21st century literature

Alan Bennett, The uncommon reader

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Light with bite is how I would describe Alan Bennett‘s delightful novella The uncommon reader. But, before I explain that further, a quick plot summary for those few who haven’t come across it. It explores what happens when Queen Elizabeth II stumbles across a mobile library on the palace grounds and becomes obsessed with books and reading. Bennett cheekily suggests what the impact might be on her family, staff and the politicians around her when reading becomes not only something she wants to do all the time (instead of her work) but also results in her starting to think and question.

One of the delightful things about the novel is that it can be read on several levels from the straight (a sweet story about the current English Queen discovering the thrill of reading late in her life) through the contemplative (a meditation on readers, reading and the value of literature) to the satirical (an expose of life in the palace, and more broadly of politics and those involved in the political process).

Take for example, reading. The Queen (in the book) says that: “Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.” Fair enough, we all agree with that I’d say. But then there’s this, again from our newly enlightened reading Queen: “Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book as it were closes the book.” Hmmm…Bennett’s Queen is one clever (and scary) lady!

Jokes at the expense of palace officials, politics and politicians abound. Nothing really new here but they are proffered with a light touch. The Queen, now talking about writing her own book, says “To enquire into the evidence for something on which you have already decided is the unacknowledged premise of every public enquiry, surely?” on which the Prime Minister thinks to himself “If this was to be the tone of what the Queen was planning to write there was no telling what she was going to say. ‘I think you would do better just to tell your story, ma’am'”.

This is no sentimental tale, but neither is it completely cynical (though some could see it that way). Sly is perhaps the best word to describe its ability to engage us with the humanity of the characters while skewering them and their (our) world at the same time. However, I won’t go on, except to say that the ironies, word play and allusions evident in the title give a clue to what is inside – and yet it can be read and enjoyed whether or not you pick up all, some or none of them. I’m sure I missed my share. But that’s okay, as I would be more than happy to read it again.

Alan Bennett
The uncommon reader
London: Faber and Faber, 2007
124pp
ISBN: 9781846680496

Note: I originally posted this on my reading group’s site but, since one of my online groups will be discussing this in the next quarter, I decided to post it over here too as a record of my current reading and discussions.

Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable creatures

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Bookcover

Cover image courtesy HarperCollins Australia

Most readers experience, I think, periods of reading synchronicity when we read books in close succession that are related in some way. I am experiencing such a period now as Tracy Chevalier‘s Remarkable creatures is the third book I’ve read recently to deal in some way with the first decades of the 19th century. The others are David Mitchell’s The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America.

Tracy Chevalier would not normally be high priority for me, but this book intrigued me because of its period and setting. You see, it is set in Lyme Regis in the early 1800s, and that rings a special bell for me! Yes, it’s to do with Jane Austen. Not only did she visit Lyme Regis, but she set a significant scene in Persuasion there*. So, my appetite was whetted.

But, I must say, I was somewhat disappointed. It’s not that I expected a lot, really, but I did expect a little more than I got. In other words, I didn’t expect exciting or innovative prose, but I did expect writing that wouldn’t bother me. However, it did, and this was mostly due to a lack of subtlety. The best writing shows, not tells, but there was way too much telling in this book, and it falls into two main types:

  • Giving “facts” that we should know. Here is Elizabeth over-explaining Mary’s calling her “Ma’am”, when she’d previously called her “Miss”:

And she was calling me “ma-am” now. Spinster or not, I had outgrown “miss”. Ladies were called “miss” while they still had a chance of marrying.

  • Describing something, such as a character’s emotions, when it should be (and usually is) apparent. Here is a bit of petulance that sounds rather silly in the first person voice of a supposedly mature Elizabeth:

As angry as I sounded, I was also secretly pleased that Colonel Birch had discovered the value of my fish enough to want one for himself.

(For a humorous review of an unsubtle book, do read Kerry, aka Hungry Like the Wolf, on Ken Follett’s The pillars of the earth.)

There are also a couple of rather gratuitous references to Jane Austen and her novels, gratuitous because the main characters don’t read novels and the reference to Austen adds nothing significant in terms of plot or characterisation. It’s as if Chevalier knew Austen went there and decided to draw on Austen’s current popularity by making the connection:

One of Miss Austen’s books had even featured Lyme Regis, but I did not read fiction and could not be persuaded to try it. Life itself was far messier, and did not end so tidily, with the heroine making the right match. We Philpot sisters were the very embodiment of that frayed life. I did not need novels to remind me of what I had missed.

Enough of all that, however. Let me give a quick rundown of the plot. It tells the story of two women who were fossil hunters in Lyme Regis in the first half of the nineteenth century. They were Mary Anning (1799-1847), a poor working class woman whose fossil finds helped change the course of paleontology, and Elizabeth Philpot (1780-1857), a gentlewoman who befriended Anning and who was particularly interested in fossil fish. Using known facts and novelistic licence, Chevalier has written an engaging story that focuses not only on the fossils and their impact on scientific and religious thinking of the time but also on the difficulties faced by women, particularly those unmarried like Philpot or unmarried and uneducated like Anning. Philpot says early in the novel that

… I had to find a passion: I was twenty-five years old, unlikely ever to marry, and in need of a hobby to fill my days. It is tedious being a lady sometimes.

