Eve's Alexandria

The Girl Who Was on Fire

"Let's give a big round of applause to our newest tribute!" trills Effie Trinket.

To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps. Possibly because they know me from the Hob, or knew my father, or have encountered Prim, whom no one can help loving. So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.

I'm not sure there's much left to say about Suzanne Collins' bestselling young-adult novel (and now box office-smashing film) The Hunger Games (2008). Abigail Nussbaum has collected a profusion of links over at the Strange Horizons blog, which between them dissect the story as shown on both page and screen in terms of its portrayal of violence, gender, race, reality TV (something Abigail has looked at in more detail in her own reviews of book and film), and more, together with fascinating meta-discussion of how The Hunger Games was marketed and the problems of selling female-fronted action films to Hollywood.

Coming to the phenomenon late - I read the book only last month, having rescued it from the TBR doldrums so I could read it before going to see the film - I was struck by two things. One: It's not, by any objective standards, a particularly well-written novel. Two: But goodness me it's compulsive reading, even so. Not since Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy (the first two volumes of which I wrote about here last year, and the last here) have I gobbled down a story with such alacrity. For three days in a row I found myself counting down the hours until I could go home from work, because being home from work would mean being able to read more of The Hunger Games.

At an unspecified distance into the future, north America has become a terrible, horrible, no-good dystopia named Panem - yes, 'bread' - in which freedom has been banned and the government controls food. (Hat tip, YA dystopia story generator.) After an unsuccessful uprising against the evil regime some generations back, most of Panem's population now lives in twelve Districts, subject to varying levels of deprivation and close police supervision. The people are forced to supplement their starvation-level diets with state handouts, which are earned by sending their teenage children to fight to the death in an arena during the annual, televised Hunger Games.

Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch — this is the Capitol's way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. "Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen."

For this, as on several occasions, the film does a better job of conveying the story's backdrop than the novel does. In the film, the history is presented semi-satirically, in a jaunty little propaganda film that is played each year before the ceremony in which the 'tributes' - the children to be sent to the arena - are selected by lot, and the audience is left to assume that things are probably more complex. In the novel, we must make do with the dour, earnest omniscience of our narrator (I'll come back to what I mean by this in just a moment), Katniss Everdeen, who becomes a tribute for her District.

As a setting, Panem is almost comically vague in its doominess and oppression: genetically modified 'mockingjay' birds allow the state to eavesdrop on its subjects, anyone stepping out of line is scooped up by a surprise!hovercraft that appears instantly from out of nowhere, and once we reached the privileged Capitol whole feasts materialise the instant they are thought of. (There is a good thematic reason for the latter, at least; having spent most of her life unsure of where her next, inadequate meal is coming from, Katniss obsessively catalogues what she eats whenever she has the opportunity, and derives real joy from simply being full. It's one of her many endearing character traits.) When Katniss embarrasses an arrogant judging panel during the build-up to the Games - shooting an arrow through the centrepiece of the elaborate buffet feast they're ignoring her for, in a moment of pure, in-your-face awesomeness - we get the sort of hand-waving haziness over consequences that reminds me of nothing so much as the essay of an undergraduate trying to bluff their way past a point they clearly haven't thought about at all:

"What about my family?" I say. "Will they punish them?"

"Don't think so. Wouldn't make much sense. See they'd have to reveal what happened in the Training Center for it to have any worthwhile effect on the population. People would need to know what you did. But they can't since it's secret, so it'd be a waste of effort," says Haymitch.

(Why would anything specific need to be revealed? Why would punishment for Katniss' disobedience need to have an "effect on the population" - as opposed to, y'know, on Katniss - and what does that phrase even mean? Above all, what use is absolute arbitrary power if you don't exercise it?)

Anyway, it all makes no real sense, but in the heat of the story it doesn't really matter. And the heat gets underway almost immediately: we begin in District 12 on the day of that year's pre-Games ceremony, the reaping. Twenty pages later, the name of Katniss' beloved waif of a sister, Prim, comes out of the reaping pot, and Katniss is pushing her way forward to volunteer in Prim's place. It's a striking gesture, both in-world - volunteers are vanishingly rare, except in some of the richer Districts where children are trained and fed for years to prepare for the Games - and for the reader, too: the impulsive, steely determination of Katniss to protect her sister sings through.

Taciturn, closed-off Katniss has been the family's literal bread-winner for years, illicitly hunting in the woods beyond the boundary fence using her late father's old bow and arrows, and swapping or selling her extra kills for grain and fuel. She has no patience with weakness in herself or in others. Her mother, who seems to have had a breakdown after their father's sudden death in a mining accident, is treated with distance and sometimes even outright contempt by Katniss:

One time, my mother told me I always eat like I'll never see food again. And I said, "I won't unless I bring it home." That shut her up.

Here we must head into one of the novel's major stylistic and structural weaknesses, though, because despite this unfair but understandable (given how young she is and how much much strain the situation has placed on her) frustration with her mother, Collins cannot resist having Katniss editorialise with an emotional insight beyond her damaged years, explaining to us how we should read these emotional tangles: the precise roots of this reflexive dislike ("some small gnarled place inside me hated her for her weakness, for her neglect") and how she knows she's not being fair, and so on and so forth.

