Author: David Hebblethwaite

Emily Mackie, And This is True (2010)

19th March 2010 / / 2 Comments

Emily Mackie’s first novel takes us into the mind of Nevis Gow, which is not the most comfortable place to be. When we meet him, Nevis is fifteen and, for the past eleven years, has lived on the road with his father, Marshall, a teacher-turned-writer (Nevis’s mother – whom the boy doesn’t remember – left Marshall for another man). Now, their van has been involved in an accident, and it seems the pair’s travels are at an end. They’ve been staying on a farm in the Scottish Highlands with the Kerrs: Nigel, the farmer, who’s coping with the death of his wife, Caroline; Nigel’s son, Colin (nicknamed ‘Duckman’); Colin’s cousin, Ailsa; and her mother, Elspeth. Nevis has been struggling to adjust to this static existence, because he doesn’t like all these people muscling in  on his relationship with Marshall; you see, over the years, Nevis has grown rather too close to his father – in fact, he’s in love with Marshall.

And This is True is a character study that gains its affect from the interplay of two themes. The first of these is the way in which Nevis’s psyche has been shaped his life so far. It’s not just that his feelings for his father lead Nevis to do things (like stealing kisses when Marshall is asleep) that seem normal to him but less so to us. It’s also that Nevis has grown to have certain expectations of how life is going to be, and he struggles to cope when those expectations aren’t met – and to notice everything that’s going on around him.

The second theme concerns memory and truth. The text of the novel is Nevis Gow’s attempt to sort out his memories of what happened on the farm, whilst being only too aware that a memory isn’t necessarily ‘what really happened’, and trying to follow his father’s advice on how to write a good story, even when he finds that life won’t quite fit that model. Nevis discovers that maybe not everything he remembers is accurate, which, I suppose, leaves him in a quandary – if his past is as uncertain as his present seems to be, what does that mean for Nevis’s future?

The best passages in And This is True are simply stunning, when Mackie lays bare the pressures that Nevis is under. But there’s hope in there, too – the hope of journeys continuing. It ends on just the right note; the end, that is, of a fine debut.

Link
Interview with Emily Mackie (Bookhugger.co.uk)

Black Static 15: Daniel Kaysen, ‘Babylon’s Burning’

15th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

A relatively short piece in which the narrator, a poetry translator named Daniel, reluctantly goes along with his brother to a party at the International Security firm where the latter works. This organisation worships ‘the Gods of gold and silver, bronze and iron, stone and wood’, and it seems those gods answer back. Whilst at the party, Daniel discovers that he has a gift for prophecy, and is offered a position at the company; he doesn’t want to accept, but the temptation may be too great…

I’m undecided about ‘Babylon’s Burning’. On the one hand, Kaysen’s writing is great (though the short paragraphs don’t always allow it to flourish); on the other, I don’t find the story particularly interesting (and the biblical coding of the names feels gimmicky to me in a story so short, where it doesn’t have room to blend in). I really don’t know which side of the fence to come down on, so… I’ll stay in the middle.

Link
Index of my Black Static 15 posts

Suzanne Bugler, This Perfect World (2010)

14th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

At the age of thirty-six, Laura Hamley lives the life of a stereotypical ‘yummy mummy’ — married to a successful lawyer, attractive children, yoga classes, paninis and air-kissing and dinner parties with friends. She has attained an aspirational dream of the times, but a phone call threatens to dredge up her past. The caller is Violet Partridge, whose daughter, Heddy, went to school with Laura. Heddy has been placed in a psychiatric institution, and Violet wants to get her released; perhaps Laura, being married to a lawyer, could help? There’s a very good reason, however, why Laura doesn’t want to get involved: she hated — and bullied — Heddy at school; but, try as she might, Laura can’t seem to extricate herself from the situation.

This Perfect World (Suzanne Bugler’s first adult novel, following two YA books) is a sharp character study. Bugler paints Laura as someone who’s only too aware of the artificiality of the world in which she lives (‘Do any of [her friends] have a skeleton rattling around in their cupboard? […] We meet, we chat, we think that we are the dearest of friends, but we all keep our cupboard doors firmly shut’ [41]), but clings on to it regardless, for fear of where she might be otherwise — the world she came from, as exemplified by Heddy and Violet Partridge.