Chevalier shows the financial precariousness of women, their lack of power, and how easily they can be exploited. Women, for example, were unable to belong to the Geological Society of London, and Mary’s collections (in particular) were written up in scientific journals by men, often with no credit given to her contribution. This is the real story of the novel and Chevalier captures well the circumscribed lives of women, and the challenges they faced in living independently. And yet, she undermines this by fabricating a jealous falling out between Elizabeth and Mary over a man. Did Chevalier really need to do this to make the story exciting?

That said, the characterisation is effective overall. She differentiates the two main characters not only by their very different voices, but also by creating a conceit for each of them. For Elizabeth it is her describing what people “lead with”. The forthright Mary, for example, leads with her eyes, while one of the foppish male characters leads, she says, with his hair. Good one, I thought! Mary’s conceit is being the “lightning girl”. The book begins with her being struck, but not killed, by lightning when she was a young girl. Lightning thereafter becomes a motif in her life for surprising or lucky events and for strong feelings.

Chevalier also writes some lovely descriptions – of people and landscapes:

While I accommodated her absence, a dull ache in my heart remained, like a fracture that, though healed, ever flares up during damp weather.

and

Lyme Regis is a town that has submitted to its geography rather than forced the land to submit to it …It is not planned, like Bath or Cheltenham or Brighton, but wriggles this way and that, as if trying to escape the hills and sea, and failing.

This is an enjoyable book for the glimpse it gives into the lives of two interesting and little known women, but the writing, for me, doesn’t quite do the story justice. For a more positive review, you may like to read Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

Tracy Chevalier
Remarkable creatures
London, HarperCollins, 2010
352pp.
ISBN: 9780007178384

*It is also the setting, of course, of John Fowles‘ The French lieutenant’s woman.

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

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Alexis de Tocqueville.

Alexis de Tocqueville (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

It’s not surprising, really, that after living in America for two decades Peter Carey should turn his pen to it. Having lived in the US twice myself, I well understand the fascination of trying to understand that large and paradoxical country. In Parrot and Olivier in America, then, Carey sets out to explore America through the eyes of two men from early nineteenth century Europe: Olivier Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, a French aristocrat whose parents had barely survived the French Revolution, and John ‘Parrot’ Larrit, a poor Englishman who had been brought to France as a boy by another French aristocrat.

Olivier was born in 1805, the same year that French writer and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was born. This is not a coincidence as the novel is Carey’s loose re-imagining of Tocqueville’s trip to America, with a friend, to study American prisons. Like Tocqueville, Olivier undertakes his trip with the support of the July monarchy, but Oliver’s companion is not an equal. Rather it is Parrot, servant-class and twice Olivier’s age. An unlikely pair, really, but perfect for Carey’s purposes …

… which are to pry into, poke at, and peer under that great American experiment, Democracy. Through having two protagonists of such diverse backgrounds and perspectives, Carey is able to explore the issues from different angles, that of master and servant. And through choosing the picaresque as his form (or style), he is able to do so without being ponderous. In other words, the tone is comic, as befits a picaresque novel, and the narrative comprises a series of adventures in which our “heroes”, Parrot and Olivier, meet a range of characters along the way who test them and their ideas. The novel is told in alternating, and well-differentiated, first person voices – starting with Olivier and ending, very even-handedly, with Parrot. It is basically chronological, but there are flashbacks to fill in gaps and frequent overlaps caused by one telling a story followed by the other giving his version.

That’s the nuts and bolts of it, but how does it come across? Well, in a word, exuberantly. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its serious side, but just that it’s rather fun to read. At least, it was for me, though that could be because of my personal history with America. Here, for example, are some of the observations which caught my attention:

On not needing government (Parrot talking with a tradesman):

‘When there is enough for all,’ the nail-maker said, ‘there is no need for government.’
‘But what of the poor.’
‘No man who will work can be poor.’

A little myopic methinks – but an idea that seems to be still entrenched in America?

On the focus on money and trade (Olivier):

No matter how strong their religious sentiments, or their passion about the reform of criminals, the Americans quickly revealed themselves to be obsessed with trade and money … They had got their hands on a mighty continent from which the least of them could, by dint of some effort, extract unlimited wealth. There being so much to be extracted it scarcely mattered how they were governed, because there is no need to argue when there is plenty for all.

For all, that is, if you are able to work, are not black and not indigenous! Even aristocratic Olivier noticed some of these contradictions.

On the ability to be self-made (Peek, the banker, to Olivier):

‘Experiment,’ he cried, laughing too violently for my taste. ‘There is no experiment. We make this transformation every day. It is called rags-to-riches …’

And on the possibility of art and culture in a democracy (Olivier):

… They [paintings in Philadelphia] made me think that the taste for ideal beauty – and the pleasure of seeing it depicted – can never be as intense or widespread among a democratic as an aristocratic people.

