Eve's Alexandria

Book Notes - Doris Lessing, #1

I'm still steadily reading the second volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, and am now about 100 pages from the end.  It feels as though she has been at my side for some time now, although my reading journal tells me I only started the first volume, Under My Skin, in late August.  If I'm honest, I'm both hungering for and dreading that last page.  Hungering, because I'm desperate to pluck down any one of half a dozen new non-fiction treats from the shelf; and dreading because I know that there is no third volume and no prospect of there ever being one.  Since volume two only brings the story up to 1962 and the publication of The Golden Notebook, there is a lot of life left unexplored.  I suppose I'll just have to make do with a biography.

What is it about these books that I have loved so vehemently? I find it hard to quantify.  Of course there is the excitement of Lessing's life. Born in 1919 and raised in the colonies, she has witnessed and been a party to all sorts of historical enormities.  The first volume of the autobiography covered her childhood and early life in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) up to 1949, taking in her education, her conversion to communism, her two disastrous marriages and the births of her three children.  It was a delectable feast of incident and otherness - the second world war, the rise of Stalin, the growing racial tensions in colonial Africa.  The second volume picks up where we left off, with Lessing's departure to London in 1949 (leaving two of her children behind with their father).  This represents a break with her old life, and a shift in the narrative thrust of the autobiography. For a start it is the beginning of her career as a writer - she glibly reports that, on arrival, she had only £100 and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing, to her name.  For another, it is the catalyst that rapidly expands her social circle so that by the early 1960s she is at the centre of a network of authors, poets and journalists that charactered the age. She poo-poos the labelling of these groups by critics and historians (and particularly dislikes the idea of the 'Angry Young Men') but that isn't to say she didn't know many of them intimately.  It was an era of rapid expansion for publishing, and of experiment in art and writing, and there was Lessing, riding the front of the wave. 

As well as the artists, there are the political activists.  One of the themes of Walking in the Shade is the slow, gradual loss of Lessing's political faith.  Once an ardent communist, she is increasingly a sceptic of any political creed. (Her cynicism leaps off the page: In politics, she sighs, virtue has to be its own reward, and anyone who expects justice and even gratitude is as stupid as a soldier risking his life in war who expects his government to do right by him or women who stand by struggling young artists and poets.) But that doesn't stop her playing host to political ferment in the 1950s and 1960s, either in the evening soirees she holds for exiled black African revolutionaries or in the trips she makes to the Soviet Union with Naomi Mitchison as part of the Communist Writer's Group.  From the perspective of the 1990s, she continues to reflect ruefully on some of her ideas at the time:

I am shocked at myself.  I wrote nonsense about China and the Soviet Union.  I am appalled at my sentimentality when I said that I had never met anyone who would throw the switch that would unleash what we then thought of as The Bomb. It seems to me now that anyone would, given the right programming.

But... these happenings aren't the attraction of the autobiography, and nor is the general social history Lessing spins around her life.  No, it is something else.  It is her honesty, both about herself and her failings, and about her time.  I can't stress her dastardly forthrightness enough. I wonder how many old acquaintances were quaking at the prospect of this volume's publication?   She certainly takes no prisoners.  I've noted before her complete lack of sentimentality and, to an extent, sympathy, and it is on show as much in volume two as in volume one.  But you musn't think this makes her an unsympathetic character, although she does occasionally appear cruel (as, for example, in the treatment of her elderly mother).  It is just that her opinions, her emotions are pared down to their barest essentials, and in being so are utterly and absolutely compelling.  Because Lessing isn't given to outpourings or explosions, when she does make a show of feeling it bears true force.  As, for example, when she examines her feelings after her mother's premature death in 1957:

I was grief-struck, but this was no descent into a simple pain of loss, but rather a chilly, grey semi-frozen condition - an occluded grief.  As usual I pitied her for her dreadful life, but this rage of pity was blocked by the cold thought: If you had let her live with you she would not have died.  I drifted about the flat, returned to my earliest self, the small girl who could see how she suffered but was muttering: No I won't. Leave me alone.  ... I was thinking, At what point during this long miserable story of my mother and myself could I have behaved differently?  But I had to conclude that nothing could have been different.  And if she returned to life and came to London and stood there, brave, humble, uncomprehending - 'But all I want is to be of use to others' - they I would say, and be, exactly the same.  So what was the use of grief? Pain? Sorrow? Regret?  It was a bad, slow time...

