Category: The Blog

Rilke is an auctioneer in Glasgow who is asked to fulfil a quick house clearance. The customer, the inheritor and sister to the deceased, is particular about having everything in one room, the attic room, burned rather than put up for auction. Why?

Alongside an impressive collection of erotic literature are some unnerving photographs; are these the dark secrets a loving sister would like to destroy? Are the photographs staged or is there something more disturbing unfolding?

Very quickly Rilke becomes obsessed with trying to uncover the secrets of the photographs and their owner.

Desire then takes centre stage: Rilke’s promiscuity pales into innocence in the face of the darker predilections revealed through the photographs.

You can see what a fast-paced ride the reader undergoes and the machinations of the plot are impressively handled. I raced through the pages hoping to find answers in Rilke’s investigations. And yet, despite all my admiration for the craft of the story and macabre nature of the subject matter and protagonist, I was left hoping for something more. I wanted to go a little deeper, a little further into the darker world the novel begins to uncover. I didn’t want to leave the novel feeling safe. Perhaps, however, that would have made quite a different kind of book and in the end this reveals my literary preferences rather than any faults in the book itself. If you enjoy mystery and crime, if you love a detective with more than one Achilles heel, then The Cutting Room will definitely be a book for you.

Next week I’m reading A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton.

 

This is one of the times when I feel tempted to make my response to a novel very personal. Reading A Little Life is not an easy thing to do. Despite how compelled I was to turn the pages, I also found reading difficult because I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear more about the main character’s life. Jude, around whom all the other characters turn, has had such a traumatic childhood that unravelling more of his history is painful.

Jude is a bright and beautiful man who was left outside a monastery as a baby. To tell you all the horrors of his childhood and early adulthood would be difficult, partly because despite the length of the novel we never hear them all, and partly because it would spoil the plot. What did happen to Jude? Why is he so keen to keep his early life a mystery? How did he get his limp and why doesn’t he like to touch people?

Jude’s relationship to his body and to pain become easier to understand and, in some ways, harder to sympathise with as the novel goes on. Despite his physical disabilities – his spine was damaged in a car accident and this leaves his legs very susceptible to pain and infection – it becomes easier to understand why pain is a release for his mental suffering even as I grow increasingly frustrated with his self-destructive tendencies. He overcomes so much and yet I long for him to overcome more, to stop allowing his past to crush the potential of his present and future. And this is, of course, a response to Yanagihara’s brilliantly drawn character. I feel for Jude. I feel for his friends. I experience the events as if they really had happened.

Although Jude is the central character, there are several other carefully drawn characters, most notably his three college friends Malcolm, JB and Willem. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but part of what the novel achieves as a whole is an ability to track the special friendships between these four men as they move through early adulthood and into middle age. We see their desires and fears, their hopes and hang-ups. We follow how career drives – and they all have jobs in different fields so that the novel also gives an insight into law, acting, architecture and art – interfere with relationships and vice versa. The twists and turns of family, work and friends are depicted with surprising clarity and elegance.

However, part of my struggles with the book – if I put the personal connections aside, and these connections have to do with self-destructive behaviour and the nature of some of the illness that Jude has to face as he grows older – is the fact that there is little sense of redemption and while this is a struggle to face it is also what makes the book so challenging and successful.

A Little Life is about what we have to work with, just this life that we are given and nothing more. There isn’t a chance to do it again or to find peace in the afterlife. Any form of deliverance has to be won in life. It’s a tough message to take and though I read with a frantic speed, sometimes to rush through scenes that I found very upsetting, I am left wishing I hadn’t finished the novel after all. There are still characters whose lives I don’t want to leave; questions I would still like answered. To leave a reader both relieved to have finished and yet wanting more is testament to a remarkable talent.

I lived with the characters of A Little Life; they peopled my days, they troubled my nights. I didn’t always enjoy reading A Little Life, but I can’t deny the challenge of Yanagihiara’s writing. Though not for everyone, A Little Life is a powerful book worth reading despite the circumstances and emotions you are forced to confront.

Next week I’m reading The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh.

The emotional, geographical and moral scope of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart is surprisingly large and, despite the complexities, powerfully compelling.

