days before the Orange Prize, I sat down with Karen Connelly's debut novel (which went on to win the New Writer's Award) and was thoroughly blown away.  Because The Lizard Cage is extroadinary - a properly sonorous book, so textured and fluently written; so moving and humane; so beautiful and haunting.  It is a book to feel strongly about - politically, emotionally, intellectually - and there is no doubt, no doubt at all in my mind that it is one of the novels to beat in 2007.  I can't imagine reading anything of a higher calibre in the next six months.

It begins mundanely enough, with a twelve-year old orphan in a Burmese monastry school, learning to read and write with a fierce will.  The boy is strangely self-sufficient and defensive of his scanty possessions, a little afraid of the other children perhaps, but still discretely happy.  He exudes a quiet determination - to grow up, to write his own name. That is until, one day, uniformed men, the representatives of Burma's repressive miltary dictatorship, come looking for him and he is forced to flee, with the help of the monks, to Thailand. With him goes the contraband the authorities are so desperate to reclaim - it is a notebook, inscribed with the final words of a dying man.

At which point the narrative stops and hop-skips backward. We leave the boy to his escape on the Thai border and begin again in a very different setting.  It is 1995 and Ko Teza, a songwriter and political activist, has been in prison for seven years with (at least) thirteen more to serve.  He has spent all of that time - 364 weeks, 2556 days - in solitary confinement in the 'teak coffin', visited only by his jailers and another prisoner who brings his food (such as it is) and empties his slop pail.  No books, no newspapers, no writing materials, no music - nothing at all to relieve the tedium.  He receives occasional parcels of food from his mother - filched of most of their contents - but he hasn't seen or spoken to her since the day he was arrested; in order that he might keep up his physical strength he kills and eats raw lizards.  He endures frequent and arbitrary violence from Junior Jailor 'Handsome', a SLORC brute, but much worse is the cultural and sensual wasteland of his bare cell.   His crime?  He once wrote a series of extremely popular songs critical of the ruling 'party', the Generals of the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Committee):

'Teza's songs became a manifestation of the country transforming around them, in Rangoon and its townships and dozens of cities and villages all over Burma, in the singer too, a new country was being born... [It was] our business, our case.  It was the old dream, the oldest music, written again in human blood, soiled by human excrement, with shoes bereft of feet scattered all around.  The chorus was a single word: freedom.'

In prison he is known simply as The Songbird.

However, despite the degradation and the inevitable mental deterioration of his imprisonment Teza maintains a precious equilibrium, balanced somewhere between calm despair and desperate optimism. He does this, firstly, through hours of meditation - he jokes that prison has made him a far better Buddhist than he could ever have hoped to be on the outside - and, secondly, by undertaking a series of minute personal rituals.  The most important amongst these is the 'cheroot ceremony' whereby he diligently unrolls the filters from the cheap cigarettes the guards give him and reads them.  They're made from little scraps of newspaper, rolled by peasant women, and represent both the holiness of the printed word and his only contact with the outside world.  He, of all people, is in a position to understand the esoteric power, and the attendant danger, of words.  The torn scraps of paper rarely make 'sense' - the original stories are impossible to fathom from them - but they act as totemic charms. Teza imagines them as messages sent for him:

'After the story he searches for the secret, the message encoded in every bit of paper.  The torn edged missives seem anonymous, but Teza knows the world has sent them.  The scraps emerge from the vastness of his country, across the rivers and fields, given by the hands of strangers.  They pass through walls, gates, bars, enormous doors.  They move across cells in the halls Teza has never seen, down corridors filled with the very particular smell of imprisoned men... He knows the ceremony of words and their secret messages bring illumination.'

Like the nameless boy of the Prologue, he is mesmerised by the possibility of the alphabet: of the magic of marking out your thoughts and feelings, brazenly and permanently, on paper. 

He is attracted too by the spoken word and speaks as often as he can, to himself, to his attendant and to the jailers who keep him under lock and key.  One of these men, Senior Jailer Chit Naing, a rebel-sympathiser, has become to closest thing Teza has to a friend, smuggling in news from the outside and offering an approximation of intimacy. Still, the written word - and communication with those distant from him - is the Holy Grail of Teza's imprisonment.  When his slop attendant, a drug-runner called Sein Yun, brings him paper and pen and urges him to write a letter to the outside world, he is sorely tempted.  Afraid, but extroadinarily tempted. 

Indeed, he does write a letter, a passionate and painful cry for help but, sensing trouble at the last minute, disposes of the evidence just as Handsome arrives to search his cell.  He eats the paper, one moistened strip at a time, and tosses the pen up and through the grate high in his cell wall.  Tosses it right out under the nose of a young boy, about twelve years old, who kills and sells rats for his upkeep in the prison and who is always on the look out for unusual 'treasure'.  The pen duly disappears and, eventually, brings the young rat-killer to Teza's cell and into his narrow life.

Connelly tells her story by turns, using first Teza, then the rat-killer, Sein Yun, Chit Naing and Handsome for point-of-view, turning each on a precise lathe.  They are, all of them, acutely drawn: Teza's dreadful lonely yearning is The Lizard Cage's keynote but Connelly has the generosity and wit to round out all her key players.  Her exploration of the motives of Teza's captors and torturers is particularly incisive.  Junior Jailer Handsome, for example, is a real piece of work: raging in his powerlessness, his thwarted ambitions and wounded pride are readily turned into violence.  Similarly, Sein Yun, a despicable coward who willingly sells his services for personal gain to the highest bitter but who is also pathetic and, even sympathetic.  Connelly recognises that neither these individuals, or any of the other sadists and tyrants that impinge on Teza's life, are to blame for the evils done to him.  They're all cogs in the machine of Burma's long, sad story.

It is the real sadness of this story, and the ubiquity of it, that drives Connelly's prose, which is both elegiac and epic in cadence.  Sinuous and lithe, The Lizard Cage seems to own more to the metre and rhythm of poetry and song then to traditional descriptive prose. In parts it is incredibly moving.  One scene in particular, in which Teza masturbates alone in his cell while thinking of his lost girlfriend, has particularly stayed with me. I feel I must quote at length (I hope you won't mind):

'He takes his hands from his eyes and lays them on his chest.  He loved her.

His hands slide down over his ribs. The blades rise out of him, xylophone keys placed side by side... The jutting leap from his ribs to his lower belly would sicken her.  He is glad she cannot see him now, with hipbones protruding like hooks.

His hands slip under the unknotted longyi.  He scratches.  He picks one, two, three bedbugs from his pubic hair.  This act brings enough pleasure to release a flood of lust and the memory of lush.  His yearning will be satisfied in seconds.

Certain moments rest in his body from the time before.  The places she marked him are far below the skin...

His desire sings to hers, coaxing it forward, and her desire comes towards him.  He unbuttons her blouse, pulls away the soft material of her bra; her nipples harden.  Shy, she covers her breasts with her hair... He floats above her, afraid to rest his weight on her, knowing he will have to use his weight, he will have to push.  The nexus of tenderness and force confuses him.  He did not expect to be so afraid of hurting her.  Echoing his own thoughts, she whispers: ' I'm afraid. You'll hurt me.'

Despite their fear, these are words of love.

The spasm charging through his body makes no sound.

Wasted pearl fills his hand, spills down his wrist.

He rolls over on his side, jawbone chafing straw mat.

The ants between the brings have gone still, as though the wall itself has clenched tight and crushed them all.'

Perhaps there is an element of manipulation and polemic to all this.  Afterall, Connelly is writing about a predicament and a dicatatorship with which she is painfully familiar; The Lizard Cage is dedicated to several Burmese political prisoners of her acquaintaince and she has lived in close proximity to the rebels on the Thai-Burmese border.  Her next book will be an exploration of her encounters in the refugee camps on that same border.  Undoubtedly, she has a message and an agenda.  As she made clear at the Orange Prize, human rights, political freedom and the power of the written word are causes close to her heart - she is determined to give a forgotten people an international voice and she is in a good position to do so.  I accept this unreservedly, and admit, freely, that I share Connelly's attendant principles and aspirations.

Nevertheless, I consider that The Lizard Cage ultimately transcends propaganda and avoids didactism.  It is never a single-issue, thinly-veiled morality tale.  Rather it is a full-bodied, unrestricted meditation on freedom of speech, tyranny and humanity, grounded in the principles of fiction - plot, character and place.  There is something powerfully fulfilling about it - calming even, certainly hopeful - that is sufficient unto itself.  It could not do what it does much better. It is in my power to be simply pleased by what it is - a testimony to the esoteric power of words - and I am.

~~Victoria~~

Socrates Explains It All

"[...] It looks like it, Socrates, from what you say."

"Can we say then, Hippocrates, that a Sophist is really a merchant or peddlar of the goods by which a soul is nourished?"

"But what is it that nourishes a soul?"

"What it learns, presumably."

One of my most memorable A-Level Classics lessons centred around the explication of Plato's Theory of Forms through the medium of daisies. It was a beautiful summer's day and our teacher, Dr Beagon, had very sensibly decided that we should take the discussion al fresco. So we sat on a rug on the lawn of Thornycroft (an annexe building largely given over to arty subjects), and watched, perhaps a tad bemused, as Dr Beagon plucked a daisy and held it up to the sky. This, it turned out, was by way of illustrating how we know daisies to be daisies: because they have a resemblence to (in Plato's terms, they partake of the essence of) the ideal image of Daisy. This ideal - the Form - is our idea of Daisy, the qualities that we know a flower must possess (or have once possessed, or have the potential to possess) in order for us to see it as a daisy: the shape and colour of its petals, the size, the yellow centre. All earthly manifestations are but pale reflections, of course; we carry within us the image of the perfect Daisy, even though we have never seen it.

Or have we? Plato (who lived c. 429-347 BCE) contended that we had: that before birth, we have knowledge the Forms, and this is how, in life, we recognise things - whether objects or qualities or concepts - as belonging to their particular categories, even though (as with chairs, say, or music) the individual examples might diverge a great deal from the baseline ideal. Thus we can envision the perfect circle, even though it is impossible for human instruments to reproduce it with absolutely perfect accuracy: we know what a circle can and should be, and so can recognise its reflections. Plato came to consider the Forms to be the basis of all human knowledge - and this knowledge, therefore, to be innate.