You can imagine Lessing asking herself variations on these questions all her life: what is the use of regret? False sympathy? Chit-chat? Polite interest? Humility? And deciding that there was no use to any of it and deciding to be the woman on display in Walking in the Shade.  Eye-wateringly truthful and headstrong, prickly with integrity and determined never to be taken for a fool.  There is a sharp kindness there too. Although it isn't always clear in the tone of her voice, it shows in many of her actions, in the people she chooses to take in and feed, and the friendships she maintains with neighbours and fellow artists.  The fact that she has little truck with her family - a hundred pages to go and she has yet to mention the children she abandoned in Southern Rhodesia in 1949 - is merely a sympton of her decision to choose her emotional dependencies for herself.

Then, there is the fascination Lessing has with her parents.  I'll admit that this theme holds special significance for me; I'm not sure why.  I too am fascinated by my parents. (Aren't we all?)  What makes them tick, as individuals and as a couple, why are they do different to me and how have they contributed to the way I am?  How could they have been different, if there lives had been different?  If they had been born when I was born, or thirty years earlier? Lessing is also fixated on these questions, both psychologically and as a writer. There are echoes of Virginia Woolf. I am  reminded of those diary entries from around the time she was working on To The Lighthouse.   By then Woolf's parents were over 20 years dead but she recognised the parts played by their ghosts in the writing of Mr and Mrs Ramsay. I'm paraphrasing from memory (because my copies of the diaries are, ironically, still at my parent's house) but she admits that she was unnaturally obsessed with them both, and that writing about them was 'a necessary act'.  She goes on to say that after writing To The Lighthouse she was finally able to lay them to rest, that she had excised them from her soul and she no longer dreamt of them as she had done.  It strikes me that Lessing is forever trying to do the same.  It seems fitting that her most recent book, Arthur and Emily (which she also says will be her last) is about them, their real lives and also the lives they might have had.  I hope she has finally laid them to rest in it.

I fear I'm rambling now.  What else can I say about Walking in the Shade?  I haven't mentioned that Lessing is charming - as when she writes about her first cat, whom she underestimated - or that she is funny, in a delicious scathing sort of way, as when she takes journalism to task for being so damned predictable:

An astonishing phenomena, journalists: you'd think they would sometimes try for a little originality.  Recently we have seen the same thing with John Major, who was described early on in his premiership as 'grey'.  For years, and until recently, John Major has inspired journalists to add the word 'grey' to every report about him. Like so many programmed rats.  Mrs. Thatcher = handbag, etc.

If there were any question still in your minds: yes, the autobiography has persuaded me to give Lessing's fiction another try.  This time I'm going to start where I should have started originally, with the early novels like The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook.  I shall try very hard to pretend The Cleft never happened. And I have high hopes that I shall succeed; I have the feeling that I had to get to know Lessing a little before I could appreciate her writing.  We are so different, she and I (we would never, never get along in the real world!) that crossing over from my side of the literary and ideological river (instinctively liberal) to hers (unforgivingly realist) could never have been accomplished without some sort of raft or bridge.  Which only goes to show that if at first you don't succeed with a universally acclaimed author, you should try and try again.

~~Victoria~~

All Is Not As It Seems

I have just read two Victorian pastiches, back to back. One, The Peachgrower's Almanac, an entirely unexpected and mercurial delight (on which, more later); the other, Kept by D.J. Taylor, amongst the more unsatisfying novels of my acquaintance.  You'll excuse a short digression: There is a wonderful moment in Josh Whedon's short-lived TV series Firefly where two of characters consider a cheap wooden ornament, and argue about whether it represents a duck or a swan. Kaylee (who is ever  hopeful) thinks that it is a swan, carved by someone 'longing to see a swan'.  I was initially tempted to label Kept a similar sort of bird - a Victorian pastiche written by someone who had read a pretty good description of what constitutes a Victorian novel - in the way of story, style, tombre - but has, alas, never set eyes on the real thing. Because, surely, you couldn't write a novel this dead, this devoid of life, if you'd modelled it on Dickens or Eliot or Trollope.