Hmm…Peter Carey is on record as expressing concern for the survival of culture. He said in his closing address at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival that ‘We have yet to grasp the fact that consuming cultural junk … is completely destructive of democracy’. In other words, Olivier/Carey question whether “high” art and “total” democracy are mutually exclusive? Somewhat related to this is Carey’s ongoing interest (see My life as a fake, and Theft: a love story) in authenticity in art. He explores it here through Olivier’s love of art, and the artistic endeavours of several characters, including Parrot and his mistress.

As for the story itself, there is a lot to enjoy. Olivier and Parrot have a complex relationship that develops from mutual disdain to a cautious friendship as the novel progresses. For all his attempts to be open-minded, Olivier never totally accepts the notion of equality between “men”, but Parrot, from both his early training and a generous nature, manages to tolerate and even accommodate this. Besides these two, there are characters from all strata of society: aristocrats, printers, bankers, land-owners, artists, actors, and so on. And, of course, there are romances, with Olivier’s playing out to a rather ironic conclusion.

One little demur, though. The book did not really engage me emotionally – something I tend to expect in longer novels – and I wonder whether this is partly due to the picaresque genre whose episodic and comic nature can have a distancing effect. Is this a failing? I think not, but it was noticeable, and means that the writing and ideas have to be powerful enough to carry the reader along. And mostly they do here, largely due to the novel’s pacing.

So, what is Carey’s conclusion? Well, it’s pretty even-handed, with both the aristocrat and the servant summing up their experience of America. But, in a twist on Tocqueville, the last words are Parrot’s. As a reader who always looks to see if structure informs the meaning, I wonder if this tells us something. Then again, there could be an element of irony in it. However you read it, there is no real answer to the question in the epigraph:

Can it be believed that the democracy which had overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists? (Alexis de Tocqueville)

Prophetic words, eh.

Peter Carey
Parrot and Olivier in America
London: Faber and Faber, 2010
578pp
ISBN: 9780571253319

Joanna Biggar, That Paris year (Guest post)

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When I received That Paris year via the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program, I got the sudden attack of the guilts! How was I to review this book alongside all the other books I wanted to read? And then the thought struck me! My daughter, Hannah (aka Wayfaring Chocolate), is a reader, was an exchange student (albeit in the USA), and had recently been to and fallen in love with Paris. Perhaps she might like to read and review it  – and, yes, she would (with not too much arm-twisting). I posted a version of that review, as required, on LibraryThing, and then suggested we post it here too. She did some small revisions and … here it is … Thanks, Hannah!

Wayfaring Chocolate’s review of That Paris year, by Joanna Biggar

That Paris year, book cover
Book cover (Image: Courtesy: Alan Squire Publishing)

That Paris year weaves together the story of five American female college students on exchange at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1962. There is something dream-like about the narration of the girls’ lives as it is J.J., one of the five, who recounts the story of each, through her own memories, tales the others have told her and, at times, her own surmising about what may or may not have happened in their lives. It is not that J.J. is an unreliable narrator, but that the novel reads in the same way that life is experienced – as a sometimes clear, sometimes hazy pinning together of what we ourselves remember and feel, what others have told us of their own lives, and the threads we create in our minds to tie the two together. Moreover, this novel shows how sometimes, in pulling together our own and others’ stories, we have the potential to blur the boundaries of our selves:

Still, I wondered at it, wondered where she had disappeared when she recited Eve’s thoughts as if they were her own.

Each of the five girls followed in this novel is initially set out as markedly different. Yet for all their varied degrees of attractiveness, confidence, studiousness and self-awareness, ultimately each girl seems focused on one thing above all else: the quest for love, sex, and a life partner. It is this that weakened the novel a little for me as, while I myself am a female university student in my early twenties with a deep love of Paris who wouldn’t mind not being single, I felt suffocated by the constant idea thrumming through this novel that a man is what will, ultimately, define me as a young woman.

The novel certainly deals with other aspects of women’s coming-of-age, such as coping with parents’ divorce, class dichotomies, living in a foreign country, and navigating the limits – or limitlessness, it seems at times – of friendship. I only wish some of these narrative threads had been fleshed out in more detail. Such issues are as relevant today as they were during the novel’s 1962 setting, and the evocative writing of Joanna Biggar ensures that the reader is cognisant of this. The political tension between America and France at this point in history, the insecurities one character (Gracie) faces when comparing her homeliness with the long-legged grace of her statuesque friends, even the novelty of putting on an American Thanksgiving dinner in Paris – these are concepts that Biggar tackles with humour, grace, and a fair degree of sympathy.

For example, even when Gracie’s dogged belief that her intelligence is a curse preventing men from liking her made me want to reach into the book and shake her by the shoulders, I couldn’t help but feel both sympathy and understanding for her in the following:

By trusting me, by believing there was a place of revelation – Paris – where possession of all womanly secrets was obtained, she had simply been delivered into another of Dante’s circle. In only a few short weeks, she already felt doomed … by being short, ill-dressed, and homely in the world capital of style.