All this was most famously explored in The Republic, but there are glimpses of it in many of his other works: a series of fictional philosophical dialogues, in which his teacher, Socrates (d. 399), interrogates a range of Athenian notables and men-in-the-street on the fixed ideas they take as truth, in the guise of wishing to learn from them. Of course, what generally happens is that Socrates exposes his interlocutor's ignorance and punctures his pomposity via rapid-fire dialectic - that is, through a series of questions and comparisons, which gradually strip the fixed ideas down to their hollow cores. Often this comes across as reductio ad absurdum to a, well, absurd degree; often you want to slap the silly opponents for letting themselves be trapped into contradictory statements. But the end result is always the same: "It must be as you say, Socrates", his opponents splutter, while the smug idiot savant goes off whistling.

(Ahem.)

It is difficult to tell how far the dialogue Plato has Socrates deliver reflects the latter's own ideas, since Socrates left no writings of his own; virtually all we know of him comes from Plato's renderings. Some of the dialogues deal with episodes from Socrates' life, like the Apology (set at Socrates' trial; more below). In others, like The Republic, he appears to be more the mouthpiece for Plato's ideas. The two I recently read, Protagoras and Meno (in the 1956 Penguin ed., tr. W.K.C. Guthrie), seem to be one of each type, although any dating of their composition is conjectural (and Guthrie's introduction may well reflect scholarship that is outdated by now).

The Protagoras may be an early dialogue, composed in the 390s BCE. Certainly it lacks some of the sparseness of the classic dialogues, being framed more as a story, one recounted by Socrates in retrospect - with quite a degree of descriptive detail - to a third party. The opponent here is Protagoras (d. 420), a Thracian philosopher perhaps best known today for the relativistic (probably) aphorism "Man is the measure of all things". One day, while Protagoras is visiting Athens, a young associate of Socrates, one Hippocrates (not the famous one), conceives a desire to become a pupil of Protagoras. He has heard, we're told, that Protagoras is a Sophist, one of the itinerant teachers of rhetoric that Plato so despised - and which Socrates was often accused of being (Plato spilt much ink denying the charge). Plato disliked what he considered to be the Sophists' easy relativism, as well as the lofty claims and hefty fees attached to their services:

Then Protagoras replied: "Young man, if you come to me, your gain will be this: the very day you join me, you will go home a better man, and the same the next day. Each day you will make progress towards a better state."

Plato was far from the only one to harbour suspicions of the elasticity of morals and beliefs that Sophistic training to argue a case, any case, seemed to produce in its subjects; nevertheless, it was much in demand in fifth-century Athens, with its system of direct democracy in which the most persuasive speaker could accumulate great power. There is an early burst of dialectic, in which Socrates - through the familiar 'skills' motif, comparing different types of teaching (from a doctor, from whom one learns medicine in order to become a doctor; from a sculptor, from whom one learns sculpting to become a sculptor; from a Sophist, from whom ones learns... sophistry?) - exposes the fact that Hippocrates has no clue what exactly Protagoras can teach him, and sets up the idea that virtue is not something that can be taught. Then Socrates goes with Hippocrates to see Protagoras, and sets out to prove that Protagoras cannot in fact teach virtue, as he claims.

What I found splendid about the dialogue, however, is that this seems to be a much more human Socrates than we generally see in Plato's writings. For a start, Protagoras is rather less of a self-important idiot than most of Socrates' opponents. Socrates does not always have the upper hand; when, as is his wont, he blithely begins extrapolating from Protagoras' statements about the nature of courage to construct deliberately contradictory stances (which he would normally then blame on his opponent's faulty ideas), Protagoras (very unusually), actually calls Socrates on it:

"On this argument it is their knowledge that must be courage."

"No, Socrates," he said. "You have not remembered rightly what I said in my reply. When you asked me whether the courageous are confident, I agreed; but I was not asked whether the confident are also courageous - if you had asked me at the time, I should have said "not all of them" - and you have nowhere disproved my admission. [...] Further, when you argue that those who have knowledge are more confident than they were before, and also than others who are ignorant, and thereupon conclude that courage and wisdom are the same thing, you might as well go on and conclude that physical strength is knowledge. First of all you would proceed to ask me whether the strong are powerful, and I should agree; next, whether those who know how to wrestle are more powerful after they have learned than before. Again I should agree, and it would then be open to you to say, adducing the same proofs, that on my admission wisdom is physical strength. But here again I nowhere admit that the powerful are strong, only that the strong are powerful. Power and strength are not the same. Power can result from knowledge, and also from madness or passion, whereas strength is a matter of natural constitution and bodily nurture."

Furthermore, Socrates is occasionally wrong-footed. When Protagoras exposes a weakness in the former's method of argument - namely, the way that Socrates' quest for dialectical absolutes ignores contingency and contradiction - Socrates disingenuously plays the 'querulous old man' card in an attempt to get things back on track:

The audience vigorously applauded this speech. Then said I: "I'm a forgetful sort of man, Protagoras, and if someone speaks at length, I lose the thread of the argument. [...] Cut down your answers and make them shorter if I am to follow you."

But when Protagoras refuses to let Socrates dictate the terms of engagement like this, the latter even throws a bit of a hissy fit:

"Well," I said, "I have no wish myself to insist on continuing our conversation in a way that you don't approve. I will talk with you another time, when you are willing to converse so that I can follow."

Eventually things become more amiable again, but it is notable that Protagoras is gradually dropped from the argument, leaving Socrates contentedly sermonising - about how bad actions arise from ignorance - to a faceless, mumbles-of-agreement crowd. This is thread that is picked up in the second dialogue, the Meno, which is set in the year 402, although it was probably written significantlylater (certainly long after Socrates' death), since it represents a more systematic exploration of Plato's ideas.

We begin with a proposition advanced in the Protagoras, namely that good acts are beneficial - and that the beneficial is, in turn, good - and people only do bad because they fail to recognise what is genuinely good (that is, they act out of the mistaken belief that short-term bad can = long-term good/benefit):

SOCRATES. And do you believe that those who suppose evil things bring advantage understand that they are evil?

MENO. No, that I can't really believe.

S. Isn't it clear then that this class, who don't recognize evils for what they are, don't desire evil but what they think is good, though in fact it is evil; those who through ignorance mistake bad things for good obviously desire the good.

Of course, one might argue in response that some people do bad simply because they want to, rather than for any assumed-beneficial goal; that one person's good might be another's bad; and so forth. Plato/Socrates' point, however, is that possession of knowledge will inevitably lead a person to actions that are good/beneficial. Possession, that is, of true knowledge: an access to that awareness of the Forms that we have before birth, but have forgotten once we are in the world. The centrepiece of the dialogue is an illustration of this point, via a demonstration, using Meno's uneducated slave and a geometry puzzle, of how someone can be brought to an awareness of their innate knowledge through simple logical urging, rather than guided tuition. (It is unfortunately too long to quote here in any worthwhile chunks, but there is a full text here - the relevant section begins between a third and a half of the way down the page - and longer discussion here).

Nothing, says Plato/Socrates, can be taught; a teacher can only coax forth knowledge that already lurks in the mind (or in the soul, as Plato would say). Better still, each person should strive to come to awareness on his (or her)* own, using constant questioning and challenging (of themselves and others) to chip away at false beliefs, and reach the core, the Form.

[ * Plato, famously, maintains in the Republic that any society which does not allow its women to learn is wasting half its populace. ]

The dialogue ends on a darker note, however, when a certain Anytus briefly joins the discussion. Anytus, it seems, has a bee in his bonnet about Sophists - and he thinks something must be done about them:

ANYTUS. It isn't [the Sophists] who are mad, but rather the young men who hand over their money, and those responsible for them, who let them get into the Sophists' hands, are even worse. Worst of all are the cities who let them in, or don't expel them, whether it be a foreigner or one of themselves who tries that sort of game.

The period in which this dialogue is set was a dark time for Athens, which had lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta in the year 404, and been stripped of both its empire and its democratic mode of government. While the democracy was soon restored, the atmosphere upon its return was a cowed and bitter one, leaning towards greater conservatism - and out for scapegoats, particularly among those perceived to have compromised Athens' traditional virtues and its will to fight. Anytus was one of those who brought Socrates to trial shortly afterwards, on charges of fostering atheism and corrupting the young - of being, essentially, a Sophist who profited from undermining moral certainties and challenging the authority of the leading figures in the polis. He was executed in 399. In light of this, Anytus' closing threat carries a heavy element of sinister foreshadowing - demonstrating nicely the literary-dramatic dimension within even Plato's most programmatically philosophical dialogues:

You seem to me, Socrates, to be too ready to run people down. My advice to you, if you will listen to it, is to be careful. I dare say that in all cities it is easier to do a man harm than good.

~~Nic

A Droopy-Eyed Update

There are times when my job is physically exhausting; not often, but sometimes.  This week is one of those times.   I've done nothing but bend, lift, climb, haul, push, pull and carry for the last three days - piles of books; boxes of documents and photographs; limb-crushingly heavy archiepiscopal registers.  It seems like everybody, students and staff alike, are cramming in as much academic research as possible before term ends next week and I feel exhausted because of it.  If I have to dig out one more medieval probate register, dank and with the equivalent mass of a baby elephant, I swear I will beat the requestee to death with it.  When I get home at the end of the day all I want is to collapse on to the sofa and vegetate until morning.  Undoubtedly, it's good for me: I like the gentle trembling in my thigh muscles as I walk home... But I'm not used to it.  Usually, my job entails a lot of talking and explaining, not to mention a good deal of fulminating on historical topics, whereas this week it equals a lot of menial fetch and return.  And it has slowed my reading down terribly.  I had such glorious plans for the weeks following the Orange Prize and it's all come to nothing much at all. The daily grind will do that to all your best laid plans.