Except, clearly, that is not the case: because .J. Taylor is also the author of a biography of Thackeray, and has undoubtedly read a dozen more Victorian novels than I have.  So perhaps in the event it isn't that he has read too few of them, but rather that he has read too many. So many that Kept is Victoriana squared; an intellectual exercise in pastice, with knobs and bells and whistles on, that fairly screams 'I'm a Victorian novel god-damn it!' until you start to feel faintly embarrassed that you bought it from a 3for2 table in the 21st century.  Taylor acknowledges the 'direct influence' of no fewer than 10 of the great Victorians in his afterword (including Dickens, Trollope and Eliot), and the looming presence of several others, Wilkie Collins first amongst them, is felt throughout. Taylor seems to have been engaged in a sort of Spiritualism - the chanelling of the great ghosts of Victorian letters.  It is a shame that the end product is a such a Frankenstein's monster of a book, unworthy of the authors who inspired it and, I imagine, the author who wrote it.

At which point I should pause to say a few soft words in Taylor's defence.  First, I enjoyed Kept to an extent; it is by no means an unentertaining novel.  Second, I consider that it is an accomplished novel, insofar as it can be said to accomplish anything much at all.  Third, D.J. Taylor can write. He knows his way around a sentence, makes good use of his thesaurus and has almost captured that lovely self-deprecating cadence that is the unique province of the English writer in the ninetneeth century (although it is a little too studied for my liking). Fourth, he has a keen, delighted eye for the natural world and the appearance of people in it that I cannot fault. Thus:

The clergyman, shovel hat pulled down over his forehead, hands plunged into the pockets of his coat, strides swiftly over the wet sand.  It is low tide, and the sea is far away: half a mile at least lies between him and the flat, rippling breakers.  At his feet have been flung interesting deposits from its passage: knots of purple-brown weed, spars of driftwood, a coil of rope, a string of onions.  To his left hand side, behind the dunes, pine trees rise into the pale air.  The clergyman sees neither the trees nor the flotsam and jetsam at his feet, for his mind is bent on other things.  Tall, thin, vellum face emerging about a white stock, Gainsborough could have painted him, placed him on a horse, even, to emphasise the curve of his legs, but this is not Gainsborough's age.  A mile behind the shoresthere is a tarmacadamed road and a few miles beyond that a railway line, and in Wells, on the boundary of the clergyman's parish, a photographer has recently opened up a studio.

This passage represents all that is good about Kept, I think.  The narratorial authority; the confident sub-clauses; the sharp awareness of a world in transition, from Gainsborough to the photographer, and the clergyman inbetween, halfway between the age of his Godly dominion and his profession's inexorable decline in a faithless new world; the inevitability of sand, sea, pines and the in-out of the tide.

That, however, is as far as my appreciation extends.  You may notice that I have said nothing particular about the plot yet.  That is because there is no real plot to speak of; or rather, there is a plot but it doesn't belong to Kept but to half a dozen other novels and snatches of history.  Here, for example, is the Great Train Robbery of 1855, and a mad woman kept in the attic, first by her husband and then by the trustees of his will, and here is a villain with a pet mouse, and here is an indecisive young man trying to get elected to parliament, and here is another young man lost and injured in the Canadian wilderness, and there is a young servant girl who saw too much, and there another who went to the bad.  Taylor is a cannibal, who patches his novel together from bits wantonly ripped off his predecessors.  In certain lights this a very clever thing to do (at least, the broadsheet reviewers seem to have enjoyed it) because it distracts the reader from the work in hand as they ferret about in their memories for references. But it proves feeble most respects.  It divests the characters of any autonomous vitality - you cannot love or hate them, since they are all pieces of a sly jigsaw slotted together for the jest rather than made-up for their own sakes.  And it means you cannot see or feel things as a whole because of the jutting, disjointed pieces to the puzzle. The wilds of Jack London's Canada do not make for an easy bed-fellow with Dickens' London, for example.    Then, there is the problem of spark. 

