Category: Authors

Reading B.S. Johnson

24th February 2013 / / 3 Comments

The first time I came across B.S. Johnson’s name was in 1999, when I came across a copy of his then-recently republished 1969 novel The Unfortunates (his “book in a box” whose chapters, bar the first and last, can be read in any order). It was a bit out of my price range, so I didn’t buy it; and Johnson joined the long list of “authors I mean to read one day”.

Johnson took his own life in 1973, but 2013 would have been his 80th year. To mark the occasion, Picador have reissued four of his other novels, as well as publishing Well Done God!, a large volume of his drama and prose. They kindly sent me a set of these books, so the time was right to investigate Johnson’s work. I left Well Done God! for the time being, but read the four novels – in order of publication, because I wanted to see how Johnson’s style developed. It has been a fascinating experience (and I should say that the new covers, designed by La Boca, are lovely).

Johnson wrote that “telling stories is telling lies”, and that feeling is embodied time and again in his work. Albert Angelo (1964; the earliest of the reissues, but actually Johnson’s second published novel) is a great snarl of frustration at the form’s limitations. Johnson tells of Albert, a trained architect who has been forced to make ends meet by working as a supply teacher. Albert is thwarted in his ambitions to be a professional architect, still dwelling on an old relationship, and hated by the children he teaches. And the novel is as ill-at-ease as Albert, with Johnson constantly switching technique: first-, second- and third-person;  a two-column format, with speech on one side and thoughts in another ; there’s even a hole cut in a couple of pages to recontextualise a few lines.

Albert Angelo is a raw novel, in terms of both tone and style. That makes it interesting to read (especially, I think, if it’s the first Johnson you read), as you can never be sure what will be on the next page, and there is nothing you can take for granted. But it also leaves you wondering where else its author can go, whether he’s put all his eggs in the one basket and thrown it with all his might.

The answer, it seems, is that Johnson went off to find more eggs, as it were. He spent three weeks as a passenger on a deep-sea fishing vessel; the result was Trawl (1966), whose narrator goes on a similar journey, where he alternately ruminates on his memories and observes the trawlermen at work. I find myself liking the idea of Trawl more than the end result: I appreciate its portrait of inertia, but it hasn’t affected me as deeply as the other three of these books.

After Trawl, we jump over The Unfortunates, and there seems to me a definite change in the second pair of Johnson’s novels. I can’t be sure of his thinking, of course; but it feels to me as though Johnson not so much made peace with the novel as found a way to make it dance to his tune. Both Albert Angelo and Trawl give the impression of an author trying to fight against the novel – by, respectively, throwing all sorts of techniques at it before hacking it apart, and rejecting fiction and narrative in favour of an introspective stasis. In contrast, the second pair of Johnson’s novel carry the sense that he is subverting the form from within, as it were.

House Mother Normal (1971) – my favourite of these novels – consists of eight 21-page sections, each the monologue of a resident of an old people’s home, followed by a concluding section narrated by the House Mother. Each monologue tells of the same events, but the cognitive functioning of the residents grows progressively weaker, until we end up with a chapter which consists largely of nonsensical syllables scattered across the page – apart from harrowing moments of lucidity:

I am a prisoner in my

self. It is terrible. The movement agonises me.

Let me out, or I shall die

This is the most piercing moment in the novel that conveys a sense of loss, but such a sense is there throughout, in different ways. The monologues are digressive, as the characters switch back and forth between their memories and the present; this underlines that all the varied lives these people have led are gone, and they’ve all ended up here, in this rather ignominious situation. As each character reveals only certain details, it’s only gradually that we realise all the House Mother is putting her residents through (a “joust” using dirty mops, for example). Her closing monologue reveals the full contempt in which the House Mother holds the people in her care; but it also shows that there is a nasty surprise lying in wait for her, in the shape of a dormant brain tumour. So the unyielding structure of House Mother Normal leads us inexorably through an ever-deeper tale of decline – until Johnson breaks the frame to remind us we’re reading a novel. This is a bleak book with inevitable touches of exuberance, as all of Johnson’s stylistic and typographical idiosyncrasies work towards that end of evoking loss.

