On Discovering William Stafford

This morning I woke to a bright blue sky. I rose, dressed, and walked to work with the intention of watching the London 2012 Olympics. Instead, I stumbled upon an NPR interview with the American poet William Stafford from the exceptional All Things Considered series.

On such incidents are lives enhanced.

William Stafford was born in Kansas in 1914, and grew into a pacifist - one, he said, of the "quiet of the land" - and a plainspoken poet. As a pacifist, he spent the years 1942-46 working in outdoor camps and projects for conscientious objectors in Arkansas, California and Illinois.His poetry, from what I've read, is reflective, gentle, and unassuming yet with a startling, simple poignancy. It focuses on the natural world, its rhythms and flows and on quietly turning the tables on common perceptions of life around us. Ultimately, a strong pacifism run throughout.

I've since spent an hour reading his work and am blown away. I've found a new friend who I hope will remain a friend for life.

Here are some of those that have particularly struck a chord. I hope you enjoy them.



'For the Unknown Enemy'
By William Stafford

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.



'At the Bomb Testing Site'
By William E. Stafford

At noon in the desert a panting lizard  
waited for history, its elbows tense,  
watching the curve of a particular road  
as if something might happen.

It was looking at something farther off  
than people could see, an important scene  
acted in stone for little selves
at the flute end of consequences.

There was just a continent without much on it  
under a sky that never cared less.  
Ready for a change, the elbows waited.  
The hands gripped hard on the desert.




'At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border'
By William E. Stafford

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

You can read more poems by William Stafford at the William Stafford Reader: www.williamstaffordreader.com/poems/topic

Book Review: Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I am re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews.

On this final morning I’m taking a step into the bizarre with Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.

Read: January 2008

Geek Love in one tweet-sized chunk:
Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family’, Geek Love is defined not by its freak-show setting, but the common humanity inherent within.

“'When your mama was a geek, my dreamlets’, Papa would say, ‘she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around, hypnotised with longing.”

Despite its freak show characters and setting, Geek Love is one of the most tender-hearted novels you could hope to read. It works because at no point is it sick, grotesque, tasteless or glibly shocking. Katherine Dunn’s talent is in making this very remarkable story feel like the most natural thing in the world. And it is. Because Geek Love is a novel about families, and individuals within families, and the crazy world which exists outside them.

Narrated by Olympia, a bald, hunchback, albino, dwarf, Geek Love tells the story of the Binewski family, and their rise to fame. For Al and Lil Binewski have grander plans than circus geeking for their Binewski Fabulon troupe. Together they hit upon the idea of breeding their own freak show. So during each pregnancy Lil guzzles drugs and pesticides, douses herself in radiation, all in the hope of producing freaks compelling and original enough to keep the circus afloat. Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family,’ Lil gives birth to 5 living children, each fantastic in their own unique way. First out comes the limbless Arturo, Aqua Boy, megalomaniac, entertainer, preacher and eventually, cult leader. He is followed by the musically talented Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia, beautiful and alluring and each as individual as they are united. The Lizard Girl comes third, green tinted and with one tail shaped leg but she dies suddenly and mysteriously aged 2. And then there is Olympia, unremarkable, unprofitable, who sleeps under the sink. Finally comes Fortunato, almost rejected for his apparent normality, he turns out to possess strange telekinetic powers and an angelic temperament. Led by this motley crew of performers, the circus grows beyond all recognition, raking in audiences in ever greater numbers.

But as within any family there are internal tensions, people pulling in opposite directions, and Arturo will not quit until the whole family is subjected to his twisted, power-crazed ways.

Most characters in novels act as personified ideas, or plot developers. It is rare to find a family whose entire dynamic just exists, naturally and without pretence. And it is all the more remarkable since the characters in question are, physically at least, far from the norm.

With a constantly evolving plot, complex and engaging characters and easily readable style, Geek Love is a book to become thoroughly engrossed in. The characters are as fabulously drawn as any I have read, equal even to those in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. They each inhabit their own skin and minds completely, think independently and diversely. You can almost picture their bodies in the shape of the words, living, breathing, dreaming, loving, hating. From the cold-hearted, vindictive sneer of Arturo to the loving honesty of Fortunato, the independent personalities of the twins and the unrequited love of Olympia, it is impossible not to love them all. Love them because in each of them lies that spark of recognisable complex humanity that is so rarely found in literature.

The whole basis of Geek Love is the inversion of society’s view of physical perfection. Despite their external differences the Binewski children do not grow up shunted, embarrassed or gawked at. They are treasured, worshipped, made special by their different forms. Al refers to them as his ‘rose garden’ his little ‘dreamlets’. They look down upon the ‘norms,’ pity all those whose bodies are unremarkable and whose lives are so much harder because of it. Indeed, their hierarchy is based upon the scale of abnormality, a scale in which Olympia is considered the lowest and Arturo the highest form of creation.

Geek Love doesn’t warn against judging character by its skin. It is not as simple as that. Rather it gets under that skin, into the life and mindset of its characters, rejecting the very notion of physical normality. Utterly original, it is a cult piece of literature which deserves to be read even more widely than it currently is.

8.5 out of 10

Book Review: Music for Torching - A.M. Homes

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews.

On day 9 it is A.M. Homes's wonderfully nihilistic Music for Torching.

Read: July 2007

Music for Torching in one tweet-sized chunk:
A delirious vision of suburban life gone wrong. Vitriolic, nihilistic, neurotic, it is a novel of scandalous normality, of impotence in the face of life.

Music for Torching is a huge blazing fire of a novel, consuming the vagaries of suburban family life like dry timber. Vitriolic, nihilistic, neurotic, it is a novel of scandalous normality, of impotence in the face of life. At times it reads like Revolutionary Road for the late twentieth century, there is that same trapped sense of powerlessness, that same longing for more, that same pressure to conform. I can’t remember when I was last so utterly hooked on a book within the first five pages.

Paul and Elaine’s marriage is burning out of control, they are isolated and atomised and horrified by what they have become. We first met them in a short story in The Safety of Objects when they enjoyed a hallucinogenic refrain from family pressures smoking crack while their children were away. Looking back on it in this book, they remember that as a moment of almost unimaginable happiness, as though it was the last time they felt united and whole. Now their nihilistic tendencies are tearing their household apart. In between passionless sex they bicker and nag, have affairs and wish they could make their lives good again. Their only pleasures involves dinner parties with their friends when they can bask in the impression of neighbourhood contentment.

The pressure is building, something has to give.

One night Elaine cannot face cooking. Paul offers to Barbecue. Egged on by their inanimate lives Elaine kicks over the barbecue setting the house on fire. Feeling deliciously liberated they get in the car and go for a meal with the children. But the house is not burnt to the ground, only gutted. Denied the cataclysmic freedom of total destruction Elaine and Paul can only try to rebuild, both the house and their fractured selves.