Spark is originality, either in the tale, or the telling of the tale, and Kept has little of neither, and what there is ends up being choked off by Taylor's efforts to mimic his model.  Occasionally it verges on the truly awful:

A sealed casket holds no charms for me. A locked door seldom makes me yearn for a key and the right to admittance.  Rather, my fasincation lies with great people and the moment when their greatness has, albeit temporarily, been put aside.  How does a bishop conduct himself when, retiring to the bosom of his family, he divests himself of his mitred hat?  What does Lord John, coming back from the Treasury chambers, say to his wife, his butler or the domestic who hands him his tea? Half the charm of fiction resides in these imaginings. Write a novel about a ploughman in his fields or a City Croesus striding about the floor of 'Change with his hands plunged into his trouser pockets and no one will read it, but let a distinguished nobleman, the heir to broad acres and the confidant of half the Cabinnet, tell his wife that he has the gout or that he will lend no more money to her scapegrace brother and the public is instantly agog.

This paragraph is, for me, a horror of composition.  Let us leave aside that it's basic sense is difficult to parse because the balance of opposites Taylor uses doesn't quite carry through to the conclusion, and consider the voice instead.   It oozes with the overweaning arrogance of the narrator (different in tone entirely to the narratorial authority of the previous quote), which has engaged itself to make a statement about fiction that suits the theme of the chapter that follows but clashes with the action of the book generally.  There is something smug about the way it declares its meat and drink to be the foibles of human life, its subject humanity itself.  Big talk for a crabbed hodge-podge of a book. This same smugness pervades the novel as a whole - it seems to know its own quality; knows just how perfectly it has mastered its genre - to the extent that Taylor almost seems to be laughing at us, his readers.

It makes me wonder if Taylor is trying to play a trick on the idea of Victorian pastiche, which is clever but not in the least bit funny.  Kept is the dictionary definition of the novel-type: an imitation of original works; a farrago; a jumble.  The entire point of it seems to be the intellectual exercise of resurrecting Victorian styles, hence the cacophony of techniques - one minute diary entries; the next letters; the next first person; and after that the third-person omnipotent - and the mish-mash of narratives.  And yet it seems to have been written with the aim of making it wrong.  What emerges is so discordant and ungainly on close inspection, so variously Victorian as to be unnatural, that I have to believe it was written to prove a point.  The point being that Victoriana is somehow unseemly, that the original cannot be recreated, and that the only type of pastiche that works is the kind that mocks itself. 

Either that or Taylor has missed the boat entirely, and failed to understand that the great Victoriana writers of the last decade - Sarah Waters, Michel Faber, Susanna Clarke - aren't trying to be Victorian writers.  They are using a literary mileau to tell uniquely 21st century stories; their voices are original even if the echo sounds Victorian.  They have founded a New Victorian, a mode inspired by the nineteenth century but not aping it.  It is this newness that gives their work the spark that Kept so determinedly lacks. I remain uncertain whether Taylor meant it to be a failure to prove a point or whether he was simply unsuccessful in an earnest attempt, but that hardly changes my final verdict: give me the reckless vim of The Peachgrower's Almanac over the careful imitation of Kept any day.

~~Victoria~~

Book Notes - Kim by Rudyard Kipling

This week I have been mostly 'reading' an audio book - Kim by Rudyard Kipling - and what an unexpected pleasure it has turned out to be.  I toyed with audio books as companions to my daily walk to and from work last year - 70 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing with nothing but the drone of traffic for company seems like such a waste! - but I never seemed to get around to putting another book on my Ipod.  Listening to Kim (which I downloaded for free ages ago courtesy of a Book Depository offer) has reminded me why I really must get myself together and join Audible.   It's such a good way to read a Classic that I wouldn't otherwise try (not to mention that 'reading' for 70 minutes a day is an enormous luxury at the moment.)  I had some vague impressions of the novel - set in colonial India at the tail-end of the 19th century, peopled with young English boys, concerned with some unlikely adventure, etc.  A 'boy's own' type of story. I had shelved it away in my head as a book to read one day, perhaps, when I had read several thousand other, more pressing, things.  I wasn't entirely wrong; just mostly.  That is to say: Kim is set in India, and it does concern the unlikely adventures of a young boy, but it is much more interesting than I had thought. 

