January 26, 2012
Evan S. Connell: Mr Bridge
Blog time is faster than real time. How else to explain that it’s approaching two years since I read and raved over Evan S. Connell’s novel Mrs Bridge? It feels like I just finished it. Back then, in the innocent days of April 2010, I asked “Classics imprints, where are you?” The answer was: here all along, because even then (quite independently of my plea) Penguin Modern Classics slowly and surely drew their plans to do the decent thing. Mrs Bridge, then, will be reissued in July 2012, with Mr Bridge to follow in 2013. I couldn’t wait until then to read the second volume, of course, and now that I’ve read it, have to get it out of my head and onto the screen right now.
With Mr Bridge, published in 1968, nine years after Mrs, Connell faces the task of making a book both familiar and new, and with all the internal consistencies that a companion volume requires. Frankly to comment on that, I would need to have read Mrs Bridge more recently (rather than just thinking I had). Anyway, Connell has given himself a minor get-out by the very character that Walter Bridge takes. He is a lawyer, a man who sees language clearly but whose vision of humanity is myopic. Words can be interpreted, nailed into place – that is his job – whereas people remain fuzzy and hard to pin down. He has no real idea how his own household operates, and is in awe at the wonders his wife works with it. “The idea of life without her caused him to move restlessly.” So, if his story doesn’t quite chime with Mrs Bridge, we can pretend it’s because he doesn’t notice what she does, says or thinks anyway. This difficulty in his vision is put comically in one of the earliest chapters, as Mr Bridge contemplates his posthumous bequests:
Often he read to himself particular passages from the will, imagining the delight and surprise with which it would be heard for the first time by his wife and children, not merely for the precision of the language but because they had no idea of the value of the investments.
The danger here is that he could be presented as a fool, with no requirement for the reader to get close to him. And certainly, Connell gives Mr Bridge some distancing views, though ones perhaps not unknown in the southern states of the USA in the 1930s. When a photograph is published in the local newspaper of a lynching, his outward response is to ask his wife, “What was this fellow doing that he shouldn’t have been doing?” His unspoken reaction is more interesting: “The photograph evoked a sense of the South: he could nearly feel the oppressive heat and hear the hoots of laughter and the jokes and shouts and lewd suggestions as the lash went whistling through the air and exploded against the Negro’s skin, the cheers and the clapping, the barking dogs, and the guns popping wildly in the pine forest.”
Like its predecessor, Mr Bridge tells a life not as one story but as many: the short episodes are discrete – there are 141 scenes in 360 pages – although people and themes recur. This ‘highlights’ technique makes the book something like, to paraphrase Geoff Dyer on Jack Robinson, a novel with all the dull bits cut out. Except that that is not quite right: rather, to begin with Mr Bridge is like a novel with only the dull bits left in. Mr Bridge’s life, like his wife’s, is not always distinguished by incident, and some of the more beautifully boring passages read like precursors to the anti-humour of Scott Dikkers’ Jim’s Journal or Sylvia Smith’s Misadventures. In these scenes, Connell resists the temptation to make them interesting: as a result of which they become absolutely fascinating. One scene, ‘No Oil’, sets up potential conflict when Mr Bridge’s garage carries out more work on his car than he asked them to; but the risk is spiked when the owner agrees to cover the cost himself. “And that was how it ended.”
Featuring the most humdrum scenes at the beginning sets up the reader for understanding that this is the undercurrent of Mr Bridge’s life (and that he is not unusual in that). This makes some of the later, surprising, chapters stand taller still. Into particular focus comes Mr Bridge’s troubled relationship with eldest child Ruth, who is growing away from him and makes him feel all the poignancy of the unrequited love parents have for their children. It brings out certain responses. In the scene quoted below, much of the force comes from its completeness as a chapter in itself, with space before and after, a floating island of intense feeling. The reader careers off the end, like Wile E Coyote, almost as soon as the drama strikes.
Ruth asked to borrow two hundred and fifty dollars. She would not say why she wanted the money. He refused to consider giving it to her without first knowing why she wanted it. At last she said one of her girl friends was flying to Tijuana and needed company. He said he would not let her have the money. Then he inquired, jokingly, why her girl friend wished to go to Tijuana, and Ruth answered that her friend was going to have an abortion. Before he knew what he was about to do he jumped up from behind the desk and slapped her across the mouth; then he sat down again as though nothing had happened, and Ruth walked out of the study. He noticed with astonishment that the hand which had slapped her was dancing around on the desk as it it was attached to a string. He seized it with his other hand and bowed his head. He could not believe he had struck her. His fingers burned at the memory. When she was a baby he had held her in his arms while she was falling asleep. There were nights when nothing more than the knowledge of her existence had been enough to waken him so that he had gotten out of bed and gone to the crib to watch over her.
This is a lovely thing: the word ‘memory’ triggering a vertiginous drop as the reader follows Mr Bridge from the present to the past; Mr Bridge wondering what went wrong while the reader has similar thoughts from another direction. Most of all, it slices open and exposes the fact that, while delivering great certainty to his children, wife and friends, Mr Bridge in truth hardly knows his own feelings. When they come forward, they do so with a force that shocks him: here his relationship with his daughter Ruth is central, in several ways.
Throughout the story, Connell gives us no shortage of reasons to dislike Mr Bridge: his racism, anti-semitism, sexism and other -isms that are so last century that they don’t even have a name any more. He could be a Blimpish caricature, but in his personal relationships, as stifled as they are, Mr Bridge develops added dimensions. His stunted affection for his wife comprises equal parts protectiveness and pity for her naivety, as when she eats the paper in a fortune cookie, never having seen one before. He realises that “he himself was responsible. He had taken her from the home where she had been sheltered as a child and substituted himself for her father, so she knew nothing she had not been permitted to know.” Their limited lives are the product of a perfect storm of personality types and the times they live in. Late in his life, late in the book, Mr Bridge recognises that “there were many things he had not done because for one reason or another they seemed unsafe – too many, perhaps.”
With his caution and his wife’s innocence, their life together is defined by fear of the unknown. Connell, however, keeps the reader who is expecting a descent into downright drama on the edge of satiety. (Mrs Bridge, written earlier but ending later, covers that need nicely.) Nonetheless there is a feeling of melancholy as the book gets nearer to its end. This is partly the heavier weight of Mr Bridge’s vulnerabilities being allowed to show, and his recognition of the only end of age – no longer contemplating his will with satisfaction, but observing the increasing decrepitude of his contemporaries (“Ultimately they were all going to go”). Finally, however, the regret comes from the naturally ambivalent feeling of completion at the end of any book, particularly one as satisfying as this.