This failure of will when it comes to the first-person narration - this inability to let Katniss be a character who expresses only herself and her feelings rather than being a clumsy mouthpiece for the author's preferred characterisation of others, or to let readers work out the omissions and ignorances and half-truths for themselves (or not) - became a recurring frustration for me as the novel wore on. For a taciturn, emotionally-damaged teenager, Katniss is almost preternaturally perceptive about motive, unless there is a specific plot reason for her not to be. Almost as soon as a character appears, Katniss has to tell us that they're a Good Egg really, as if somehow we aren't trusted to form our own judgements. Take this exchange, for example, between Katniss and the stylists assigned to give her a makeover when she arrives in the Capitol (appearances being everything in the quest to attract support, and thus sponsorship, during the build-up to the Games):

The three step back and admire their work. "Excellent! You almost look like a human being now!" says Flavius, and they all laugh.

I force my lips up into a smile to show how grateful I am. "Thank you," I say sweetly. "We don't have much cause to look nice in District Twelve."

This wins them over completely. "Of course, you don't, you poor darling!" says Octavia clasping her hands together in distress for me.

"But don't worry," says Venia. "By the time Cinna is through with you, you're going to be absolutely gorgeous!"

"We promise! You know, now that we've gotten rid of all the hair and filth, you're not horrible at all!" says Flavius encouragingly. "Let's call Cinna!"

They dart out of the room. It's hard to hate my prep team. They're such total idiots. And yet, in an odd way, I know they're sincerely trying to help me.

Strangely enough, I had worked that out, in fact: maybe it was the "distress", maybe it was the "encouragingly", maybe it was the fact that they're too silly and fluttery to be hateful? Who can say. And would it have mattered enormously even if I'd read them differently?

The only character whom Katniss consistently misinterprets is, of course, the love interest, her fellow District 12 tribute Peeta. Peeta is a bit of a charisma vacuum, frankly; tiny District 11-er Rue makes much more of an impression during her brief flowering of (manipulatively) endearing page-time, although apparently not enough of an impression on some readers that they noticed that she's repeatedly described as having dark skin, and thus it's not, in fact, political correctness gone mad that a black actress was cast in the film to play this innocent little girl who rouses Katniss' protectiveness because her delicacy and vulnerability remind her of Prim. (Sigh, world. No, really, sigh.)

But Peeta, however dull in his own right, is central to the novel's most interesting aspect. I don't mean the Games themselves. The Games are, as many others have said, basically just a watered-down version of Battle Royale, lacking that film's gruelling physical and emotional brutalism. It's clear from the outset of The Hunger Games that not only is Katniss not going to die, but also she's not going to have to kill anyone who doesn't deserve it in some way (trying to kill her, trying to kill someone else who's nice, generically evil). No; what kept me turning the pages so convulsively was a) Katniss herself, who - irritatingly over-explanatory narration aside - proves a smart, tough and resourceful heroine, and b) wanting to see how Collins was going to Houdini out of the narrative locked box she'd set up for herself. Sure, Katniss wasn't going to kill, but how would Collins get round that? There can only be one winner of the Hunger Games, and you only win by being the last child left alive.

The twists and turns of Katniss' adventures in the Games arena - her struggles to find enough water to keep herself alive as much as her brushes with more violent death - are entertaining. But what impressed me was the emerging theme of how the Games are played out: not just through killing and avoiding being killed, but also by playing to the vast unseen television audience, who are watching the selective feeds from the arena's omnipresent cameras. Before the Games, Katniss gets a crash-course - semi-successfully - in how to perform for the crowd: primped and preened and dressed in fabulously ridiculous but eyecatching outfits by her chief stylist Cinna, she and the other tributes are paraded through the Capitol, and interviewed in a flashy TV studio before an eager audience.

Remember, heads high. Smiles. They're going to love you! I hear Cinna's voice in my head. I lift my chin a bit higher, put on my most winning smile, and wave with my free hand. I'm glad now I have Peeta to clutch for balance, he is so steady, solid as a rock. As I gain confidence, I actually blow a few kisses to the crowd. The people of the Capitol are going nuts, showering us with flowers, shouting our names, our first names, which they have bothered to find on the program.

The pounding music, the cheers, the admiration work their way into my blood, and I can't suppress my excitement. Cinna has given me a great advantage. No one will forget me. Not my look, not my name. Katniss. The girl who was on fire.

Win the crowd, and you win tangible support in the arena: gifts of food, weapons, first aid supplies. Fail to entertain, though, and you're in trouble, as Katniss finds when she spends the first few days of the Games just hunting for food and hiding from the other tributes a couple of miles away on the other side of the arena (her strategy for much of the novel is simply to find enough resources to survive while everyone else kills each other, although she has a couple of very enjoyable moments where she puts her smarts and her survival skills to more pro-active uses). One morning she awakes to a forest fire, which drives her back towards the action, the Games' controllers (she realises) having decide to push her into doing something that will excite the viewing public a little more. Before she goes into the Games, Haymitch - a washed-up former winner of the Games and the District 12 tributes' chaperone and advisor in the Capitol - teaches her something that will prove to be the key to her survival:

"All right, enough," he says. "We've got to find another angle. Not only are you hostile, I don't know anything about you. I've asked you fifty questions and still have no sense of your life, your family, what you care about. They want to know about you, Katniss."

"But I don't want them to! They're already taking my future! They can't have the things that mattered to me in the past!" I say.

"Then lie! Make something up!" says Haymitch.