I was feeling slightly stir crazy at the beginning of June.  I always feel that way when my reading has been dictacted by a prize or a long string of (non-Alexandrian) reviews. I begin to fantasise about the piles and piles of books that I would be reading were I not dedicated to something else; time expands in my view and I imagine the veritable mountain of novels I could devour in one evening, one day, one weekend, were I free.  There are literally of hundreds lying around, waiting, after all. 

I had my eyes on three books from my TBR pile that I meant to read before June was out, none of which has made it into my eager little hands.  Yet. I was terribly side-tracked by Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a perfect slice of Victorian 'sensation' fiction (on which, more later).  The question is, which of those erstwhile novels should I read next:

• Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth - It was Sandra who first turned me on to this novel, way back when I first started reading litblogs and thinking of starting one of my own.  I think it might be quite Woolfian:

'It's turn-of-the-century New York, a city bursting with new life as the old century's order makes way for the mercantile class. But in the Pinkerton household a nineteenth-century embarrassment remains. Alice Pinkerton. Alice isn't mad exactly, but she's not sane either. She is tolerated, free to wander about, free to accompany her family to tea parties - free to be treated like a simpleton. But in truth Alice's mind is razor sharp, honed by a restless imagination, years of reading and a profound contempt for her surroundings. Left alone to read, to think, she has devoured the world that brings her mind alive: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo, Whitman, Poe, they are her inspiration; Jane Eyre, Catherine Moreland, Desdemona her companions. As she moves through the witless world around her, observing its prejudices, its shallow culture and its vanity, it is society that prompts her observations, viewing all through the prism of the art that has sustained and nourished her lonely life.' 

And doesn't that sound wonderful?  The paperback is one of those lovely heavyweights too - silky white paper; striking cover with a perfect colour contrast.

• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - You might remember that I meant to read this back in November 2006, when I tried to instigate a 'core' classical read for each month.  Well, inevitably, I failed.  But I still desperately want to make time for it.
• The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett - I must, must, must read more of the Lymond series before I forget all the intricate plotting of the first two novels... But, what am I saying, I have already forgotten a lot of it! Still, I mean to make room for this and the next one before the summer is out.  Oh, and some more Patrick O'Brian too. 

Tis so difficult to chose.  Perhaps I should follow Danielle's example and read them all at once.  Or perhaps I should go with one of the two library books I have on hold: Khaled Hosseini's new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, about women in Afghanistan or D J Taylor's Victorian pastiche, Kept.  The latter I know I want to read, but the former was order on impulse.  I abhor the idea of 'oppression' fiction designed for a Western audience, particularly when the geographic remit is so intimate to the UK's political interests.  But I decided I should give it a try.  I avoided The Kite Runner with an anti-populist obstinancy but I'm prepared to give Hosseini's second novel the benefit of the doubt.  You never know.

~~Victoria~~

Yammering 101

Watch out.  I'm about to start 'yammering'. 

[NB: I've decided not to restate what has already been well articulated on this issue elsewhere but, if you're interested, you can go here, here, here or here for reasoned comment.]

A few months ago, while reading the blog of London bookseller, Crockett and Powell, I read a passionate, startling recommendation of Catherine O'Flynn's debut novel What Was Lost.  I had never heard of it before.  A few days later it popped up again, this time at The Bedside Crow.  In March it was Book of the Month on Radio 5 live and appeared on the Orange Prize longlist.  Published by a small but evidently market-savvy publisher - Tindal Street Press - O'Flynn's novel was suddenly everywhere I looked.  Everywhere.  I must have missed it when it made the rounds of the mainstream review outlets in January, but it was getting good coverage in the blogosphere: Susan Hill, dovegreyreader and, more recently, Vulpes Libris, all gave it a thumbs up.  Then, last Wednesday night*, it got a special mention at the Orange ceremony - Jackie Kay said that it had pained the New Writer's Judges to omit it from their shortlist. 

I was, finally, sold.  Thursday morning saw Esther and I in Waterstones in Oxford, wheely suitcase in tow, hunting down a copy, and I duly devoured most of it on our train back to York later in the day.  It didn't disappoint: funny and socially astute, with a keen eye for what is both ridiculous and disturbing in our consumer-driven society, it also had the courage of its convictions in tackling the fallout - alienation, loneliness and guilt - surrounding the disappearance of a young child.

It has two narrative strands: the first set in 1984 and centred on Kate Meaney, a 10 year old 'private detective', and the second set in 2003/4 and split between Lisa Palmer, a deputy retail manager and Kurt, an insomniac security guard.  The setting for both, however, is the Green Oaks Shopping Centre, one of those depressing loci of twentieth-century consumerism, replete with ersatz streets, fountains and its own radio station.  Opened in the later 1970s as the model of convenience, it has gradually become the kind of place that disconsolate couples and families go on a weekend because buying stuff is better than spending yet another day in each others' company:

'This is how we spent our Sundays now. It's become quite the tradition... Go to Green Oaks and get that thing we need. Maybe when we're here we'll find something else we want as well... We haven't found anything we want to buy today.  We're going in all the right shops but nothing's really grabbing us. It's raining outside, so what else would we be doing? Sitting at home staring at each other. Going up the walls on a Sunday afternoon, that's what we used to do. Thank God for Sunday trading.'

(This from one of the anonymous shoppers whose short interior vignettes punctuate the main story.)  Thus the atmosphere that O'Flynn creates is one of soulless claustrophobia, of an endless round of meaningless purchase and profit - the epitome of banality; a haven for lost souls.

Yet for Kate Meaney there is something thrilling and dangerous about the place; as she would have it: 'Crime was out there. Undetected, unseen.'   Deserted by her mother in early childhood and lately bereft by the death of her loving father, she has retreated into a fantastical world of good and evil modelled on the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler.  Backed up by her redoubtable partner 'Mickey', a stuffed monkey dressed in spats, she has taken to patrolling Green Oaks' strands day after day, 'detecting' criminal activity.  In her diary she minutely records the 'deviancy' of her subjects:

'Friday 20th April: Woman in blue raincoat spotted once more on bench outside Mothercare. Today she had a pushchair, but still no child.

Tuesday 24th April: Nothing to report today. Man seen eating orange peel from brown paper bag. Followed him for 40 minutes but no further deviancy observed.  Spent two hours outside banks - no one looked wrong.'

She is contentedly driven in her search for wrong-doing to the exclusion of all else, absolutely certain that sooner or later she will 'see someone...with a different look on their face. Anxiety, or cunning, or hate, or desire, and she would know that they were a suspect.'  Undoubtedly, her obsession serves as a mechanism to mask her pounding grief and loneliness. 

She has no home-life to speak of - she lives with an elderly and indifferent grandmother - and has no trouble slipping off to the centre after school and at weekends.  No one notices her.  Indeed, she keeps an almost pathological low-profile; a veritable poster child for emotional neglect.  She is amenable and quietly clever at school, and her only friends to speak of are Adrian Palmer, a young man in his 20s who works in a neighbouring newsagents, and Teresa Stanton, a classmate suffering systematic physical abuse. They both know about her 'detective agency', but not about her troubling fixation with Green Oaks' underbelly.  Thus neither is equipped to counsel the police on her likely whereabouts when, one day late in 1984, she suddenly and mysteriously disappears.

Until, that is, the early hours of Boxing Day ten years later:

'He never expected to see anything on the CCTV. No-one ever did on the nightshift...But then she appeared in the middle of the night... He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. It was a child, a girl, though her face was hard to see. She stood perfectly still, a notebook in one hand and a toy monkey sticking our of her bag.  Kurt spun round to pick up his radio...and as he turned back to the screens he saw her disappear out of picture.' 

The fuzzy, low-grade quality of this image is the stuff that horror stories are made of - the young child, missing for a decade, coming back to haunt the same shopping centre she frequented in life.  For Kurt, the security guard who sees it, it is a resounding wake-up call.  Like Kate before him he pounds Green Oaks' corridors on the look out for crime (although he is hardly as inspired by the prospect) and like her he uses the Centre to blanket grief and loneliness.  Having lost his girlfriend in a car accident, and given up all prospect of a 'real' career, he has offered himself up as a sacrifice to his role there; quietly though, slowly but surely, the monotony is carving up his sanity.  Kate's ghostly appearance is a catalyst for change, galvinising him to re-examine his life, particularly his relationship with his over-bearing father and with his own conscience. 

The next day Lisa Palmer, deputy manager of Your Music and another victim of the boggy tedium of Green Oaks', finds a stuffed monkey, dressed in classy spats, in one of the service corridors behind her store.  Unlike Kurt, she has every reason to recognise it immediately: ten years ago her brother Adrian was accused of the molestation and murder of its owner.  What follows is a startling investigation into Kate's final day, and an indightment of the sad absurdities of contemporary Britain.

O'Flynn's novel is incredibly brave in tackling 'what was lost'.  Not just the loss of Kate - she is the story's headline but hardly its first cause - or the subsequent waste of Adrian Palmer's life (or Lisa's, or Kurt's), but the loss of trust, family and wider community that underlies the narrative.  The building of Green Oaks is ultimately destructive: it is built on the remains of industry, symbolic of the end of British manufacturing and the consequent loss of thousands' of jobs, and predicated on the homogenisation of commercial experiences.  It has sucked the life out of local businesses - Adrian's newsagency is, ironically, one of the only shops to survive; the butcher's next door isn't so lucky.  Even in Kate's time his shop is failing:

'Mr Watkins was an old man, Kate estimated probably seventy eight. He was a nice man with a nice wife but very few people bought their meat from him any more.  Kate thought this possibly had something to do with the way Mr Watkins stood in his shop window swatting flies against the sides of the meat with a large palette knight.  It was also a self-perpetuating situation, in that the fewer customers Mr Watkins had, the less meat he stocked and the less meat he had the less he looked like a bucther, and the more he looked like a crazy old man who collected and displayed bits of flesh in his front window.'

By 2003/4 the local shops have become a hang-out for gangs of youths: Kurt's mother, who insists on getting her groceries there, is brutally beaten at the end of the novel.  But she is unrepentent:

'She just didn't like it there [at Green Oaks], couldn't understand why everyone flocked there and deserted the local shops where people knew your name and asked after your family.  The attack had shaken her, but it wouldn't stop her.'