There are two major tales, one set in Bosnia during the war, and one in Thailand around the time of the Tsunami in 2004, but any attempt to reduce the plot does a disservice to the craft of the telling of these stories that unravel around formative relationships, those special people who shape how we see ourselves.

Anya is a human rights researcher who receives a call from her ex, William, for the first time since they split up three years ago. That tug to reconnect is there despite her anger and when she realises she could answer some questions about possible war crimes in Bosnia by visiting William in Thailand – something about a resort by the ocean that cropped up during a visit to a dead soldier’s ex-girlfriend – she uses her job as an excuse to follow her heart and gets on a plane.

Marko is a Bosnian living in Cambridge, England. He fled Bosnia after burying the man he considered to be his brother, the war hero Kemal Lekić. Kemal was killed in a devastating bomb attack on their hometown. As none of his remains were found they carried an empty coffin to the grave. But when he gets a call from his cousin explaining that Kemal’s body was found in Thailand after the tsunami, he returns to Bosnia to bury Kemal again and to unearth the truth about who Kemal became in the war and afterwards. It’s also an opportunity to see Kemal’s ex-girlfriend, Vesna, a woman Marko was once in love with.

And then there’s William. He runs an English language school in Bangkok but he’s living in a haze. He longs for the holiday with Anya to develop into something, but it’s 2004 and deep beneath the waves tectonic plates are shifting, building momentum for devastating upheaval that will tie all these lives together.

In telling the story like this, it feels like a thriller. Certainly, I turn the page in order to find out what really happened back in Bosnia, but there is so much more to this novel than that (this is a mere fraction of the tale that also explores, Karate, rape and miscarriage and includes a dizzying number of characters all somehow relevant to the novel’s themes). The different places are described with care and affection. I can see and feel the differences in terrain, the weight of the air and sun. I can also read the story as a narrative about learning to live with loss, loss of a home, loss of a loved one, loss of a sense of self. They Are Trying to Break Your Heart is all about how to put yourself back together in the face of tragedy be it personal or global. Understanding the story of your loss, carrying it like a beacon into the world, allows you to move with and beyond it.

It’s a powerful novel and quite how David Savill managed to juggle all these narratives and all these places and histories in a relatively short novel is staggering. They Are Trying to Break Your Heart is a phenomenal achievement; a beautiful, global, novel that will stay with you long after you finish reading the final page. Pre-order your copy now as it comes out in April this year.

Next week I’m reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara mostly because I so enjoyed her article in The Guardian, ‘Don’t we read fiction exactly to be upset?’.

Infinite Jest is a novel that undoubtedly divides readers. Any of you who follow my blog will know that it has taken me over two weeks to read and review this book and this is in part a response to some things that have been happening in my own life, but also because David Foster Wallace’s prose demands attention; you cannot speed read Infinite Jest, there are too many turns in a sentence, too many phrases that require an aural reading of the language, too many hidden delights buried in technical discussions of film-theory or tennis demanding thought in a way that even someone like me, who isn’t that interested in tennis (though does like a little film theory now and then), can’t turn away from.

Even reading this first sentence of mine, you can see how hard it is to break free from the D.F.W. way of writing. No surprises that those who like Infinite Jest are near-on obsessives, possibly mostly young male American literature-geeks who find themselves understood and expressed in the playful yet earnest prose.

There are three strands to the plot set in a near-future world where time is subsidised. Most of the action takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment in the Boston area where a tennis academy and a halfway house for addicts share a hillside. One plot strand follows some of the addicts and residential wardens of the halfway house, most importantly Don Gately a former burglar who began his addiction issues at the age of 10 drinking his mother’s vodka. One plot follows the lives of those at the tennis academy, especially those of the rich and talented Incandenza family. The final plot is about the war for Canadian and Québécois independence since the USA, Canada and Mexico signed a deal to become the Organisation of North American Nations in which the USA gave Canada all of its toxic territory destroyed by years of bad waste management (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, violent Québécois seperatists in wheelchairs whose squeaks provide fodder for many nightmares, are some of Wallace’s more amusing if bizarre inventions).

The tennis academy was set up by James O. Incandenza, who also dabbled in making films, was an alcoholic, and who killed himself by putting his head in a microwave. The last film he made, ‘Infinite Jest’, becomes the pivot around which the plots converge. Whoever views this film finds it so pleasurable that their mind is unhinged and they are reduced to a state in which all they can do is crave further viewing of the film. But who has the original cartridge from which further copies of the film can be made and who will use it for what political purpose?