"I'm not good at lying," I say.

"Well, you better learn fast."

Delight the viewing public enough - give them surprises, give them pluck, give them someone to root for, give them a story - and you might be able to tip the scales in your favour. Katniss gradually discovers that she can use Peeta's very public declaration of affection for her - stammered out between blushes during his pre-Games TV interview - to her advantage. Audiences lap up the drama of, as she puts it, "Poor tragic us", the star-crossed lovers who cannot both survive the arena. And so Katniss plays along, performing desperate heartbreak for the cameras as she protects the badly-injured Peeta and plots her survival.

Impulsively, I lean forward and kiss him, stopping his words. This is probably overdue anyway since he's right, we are supposed to be madly in love. It's the first time I've ever kissed a boy, which should make some sort of impression I guess, but all I can register is how unnaturally hot his lips are from the fever.

The conflicting layers of Katniss' emotions - her play-acting, her (entirely baseless and plot-convenient) conviction that Peeta is play-acting too and secretly out to kill her, and her inexorably growing feelings for him regardless - are sensitively and subtly drawn, and as a sideways looks at both the artificial narrative arcs of reality TV and the performative self-identity and lack of privacy of the internet age, it's very effective indeed, with Collins juggling the ambiguities and painful compromises required by the situation extremely well:

"Either that or he's got very generous sponsors," says Peeta. "I wonder what we'd have to do to get Haymitch to send us some bread."

I raise my eyebrows before I remember he doesn't know about the message Haymitch sent us a couple of nights ago. One kiss equals one pot of broth. It's not the sort of thing I can blurt out, either. To say my thoughts aloud would be tipping off the audience that the romance has been fabricated to play on their sympathies and that would result in no food at all. Somehow, believably, I've got to get things back on track. Something simple to start with. I reach out and take his hand.

So, yes: recommended, with reservations. Because it hooks, and it won't let go.

~~Nic

An Avalanche About to Slide

Women, even quite young women, had a disconcerting habit of falling in love with him. Or imagining love. He would not have minded so much if he himself were not susceptible to sexual longings as some individuals are susceptible to pollen even as others are immune.

Seigl was sexually susceptible: less so emotionally susceptible. He'd had a number of love affairs since late adolescence but had never wanted to marry nor had he been weakened, or flattered, by another's wish that he marry. "Intimacy, on a daily basis. Hourly! How is it accomplished?"

I don't imagine that The Tattooed Girl (2003) will be the last Joyce Carol Oates novel that I read - any writer as lauded as she is surely deserves more than one chance - but it certainly didn't turn out to be a great place to start. There are some excellent passages in this potboiler about an author, his domestic help, and her lover, but ultimately I never really felt like it rose above the exaggerated flaws of its central trio - pedantic, petty, and almost childishly lurid, respectively - to become something larger and more subtle. (I note that Vicky's first outing with Oates, way back in the infancy of this blog, didn't go terribly well either. Can anyone make a recommendation?)

The first of our trio - of whom we're told that he "wasn't a vain man"; I refer my readers to the excerpt at the head of this post and ask, oh really? - is one Joshua Seigl, a half-Jewish author primarily famous for writing a Holocaust novel. He is a fussy, prissy mass of neuroses, "a large bewhiskered gregarious-seeming man who in fact prized his independence, even his aloneness", and much of those sections of the novel that are told from his point-of-view consist of him overthinking things to the point of paralysis, or remembering how he has overthought things in the past. What do his fellow residents of the exclusive Carmel Heights district think of him? Is his spare room clean enough? Should he take a teaching post at a university to support himself? The answer to that one, inevitably, was no; he fears "the powerful attraction of teaching, as an emotional substitute for writing".

I imagine it was Oates' intent to present Joshua as his own worst enemy - perhaps if he stopped procrastinating and gave up some of that much-prized solitude, he might become a bit more interesting, if only because he'd have to vary his topics of conversation a little after a while - but he makes for pretty tedious and rather caricatured company. He is "an avalanche about to slide", who walks with a cane, clings to railings as he descends staircases for fear of falling, and decides to employ an assistant - not as his secretary, you understand, more as his executor. He romanticises himself and his privileged existence with every faltering, emotionally-palsied step he takes:

The subject of finances embarrassed Seigl, and made him restless. His Marxist sympathies arouse him to a self-disapproval and yet: receiving an income freed him from any obsession with money-making. There was a purely romantic, unworldly quality to Seigl, his discomfort at being paid for his writing, for any expression of his "spirit". For wasn't writing a spiritual endeavor, in essence? It was conceived in the privacy of a man's heart, and therefore had to be pure, uncontaminated by greed.

He is also, we discover a little way into the novel, all of 38 years old.

Despite having all the lust for life and self-possessed spark of a particularly timid septugenarian, however, Joshua still appreciates the visual stimulus that is Alma Busch, the young woman upon whom he impulsively bestows the office of his assistant. (The phrasing is deliberate; 'bestowing' is more or less exactly how Joshua conceives of his relationship to her, and he is almost entirely oblivious to the damaging power imbalance this creates.) It's not quite that the sight of her enables him to cast off the shackles of his self-imposed aura of premature age - he mentally puts her in the box he marks "sexually attractive young females", which seems a bizarrely detached way for even a midlife-crisising man to think - but he definitely finds her hot. Hot, that is, in a really, really patronising way: after reflecting on her "beautiful thick-lashed eyes, moist and yearning", he proceeds to think of her as an animal:

Yet he smiled down at this awkward buxom girl standing so passively before him. Like a young farm creature, a sleek young calf for instance, waiting to be herded in one direction or another.