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), the last of Johnson’s novels to be published in his lifetime, is perhaps the most refined of these four books – which is to say that it’s the one where his concerns are most fully masked by the veneer of the novel. Christie Malry is an accountant who devises his own morality-based system of double-entry bookkeeping. For every slight the world visits upon him, Christie resolves to take a commensurate revenge; so, for example, when an office block prevents Christie from walking where he like (a Debit), he makes a scratch in its facade (a Credit) – and the moral balance is restored.

This novel looks like a fairly conventional narrative, but Johnson is constantly stopping to wryly point out its workings (“Meanwhile, they were both perfectly happy. Well, this is fiction, is it not? Isn’t it?”). It’s as though Johnson is goading his readers, saying: “You wanted a novel? Well, you’ve got one, but you’ll have it on my terms”. The kind of self-referentiality on show in Christie Malry’s actually feels over-familiar from more recent works, which makes it less bracing to read than a book like Albert Angelo – but this novel’s effect is subtler.

The key point about Christie’s bookkeeping system, I think, is that it’s arbitrary – he can decide what constitutes a Debit and Credit, and what an action is “worth”, without having to justify it to anyone but himself. Christie takes advantage of this to give himself licence to commit increasingly violent acts. It’s all absurd – and I think that Johnson is implicitly suggesting that so is a novel. Like Christie’s double-entry, a novel imposes a framework on the world that’s conjured up out of a person’s mind; it’s not really there, it doesn’t work – and perhaps it could lead you astray.

So that was my first, fairly extensive, sampling of B.S. Johnson’s work. Perhaps what strikes me most is the exuberance of it, after everything. Considering the reservations Johnson expressed about the novel and the concept of fiction in general, it would seem that he found a good deal of usefulness in them as well; and the tension created by this permeates his work. It’s a great loss that Johnson’s life was cut short, but I am grateful that his work remains – and even more so that I still have more of it to read.

See also
Alan from Words of Mercury has been reading Johnson as well, and blogs about Albert Angelo and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

Robot stories: vN and Black Mirror

16th February 2013 / / 3 Comments

Last week in Strange Horizons, I was disappointed with Rosa Montero’s Tears in Rain. But I actually read that book a month or so ago; more recently, I’ve come across two more pieces of fiction that have caused me to continue the train of thought I started in my SH review. The first is vN by Madeline Ashby, which I read because I saw it being discussed as one of the likely novels that missed out on the BSFA Award shortlist.

For the first few pages of vN, my impression was favourable. We’re introduced to Jack Peterson, whose wife Charlotte and daughter Amy are both self-replicating androids (von Neumann machines, or vN). Right from the start, ethical complexity is at the front and centre: all vN from the same clade (‘family’) look identical, and this will also be trur for Amy and Charlotte; so, Jack wonders, “what if one day, years from now, he kissed the wrong one as he walked through the door?” (p. 8). There’s no chance of that yet, though, because Jack is deliberately refraining from feeding Amy a full diet of vN food, so that she can grow up at the same rate as a human child. But, as Amy’s principal points out, this may not be such an appropriate thing to do: “She is not a kindergartener, and has not been one for years” (p. 22). The stage is set for a thought-provoking read.

By the end of the prologue, I was feeling less enthusiastic. At Amy’s kindergarten graduation, her grandmother Portia appears and tries to kill her. A boy dies in the ensuing scuffle, and a ravenously hungry Amy eats her own grandmother, which causes her body to grow into that of an adult. In the context of another book, I’d probably like this offbeat spirit; but here it set alarm bells ringing that cartoonish violence might win out over the more thoughtful material – and so it proves.

Amy spends most of the novel on the run, pursued by members of her own clade and others besides. She’s of interest to them because her failsafe (which stops vN from harming humans, but also induces nausea in them if they witness human injury and suffering) no longer works. This chase plot allows Ashby to show more of her future society. There’s further exploration of the place of vN, and how their presence has changed things. it is certainly much more searching and satisfying than the examination of ideas in Tears in Rain – but, for all that, it’s  clearly playing second fiddle to the action.

And, despite some striking images (such as Amy being set upon by crowds of vN who look just like her), much of the novel is quite uninvolving, Partly this is down to the prose, which never seems to catch fire again as it did in the first pages. But mostly I think it’s because the sense of place is so very sketchy. The backdrop of Tears in Rain may be generic, but at least it has an atmosphere, however ready-made; too often, the events of vN may as well be taking place in front of a blank wall (a sequence set in a museum of the city of Seattle really shows up the limitations of the rest). As a result, Ashby’s book is lacking in the detail and context that would help to give the action dramatic weight. By the time the final plot revelations came, I just didn’t care any more.