[*Please forgive me if I spell names incorrectly. Having only heard them and not read them, and not having the text to hand, I'm having to work phonetically. I could have looked online but, well, I'm too lazy.]

The young orphaned protagonist, Kimball O'Hara, has grown up in the gutters of Lahore and, although Irish by birth, is as much a native of India as any of his street-rat friends.  He is sharp and carefree, though illiterate and wild, living entirely off his wits; the only sign of his heritage is a leather roll of papers - his birth certificate; his father's army dismissal - which he wears around his neck like a charm.  He occasionally runs errands for pennies, most particularly for the brusque Afghan horse dealer, Mahbub Ali, but otherwise is his own master.  He follows his irrepressible curiosity where-ever it should lead him.  In this case it prompts him to befriend a stranger to Lahore, a Tibetan lama on a quest to find a sacred river, and thereafter to embark south with him on the great trunk road.  Before leaving he is entrusted with one last mission for Mahbub Ali - to deliver a letter with all haste to an Englishman in Umbala along the way.  This, rather than the meeting with the lama, is the real beginning of Kim's adventure.  Mahbub, the letter and the Englishman who receives it are all more than they seem as, it becomes clear, is Kim.  Mahbub is a government spy, plying information up and down the trade routes, and has been using the unsuspecting Kim as his agent, with intention of bringing the boy into the 'Great Game' of the Secret Service before long. 

Which is about as far as I have gotten at the moment.  Two things strike me immediately:

1. That Kipling's narrative voice is both familiar and alien to me.  On the one hand the novel is that friendly old beast, the late Victorian realist novel in English - gregarious, self-aware, pompous.  On the other is the patina of sympathetic colonialism from an Anglo-Indian perspective. (I don't know much about Kipling, but I know he was born in India and identified thus all his life.)  He clearly had a great affection for the country and its socio-cultural linguistic hub-bub - the secret service operates under the guise of the 'ethnographic survey' - and Kim is the personification of its glorious hybridity.  It is this which is alienating.  The language of British India, the assumptions Kipling makes about the reader's knowledge of the world of the novel, is a jolt.  I have grown up with only the faintest echoes of Empire - school children barely touch the subject in history; too embarrassing by far - and to hear Kipling's narrative voice is to be reminded of a lost and almost forgotten identity.  It is a window on a way of living and a way of seeing that has been washed away, and is both fascinating, discomforting and vaguely confusing all at once. 

2. That Kim is strangely under-marketed.  Given that its hero is the descendent and ancestor of a thousand and one boy heroes, full of sass and promise, and given Kipling's wry, self-deprecating prose-style, I'm surprised it isn't a) more studied by schools (it ticks all the boxes on identity, multi-culturalism, ethics, plus raises interesting questions about the history of race-relations and Empire), and b) pushed more by the Reading for Boys and Classics rebrands we've seen recently.  I mused that it might be considered culturally insensitive (because Kipling's enlightened relativism only goes so far, as you might expect), but then remembered that Penguin recently re-marketed She by H. Rider-Haggard as part of its Red Classics with narry a qualm, which deals in far more explicit and offensive racial stereotypes. (Not to mention that it's incredibly sexist.)  So why not Kim? Is Kipling so unfashionable these days?  Too English? Too colonial? I suppose he may have a reputation for being stuffy on the one hand, and saccarhine on the other, but it seems to me that neither badge is earned.

More thoughts when I finish the book later this month.

~~Victoria~~

Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of...