I think Bugler spells out Laura’s view of her current life rather too much — it becomes clear enough in quite subtle ways, and we don’t really need (for example) Laura to reflect ruefully on her vow never to become like The Stepford Wives, because we’ve already understood the point. This is a collective problem, however; individually, Bugler’s observations are incisive and striking.

The author also establishes some effective parallels within her narrative. As far as Laura is concerned, Heddy Partridge is a blank screen on which to project her memories; she remembers what she did to her, but has never thought about Heddy as a person in her own right — what matters is that Heddy was, and is, the polar opposite of Laura. So, when Laura learns from Violet that Heddy has been cutting herself — like Laura did as a girl (because that’s what her friends did) — she has to consider the uncomfortable possibility that she’s closer to Heddy than she thought.

Bugler also skilfully portrays Laura’s adult social world — with its social conventions, and boundaries of speech and action that you don’t cross — as being every bit as mired in politics and snap judgements as was the playground. Laura’s discontent with her life bubbles under throughout, eventually bubbling over — and the result is a fine novel that stays in the mind afterwards.

Black Static 15: Alan Scott Laney, ‘Maximum Darkness’

13th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

A debut story now, and one that,unfortunately, misses the mark for me. ‘Maximum Darkness’ is the tale of  twenty-two-year-old Robin Parker, who has become plagued by visions — he sees auras of light and shadow around people. He doesn’t understand what they are, but remembers reading a story once about something similar; if he could only find the book it was in…

The problem with this story is that the real turmoil in Robin’s mind doesn’t come across strongly enough. We know that he’s deeply disturbed by his visions, but we’re watching him react to them from a distance, rather than experiencing them with him — and, because we’re not so invested in Robin’s experiences, it becomes harder tio empathise with him. ‘Maximum Darkness’ ends up as okay, but nothing more.

Link
Index of my Black Static 15 posts

Black Static 15: Simon Kurt Unsworth, ‘The Knitted Child’

7th March 2010 / / 2 Comments

A young woman suffers a miscarriage, and her grandmother knits her a doll to replace the child she lost. It’s no ordinary gift, though, because the old woman has magic, and her doll is sentient — but it has no way to communicate.

This is such a beautiful story. For a start, Unsworth’s prose has the rhythm of classic storytelling — one imagines ‘The Knitted Child’ being great read aloud. The tale as a whole is a highly evocative portrait of grief, made perhaps all the more so because we see much of the story from the knitted child’s viewpoint; so, we experience not only the family’s heartbreak, but also the doll’s frustration and sadness at not being able to act — at not being able to be in reality the child that it wants to be in its mind.

‘The Knitted Child was the first of Simon Unsworth’s stories that I’d read; it will not be the last.

Links
Simon Kurt Unsworth’s blog
Index of my Black Static 15 posts

Black Static 15: James Cooper, ‘Eight Small Men’

6th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

It never ceases to fascinate me how different people can have such different views of the same story. As an example, Des Lewis liked James Cooper’s ‘Eight Small Men’ very much, whilst Jonathan McCalmont didn’t. I’m somewhere in the mddle of those two views, though falling more on the negative side.

Cooper’s narrator is Victor Farnsworth, who is visiting his dying foster father, Aubrey Bunce. The bulk of the story takes place a quarter-century earlier, when Victor and his older brother Franklyn lived with Aubrey, and Aubrey’s wife Edith (whom the boys called ‘the Matron’) and son Edwin (nicknamed Roach). The Matron’s household rules are strict and her punishments draconian; Roach gets his share of the latter, and in turn bullies the Farnsworth brothers — until, after one incident, tragedy strikes.

The key issue I have with ‘Eight Small Men’ is that, to me, it doesn’t manage to evoke the emotions underlying its events at the deep level which is necessary for the greatest effect. When I read about the treatment meted out to the boys, I reacted with disgust, as one would expect — but the feeling of what that was really like to the characters involved didn’t radiate from the page. Similarly, Victor’s major psychological transformation is portrayed ‘at a distance’, so its affect is weaker than it might otherwise be.