Alma is, I think, the most interesting character in the novel, in the sense that she's the one who feels closest to a human being. We mostly see her through the eyes of the other two protagonists - more on the third in our trio, Dimitri, in just a moment - but on the occasions when we are party to her thoughts, she's a fascinatingly vivid creation, all longing and rage and inarticulacy:

And Alma made sure he wasn't creeping up on her like he did sometimes (without him knowing she saw him in the corner of her eye) and she was prowling restless and hot Hate hate hate both of you Jew kike bastards and her heart was pounding like she'd sniffed the purest coke straight up into her brain and she watched seeing her hand open a glass-fronted bookcase in Seigl's study and from a shelf she pulled a book that made her smile almost, small as a children's book, which was what she thought it might be, the title sounded like a children's fairy tale, Anna Livia Plurabelle, but when she opened it and tried to read the tiny print swam in her eyes, fucking words made no sense like they were not English or any kind of English she'd been taught and her heart kicked in resentment and fury and her hands yanked the covers of the little book back until she heard the fragile spine crack and she smiled with childish satisfaction like a boy yanking a frog's legs apart tearing the frog into two pieces. There! Fucker.

Her inarticulacy, in particular, makes her stand out: in a novel filled with people who spend a lot of time telling eloquently plausible half-truths or downright lies about themselves, Alma is someone who is oppressed by words. Her struggles to explain herself - to name herself - are so often suppressed and stunted by others' abuse and condescension, or her own fear and incomprehension, that she repeatedly resorts to physical, (self-)destructive ways of expressing herself: the damaging of one of Joshua's books, here, or the use of her body to keep people (men) interested:

Saying now, to make Dmitri who was sullen and sulky and disgusted with her love again, as in high school she'd tried to make boys love her who'd gone out with her once, twice, three times then dropped by saying weird wild things that flew into her head, anything to snag their straying attention, "Guess what? He said he had some sickness. 'Medical condition' he said. This cane he has..."

Even, here, when she does use words, they are desperate and scattershot things that "flew into her head", rather than tools she can marshall to regain control of a situation or express her thoughts.

Alma's lover, Dmitri, is a much less nuanced portrait: a villain at whom we can readily hiss, but not much more than that. Even his own point-of-view describes him as a "predator", and when we're told that he feels "a thrill of pity" for Alma when he first sees her, it provokes a shiver of misgiving. Here is an example of where I'm determined to try Oates again, because 'thrill' is a wonderful choice to combine with 'pity', offering a beautifully concise shock of Avoid! This! Man! - who gets excited by a fellow human being's vulnerability, except someone skin-crawlingly creepy? - without overplaying the hand. It's a shame, then, that Oates doesn't stop there, instead piling on the evidence of Dmitri's wrongness with each fresh page. Exhibit A:

He was feeding her now, watching her eat. [...] Sometimes watching females gorge themselves disgusted him but Alma was different. A beautiful soft fleshy goose you wanted to fatten. Stuff her milky white face and throat with the richest foods till her liver swelled, ripened, burst.

Ick ick ick I do not want to spend an entire novel in this man's company get me out of here.

Dmitri hates Jews (or at least the Jews like Joshua that his confirmation bias lets him see): they're rich, he's not, thanks to their "cunning and conniving" natures and/or "possibly a gene". But most of all he hates women, and likes to spend as much time as possible musing on how his abusive, manipulative and eventually violent power over Alma makes him feel more like a man, and how if he were only as rich as Joshua he'd be sleeping with some desirable woman rather than "slut white trash" like Alma.

A human punching bag, this Tattooed Girl.

Every guy needs this, sometimes.

Her mouth was bleeding. Her nose. Handfuls of hair yanked out. A tear in one of the soft, dopey-looking nipples.

Alma is 'the Tattooed Girl' because of a tattoo on her cheek. Superficially, the difference between Joshua and Dmitri can be seen in the divergent ways they respond to their first sight of this tattoo: Joshua's impulse is to try to brush it away, as if it is a temporary blemish, whereas Dimitri sees it as a target that he might aim a fist at. But is Joshua's dreamy musings on the female form and his comparison of Alma to "a sleek young calf" really different in kind, rather than degree, to Dmitri's imaginings of her as a goose for fattening?

Neither of them credit her with much of a mind of her own. Joshua thinks of her as a "simpleton" and a "child"; her likely virtues as an assistant, he reflects, will be that she is, "Not very bright, maybe. But steadfast, dependable. Likely to be loyal to her employer. And never critical", and once she is working for him he tells himself that "[s]imple repetitive household tasks that would have been maddening to Seigl seemed to be consoling to her", blissfully ignorant of the fact that she is stewing in unfocused anger at him. To Dmitri, she is a sexual being without self-awareness or possibly even self; she is a "slattern", who has "a look about her like she wasn't wearing any clothes but didn't know it". To Alma herself, she is helpless:

For the Tattooed Girl was the first to concede her weakness for adoring any man who refrained from kicking her in the gut, as she adored any man who did kick her in the gut, out of a craven need to adore any man.