After I'd finished The First Verse by Barry McCrea it occured to me to wonder how many other wonderful novels are published in Ireland but never publicised (or even published) in the UK.  A quick glance down the backlist of McCrea's current publisher, Brandon Books, suggests that the answer might be quite a lot.  Not that contemporary Irish writers are unknown to us, far from it - Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, John Banville, Patrick McCabe, John McGahern all come immediately to mind - only that it would appear there are innumerable novels passing the British mainstream by unnoticed.  (The same clearly goes for American novels and novelists too; not to mention those writing in a language other than English. An unavoidable shame, or an Anglo-centrism we should seek to rectify? Thoughts on a postcard.) The First Verse has lost out on media attention twiceover.  Originally published in America (where McCrea now lives) in 2005 after failing to find a British backer, it has just now reached the UK market in the guise of an Irish paperback.  If it had been written by an English man living in England would it have been different? I should imagine so.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, it has already won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, and been nominated for various other LGBT awards. (Should we add: if it had been written by a straight English man living in England...?) The shout-quotes on the front cover from Edmund White, Colm Toibin and Elaine Showalter are universally glowing. I note that it was also favourably reviewed by the ever watchful London Review of Books on its American release; yet another sign of its superiority amongst book papers.  I'm at a loss as to why it has taken so long to appear here. Because, despite the lack of trumpets and fireworks heralding its appearance, The First Verse quickly proves itself worthy of all possible accolades. McCrea is the kind of new writer we should be excited about - fluent, witty, meditative, terrifying, fiercely literary.  His book was first recommended to me by a work colleague, who had herself been recommended it by word of mouth.  Consider this my way of handing on the good news to you.

I'm not unaware of the irony of passing The First Verse from virtual hand to virtual hand, since the plot itself rests on the obsessive passing of books from one reader to another.  And, not incidentally, on the transformative power of reading. It all hinges on the person of Niall Lenihan, a young gay man native to James Joyces' Sandycove.  The novel intially finds him aged 19, lovesick, shy and on his way to take a degree in English and French Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.  It is, as he latterly recognises, the 'extreme unction of his childhood' - the break from home, from parents', from old lovers - and amongst lifes most disturbing and wonderful experiences. But soon after unpacking his bag in his dorm room, making tentative friends with his classmates and scoping out the local gay clubs, he receives a strange visitor.  A handsome coquettish man calling himself Pablo Virgomare rings his doorbell and asks for him, only to then sing a few lines from the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' before disappearing into the Dublin streets.  Niall is, understandably, intrigued and more than a little seduced.  At first he dismisses the man as a momentary aberration, a hallucination brought on by the trauma of independence, but over the weeks that follow Pablo persists in appearing at the periphery of Niall's vision, singing his infernal rhyme.

At the same time Niall meets and becomes intrigued by two reclusive postgraduate students, John and Sarah, who spend their lives obsessively and arbitrarily flicking through the pages of books.  Like Pablo they initially exist at the edge of his awareness, only gradually coming into focus until, eventually, he begins to riddle out their strange behaviour.  Both practise a form of divination called the sortes, using random passages selected from books - novels, non-fiction, tour-guides, pamplets, or text of any sort - to guide their every action and decision. A series of synchronicities - coincidences involving, in this case, literary quotes - convince them to take Niall under their wing and initiate him into their 'cult', Pour Mieux Vivre.  They claim that practitioners of the sortes exist across Europe, working towards a common goal, although Sarah is the only point of contact with other members.  Their aim is to unify life with art, literature with reality, through what John calls 'esoteric reading practises'.  At first it seems like the answer to all of Niall's questions - it rips away the pale uncertainties from the world around him and offers a model of the present and future which is knowable and accessible.  More importantly it relieves him of the responsibility of living his own life, of finding love or of pleasing his friends.  Instead all he need do is consult the books, interpret their answers and act accordingly.  Who has not wished for such a blissful relief from the trauma of actually living?  His is an act of literary submission - the epitome of escapism.   

Yet it becomes increasingly clear that Pour Mieux Vivre is not compatible with the living of an ordinary life.  College, friends, family, eating, sleeping all must be jettisoned in the name of the sortes.   As the three practitioners fall deeper under the addictive spell of the books, they become like ghosts, flitting in and out of a reality which, for Niall, is becoming less and less important.  They spend hours and hours conducting their rituals and rites, reading passages from books simultaneously until they experience visions - singing, heavenly lights, moving statues.  It becomes clear that they must give up the game or loose themselves to it all together.