What ensues is a dark and claustrophobic journey through the frenzied minds of a couple desperately trying to recreate the image of family happiness. Cue all manor of sexual affairs, not to mention a crack team of house cleaners in space suits and the ubiquitous school hostage situation. But no matter how good and honest their intentions Paul and Elaine are never quite able to get hold of themselves, and bring everything back to how it should be. And normality is sucking them into a false sense of security.

Homes has a vibrant and to-the-point style of prose which makes her writing incredibly warm and inviting. Her characters are well conceived and brilliantly realised, flawed and infuriatingly lovable at the same time. She is concise and her vocabulary is exact; reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald in her ability to say a lot with few words. She is a very good writer and this is a very good book.

Music for Torching is a delirious technicolor vision of suburban life gone wrong. The Times review probably describes it best: “Homes doesn’t so much critique suburban American life as shoot it, stab it, chuck it in the boot of her car and drive it into a lake.” The exhilaration contained within these pages is difficult to diffuse, it is a glorious fire-cracker of a book and you are going to love it.

8.5 out of 10

Book Review: 84 Charing Cross Road - Helene Hanff

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day 8 it is the correspondence between a New York writer and London bookseller that make up 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff.

Read: November 2008

84 Charing Cross Road in tweet-sized chunk:

A book lovers dream, 84 Charing Cross Road chronicles one of the most enduring long-distance friendships to be found in literature.

When Helene Hanff sat down at her typewriter on October 5th, 1949 and typed off a purchase order to a small antiquarian bookshop in London, little could she know that she was about to be drawn into an intercontinental friendship that would last decades and chronicle both her life, and the lives of those she corresponded with. But that is what happened. The ensuing friendship between herself – a free-spirited and self-educated New York writer with ‘an antiquarian taste in books’ – and Frank Doel – a reserved bookseller in post-war Britain – was to last for more than twenty years, and capture much of their different personalities, as well as the character of their cities, separated by a wide ocean, and a common language.

Their relationship catches something of the age. It is 1949 and Britain is still recovering from war, with rationing and reconstruction the order of the day, and stoic survival the dominant mood. Frank Doel embodies the Britain of strict social and moral codes, stiff upper lip professionalism, and courteous detachment. Against this Helene is fiery and abrasive, a no-nonsense New Yorker full of witty sarcasm and little respect for personal boundaries. She sees Frank as delightfully representative of a romantic literary past in which John Donne attends Trinity College, Samuel Pepys is chased around the bedroom by his wife brandishing a red-hot poker, and books are printed in beautifully bound, gold edged hardbacks.

Theirs is a deep friendship, but not the love story some suggest. For Helene the love affair is with ‘the England of English literature’ which Frank so helpfully lays out for her, while to him she is an taste of excitement from across the Atlantic, brash and fun in a way post war Britain was not. This intercontinental friendship is charming. You read along enraptured; aware of how privileged you are to be granted such intimate insight into two lives, adopting their friendship almost as if it were your own. You smile along with Helene when she is sent into ecstasy by the arrival of a first edition of John Newman’s Idea of a University, and with Frank when a parcel of tinned food (near impossible to get due to rationing) arrives at the bookshop. When she asks him to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he responds by asking her to ‘give a few cheers for THE SPURS’. She vents with fury at the destruction of a book used for packaging, and he travels to sales disbanding once great estates to see if he can find any good books in their libraries.

For a books aficionado, this is an absolute joy. There is so much to learn about classic literature, the lives of great writers, and the history of the book trade. Helene Hanff’s self-taught learning is impressive. At one point she describes her early readings, and the way she consumed the annuls of literature one step at a time, from Milton’s Paradise Lost, to Arther Quiller-Couch’s lectures, to The Bible. This is a book chock full of life and energy and perfect characterisation.

And yet between the lines there is so much sadness. Time passes silently, with so much happening in each of their lives that is never spoken about. Invisibly, they grow older and have adventures and experiences we never hear about, tragic events strike, time passes; life goes on away from our prying eyes. At times months and even years go by without a letter, what happens in these years a mystery. It is difficult not to wish for so much more than the 99 pages. The more you read, the more you want to read, and all this life lived between the lines on the page is so close and yet so utterly unreachable that you yearn for more.

But the passage of time is reassuring as well, for time does not pass for Helene and Frank. Outside their correspondence, the world continues to turn, but nothing affects their camaraderie. Like the English literature whose history they are each so steeped in, they remain untouched, and when you finish the last letter, one of the joys is that they remain before you for a long time, like long lost friends who you will never forget. And in this beautiful Virago celebration edition, we also get The Duchess of Bloomsbury, a diary of Helene's eventual trip to London in promotion of 84 Charing Cross Road. It offers a beautiful counterpoint to the longing of her correspondence, and a fascinating portrait of the real London, warts and all, even through the eyes of a lifelong anglophile such as Helene. I love 84 Charing Cross Road, it is a wonderfully enchanting book and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

9 out of 10

Book Review: The Underground Man - Mick Jackson

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

As day 5 ticks into day 6 I revisit one of the most charming books I have had the pleasure to read: Underground Man by Mick Jackson.

Read: June 2008

The Underground Man in one tweet-sized chunk

A book to fall in love with and remind you how great literature can be.

"As a young man I imagined growing old would be something like the feeling one has at the close of a long and satisfying day: a not unpleasant lassitude, always remedied by a good night’s sleep. But I now know it to be the gradual revelation of one’s body as nothing more than a bag of unshakeable aches. Old age is but the reduced capacity of a failing machine. Even my sleep – that beautiful oblivion always relied upon for replenishment – now seems to founder, has somehow lost its step. My fingers and toes are cold the whole year round, as if my fire is slowly going out."

The Underground Man is one of those uncomplicated, absolutely charming novels which you wish you could read all the time. Mick Jackson writes with the brevity and technical acumen of a literary master like J.M. Coetzee, and the warm-hearted sensitivity of a loved childhood author such as Michael Morpurgo. It is an absolutely fantastic novel.

An old, reclusive Duke has just completed the construction of a series of tunnels under his vast estate. For what purpose, he is not entirely sure. Probably because he has never felt entirely comfortable around people. He is inordinately wealthy but getting on in years, without an heir to take over the estate when he passes. Many of the staff he has lived with throughout his life are beginning to get a little old as well. It is all rather depressing. And yet his imagination appears to know no bounds. As he searches for an explanation for the malaise that seems to be engulfing him he begins to retreat further and further underground, into the heart of his family estate, and the memories which dwell there. A strange young boy seems to be floating around him, and there are memories which demand to be noticed.
 