January 5, 2012
Lorrie Moore: ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk’
My ongoing issues with availability of time to read and review are so well-rehearsed here that I’ve begun to bore even myself. I mention them once again only to explain why I’ve decided to take a page from Trevor Berrett’s blog and review a short story. I’ve done this once or twice before, but only when the story was published as a standalone volume. There are compelling reasons to do this, I think, other than the necessity of time constraint. Many stories deserve consideration at full length and can serve as a window to an author’s work generally. The corollary is that it’s difficult anyway to review an author’s collected stories effectively. Is it possible even to read them effectively, when the tics of any author will start to seem pathological over (in this case) 650 pages?
All this is relevant because I read ‘People Like That Are The Only People Here’ precisely because of the opposing responses it’s received. When I mooted reading some Lorrie Moore on Twitter, one reliable reader singled out the story as a must-read. This reminded me that another reliable reader, Adam Mars-Jones in his critic’s garb, had highlighted it in his review of Moore’s Collected Stories as “the most mannered and posturing thing in the book.” (He makes it clear that this stands it against some pretty stout competition.) They might both be right. Another tweeter observed that ‘Peed Onk’ (let’s call it that from now on: short, and no mistaking it for anything else) is “as good a case for the prosecution as for the defence. It’s very ripe.”
It sure is. ‘Peed Onk’ – at 34 pages, one of Moore’s longest stories – is about a baby with cancer, or in fact it’s about his mother. It’s also full of jokes and wisecracks – both distinct from comedy. This is where Mars-Jones takes issue with Moore, not just in this story, but generally: her humour is “closer to a compulsion than a talent.” There is some truth in this. Any story about childhood cancer is going to promise hard going, and it’s a promise – or threat – that the reader largely wants to see fulfilled. Terrible things happening should be terrible to read. So when the predominant tone of the narrative is jaunty – the sentences stabbed with exclamation marks – it risks making the reader too comfortable. You could end up with something like Emma Donoghue’s Room, robbed of force by the narrative constraints the author has placed on her story. Here, however, I think Mars-Jones’s concerns are unjustified. The mother is thinking and speaking in this way, surely, as a coping mechanism for the worst horror that can strike a parent. Indeed, if it’s correct that the story reflects events in Moore’s own life, then the jokes, the tone, the story itself may be entirely real instances of the coping mechanism in operation.
This quality is there right from the title (on which generally I agree with Mars-Jones: “Moore never seems to have found a title arch enough to satisfy her, but surely this time she comes close”). Here, ‘Peed Onk’ is what everyone in the hospital calls the unit for Paediatric Oncology. A wise barrier to erect, from two of the worst words in the language to two of the cutesiest: ‘Peed Onk’ sounds like an exclamation from In the Night Garden. The parents here, and the children too, need all the cushioning they can get while they adjust to the new reality. “Everyone admires us for our courage,” says one father. “They have no idea what they’re talking about. Courage requires options.”
The charge of excess whimsy is addressed too by the fact that the tone of the mother’s thoughts is often closer to hysteria than to humour. And even within the jokes, there is darker truth: a parent’s fear of their child falling sick, yes, but also of not being a good enough parent in the first place, of not always putting first the child now at risk of being lost forever.
Perhaps, she thinks, she is being punished: too many baby-sitters too early on. (“Come to Mommy! Come to Mommy-baby-sitter!” she used to say. But it was a joke!) Her life, perhaps, bore too openly the marks and wigs of deepest drag. Her unmotherly thoughts had all been noted: the panicky hope that his nap would last longer than it did; her occasional desire to kiss him passionately on his mouth (to make out with her baby!); her ongoing complaints about the very vocabulary of motherhood, how it degraded the speaker (“Is this a poopie onesie? Yes, it’s a very poopie onesie!”).
This may be where the experience that the reader brings to the story is relevant. I have never knowingly opened a sentence with the words “As a parent”, but I did wonder if my own position – having two young children I could mentally put in the place of Baby in the story – added piquancy to the whole thing. The fact of feeling a more emotional draw from a story because of association with the characters may well be a failure of imagination, but subjectively, at the time, it feels like an expansion of it.
Moore certainly passes up no opportunities to invite the reader’s empathy and association. There is pathos aplenty, right from the moment at the beginning of the story when the mother discovers blood in the baby’s nappy, “like a tiny mouse heart packed in snow.” She asks, “How can it be described? How can any of it be described?” but ineffability is not Moore’s way. And it is effective and efficient, this targeted aim at the heart of the reader. What parent, what human, cannot feel the twinge when the mother whispers into the baby’s ear, “If you go, we are going with you. We are nothing without you.”
Yet it is also this direct appeal which is Moore’s biggest weakness. After ‘Peed Onk’, I read two more stories as recommended to me: ‘Dance in America’ and ‘You’re Ugly, Too.’ These also are very good stories, thoroughly funny and unmistakably sad, and made it certain that I will read more. But like ‘Peed Onk’, they seem to have the author’s thumb on the scales, too obviously directing the reader. There’s evidence of control-freakery, a determination on Moore’s part to steer the reader’s understanding of her characters via pithy insights. In ‘You’re Ugly, Too,’ we’re told on the first page that the main character was “almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite.” This, to my tastes, is too neat: now that the reader has been told this, how can they make up their own mind? And when Moore adds that the character wore novelty earrings “no doubt for the drama her features lacked,” that no doubt makes it clear that the observation must be coming from the writer rather than the character herself. Author, step back, let go! Similarly, the anecdotes and just-so details around the characters come worryingly close to quirkiness.
Yet this is clearly something which others not only value but consider one of Moore’s finest attributes. Critics whose praise features on the cover of The Collected Stories say “Moore’s stories pack more wit and tragicomic power into a single paragraph than most novels manage over fifteen chapters,” and “Every line feels crafted, cared about, subjected to crash-testing, really meant.” To me, these threaten unwelcome claustrophobia. The signposts to the reader – laugh here, cry now – are made all the more glaring when you read three stories and all feature serious illness: childhood cancer, cystic fibrosis, mysterious growths. What easier shortcut to the reader’s sense of significance could there be? Still, Moore shows that there is pleasure to be had in all this pain: within these parameters, the stories are a delight to read. And here, also, is one area where Moore’s nemesis Mr Mars-Jones can’t crow: most of his fiction has been set around sickness too.
