Book review: After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

After the Fire, A Still Small Voice in one Tweet-sized chunk:
Powerful, white knuckle writing. Debuts don’t come much more impressive than this.

“Sometimes people aren’t all right and that’s just the way it is.”

This apparently simple statement spoken by one character to another reflects Evie Wyld’s prime concern in her stunning debut After the Fire, A Still Small Voice: the legacy of suffering. It is not so much the cauldron of war that she looks at, as its aftermath. If there are times when nothing you can say or do can keep the real sadness and horror of a situation at bay, then what happens next? As her biblical title suggests, this is about what follows the fire and brimstone of war. And what becomes of the human detritus emerging from it.

Freshly wounded by his girlfriend leaving him, Frank has retreated to his family’s Queensland beach shack in the middle of nowhere, a place he last visited as an already scarred teenager, battered by his mother’s death and his father’s abusive neglect. He’s drinking too much, has scars he cannot heal. The hot and hard Australian landscape reflects Frank’s arid mentality. He’s not only following a pattern in his own life, but one that has been played out repeatedly through the generations of his family.

Decades earlier Leon tries to hold his family together as his parents fall apart around him. His father Roman retreats to the isolated shack following his traumatic experience in Korea, leaving Leon to sculpt sugar figurines for wedding cakes in the family cake shop. But when he’s conscripted to Vietnam, Leon too packs his bags and heads off to a sticky war in the balmy jungle. War-induced suffering is passed from generation to generation, a chain of inherited pain. If this sounds slightly melodramatic, let me assure you that there is nothing overblown here.

Cause and effect; nature and nurture; then and now: these are some of the questions that Evie Wyld poses without attempting to answer. She neither moralises nor turns her intimate portrait into an ‘issues’ book. In the quality of her prose, delicate treatment of difficult subjects, and control of information, she proves herself one of the brightest debut novelists to emerge in recent years and more than deserving of her place as one of The Culture Show’s twelve Best New British Novelists. This feels like a debut novel that has taken risks, and it is all the better for it. Her attention to detail and focus on each individual sentence gives it a feel that is almost like poetry. It is a book best read slowly, with time to stop and think about what is happening. Descriptions are caustic – “He rubbed the grit of hair on his face” – but often delivered with a deadpan wit – “Like a man slow-dancing with an orang-utan, he walked the stove and cylinder, corner by corner, out of the shack and well away from the burning mattresses.” Wyld makes the reader work, encouraging them to decipher connections through allusion, and this exacerbates the heavy atmosphere to make for a sometimes uncomfortable read. But it is in its unflinchingness and refusal to delineate moral boundaries that it most excels. Leon is the more immediately likeable of the two characters, yet it is his emotional collapse that has set the precedent for Frank’s. There’s no blame, just a long line of cause and effect.

The empty landscape makes the characters turn inward, and it is hard not to feel that far from providing them the escape they seek, the landscape only traps them further inside themselves. The mood is creepy, dominated by suspicion and domestic abuse, missing children and an ever present fear of the bunyip. There’s an echo of Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ in its masculine cadences. Frank and Leon deal with troubles not by talking about them but by running from them, drowning them in alcohol, loneliness or violence. But even in their brutishness they retain their humanity, their fragility presented through the sugar figurines that Frank finds still standing in the deserted shack. Wyld seems fascinated with those who commit appalling acts but are not appalling people, and those who forgive them but are not victims. The relationships are intense and volatile, too important for these broken people not to sabotage.

After the Fire, A Still Small Voice isn’t perfect but it is fantastic: a white-knuckle read that is one of the most accomplished and impressive debuts I’ve read for a long time. It’s not dramatic and it’s not newsworthy, but it is what the novel does best – giving a voice to those the world forgets. There’s more than a hint of Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor here, in Wyld’s humanising of those on the fringes of society, in her presentation of the characters as they are, without judgement or romanticising their suffering. You won’t forget this in a hurry.

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2009. Edition shown published by Vintage in 2010, PB, 296pp, 9780099535836

Book Review: Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge

Read: July 2010

Master Georgie in one tweet-sized chunk:
Short and apparently simple, Master Georgie is an enjoyable snapshot of lives and the Crimean War.

It is a rare delight to encounter a book of such apparent simplicity as Master Georgie. The narration – split between three voices – is compelling and smooth, the prose wonderfully uncluttered. It is overloaded neither with explicit themes or complicated ideas. There is no sense of a writer trying to be clever. Master Georgie is storytelling of the finest order.