With much of the text being about addiction of one kind or another, the novel itself is addicted to flexing and stretching language in a way that exercises the reader. If you want something to chew over, there is plenty in Infinite Jest both esoteric and mundane, a language rich in slang, obscenity, dialect, acronym and challenging grammar. Any word that carries meaning, even if it requires explanation in the voluminous number of endnotes, is as valid as another; there is a pleasing parity of expression. This doesn’t mean that such a book is always a delight to read and this is where readers, I assume, divide: some will revel in the occasionally convoluted prose and Wallace’s divergent discussions of, for example, the demise of commercially subsidized television or the reason for the failure of the videophone; others will feel frustrated by it and lose the heart to continue especially as the plot evolves relatively slowly. However, the sheer wealth of detail and knowledge, whilst occasionally overwhelming, is also revealing and intriguing.

David Foster Wallace has a voice that lives up to the hype (I say has despite being aware that he can add no further words to the voice already committed to the page) and in Infinite Jest he unabashedly confronts us with our desire for pleasure and asks us what we are willing to risk to sustain that pleasure and whether we should consider redefining the meaning of pleasure itself. I would argue that the sheer volume of words is part of Wallace’s joke on our endless desire for more. If you don’t like the idea of wanting more and more of this kind of narrative, I would advise that you don’t even begin.

Next week I’m reading They Are Trying to Break Your Heart by David Savill.

We’ve come to take you Home explores two characters’ lives: Sam’s, a modern day teenager with a pilot for a father; and Jess, a young girl living through the First World War.

Sam’s parents are fighting because her father is away so much. Their fighting seems to trigger strange shifts in reality for Sam. One minute she is riding a fairground ride or running down the road after her father’s car and the next she is somewhere else entirely seeing airships, bombs, bodies, her own fingers lacing up a bodice. It becomes clear quite quickly that she is slipping into Jess’s life. Why that might be takes a novel to unfold.

Jess lives in the country and at first the Great War barely touches her. Her father is too old for the initial draft and for some time Jess’s family life continues unbroken. Then her father is called up and the real hardship of life in an England of food shortages begins to take its toll forcing Jess’s mother to send her up to London. She goes into service in the house her mother worked in as a young woman. Wartime London brings hard labour, love and heartache. Will Jess ever feel she has a family again?

It’s difficult to describe this novel without giving away plot, but you can rest assured there is more to uncover. I’m certain that this is a book that will have wide appeal. The centrality of the nuclear family and the importance of loving parents will be a great draw for many readers. While I admire the writing and plotting of the novel, I found myself more interested in Jess’s story than Sam’s and unfortunately, for me, the whole book came together too neatly leaving me with questions, threads of uncertainty that seemed not to fit in the knot of the ending.

Ultimately, We’ve come to take you Home is a family love story and ghost story combined, full of intrigue and written with care. Though it doesn’t quite work for me, it may well work for you. If you like the idea, We’ve come to take you Home won’t disappoint.

Next week I’m reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

There is something extraordinary about this quiet and gently unassuming novel. The lives of two people who make shoes are set next to each other: one story follows Claire, an English factory worker who is estranged from her family after falling pregnant as a teenager; the other story is of Pawar, a South-Indian man in his later life with prostate problems and regrets who makes chappals, a kind of sandal, by hand.

The monotony of their work, and their confused relationship to it as something meditative, grounding but also binding and wearisome, is very similar. Their struggle to communicate effectively with family is also shared and yet they are different in nationality, gender and age. This is undoubtedly the reason for the title of the novel, The Living: no matter where and who we are, the fundamentals of life, relationships, work, health, connect us.

The Living is deliberately uninterested in the grand narrative and yet, precisely because of this, ends up saying something rather beautiful about the realities of daily living that many great epics fail to communicate. It may be short, and it may seem simple – some would say it’s an easy read – but this clarity of narrative, that quietly nudges the reader to cogitate and unpick and question, is surprisingly difficult to create.

The Living is a delightful gem of a novel that I will definitely continue to think about. Anjali Joseph is clearly a very talented writer and I look forward to reading her other published novels and her future work.