I also haven’t yet come to a satisfactory interpretation of the tale’s supernatural overtones (to which the title refers, though I won’t dwell on that). An iffy start to this issue of Black Static, then, but there are still four stories to go.

Links
James Cooper’s website
Index of my Black Static 15 posts

Black Static 15: Feb-Mar 2010

5th March 2010 / / 5 Comments

I’ve been blogging Interzone, so it’s only fair to do the same for TTA Press’s horror/dark fantasy title, Black Static. There are five stories in the latest issue, which are:

James Cooper, ‘Eight Small Men’

Simon Kurt Unsworth, ‘The Knitted Child’

Alan Scott Laney, ‘Maximum Darkness’

Daniel Kaysen, ‘Babylon’s Burning’

Sarah Singleton, ‘Death by Water’

EDIT, 9th April: All complete, and my pick of the issue is the Unsworth piece, with the Singleton second.

Alex Preston, This Bleeding City (2010)

4th March 2010 / / 1 Comment

This Bleeding City is one of those novels with which you can tell roughly where it’s heading more or less from the outset – not because of any clumsiness on the author’s part, but because the story is so archetypal: young man goes off to seek his fortune, and discovers that what he thought he wanted wasn’t necessarily so great after all. The context for this particular telling of that story is the City of London (where Alex Preston himself works) in the run-up to the recent financial crisis.

To fill in more specifics: whilst at university, Charlie Wales’s ambition is to work in the City; to truly become part of the smart set in whose circles he moves; to meet the expectations of Vero, the beautiful French girl whom he loves. On graduating, Charlie moves to London with Vero and another university friend, Henry; and eventually finds work at a hedge fund. But Charlie struggles with the demands of the job… and you may be able to guess much of the rest (though probably not all of it; the story isn’t quite as straight forward as you might anticipate).

When you know the broad trajectory of a novel – and the prologue of This Bleeding City shows explicitly that tragedy is on the horizon, so there’s no getting away from that knowledge – the telling has to carry even more of the weight; Preston does a pretty good job here, on the whole. Having said that, some aspects of his style can be difficult to warm to; for example, his dialogue can sound too much like speechifying:

‘[…]I’m sorry that I’m not planning a play for the Festival or writing reviews for a highbrow theatrical website, but we all made those choices, and it’s trite but true that it was a long chain of little decisions, a series of mistakes and ill-chosen priorities and… and we ended up here. We had so many ideals, so many dreams, and we ended up settling for money.’ (32)

I’m not generally keen on dialogue that draws attention to itself, as this does. But there is a way in which it works quite well, because it foregrounds the fictionality, emphasising that there’s a greater story behind the specific one being told here. And there’s narrative power in Preston’s writing nonetheless; it’s not so much that particular images or sentences stand out (though there is a description of a sunset which is striking, albeit less because of the words on the page than the way Preston depicts it as a rare moment in which the workers of the City can unite in taking their minds off their jobs), but that the text as a whole has the pull of good storytelling.

The main weakness of This Bleeding City, I’d say, is that the characterisation of Charlie doesn’t quite come together.  He seems to me a very self-aware sort, who sees shortcomings in his chosen career path even early on (as an example, consider the passage of dialogue I quoted earlier, which is spoken by Charlie to Vero); he doesn’t strike me as the type who would carry on doing something for so long when he knew in his heart that it wasn’t right for him (or, if he is that type, it doesn’t come across strongly enough in the novel). And, since Charlie’s character is the fulcrum of the book, this can’t help but dent its success to an extent

So, This Bleeding City has its flaws – but it’s still a good read for all that, and one I’d recommend. I’ll be interested to see where Alex Preston goes next with his writing.

Links
Alex Preston’s website
Preston talks about the novel

The month in reading: February 2010

3rd March 2010 / / 2 Comments

I didn’t read quite as much in February as I did in January — but I did read a couple of books that I’m pretty sure will end up on my list of favourite reads of the year. So, my pick for ‘book of February’ is a dead heat between Liz Jensen‘s masterly character study/climate-change thriller The Rapture, and Skippy Dies, Paul Murray‘s sprawling tale of growing up (with added touches of comedy and theoretical physics).