***

My other recent robot story is ‘Be Right Back’, the first film in the new series of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. We meet a young couple, Martha (played by Hayley Atwell) and Ash (Domnhall Gleeson). He heads out to return a courtesy car to the garage; she, an illustrator, stays at home to work on an urgent new commission. But Martha experiences a growing sense of dread that the worst has happened to Ash – and her fears are swiftly confirmed. At the funeral, Martha’s friend Sarah offers to introduce her to “something that will help”. At first, she doesn’t want to hear it; but soon finds herself signed up for – and swiftly drawn into – a service that uses a dead person’s online traces to reconstruct a virtual version of their personality. Martha moves from messaging ‘Ash’, to speaking to his construct on the phone – before paying for it (him?) to be downloaded into an artificial body.

As a fully rounded piece of drama, ‘Be Right Back’ has its shortcomings, particularly that the opening section establishing the couple’s relationship is that bit too compressed for one to become fully invested in it emotionally. But ‘Be Right Back’ is weighted towards its ideas, and there it works better. I actually found it the most satisfying of these three robot stories, because it’s best able to achieve what it sets out to do, and reaches furthest into its issues.  ‘Be Right Back’ is content just to focus on the relationship between two individuals, which is quite a refreshing change in a contemporary work of science fiction. We see Martha’s changing reaction to Ash, shifting from the delight of being able to hear his voice again to the despair of the uncanny valley as she realises that this is not him – that the robot looks and sounds like Ash, but doesn’t sleep, breathe, or react like him. The surface is there, but not the spark.

In the great scheme of things, ‘Be Right Back’ may not go as deep as it could (it’s not as searching or elegant as Chris Beckett’s ‘The Turing Test’, for example). But where it does go is still worthwhile: in one of the film’s later scenes, Martha – now at her wit’s end – has taken the Ash-robot to the cliffs, and instructs it to jump. At first, ‘Ash’ is calmly accepting of this, until Martha remarks that he would be afraid – at which point the robot slips seamlessly into the role of crying, pleading Ash. It’s a stronger moment than anything in vN or Tears in Rain – and just the sort of touch that a story like this needs.

Sunday Salon: Ten Love Stories

10th February 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been reading Marry Me, Dan Rhodes’s new collection of flash fiction on the theme of marriage. This being Rhodes, all is not exactly sweetness and light: in many of these stories, a male narrator is treated shabbily by his female partner – or occasionally he’s the one behaving shabbily himself – in absurd and darkly amusing ways.

‘Is there someone else?’ asks one man as his wife leaves him. ‘No,’ she replies, ‘there isn’t. But I would really, really like there to be’. Another woman informs her husband that he’ll have to leave, then produces a catalogue and sells him pots and pans for his new home (‘I would give you a discount because I know you, but it’s early days and I’m sure you’ll understand that I’ve got to keep a firm grip on my finances now I’m a single gal’). And so on, and so on, with these wonderfully barbed and pithy lines.

But, just occasionally. there are touches of real romance, as with the couple who put the lump of charcoal he gave her in lieu of a diamond under their mattress in the hope that pressure may transform it. The result: ‘it never looks any different. I think we would be a bit disappointed if it ever did.’ Moments like this bring light to the book, which ends up being quite sweet, in its own deliciously sour way.

***

As it’s nearly Valentine’s Day, I decided to go back through my blog archives and see how many love stories I’ve reviewed over the years. My instinct was that it wouldn’t be that many, but (allowing for my subjective interpretation), I’ve come up with a list of nine more books to add to the one above, which is more than I expected. Here they are – but I’m not necessarily promising happy endings…

Viola di Grado, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (reviewed Jan 2013)

A girl struggling to move on from her father’s death may have found a way forward when she meets a local boy who teaches her Chinese – if she can let herself move forward, that is. I really enjoyed this book, but it might as much an anti-love story as a love story.