What O'Flynn seems to abhor most of all is the anonyminity of modern life, the increasingly inpersonal nature of our human transactions.  It is the loss of intimacy and, concurrently, of basic emotional literacy that dogs the novel.  This is a point forcefully made in the italicised vignettes at the end of chapters which interrogate visitors to the Centre - these 'shoppers', young, old, male and female, have no identity.  Their interior monologues are highly personal but nobody is looking, nobody sees; equally, nobody listens, nobody hears.  This is the great irony in a novel in which looking and hearing are of the utmost importance, what with Kate's investigations, Kurt's thirteen years in front of the security screens and Lisa's day to day battle for aural harmony at Your Music. 

In the end, however, What Was Lost is a novel about desire: the desire for love, for meaning, for contact. Kate's final day at the Centre is the day on which she meets the subject of her desire: the criminal:

'She had always known she would see something different in his face and as she drew closer she felt a thrill of recognition as his features became clearer.  The man was looking towards the children's play area...'

What Kate does not realise is that, almost simultaneously, the man recognises her, the much-contemplated object of his desire: the victim.  In a moment of terrifying symmetry, they understand that they have always been meant for each other, that something essential about their life experiences have brought them to this juncture.  You might call it destiny.  And Green Oaks is the monstrous, chaotic scene of it all, and of the pathos of all the other wasted or deformed lives which O'Flynn envisions:

'Four hundred thousand different stories on a busy day, floating up in the air like foil balloons, sticking to the ceiling. Green Oaks is more than bricks or mortar... The voices merge and give the place its own sound.  No one notices it, but they all hear it: it's what brings them here - the low-level static hiss.  If you could tune to the right frequency the individual voices would break through then then you'd hear them all.  You'd hear what they were hoping to find at Green Oaks.'

But, ultimately, it can only take and O'Flynn knows it.

~~Victoria~~

*This post was mostly written on Monday 11th June, but remained unfinished because of the cold/flu lurgy I caught at the Orange Prize.

Town Of Books

This weekend, I joined Niall and Graham on arguably the ultimate in bookish roadtrips: to a certain small town just over the Welsh border, Hay-on-Wye.

For anyone who hasn't heard of it, Hay is primarily famous for being a bibliophile's paradise. It plays host to no less than thirty-eight bookshops - particularly impressive given how tiny the place is (the population stands at about 1500 people...). These shops range from the charmingly tiny to the utterly cavernous (like the brilliant Cinema Bookshop), and the overwhelming focus is on second-hand, antiquarian and remaindered books. There's a sizeable literary festival held there every year in May/June. And it's also, splendidly, now twinned with Timbuktu (allegedly because of the importance of writing to Timbuktu's history and culture, but I suspect mostly because no-one could resist the pun).

There really are bookshops everywhere - including one in the castle:

That Hay is located amid some beautiful countryside is really just the icing on the cake. We can recommend Offa's Dyke walk (along the river), which has an abundance of enormous trees that are just perfect for sitting under to while away a few hours with your purchases. Here's the river:

Inevitably, my bookpile (which would have been about three times bigger, except that a) I ran out of money, and b) I'm ridiculously fussy about the condition of books I buy):

(From the top...)

• Joanna Russ, The Adventures of Alyx   (this one came from a shop - Richard Booth's, I think? - that segregated its science fiction section into 'SF' and 'Lady Authors'; Russ wasn't with the ladies, however... make of that what you will ;-))
• Josephine Saxton, Queen of the States
• Steph Swainston, No Present Like Time  (sequel to this)
• Simon Ings, The Weight of Numbers
• Gregory Normington, Arts and Wonders
• Alessandro Baricco, Without Blood   (from the author of Silk, which I loved)
• Harriette Wilson's Memoirs: The Greatest Courtesan of Her Age, ed. Lesley Blanch
• Reynold Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam  (very old and v outdated book on the Sufis, but great fun nonetheless)
• Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary
• Tim Mackintosh-Smith, The Hall of a Thousand Columns   (part 2 of his Ibn Battuta journeys)
• Stella Duffy, Calendar Girl
• Michel Faber, Some Rain Must Fall
• Alan Cameron, Porphyrius the Charioteer
• Usama b. Munqidh, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Age of the Crusades, tr. P.K. Hitti
• Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory   (purchase of the weekend - a bargain and in perfect condition)

And the total haul:

I'll link to the rest of my photos later (mostly of trees); Niall has more here.

~~Nic

I want you to want it... Or The Orange Prize Party, 2007

The conquering readers have returned!  Having taken the Orange Prize Party by storm (well, sort of), forced our web address upon many unsuspecting folk - including agents, PR people and a biochemist from Imperial College London - and hugged a record number of authors, the denizens of Eve's Alexandria have staggered back to their respective abodes, pleased and satiated, if slightly unstable of stomach.

And it all went incredibly smoothly from start to finish.  Esther and I set off from York at precisely 7.44am on Wednesday (picture the headlines: "British train 'on time'. Shock!") and merrily tootled south,  arriving in Oxford around lunch time, where we were met by Nic.  So far, so calm.  Then it was back to Wolfson College for a spot of lunch and a pre-Prize dissection of the short list: we were divided over the merits of Cusk's Arlington Park and Desai's The Inheritance of Loss but agreed that The Observations was great fun, that Anne Tyler's Digging to America was well-observed fluff and that the eventual winner, Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was the novel with the most gravitas.  [NB: Nic, demonstrating her admirable penchant for multi-tasking, wrote most of her post on Desai's novel during this discussion, despite our doing everything humanly possible to distract her.]  Then, having donned our party dresses, the three of us skipped back to Oxford train station and leapt aboard a timely train to London Paddington.

(For those who are interested, we all wore black: both Nic and Esther went with sleek trousers and sassy tops, while I went all girly and wore a little black dress from Coast. We all looked rather wonderful, if I do say so myself. Photos to hopefully follow in the near future.)

From Paddington it was a quick, if incredibly busy, rush-hour tube ride to the south bank and Royal Festival Hall (although, I admit, we got a little lost in the environs of the South Bank Centre - so many steps and stairs, so few of them leading anywhere).  Having eventually found our way to the entrance, however, we were greeted by flaming torches, a bevy of press photographers and an actual 'orange' carpet.   Sadly the photographers didn't show a great  deal of interest - clearly out of the loop on our imminent book-world celebrity - but we enjoyed swooping in, clutching our shiny tickets, feeling very self-important. 

Inside we were greeted by a bevy of name-checkers - cue last-minute panic that we weren't actually on the guest list and all this was a readerly fantasy - before being ushered through into the rather stately foyer of the Festival Hall ballroom.  We were quite early, almost bang-on-time for the Champagne Reception, at 6pm and so swept up the staircase, lit by dozens of flickering tea lights, with just a few other early arrivals.  The ballroom proper was spacious and open, punctuated only by the small groups of people gathered around the canapes (displayed on precariously balanced tray-towers - later in the evening I nearly, very nearly, sent a shower of them crashing onto Andrea Levy's feet, saved only by a woman wrestling with the last nub of smoked salmon. Many thanks to her.) and by two raised sitting areas, carpeted in dazzling white.  Toward the front was the dais, with the announcement podium - looking a little garish, as the Orange Prize colour scene is want to do - and another press point, already lined with slightly-scruffy cameramen and photographers. Behind that was the outdoor balcony, furnished with orange chaise-longues (which look classier than they sound!) and huge palm plants, and overlooking the irreverant noise and bustle of the city.  Later in the evening this was where most of the authors seemed to gather, like bees to the honey-pot of the television crews conducting interviews out there, while the representatives from press and publishing congregated near the indoor bar.

It was this bar we headed for on arrival: in search of a little champagne, no doubt to ease our collective knot of nerves.  I was overjoyed to be intercepted on the way by a waiter in a Taittinger apron, bearing flutes of the bubbly stuff on a silver tray - I have always wanted to accept a drink from a silver tray carried by a smiling waiter.  I took it and felt an odd moment of disconnection, as though we had been interlopers before, even with our silver tickets and our pretentions of internet criticism, but now, with champagne in hands, we belonged amongst the others.  We stood together for a while, seperated from the gradually burgeoning groups (everyone seemed to know one another!), chatting some more about what should and would win the prize in less than an hour's time.  Occasionally one of us leaned in and murmured: 'Look, over there, that's so-and-so.'  We spotted Jackie Kay first, seated with some of her fellow judges, and wearing a luminous, bejewlled kaftan dress; and then Muriel Grey, showing off her leggy legs in a mini number; and then Andrea Levy, looking magisterial and composed; and then Natasha Walter, the Guardian's feminist critic, also in a startling blue dress. 

And then Esther spied, Ann, the Read, Write initiative co-ordinator from our local library in York. Which was something of a jolt. We duly wondered over, only to discover that, in a fit of shocking coincidence, Ann's team of literary co-ordinators had won tickets to the ceremony by chance in a Reading Agency competition. Huh.  So there we stood, slurping champagne - Taittinger waiters constantly made the rounds topping up our glasses - and discussing the ways in the Orange Prize reaches out to libraries and involves its readers, while the room filled up around us.  Twenty minutes later, I looked up to discover the ballroom packed to the walls with people, of all ages, ethnicities and styles.  There was perhaps a bias towards women, but there were men too, and some older children, everyone talking avidly and gobbling down the canapes (which never seemed to be gone, despite the munching; yet more attentive waiting staff methinks).

At 6.45, by unanimous assent, everyone started to shuffle forward towards the podium for the announcement which was soon initiated by Kate Mosse, the award's co-founder.  She did her rounds of thanks with what appeared to be real enthusiasm, before yielding the floor to the representative from Orange, whose name I've thoroughly repressed but who was most definitely French.  He lilted away for a while - 'how honoured to sponser...'; 'what success year-upon-year'; 'looking forward to many more years of successful partnership' etc - before promising the Prize its own dedicated website.  Which is well-past due, I think; the corner of the Orange site currently devoted to the Prize is puny. Then it was time for the Harper's Bazaar Orange short story competition announcement.