The Living is published by Fourth Estate this March.

Next week I’m reading We’ve come to take you Home by Susan Gandar.

If you were wondering what happened to Miranda after she was betrothed to Ferdinand in The Tempest, or want to learn more about the young lovers and the fairy realm of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this might be the book for you. The stories are inventive and delightful, in turn playful and philosophical, full of politics and magic.

I particularly liked the first two stories, Coral Bones by Foz Meadows– in which Miranda’s life in Naples is envisaged – and The Course of True Love by Kate Heartfield– where we find out what happened to the changling boy from India whom Oberon and Titania were fighting over in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – but the depiction of Helena as a powerful, magical healer in Even in the Cannon’s Mouth by Adrian Tchaikovsky also lingers in the mind.

Of course I am unfairly tearing the stories apart when they are meant to work as a whole, each new story building on the previous one to create a wider vision of Shakespeare’s fantasy world, as the title suggests. Shakespeare’s sources are revisited and the transformative power of Ovid, Rumi and so on work within the text to deliver, among other things, an undead Macbeth and a vision of multiple parallel worlds that extend far beyond the fairy realm.

This was all very enjoyable, but however much I liked immersing myself in these new tales I couldn’t quite escape the sense that this was all an elaborate creative writing device. Julian Barnes’ final story, On the Twelfth Night, that ties the tales into a cohesive ending was particularly frustrating – though still clever and intriguing – because his second person always felt a little contrived. Adrian Tchaikovsky has a similarly devicive second person in Even in the Cannon’s Mouth. To add to these frustrations, not being a Shakespeare scholar made me feel I was missing important and witty allusions. I wanted the volume to be more than an academic diversion and yet the afterward entered into a discussion about the authenticity of the various authors’ methods as if it were possible, let alone essential, to mirror Shakespeare’s creative process and to use that as a measure of the collective tales’ success. That seems to me to be a crazy way of looking at these stories.

I enjoyed Monstrous Little Voices. I had fun romping around Italy and contemplating the power at play in human and fairy courts. Whether this adds to my understanding of Shakespeare’s work, whether it is even intended to do so, I can’t truly say. The energy of metamorphosis powers through the book and for that Monstrous Little Voices is a success; I’ll leave the academic judgement to someone else.

Next week I’m reading The Living by Anjali Joseph.

There is nothing conventional about Harper’s life, at least not when you’re a twelve-and-a half-year-old living in middle England in the 1980s and your parents are divorced. What a way to go charts Harper’s journey into teenagehood and navigates dating for divorcees and the complications of adult relationships, getting mortgages, cancer, activism and kissing boys.

Given the seriousness of the subject matter, Julia Forster cleverly infuses the prose with the wry humour of Harper’s childish perspective. Cultural references abound and it feels as if there is never a missed beat. This is sharp and polished writing.

It’s clear from the cover that this is a funny and nostalgic read, and I’m not normally drawn to those things (take what you will from that), but What a way to go is hard to put down and even when characters are using their own coffins as bookshelves, there is an upbeat nature to the story and writing that leaves the reader with a sense of hope. What a way to go picks you up and reminds you that there is a positive side to everything.

So drag those flammable shell suits from the bottom of the cupboard, grab some Baby sham or some gin, give your hair a good backcomb and set with hairspray, light up a fag and prepare to laugh your way through What a way to go. You won’t be disappointed.

Next week I’m reading Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World edited by Jonathan Oliver and David Moore.

The Flame Alphabet envisages a world in which language becomes toxic to all but children who roam their neighbourhoods spewing angry rebellious words and reducing adults and parents to people with shrunken faces, their speech dulled by a callus that forms hard and thick under their tongues. Certain words are more noxious than others; anything that references the self is particularly dangerous.

At first, children are abandoned to buses that profess to take the sickness away. Parents without off-spring flee. Those with children who haven’t already waved their infants off on the buses are forced to evacuate the city leaving their loved ones behind in quarantine zones.

Once out in the world where can the sick go? What hope do they have? As the sickness spreads so do the salt drifts, beautiful dunes that blow in on the silence.