Evan Mandery, Q: a Love Story (reviewed Sept 2012)

This must be a love story, because it says so in the title, right? Well, maybe not, as its protagonist receives repeated visits from his future self, trying to persuade him to call off his relationships. But the ending is actually rather affecting.

Alice Zeniter, Take This Man (reviewed May 2012)

A fine portrait of complex circumstances, as a young French-Algerian woman prepares to marry her Malian childhood friend in a bit to prevent his deportation. Not so much a tale of ‘will they?won’t they?’ as ‘should they? shouldn’t they?’.

Henry Green, Loving (reviewed Jan 2012)

A tale of love and contested space in a wartime country house. It begins and ends with the words of a fairytale, but that kind of happiness is a long way from being guaranteed.

Robert Shearman, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (reviewed Aug 2011)

An excellent set of stories examining love in its various manifestations.

Alison MacLeod, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction (reviewed July 2011)

Another fine set of stories about love.

Daniel Glattauer, Love Virtually (reviewed Feb 2011)

A novel told through two people’s emails; their correspondence becomes a form of courtship dance. Will they or won’t they? I don’t know without reading the sequel.

Priya Basil, The Obscure Logic of the Heart (reviewed June 2010)

A non-religious boy from a wealthy Kenyan Sikh family and a girl from a devout Birmingham Muslim family fall in love – and the complexities of their situation are very nicely delineated in the book.

Ronan O’Brien, Confessions of a Fallen Angel (reviewed Aug 2009)

The story of a young man who has apparently prophetic dreams of people’s deaths. I include it here for its wonderful portrait of falling in love twice, in two different ways – the dizzy rush of first love, and a slower flowering of affection later on in life.

Strange Horizons review: Rosa Montero, Tears in Rain (2011/2)

7th February 2013 / / 0 Comments

Today, Strange Horizons publish my review of Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero (translated from the Spanish by Lilit Zekulin Thwaites). The book came from the SH review pile, and I was especially interested in reading it because it’s a work of science fiction in  translation – and we don’t see nearly enough of those in Anglo-American publishing. It’s not just the case that sf imprints don’t often publish translations; publishers who specialise in translated works don’t often cover science fiction (with the odd exception like Haikasoru).

So when a translated work of sf does come along, it is still something notable. Sadly, though, Tears in Rain is not a good book.

It’s a common enough view (one for which I generally have little time) that “mainstream” writers who use sf tropes recycle them unimaginatively because they’re unfamiliar with how they have been used in the past. What concerns me more is when sf writers who do know the tropes are still content to just go through the motions – and this latter is what Tears in Rain feels like to me. But I would not consider Montero a genre sf writer, so why does her novel have such an air? I tried to explore something of this, albeit indirectly, in the review.

In my mind, I kept coming back to the idea of “off-the-shelf futures” that came up in the discussion of Paul Kincaid’s LA Review of Books piece (see the comments for his use of that term). I think that’s what we see in Tears in Rain: a kind of science-fictional future which is so familiar as an archetype that you don’t need to be steeped in knowledge of sf to draw on it – and one so familiar that it has no purchase on the imagination. This – coupled with a thriller plot that doesn’t thrill – is what’s at the root of Tears in Rain’s weaknesses.

Click here to read the review in full.

Bookmunch reviews: HHhH and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

5th February 2013 / / 2 Comments

Here’s my latest couple of reviews for Bookmunch.

Laurent Binet, HHhH (2009/12)

In 1942, Czech Jan Kubiš and Slovak Jozef Gabčík were sent from London and parachuted secretly into Prague. Their mission: to kill Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo, widely considered in the SS to be the brains behind his superior (‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich,’ they’d say – Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich, or HHhH). Laurent Binet heard this story as a child, and became more and more fascinated by it after going to Slovakia as a teacher, and finding the church crypt where Gabčík and Kubiš hid after their attempt on Heydrich’s life. In this novel, Binet tells the men’s story – but he also chronicles the process of research and writing, and the difficulties of making fiction out of real events.

This is a fascinating approach. Binet may present a scene that reads like historical fiction, then unpick it in the next chapter, asking how much he can really be sure about, what he may have left out or glossed for the shape of his story. It has the effect of creating tension even when you know broadly where the history is heading, because suddenly nothing is certain. Alongside this, as Binet tells of his time researching and writing HHhH, it too takes on something of the quality of fiction – and the lines between what’s real and what’s not are shown to be ever more blurred.