This has to be the most unpublicised aspect of the Orange Prize.  I hardly knew it existed and the ceremony surrounding it was short, even abrupt.  The winner this year was Canadian Joanna Reid, but she (and the announcing judge) were hustled off stage before they had to time to say anything at all.  Why the hurry?  Because time, and journalists, and about 50% of the Orange Prize audience wait for no woman.  I have never seen a group of such impatient adults, grizzling like children to be either on their way or back to their chatter - throughout the ballroom there was a strong sense of urgency, of 'get it over with, we didn't come here for this!'   As Jackie Kay, the head judge of the New Writer's panel ascended the stage, I wanted to step up on to the railing behind me and yell: 'Can't you shut up!' over the low drone of voices, nattering about goodness-knows-what. 

The New Writer's Award went, with my blessing, to Karen Connelly for The Lizard Cage, which truly is a wonderful novel.  I finished it on the train yesterday and Jackie Kay hit the nail on the head when she said that (and I paraphrase from memory) 'although the novel is unrelenting in its portrayal of desperation and cruelty, there is some share of hope on every page'.  Karen pounced up onto the stage, beaming, accepted her orange bouquet and her magnum of pink champagne, and was about to be hustled off again within 30 seconds ala Joanna Reid, when she made a dash for the podium and embarked on an impassioned speech.

Now I know that this speech has caused much consternation, not least because its length meant that the webcast of the ceremony cut short just before the main winner was announced.  But, having been there, I must convey my respect for Karen Connelly's audacity.  Afterall, she has written a vitally important book about Burma's crisis of human rights, an eloquently lyrical representation of life under Burma's military dictatorship, that has sprung from her own experiences as a resident in that country.  And, she has won a literary prize for it.  Why shouldn't she speak?  She was both emotional and inspiring, offering her thanks and respects to the Burmese writers and activists who have died, or who are now dying, in prison in their own country and taking a passionate stance for the place of the book in the modern world.  I was so angry at those in the ballroom who turned to each other and began whispering, sighing and literally groaning at the prospect of listening to her for a few minutes.  We later learned that Karen had asked the prize committee several times to let her speak if she won, and had also petitioned the judging panel for the same privilege.  They had refused her on the grounds of time constraints and that it wasn't 'the thing to do'.  I'm glad that she defied them all the same, right there in front of all those people  - her courageous determination to say what needed to be said is a credit to her. 

Next was the main announcement, drawn out as each nominee was invited up podium-side for a photo op - oh how different to the rush of the earlier prizes - all that is except Anne Tyler, who hadn't flown over from the US and was represented by a friend. There was loud pulsing music as each woman ascended the stage and was given what I think must have been a specially bound copy of their novel. The bessie itself finally went to Chimamanda Adichie for Half of A Yellow Sun in a moment of sheer inevitability. It was clear everyone knew it was coming. The ballroom seemed to exhale a collective sigh of pleasure that the apple-cart hadn't been upturned, that there were no shock to the revelation of the winner.  Adichie was gracious and incredibly beautiful in her cream dress and patterned headscarf - such perfect skin! - and commented on the loveliness of the 'bessies' breasts, which was cute.  I thought it all much deserved.

With all the official business over the party truly began, and what a whirlwind it was.  We battled our way through the crowd to Naomi Alderman, the lovely lady behind our invitations, and duly fell upon her with hugs and exclamations.  But we had barely complimented her on her dress (she was looking very sultry in a red number), congratulated on her judging the New Writer's Award and met her agent, before she was whisked away from us by some Very Important Person.  This was to become the pattern of the evening.  We would just start talking to an author - Naomi, or Jackie Kay, or Ali Smith - and someone would mosey on in with literati privileges and carry them off to be interviewed or to talk business.  It was all very bemusing.  Nevertheless, we threw ourselves in with gusto and chatted with Naomi's agent about the powerful potential in blogging.  She was extremely eager to hear how Eve's Alexandria worked and seemed shocked to discover that the vast majority of litbloggers only write as an unpaid hobby.  We explained how close the blogging community was and how passionate and honest; and how people blog about books out of love.  It was interesting how even people engaged in buying, selling and shepherding books onto the market are astounded by this.

It was around this time that the food was served: waiting staff carried around huge trays of neat little salads, main courses and deserts, all nestled in china cups designed to be eaten while standing and chatting.  It was all incredibly good - there was a parmesan and aspargus risotto to die for, and a particularly yummy feta and lentil salad - although the tiny little ice-cream cones for desert had a synthetic edge, probably so they wouldn't melt in the heat.  All those people will tend to warm a place up!  We kept wandering outside onto the balcony to cool off on one of the chaise-longue, and then wondering back into the fray.  By this point we were all pleasantly giddy with champagne, and with sipping the white wine that followed it, and far less inhibited, inviting ourselves into conversations as and when the opportunity presented itself. 

Later in the evening we hooked up with Naomi again, and got ourselves introduced to Jackie Kay, who was incredibly sweet and friendly, planting a celebrity kiss on my cheek and offering hugs all round. (There was an astonishing amount of hugging going on - it seems that in the literary world, meeting someone new always entails pressing your body against them. Not that I'm complaining.)  If you've never heard Kay speak I recommend you do so.  She has the most wonderful Scottish burr, sexy and irreverant at the same time.  We reminisced about YLAF 2006, and she (also a little tipsy) shared a half finished poem with us; we also spoke a little about judging the New Writer's Award.  Which led us into another discussion about blogs and, before we knew it, we were advising Jackie's tour organiser, Kate, about establishing an internet presence and getting the word out about events through a dedicated blogfeed.  We were so flushed with enthusiasm!

The crowning glory of the evening, however, was being *recognised* by Ali Smith.  Yes, indeed, recognised.  I don't know whether I mentioned it before, but back in October of last year, during YLAF, we met Ali at a book signing and chatted a little; she gave me her own reading copy of The Accidental whereupon I swooned happily home.  When we were re-introduced on Wednesday night, she exclaimed (in another one of those husky Scottish accents) 'I know you girls! I gave one of you a book.'  Cue more hugging, grinning and chatting.  Before she left for the night, she passed us her email address and ordered us to contact her, declaring to all and sundry (including Zadie Smith) that we were 'great girls, great girls.'   Naomi later told Esther that Ali had been incredibly pleased to meet younger women passionate about reading, and had been quite struck by us.  Huzzah for Eve's Alexandria!

After 9.45pm the gathering started to break up, much to our consternation.  We retreated out to the balcony with Naomi (who had just given an interview to Newsnight) and her boyfriend Guy and bemoaned all the light-weights sneaking off to their beds.  Who throws a swanky party that finishes at 10pm?  The Orange Prize committee, evidently.  By 10.05, tipsy and descending into hilarity, we were ushered towards the door, declaring our undying affection for each other and for the Orange prize, making our farewells.  Our last exchange with Naomi involved her offering to send me the draft of her new novel, to which I drunkenly replied 'Yes. I want it!' (clearly, I was attaining new heights of eloquence and poise), to which she replied 'I want you to want it.'  Very highbrow indeed.  And with that we glided out into the fresh night. In true Alexandria style we hobbled back to Waterloo station engaged in avid discussion about Karen Connelly's speech and hopped the tube to Paddington, pulling in just in time to catch the nearly-last train back to Oxford.  A neat end to a wonderfully enjoyable evening.

I find it hard to believe now that we were actually there, that we conversed so confidently with so many different people in the literary world, and that we did it with such aplomb.  It was a strange experience really.  In the one sense, I felt very much a part of it, and in another, completely alien.  Either way, it felt full of new and vigorous possibility. Roll on 2008.

~~Victoria~~   

And the winner is ...

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

(Brought to you via text message, direct from the ceremony, via a helpful assistant.)

EDIT: And the New Writer award goes, as Vicky hoped, to:

The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly

We now return you to your regularly scheduled bloggers.

A Sieve of His Heart

The house had been built long ago by a Scotsman, passionate reader of the accounts [of India] of the period. [...] His true spirit had called to him, then, informed him that it, too, was wild and brave, and refused to be denied the right to adventure. As always, the price for such romance had been high and paid for by others. Porters had carried boulders from the riverbed - legs growing bandy, ribs curving into caves, backs into U's, faces bent slowly to look always at the ground - up to this site chosen for a view that could raise the human heart to spiritual heights.

Of all the novels I've read so far from this year's Orange Prize shortlist, I found Kiran Desai's Booker-winner The Inheritance of Loss the most alienating, the most difficult to get to grips with. This is a function more of form than subject matter, I think - even though alienation is, unambiguously, the book's major theme. It's the combined effect of a largely retrospective narrative structure, a treatment of character that is a little overfond of the eccentric and exaggerated - and a wry, distant, and at times pompous authorial voice. Not having read Desai's first novel, I have no idea how many of these things are deliberately rendered so for this story. All I can say is that they are very effective ways of exploring the central theme; perhaps rather too much so, at least for this reader, as I found the result striking, unusual, and (usefully) unsettling - but also at times mannered, callous, and actively resistant to any reader engagement bar a rather cold and arid contemplation.

The story, set in the 1980s, has an unbalanced bipartite structure; its focus is split between Kalimpong, in the north west of the Indian subcontinent, where a small group of individuals (Indians, Nepalis, various ex-pats) are caught up in separatist unrest, and New York, where Biju, a prodigal son of Kalimpong, struggles to make a life as an illegal immigrant. The latter strand is by far the stronger.

In both settings, the sense of place and atmosphere is very strong indeed. It is best evoked through the half-glimpsed detail and circumstance surrounding the characters' lives - the food shared (or not), the ground walked on, the natural and artificial light seen by, all the unconscious rituals and assumptions of daily life. When Desai steps out of the individual and collective lives to paint larger pictures, however, the prose is pretty but the tone tends to be distancing. Sometimes this doesn't matter: the (lovely) opening paragraph lacks the specificity and experiential feel that works so well elsewhere, but it fits the 'far peak' being described:

All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.

Where it is more of a problem is when this tendency combines with Desai's fondness for making jarring, programmatic statements about her two settings (as shall be seen below), or when she uses it to brush over matters that might best be explored through the characters' own reflections, as in the several, slightly cursory overviews of what stirs the Nepali unrest, or in the thumbnail sketches of lives peripheral to the main narrative.