Loosly based on the life of the 5th Duke of Portland, William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck who really did build a network of tunnels under his estate, Jackson brings the Duke's eccentric mind dazzlingly to life. He ponders how apple trees work, whether his insides are colour-coded, what happens to all the huge whale bones at the bottom of the ocean. He is lovable, thoroughly original and oh so sympathetic. One can't help but love him. Indeed, I can’t think of a character I have wanted to take under my wing and care for more than the Duke.

There is virtually no plot, just the delightfully eccentric and amusing mind of the Duke, as he dallies through life and slowly descends into madness. I've never met anyone who has anything bad to say about this book. It is one of the best Booker shortlisted books I have ever read. I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.

9 out of 10

Book Review: Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day four I revisit J.M. Coetzee's masterpiece, Waiting for the Barbarians.

Read: April 2008
Waiting for the Barbarians in one tweet-sized chunk:
Waiting for the Barbarians is the clearest enunciation of Coetzee's primary concern: individual shame for collective crimes.
 

“‘When some men suffer unjustly...it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.”

Set in the harsh, desolate frontier lands of a nameless Empire in a timeless age, Waiting for the Barbarians is a sparse, allegorical novel, devastatingly powerful in its depiction of one mans complicity in barbaric acts of so called ‘civilisation’. It is the clearest enunciation of the concerns which run through much of Coetzee's fiction: independent thought in the face of a single public conscience, the surprising involvement of the outsider,  moral conviction, peace. It is a beautiful and powerful book; probably my favourite of all his works.

For years the Magistrate has presided over the affairs of a small, peaceful frontier fort, collecting rents, settling petty disputes, and excavating the ruins of fallen towns, unconcerned about rumours of an impending war with the Barbarians. But when interrogators from the shadowy Third Bureau arrive it seems they are intent on turning his peaceful harmony into a raging battlefield. And following a case of barbaric torture, the Magistrate is jolted from his comfortable complicity into an act of quixotic rebellion and he begins to learn just how lonely martyrdom can be.

Waiting for the Barbarians sees Coetzee tackling big issues: complacency and complicity in the face of barbarism, the boundary between freedom and incarceration, and the devastation war inflicts on both our psyches and ways of life. It is too easy to say it is an allegory for apartheid in South Africa - though undoubtedly it is – for Coetzee’s real success is in expanding theses small particulars, to a general treatise on human nature and the social systems we build to, supposedly, protect ourselves from the barbarian outsiders.

Many writers have meditated on the collision between conscientious individuals and harsh, repressive regimes. Kafka did it in The Trial, Camus in The Outsider, Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley in Brave New World, and the list goes on and on. If there is a twentieth century literary concern this is probably it. But Coetzee takes it that stage further than others, to analyse the complicity of the Magistrate himself, to question the arrogance of one man standing righteous against the tide of popular opinion, the pointlessness of it all. Coetzee doesn’t merely make his Magistrate a victim of the bureaucracy, but he is complicit within it, and knows even as he fights back that he is just doing so to cleanse his own narcissistic guilt. He is by no means a shining white night of freedom but a flawed person just trying to live his life in his own way.

Furthermore, the sense of place Coetzee creates is exquisite: the vast, empty wilderness a bleak uncompromising landscape looming ominously over the entire novel. The nomadic austerity of life in that wasteland strikes a chord with the barren emotional prospects of its central character. It is evocative of Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dan, an untamed world, shorn of romantic connotations, a greater threat to the lives of man than ever the Barbarians could be.

You don’t read Coetzee to enjoy a stroll through the park, you read Coetzee because, perhaps more than any other modern novelist, he knows what it is to be human, and he is able to convey it all so simply, in so few words that it leaves you stumped. You shake your head regularly, unsure whether you love or hate the characters, uncertain how such stripped down life can be portrayed so beautifully. Because above all else, Coetzee is a beautiful writer, his prose flows from pen to paper to reader invisibly, reads so smoothly you barely realise what an accomplishment it is. And he presents his situations starkly, vividly, but with an equanimity and reluctance that leaves you devastated. The scarcity of the prose, the barren landscape of possibility, the simple power of his storytelling, each of these is exquisite.

This is a very, very great novel. And despite everything it carries no message, save perhaps a call for recalcitrance in the face of force. As the Magistrate says: 

“I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.”

You know what? I think I agree with him.

9 out of 10

Book Review: The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day three it is G.K. Chesterton's often overlooked masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday.

Read: May 2008

The Man Who Was Thursday in one Tweet-sized chunk:
A riotous escapade into the absurd which nonetheless contains truths rarely found in more serious works. 

In a review on Waterstone's.com, my esteemed former colleague Henry Coningsby (writing what is probably the best sentence I have read on that site) claims that “the mind of G.K. Chesterton is perhaps best compared to an ocean of champagne: there is vastness, there is effervescence - and, if you're not used to it, the effect can be quite overpowering.”

I am delighted to report that after only one chapter of this glorious book I was thoroughly, inexplicably, wonderfully, light-headedly...drunk. 

The Man Who Was Thursday plots the adventures of Gabriel Syme, a poet and policeman who goes undercover in the Central European Council of Anarchists in the hope of uncovering a conspiracy. But once he has taken up the role of Thursday on that secret council, he begins to discover that he is not, as he first imagined himself to be, alone amongst enemies. It is all rather more complicated than that. And, in the course of a wild, journey across London and northern France to prevent an anarchistic bombing, the black and white forces of order and disorder come together in battle, with the result that those opposing, black and white forces become a whole lot less distinct. 

Chesterton has made much of the fact that he subtitled this novel A Nightmare. He likes to play the jester, to support the notion that this book is something like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a weird and wacky journey through a masked world of uncertainty, whose culmination is waking up once more to a world of nature, and of hope, and peace. He wrote it at a time when he suffered depression and it is almost as though he is writing himself happy again. The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the most all-encompassing novels I have read. If it is a nightmare, then at the same time it is a blissful daydream and a deep, restful sleep. And probably all the levels of wakefulness as well. It is a riotously funny and enthralling, farcical adventure and at the same time a book with more ideas bristling about than hairs protruding from an old English Gentleman’s ears. Indeed the real characters in this book are not Syme and his fellow council members, but the ideas they debate. Anarchy, nihilism, the moral ambiguity of force, poetry and many others are thoroughly turned over, and all in only 200 pages. And the ideas are not only intelligent, they are hilarious. There are even reports that reading this book is prescribed by psychiatrists for the treatment of depression! I can see why; it certainly made me laugh out loud, and could, I suspect, have renewed my faith in mankind amidst even the roughest of times. 