One thing I did particularly enjoy was that there were times during the reading when I felt that all I had to do was close my eyes to believe myself back in a smoky Parisian cafe, or perhaps on a beach in Avignon with the wind rising, or sitting by the Seine watching stylish Parisian women strut past me. Biggar has a talent for evoking a Paris, and a France, that is both familiar yet not clichéd, and this was something I particularly took pleasure in. There were also moments when particular lines jumped out at me as if they were my own, such as when one character tells another that:

Maybe it’s just that you have a way of listening like you’re hearing more than I even know I’m saying […] Jocelyn listens too, so much so that sometimes I think she can play back to me what I’ve said. Maybe she doesn’t hear in quite the same way.

Haven’t we all had people in our lives who, we know, implicitly “get” us, and others with whom conversations only ever take place on the surface? I think Biggar captures the way in which both types of friends are valuable in different ways. In fact, you could read her novel as a study of different types of friendship (and, as I’ve mentioned above, how for some women friendships are apparently mediated through and in reference to men).

Yet despite my slight reservations with the novel, I would still recommend it for anyone who has had, or wants, a Paris Year of their own. This novel brought back memories of my own time in the City of Lights and, for that, I am grateful.

Joanna Biggar
That Paris year
Bethesda: Alan Squire Publishing, 2010
469pp
ISBN: 9780982625101

(Review copy courtesy Alan Squire Publishing, via LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program)

Toni Jordan, Fall girl

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Jordan Fall Girl

Fall girl cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

It’s just as well I’m not one of those readers who likes to draw conclusions about writers’ lives from their writing, because if I were I’d be seriously concerned about Toni Jordan. You see, her latest novel, Fall girl, is about a con-artist, a very experienced one in fact. And Jordan writes so convincingly you’d almost think … ah, but we’re not going there, are we!

Now, Toni Jordan writes chick lit, but it’s chick lit with a difference. The heroine of her first novel, Addition (which I reviewed earlier in this blog’s history) has obsessive compulsive disorder and at the start of the novel is almost a recluse. She is not, in other words, your typical chick lit heroine.  And so it also is with Fall girl‘s heroine, Della. She too is a little off-the chick-lit-beaten track. She is:

  • not in normal employment;
  • not really upwardly mobile (as her family lives in a dilapidated mansion, and tends to spend up big “wins” rather than using the money to improve their lifestyle);
  • not focused on fashion and appearance (though she does prefer to dress well); and
  • not looking for a husband (though of course this being chick lit, romance does rear its head).

The hero, Daniel Metcalf, however, is somewhat more typical: “he looks like a model from an adventure store catalogue”. He is tanned, strong, big and muscled, and there is a little nod, I think, to Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy in him. But there is also a bit of a mystery about him that our heroine needs to resolve if she is to succeed in this, her biggest “sting” by far.

What can I say about it? It’s a fun read. The plotting and characterisation are good. It’s told first person, in a mostly light tone, but there is light and dark, as not everything runs smoothly (of course). There are some lovely comic scenes – particularly during the scientific expedition on which Della (aka Dr Ella Canfield) takes her mark, Daniel, to demonstrate how professionally his grant money will be spent. Without giving anything away, the resolution is in keeping with chick lit without being completely, neatly tied up.

Is there anything else to it? The writing is good – in a traditional, straightforward way – and the structure is generally chronological, with the odd flashback to fill in Della’s family background. It drips with irony, but in a light-hearted, rather tongue-in-cheek way. Jordan knows that we know the conventions of the genres – of both chick lit and the con – and plays them to effect. We read, and we smile, not grimace. But, there is something else here too, something besides the chick lit and the con story, and that is a coming-of-age story. Not the traditional adolescent story, but we discover as the novel wears on that twenty-something Della has not really achieved self-determination. Everything she does is in accord with her training and her father’s “rules”. Towards the end of the book, her stepmother Ruby talks to her about her upbringing in the family and her inculcation into its “business”, and says:

What you choose to believe is up to you, Della. You don’t have to listen to anybody. You have to make up your own mind.

But, of course, being a Jordan novel, it’s not typical “coming-of-age” either and what Della decides is part of the fun of the ending.

This is a light, entertaining read – and yet it’s not lacking in things for readers to think about. In fact, it’s just the right sort of read for the Christmas holidays. Lisa at ANZLitLovers would probably agree – but go check her review for yourself.

Toni Jordan
Fall girl
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010
234pp.
ISBN: 9781921656651

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Gretchen Shirm, Having cried wolf

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Having cried wolf, book cover

Book cover (Image from Affirm Press)

I have come to the conclusion that short stories are the best holiday reading for me. After a day’s sightseeing followed by reading up on sights for the next day, I usually find I have little time left for my reading. Novels are hard to read under such circumstances, but short stories? Well, they are just the thing. And so, on our recent trip to Hong Kong, I took Gretchen Shirm’s first collection of short stories, Having cried wolf.