December 14, 2011
Twelve from the Shelves: My Books of 2011
As the toad work squats on my life, and infant Self number two squats on my lap, shoulder, and every other free space, this blog has been updated less frequently in 2011 than before. I can’t promise better for the immediate future, but let’s distract ourselves in the meantime with a best-of-the-year selection which I think is as strong as any I’ve posted. One of the advantages of having less time to read and write is that I’m better at choosing which books are likely to delight me most. This list includes only titles I’ve reviewed, so apologetic nods go to fascinating books I never got around to writing about, such as Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, and James Kelman’s A Disaffection. Sadface too for the absence of books like Adam Mars-Jones’s Cedilla and Edward St Aubyn’s At Last. (No, I didn’t have a no aristos rule.) Oh, another note relating to the squeezing of time this year: more than half of these books have fewer than 160 pages. And yes, I’ve gone over the twelve. I always do.
Richard Beard: Lazarus is Dead
This list is alphabetical by author, but if I had to choose my favourite new book of the year, it would be this one; this one would be it. (Mirroring; that’s a clue, you see.) It ticked all my hard-to-reach boxes, with its straight face, twinkly eye, but untongued cheek. It’s a novel, it’s a biography, it’s a study in fiction and storytelling, and it’s got Jesus. It deserves to be massively popular.
John Burnside: A Summer of Drowning
I had lost my way with John Burnside’s early fiction (in truth, he says that he lost his way with it), but the clamour of praise for his latest novel became impossible to ignore. I read the book just to shut it up. It’s a whispering, creepy, insistent horror story, set in darkest northest Norway, which plays with what artists do and whether it is right or not that “to refuse oneself is exemplary.”
Italo Calvino: Mr Palomar
This was a book I never finished on my first love affair with Calvino 15 or 20 years ago. I now see why: it’s a tricky little thing, the oddest of character studies told in philosophical musings, with beautiful prose (thank you, translator William Weaver) that is not just decorative. It is also as intricate structurally as a Chinese puzzle ball. An Italian puzzle book, then.
Anne Enright: The Forgotten Waltz
I was told this year, with apparent relish, that Enright’s The Gathering was the lowest-selling Booker winner of the last decade. This meaningless factoid (is it even true?) made me want to reread that book, which I know will give up more with every visit. Meanwhile, her new novel is immediately impressive and subversive, with its sly take on a grand universal – adultery – and a pin-sharp portrait of right now: the Irish property crash and financial crisis. This is how good ‘literary fiction’ can be.
Marlen Haushofer: The Loft
Straight from nowhere, drawn to my attention by the translator’s trusted name, comes the quiet, seething story of an Austrian housewife who discovers her old diaries. It is one of those looping, unified narratives that draws the reader in from seemingly innocuous beginnings: “From our bedroom window we can see a tree that we can never seem to agree about…” In a loft in central Europe in the mid-20th century, all human life is here.
Lars Iyer: Spurious
A blog I never got around to reading became a book I couldn’t stop. I’m glad it went that way, in the spirit of Geoff Dyer, who doesn’t read journalism by his favourite writers as it appears, so that he can read it all at once in book form. Spurious is the funniest book I read all year, and follows two frenemies (yep) as they fail entirely to make progress on anything, or even to agree on what form progress might take. “‘Go on, tell me,’ says W., getting excited. ‘How fat are you now?’”
Denis Johnson: Jesus’ Son
This book of stories, due for reissue in the UK by Granta Books in autumn 2012, is linked by its drifting narrator: hyperbleary, all edges, semiconscious through illicit medication. But the writing is as tight as our man is louche, and the book provides a porthole I couldn’t tear myself away from, into a way of life I’d never want to go near. Like Spurious, it’s surprisingly funny - which is the only kind of funny that I like. Listen to Tobias Wolff read the best story, ‘Emergency’, here.
Georges Perec: W or The Memory of Childhood
Perec to me was the arch-trickster of European postmodernism, the homme who put the ‘Ooh!’ into Oulipo. His lipogrammatic novel La Disparition; his jigsaw-puzzle epic Life: A User’s Manual. But Perec reportedly wanted to write one of everything, and when Wikipedia describes this book as “a semi-autobiographical work that is hard to classify,” well, you can say that again. Don’t classify it: read it, with its jocular-sinister parallel world where Olympic ideals reign, and its dual title with one meaning. W is the sort of book which makes you (made me) rush off and buy all the author’s other books that you didn’t have.
Jack Robinson: Days and Nights in W12
Another unclassifiable wonder, written under a pseudonym (what a childish conceit). Above all it’s that rarest of things: a self-published book that is not just readable but essential. (Go on: I challenge you.) Robinson, aka Charles Boyle, brings a magpie eye and a big imagination to scenes of daily life in the streets that surround him, inventing, questioning, enlightening and confusing. It’s plotless, semi-fictional, fragmented, and touched with the brilliance of a man who, if he does know how to write a bad sentence, is keeping it to himself.
Nicholas Royle: Quilt
This novel is a not-quite-seamless blend of an affecting study of grief (a man deals with his father’s death) and an aggressive literary experiment. It, or its narrator, devolves into a sort of madness by the end, obsessed by rays (the flatfish). Then, after the end, there is an thrilling afterword which acts as an attack on complacent literary culture and as a manifesto for books like this. Can I join your club, Professor Royle?
Sjón: From the Mouth of the Whale
Here is a book in a field of its own for sheer eccentricity and oddness – perhaps challenged by Blake Butler’s There Is No Year, which narrowly missed my list. Sjon’s book wins by sheer force of charm and character. I struggled to capture it in my review, when I’d just read it, so the chances of my doing better now are slim. It’s full of enquiry, discovery and intellectual jeux d’esprit in 17th century Iceland. (I know!) Just read it.
Alberto Barrera Tyszka: The Sickness
If there’s a stereotype for the sort of book that appeals to me instinctively, it would be a slim, unflinching novel in translation about an ostensibly gloomy subject matter. How kind, then, of Alberto Barrera Tyszka to write me one. It’s about a doctor who cannot bear to share his father’s cancer diagnosis with him. (So, fathers and sons too: another guaranteed tickler for me these days.) Perhaps as I get even older, I will no longer care to be reminded that life is chaos which ends randomly; but for now, this is just the ticket.
Jiří Weil: Life with a Star
An addition to the great canon of Holocaust literature may not seem urgent, but as this book is 60 years old, I was already rather late to it. (When I wrote my review, it was out of print in the UK, but it will be reissued by Daunt Books in April 2012.) Life with a Star is brimming with irony and pathos, and the blackest humour that helps address the greatest enormities. Fearing extermination by the unnamed oppressor, one man points out, desperately, that the whole population of Earth is going to die anyway, so what does it matter? “That won’t help us,” replies another. “Even if everyone dies, we will be the first.”
Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
It was a joy to return this year to one of my favourite writers, whose invention and boldness even in the well-trodden genre of childhood memoir make every page sparkle and glow. A mature companion piece to Oranges are not the only fruit – and looking likely to match it in popularity - it is a love story, a family story, a comedy, and a call to arms for those who still give a damn about literature. That’s you.
November 24, 2011
Richard Beard: Lazarus is Dead
Occasionally you read a novel which entirely subverts your expectations and, in doing so, becomes one of your favourites of the year. (I had better add, in case anyone suspects slippery phrasing, that this is that book.) I’m not sure what I thought Lazarus is Dead would be: not quite a ‘religious spoof’ as the Edinburgh Book Festival crassly categorised it. Perhaps a contemporary allegory? In fact, such category issues are central to the book.
Lazarus is Dead is described on the jacket as “genre-bending,” though blending might be more apt. It is a novel, a biography, and a study in fiction and storytelling. It is both respectful to the biblical scriptures, and more observant than they are to Lazarus’s own story. The only gospel which mentions Lazarus is John, and for a man who is Jesus’ “only recorded friend”, his story is short. Front of stage in his own book, Lazarus here becomes a man in full.
In Beard’s story, Lazarus is a businessman. “His life is ordered, successful, unusual; he doesn’t need enlightenment.” He attempts to carry on with life and work through a worrying decline in health; each time Jesus performs a miracle, his condition deteriorates. He turns to a healer, Yanav, who “likes sick people with active imaginations who thrive on close attention,” and whose treatments unsurprisingly fail to help. Lazarus thinks back to his childhood friendship with Jesus: “as children in small-town Nazareth, the boys could barely be told apart.” Lazarus returns again and again to a pivotal event in their childhood with another friend, Amos, in which Jesus does not come out well and which is decisive in parting the young friends. Indeed, Beard is brutally balanced in his approach, reminding us that in John 11:6, Jesus remained at a distance from Lazarus as his death approached, all the better to ensure an unignorable death and a memorable miracle. Even earlier, when Jesus walks on water:
Innocent people must drown in Lake Galilee. Blameless families are required to grieve. This must be so, otherwise no one would be frightened for the disciples in the storm.
If Jesus is the son of god, then all stories before and after exist in the service of this one incredible story. Every drowning makes its contribution to the glory.
The similarity of Lazarus and Jesus in childhood, their closeness, returns as a more complex thought: the potential for Lazarus to usurp Jesus’ place in the Christian story is a central element of the book. (One might think of Jim Crace’s Quarantine and its alternate take on the origins of Christianity.) As Lazarus’s health declines, local priests and Romans alike are watching him for his friendship with the dangerous Jesus, or, later, wondering if Lazarus himself might be the much-promised saviour. “Doesn’t the messiah come back from the dead?” Beard also explores why the disciples themselves might see Lazarus as a threat.
There is playfulness in Beard’s forensic analysis of biblical verses. When John writes that Lazarus was sick, what was he suffering from? He “records no specific symptoms,” reports Beard. The condition is “so familiar that the bible doesn’t need to describe it.” Beard adds that we know the illness was fatal, but not infectious: Lazarus lived with his sisters, who remained unaffected. “This eliminates tuberculosis and smallpox.” It is also a gut-wrenching and visceral story, a grisly and pain-wracked descent from life toward death.
He tries to speak, tries to say. His thoughts and memories and feelings have come to nothing. It doesn’t matter how much anyone learns. Poc. The knowledge disappears. One thing after another, and Lazarus plucks imaginary objects from the air. The opportunity to marry. Poc. The decision to be good, or the chance once more to see Lydia naked. Poc poc. To have children of his own and to show them the glory of the Temple. Poc.
But there is comedy, too, from the literal interpretation of the Bible story as a human experience. “In the Book of John, Lazarus has a non-speaking role,” Beard reminds us, but here he gets his say. After his resurrection, Lazarus comes to see Jesus, but the disciple Peter tries to put him off, tells him that Jesus is sleeping: “What he did today wasn’t easy.” Lazarus responds, “This time yesterday I was dead. I have a couple of questions.” One of those questions is expressed by Lazarus’s sister Martha: “What for?” It is the unanswerable. Lazarus’s tragedy is to believe that he has been raised from the dead – and before that, made to die – simply as an illustration of Jesus’ abilities, or, worse, as a trial run for a greater death and resurrection soon to come.
Given that the biblical record of Lazarus is so scant – forty-four verses – Beard also uses other texts and interpretations to build his story: Robert Graves, Pär Lagerkvist, E.P. Saunders, and more. But this is no dry analysis: the characters are alive, the scenes vivid, the plot gripping. The story drives us on through a desire to see first how the inevitable comes about (Lazarus dies), and then to see what happens afterwards (which we don’t commonly know). The structure is immaculate: the chapters balanced in an ‘angel-wing’ pattern of declining length, seven to zero representing Jesus’ miracles, and then back again. Beard’s short declarative sentences have a scriptural authority, even as the book explores authority and questions authenticity. This is the author as creator: any biography is, he says, “an attempt to bring someone back to life.”
What helps make Lazarus is Dead such a brilliant achievement is Beard’s ability to balance two ideas at once. He is respectful but playful, rigorous yet inventive. If Truman Capote invented the ‘non-fiction novel’ – I said if - then this might be a new form of fictional biography. Beard uses the existing stories to work out the ascertainable facts, and then builds on these facts to create a new story. It is this transformation, from verifiable truth to imaginative truth, which is the very essence of art.
November 10, 2011
Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
As a reader who’s been with Jeanette Winterson through thick and thin (and there was enough of the latter to make me wonder if the thick, viewed from a distance, was thin too), I was disappointed to hear that she was publishing a memoir. Didn’t she say “There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies”? That was the refrain from her 1994 novel Art & Lies, one of the thinnish moments I’m nonetheless very fond of (“my most closed piece of work … written at a time when I was looking inwards not outwards”). But there needn’t be any contradiction here: the most interesting kind of memoir – from Nabokov to Burnside – is that where the author acknowledges both the limitations of memory and the creative aspect of the process of writing the life. In the foreword to This Boy’s Life, expert liar and memoirist Tobias Wolff says that “I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology. Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome. I’ve allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.” Or as Winterson puts it here, the ending you need is not normally available unless you write it yourself. “Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open.”
