Category: Authors

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

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

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

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (2010)

28th February 2010 / / 14 Comments

One thing’s for sure: there won’t be another book like Skippy Dies all year. Paul Murray’s second novel (his first in seven years) is a 661-page opus (published as a three-volume box-set) set in an Irish boarding school, largely about the trials and tribulations of growing up and falling in love (both as a teenager and an adult), but also touching on the First World War, theoretical physics, and the changing face of education in the modern world. One other thing – it’s excellent.

The book opens with a doughnut-eating contest between Ruprecht Van Doren – a fourteen-year-old maths prodigy with a weight problem – and his diminutive room-mate, Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster. In accordance with the title, Skippy drops dead during this race – though not from choking on a doughnut. The rest of the novel explores events leading up to, and beyond, the fatal moment.

Skippy Dies interleaves the stories of several characters: there’s Ruprecht, obsessed with the physics of higher dimensions and set on building a machine that could enable travel between universes. There’s Skippy, who has a crush on Lori, a pupil at the neighbouring girls’ school, and can’t believe his luck when his love is returned (if only Carl, the school’s hard-man drug-dealer, didn’t also have his eyes on her). There’s Howard Fallon, the history teacher who falls for a lovely substitute teacher, Aurelie MacIntyre, and is determined to win her love, even if doing so wrecks his existing relationship. And there’s Seabrook College itself, a Catholic school not quite at ease with the changing times.

For all its length, Skippy Dies never once feels like a hard slog, never once feels as though it doesn’t deserve all its 661 pages. But what makes Murray’s achievement in this novel so extraordinary is the sheer range of effects he produces. First of all, and particularly at the beginning, this is a very funny book; the banter between the boys is good, with Murray demonstrating well their tendency to bring even the most serious, high-flown ideas crashing back down to earth with a word. As an example, when Ruprecht describes an invention he’s working on that will broadcast classical music into space in the hope of reaching alien life, another boy replies, ‘What’s the point of playing a load of boring music into space? You want them to think that everyone on Earth is like a hundred years old?’ [127]

Skippy Dies also has much to say that is serious, and does so very eloquently indeed. For example, points are made around the issue of education: the school’s Acting Principal, Greg Costigan (known to all as ‘the Automator’) is the epitome of the target-driven, commercially-minded headteacher, who doesn’t approve of Howard’s teaching the First World War; it’s not in the textbook, it won’t help the boys pass their exams, so (to Costigan’s way of thinking) it has no value. I don’t think there’s much doubt over where the novel stands on that issue.

Murray succeeds on the level of character, too, where he has some subtle and highly effective touches. One of these is the way he reveals the turmoil of Carl’s home life; the boy’s parents row with each other, but it goes on in the background while we’re following Carl’s viewpoint – and it’s all the more chilling because he completely ignores them.

Also striking is the way that some of the concepts from physics described in the book become mirrored in the emotional events of the story, often leaving some incisive observations behind. For instance, there’s the idea that the smallest possible units of matter act randomly and unknowably; then we learn how Howard (who became a teacher pretty much by accident) attended his school reunion recently, and wondered whether everyone went along in the same fashion: ‘Could the dark truth be that the system is composed of individual units none of whom really knows what he is doing, who emerge from school and slide into the templates offered to them by accident of birth…’ [191]  But it’s Ruprecht who gets stung the most by this use of physics, when he comes to realise that the physical laws he puts such trust in just aren’t enough to deal with the human universe.

And I’m only scratching the surface, here, of what Skippy Dies has to offer. It’s a rich, immersive read that you shouldn’t miss.

Link
Penguin Books – interview and extract

Interzone 226: Stephen Gaskell, ‘Aquestria’

23rd February 2010 / / 1 Comment

On the planet of Aquestria, the two resident human factions — the Loyalists and the Senastrians — are at war, though both are suffering the effects of a plague which is killing off plants and animals alike. Isiria and Kelif, two Senestrian Special Investigations officers, respond to a call and find a strange man with his tongue cut out.  Thinking he might be a Loyalist, Kelif interrogates the stranger, until his methods become so aggressive that Isiria takes matters into her own hands.