Gretchen Shirm is a new Australian writer who was awarded the D.J. O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship for Emergent Writers in 2009. The blurb on the back of the collection likens her to Olga Masters, Helen Garner and Beverley Farmer, and I can see that, but as I was reading the stories I kept thinking of Tim Winton‘s The turning. The obvious reason is because, like The turning, Having cried wolf comprises short stories that are connected by character and place. The fifteen short stories are set in (or deal in some way with) the fictional New South Wales coastal town of Kinsale, and several characters reappear throughout, sometimes in their own stories and sometimes in others. It is rather fun, actually, identifying these and picking up the thread of a story as you progress through the book. Despite this, though, the stories do, I think, also stand well alone.

While Shirm doesn’t focus quite so much as Winton does on the description of place, beyond, that is, conveying the sense of small-town life, her themes are similar: the challenges of small-town living and, particularly, of maintaining meaningful relationships. These themes, however – particularly regarding maintaining relationships – are also those of the aforesaid Masters, Garner and Farmer.

And so to the stories. I must say I enjoyed them – though they are not a particularly cheery bunch. Shirm’s writing is tight and sure, with none of the over-writing often found in first-timers. She writes in first and third person, in female and the occasional male, voices. The characters range from early teens to middle-aged and she captures them all well. Her subject matter includes coming-of-age, marriage and separation, sexuality, suicide and some uncomfortable morality. While many of the stories are interlinked, they are not organised in a totally chronological manner. For example, we learn in the first story, “Breakfast friends”, that Alice is separated from her husband, but in a couple of stories later, “The shallows”, we meet her with the boyfriend who later becomes her husband. This nicely replicates I think the random way we often find out about people in real life.

I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow discussion of the stories but just mention a couple to exemplify some features of her writing. “Small indulgences” for example is a first person story by a rather down-trodden wife. It perfectly encapsulates a woman who has almost, but not quite (as she refuses to colour her hair), subsumed herself to her husband’s needs – and it ends on a delicious if rather sad ironic note. Several of the stories end effectively on metaphors that are subtle but gorgeously appropriate. “Duplicity”, which is about the son of the woman in “Small indulgences”, ends with “There were still no lights on in the house, but by then Daniel was used to the darkness”. And “Breakfast friends” ends with:

The cicada shell is empty now, but inside it was once soft, malleable and not yet formed.

The meaning of that is clear when we read it, but gains added poignancy as we learn more about its characters in later stories. There are many other lovely expressions throughout the stories, such as

… she wants to pour the memory into a mould and leave it there to set.

Why can’t I think like that!

Shirm uses foreshadowing in many of the stories to convey suspense and move the plot along, but she’s not heavy-handed about it. It does mean though that the stories are similar in tone. In other words, this is not a collection of great tonal range but I don’t think that matters, because there’s enough variety and interest elsewhere. There are however a few grammatical oddities that jarred. In a first person voice they can I suppose be forgiven, but there were a couple in third person stories that did bother me. “Peter’s friends swum in the pool” just isn’t right. Is it okay if the voice is third person subjective and that’s how the character might speak? I’m not sure. I’m being pedantic though because overall this is fine confident writing with lovely insights into human behaviour. It does not read like a first collection – and I hope we see more of Gretchen Shirm.

Gretchen Shirm
Having cried wolf
(Series: Long Story Shorts, 4)
Mulgrave: Affirm Press, 2010
ISBN: 9780980637892
221pp.

(Review copy supplied by Affirm Press)

David Mitchell, The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet

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‘Oh I found ways to live to tell the tale. It’s my chief hobby-hawk is the noble art of survivin’.’

‘Loyalty looks simple,’ Grote tells him, ‘but it isn’t.’

‘…Expensive habit is honesty. Loyalty ain’t a simple matter, Di’nt I warn yer…’

It’s interesting that some of the main themes of David Mitchell‘s The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet are conveyed by one of its lesser (in terms of status) and more questionable (in terms of morality) characters, the Dutch cook, Arie Grote. Interesting because such a slippery and relatively minor character expresses some critical themes and because Mitchell’s making this choice provides a clue to the book’s tone and style. It has, in other words, a rather wry undertone.

Dejima model, Nagasaki

Model of Dejima, at Dejima Wharf, Nagasaki

So, what is its plot? Broadly, it is about the Dutch East India Company‘s activities on Dejima, a walled island in Nagasaki harbour, during Japan’s isolationist (or, “Cloistered Empire”) period, with most of the action taking place between 1799 and 1800. It follows Jacob de Zoet, a young man who arrives in 1799 to work as a clerk (and to make his fortune so he can return home to marry his love, Anna). What he finds is a multicultural community comprising Dutch, Japanese, a Prussian, an Irishman and others including Malay slaves, living and working within a complex web of ambitions, animosities and allegiances. He discovers pretty quickly that he’s going to need good survival skills to make it through. The question is: will he make it through, and will he do it with his integrity intact?