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? takes its title from the response Winterson’s adoptive mother made when she told her how happy she was in a relationship with another woman. Ah, Mrs Winterson, who has loomed large in the public perception of the author to the detriment of two and a half decades of interesting work. She only has herself to blame, perhaps, having begun her career with a semi-autobiographical novel, and having begun that novel with a depiction of her monstrous mother. (“Like most people, I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling. My mother liked to wrestle. It didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.”) For Oranges are not the only fruit to have become Winterson’s most famous book is not very surprising: it’s her most straightforward, her most plainly warm and witty and affecting. (The award-hogging TV adaptation didn’t hurt.) What came next in her fiction was always more ambitious, and to me more interesting, even when it felt inchoate or reiterative. Oranges is the book, twenty-six years old, which is still the only one namechecked on this cover; though that’s apt enough as it seems clear that this memoir is destined to become her second most famous.
It’s apt too as Winterson expresses rueful regret at the way in which Oranges has been taken as her autobiography: so here’s the real thing. Oranges was a “cover version … a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” If Oranges was all about her mother, then Why Be Happy is all about her mothers: Mrs Winterson, who took her in (though “the Devil led us to the wrong crib” she would say when young Jeanette was troublesome), and her birth mother, who gave her up aged six weeks. (As I write this, my son aged four weeks is sleeping in front of me. This is heady stuff to contemplate.) She does it plainly, and winningly, part confessor friend, part eloquent persuader.
Mrs Winterson dominates the first half of the book, as she dominated Jeanette’s life (I’m using her first name not to sound cosy but to prevent a blizzard of Wintersons from blocking up my sentences). She dominated, yes, because she was large: ”she loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself.” The tone and intention is not mocking or disdainful. Jeanette wants to understand Mrs Winterson, with her contradictions, eccentricities (“two sets of false teeth, and a revolver in the duster drawer”) and infectious misery. To Mrs Winterson, the universe was a “cosmic dustbin”, and it seems to Jeanette that her religious attachment to an Old Testament God was a manifestation of her fear of happiness. ”She thought that happy meant bad/wrong/sinful. Or plain stupid. Unhappy seemed to have virtue attached to it.” The battle between her and her mother, Jeanette says, was between happiness and unhappiness. Reading the book, and in particular the later sections which disclose her violence towards her girlfriends, failed relationships, breakdown and suicide attempt, one could hardly consider this devotee of happiness an untroubled soul. Then again it is not happiness she argues for, but the pursuit of it. The chase is the aim.
Jeanette does not denounce Mrs Winterson, nor the Church which carried out an exorcism on her to rid her of the demon of homosexuality. “I saw a lot of working-class men and women – myself included – living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the Church.” This is not so surprising when we consider her love for the Bible as a work of literature. She writes of evening classes attended by working men, in the days when “the idea of ‘bettering yourself’ was not seen as elitist.” The classes were big on Shakespeare, “and none of the men ever complained that the language was difficult. Why not? It wasn’t difficult – it was the language of the 1611 Bible; the King James version appeared in the same year as the first advertised performance of The Tempest.” The problem with “modern Bibles with the language stripped out” is that “uneducated men and women, men like my father, and kids like me in ordinary schools, had no more easy everyday connection to four hundred years of the English language.”
Her childhood is a resource both personal and political for her. It surely wasn’t so very unusual to grow up in the 1960s without a car or telephone (outside toilets were perhaps rarer), but certainly her upbringing was without frills. This, combined with a nascent feminism, contributed to Jeanette’s decision to vote for Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 general election: her first vote at the age of 19. Thatcher “seemed to me to have better ideas than the middle-class men who spoke for the Labour party, and the working-class men who campaigned for a ‘family’ wage, and wanted their women at home.” By then she was thrilling to the “energetic quiet” of Oxford University, even though she discovered there a neglect of women writers that was not so much a conspiracy of silence as “a conspiracy of ignorance.”
Later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.
She always was a scrapper, never one to compromise. ”I am an ambitious writer – I don’t see the point of being anything; no, not anything at all, if you have no ambition for it.” The book evolves from memoir to manifesto, as impassioned on the subject of literature as her essay collection Art Objects (which, when I read it 16 years ago, left me cheering and wondering how I could join her society). T.S. Eliot, she says, kept her company when she felt alone at home; she found his books in the library where she collected murder mysteries for her mother. “I had no one to help me, but T.S. Eliot helped me.”
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that’s what poetry is. That’s what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.
It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
She has a deft way of combining commonsense with high ideals, though with a tendency to venerate aspects of the past in a way slightly out of sync with her literary enthusiasm for making things new. She soon realises that voting for Margaret Thatcher did not bring her what she wanted. “I did not realise then that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results.” And her defence of libraries – the places where she found herself – is apt in the current economic climate, where they feel like a soft target for councils strapped for cash. “It seems so easy now to destroy libraries – mainly by taking away all the books – and to say the books and libraries are not relevant to people’s lives. There’s a lot of talk about social breakdown and alienation, but how can it be otherwise when our ideas of progress remove the centres that did so much to keep people together?”
Social breakdown and the strength of society is important to Jeanette because she needed to get the sense of community that was lacking in the home from somewhere. “I never believed that my parents loved me.” (And suddenly it becomes clear why love is relentlessly presented as our highest value and achievement in her fiction.) “When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable.” The Bible helped, telling her that God loved her, but as she reached middle age, she found herself unable to resist seeking out her first mother, the one who gave her up. “Adoption drops you into the story after it has started. … The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.” The last third of the book is a gripping and powerfully affecting trail in search of her birth mother, and of what happens afterwards. It is typically honest and unsparing, and left me feeling emotionally exhausted.
The three elements in the book – love, literature, life in the world – are ultimately inseparable. Mrs Winterson “read the Bible as though it had just been written – and perhaps it was like that for her. I got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.” Jeanette not only explains but shows how her childhood informed her fiction, including the lack of straightforward narrative which she attributes in part to her own life’s lack of narrative. ”That’s not method; that’s me.” She gives new life to the textual refrains from her books which ring like mantras for those who know her work well. Here, in an eloquent chapter ending, which seems appropriate to end this review, the last sentence is the first sentence of her 1992 novel Written on the Body:
[My mother] didn’t like stories about being raised from the dead. She always said that if she died we weren’t to pray to bring her back.
Her funeral money was sewn into the curtains – at least, it was until I stole it. When I unpicked the hem, there was a note in her handwriting – she was so proud of her handwriting – it said: ‘Don’t cry Jack and Jeanette. You know where I am.’
I did cry. Why is the measure of love loss?