This is, essentially, the novel; I haven't mentioned Joshua's unbearable sister Jet, who swoops in periodically to tell Joshua what a genius he is, strike dramatic poses, and talk a lot about how having Jewish heritage on one side of the family gives her the right to annexe other people's genuine suffering to the grand and terrible project of being a spoiled rich girl with bugger all to do. It's possible she's mentally ill, as it happens, but goodness knows Joshua doesn't stop gazing at his navel long enough to notice. What develops is a sort of Gothic novel: we duly wallow in luridness, hatred, and Joshua's pompous self-absorption:

Seigl had intended to begin with his manuscripts. Clearly, this was urgent. Yet, faced with the prospect of seeing what he'd accumulated over the past fifteen years, and of needing to reread so much, he felt weak, defeated beforehand. To be a writer was a moral commitment, maybe he hadn't the strength. The tragic grandeur of his subjects mocked his feeble talent. [...] he lapsed into a sudden, stricken silence.

As I wrote in my notes on this book at several points, frustrated: YES, IT'S SO HARD TO BE YOU.

So: moments of wonderful insight and skill and subtlety, lots of dreary histrionic silliness to wade through to get to them. Please, point me towards some better Joyce Carol Oates, because on this evidence I would love to discover her work.

~~Nic

Our damn consolation

I've said hardly anything about the Orange Prize so far this year.  I've been sitting back and watching from the sidelines, resisting the lure of the longlist and staying out of the perennial dogfight about sexism.  But now the shortlist is out and I'm back on board with a read-along.  I prevaricated about doing it, but then a colleague at work asked me if I would like to host an Orange Prize reader's day with her in June and how could I resist?*  Obviously this would mean reading the six books, and I couldn't resist that either.  This year's shortlist has grabbed my attention.  After a slightly lacklustre showing in 2011, I'm excited to see how cerebral this year's list is.  I'm sad and slightly outraged that Ali Smith has been omitted (again!), but thrilled to see The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller there (I already read and reviewed it in November last year). I haven't read any Anne Enright since The Gathering won the Booker Prize but I loved that book and am keen to read more; Patchett, Ozick and Georgina Harding have all be on my TBR for a while.  

Which leaves Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. Of the shortlisted books, this was the one about which I felt ambivalent.  It has been sitting on my book shelves for almost 12 months, since last year's Orange Prize in fact.  It arrived from Serpent's Tail during the longlist readathon and got pushed to one side.  Then it was Book at Bedtime on Radio 4, and then on the Booker shortlist, and then the Giller shortlist, but I still didn't read it.  Why? Because it's set during WWII and it's about jazz.  As you may remember, I have a very low tolerance threshold for war books.  I could go a very long time without reading yet another novel set in Nazi-occupied Europe.  Last year's Orange longlisted The Invisible Bridge very nearly did for me.   And jazz?  I just don't get it.  My ear isn't tuned in right; all I hear is randomness and twiddling.  I understand that what I'm listening to is pure musicality, improvisational genius, but I still don't get it deep down. So the motivation to read Half Blood Blues wasn't ever very strong. It was the first of this year's shortlisted books that I picked up after the announcement simply because it was sat ready on my shelf.

I've read it quickly (by my standards anyway) in just four days, expedited by a day off sick. What a strangely compelling reading experience it was; not exhilarating exactly, but exciting because of Edugyan's accomplishment.  The plotting is achingly simple and the rest is all character, character, character.  The book stretches out the personalities of its principles like taffy.  Edugyan makes them so thin at times you can see right through them; and then she gathers them back into themselves to make something rich and unfathomable. Afterwards they squat and grow in your mind.

Our narrator is Sidney Roscoe Griffiths - Sid to his friends - an octogenarian double bassist, recounting the story of his experiences in Nazi Berlin and occupied Paris from the vantage of fifty years hindsight. He was in Germany during jazz's golden age in the 1920s and early 1930s, playing with the Hot-Time Swingers.  Sid's oldest friend 'Chip' Jones was the drummer - they were both from Baltimore, the African-Americans needed to 'sex up' the German band.  Their manager Ernst played the clarinet, and there was Big Fritz on sax. Jewish Paul Butterstein played their piano.  And then there was 'the kid' on the trumpet.  Hieronymous Thomas Falk: twenty years old and an absolute prodigy, one of God's golden few.   The Nazi regime forced the group underground in the late 30s, and in 1939 they fled Berlin for Paris under the auspices of Delilah Brown and her patron, Louis Armstrong.  They settled down to cut a record - the record that will make them famous - only for the 'Boots' to invade less than a year later.   1940 finds them waiting anxiously for the arrival of the visas that will allow them to leave the country, but a reckless early morning visit to a cafe leads to Hiero's arrest for 'race pollution' and the dissolution of the band forever.  (That isn't a spoiler; Sid recounts the arrest in the opening chapter.)