Take this dialogue from the first chapter for instance: 
“’Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt.’ 
‘There again,’ said Syme irritably, ‘what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be seasick...Revolt in the abstract is — revolting. It's mere vomiting...It is things going right...that is poetical!’” 

And so much of it is like this: quick witted, inteligent, thought provoking. I thought I had worked out the plot from about half-way, and in one sense I had. But then it went on and on, the ideas are mind boggling, and all taken to a level further than any other book I have ever read. With every page the plot twists and turns; from secret underground lairs, and seafront battles, to elephant chases across London and hot air balloons over the shires. With all the ideas bubbling around in my brain I was light-headed, amazed, enchanted. I sat there nodding along with Gabriel Syme’s witty repost, his very British Gentlemanly style, and eccentricities, and concerns. 

And the result of all this? I am disorientated, still trying to work through everything in my mind. I am overpowered by Chesterton’s wit, his love of ideas, his thick satirical pen. Like an English turn-of-the-century Catch-22 this is a riotous novel I cannot wait to re-read. And I am not sure if one is meant to agree so completely with Syme’s world-view – perhaps Chesterton is laughing at me from wherever he now is – but I have not felt my own thoughts represented on paper so clearly for an awfully long time. 

It is almost impossible to write a review of this book. It is too good to pin down with normal words. You must read it yourself to see what I mean. It is as Jonathan Lethem writes in the Modern Library Classics edition introduction, “How do you autopsy a somersault? G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the great stunts ever performed in literary space, one still unfurling anytime you glance at it”. It has been said that Chesterton is “the master who left no masterpiece.” I cannot comment on any of his other work, but if this is not a masterpiece, then I don’t know what is. 

9.5 out of 10

Review: Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris.

Read: on a train back from Edinburgh - August 2009

Keep the Aspidistra Flying in one tweet-sized chunk:
Bitingly satirical, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is packed with ideas but let down by its infuriating narrator.

“Before, he had fought against the money code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes… He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever.”

George Orwell wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying in 1934/35 while working at a bookshop in Hampstead and it was published in April 1936, just a few months before he left to fight in the Spanish Civil War. It is a novel of its time, capturing something of the ideological conflict, sociological concern, and economic distrust which so characterised the 1930s.

The story is of Gordon Comstock, a copywriter with an advertising agency who walks out of his ‘good job’ – “the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket” as he terms it – to embark on a long, deliberate and painful slide into penury. Disgusted with the money obsession he sees all around him, and frustrated by the social constraints which are interlinked with this, Gordon takes a position as a poorly paid bookseller and eagerly begins his new life as a poet.

Already the author of one “sneaky little foolscap octavo” which can now be found lining the remainder shelves of bookshops all across London, he is unbowed and feels his magnum opus, London Pleasures, swelling inside him. Lines rise unbidden, he scribbles furiously, determined to stick it to all those that have ever stood in his way. This will be his revenge on all those pathetic ancestors who whittled away the family fortune leaving him to work for a living rather than pursue his muse.

“Outside, all was bleak and wintry. A tram, like a raucous swan of steel, glided groaning over the cobbles, and in its wake the wind swept a debris of trampled leaves. The twigs of the elm tree were swirling, straining eastward. The poster that advertised Q.T. Sauce was torn at the edge; a ribbon of paper fluttered fitfully like a tiny pennant. In the side street too, to the right, the naked poplars that lined the pavement bowed sharply as the wind caught them. A nasty raw wind. There was a threatening note in it as it swept over; the first growl of winter’s anger. Two lines of a poem struggled for birth in Gordon’s mind.”

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a book of conflict between the internal and external, between who Gordon wants to be, and what the world makes him into. What he finds in his painful descent through London is that no matter how miserable life is being a slave to money, it is infinitely worse without any at all. Poverty does not free him from expectation and responsibility; it does not give him the ability to do whatever he wants. It chains him to doing nothing.

This is a biting piece of realist satire targeted against those who put literary pretension above economic reality, those who romanticise poverty, and those Raskolnikovian protagonists who expect the world to fall at their feet yet never do anything for themselves. It is a bleak, uncomfortable novel, whose satire is inherent rather than demonstrative and which rarely elicits so much as a chuckle from the reader. Gordon is frustrating in a pull-your-hair-out-just-to-feel-something sort of way. As events progress he grows ever more listless and depressed. His obstinate determination to follow his renunciation of the money game through to its conclusion, whatever that may be, makes for painful reading. He is incredibly fortunate – a good education, talent, friends willing to go out of their way to help him, a sister who puts his wellbeing before her own, and a former colleague named Rosemary whom he loves and who, inexplicably, seems to feel the same about him – yet can only see his own petty misfortune. He is too proud to ask for help, to do so would be to embrace failure.

One of the reasons Orwell has become so universally popular is that his style is at once readable and poetic, to the point yet visually stimulating. He has an exceptional eye for descriptive prose, both in regard to his characters and the settings they inhabit. Just as Dickens often reflected the nature of his characters through their names, so Orwell does through their bodies. Gordon is a typical small and frail man with a chip on his shoulders. He worries that no-one is really paying attention to him, that life would be different were he taller, wealthier, more gregarious. He wants to be seen, celebrated, respected. Elsewhere, those interested in money above all else are fat and gluttonous, and those of the upper class tall and thin and elegant. Orwell treats all those characters who pass under his microscope with a sort of loving yet laconic disdain, like that of an especially critical parent. There is a great phrase where he describes a fat man as “[filling] his trousers as though he [has] been melted and then poured into them”, and there are plenty more of these witty physical descriptions.

Yet for all the fluid prose it is the society itself which provides most fodder for thought. Set in what Marx would have understood as the final phase of Capitalism, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a fascinating and utterly unfamiliar portrayal of a social milieu now almost totally defunct. An aspidistra (for those like me who had no idea) is a hardy house plant popular in the Victorian era but which had fallen out of fashion by the 1930s, becoming a lower class pretention of wealth, a reflection of the “mangy, lower-class decency” Gordon is desperate to avoid. As he walks the streets of London he sees them in almost every window he passes, a sort of symbol for the aspirational rather than revolutionary working classes.

“There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.”

This is a society in which there appears to be a genuine battle of ideas between socialism and capitalism, an age in which it is only clear in hindsight which direction history will take. What struck me while reading was a sense of what we have lost in the last seventy-odd years. When did we grow so used to consumerism that we stopped questioning its relevancy? When did the desire for something new and the money to purchase it become so central to our lives? What I realised with some sadness was that I have never known a time when the simplistic slogans and garish stereotypes of advertising haven’t been present all around me. I cannot conceive what life without marketing would be like. Gordon, it seems, can. And he doesn’t like the world as it is becoming. Orwell is careful not to let his own politics influence the direction or inflection of what takes place, but just being present in such an environment really brought home to me how completely that element of thought has disappeared. I like to consider myself a socialist, yet that is in a modern liberal context rather than this. The ideas of Gordon and some of his friends are as alien to me as feudal agrarianism would be. It reminded me of my grandfather, John Ruddock, who was a founding member of a communist leaning actors organisation, and made me wonder what he, and all those others like him, would make of the world of today? What would Orwell think?