And yet I use the phrase ‘apparent simplicity’ advisedly, for the simplicity of style masks a cunningly composed narrative which questions how one can ever know something simply by looking at it. In Master Georgie, Beryl Bainbridge confronts the reader with an oddly compelling statement: you cannot know these characters.

When war breaks out in the Crimea George Hardy, surgeon and photographer, sets off to provide whatever services he can offer in support of the British effort. With him travel his adoptive sister Myrtle, amateur geologist Dr Potter and photographer’s assistant and fire-eater Pompey Jones. The narration is split between them, starting in the cold back streets of 19th century Liverpool, travelling through sweltering Constantinople and on to the battlefields of the Crimea. As each seeks to shed light on Master Georgie (as Myrtle terms him) a picture begins to develop of everyone but him. He remains the dark spot on the plate.

The Crimean War was the first to be extensively documented by photography and one gets the impression that Bainbridge spent a great deal of time searching for inspiration for her characters by looking at these pictures, only to come up with more questions than answers. That is how the book reads: a snapshot of a long dead, anonymous person who can never be resurrected, not even through literature. Master Georgie is all about what lurks beneath the surface of a photograph: the context, facets of themselves people choose to hide from the world, the misinterpretations that people ascribe to surface images. At one point a fellow character enquires as to why Myrtle often looks sad. “It’s the way I am on the outside”, she replies. “Inside, I assure you I’m quite happy.” This seems to sum up Master Georgie nicely.

There is an element of satire here, too. There are two targets for this: specifically the bombast of Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and generally those who gallantly march off at the first hint of war assuming victory. It reminded me very much of The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell with its portrayal of out of place Britishness, a pompous sense of worth that is never fully punctured, even while confronted by death, disease and defeat. There are some absurdly funny moments. The wealthy British bring trunk -loads of possessions and are accompanied as far as the Constantinople by their spouses and children as though for a bit of a summer jaunt. There is a funny scene when, having arrived in Constantinople, they go to the opera only for it to descend into a brawl over a perceived indiscretion towards Myrtle.

The satire is not biting though, and surrounding it is a tender portrayal of life, war and the consequences of our actions. Like the best war books, one comes away feeling that it was all so bloody pointless.

Yet none of this is to say that Master Georgie is an easy book. It is slippery, never quite giving the reader what one wants or expects. The drama is quiet, unassuming. Some of the supposedly dramatic aspects – particularly the shared and mysterious guilt the synopsis promises – didn’t really resonate with me at all. The prime feeling I came away with was puzzlement: I knew I had enjoyed the prose and the journey without really engaging with any of the characters; without being able to identify why. Others I know have reacted to it with utter indifference. Yet the fact remains that I enjoyed reading it, and it continues to challenge and interest me a month later. This was my first Beryl Bainbridge novel but I’m certainly going to read more by her in the coming months.

7 out of 10

Abacus, 1998, 9780349111698, 212pp

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Book Review: Monsters of Men - Patrick Ness

Read: April 2010

Monsters of Men in one tweet-sized chunk:

Monsters of Men is a near perfect conclusion to a near perfect trilogy.

“War,” says Mayor Prentiss, his eyes glinting. “At last.”

So begins Monsters of Men, the final volume in Patrick Ness’s multi-award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy. Lines have been drawn, armies are marching; divisive and polarising leaders have got what they wanted. And Todd and Viola are caught in the middle of it, faced with ominous odds and unenviable choices. The first of these is to split up, with Todd staying behind to keep an eye on the Mayor and fight the invading Spackle army while Viola goes in search of the scout ship that has just landed. Once again, their trust in each other will be tested to its absolute limit.

Given that its title stems from the warning delivered by various characters throughout the series – “war makes monsters of men” – it is no surprise that war is the predominant theme and, for better or worse, shapes everything that takes place. Yet Monsters of Men is as complex and multifarious as war itself, an investigation into the many ways and many ends for which people are drawn into it. It is an enthralling culmination to the finest series I’ve read in many years. Chaos Walking combines first rate characterisation with heart-stoppingly exciting plots and engaging, direct, and often lyrical prose. I run out of superlatives when describing just how good it is.

Best of all it challenges the reader. You cannot sit back and watch passively as events unfold. At every turn you are placed in the characters’ shoes, confronted with the question: what would you do? What would you do if your greatest enemy were the only person who could save you from a marauding army bent on revenge? What would you do if your “one in particular” were about to die and the only way you could save them were to fire a missile that would kill hundreds, if not thousands, of enemy soldiers and destroy all hopes of a desperately wished for peace. Faced with the choice between vengeance and forgiveness what would you do? What space is there for idealism when your very survival is driven by a need for realpolitik?