This story is… okay. There’s a nice idea at its heart, and some deft touches in Gaskell’s writing where he evokes Isiria’s unease with Kelif’s tactics. But, though it’s always readable, much of the story doesn’t really leave a lasting impression. ‘Aquestria’ is decent enough, but nothing special.

Link
Stephen Gaskell’s website

Click here for all my Interzone 226 posts.

Liz Jensen, The Rapture (2009)

17th February 2010 / / 9 Comments

I read The Rapture in advance of this week’s TV Book Club; I had no particular expectations of it – and it turned out to be the best book I’ve read so far this year. Certainly, if I’d read it last year, it would have been on my list of favourites for 2009.

A few years in the future, the climate has changed for the worse, and the summer heat is unbearable; religious groups have sprung up, proclaiming that the end times are near. In a town on the south coast of England, psychotherapist Gabrielle Fox is treating Bethany Krall, the teenage daughter of a preacher. Bethany savagely murdered her own mother, and is now being held in a secure institution. She’s a difficult patient – Gabrielle being only the latest in a string of therapists who have tried to understand the girl – but it’s in Gabrielle’s interests to succeed in treating Bethany. A car accident left Gabrielle paralysed from the waist down; Bethany is her chance to prove that she’s still up to the job. What’s particularly unusual about Bethany is that she is apparently able to foresee natural disasters – and she has predicted that the end of the world will come in a matter of months.

The Rapture is narrated by Gabrielle in the first person; her voice is descriptive, measured, and rather cold – for example, she describes her father’s demise from Alzheimer’s in terms that betray no feeling of sadness or loss. She is not a protagonist one can warm to easily, yet Jensen makes her a compelling presence for all that. Gabrielle’s sparring with Bethany is fascinating to read; despite the girl’s violent tendencies and physical superiority over Gabrielle, one senses that Bethany’s greatest weapon is her articulacy. Gabrielle’s profession requires her to be alert to the nuances of language, but now she’s up against someone who knows how to play that game, knows what buttons to push. That’s why Gabrielle feels threatened by Bethany – because the girl can attack her in an aspect of life where she still felt secure.

Jensen’s keen observations don’t stop at the relationship between these two characters. Convinced that she’s never going to be in a relationship again, Gabrielle is unprepared for when she meets Frazer Melville, a physicist who falls for her. We see the complex tangle of emotions that Gabrielle is feeling when Frazer first acts romantically towards her: ‘I can’t handle it. It will kill me. It will kill my belief that I am no longer a woman. No, worse, it will revive the hope that I am, and then all that can happen is that it will be shredded. [p. 112]’ Even such a positive development is not without its dangers to Gabrielle’s sense of self.

Nor is Jensen’s acuity limited to relationships. When Gabrielle and Frazer discover that Bethany’s prediction of an earthquake was accurate, they have a crisis of conscience – having withheld their knowledge that this disaster would occur, doesn’t that make them complicit in the resulting deaths? But, if they had alerted someone, who’d have believed them? It’s not just that Jensen is examining here the issue of responsibility when one has privileged knowledge; there’s a sense of deep uncertainty over how to handle new kinds of knowledge – Gabrielle and Frazer now know things that others will find impossible to believe; they don’t know the right thing to do because there is, by definition, no precedent on which to draw.

So, I like very much the way that Jensen observes people in her novel; one of the most impressive things about The Rapture is the way that she highlights the personal, human responses against the background of grand catastrophe. What’s also impressive is that the novel works from so many directions, even when they might seem to be contradictory. As I’ve already described, it works well as a character study; in the second half, when the time comes for The Rapture to be a disaster thriller, it doesn’t disappoint there, either. Jensen ramps up the pace, and provides the necessary spectacle and borderline (im)plausibility, leading to an entirely apposite conclusion.