I hope this does not come across as me romanticising a past time for that is not the aim. Some of the descriptions of the mental and physical realities of poverty are incredibly moving. Before long, Gordon has slipped into a listless and depressed malaise. He cannot afford a drink in a pub with friends, or to go to the cinema. His only pleasure becomes an illicit cup of tea in his cold room before crawling into bed. He is too cold to write anymore, and when he tries all he sees is the faults of what is already written. He edits, endlessly, but never composes. When finally he earns some money through poetry he is so drunk on potential that it brings nothing but further misery.

Like 1984 and Animal Farm, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is hard-hitting social satire rather than political programme. Gordon rejects socialism just as heartily as he does consumerism, and the only obviously socialist characters are middle or upper class young men with good intentions but who remain oblivious to the realities of the poor. This is not a book to turn anyone communist. But in portraying a society in which debate and discussion appears rife, Orwell gives today’s reader a chance to appraise the world of today in a different light. Doing so reminded me of things I have forgotten to see.

Yet it is often considered one of Orwell’s weaker novels. Partly this is due to the changes to some of the slogans that his publishers imposed at the last minute for fear of litigation, partly because Orwell disowned it later in life, considering it a writing exercise which he had only published because he needed the money. But it is also because, although blessed with the same tight and visual prose that makes much of Orwell’s oeuvre so readable, it is not in the same league as his later works. There are elements of biography to much of what takes place, and although Orwell does not speak through Gordon, anyone familiar with Down and Out in Paris and London will note that the descriptions of life on the streets and poverty come from personal experience.

Between it’s infuriating narrator and bleak demeanour, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is not a book to fall in love with. Not for me anyway. Rather the significance of it lies in its portrayal of a forgotten era in history, one I didn’t realise had so completely disappeared until I delved inside. This is probably a better book to review than it is to read.

6.5 out of 10

Boyhood - J.M. Coetzee

Day 9 of the Books, Time, and Silence 10 Days of Christmas

Read: August 2009

Boyhood in one Tweet-sized chunk:
One of the richest and most rewarding insights into the experience of childhood you will ever read.

Boyhood is the first of John Coetzee's fictionalised biographies, telling the story of his childhood, from birth through to adolescence. Told with the redolent economic prose and exact lyricism that won him the Nobel Prize, it is a searingly self aware, 'warts and all' view of childhood in 1940s and 50s South Africa and an insight into the mentality of the man Coetzee feels himself to be.

We meet John aged eight or nine, a precocious child with an appetite for learning but few social skills. Outside the homestead he is a shy, retiring type, but at home he becomes something of a tyrant, a demanding and difficult child who craves and disdains love in equal measure.

The Coetzee's live in Worcester, a small city 90 miles from Cape Town in the Afrikaner heartlands of the Karoo. They are middle class Africaner, who by virtue of education “prefer to be English”. His father, a government official/lawyer, has a tendency toward alcohol, and his mother believes that “studying is just nonsense”. Although he has a brother who barely appears, John is a solitary child, a sickly and bookish boy with an active imagination. When choosing sides in the Cold War he picks the Russians because the capital R is “the strongest of all the letters.” He spins glorious fantasies of Troy and of British valour at Dunkirk and devises an automated bowling machine so he can play cricket alone in the garden. He is happiest when he is playing by himself.

Yet for all his precocity, John is distinctly unimpressed with the sort of person he is. Boyhood chronicles not only the promise that literature provides him for escape from provincial tedium, but the weakness and vulnerability of childhood too. He is only too aware of his social shortcomings, and lives a life of doubt, anxiety and self-derision. He is haunted by what seem to be routine and harmless events: getting his hair cut is a “remorseless” experience that leaves him “squirming with shame”, while the very idea of being late for school precipitates nightmares in which “he weeps in helpless despair”.

At school he is an outsider whatever he does. Unlike the other kids he has never been caned, and lives in perpetual fear of it happening. He would like to be beaten, if only once, in order to fit in. It becomes a right of passage to him, but one he cannot bring himself to effect. He tries to go bare foot like the Afrikaans boys, but when his feet hurt instead of sympathy is met by derision from the other boys. When forced to specify his religion at school he makes a spur of the moment decision to identify as Catholic and finds himself ostracised, not only from the protestant and Anglican majority, but the other Catholics who mistrust him and suspect he has lied.

Behind all of this lies apartheid: silent and insidious and vile. If his mother calls to a black man in the street they must come and do her bidding. There are no black children at the school. Yet the apartheid isn't the only social tension, the Afrikaners are ostracised too, their language, poverty and rural ways making them almost as maligned. It is a world the young John feels horribly uncomfortable in, but he is too young to understand quite why. He wants to write, and if he did he would write about “something dark,” something that reflects the world he lives in.

What he does understand is the dynamics of his family. He spends much of his time dissecting and evaluating them, establishing his role within the family and the effect they have on him. He sees himself in his father and for that reason cannot stand to be around him. Of his mother he is more conflicted: torn somewhere between cloying obsession and raging against the claustrophobia of her love. He is made weak by this love which he craves and goes great lengths to inspire, yet lives in fear that his ''ugly, black, crying, babyish core” will be revealed. She has turned him into “something unnatural, something that needs to be protected if it is to continue to live.”

He loves and hates his mother as Coetzee the writer loves and hates many of his female characters. He describes himself as twice-born: once from woman and once from the family farm in Voelfontein. And it is here, where they visit once a year, the young John feels most at home. He “loves every stone of it, every bush, every blade of grass, loves the birds that give it its name, birds that as dusk falls gather in their thousands in the trees around the fountain, calling to each other, murmuring, ruffling their feathers, settling in for the night.” It is is a place he feels free, and a place he returns to in Summertime. “The farm is his secret fate.”

The landscapes of his fiction are scattered throughout, most notably in the relationship he feels for Voelfontein which mirrors that of the farm in Life and Times of Michael K. Yet what is perhaps most skilled in Boyhood is that it does not read as a work of revisionist history, demonstrating that the young Coetzee was always destined to be a writer. As in Youth it rarely evident that he is to become one of the leading novelists of his generation. At the end, however, there is a tantalising clue. Boyhood ends, as many do, with the death of a relative and John wondering what will happen to her stockpile of stories. Who will remember them now that she is gone?