Where Inheritance is at its most compelling is in the arc of Biju's tale. As we follow him from one underpaid, squalid job to another, Desai deftly universalises Biju's experiences, bringing out a host of connections and tensions between him and the other immigrants - whether sinking or swimming - he meets. Biju's reflections on the path that led him to the US shade in the details without hammering home the points; we see his father's hopes for a better life for his son, the network of favours and lobbying needed to get a visa (a scene in the US embassy is particularly vivid in its depiction of the desperation and venality at work, on both sides), and the various culture shocks and little betrayals involved in living and working a city that simultaneously hates and needs immigrants. Biju's subsequent slide from great (and, needless to say, hopelessly inflated) expectations to downtrodden disillusionment, and his spiritual malaise amid the cult of individuality and materialism, is well drawn; his eventual decision to leave America is bitter, but not entirely a measure of his defeat:

Year by year, [Biju's] life wasn't amounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing air. And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity - oh the tediousness of it. Clumsy in America, a giant-sized midget, a big-fat helping of small... Shouldn't he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.

Of course, this isn't the kind of book where returning home is an instant cure-all; Biju's yearning, idealised image of India-the-spiritual-motherland, where everything is invariably more authentic and worthy simply by being Indian, is sharply undercut by both plot developments and authorial commentary. His misty-eyed recollections of home are followed up immediately by a gloss from Desai, to the effect that Biju's memories are selective (forgetting, for instance, why he was driven to seek a new life in the first place); on his arrival, moreover, he is quite literally stripped of the trappings of American culture, and his remaining dignity, when he is robbed by insurgents. This, after all, was what he was hoping to escape:

She had died seventeen years ago, when Biju was five, slipping from a tree while gathering leaves to feed the goat. An accident, they said, and there was nobody to blame - it was just fate in the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed.

By and large, the milieu of which Desai writes, both in India and America, is poverty: the crunching inevitability of what life has in store for the powerless in a world so thoroughly weighted towards the powerful. When privileged ex-judge Jemubhai's house (the one referred to in the opening quotation) is raided by militants in the first chapter, the vulnerability of the victims is felt and expressed most viscerally by the family's cook:

"Please living only to see my son please don't kill me please I'm a poor man spare me."

His lines had been honed over centuries, passed down through generations, for poor people needed certain lines; the script was always the same, and they had no option but to beg for mercy. The cook knew instinctively how to cry.

Desai is a touch heavy-handed, here (and elsewhere), in her rush to convey her Message, but the point is well taken. Jemubhai and his niece Sai, while they are no less afraid or humiliated than the cook (who at no point during this encounter is given a name, only a label), are afforded some measure of protection by the ex-judge's social and economic status. Their deaths would be investigated by the authorities; the cook's would, most likely, not be, unless Jemubhai demanded it. Before the novel ends, this protection is itself upset, as the high status marks this and other affluent families out as targets, and as the benefactors of systemic injustice:

Just when Lola had thought it would continue, a hundred years like the one past - Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at Christmas - all of a sudden, all that they had claimed innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven wrong.

It did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country; it did matter to live in a big house and sit beside a heater in the evening, even one that sparked and shocked; it did matter to fly to London and return with chocolates filled with kirsch; it did matter that others could not. They had pretended that it didn't, or had nothing to do with them, and suddenly it had everything to do with them.

Nevertheless, we can well imagine that, once the dust has settled, there will once again be a hierarchy of powerful/protected and powerless/vulnerable. Different people may occupy the relative positions, but the relative positions themselves will always exist. Gyan, Sai's Nepali maths tutor and sometime lover, recognises the same thing even as he is drawn into the separatist fervour (again, the link between the character's experience and what the author wishes him to realise is somewhat forced, but again the point is well taken):

The patriotism was false, he suddenly felt as he marched; it was surely just frustration - the leaders harnessing the natural irritations and disdain of adolescence for cynical ends; for their own hope in attaining the same power as government officials held now, the same ability to award local businessmen deals is exchange for bribes, for the ability to give jobs to their relatives, places to their children in schools, cooking gas connections...

Gyan provides our only insider perspective of the Nepali unrest. This is unfortunate, because Gyan morphs into a petulant boy at the first whiff of insurgency, something Desai chooses to convey via the caps lock key and an excess of exclamation marks (instead of say, tone of voice, body language, or simply trusting in the dialogue to get the point across). To Sai, for example, accusing her of that most terrible of crimes, acculturation (to erstatz westernised norms, here):

"Copycat, copycat. Don't you know, these people you copy like a copycat, THEY DON'T WANT YOU!!!!"

He's not the only character in the book to read like a thirteen-year-old on his first foray on an internet message board, but he's by far the most persistent with it, and it rather obscures his (undoubtedly confused, and therefore interesting) motivations. Since the bluster is rarely alleviated with anything that sounds like his own - as opposed to the author's - thoughts, the whole episode feels like something of a waste; up close his storyline, so interesting in the abstract, lacks the vivid, deeply-felt bite of Biju's.

The same might be said of most of what takes place in Kalimpong. There's a much larger quotient of larger-than-life eccentrics on the Indian side of things: lots of noise and colour, signifying nothing so deep as is apparently aimed for. Jemubhai, who was educated in England and has internalised a contemptuous, colonialist view of India and Indians, is a fascinating character, and comes the closest to generating real sympathy (too many of the others feel almost cartoonish in both their foibles and their plight). Still, there are some leaps in his backstory, and his pathological self-hatred never quite feels justified in terms of what is shown to us; again, he never feels as real and rounded as Biju.

Just time - since Vicky is here, and dropping increasingly irritated hints about me getting ready to go into London (for the Orange Prize ceremony and all that ;-)) - for a brief note on the prose style, which borders on the pompously arch (or archly pompous?). The authorial voice is very mannered, sometimes irritatingly so; see the follow-up to the image that opens the book (quoted above), for example:

...despite, ah, despite the mist charging down like a dragon, making ridiculous the drawing of borders.

Or the tendency for characters' thoughts to be framed with 'one', even when the characters in question don't seem the type:

Biju went out and came back in. "They say they will try your home address now." He felt a measure of pride in delivering this vital news. Realized he missed playing this sort of role that was common in India. One's involvement in other peoples' lives gave one numerous small opportunities for importance.

While we might take this a sign of Biju's aspirations, the laboured tone strikes through even the most intimate passages:

He weighed her hand.

"Light as a sparrow. The bones must be hollow."

These words that took direct aim at something elusive had the deliberateness of previous consideration, she realized with a thud of joy.

Right. Really should go. Watch out for us on the podcast of the ceremony tonight!

~~Nic

(who blames Vicky & Esther if this post doesn't make any sense - amazing how hard it is to blog coherently while drinking vodka and being HARASSED* by importunate friends...)

*allcaps in tribute to Desai ;-)

The Orange Prize - Predictions, 2007

Tomorrow is the big day: the Orange Prize Awards Ceremony.  Esther and I will be leaving York before 8am, in order to be in Oxford with Nic around midday, in order to be ready to leave for London around 4pm.  We should be at Royal Festival Hall for 6pm and the Champagne Taittinger reception, the actual announcement to follow at around 6.45pm. 

I think I can allow myself a little, discreet *squeee*.

I can't tell you how excited I am, and nervous too.  (My stomach has been roiling all day; I couldn't concentrate at work.)  Thinking back to last year, when Esther and I hovered over the computer watching the announcement on the live webcast (also available this year), and how invested we were, I can't believe we'll actually be there this time.  In the room, experiencing it in real time, in the flesh so to speak.  I have such an affection for the Orange, far deeper than for the Booker or the Costas or any other literary award.  How to explain it?  Perhaps it is just that I appreciate the work it does in bringing women's fiction to light, especially now with the ridiculously high standards of the New Writer's Award; or perhaps that it has a strong community feel, bringing readers together in accessible debates about the shortlists. Or that it has such an international outlook. Certainly, it isn't because I always agree with the results! (See last year.) The Booker gets more coverage, and has the literary kudos, but I couldn't imagine going to the announcement party or inviting the judges around for tea and cake.  Which is not to suggest that the Orange Prize is parochial or domestic, only that it is built on the ideals of its readership and welcoming because of it.

So, what do I think of this year's shortlists?  Like last year, I've been cutting it fine with my reading, making it through only by virtue of having already read two of the books on the main shortlist. Unlike last year, however, I have no strong allegiances - I have preferences, but not violent ones. In my opinion, this year's list is lack-lustre in comparison to last year's (with some few exceptions); there is nothing on there to rival Ali Smith's The Accidental  for style and substance, or Sarah Water's The Night Watch for narrative thrust, or Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black for caustic humour.

I have a feeling that the winner is something of a foregone conclusion - the bookies have Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as the favourite with odds of 13/8, with Anne Tyler in second place at 11/4; Xiaolu Guo's A Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers is the outsider at 10/1.  This doesn't suprise me at all since Adichie's novel has something the other novels, by and large, don't: gravitas.  Sure and confident, it addresses genocide, politics and humanity under stress and it does it with dignity and without sentimentality.  There is no way it could be labelled 'domestic'.  Unlike Arlington Park (by Rachel Cusk) or Tyler's Digging to America or even A Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers, it doesn't whiff of 'women's interest'.  It has its faults, surely, (not least a touch of bizarre structuring) but it is brave and unflinching.  And we should take into account that Adichie has been in this position before, in 2004 with Purple Hibiscus, and was denied.  Things like that often tell on a judging panel. 

Saying that, I don't know that Adichie's novel is challenging *as a novel*.  Its subject matter is weighty and difficult, and the issues it addresses are painful, but it doesn't do anything adventurous with form - it has a sleight of structuring but that feels contrived and forced onto a story of personal dynamics not made to bear its weight.  I think Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (third favourite at 7/2) carries itself better in this regard at least: its bi-part structure is robust even if its prose is sometimes overwrought.  Funny then, that I've almost discounted it as a contender for the Bessie - perhaps I don't quite believe a Booker winner will get a look in, especially with Adichie on the list.