There is a love triangle of sorts, involving a young Japanese midwife named Orito. And there’s a drama centred on her “abduction” to a horrifying (invoking, for me, Margaret Atwood‘s The handmaid’s tale) monastery/nunnery called Mt Shiranui, which is overseen by the evil lord/abbot, Enomoto. This sounds, I admit, a bit melodramatic and in a way it is, but it seems to work, largely because of the characterisation.

The novel has a huge cast of characters, as this Character List (source unknown) shows and, over the course of 450+ pages, Mitchell gives us the backstories to many of them. At times I felt there was too much detail – as in “why do I need to know all this?” – but the stories were so interesting that I didn’t really mind. Mitchell is not, I have to say, a taker-outer and so, if you like your stories to move along at a fast clip, this is not for you. Many of the characters, from bottom to top of the hierarchy, are corrupt, as they scheme, bribe and manipulate for money, power and/or prestige, but not all are. Some of the most interesting characters are those who are not corrupt but are not perfect either. They include Jacob; the doctor/scientist, Dr Marinus, who tests Jacob somewhat cruelly; the young interpreter, Ogawa Uzaemon, who overlooks Jacob’s illegal importation of his Christian psalter; and John Penhaligon, the gout-ridden English captain who makes a play for Dejima late in the novel.

Having read and enjoyed Cloud atlas, I must say I kept expecting some, shall we call it, literary “tricksiness” but it never really appeared. This is historical fiction told in a linear fashion, albeit with the odd digression and some shifting perspectives. In fact, while not particularly “tricksy”, the style is not simple. There is a lot of variety in the telling:

  • dialogue (and italicised thoughts of characters, as conversations or action occur);
  • backstories;
  • set-ups that don’t always follow through as you would expect (such as that concerning Jacob’s hidden psalter);
  • scenes in which the main action is interspersed by something else going on (such as Cutlip preparing his boiled egg while Penhaligon negotiates with the slippery Prussian, Fischer);
  • action and adventure; and
  • a good deal of humour (including the scene in which a Japanese translator tries to translate a scientific lecture being given by Dr Marinus).

The language is similarly diverse. Mitchell uses irony, metaphor and symbolism, wordplay, and repetition, to name just a few techniques. Here, for example, is a rather lovely oxymoron:

The creeds of Enomoto’s order shine darkness on all things.

And here is a moving description related to an honourable death (without naming names):

An inch away is a go clamshell stone, perfect and smooth …
… a black butterfly lands on the white stone, and unfolds its wings.

I was impressed by the array of literary devices he used and how it never felt overdone. It was his language and characterisation, more than anything else, that kept me engaged.

The book does suffer a little, though, from the breadth of its concerns. I flicked through the book to jot down its themes and ran out of space on my page! So, I grouped them:

  • Political/historical: commerce, nationalism, colonialism and slavery
  • Philosophical: fate, faith and belief, truth
  • Social: education, oppression of women, science and enlightenment
  • Personal/psychological: loyalty and betrayal, honesty, love and integrity, survival

That’s a pretty broad church and, although some naturally overlap, the effect is to dilute the book’s impact somewhat.

So, how would I encapsulate it? Well, I’d sum it up as being about “imprisonment”, both literal and metaphorical. The Dutch are imprisoned on Dejima, the Japanese are imprisoned within their self-imposed isolationist policy, Orito and her “sisters” are imprisoned at Mt Shiranui. And people are imprisoned by their roles and/or culture. For example, women’s options are restricted, slaves have little control over their lives, and many of the characters, including Jacob, are imprisoned by their lack of economic resources that would enable them to freely choose their lives.

This is one of those rather unwieldy books that is hard to pin down but, despite this, I did rather enjoy watching Jacob and co. going about “the noble art of survivin'” in an intriguing place and time.

Nicole Krauss, The young painters

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In her work, the writer is free of laws. But in her life, Your Honour, she is not free.

Nicole Krauss‘s short story, “The young painters”, is a sly, clever little piece. I have not read Krauss’s novels so came to this short story with no preconceptions, other than that I’d heard of her. The story starts with:

Four or five years after we got married, Your Honor, S. and I …

Ah, I thought, so the narrator is defending herself in a court for some crime she’s committed. And so it turned out – more or less – because this is not about the usual sort of crime nor the usual sort of court. It is about the crime of art, that is the crime of stealing the lives of others for art’s sake. In this case, the artist is a writer and she has “stolen” a tragic story from a dinner host about “the young painters” of the title. She has also written a novel using her father’s last days, telling stories about him (particularly regarding his loss of control of his bodily functions) that she knows he would have seen as a betrayal. She does it nonetheless, justifying herself in two ways: one is that she doesn’t write the novel until after his death and the other is that the story reflects

less on him than on the universal plight of growing old and facing one’s death – I did not stop there, but instead I took his illness and suffering with all its pungent detail, and finally even his death, as an opportunity to write about his life and, more specifically, about his failings, as both a person and a father, failings whose precise and abundant detail could be ascribed to him alone. I paraded his failings and my misgivings […] even if the final notes of the book were of triumphant love and grief at the loss of him, in the weeks and months leading up to its publication a sickening feelings sometimes took hold of me  […] In the publicity interviews I gave, I emphasized that the book was fiction and professed my frustration with journalists and readers alike who insist on reading novels as the autobiographies of their authors, as if there were not such thing as the writer’s imagination …

Later in story she runs into the dinner party host and senses, rightly or wrongly (the point is not what others think but her own conscience), his displeasure at her use of the story. She defends herself, to his Honor, by saying the story had not been told in confidence, that she had not discovered it surreptitiously by sneaking around his diaries and journals (which of course begs the question of those writers who do!).