October 27, 2011
Magnus Mills: A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In
When I was younger, it used to drive me mad when friends (or, more often, family members) would knock music by artists I loved, saying: “All their songs sound the same.” What they meant, I thought, was that their songs don’t sound like anyone else. So it is with Magnus Mills: all his books sound the same, in a sense, because they don’t sound like anyone else.
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, therefore, is in a sense business as usual for Mills. It places us in the usual nonspecific but familiar setting, and gives us the unnamed narrator, the bluff blank dialogue, the sense of circularity, and expectations of frustrated progress (both the characters’ and the reader’s). What we also get is Mills’s trademark representation of the world of work and labour, which has occupied so many of his novels. He is most interesting when approaching it at an angle rather than head-on. All Quiet on the Orient Express, where a man “spills a tin of green paint and thereby condemns himself to death”, for example, is a chewier stew than the more directly work-related Scheme for Full Employment or Mills’s last novel, The Maintenance of Headway. With A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, the oblique title confirms that we are in sideways territory again, and sure enough, the result is one of Mills’s most ambitious and satisfying confections.
Our hero – why not call him that? – is a naïf finding his way: the rules of the world are explained to the reader as he discovers them. This is not to say that the reader ends up enlightened, or running ahead of the narrator: correspondences in literature and history suggest themselves, but remain inchoate. The Empire of Greater Fallowfields, for example, where the book is set, looks very like Britain (it has “the only flag that could be flown upside-down without anybody noticing”), or rather like a cross between a fairytale reading and a media interpretation of it. People appointed to high office have no idea what they are doing, there is a general loss of purpose, like in Vonnegut’s Slapstick, where people “had to believe all their lives that they were perhaps sent to the wrong Universe, since no one has ever bid them welcome or given them anything to do.” Now that they have been given something to do – Postmaster General, Astronomer Royal, Pellitory-of-the-Wall – the characters are defined, literally and psychologically, by their roles. Their personalities are not ruled by the usual qualities in fiction: ambition, envy, passion; instead we get humanity writ small: pedantry, bossiness, passive-aggressive needling. When one complains about unfair treatment, another points out that “unfairness is what keeps the world going round.”
The narrator’s role is Principal Composer to the Imperial Court. He takes up residence in the ‘cake’, the building where the orchestra practises and the conductor Greylag composes music which will be credited to the Principal Composer. He may not know much about music, but our man at least knows more about the stars than the new Astronomer Royal (“They’re all fixed, are they? Well, that’s definitely a fact worth knowing. Thank you”), who can’t even get his telescope to work – though he will once he finds a use for the universal sixpence stipend which none of the court officials is otherwise able to spend. Meanwhile, they are treated with surly compliance by the workers – “serfs” – of Greater Fallowfields, and they are required to rehearse a play which has parallels simultaneously with Macbeth and with their own predicament. Petty bureaucracy is never far from hand: “It’s treasonous to interfere with the postal service,” says Wryneck to Garganey (all the names are like that). “Even to make improvements?” “I’m afraid so.”
Analogues and connections spring up, but scatter as the mind settles on them. Is it a parallel for Nazi Germany, or postwar Germany, or the drifting United Kingdom? The people of Greater Fallowfields believe that the world envies them, when in fact it is passing them by while they remain caught up in their own affairs. They take notice only when the outside world becomes a threat as a neighbouring country builds a railway into Fallowfields. So concerned are the empire’s noblemen about their neighbours taking over (“the customs of the east,” says Smew. “We don’t want them here”), it doesn’t initially occur to them that the greater threat might be from their own people leaving. They are complicit in their own downfall because they are tied to the past and comfortable in their own limitations (“I’d have liked to have been able to award Greylag and the orchestra with a day off in recognition of their valiant efforts, but unfortunately this was beyond my gift”) - even though those limitations, the roles they hold, were only recently new to them. ”Progress doesn’t bring improvement,” one of the noblemen says. “It just makes people think they’re cleverer than they actually are.”
As with most Magnus Mills books, the best approach is to forget about pinning it down and simply enjoy the slipstream. A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is sparklingly sad and seriously funny. It tells us about loss and power and control and authority and things that more literal and realistic books would not address half as directly. It reminded me most of all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpiece The Unconsoled; like that book, like life, here all the characters can do is “try to carry on as though everything was normal.”
October 13, 2011
Deborah Levy: Swimming Home
Swimming Home is one of the launch titles from And Other Stories, a new publisher headed by alumni from Serpent’s Tail (Stefan Tobler) and Dalkey Archive (Sophie Lewis). Such a provenance immediately made me want to read this novel (a quote on the back from Jeanette Winterson and an introduction by Tom McCarthy sealed the deal).
You can read my review of the book for the Guardian, here.
October 6, 2011
Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
This is one of those books that I would happily have ignored as ‘not for me’ (indeed, I happily had) but for a friend urging me to read it in the strongest terms (“one of the best books I’ve read all year”). Does it matter, I tentatively wondered, that I barely know of Edward Thomas at all, and certainly haven’t read his poetry? “Absolutely not.”
Now All Roads Lead to France may be encumbered by a clumsy (albeit relevant) title, but the subtitle is unarguable. It relates, season by season, the last four years of Edward Thomas’s life, before he died on the Arras battlefield on 9 April 1917. The previous day, a dud shell had delivered him a lucky escape. Then, after a successful Allied assault, Thomas leaned into a dug-out to fill his pipe when “a shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart. He fell without a mark on his body.”
Matthew Hollis follows the old principle that you should begin a story as close to the end as possible, and his book is all the better for it. In a life of thirty-nine years, where Thomas didn’t even begin writing poetry until a little over two years before his death, the risk of boring the reader with childhood and early life would be great. Instead Hollis fills us in briefly with what we need to know, and concentrates in detail on Thomas and his surroundings and influences.
In fact, this is not just a book about Edward Thomas, but about the cultural life of England in the early twentieth century, and the opposing forces who wanted to move poetry on from its Edwardian stagnation. In one corner were the ‘Georgian poets’, so called for their inclusion in anthologies edited by Edward Marsh and published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop between 1912 and 1922. They included, behind the survivors like Rupert Brooke and John Masefield, thickets of poets each of whom regarded himself as the greatest poet in England, all now more or less forgotten: W.W. Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, W.H. Davies. The Georgians were, said Monro, a ‘forward movement’ in poetry, and he probably didn’t intend faint praise when he described their verse as something “the general public could appreciate without straining its intelligence.” To others, the Georgians, with their innocent, pastoral poems in sing-song rhythms, were beneath regard. As T.S. Eliot put it, not intending any kind of praise, “the Georgians caress everything they touch.” Squared up opposite were the Imagists, including Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Richard Aldington, but most prominently Ezra Pound, and whose manifesto required direct treatment, pared language and a relatively free verse. They were, as Hollis says, “modern, forward-facing, trim,” and exemplified in Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’.