The prose in HHhH is often matter-of-fact rather than colourful. It’s not that Binet doesn’t do colour: there are some gripping passages of narrative as Gabčík’s and Kubiš’s mission reaches its climax (I must add here that Sam Taylor’s translation from the French is superb). Rather, I suspect that the more neutral tone represents Binet’s desire to remain true to the history (perhaps the change of tone towards the end is a recognition that he can’t do so completely). And I don’t find that tone dry, nor Binet’s interjections intrusive; HHhH works well as a whole, both as a tale of history and the pitfalls of telling it.

Any Cop?: If you’re in the mood for a novel which is as interested in examining what it’s doing as in portraying its historical subject, definitely give this a try.

Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012)

In the 1920s, young Hattie is one of the many American blacks who will travel from the Southern states to begin new lives in the North. A couple of years after settling in Philadelphia, Hattie has married August and given birth to twins, whom she names Philadelphia and Jubilee in optimism for the years to come – but the children die as babies. She will go on to have many more children who survive, but this is the first sign of the difficulties Hattie and her descendants will face making their way in life throughout the twentieth century.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is structured as a series of episodes, each focusing on one or more of Hattie’s children at points in history ranging from 1925 to 1980, which together create a composite portrait of the family. The emotional scope of the novel is vast, as Ayana Mathis’s characters face desire, betrayal, racism, insanity, and more besides. Perhaps most central to the book are issues of living up to (or failing to meet) the expectations of others, and what binds (or may separate) the members of a family.

Mathis moves between many different viewpoints (third- and first-person) with fluency and ease. Her characters are always vivid, such as Six, whose violent outburst as a child becomes channelled into an unstoppable religious fervour (“The Word collected in his mouth like a pile of pebbles and pushed itself out through his lips”); and Bell, who couldn’t have foreseen herself living in squalor and wasting away from tuberculosis (“She’d taken such pleasure in saying no to [two marriage] proposals…Women who married men like that did nothing but shop for groceries and nearly die of boredom. But here I am dying anyway”).

And through it all is Hattie herself, from age 17 to age 71, who wants the best life for her family, but doesn’t always get it. It would be wrong to say that her determination never flags, or that she sacrifices herself entirely – Mathis’s portrait is too complex to sum up in that kind of way. But Hattie’s personality, and those of her children, fill the book to its very end.

Any Cop?: Absolutely. This is a superb novel of character and situation – and it’s only Ayana Mathis’s debut.

Books in brief: early February

3rd February 2013 / / 9 Comments

Another catch-up with some of the books I’ve been reading recently…

Anya Lipska, Where the Devil Can’t Go (2013). At last, a mainstream UK publication for the crime novel set among East London’s Polish community that I reviewed on here a couple of years ago. The new edition has been re-edited, but is much as I remember it – which is to say that it’s a fine book, and you ought to read it.

John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). I’ve never read much spy fiction – not for any particular reason, just that I haven’t really felt inclined to. But I do like to try different kinds of book, so I went with this tale of Alec Leamas, a spy sent on one final mission. Le Carré’s writing is clean and cool – so much so that it becomes impossible to be sure of Leamas’s true motivations. Ultimately, I don’t think the book was for me (again, no real reason; just one of those things), but I’m glad I tried it.

Hilary Mantel, Fludd (1989). I wanted to read something by Mantel, but preferred to leave her Cromwell trilogy until it’s complete. So I tried this tale of an isolated English mill village, some time in the 20th century, which gains a mysterious new curate. I appreciate its portrait of pragmatism – for example, the village priest is an atheist, but resistant to change, because his job is part of what holds the fabric of village life together – but the novel hasn’t stayed with me.

Sarah Butler, Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love (2013). Alice returns to London to reunite with her family as her father is dying of cancer. What she doesn’t know is that her real father, Daniel, has been living on the streets for years, and has never met her. The events of the novel bring them together… and the rest is not for synopsising. This is a very nicely written debut, and Butler gains real effect from not focusing on the back story – she lets the present speak for itself.

Eugene Salomon, Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver (2013). A New York cab driver for more than thirty years, Eugene Salomon has plenty of stories. He’s kept a blog of them, Cabs Are For Kissing, for six years; now here’s a book of them. Salomon is quite the raconteur as he takes us through the many facets of life in his job – perfect reading for those moments when you want to cut loose and relax.