And so, here we have laid before us various writerly defences:

  • I’m universalising from the particular;
  • I’m not writing autobiography but fiction;
  • the story was “given” to me (and, presumably, you knew I was a writer when you told me).

But, for this writer, it all starts to play on her conscience … and here I will end so you can read the story yourself. It’s very short – just 4 pages if you print it out from the link below – and I’ve only touched the surface. The ending is effective.

If this story is a guide to Krauss’s ability as a novelist, and the way she thinks about her “art”, then I’d like to read more, as I found it a cleverly – and dare I say it, poignantly – conceived and executed story.

Nicole Krauss
“The young painters” (from “20 under 40”)
The New Yorker, 28 June 2010
Available: Online

Note: As with several of The New Yorker short stories, this is apparently an excerpt from her novel Great house.

John Banville, The infinities

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Hermes, sculpted bronze figure by Lee Lawrie. ...

Hermes, sculpted bronze figure by Lee Lawrie (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia

This is what Benny loves, what all the gods love, to eavesdrop on the secret lives of others.

Hmm … this is also, I think, what readers love! Readers after all are, surely, the ultimate voyeurs. And yet the god Hermes, who narrates John Banville‘s The infinities, also admits to the gods interfering in people’s lives, which is, in a way, what authors do. Is this double whammy – voyeur and meddler – one of the reasons why Banville chose a Greek god as his narrator?

The infinities is one of those books that takes place in a day, and it has a fairly small cast of characters. Adam Sr has had a stroke and is ostensibly on his deathbed. He is being cared for by his much younger second wife Ursula and his somewhat “loony” daughter, Petra. Also living on Adam’s Irish estate are the middle-aged employees Ivy Blount and Duffy.  The novel starts in the morning with the arrival of son, also Adam, and his wife, the aptly named Helen. During the day two more people arrive, separately, Roddy Wagstaff and Benny Grace. The only other characters are two Greek Gods, the narrator Hermes and his “father” Zeus.

You might presume from this that the novel is one of those traditional deathbed stories about a family which gathers to await the death of a loved one and lets loose their pent-up conflicts, but it’s not so. This is a more interior novel in which the interaction between the characters is less important than their individual responses to their rather messy lives. They are overseen by Hermes who watches with amusement and not a little envy while also trying to keep his father, the “randy” Zeus, in check.

Unlike The sea, that more sombre novel of Banville’s, this one has a light if not downright funny touch. The gods roam at will around the estate, occasionally taking the form of other characters in order to meddle a bit in their lives, or, in the case of Zeus in particular, experience a little human pleasure with the luscious Helen (“‘Oh’, she says laughing, ‘it was divine, surely'”). Some of the names are symbolic – Helen, of course, recalls Helen of Troy; Adam reminds us of the “first” man; Adam’s last name is Godley. But this isn’t overdone. Not all names are so laden with meaning – and those that are have a more playful than serious import. Added to this is the delightful humanising informality of Hermes talking of Zeus as “Dad”.

So, what is it all about? Adam Sr is (was) a mathematician who explored Quantum theory and developed his own theory of multiple infinities. By contrast, the gods of course are infinite (or, more accurately, immortal), but they envy humans their mortality. Hermes says of his father’s flirtations with women:

Each time he dips his beak into the essence of a girl he takes, so he believes, another enchanting sip of death, pure and precious. For of course he wants to die, as do all of us immortals, that is well known.

Towards the end Adam realises what the gods already know, that “somehow, extension brought not increase but dissipation”. He says:

I still do not understand it. The hitherto unimagined realm that I revealed beyond the infinities was a new world for which no bristling caravels would set sail. We hung back from it, exhausted in advance by the mere fact of its suddenly being there. It was, in a word, too much for us. This is what we discovered, to our chagrin and shame: that we had enough, more than enough, already, in the bewildering diversities of our old and overabundant world. Let the gods live at peace in that far, new place.

Ha! Except the gods already know what Adam and Benny learnt, which is why they keep hanging around the humans. They know that it is death that somehow gives life its meaning. This makes the ending, which I will not give away here, doubly ironic.