I didn’t know Edward Thomas’s poetry at all when I started this book, though I enjoyed the first few sections so much that I quickly went out and bought his Collected Poems. The first glance of them seems to park him with the Georgians: the bucolic concerns, the looking down and looking in, the frequent recourse to rhyme. In fact what Hollis convincingly shows us in the first half of the book – before Thomas had written a single poem – is that he was persuaded of the need for a new cadence or tone in poetry for years before he began writing it. This conviction was shared by the man who more than any other shaped Thomas’s approach to poetry and who is here so thoroughly presented that he becomes the second subject of the book: Robert Frost.
The names are coming thick now: Frost, Pound, Eliot, Brooke, Yeats too. Hollis’s biography quickens an entire lost world, and is a rounded recreation of the sort of literary life which has always seemed just out of arm’s – or time’s – reach. It seemed out of reach to Thomas too, who by 1913, at the age of 35, was a busy critic, editor and biographer. He had published more than twenty prose books and more than 1,500 signed book reviews (with plenty more printed sans byline). But his prolific rate did not mean low standards: he was “the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry,” according to a letter in The Times, and Walter de la Mare praised his unswerving commitment to distinguishing rich crop from fallow field:
For the true cause, he believed, is better served by an uncompromising ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ than by an amiable ‘All are welcome’.
(De La Mare also said, perceptively and presciently, that “any reviewer who uses the word ‘genius’ should be fined for the benefit of a literary fund.”) Thomas, busying himself with scrappy literary work, had suffered from depression since before going to university, and found no happiness in family life. In reading of his breathtaking disregard for the needs of his wife and children, I was reminded of John Cheever, who “loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown.” Thomas spent as much time as possible away from his family, and made them miserable when he did return for brief visits. When his wife Helen was pregnant with their second child, she wrote to a friend, “I have prayed that I and my babe may die, but we shall not, tho this would free Edward.” Thomas himself acknowledged that “What I really ought to do is live alone” (which he more or less did, given his frequent weeks-, even months-long absences) but was not above absurdly passing the blame, or at least failing to take it upon himself. “But I can’t find the courage to do the many things necessary for taking that step. It is really the kind [Helen] and the children who make life almost impossible.” Since Thomas had no considerate person in his life to tell him to shit or get off the pot, he continued this selfish behaviour until his death. Was the unhappiness he brought his wife and children worth it for the poems it gave us?
It is not, of course, a biographer’s job to pass judgment on his subject, but at times Hollis seems almost to be writing a narrative account from Thomas’s own viewpoint, with all the identification that implies. There is only a little of the marriage problems from the standpoint of Helen, the wife who put the long into long-suffering. He implicitly criticises a poetry editor, who knew Thomas well, for returning poems to him unread (even though Thomas had submitted them as the work of another, anonymous, poet, so the editor couldn’t know they were Thomas’s own). And he offers no comment on Thomas’s embarrassing renunciation of his early – farsighted – praise of Ezra Pound, apparently to save his critical career in the face of outrage from London’s literary cliques. However, these are the only weak points I could find in an otherwise exemplary (half-) Life. If pushed, I could also complain about the choice of tired photos – so ubiquitous they’re invisible – of several of the main players: I only have to say the names W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke and I guarantee you will know exactly which photos are used to depict them in the short eight pages of illustrations. However I presume these – school of Google Image search, page 1 – were not Hollis’s choices.
Ah yes: back to Robert Frost. He dominates much of the book, and his poems are written about here with such sympathy and understanding that I immediately wanted to read them instead of Thomas’s. He was Thomas’s greatest friend and mentor, and the two independently came up, then supported one another in, the notion of “the sound of sense”: a new acknowledgement of poetry as carrying the rhythms and tones of natural speech. This was, to use a terrible phrase, a third way which challenged both Georgian ornament and Imagist minimalism. It came from a belief that “words exist in the mouth, not in books.” Simultaneously acknowledging and challenging his antecedents, Frost declared that his own verse “dropped to an everyday level of diction that even Wordsworth kept above.” For Thomas’s part, he eschewed the forcing of rhyme where none naturally existed, warning himself against “any future lenience to the mob of gentlemen who rhyme with ease.” Hollis’s careful unpicking and assembly of Thomas’s and Frost’s theories of ‘the sound of sense’ is thrilling and brilliant; we see Thomas gradually and then suddenly become a poet, erupting with a white heat of creativity in late 1914. (“Did anyone ever begin at 36 in the shade?” he wondered.) For him this was a natural development, fuelled by Frost’s empathy, of his thinking since the turn of the century: “the best lyrics seem to be the poet’s natural speech,” he wrote in 1901, or as Hollis more formally puts it, this was “the overlaying of variable speech rhythms upon the strictures of conventional blank verse.”
She found the celandines of February
Always before us all. Her nature and name
Were like those flowers, and now immediately
For a short swift eternity back she came,
Beautiful, happy, simply as when she wore
Her brightest bloom among the winter hues
Of all the world; and I was happy too,
Seeing the blossoms and the maiden who
Had seen them with me Februarys before,
Bending to them as in and out she trod
And laughed, with locks sweeping the mossy sod.
It seems likely that this book will be read predominantly by those who already know Thomas’s poetry. For me, the result is an enlightening and peculiarly tense read: wondering whether he will actually get around to writing all that verse as the end grows nearer and he heads off to war – or, more seriously, feeling the anticipatory fizz as I awaited the unveiling of the work. (Beginning in his mid-30s and knowing so much about poetry before he began means that Thomas has almost no apprenticeship material: his gift springs from the womb fully formed.)
The corollary of that is that once Thomas gets going, and once he goes off to war and his death comes closer, the book seemed less urgent to me. His desire to go to war was not so relaxed as Rupert Brooke’s (“Well, if Armageddon’s on, I suppose one should be there”), and Hollis suggests that it came from a fear of seeming unmanly, deriving most strongly from one incident where he failed to back up Robert Frost in a dispute with a gamekeeper. Also, the money was welcome: he could earn more as an officer than he did from his writing. The last third of the book becomes almost literally a life in poetry: Hollis quotes generously from Thomas’s work as his poems transmute his daily lived experiences into art. This is welcome, though it remained the case that the first half of the book triumphed over the second: because the most extraordinary aspect of Thomas to me is not what he did with his poetic gift, or how the world lost it so quickly, but that he managed to get there in the first place.