Falk is a rare thing in 1930s Germany: a 'Mischling' or half-blood 'but so dark no soul ever like to guess his mama a white Rhinelander.  Hell his skin glistened like pure oil.'  His status in 1930s Europe is increasingly difficult and uncertain.  In his native Germany he has been stripped of his citizenship; in Paris he is the enemy. He stands out everywhere and doesn't belong anywhere: 'When Hiero'd cut in with his native German, well, [they] would damn near die of surprise.  Most ain't liked it though.  A savage talking like he civilised.'  Sid is the opposite; he can fit in anywhere.  He is 'so light-skinned folks often took me for white.  Son of two Baltimore quadroons, I come out straight-haired, green-eyed, a right little Spaniard... this given me a softer ride than some.'  Like his bandmate Paul - Jewish, but blond haired and blue-eyed - Sid can 'pass' in a prejudiced society.  His difference isn't stamped on his features, although this leads to a problem of a different order: 'we passed, sure' he remembers, 'But there was passing, and there was passing.  Sometimes it seemed we'd passed right out of our own skins.'  Like Hiero, Sid doesn't always know where he stands in the world or, rather, what he stands for.  'Passing' compromises his sense of identity.  Occasionally there is a note of envy in his descriptions of Hiero, of his grave face and 'majestically bony' physique, his blackness 'like a starless night'.

Sid's relationships with those around him are the threads that hold the book together.  Following them, untangling them, stepping back and reappraising them is what makes the novel such an intense pleasure.  They are fiendishly difficult to riddle out.  Chip, for example, is Sid's oldest friend - the pair are still close in 1992 - but he's a player, a hard drinker, an inveterate liar and, on more than one occasion, downright cruel.  Their relationship is ambivalent, sometimes hostile, always unequal.  Sid characterises it as more addiction than affection:

Don't know what it is about that man.  He's like a weakness for me, even seventy years later.  I ain't a stupid man, no more than most. And he ain't that damn charming. But it seems we is friends to the last.  Why I don't know.  The best I can say is that it's like some rundown part of me.  I just got this broken switch in my brain, can't say no to Chip Jones.

But it is the triangular relationship between Sid, Delilah and Hiero that focuses the novel's tension.  Hiero is always 'the kid' to Sid, and an object of hatred, jealousy, compassion and (almost certainly) love.  Unlike everybody else Sid is not convinced by Hiero's musical genius:

He sounded broody, slow, holding the notes way longer than seemed sane.  The music should've sounded something like a ship's horn carrying across water - hard, bright, clear.  The kid, hell, he made it muddy, passing his notes not only over seas but through soil too.  Sounded rich, which might've been fine for a older gate, but felt fake from him...there wasn't no grace. ... He wailed. He moaned. He pleaded and seethed.  He dragged every damn feeling out of that trumpet but hate.  A sort of naked, pathetic way of playing...  I hated it.  It felt so damn false, so showy.

When the enigmatic Delilah Brown comes onto the scene, showering Hiero with attention and praise while Sid languishes lovesick for her, his jealousy is towering.  He oscillates between feelings of rage and envy, and unexpected flushes of sympathy.  The sympathy is a response to Hiero's innate tragedy as a nationless, family-less outcast, gawky and unloved.  His desire to be loved, and to be needed, is echoed by Sid's own.

The wild swings of Sid's attitude to Hiero are indicative of his general nature.  He feels things powerfully in black and white.  He peppers his narration with portents; feelings of darkness and light wash through him in waves and he characterises suspense simply as a 'blackness' hovering over him or sitting in his stomach.  It is difficult to tell whether he is trying to create an effect for the story, or whether he actually experiences life in this yo-yo fashion.  Either way it signals what an interesting narrator he is.  Not because he isn't trustworthy - we surely know by now that narrators can never be trusted - but because he is so very transparent.  He is telling the story the way he thinks he wants us to hear it, but he isn't hiding anything.  So, although Sid is apparently oblivious to it, it is clear that Hiero adores him, looks up to him, wants to be him or to be with him. (I felt there were some moments when Hiero was being coded as gay, but perhaps I was over reading?) 

Edugyan does such a beautiful job with Sid, and Hiero, and the rest, that I didn't yawn my way through the WWII setting.  It was a good fit, and almost beside the point.  I was almost disappointed that I still didn't like jazz by the end, because I wanted to feel what the characters were feeling about it.  But I sort of understood why they liked it, why it was (as Chip so eloquently puts it) a 'damn consolation' for everything that goes wrong in their world.  I also understood - and this is why Half Blood Blues has been nominated for all those prizes I think - why it was no damn consolation at all. 

 ~~Victoria~~

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Another Kind of Light and Life

The logical thing is to do as he's asked: to think about it. Indeed. Write it down. Remember it, re-imagine it, gather it together.

Because it'll be proof - won't it? - proof that you really are doing what you want. Proof that I, Jessie Lamb, being of sound mind and good health, take full responsibility for my decision, and intend to pursue it to its rightful end.

I underline my name on the pad. The question is, where to begin?

Jane Rogers' Booker-longlisted and Arthur C Clarke Award-shortlisted The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011) has attracted distinctly mixed reactions during its brief lifetime. (Here is a representative selection of comments from reviewers and critics I read regularly, most of whom I agree with much of the time: two for, two against, and one not completely convinced either way.) For my part, after some initial scepticism, I found myself utterly won over. Here's why.

The novel tells two parallel stories. In one - the framing story - protagonist Jessie sits alone in the small room where she has been imprisoned by her father. Armed with a pad and pen, she tells us the second story: the tale of how her relationship with her father deteriorated to the point where he decided to hold her captive. You see, with a teenager's keen sense of urgently idealistic melodrama, Jessie is planning to sacrifice herself for the sake - as she sees it - of the human race.