All of this is narrated by Samuel, whose account of the sickness and its immediate aftermath is written down at great cost for even written language, all forms of alphabet and script, induce pain and sickness. Deciphering how and why people are suddenly afflicted becomes increasingly difficult as any form of communication, even hand signals, become intolerable. Even the children are immune only as long as they retain their youth.

Added into this complex mix is Samuel’s faith. He is a Forest Jew. He worships secretly with his wife in a Jew Hole where the word of the Rabbis is passed down an orange wire and into a listening device. The only scientist who seems to have any idea of the origins of the sickness, LeBov, claims the Forest Jews hold knowledge of the sickness, foretold its coming and may hold the key to its end.

Samuel soon encounters LeBov and his aliases and finds himself at the centre of research.

Father to a child who sickens him, potential Father to the beginnings of the sickness as a Forest Jew, the whole idea of signs and symbols in speech and on the page becomes abhorrent. Samuel refuses to envisage what others might do in this speechless time for ‘To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.’ (p265).

Unsurprisingly this is a story of failure. Failure to keep the sickness at bay, failure to be the hero disaster narratives desire. Samuel wants to be Father to his family, his wife and child, but his position as the wielder of power is as debased as the alphabet and as the civilization we know and yet he continues to hope.

Despite having revealed a lot of the plot I don’t think I’ve given away anything salient that would stop you from reading The Flame Alphabet. The novel comes with many accolades from respected sources and I don’t want to detract from those voices – there are many passages that clamour to be remembered and quoted such as p266:

Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it’s the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us.

Oh, I fucking hope so.

I am also very fond of the passages about the birds – but I still wanted something else from this novel. I’m not sure what that something is. Writing and thinking about The Flame Alphabet simply reminds me of the elegance of the language and its ideas and images that flow freely from ancient religious texts with the same lyrical agility and narrative power. It suggests to me that my frustration is one of personal desire. The idea that the human race might cease to communicate, no longer be able to share thoughts, is a vision of apocalypse that comes with more of a whimper than a bang and there is part of me that rebels against that. Perhaps, however, this is exactly where The Flame Alphabet’s brilliance lies. The saving grace of silence is that without stories there is no chance of being misunderstood. The Word can no longer be misunderstood. All that is left is survival.

Next week I’m reading China Miéville’s King Rat.

This is the first comic I’ve reviewed and as a reader of fiction, possibly the occasional graphic novel, I’m probably not well qualified to discuss the genre but I’m going to give it a go anyway.

Bitch Planet appealed to me because I loved the way in which it promised to dramatise the extremes of a patriarchal society. Humans have developed the ability to live on other planets. Bitch Planet is the nickname for the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost, another planet where non-compliant women are detained to live out their lives in penitence and service.

Non-compliance comes in many shapes and forms. You may not obey your husband or your father. You may refuse to look after your appearance and be too fat or too tattooed. You may be considered a bad mother. You may refuse to keep quiet. Your sexual preferences might be considered ‘wrong’. Any woman who doesn’t support the patriarchal hegemony is non-compliant and likely to be sent away for life.

Book One introduces the possibility of escape or, more likely, pay back in the form of the most popular sport on Earth, Duemila or Megaton.

Megaton is used to pacify the people of earth. If they watch a violent game of sport, their need for violence is contained and they remain compliant. But people are growing bored of the feed (television) and of Megaton and the introduction of an all-female team from Bitch Planet, fighting for their freedom, would certainly reignite peoples’ interest.

Book One follows Kogo Kamau or Kam as she is chosen to put together a team of non-compliants.

It’s a great idea and fun to read. It reminds me of all the subtle misogyny still rife in our society and provides a platform for thought and discussion. It does, however, also carry tropes from other narratives like The Hunger Games, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Mall, some television episodes of The Black Mirror, Equilibrium and so on. This doesn’t stop me wanted to read more though.

Packed with ideas, mindful of tropes and cliché, Bitch Planet is an intriguing series that I will definitely read more of. The artwork is delightfully retro and playful in its use of cover art, adverts, and colour. Typically, for a person who likes the space available in a novel to delve further into characters’ heads, I’d like to know more about the people in the comic but I trust that will unfold over time.

Quick, provocative, and fun, Bitch Planet is a great comic for people who want to think and talk about the interaction between the individual and society as defined by those with power.

Next week I’m reading The Flame Alphabet: a novel by Ben Marcus.