Every choice is played through to its conclusion, laying clear the full ramifications of that choice, the characters forced to live with and adapt to the world they have shaped.  Reading is a dynamic experience; different fonts for the different narrators bring the text alive, Noise sometimes squeezing, sometimes ramming its way onto the page. Characters feel alive because their choices are your own and because they are each three- dimensional, capable of a whole gamut of actions and reactions, none of which are black or white. Ness seems to instinctively appreciate that it is in contradiction and hypocrisy that life is lived and experienced. Uncomfortable truths demonstrating just how difficult some choices are:

“Come!” he says to me. “See what it’s like to be on the winning side.”
And he rides off after the new soldiers.
I ride after him, gun up, but not shooting, just watching and feeling-
Feeling the thrill of it
Cuz that’s it-
That’s the nasty, nasty secret of war-
When yer winning-
When yer winning, it’s ruddy thrilling-

Or how about this, a realisation that love might be the most destructive possibility of all:

“I’d have done the same, Viola,” Todd says, one more time.
And I know he’s saying nothing but the truth.
But as he hugs me again before I leave, I can’t help but think it over and over.
If this is what Todd and I would do for each other, does that make us right?
Or does it make us dangerous?

Monsters of Men combines gripping storylines with real moral quandaries. In Todd and Viola it has heroes you root for with every ounce of your being. They are far from perfect and it is their self-abasement, their doubt, which makes them so likable. And the point that Todd and many other characters come back to time and again is that it’s not how you fall, but how you get back up again that counts.

Contrarily it is the absolute certainty of Mayor Prentiss and Mistress Coyle that makes them so hideous. Their bloodthirsty eagerness for war only adds to this, as does their calm and rational defence of its transformative nature, the Nietzschean survival of the fittest test by which you walk into the fire and either emerge bigger and stronger, or fall away. War doesn’t make monsters of men, Mayor Prentiss and Mistress Coyle chillingly echo each other early on. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place.”

Yet whereas The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and The Answer had, at their heart, a message that power is the ultimate end, Monsters of Men begins to reveal the inherent flaws in that argument. Madness is often defined as continuing to do the same thing time and time again yet expecting different results, and the longer the book goes on, the more those who seek to divide and rule appear ridiculous. Stuck using the same tactics as before, without recognising the new opportunities that exist.

Underlying their military struggle is another battle – this one an ideological struggle between competing visions of how peace is won (discussion versus force, individuality versus collectivism) – and they are losing it.
What would life be like if you could hear everybody’s thoughts, and everybody could hear yours? What would be the effect on individuality, free thought, privacy? These are the questions Ness posed in The Knife of Never Letting Go. In The Ask and The Answer the question evolved into competing ideas of how to run such a society. In Monsters of Men, the circle is completed and the benefits of Noise presented. What if communication were organic rather than active, a natural inter-connectedness that provided community to all and bred trust and unity rather than secrets and lies? How much more intimate might relationships be if miscommunication were no longer possible?

“I think it could be the way forward for all of us,”…If we can all learn to speak this way, then there won’t be any more division… That’s the secret of this planet, Todd. Communication, real and open, so we can finally understand each other.

Warmth, love, and hope abound. As the book goes on these choices begin to congeal around a coherent moral stance, a single call to arms: be the change you want in the world. No matter how hard that might be.

“I’m sorry, Bradley,” I say. “I couldn’t have done any other thing.”
He looks up sharply. “Yes, you could have.” He pulls himself to his feet and says it again, more firmly. “Yes, you could have. Choices may be unbelievably hard but they’re never impossible.”
“What if it’d been Simone down there instead of Todd?” I say.
And Simone is all over his Noise, his deep feelings for her, feelings I don’t think are returned. “You’re right,” He says. “I don’t know. I hope I’d make the right choice, but Viola it is a choice. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that’s not how a person with integrity acts.”

With a host of new characters – including an angry third narrator bent on revenge – who provide fresh impetus and perspective, Monsters of Men is a fitting conclusion full of all the qualities and insight that made its predecessors so rewarding. As you’d expect from a final volume, loose ends are tied up, though not at the expense of the narrative flow, and plenty remains unanswered. Most notably of all, Ness integrates the vast and powerful themes into the plot so seamlessly that they appear effortless. This is a rare and remarkable achievement. Monsters of Men is a near perfect conclusion to a near perfect trilogy.

Walker Books, May 2010, 9781406310271, 624pp

9.5 out of 10