If there’s a weakness here, it’s exactly that – that the text sets itself free of plausibility in the name of storytelling. But that’s the nature of Jensen’s story: it’s what the novel needs at that point, and it’s done with enormous panache. The Rapture is a novel that appeals to the head and the heart, and doesn’t skimp on either. As I said at the start, it’s my favourite read of the year to date.

Further links
Liz Jensen’s website

Interzone 226: Rachel Swirsky, ‘Again and Again and Again’

8th February 2010 / / 4 Comments

Oh, but I loved this. A two-page chronicle of children rebelling against their once-rebellious parents, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the future, where technology makes the possibilities for shocking the previous generation ever more extreme, until…

Well, if I’m any more specific, I’ll spoil all the fun for you. And that’s what this story is – great fun, and (one suspects) only too true.

Link
Rachel Swirsky’s website

Philippe Claudel, Brodeck’s Report (2007/9): Not the TV Book Group

7th February 2010 / / 0 Comments

Introduction

In the wake of The TV Book Club, four book bloggers (Lynne Hatwell of Dovegreyreader Scribbles, Simon Savidge of Savidge Reads, Kirsty of Other Stories, and Kimbofo of Reading Matters) have launched their own online reading group, which they’re calling ‘Not the TV Book Group’. The group will run fortnightly on Sundays for sixteen weeks, with discussions being hosted on each blog in turn. The schedule is:

7 Feb – Philippe Claudel, Brodeck’s Report

21 Feb – Ali Shaw, The Girl with the Glass Feet 

7 Mar – Susan Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia

21 Mar – Jennifer Johnston, The Illusionist

11 Apr – Mary Swan, The Boys in the Trees

25 Apr – Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

9 May – Jon Canter, A Short Gentleman

23 May – Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling

I thought it would be interesting to join in, which I’ll try to do for all eight books (though, of course, we’ll see how well I manage!). For now, though, let’s turn to the first selection, Brodeck’s Report by the French writer Philippe Claudel (very well translated by John Cullen). I’m hoping to make this review more reactive than usual, so I’ll be looking out for commentary elsewhere online and maybe updating this post as the day goes on (and, of course, commenting on the actual discussion when it goes live). First of all, here’swhat I thought:

My view

One night, in a remote village somewhere in post-war Europe (Claudel is deliberately vague about place and time in the novel), there is a murder. The victim is known only as ‘the Anderer‘ (‘the Other’), a colourful stranger who arrived in the village from who-knows-where, and immediately drew fascination (gradually turning to suspicion) with his unusual dress and manner.

The Anderer has been killed by men of the village, who ask Brodeck — a villager who didn’t witness those events, but has attended university and so (the logic goes) can write — to produce a report on what happened, so there can be an authoritative statement. Alongside his report, Brodeck writes a second account, which forms the text of Claudel’s novel; this longer account covers not only matters concerning the Anderer, but also key events of Brodeck’s life — including his time in a concentration camp.

Brodeck’s Report comes garlanded with many glowing quotes from newspaper reviews; I’m not quite as thoroughly enthusiastic about the novel as they appear to be, but I still think it’s a very good book. Claudel’s central theme, I think, is that, given the right circumstances, anyone could be party to monstrous acts; there are strong parallels between the villagers’ treatment of the Anderer, and Brodeck’s treatment by the camp guards — and even Brodeck himself is not entirely innocent. This is a powerful demonstration of how even apparently ordinary, decent individuals could come to do the worst.

One of the most striking things about Brodeck’s Report is Claudel’s construction of the novel. Instead of taking a linear approach, he moves backwards and forwards between times and events — sometimes even within the same passage — yet never loses his control over the narrative. As the threads swirl around and move inexorably towards their conclusions, the story itself becomes a kind of net, mirroring the way that the characters become snared by events, prejudice, and social pressures. Claudel’s prose (and, of course, Cullen’s translation) succeeds at more detailed levels, too; there are some very well written, highly affecting scenes (often concerning some of the plot’s most harrowing events).

I doubt I’d have read Brodeck’s Report if not for this book group (actually, never mind that, I wouldn’t even have heard of it) — but I’m glad I did, and I look forward to seeing what others have made of it.