There is a plotted tension to The First Verse that is alien in a book of its kind.  It is at once a book of no surprises, and many.  You see, McCrea's writing style will be familiar to most readers of good contemporary fiction.  He writes here in an assured first person that oozes confidence, straying occasionally into verbosity but never irrepreably.  He is entirely at home with words and is, consequently, a wordsmith of the first order.  His descriptive prose is especially good, fed by the rich ancestry of Irish literature; his talent is clear from the first page:

For a long time I used to lie, and say that words had 'always' been my 'trade', while in fact mine is just the rude tongue of my homeland, the bourgeois suburbs on Dublin's southern side, a Levantine country reaching from the tree-hushed redbrick of Ranelagh, Rathmines and Donnybrook, on the edge of the city centre, stately places of canals, cornices, and quiet burghers, extending east and southbound along a glittering Mediterranean coast. Amphibious green trains run along its foamed edge, sliding back and forth between the heart of the Hibernian metropolis and the deep south, through the litorally bounded civilisations of Glenageary, Blackrock and Killieny, through Dalkey, Seapoint, and Bray... These are the boundaries of my home, and my language consists only of its bland Neapolitan vowels, its middleclass maritide cadence and its uncertain refusal of tense.   

At the same time The First Verse is a thriller - a quiet thriller but a thriller nevertheless - with a plot that rushes the reader to the end.  Happenings are as important to McCrea as expressing the happenings, which is a sadly rare thing in fine literary fiction.  The marriage of style and plot is such that we're left to wonder: is this a thriller disguised as a literary novel or a literary novel disguised as a thriller.  I lean towards the latter but, either way, there is no denying it works a magic all its own.

At the heart of the book is a philosophy of reading that interests me greatly.  Members of Pour Mieux Vivre simultaneously expect too much and too little of their books, and of words more generally.  They are asking for prophecies, in the full expectation that the world is ordered thus, by glutting on nonsense and mainlining books (which are words, which are information) like junkies. If reading is an act of understanding then they are barely reading at all.  They are incanting, which is not the same thing.  The irony is that by overestimating the power of books to predict the future (and know the present), they are underestimating their power to help us think critically for ourselves.  Niall experiences this loss early on, when he realises that he can no longer 'read' what is written without overwriting it with his own predictions and impressions.  There are no longer any novels, or histories, or travel guides, there are only words chosen at random and mashed together.  He cannot follow a thread; there isn't meaning, apart from that which he applies.  And if words no longer have meaning, then the stuff of reality, held together by language, begins to disintegrate.  Without the co-ordinating power of words, Niall's grasp on the world begins to slip.  Even as he expects the sortes to reveal a hidden world, he is destroying the one he already knows.

I considered interpreting this in a number of ways: Reading as a dangerous escapism... Reading as a form of divination... Reading as solipsistic crisis management... My most persistent impression, however, is that McCrea is exhorting readers, all readers, to be careful, critical and thoughtful.  Reading is an act of interpretation, and it is inevitable that this process be subjective.  At the same time it places us in a position of responsibility - to the book, to the author, but mostly to ourselves - not to be complacent or flippant.  We are not to glut on words until they mean nothing, nor to take them for granted by using them wantonly.  Which is not to say that we should read less, or not read for pleasure, but that we should read more critically.  When we do this we are no longer escaping from reality with a book, but using a book to confront it. 

There are other questions to be asked, of course, since this is such a characterful thriller: who is Pablo Virgomare? Why does his name so conveniently invoke the Virgin Mary?  What is the underlying state of Niall's mental health?  Is Pour Mieux Vivre real, or an illusion conjured by Sarah?  Is Sarah an illusion conjured by Niall? And what does a child's nursery rhyme about church bells have to do with anything?   Touching on them now would spoil the effect, and so I won't.  Because The First Verse is a powerful revelation of a novel and you should read it for yourself.  There should be a blog-buzz about it.  Really.

~~Victoria~~