Also on my recommended list from last month are Dan Rhodes‘ macabre Little Hands Clapping, and Amy Sackville‘s otherworldly The Still Point. And I should mention ‘Again and Again and Again’, Rachel Swirsky‘s highly enjoyable story from the most recent issue of Interzone.

All good reads, there. Check them out.

Amy Sackville, The Still Point (2010)

2nd March 2010 / / 6 Comments

‘The still point of the turning world’ (in the words of T.S. Eliot, quoted in this novel’s epigraph) is the North Pole, to where Edward Mackley led a fateful expedition at the turn of the 20th century – his body was not found for another fifty years. In the present day, Julia, a descendant of Mackley’s, lives in the explorer’s old house with her husband Simon, where she tries to find meaning in life even as her marriage slowly loses its spark. By novel’s end, Julia will find herself re-evaluating both her own relationship and what she thought she knew about Mackley and his wife, Emily.

Amy Sackville’s debut has to be one of the most intensely focused novels I’ve read in quite some time. The action in the book’s present takes place over the course of one day (though there also passages set in Edward Mackley’s time, and flashbacks to earlier in Julia’s and Simon’s relationship), and is almost entirely about the relationships of the two couples. Sackville sets up thematic parallels between the two, using the North Pole as a metaphor; the central idea seems to be that the nature of Arctic geography is such that you can never be sure when you’ve actually reached the Pole, just as perhaps you can never truly be sure that you’ve got to the heart of the person you love.

The parallels between the couples are interesting and, in a way, rather challenging. Ostensibly, they’re quite straightforward – both Julia and Emily are free spirits who ended up with a domestic existence while their husbands go out to work, and both have reason to wonder, ‘Is he coming back?’ Think about it more deeply, though, and the comparison starts to seem absurd: there’s a world of difference between trekking to the North Pole and commuting to London for the day, and between waiting decades for news of your husband – who, you’re well aware, might have died – and waiting a few hours to discover whether he’s returning home to you after work, or seeing someone else.

And yet… I think Sackville is challenging us to consider such deeper parallels. It seems clear that Julia sees something of herself in Emily’s situation, and undoubtedly both women have been ‘left behind’, albeit it in different senses. I suppose one could turn the question around and ask what there is of Julia’s situation in Emily’s, which raises the issue of the human consequences of attempting great feats – if someone is left behind at home, does it really make a difference why that was, if they have to deal with the same emotions? The Still Point certainly leaves one with plenty to think about.

Sackville’s prose style is interesting, often addressing the reader directly:

Closer inspection of [the couple’s] eyeelids will reveal that [Julia] is dreaming. Behind the skin you wil just discern, in the violet dimness, the raised circles of her pupils scud and jitter as the eyes roll in their sockets. You would like to know the hidden colour of the irises. Very well, then: hers are brown, his are also brown, but darker. [7]

I wasn’t sure for some time whether I’d get along with it, but now I think it suits the novel well; it gives the sense of eavesdropping on the characters rather than inhabiting them, which seems appropriate for a book about how it’s a struggle fully to get to know people. This style also leads to some striking effects: for example, there’s a scene where Julia and Simon argue, and the clash of their argument with the more poetic writing around it is quite something. Then there are the places where Sackville just writes beautifully, as with many of her descriptions of the Arctic:

Blank, white, vast and silent but for the slish of the summer ice. It is not the heave and roar of the darker months, but a constant drip, the rush of a hundred rivulets. A slick sheen over everything as if coated in glass. There are no shadows here, beneath the Arctic sun. There is no sense of depth, only massive solid forms without contour and, between, the black sea. The sky is almost white. Don’t look up, or let your gaze rest anywhere for too long. The sun is everything; try to keep your eyes half closed, the brightness will blind you. [153]

The Still Point is a book which has stayed with me; perhaps it wasn’t until I’d finished it that I realised just how much I’d been drawn into its world. I’m glad that I was.

Link
Portobello Books

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