Boyhood is a very real, very honest account of childhood, with its joys – cycling around the neighbourhood and going to the cinema – as well as its struggles. As a work of autobiography it is a warm and funny, yet run through with deep discomfort. As with all biographies, it says as much about the person writing it as it does its subject but what resounds throughout is a sense of childhood, a sense that even if it is partly Coetzee projecting his adult self onto the person he was, he is aware enough, and skilled enough as a storyteller, to inhabit his character. The result is one of the richest and most rewarding insights into the experience of childhood you will ever read.


7 out of 10

The Quincunx - Charles Palliser

Note: This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I am delighted to announce I have just become a fully fledged Book Fox.

Read: December/January 2007

Picture the scene: it is early December, Christmas lights blink at you as you walk through throngs of shoppers, laden down with presents for your loved ones. The air feels charged with an electric buzz. Across the cold tarmac the sweet sound of carollers makes you yearn for peace, quiet and a glass of mulled wine. Your shoulders ache, feet are sore. Then, just as you think the shopping is finally finished you are reminded of the one person you always forget, that person you really should buy something for. That person you never know what to buy for. Well never fear, for I have the perfect solution to all your woes.

The Quincunx is absolutely, positively, the perfect book for winter reading. Weighty as a draft excluder, thick as treacle, enticing as an open fire, you pluck it from the shelf a devour it. No book I have read provides such indulgent enjoyment. Fast-paced and exhilarating, it lures you in and takes you on a tour of early-nineteenth century England, with a conspiracy so enthralling it will keep you guessing long into the night – because once you get into the plot, there will be no putting it down until you are finished and the mysteries have finally been solved. It is one of those novels that could keep you company all winter, packed as it is with a horde of devious, dastardly, lovable, and mysterious characters. But despite its 1200 pages, you’ll probably be finished in a couple of weeks.

Whenever anyone asks me to recommend a book, this is what I suggest. The Quincunx is a proper story: epic in scope, with companionable characters, and a suitable dose of stimulation for the grey matter. I have never met anyone who had a bad word to say about it.

The plot follows Johnnie Huffam as he battles to stave off hidden conspiracies and outmanoeuvre his relatives in order to obtain the inheritance that is rightfully his. But in the meantime there is the small matter of just trying to stay alive…

It all comes down to a scrap of paper: the codicil the codicil to a will written half a century earlier, a will which has provoked greed, hatred, murder, and lunacy since before it was written. As enemies circle and the fate of the inheritance moves steadily towards resolution in Chancery, Johnnie must find out who he is, and his place in the wider familial quincunx, before it is too late.

If you like epic fiction you’ll love it. Although its setting makes it ideally suited to winter reading (why is it that when we think of the nineteenth century we think almost exclusively of cold grey streets, fog, thick overcoats, and families huddling around the fire? Is it because Christmas as we know it is such a nineteenth century invention, characterised so clearly in Dickens’s Christmas Carol? Or perhaps the smog of the Industrial Revolution has settled on the collective imagination?) it is really a novel for any time or place in which you want to lose yourself entirely in a great story.

But The Quincunx is not just a riotous plot-driven adventure – though that, surely is more than enough. It is a pastiche of the mid-nineteenth century novel, the kind made famous by the likes of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Indeed John Huffam, takes his name from Charles John Huffam Dickens’s middle names, and the namesakes also share the same date of birth. However, these references are just the tip of the iceberg. The pastiche is there in almost everything from the characters, to the settings, to the central concept of the book itself: a debate between the concepts of law and equity, that is between what is written in law and what is deemed equitable or fair.

It is this pastiche that is most often discussed in regard to The Quincunx. But the term doesn’t really do the book justice. Far from simply paraphrasing and satirising classic authors, Palliser takes the skills, interests and characteristics of the mid-nineteenth century novel and perfects them, distils them, concentrates them, creating a novel which is more Dickensian than Dickens, more Collins than Collins ever was. It is everything you could want in a Victorian novel: episodic, all encompassing, and packed with denouements at every turn.

Added to this nineteenth century focus, Palliser uses a host of modernist devices including an unreliable narrator, inconclusive ending, and concealed structure to make the mystery all the more deceptive. There is a whole hidden structure which revolves around the number five, the quin of the title. There are five related families over five generations, whose five crests form a quincunx, an arrangement of five objects with one in each corner of a square and one at the centre. The novel itself is divided into five parts, and each part is divided into five books and then five chapters. In a review, this may seem irrelevant, but within this carefully designed mathematical structure are held many of the fundamental mysteries of The Quincunx. It is one of those books you could study for years and still not grasp fully. The amazing extent of this planning is made particularly clear in Palliser’s fascinating, if a little self congratulatory, Afterword to the current Penguin edition.

When I started reading The Quincunx on Boxing Day a few years ago, I thought I was in for a long period of concerted reading. I was anxious, uncertain, and wary due to the amazing length of it. Yet only six days later, about an hour into the new year it was finished. In the intervening days I barely got out of bed for anything, let alone to welcome in the New Year. And when I had finished, I found myself sad and lonely as at the passing of a friend. Even at 1200 pages The Quincunx is nowhere near long enough. I love every single word of it. And that is in spite it containing three of the things I most dislike in a book: small print, long paragraphs of text, and chapters which start on the same page as the previous one finished. Were it not for the engaging plot, it would be one of those dispiriting books in which just turning a page feels like a great achievement. But as it is the pages fly by as unnoticed as the minutes turning to hours.

For some the often lengthy discussions about law and equity could prove hard work, but I found them illuminating. At times Johnnie’s narration is a little mature and astute for such a young boy, but then what most exemplifies The Quincunx is a need to question everything, including Johnnie himself. This is particularly evident as Johnnie grows closer to his goal, and begins to realise that neither good nor bad can be taken at face value, and that trust is a dangerous emotion to give in to. And in the end, despite being focused on the absurdity of familial inheritance in a closed hierarchical society, the reader is left unsure as to the moral fortitude of its hero. After all he has seen, will his life simply offer yet more evidence for the selfishness of man?

You’ll just have to read it to find out.

So let’s return to where we were at the beginning of this review: it is December, you are out late and just need to find one more present before you can go home. Now you know exactly what to do: make a beeline for the nearest bookshop and place an order for The Quincunx (ISBN: 9780140177626). Who knows, if it is a good bookshop they might even have one in stock. That done you can return home invigorated, feeling somehow that the mood of winter has been captured in a series of black marks on cream paper.

And who said anything about giving it as a present?