Updates

11.10 – The discussion is now underway at Dovegreyreader Scribbles.

Interzone 226: Jay Lake, ‘Human Error’

6th February 2010 / / 1 Comment

Again, I find myself thinking: nearly there, but not quite. ‘Human Error’ is about three miners on a distant asteroid who chance upon an artefact which is apparently the product of non-human intelligences. Reporting such a  find will make the ‘rockheads’ fabulously wealthy — if they can only settle their differences first. The relationships are the core of Lake’s tale, and I appreciate what he’s aiming to portray (as summed up by the ironic pun in the story’s title); but I don’t tink he manages fully to capture the claustrophobic intensity of the situation.

Link
Jay Lake’s website

Dan Rhodes, Little Hands Clapping (2010)

4th February 2010 / / 3 Comments

My introduction to Dan Rhodes was his previous novel, 2007’s Gold, which I enjoyed very much; enough that I needed no persuading to seek out a copy of his latest work.  Little Hands Clapping is very different in subject matter, but unmistakably the work of the same author; and, as I read, I began to see deeper similarities. Perhaps more than usual, I find my thoughts about the present book coloured by those I had of the earlier; in that light, I’m a little less satisfied with Little Hands Clapping than with Gold, though the new novel is a very enjoyable read in its own right.

Synopsising Rhodes is awkward, because it doesn’t give a full picture: for one thing, if you take a bald summary of the plot, it seems that nothing much happens – but that’s not how the book reads; for another, Rhodes’s style is integral to the experience of reading him. I’m trying to think how to describe his style – words like ‘fairytale’ and ‘whimsical’ are going through my mind, but none of them seems quite right. The sense is more one of being told a story – of viewing a slightly heightened version of reality.

One of Rhodes’s common techniques is to mask something harsh and real behind that facade of tale-telling, such that you might have to stop and check back that, yes, you did understand that correctly. Take, the beginning, for example, where the author introduces his main setting, a German museum devoted to the subject of suicide. The museum’s caretaker is a grey old man who’d probably feel right at home in a Roald Dahl story; we first see at the end of the opening chapter that he’s not as straightforward as we might have assumed, when he happily munches on a spider which has crawled into his mouth. (The museum gains its own tinge of unreality from the way Rhodes unveils room after room, like a magician producing handkerchiefs from an apparently empty fist.) Whilst lying in bed in his quarters above the museum, the old man hears a noise from below; he thinks nothing of it, and, perhaps, neither do we – but we soon discover that the noise was someone hanging himself (this happens regularly, despite the museum’s having been founded with the aim of deterring people from suicide).

Other harrowing facts are revealed in a similarly deadpan way, not least that the doctor whom the caretaker surreptitiously calls out to deal with all the suicides has his own use for the dead bodies – he eats them. This will become public knowledge by novel’s end, as we learn early on.

Running in parallel are several other storylines, notably that of Mauro and Madalena, the most beautiful boy and girl in their village, who seem destined to be together always – and they are, until they leave and discover that, whilst Mauro is just as handsome in the wider world, Madalena is merely pretty. fate turns against them… With Rhodes’s style, it can be hard to get at the ‘real’ emotions; but this strand of Little Hands Clapping is affecting nonetheless, with some telling observations of love and how it can evolve.

So far, so good; why the unfavourable comparison with Gold, then? Because, as far as I can see, Little Hands Clapping doesn’t have the same subtextual richness. The individual elements of the novel are fine, but I don’t think they tie together in the way that Gold’s did, and that’s why I’m less satisfied. But I’m not dissatisfied, no way; not when Rhodes builds and maintains a momentum that drives his story on to a conclusion that seems inevitable (but is it?), yet remains compulsive reading. And the ending – like the ending of Gold – is a lovely piece of writing.

And so, with regret, I leave the imagination of Dan Rhodes behind once more. There’s no other imagination in literature quite like it – and I look forward to when the time will be right to go back there, to read another of his books.

Link
Dan Rhodes’s website

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