“Nowhere is exactly as you think it’s going to be”

31st January 2013 / / 9 Comments

Sam Thompson, Communion Town (2012)

Communion Town has a quote from China Miéville on the front. That’s handy, because it is just the sort of book I could imagine having a quote from China Miéville on the front – which is to say that it’s a speculative novel  (collection?) which is intensely about the city and the experience of urban life. In some ways, it is a conceptual opposite of Hawthorn & Child: where Keith Ridgway’s novel is all about thwarting and denying story, Sam Thompson’s debut is built on the premise that everyone has their own story – and, in a city, they all jostle up against one another.

So, we have ten stories/chapters, all set in the same fictional city (unnamed – Communion Town itself is one particular district, but the name also signals the idea of disparate people coming together in a single place). It’s a non-specific city, but feels less like a bit of everywhere thrown together than like a version of London whose reality has been stretched and twisted: there’s a metro rather than a Tube, and olive groves in the surrounding countryside, but the whole patchwork atmosphere of the place is very reminiscent of London. Thompson has a knack for coming up with evocative place names – Sludd’s Liberty, Cento Hill, Rosamunda – that further enhance the sense of untold stories taking place out of sight.

But what of the stories within sight? The first, entitled ‘Communion Town’, has echoes of Miéville in its tale of two asylum seekers interrogated by an unknown agency, a terrorist plot by a group called the Cynics, and talk of ‘monsters’ beneath the city streets. This is the first of many perceptual ambiguities in the book, and I have to say it’s one of the most harrowingly effective that I’ve come across in some time. Depending on what you interpret the ‘monsters’ to be, the implications of the ending range from uncomfortable to downright shocking.

Then we move to the second chapter, ‘The Song of Serelight Fair’, and suddenly we’re in a different world – or, rather, the same world, but filtered through the perspective of such different characters that it might as well be different. This is more of a love story, in which a student moves into the circles of a girl from a more privileged background, and soon finds himself out of his depth.  But, again, there’s that added fantastic dimension, this time waiters who appear and behave like automata, right down to having music emanating from their chests. Are they mechanical? People forced to wear costumes? Or – perhaps most chillingly – is this the way that the privileged set perceive those lower in the social order?

So the book continues, with each chapter providing a different window on this city, making the place anew in the process. ‘The Significant City of Lazarus Glass’ is a distilled golden-age detection, in which the city becomes a web of riddles and outlandish crimes – that’s if it isn’t just a giant memory palace. ‘The Rose Tree’ is a tall tale told down a café, which paints the city as a place of dark corners, where strange transformations await the unwary. ‘The City Room’ tells of a bright (though possibly haunted) childhood world, where the city of Thompson’s book may or may not be a boy’s home-made model.

Like, I suspect, many people, I first heard of Communion Town when it was longlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. I hope that won’t be the last we hear of this fabulous kaleidoscope of a book – that its full story has yet to be told.

See also

  • Nina Allan’s review of Communion Town for Strange Horizons
  • Aishwarya Subramanian’s review at Practically Marzipan
  • Maureen Kincaid Speller’s review for WeirdFictionReview.com

January in Japan: Yoko Ogawa and Natsuo Kirino

25th January 2013 / / 8 Comments

Yoko Ogawa, Hotel Iris (1996/2010)
Translated by Stephen Snyder

Seventeen-year-old Mari is working at her mother’s hotel when a middle-aged man and a prostitute are thrown out for rowing and disturbing the other guests. Mari is drawn to the man, and starts to see him regularly; he tells her that he’s a Russian translator – the heroine of the novel he’s working on is even named Marie. The two enter into an intimate, masochistic relationship – which, naturally enough, can’t last forever.

Hotel Iris is a quiet book, and all the more powerful and disturbing for it. So thoroughly does Ogawa create the viewpoint of Mari as she’s drawn into the translator’s orbit, it’s a real jolt to be reminded that this man’s intentions are questionable at the very least. But what makes the novel particularly challenging to consider is that Ogawa is clear on the affair’s positive consequences for Mari, as well as the negative ones: it gives her an escape from being put-upon by her mother, however dangerous it might turn out to be. Hotel Iris is an uncomfortable read, in the best possible way.