It feels impossible to do justice to this superficially simple but rather astonishing book and I have already laboured over my post far too long, so I’ll just make a couple more comments. One is the shifting POV from our narrator Hermes to interior monologues from others, particularly Adam Sr. It seems, at times, that Adam is Hermes, something both disconcerting yet also oddly logical. And there is the tight, evocative language. Take, for example, his use of colour. There’s a lot of blue-black-grey which expresses well the hovering death and its associated mystery, but there are also hints of the more earthy of-the-world green-brown colours and, in the cushion clutched by Ursula, a touch of passionate red. Banville’s intent can almost be read by simply tracking the colours.

In the end, the book is a hymn to the mortal world, in all the messiness that’s been laid before us:

This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed for ever in a luminous, unending instant.

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

John Banville
The infinities
London: Picador, 2009
300pp.
ISBN: 978033045025

Lionel Shriver, So much for that

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Lionel Shriver, So much for that

Book cover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

Having had my own rather traumatic experience of the American healthcare system back in the 1980s I was rather keen to read Lionel Shriver‘s latest offering, So much for that. And, I wasn’t disappointed – or, let me rephrase that, I found it an interesting and engaging page-turner though not a top-ten-of-the-year one.

First a quick plot summary. The book starts with 48-year-old nice-guy Shep Knacker planning to escape the American rat-race to his dreamed of, and as it turns out ironically named, AfterLife in Pemba off Zanzibar. Unfortunately, his plans turn sour with his wife’s announcement that she has a rare aggressive cancer called peritoneal mesothelioma and will need him to continue working, for his health insurance. Paralleling Shep and Glynis’ experience of health service and insurance – and told in roughly alternating chapters – is that of their good friends Jackson and Carol whose 16-year-old daughter, Flicka, was born with the degenerative disease, familial dysautonomia.

So, at the start we have a terminal cancer diagnosis and a child with a disease that is not likely to see her making old bones. Through the course of the novel, two more health issues are thrown in to round out the mix – aged care for Shep’s father after he falls and breaks his femur, and elective shall-we-say “vanity” surgery undertaken with disastrous results by Jackson. This all felt a little contrived to me – as did the occasional preachy dialogue that seemed to be there to make sure we got it. (Shriver is not a taker-outer I think!)

But, somehow, Shriver made it all work – right through to the rather surprising and, thus, risky ending. I liked the fact that she balanced the health care polemics with some wider issues such as the psychology and language of illness and the soul-destroying nature of the American (in particular) rat-race. And I liked the way she offset the plot and structural contrivances with a warm but unsentimental regard for her characters. Glynis and Flicka are not “pin-up” patients but “real” people who are angry with their lot and exhibit selfishness and petulance more often than meek forbearance. Glynis, like the character in Helen Garner‘s The spare room, is in denial about her fate pretty much to the end, and Flicka sees little value in living the sort of life she does. Both consequently feel little need to make it easier for those around them.

Most of Shep’s chapters commence with a statement of his net worth, which at the beginning of the novel is around $730K but which decreases with alarming rapidity as the months wear on and his poor insurance cover doesn’t begin to meet the costs of Glynis’ treatment. If you knew nothing before about co-payments, deductibles, co-insurers, out-of-network providers and lifetime payment caps, you’ll know all about them by the time you finish the book. (Apparently the most common cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA is medical debt.) But this is just the background – the polemics if you will – because the more interesting story is that of Shep and Glynis’ complicated but loving relationship, and of how friends and family react to the diagnosis. We feel Shep’s pain as he realises “he couldn’t fix things”. We understand Glynis’ eventual epiphany that “her husband had misguidedly hoarded his pennies, when the only currency they spent that had ever counted was time”. We cringe when we recognise ourselves in the friends who don’t visit often enough, who offer lip-service assistance rather than actual help. And we start to understand the real implications of cancer-speak that encourages an unrealistic belief in positive thinking, that suggests you can win the battle if you fight hard enough:

I know you mean well [says Shep to the oncologist], but after all this military talk she now equates – dying – with dishonor. With failure. With personal failure.

Near the end Shep asks the doctor what the $2 million spent on Glynis’ treatment (to date) had bought:

“Oh, I bet we’ve probably extended her life a good three months.”
“No, I’m sorry, Dr Goldman,” Shep said on the way out. “They were not a good three months”.

… leaving the real question, which Shep had previously asked his father, hanging:

“is there also a limit to how much you should pay to keep any one person alive?”

Lionel Shriver does not specifically answer this question in the novel but – despite the ending – you know exactly what she thinks.

There is more I could say about the novel. The story of Jackson and Carol, for example, offers the book more than a simple confirming parallel. There are some genuinely funny moments, particularly those between Shep and his free-loading sister Beryl, and those when Jackson pronounces yet another long-winded title for the book on “mugs and moochers” that he never will write. And there are some interesting discussions about art and artists, and about parenting in modern USA. But I’ve said enough I think to give a sense of what this book is about.

Shep says at the end that he’d “rather live a good story than read one”. I’ll leave you to ponder the implications of a novelist writing that line … and simply say that while this is not a perfect novel, I don’t begrudge having given up a bit of my good life to read it!

Lionel Shriver
So much for that
Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2010
433pp.
ISBN: 9780732287030