But what if neither Desai or Adichie, with their serious socio-political novels, win? What a shake-up that would be!  I greatly enjoyed both Arlington Park and The Observations, and they both have something to recommend them.  The Cusk is unabashedly about women, women, women, which I respect; and I admire the way she evokes interiority, with her sly ear for dialogue.  But I'm not sure if it isn't too much the strident monologue for the Orange judges.  I can see the headlines: 'Shock! Novel about depressed housewives wins women's fiction prize'.  Jane Harris' novel is a lot of fun in comparison, taking pastiche in both hands (even if the ending is a little dog-eared) and with a marvellous, untrustworthy narrator.  But, I think it slips down a little too easy and that it doesn't match the standard of, say, Sarah Waters' great Victorian mystery-noir, Fingersmith, which didn't win the Orange in 2002.  A win for Harris would be a kick in the teeth for Waters. 

The two novels I would be disappointed or, rather, bemused to see win are Digging to America and A Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers - the former was too much candy floss and the latter too affected.  Sexually disturbing and challenging (IMHO, at least), I felt too frustrated with the proto-English patois of the Chinese narrator to really engage. 

Finally, what about the New Writer's Award which is, as I see it, the most exciting of the announcements? There is so much at stake:  a new writer, about to be launched into the spotlight.  Like last year, the shortlist has exercised my tastes and led me to read three novels I would probably have never sampled without the impetus.  Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki isn't really a contender I don't think, but both Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allen and The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly are excellent novels. 

You may or may not remember that I tried to read Clare Allen's novel last year, when it was on the Guardian First Book shortlist, and that I failed.  Possibly I wasn't in the right mood for it, or I just needed a real push to invest in it.  Either way, I found myself both amused and moved by it (post to follow) this times and was grateful to the New Writer's Award for making me give it a second chance. 

But.  But.  Connelly's The Lizard Cage is undoubtedly my great discovery of this year's Orange Prize.  Last year it was Disobedience by Naomi Alderman, about Jewish lesbians in Hendon, this year 'tis a novel about political prisoners in Burma, so beautifully written - both poetic and visceral - that I want to go out and hawk copies on the street.  It is easily to Adichie's standard, if not more clearly evocative, and is where I've placed my bet on the New Writer's Award.  I hope, hope, hope that it wins. 

I suppose we'll know in just 24 hours.  Full party report to follow when we get back on Friday.

~Victoria~~

People I Don't Want To Be When I Grow Up

Nic: Arlington Park, Rachel Cusk's day-in-the-life tale of five housewives who are not so much desperate as thoroughly bored (and, let's not beat about the bush here, thoroughly boring), has a rather inauspicious beginning - if perhaps not quite for the reasons intended by the author:

All night the rain fell on Arlington Park.

The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky. [...]

In Arlington Park, people were sleeping. [...] A handful of dried leaves shuffled on a pavement.

If you're wondering how a sky can be "arid", or leaves still dry, in the middle of a rainstorm, well - welcome to the club. Several paragraphs and a page later, it becomes apparent that what Cusk actually meant in her opening line was "All night the rain fell on Arlington Park... except for the part of it I'm about to spend two pages describing."

This rather muddled fidelity to an unfortunately-clichéd image - yes, stop me if you've heard this one before, but a storm is preparing to break over emotionally-repressed suburbia - proves to be characteristic of the novel as a whole. Just a little later, we are told that the nearby city is filled with - surely not? - "relentless activity"; emotions are, on more than one occasion, experienced "like vertigo". Not coincidentally, I suspect, it is also a tic shared by most of Cusk's viewpoint characters: during a single chapter, part-time teacher Juliet envisions her stored-up resentment as 'lead in her veins' not once but four times.

Yet the frankly mediocre opening passage is punctured, over the page, by a snippet of dialogue between two anonymous characters:

There was no one to see the rain coming, except a couple hurrying down the silent streets on their way back from an evening out.

'I don't like the look of that,' said the man, peering up. 'That's rain.'

The woman gave an exasperated little laugh.

'You're the expert on everything tonight, aren't you?' she said.

They let themselves into their house. The orange light showed for an instant in their doorway and was extinguished again.

An entire relationship dynamic in three lines, this brief exchange comes as a considerable relief: so pithy, so observant - who doesn't know couples who sound like that? (Who hasn't sounded like that themselves?)

But in this apparent success lies the problem, I would suggest. Because it is observation, rather than imagination and empathy, that is at work throughout the novel. The characters talk and act like snapshots of real people, people you've overheard, people you've spoken to - but snapshots are, for the most part, what they remain. There is no filling in of gaps; these people are little more than the sum of their neuroses and over-familiar soundbites.

Juliet has surrendered her ambition at the feet of her husband's, retaining a part-time job she has little passion for while raising their children.  Amanda, adrift without the sense of autonomy and responsibility she found in her job, diverts her controlling energies into relentless housework ("It was messy work, the unending struggle to maintain separation between outside and in"). Solly seeks diversion through 'exotic' (non-English) lodgers while quietly dreading the birth of yet another child. Christine throws dinner parties, ignores her children except when they get in her way (as do all the women bar Solly), airs her petty received prejudices at every opportunity, and makes pronouncements like the following, regarding the mall:

"I just love coming here," Christine expostulated, surveying the brutal grandeur of the car park. [...] "I don't know, it just makes me feel good. It makes me feel that life is full of possibilities."

If Christine felt remotely like a real person - a well-rounded portrait of a dim, bigoted Little Englander - this level of meaningless might be striking and rather disheartening. But the statement seems to be there more to get a reaction (disdain and/or pity) from the reader than to illuminate who Christine is. The women's mental voices read like externally-accessible (and essentially fabricated) presentations: self-help books or columns in the less-thoughtful end of the women's magazine market. This effect might be intentional - so worn out are they that they have even lost touch with their inner monologues - but, given how Cusk fudges the non-PoV transitional passages such as the one discussed above, I find it hard to grant her the benefit of the doubt on this point. Either way, it has the effect of blurring the characters together, making them difficult to tell apart except by external markers (names of husbands, home furnishings, etc). One particular scene, which follows Christine as she prepares for the dinner party, could have been told from the perspective of any of the cast; in no way do the thoughts feel intrinsic or unique to her personality (indeed, quite the opposite). Their neuroses are all much of a muchness, and their responses to them are likewise interchangeable: dreamy, dreary disengagement, with occasional detours into histrionic self-pity.

I found myself comparing this to a novel on last year's shortlist, Ali Smith's entirely splendid The Accidental, which covered a certain amount of the same thematic ground that Cusk aims for: a small group of characters are confronted with the essential emptiness of their lives during a bounded period of time, experience semi-crisis, and on the whole emerge from the novel little changed and only slightly more self-aware. But whereas Smith experimented with form and drew even her most unsympathetic characters with sensitivity and compassion, Cusk seems to be only interested in setting up straw men to make her hardly-revelatory points, about the pitfalls of homemaking and letting creative and mental energies go to seed in the face of the daily grind. Five women's whole lives in a single day, and in that day little but hackneyed phrasings and caricatures: it's like Mrs Dalloway as retold by someone who only heard about the original through a game of Chinese Whispers.

To clarify: I don't believe that my issue here is that I simply didn't like the characters. As I said in my previous post, being dislikeable is no barrier to being interesting, when it comes to fictional characters; and in any case, disliking these women would be like shooting fish in a barrel. They're soft targets, created to be this banal, this sunk in their subjectivities. The problem was that I didn't engage with any of them, that they drew distressingly little reaction from me at all; I wasn't interested in them one way or the other.

What frustrated me, I suppose, was not the lack of self-awareness - since that so often devolves into tedious navel-gazing - but of a sense of irony, of the absurdity of oneself. The situations they face are hardly unique, after all; we get several hints that their mothers went through similarly unfulfilling family experiences. It was hard to escape the notion that, by inflating and wallowing in their misery rather than spotting it for what it is - universal, temporary, shareable, solveable - they create the rods for their own backs. Which may be Cusk's point... but the getting there is so tedious, and there is no attempt to go beyond making this (not exactly new) point, despite the promise raised by the Woolfian structuring of the narrative. They have no personality other than their banality.

Another lack, and one that the novel does evoke deliberately (I think) and well, is of any awareness that goes beyond the self. None of the characters possess much empathy, or sympathy, or any but the most shallow attempts to understand and connect with the people around them (including their children and partners). All find it impossible to imagine any configuration of life beyond their own. Solly's observation of one of her lodgers, a single and successful Italian woman, is very telling in this regard:

She couldn't bear the idea of loose threads, of open spaces, of stories without endings. Did Paola not want to get married? Did she not want children, and a house of her own?

This seems to me to be the crux of so many of the characters' problems: deeply-ingrained social habit, whether it lies in gender roles, in class, or in education. Most of these women are raising a family because that's just the thing that one does, the next stage on the ladder of life, regardless of whether or not they truly want to, or are equipped to, or might have waited until they had a secure enough life of their own to withstand the crushing pressures of parenthood. We might imagine that they got married for the same reason, that likewise this might be why they also renovate their kitchens and throw dinner parties and spend their spare time shopping at soulless malls. They have no imagination, or even when they do life eventually beats it out of them; the result is stagnation.