Natsuo Kirino, The Goddess Chronicle (2008/12)
Translated by Rebecca Copeland

The latest title in the Canongate Myths series is inspired by the Japanese myth of Izanami and Izanagi – which isn’t a story I know, so inevitably I’m going to miss out on something here. But the intriguing thing for me is that The Goddess Chronicle is written by Natsuo Kirino, and at first glance seems quite different from a gritty urban novel like Out. But look closer, and similarities emerge: both books focus on female characters who try to escape a system designed to hold and define them.

Our narrator is Namima, whom we first meet as a servant of the goddess Izanami in the Realm of the Dead; Kirino’s novel is the story of how she got there. Namima is born on a tiny island, granddaughter of its spiritual leader, the Oracle. It’s a hereditary position, though Namima’s older sister Kamikuu is destined to become the next Oracle – and it’s not until Kamikuu takes over that Namima learns her preordained role as the Oracle’s sister: to watch over the island’s graveyard for the rest of her life, with no human contact. Namima tries to escape the island with the boy she loves – but tragedy strikes, and she finds herself in Izanami’s realm.

A number of stories overlap in The Goddess Chronicle. There’s Namima’s childhood on the island, which has a measured clarity tempered with a touch of strangeness. There is Namima’s sojourn in the world of the living as a wasp, a fine ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale. And there is the story of Izanami and her brother/lover/enemy Izanagi, which now has Namima as a witness. Their story provides a point of comparison and contrast with Namima’s own. All is wrapped up in clean prose that gives this engaging novel a mythic feel of its very own.

January in Japan is a blog event hosted by Tony’s Reading List. Click here for the index of my posts.

January in Japan: Project Itoh

20th January 2013 / / 4 Comments

Project Itoh, Harmony (2008/10)
Translated by Alexander O. Smith

I couldn’t take part in a theme month like January in Japan and not investigate some speculative fiction. The book I’m looking at today comes from Haikasoru, an imprint specialising in English translations of Japanese science fiction and fantasy.

First, in case the author is unfamiliar, some background: Project Itoh (real name Satoshi Ito) was a web designer and writer who died from cancer in 2009 at the age of 34, after many years of battling the diseade. He was working on Harmony whilst being treated in hospital, and questions about health and medical treatment are central to the novel.

After a cataclysmic event that devastated the world’s population, human life has come to be seen as the ultimate resource – so much so that traditonal governmental structures have largely been replaced by ‘admedistrations’, and most adults are injected with WatchMe, a nanotechnology which monitors the body and repairs all damage and illness. To abuse one’s health is, in effect, to vandalise public property.

But children don’t yet have WatchMe, and Tuan Kirie, its inventor’s daughter, has a friend who’s keen to take advantage of that. Miach Mihie wants to rebel, to retain soverignty over her own body – and the ultimate expression of that wish for Miach is to take her own life. She persuades Tuan and another friend to enter into a suicide pact – but only Miach succeeds.

As an adult, Tuan works for the Helix Inspection Agency (“the elite soldiers of lifeism,” p. 41), policing the good health of the world. But she’s partial to the odd cigar or other indulgence, and has a fake WatchMe that lets her get away with it. She can’t remain in glorious isolation forever, though, and invstigating a mass suicide leads Tuan to confront realities that cut uncomfortably close to home.

The great strength of Harmony is its capacity to dramatise questions of personal responsibility versus the common good (and who gets to decide what those terms mean), authoritarian intervention versus individual choice – and ultimately, perhaps, the question of what a life’s purpose should be. Every ‘side’ in the novel has a point, but each view also has its limitations – and the charachters’ actions may subtly turn them into the opposite of what they profess to want.

In some ways, the plot of Harmony may come across as overly simplistic, serving mainly as a vehicle for characters to meet and discuss the novel’s key issues. But it could also be seen as a sign of how deeply Itoh’s characters are enmeshed in a wider system, that what they do runs along these broadly generic lines that they can’t perceive. There’s also an equivalent of HTML for emotions peppered throughout the text (a chunk of narration might be bookended with and , for example. This is a further indication that, however much they may talk of determining their own destinies, Harmony‘s characters are trapped in even deeper ways than they can imagine.