10 out of 10

Red Dust - Ma Jian

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: September/October 2009

The essence of good travel writing lies in duality: in the balance between the external journey through a physical landscape and the personal journey which takes place alongside it. It is not enough simply to travel through a country meeting people and visiting places, then recounting anecdotes so as to shed light on the nature and culture of that society. To do so is to forever remain an outsider looking in. Rather the best travel writing interrelates the landscapes, cultures and people to the parallel emotional journey of the writer so that the terrain of one moulds, shifts, and reacts with that of the other.

So it is with Red Dust, a book subtitled ‘A Path Through China’ but as much a tale of Ma Jian’s quest to find himself as an artist and a man as anything else. Because of this, his panoramic, three year tour of China provides a wonderful insight into the nature of that vast country and the people who live there. Through it all, from the emotional highs and moments of tranquillity surrounded by outstanding natural beauty to the lonely lows, near death experiences and horrendous acts of barbarism, he retains a clear perspective and reports what he sees and feels in a remarkably impartial manner. He is honest about his faults and those of his country, unapologetic about their successes. His is a search for answers to three specific questions: who is Ma Jian? what is China? And how do they relate to each other.

It all begins in 1983 as Ma turns thirty. Recently divorced, his ex-wife is now seeking custody of their daughter; his current girlfriend is sleeping with another man. By day he works in the Foreign Propaganda Department in Beijing, photographing the country in order to create books of images which will be presented to foreign diplomats. At night he moves in an artistic milieu of painters and poets whose gatherings have to take place quietly under cover of darkness to avoid detection by the police. These gatherings consist of lots of impotent jokes – a kid asks his dad, “Dad, why do we have a picture of Chairman Mao but no picture of the Communist Party?” And his dad says, “Because the Communist Party isn’t human” –poetry recitals, camaraderie, and life drawing exercises. All of which means that despite his best efforts Ma is very much on the state radar. With his long hair, gregarious lifestyle and denim jeans he does not fit the standards expected of a healthy young socialist. Economic development may be beginning to open up the country but with the newly launched Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution he can feel the authorities breathing down his neck.

"Everything is starting to change. China feels like an old tin of beans that having lain in the dark for forty years, is beginning to burst at the seems…Six years have passed since the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the cultural revolution. Deng Xiaoping is back in power, calling for ‘Four Modernisations’, private enterprise and foreign investment. He has liberated the economy, but continues to clamp down on all forms of dissent. When the activist Wei Jingsheng said the Four Modernisations were meaningless without the Fifth – democracy – he was arrested, put on trial and sentenced to fifteen years in jail."

Despite artistic promise he does not have the political astuteness that is required of someone in his line of work. He causes a furore when failing to notice a patch of flaking paint in the foreground of a photo of Yangzi Bridge in Nanjing. He receives a heated ticking off when he chooses a yellow font on the front cover of a magazine. “You are trying to suggest that we are a federation of pornographic trade unions!” exclaims the irate section head of his work unit. It is all told with straight faced satire, an absurd situation which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so terrible.

Creatively stagnant, restless, and fearing arrest any day, he resigns his job and spends most of his money on a train ticket to the westernmost border of China. It is a journey which requires some forgery but which would have been near impossible only a few years earlier. And so begins his three year shoestring budget, 13,000mile plus tour of China. He survives thanks to the kindness of those he meets, and by making a bit of money by selling short stories and poems, or doing odd jobs in cities he passes through. Much of the time he walks vast distances alone. Sometimes he goes days without eating, or months without washing. He is absurdly ill-prepared for the journeys he takes, and seems unwilling to learn that it is not wise to set off across a desert at night with only a compass, small back pack and a couple of bottles of water. He treats his escapades with almost flippant disregard, yet his survival instinct and slippery loner tendencies demonstrate a man of rare tenacity. He is a man existing for existences sake, travelling for the sake of travelling, searching for himself everywhere he goes without a plan of where to go next. He is an engaging, amazing, enthralling character.

Most travelogues are written by foreigners travelling the country with a purpose in mind, usually to uncover the hidden heart of a place so as to advance understanding of it. It is so refreshing to view China from the inside, from a native who has spent their whole life there and yet still finds shocks and surprises on an almost daily basis. Ma Jian has the cultural understanding of a native but the wide eyed amazement of an outsider: he is both. He gives us an insight into how an educated Han is perceived in different areas of the country, from indigenous tribes of the Burmese border to the intellectuals he meets along the way. And because he is travelling in a country where people do not travel, he remains perpetually on the outside of life, viewed with amazement, welcome and distrust wherever he goes.

It is not a criticism per se, but it is his footloose approach to his travels which I found most difficult about Red Dust. It is not the most purposeful of books to read, there is no narrative arc or sense of where it is going at all. While it is subtitled ‘A Path Through China’ Red Dust would perhaps be better conceived as ‘Paths around and around China.’ It sat by my bedside for almost a month as I read five or ten pages per night before bed without ever becoming fully engaged. It reads as an endless series of encounters set within a greater spiritual journey but which has no discernable sense of progress. He is in search of Buddhist enlightenment and dreams of travelling to Tibet but never seems to make much effort to get there. His wanderings are captured in an anecdote he recounts when visiting a village in remote South Western China. There they tell him about an American pilot who landed there in the 1940s and was kept as a slave by the local tribe for 9 years before finally escaping and going home.

"The American pilot was able to stay here all those years because he had a goal in life: he wanted to go home. I have no such goal, so I must keep walking."

So it is. The lack of purpose is the greatest strength and most awkward weakness of this fascinating, though not always easy to read, book. There is an occasional tension between past and present tenses which irritated me and provided another barrier to a smooth reading experience. But in the end, he does learn something of himself. At last, after nearly three years of travelling and an enthrallingly terrifying journey through the borderlands of Burma he reaches Tibet. There he seeks Buddhist enlightenment only to find disappointment. Buddhism, he concludes, cannot solve the problems of man. “From now on I will hold to no faith. I can only strive to save myself. Man is beyond salvation.” The answers he has sought throughout his travels do not exist. It is the most enthralling, poignant and rewarding part of the book. It rectifies any flaws in the structure and leaves you with a cathartic sense of culmination, or the start of a new passage in his life. His journey has come full circle. The answer to the great myth of life has taken the form of another question. And all he can do is hope.

"In the middle of the night I lie awake on the metal bed under two thin quilts, shivering with cold. A wind howls through the rain and snow outside. This stinking body no longer belongs to me, my mind is as empty as a plastic bag caught in the high wind. Suddenly, I think of Beijing, and realise that although it is crammed with police, at least there is a bed and pillow waiting for me there. I came to Tibet hoping to find answers to all my unasked questions, but I have discovered that even when the questions are clear, there are no clear answers. I am sick of travelling. I need to hold onto something familiar, even if it is just a tea cup. I cannot survive in the wilds – nature is infinite but my life has bounds. I need to live in big cities that have hospitals, bookshops and women. I left Beijing because I wanted to be alone and to forge my own path, but I know now that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people’s beginnings and ends. I have stopped here, not because the Himalayas stand in the way, but because my inward journey has reached its end. In fact, we all tread a path – the gold-digger, the coil-remover, Myima who left her turquoise behind and rose to the sky. We are just travelling in different directions, that’s all."