The first few chapters sketch out the dilemma: it's five minutes into the future, and humanity's continued existence lies in the balance on account of a fearsome new illness called Maternal Death Syndrome. It's exactly the sort of improbably over-the-top, instantaneous super-plague that literary writers dabbling in science fiction love: an unholy union of CJD and AIDS that infects every woman, everywhere, and is triggered by pregnancy, effectively turning conception into a death sentence. It makes very little sense at all, but it proves a potent allegorical and emotional lens to bring Rogers' concerns into focus: how, in such a scenario, does a young person like Jessie envision her future? Can individual sacrifices matter - let alone make a difference - in the face of such overwhelming odds?

It occurs to me, having written that last sentence, that in some ways Testament is a climate change novel. Not in the sense of literally being about climate change, although certainly that is an element of its setting; rather, in the way it examines the powerlessness of individuals - even really, really green ones - to combat a global problem effectively through their own actions. Like many teenagers, Jessie is passionate about, as she puts it, "living on the planet in a less greedy destructive way", and is convinced that anyone who isn't confronting the problem Right This Instant is wallowing in a typical adult "cynical, complacent, couldn't-care-less" attitude. She starts meeting with a group of young would-be activists, who all agree that the older generation is the problem, that MDS is really just a long-overdue punishment, and that even now adults are responding with proper urgency:

"The point is, a bad thing was ready to happen. The ground was prepared."

"Not by us," I said. "By our parents. And their parents. They're the ones who've messed things up."

"Right. But now this has happened everyone can blame someone else. Instead of being mad at the government for giving scientists money to make hideous weapons, or at themselves for polluting the entire world, they can put all the blame on some unknown monster. [...] People always think there's enough time left to change."

"Well, they're stupid."

Inspired by her friends, Jessie tries to reduce her impact on the planet, but is doomed to be frustrated when her parents don't quite share her zeal ("Dad went yes yes you can plant veg in the garden, yes we can stop the supermarket run, if you've got time to go to the market. Transferring the effort to me, and then niggling if they thought I hadn't spent long enough on my homework") and outraged when she catches them committing such dreadful sins as booking a holiday abroad.

As a reader, it's hard to escape the knowledge that even if she did manage to convert them to growing all their own food, one family - or even a whole town of families - is never going to be enough to overcome climate change. For Jessie, though, I imagine this objection would be beside the point; I imagine this fairly securely, because I recognise so much of my own adolescent self in the way she writes her world.

For Jessie, individual actions do change the world - they have to, because the political is personal, everything is urgent, and the alternative is that you have no control over your environment whatsoever. Jessie and her peers are obsessed with control, because as teenagers still living at home they're inescapably aware of how little autonomy they have. When a fellow climate change activist blurts out, one day, "'We shouldn't have to live with adults [...] We can look after ourselves. [...] Why should we be kept like - like pets? By them?'" - and, with a healthy dose of dramatic irony, goes on to compare being raised by one's parents to 18 years of "imprisonment" - she's expressing, naively but utterly sincerely, what everyone else is thinking.

Likewise, when Jessie is attacked by a group of boys one evening, her response is to blame herself:

He and Mum must have been as shocked about the gang as I was, because they became ridiculously protective, and offered me lifts all over the place, until it finally sank in to their heads that I had given up car travel. I knew I'd been attacked because I had stupidly walked straight into something; if I kept my eyes and ears open I could avoid trouble.

She has to preserve (an illusion of) control: if she just follows the correct behavioural formula in the future, it can't happen again.

Many young people who feel so acutely their inability to control their own lives develop anorexia as a tragic coping mechanism. Jessie, though, has a different - if no less self-destructive - option open to her, because her father is a research scientist whose laboratory is investigating MDS. A vaccine has been developed, but since absolutely everyone in the world is already infected with the virus that causes MDS (bow down before the super-plague, puny humans!), it can only be given to a gestating foetus. MDS-immune children can be produced, therefore, but only if there are women willing to do the gestating - using frozen embryos stored before the advent of MDS - and die of melted brains in the process; indeed, the only way a woman can be kept alive long enough to bring a pregnancy to term is by being put in a coma. You can see, I suspect, where this is going.

The scenario is simultaneously grim and ludicrous - the biochemist in the room confirms that by the time such a foetus had developed an immune system of its own (necessary for the vaccine to work), it would have been infected with MDS by its mother anyway - but plausibility isn't Rogers' point. Her goal is to give idealistic, desperate Jessie the ultimate chance to take control of her life: by ending it in the cause of something much bigger than herself. As "a stream of girls started to volunteer" to be 'Sleeping Beauties', as they're dubbed, Jessie is, unsurprisingly, inspired. As she explains, looking back:

You could see why they did, even then. They were following Ursula Johnson's example. They did it for their husbands, or their families, or their religions. They did it for the future. What better single thing could a person do with her life?

But naturally people fussed and objected like they always do when someone tries to do something positive.

She just about acknowledges that perhaps not everyone who becomes a Sleeping Beauty does so as an exercise of healthy free choice, but she is resolutely convinced that anyone who expresses concern over the idea is just a cynical, complacent couldn't-care-less enemy of all that is hopeful ("OK there are bad things, like the Chinese who sold their daughters to clinics - OK - but because there are bad things does it mean nothing new should happen? That nothing can be done?" Ah, yes, it's always China...). For Jessie the narrative of sacrifice, the personal act, is the point. When her dad mentions that eventually the Sleeping Beauties won't be necessary, because research on artificial wombs has been accelerated, she doesn't want to know, presumably because it lacks heroism:

"What are artificial wombs?"