September 22, 2011
John Burnside: A Summer of Drowning
Reading two books by one author in the same year is rare for me, but how many authors present so many different forms to us as John Burnside? A poet, novelist and memoirist, his acclaim in all three areas would be sickening if it weren’t so thrilling. As noted previously, I had given up on his fiction after the diminishing returns of his first three novels, but his first memoir A Lie About My Father had me agog a few months ago, and keen to read his recent stuff. The impulse was supported when I read that Burnside himself now regards the second and third novels which lost me as “disastrous”. Time to come right up to date then, with his latest.
A Summer of Drowning suffers, in my view, from a troublesome (hardback) cover. (The printed version is much darker than the image above.) Even as an interested party, I saw it and thought, what were they thinking? As it happens, my scepticism was unjustified: the cover shows the painting Fisherman’s Cottage by Harald Sohlberg, which is significant in the story. Indeed, as I became more and more delighted and disturbed by this exceptional novel, I took to contemplating the cover in wonder in between bursts of reading. But a cover which attracts only after the reader has begun the book could still look like an own goal.
It is narrated by Liv, a twenty-eight year old woman who lives with her mother on Kvaløya, a small island in the Arctic Circle. Liv tells us how ten years ago a local boy, Mats Sigfridsson, drowned off the island: “I like to think that the sea took pity on the puny child it had killed, and was in the process of carrying him home.” Not only that, Mats’ brother Harald died the same way ten days later, and a visitor to the island, Martin Crosbie, went missing shortly afterwards. Normally it would be blogging etiquette to emphasise that this is not a spoiler, and here you may be doubly reassured: not only does Liv tell us all this in the prologue, but the book doesn’t really go into much detail about the events when the narrative does catch up with them. This is one of those tricky volumes where the first task of the reader is to determine exactly what it’s about.
It’s about, at least in part, Liv and her mother, Angelika Rossdal. She is a painter who, having gained fame, appears to reject it by withdrawing to the frozen north. I say appears to because she continues to welcome journalists who want to interview her, and to hold court for a group of men Liv refers to as “the suitors” and whose interest, whatever form it in fact takes, her mother clearly finds satisfying. (Liv never knew her father, though she discovers that he was her mother’s opposite: a campaigner and ideologue who wanted to change the world by engaging people with it.) Liv has been in her mother’s shadow for so long that it is hard to tell who the thoughts belong to when she says something like this, concerning her mother’s withdrawal:
To turn away from the busy world is interesting, up to a point … but to refuse oneself is exemplary. To become nothing, to remove yourself from the frame – that is the highest form of art.
She is not just talking about an artist’s work. Mats and Harald Sigfridsson, in drowning, may have removed themselves from the frame, and become nothing. Liv herself, solitary and unclubbable, has refused herself in relation to many aspects of society in the ten years since the boys died. “I chose to become invisible. … I have remained in these meadows, where I have always been, and I have done nothing at all.” Her only significant human contact is Kyrre Opdahl, a man who has lived in the area for as long as anyone can remember, and who “was my own personal storyteller, someone who charmed and frightened me, in more or less equal measure, all the time I was growing up.” Kyrre rents out a cottage, or hytte, to tourists each summer, and tells Liv about the huldra, a wild spirit who takes the form of a beautiful girl and lures men to their doom. (“First she brought him a little happiness, then she killed him.”)
Liv’s mother has a great gift in her painting, which means that her lack of interest in people is accepted, even viewed as selfless: she had to remove herself from society to fulfil her potential. The reader may not be so convinced. The myth of Narcissus is related in the book, and referred to in an epigraph. It’s typically remembered as a simple warning against self-regard, but Liv is reminded by one of her mother’s suitors, Ryvold, that it goes deeper. Narcissus didn’t know to begin with that it was himself was seeing in the pool.
He had thought he was alone, looking at a world separate from him, a world of other things, and then, all of a sudden, he sees that he is in that world. [...] And it’s only when he discovers the truth, and sees that his self is an object in a world, like all the other objects, that he becomes a painter. Because, for the first time, he is part of the world, and art is his way of confirming that. A way of saying that he is in the world, in the world and of it.
Angela Rossdal’s self-denial, her “gift for refusal,” is not so humble as it seems. And she has not prepared her daughter well for living in the world by allowing her to believe herself not to be a part of it. (One might say that this story of erasure is just one psychological drama after another.) Where Angela’s fame and talent get her far, Liv has no such collateral with the islanders to justify her own isolation. What must they think of her? That appears to be something else the book is about, though I wasn’t entirely satisfied by this aspect. From the start we get hints of Liv as being somewhat unusual, unreliable even (“I have very few memories that I would be prepared to call my own”) and as the story proceeds, the clues build up. She spies on Kyrre Opdahl’s guests in the hytte: “It was because I wanted them to be happy”. This may be her best attempt at matching her mother’s careful negotiation of observation and distance. She becomes obsessed with the notion that the demonic huldra is a local girl called Maia (the only other female we meet on Kvaløya: Liv and her mother are surrounded by men). Burnside wants the book to be ambiguous – “The Turn of the Screw, set in the Arctic Circle” – but it already is, and is also rich and sinister, even without making Liv such an obvious object of suspicion for the reader.
The thrill of A Summer of Drowning comes from being in the presence of a writer on form and attacking his subject from all angles. (The style of the book, like an oral telling, makes the reader’s awareness of the teller – whether Liv or Burnside – central.) A sense of excitement began to stalk me from around the halfway point, a suspicion of horror internalised and unacknowledgeable, perhaps even coming from the reader himself. It was connected to Liv’s inability to be in the world and to accept the others who exist in it: she dreams of “some inconceivable Before,” when people did not yet exist. “I regret that lost state.” To bring about this sort of engagement with a book – hard to put your finger on but impossible to stop thinking about, even when you’re not reading it – is a rare achievement. Liv, in a sense, is the most frightening character I’ve read in a book in years. When she speaks of another character’s “immense, dark calm” and how, after an awful event, “she had started to relax – but she was relaxing into something terrible, and she was going about the world in a state of complete indifference to whatever might come,” it’s ominously clear what she’s really talking about. “Stories are really about time,” Ryvold tells her. “They tell us that once, in a place that existed before we were born, something occurred – and we like to hear about that, because we know already that the story is over.”
September 15, 2011
Jill Dawson: Lucky Bunny
I’ve reviewed Jill Dawson’s new novel Lucky Bunny for the Guardian. You can read the review by clicking here.