7 out of 10

A Convergence of Birds - Jonathan Safran Foer (ed)

Read: Januray 2009

There are few authors who inspire such breathless excitement in me as Jonathan Safran Foer. And even though his contribution to this intriguing book is only 19 pages long, it is worth buying for this alone. ‘If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe’ is quite possibly his most supremely written work. It is a masterful work of atmospheric storytelling told in rich vivid prose and packed with spectacularly evocative metaphor. It begins with this sentence, and the quality never wanes from there on.

“If the ageing magician should admire the ribs of his hungry gondolier, it’s only because they look like wands.”

My problem with reviewing Jonathan Safran Foer’s work is that I do not possess the requisite number of superlatives. There are only so many times I can use words like ‘spectacular,’ and ‘mesmeric.’ So just go and read this book instead. Alongside Foer's story there are 21 other fascinating contributions to this compendium, all creative responses to the life and work of collector and assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Foer started writing to famous poets and writers, asking them to create original works based on their responses to the work of Joseph Cornell when he was still a college student and long before Everything is Illuminated was published. So to see so many of the leading lights of American letters included here is amazing. Where else can you find Joyce Carol Oates, Barry Lopez, Siri Hustvedt and others all included within the covers of a single book alongside 28 full colour illustrations of one of the most intriguing artists of the twentieth century?

8 out of 10

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

If Mrs Dalloway were a diamond it would be almost as big as the Ritz, priceless, and kept under lock and key in a national museum. Visitors would gape at it, experts celebrate it, soothsayers develop all sorts of legends around it. Most of all it would inspire awe in those who looked upon it, for no one could quite conceive of the gargantuan forces needed to bring about its creation. And yet, for all this immense beauty it would remain shut up in its case, impractical, and with grains of carbon imperfection at its core.

What Michael Cunningham does in The Hours is akin to the master jeweller who takes this unwieldy diamond and from it creates a series of smaller, perfectly crafted gems which sparkle in the light and can be placed within rings and pendants and worn in public for all to enjoy. His skill is in knowing exactly where to cut and where to shave so that none of the original beauty is lost. The result is a precious reworking of a great novel, simplified, purified, and with an engaging plot which augments, comments upon, and replies to the themes of Woolf’s original text.

The story unfolds through the interweaving narratives of three women whose lives are linked by and constantly refer back to Mrs Dalloway. It is the 1920s and having been forced to retreat from literary London after a breakdown, Mrs Woolf is tentatively beginning to write her new novel. Occasionally she catches a glimpse of inspiration, but fears it will fade like a dream the moment she wakes up. It is the 1940s and Mrs Brown is pregnant with her second child, savouring a few extra minutes in bed with her book before she has to go downstairs and play the role of wife and mother. And it is the end of the twentieth century and Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her New York apartment to buy flowers for the party she is throwing in honour of her friend Richard Brown, a celebrated poet who is dying of aids.

It is all of these three times at once, for life, like great literature, is timeless. The characters experience similar hopes and fears, similar passions and constraints, and, just occasionally, those moments of exquisite happiness which makes each of these books such a rare treat. What changes is the world around them: the material freedoms of different ages and the social mores which govern what one can and can’t be. As in Mrs Dalloway, the focus is on the beauty and wonder of individual moments, but more fundamentally than its predecessor, The Hours is about their transience, the irrevocable march of time which ensures that everything will ultimately fade and decay. On top of this Cunningham takes many of the sub-plots from Mrs Dalloway – privilege, parenting, homosexuality and mental illness – and looks at them through the lenses of different decades. What is impossible, almost unthinkable, in Virginia Woolf’s 1920s and hidden behind suburban façades in the 1940s is gloriously possible in the 1990s. This is most clearly the case when it comes to homosexuality. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa cherishes one moment in her life above all else, the kiss she shared with her friend Sally Seton. Here the inspiration for this passage comes from Woolf’s own life, and a simple sisterly kiss shared with her sister. This moment is developed through Mrs Brown stolen moment of solidarity with a sick neighbour, and then fully achieved in the New York of the 1990s, where instead of marrying Richard Dalloway, Clarissa is living happily with Sally.

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book…What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”

The Hours is packed with these sorts of triptych moments, where biographical fact and classic fiction blur together to create something new. Special moments from Mrs Dalloway are revisited and updated; reflected upon in an atmosphere of nostalgic illumination which only serves to heighten their poignancy. By portraying Virginia Woolf, meticulously researched and brought to life, Cunningham is able to add to the mix an investigation on the nature of writing. Through his elegant, haunting prose, he explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader. While Mrs Woolf is shocked to discover that she can still think clearly and write capably, Mrs Brown is overwhelmed by the clarity of her expression and ascribes almost mythical significance to her words. And while Richard Brown is preparing to be honoured as one of the greatest living poets, he muses repeatedly on the impossibility of it all:

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something live and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”

These moments of heartbreaking honesty are what make The Hours such a great read. For all the beauty of Woolf’s prose, it remains an acquired – and even then challenging – taste. Not so Michael Cunningham. He has a clarity of expression which is dreamy, emotive, and a joy to read. Where Mrs Dalloway is hard work, dense and over punctuated, The Hours is understated and with a beautifully lilting flow. What Michael Cunningham understands is that spectacular prose cannot be overdone. For a passage to shine with its full power it cannot be crowded with dense prose on all sides. Great art is about knowing where to stop – not layering the paint too thick, repeating the motif too often, or attacking the notes with too much bravado – and letting what is already created speak for itself. The Hours may owe its most powerful passages and images to Virginia Woolf’s literary genius, but in taking them out of the Mrs Dalloway context and making them the centrepiece of all which takes place, they become even more beautiful to the eye, like a single flower blossoming in the middle of a lawn.

It is impossible to say which I prefer: the elegant and rewarding Mrs Dalloway which can be peered at in awe through a microscope for hours on end, or The Hours, masterly crafted and perfectly paced. It all comes down to personal preference and I cannot recommend them each highly enough. Ultimately they are each better for the existence of the other. Each captures the beauty in individual moments and the fragility of time. There is one moment near the end of The Hours which sums it all up and captures perfectly that very human experience which they are each about.

“Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties;…we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”

9 out of 10