More than any other book I’ve read since… New Model Army, actually, Harmony gave me the grand thrill of contemplating challenging ideas. It has stayed with me since I finished it, and I’m sure I will return to it in future. I’m also sure that I’ll want to read more by Project Itoh.

See also:
Adam Roberts’s review of Harmony for Strange Horizons, which also reflects on the place of medicine in modern science fiction.
The index of my January in Japan posts.

Finding a way out: Andrew Kaufman and Viola Di Grado

14th January 2013 / / 3 Comments

Andrew Kaufman, Born Weird (2013)
Viola Di Grado, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (2011/2)

I enjoy fantastic literature in all its forms, but to my mind there’s a unique elegance to works that bring the lightest touch of fantasy to the mundane, and do it well. It takes a fine hand to make that slight supernatural element feel essential but not inadequate. Andrew Kaufman has that sort of hand, and his new novel Born Weird might be his most fully achieved work yet.

When the Weird siblings were born, their grandmother Annie gave each a blessing: Richard would keep safe; Abba would have hope; Lucy wouldn’t get lost; Kent would win a fight; and Angie would always forgive. As is so often the way, though, these ‘blessings’ turned out to troublesome. Now, Annie Weird knows that she is about to die, and instructs Angie to bring her brothers and sisters together in the hospital at Annie’s moment of death, when she will undo her work.

Born Weird then becomes a novel about being trapped in your family’s shadow, which manifests in a very tangible way for the Weirds. Angie is angry with her grandmother in the hospital at first, but forgives her as soon as she’s down the corridor – not because she wants to, but because she can’t help it. Likewise, the other Weird siblings have been constrained in some way as to what they could do or who they could be – by both mundane and supernatural phenomena. The dexterity with which Kaufman moves back and forth across that line is a delight to behold.

The author also deploys humour and eccentricity with great effect. When Angie unites with her sister Lucy, she is struck by the latter’s bizarre haircut. We soon find out where it comes from: Nicola, the Weirds’ mother, has dementia, and believes herself to run a hair salon in her care home; her children may be customers, but she no longer knows them. This is the flipside of the supernatural: an all-too-real fantasy world from which there will be no return.

The Weirds’ lives may have a thread of magic, but their familial frictions (and joys) are very much grounded in reality. Born Weird is alive to the strengths and limitations of both approaches, and balances the two wonderfully.

***

Viola Di Grado’s first novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (translated superbly by Michael Reynolds), also has a protagonist who feels trapped by her family situation, and, though there’s nothing overtly supernatural about it, the book has a hallucinatory quality all its own. Our protagonist is Camelia Mega, a young Italian woman who has lived in Leeds ever since her journalist father brought the family over to England a decade earlier – the same father who subsequently left to live with his mistress and then died in a car accident.

Camelia feels stranded in Leeds, and has the sense that winter just drags on and on:

Leeds winters are terribly self-absorbed; each one wants to be colder than its predecessor and purports to be the last winter ever. It unleashes a lethal wind full of the short sharp vowels of northern Englishmen but even harsher, and anyway, neither one of them speaks to me. (p. 9)

Whether it really is always winter in this version of Leeds is beside the point, because Camelia’s perception is what counts here. That paragraph I’ve quoted shows how fluidly her narration slides between the outside world, her inner world, and ruminations on language itself. Camelia has woven herself a kind of net out of language, and she can’t get out – she keeps comparing things to her father’s accident, as though she can’t bring herself to move on from it.

There is a glimpse of light on the horizon, though, in the shape of Wen, a boy from a local clothes shop who takes it upon himself to teach Camelia Chinese. This is a different kind of language for Camelia, where a word can change its meaning entirely depending on the tone in which it’s spoken. This gives her a sense that she can look at (and be in) the world differently, though Camelia doesn’t necessarily find it easy to let herself do so.

The Chinese system of writing with ideograms is also an ironic companion to the way Camelia communicates with her mother Livia: after her husband’s death, Livia became mute; she and Camelia now communicate via looks – though it’s not clear how much of it is really two-way, and there is the sense throughout that Livia mother is living her own life beyond her daughter’s knowledge, which contributes to Camelia’s sense of lacking control. Di Grado paints an incisive portrait of a character caught between holding on and letting go, unsure which is worse.

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