"Incubators. Machines babies can grow in."

I thought it sounded disgusting.

(Yes, Jessie. Disgusting. As opposed to actual women living their final months in comas while their brains slowly liquefy.)

This is where Rogers' use of a snippet from Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis as an epigraph for the novel ("Another kind of light and life / Are to be mine...") comes into focus. In most versions of the story, the Greek king Agamemnon's blood sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, to ensure a fair wind to Troy, is all about him: it is demanded of him by the gods, it is his decision to make, and ten years later Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, places the blame for her bereavement squarely on him when she kills him for it. But in Euripides' play, Iphigenia - although initially a helpless, tricked pawn - ultimately chooses her own fate, and in doing so she specifically frames it as a heroic death. She is presented as a paragon of female virtue and bravery, in implicit contrast to the faithless Helen, whose desertion of Agamemnon's brother Menelaus is the reason(/excuse) why there's a massive army of Greeks standing around waiting to sail to Troy, so they can mooch around on the beach outside the city walls for ten years and bicker about slave girls.

On one level, Iphigenia's self-sacrifice is a pointless act of self-delusion, a story she tells herself to give meaning to her surrender to the inevitable; the only way you get out of a situation like this alive in Greek drama is through a deus ex machina, and on this occasion the gods aren't playing, because they want you dead too (although in another of Euripides' plays Iphigenia is secretly spirited off at the last moment by Artemis, and an animal magically disguised as her is killed in her place; the Greeks did love messing with their myths). On another level, though, it is an act of agency, however warped and tragic: faced with a situation she can't hope to escape, Iphigenia takes control in the only way she can, by choosing death before it can be forced upon her.

So Jessie is Iphigenia, although in her case she believes she is saving life rather than enabling a war. She has already convinced herself that she has no future:

"Our lives won't be worth living if we know there's no future."

"Why? There's no future for anyone beyond 80 years or so. Everyone dies."

"But we always know there'll be more people. We know it'll all carry on."

Looking back from her makeshift cell, Jessie describes how she felt oppressed by her inability to do anything in the face of such bleakness ("I was powerless. I had to find a way out"), and also how the Sleeping Beauty programme offered hope ("Scientists had found a way for us to survive"). We get glimpses of the scheme's reception in the world around Jessie: the first Sleeping Beauty, aged 15, gets a funeral at Westminster Abbey, but the participating labs are picketed daily, especially after secret filmed footage of the young women in comas is smuggled out. When her friend Sal, horrified, shows Jessie the footage, she is characteristically dismissive, refusing to make the connection between the heroic act of sacrifice she imagines and the ugly reality:

The point about it is they don't show the women like people you could care about, they show them like animals, in disgusting states, naked, puking up.

When Jessie goes to the lab and signs up to be a Sleeping Beauty, again her desire to control her life, however much harm she does herself in the process, is at the forefront; she describes her relief at feeling that she is "doing something" at last as "the beautiful sharp knife of my secret". The imagery is, if you'll forgive the pun, pointed: The Testament of Jessie Lamb is not the pro-life tract that some have suggested (well, I have no idea how Rogers intended it, but it doesn't have to be read that way), but a novel about a teenage girl finding the ultimate way to self-harm. And through that self-harm, she feels fully in control for the first time:

Mum and Dad don't understand. They think it's something awful. If I could make them see that actually it's making me happy; that deciding what I'm going to do, and setting that in motion, is giving me power; that for the first time in my life I feel safe and in control - if I could make them understand that, surely they wouldn't be upset?

It probably doesn't help that her father - at least in Jessie's presentation of him - is nauseatingly up-beat about the whole thing, in the days before he realises Jessie plans to join in. When Jessie's mother expresses horror that the Sleeping Beauties are "'expected to give up their lives for alien genes'" (it's not clear to me how that is worse than dying in the same way for your own genes, but I imagine I'm in a minority on this), he replies, "'But the girls who do this will know they're helping the survival of the whole race.'" Thanks, Dad!

Jessie squirrels away these moments, and unearths them, later, when he flatly refuses to let her do the same, and locks her up in an effort to stop her from returning to the lab to begin the process. I found the contrast between the gung-ho dad of the past and the implacably opposed dad of the narrative's present to be rather forced, but we can perhaps put this down to Jessie being selective in her retelling.

And yet, she is convincing. Not in the sense of getting me to agree with her decision - dying for the sake of the human race's future breeding potential, rather than to save actual living human beings now, is much too abstract and woolly a goal for me, especially when even within the novel it is presented as potentially unnecessary - but in the sense that I was convinced by the end that this was her decision. It's self-aggrandizement, it's self-harm, it's something she might have thought better of, had she waited a year or two: but it is absolutely and without doubt her choice, passionately made and claimed as such. And if you believe in a woman's inalienable right to choose what she does with her body - as I do - then that also involves supporting women who make choices you wouldn't.

"But you lose me here, Jess. I can't buy it - this destiny stuff, this thing I need to do. You're a free agent. You can do anything with your life."

"I know. Listen. Let me explain. Because it is freedom. That's what it is."

Like Iphigenia, Jessie chooses to embrace a self-abnegation that achieves, objectively, nothing except grief for her family. Like Iphigenia, she makes me believe that doing so is a measure of her agency.

~~Nic