Which is sad, granted, but I'm not sure it will come as much of a revelation to anyone reading the book.

~~~~

Vicky: I disagree with Nic on this one - I think that Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park is in with a good chance of winning the Orange Prize, and that it expresses the vapid pretentions of middle-England quite brilliantly and that its women, sloughed in depression and doubt, are both individual and nascently self-aware.  What Cusk does so well in Arlington Park, in my opinion, is lift the roof off suburbia, tweak back the stifling blanket, to reveal what is most disturbing, distressing *and* familiar about our (women's?) neuroses.  And I disagree that it lacks irony; I think the narrator - omnipotent and wry - has a strong sense of the vacuous and the ridiculous, conmingled with a cloying sadness and resignation.

That is not to say that it is a perfect novel, although I did think it a deeply enjoyable one.  I share Nic's qualms concerning the opening passages, and with Cusk's descriptive prose more generally.  The effect is clearly meant to mimic 'Time Passes' from Woolf's To the Lighthouse - that virtuoso performance of characterful emptiness - but is weighed down by its own momentous cliche.  I too was puzzled by the 'arid' sky and the 'dry leaves' of the first paragraph, and uncomfortable with the affected park scenes just past the novel's halfway point.  In these instances, away from her characters and the dialogue she excels at, Cusk hams up her meaning to the nth degree.  The angst is sometimes too much; smattered with exclamation points, it swells toward the hystrionic:

The whole mechanism of the world, running on, running like a machine: time poured into it like a blank river, and set off all these infinitesimal movements!  It was painful, in a way, for them [the women in the park]; for them it was a form of agony to watch it.  Standing on thier wood chippings in the playground, the women were as though snared in the mechanism. They were caught between the blank river and the churning wheels.  Trapped as they were, every movement caused them pain. The diving kites hurt them.  The people in thier white shoes seemed to be trampling them underfoot.  The dogs frightened them, and made their hearts thump in their startled chests.

And I don't think her prose is Woolfian enough to bear it.  It flows by happily enough, but the raging torrent is too much. Cusk does much better - much, much better - when she confines her mad dash of emotions and images to her character's interiority. 

I disagree that they are all 'much of a muchness', or that their neuroses are interchangable.  The five women from whose point of view Arlington Park is narrated - Juliet, Amanda, Solly, Christine and Maisie - are disparate and pointedly so.  It is true that their despair and disappoint springs from a similar source - their unfulfilling lives, as mothers, wives and domestic lackeys - but the flavour of it, and the tenor, is different in each case.

Juliet, with whom the book opens ('aged thirty-six, mother of two, a teacher at Arlington Park School for Girls - a person regarded in her youth as somewhat exceptional'), spends her time chafing against the bit of her domesticity and of the feminist backlash.  Her anger is palpable, directed against men, against her children and against herself, and her sections of the novel are filled with notably violent images.  At a recent dinner party she argued with her host about the legality of extended maternity leave, an exchange that saw her branded as 'strident' and led to an entirely inappropriate joke about her breasts (made by her demure husband). Recalling it on the morning of the narrative she thinks:

All men are murderers... All of them. They murder women. They take a woman, and little by little they murder her.

Intelligent and observant, she realises the fixedness of her situation and that she is, in part, its architect:

Really they were only the dreary lineaments of her mother's life, a husband, a house, children - but to Juliet they seemed mysterious, full of foreign, ineluctable glamour... It almost made her laugh now, to think of it.  A woman a hundred years ago knew her life would be over the moment she got herself pregnant.  But Juliet had thought it required a degree of cleverness, that there was something difficult about it.

As Nic points out, she (and her counterparts) are ploughing the same furrows as their mothers, bound up tight in social convention.  Her attitudes though, particularly toward her children, is anything but conventional.  Like all the women in the book, she displays no peculiar affection for her offspring.  Instead, they're little aliens, signs of their mothers' repression. 

Amanda, the novel's second protagonist, is perhaps the most disaffected and pathologically depressed of all Cusk's characters.  Her relationship with her son, Eddie, is characteristic - she resents him, hates him and cares for him all at once.  In what struck me as one of the most powerful scenes of the book she takes him to the butcher's to buy meet and, in a moment of glorious Freudianism, imagines him dismembered and on display in the cold cabinet:

Eddie stood and fingered the glass so that the spectacle of dismemberment behind it seemed to expand itself, to incorporate him. She saw his parts arrayed on metal trays, in fans and pyramids of flesh fringed with parsley.

Later in the day, just before she pulls off a coup of a coffee morning, she receives a telephone call from her sister to tell her that her grandmother has died.  Unable to connect with the grief of the moment - she instantly resents the intrusion of the news and resents her sister's presence at the deathbed - she breaks the news to her son in a brusque, heartless way.  When he hugs her legs and tells her 'I love you mummy', she calls him a 'silly boy' and disengages herself from his embrace.  No comfort, no empathy.  Realising how vulnerable she is, how empty, she prefers to fill her life with what is most vacuous - chores and social conventions will have to do in place of meaning.

A woman who has absolutely and totally embraced this option, unto the point of caricature, is Christine, the novel's proto-Clarissa Dalloway.  Akin to Clarissa, who 'loves her roses' but can't remember whether it is the Albanians or the Armenians who have been massacred (it was the Armenians, in Turkey), Christine is a champion of misinformation.  Unlike Nic, I think she is a well-rounded 'dim, bigoted Little Englander', a Daily Mail reader extroadinaire, and that she is brilliantly pathetic (in the traditional sense) into the bargain.  Raised by a neurotic and (probably) alcoholic mother, she is not a native of Arlington-Park-esque suburbia and is painfully aware of her less auspiscious origins.  She admits, in a moment of candid self-awareness, that the local housing estate, Redbourne, frightens her:

...everytime she passed through it, Christine felt a fear from which the plain unlikelihood of its realisation could not protect her. It was the same kind of fear she had felt in childhood, when pondering the secret possibility that she might not be the true child of her parents: a retrospective fear of unauthenticity which seemed to reveal to her the vulnerability of her grasp on the real, the authentic life.  Redbourne reminded Christine of the insufficiency of her control of destiny, the fatal slightness of its degrees... Half a mile apart, in some places less than half a mile, Arlington Park and this textureless suburb were the very illustration of this principle.  Geographically, half a mile was the slenderest of the threads: that was how close she had come to living in Redbourne. Its presence was a constant hazard, in that it sustained a distinction in the face of which she could never feel entirely safe.

Because the truth is that Christine is vulgur, and she knows it.  The patterns of her speech give her away - 'I mean, when you think about it...'; 'I'm not being funny but...'; 'bloody' this and 'fucking' that (she is the only woman in the novel to swear) - as do her eating habits.  On a trip to the mall, her 'friends' sit down to salads and sandwiches, while she orders a huge burger; at the end of the day, her dinner party is nothing but frazzled chicken breasts, bagged salad (which a guest perks up with fresh tomatoes) and a bought lemon tart that she forgets to serve.  And when faced, on the same mall trip, with Maisie's subtle hints against purchasing a purple top that is too small for her, she erupts into a disgraceful display:

'Here comes the vicar in drag,' Christine persisted. 'Here comes the fucking Purple Lady.'

'Christine!' said Stephanie shrilly, 'I was only talking about the colour.'

'I like the colour.' Christine regarded her reflection with narrowed eyes. 'Ella, if you don't shut up I'm going to rip your tongue out of your throat.'

This last to her poor benighted daughter.  Christine knows that she is something of the caricature about her, that her pretentions really are a pretence.  A dim bigot, she lives in perpetual fear that something will give her away for what she is: lower middle, even working, class. Little does she realise that her lively brashness, the embarressment and display of it, is part of the reason Arlington Park's frazzled housewives are drawn to her - it can't be a coincidence that she is only woman in the novel to stand up to her husband and argue, or that she is the only one to have something in the way of a sex life.

Sex is something that the women in Arlington Park don't have, by and large.  They have husbands and children by them, so they must, at some point, have engaged in the act, but otherwise they are almost holy in their celibacy.  Solly Keir-Leigh's husband is almost always away on business and in his absence, and in the face of her three (soon to be four) children, she takes refuge in the sensual exoticism of her Italian lodger, Paola.  As Nic intimates, Paola is everything Solly is not: stylish, mysterious and uncomprimising in matters of independence, she even has a son, but has left him behind in Italy with her ex-husband.  In keeping with the cloistered traditions of Arlington Park, their relationship is not sexual or erotic, but it is both sensual and yearning.  Solly is fatally attracted to Paola's self-possession, and also to her actual possessions, which seem to represent something she has failed to attain:

She looked in Paola's pink satin washbag and found make-up in heavy black enammelled cases, and a foil packet of contraceptive pills.  She opened one of the drawers and took out lace garments, things with buttons and ribbons, a garter belt and a long, fine, gossamer-like pair of stockings... She felt a terrible pain at the sight of these things.  What were her threadbare jeans and her string of beads compared to this? They were the abortion, the pitiful remnant of her femininity.  She felt she had nothing - nothing... She felt like a machine, like an animal.

It is this animal despair, this incredible rage of wanting-something-more that rings so clearly and truthfully throughout Arlington Park.  It is the threat of the ordinary and the violence of the everyday that strikes it major chord.  Admittedly, it is a novel that has been written before, many times, and Nic is right to point out its fidelity to the topos of repressed suburbia, but I think Cusk does it exceptionally well. It is so wilfull and passionate about women's lives.

I have only one final qualm.  The lives of five 'friends', in a single day, with a dinner party at the end? Arlington Park's homage to Mrs Dalloway is unmistakable, although its narrative structure has more in common with To the Lighthouse and Cusk makes several cosmetic allusions to Orlando (most especially the pair of swans that Juliet sees 'rising from the dark folds, rising from the trees', both exultant with hope and forbidding in their majesty, at the end of one of her chapters - the same 'omen' marks the ending of Orlando).  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this annexation of Virginia Woolf's cadences.  On the one hand, I'm inclined to think it limiting and over-ambitious: Woolf already has the market cornered as regards her brand of the semiotics of interiority.  Cusk would do better to make her own way, descriptively and structurally - Arlington Park walks a fine line between rip-off and variation. On the other, I recognise the richness and relevance of Woolf's approach to character - its intensity and scrupulousness, the way it tightly adheres to the e mundane while evoking the otherworldly - and I admire Cusk's audacity in seeking to replicate it.  I also think that Woolf would have approved of the subject matter and of its trajectory because, like her greatest novels, it is both parochial and, yet, not.  It is chokingly claustrophobic and particular (I think immediately of Woolf's Between the Acts), but widely relevant in touching a well-spring of anxiety about the vacuous, selfish and status-driven nature of middle-class British culture. 

It is no shame to write a fiction about what is essential and relevant to its intended audience, nor to write a novel with precedent, so long as you do it well and with feeling. Cusk succeeds in both regards. I wouldn't be at all disappointed to see Arlington Park win.