Tag: literature

Book notes: Tarun J. Tejpal and Ryan David Jahn

28th September 2012 / / 1 Comment

Tarun J. Tejpal, The Story of My Assassins (2009)

The first that Tarun Tejpal’s protagonist, an unnamed investigative journalist, learns of the attempt on his life is when he hears that the Delhi police have captured his would-be assassins.

He is placed under police guard whilst still unsure of what exactly has been going on. Tejpal’s novel then alternates between the protagonist’s struggles with his magazine and relationships, and stories of the killers’ backgrounds. The panorama revealed is altogether broader and more impersonal than our man could have suspected. The tales of the assassins show the various ways they were drawn into crime by circumstance. One discovered as a boy that he was handy with a knife, and saw that as his means of getting on in the world. Another was a timid underachiever until he fought back against one of the padres at his English-language school, and then found his true talent among gangs rather than in the classroom. All have ultimately been moved around by forces beyond their control.

And, as he learns more, the journalist learns that something similar has happened to him – that this is about something more than just a plot to kill him. Tejpal mirrors this theme in the structure of his novel: self-contained sections reveal more than one person could know. The Story of My Assassins adds up to a wide-ranging portrait of people trying to make something of life, if it doesn’t get made for them first.

(This review also appears at We Love This Book.)

Ryan David Jahn, Low Life (2010)

I don’t know quite why it took me so long to read another Ryan David Jahn novel after I so enjoyed his debut, 2009’s Acts of Violence (aka Good Neighbors). But now I have, and I won’t be leaving it so long again. Where Acts of Violence explored why a disparate group of people might refuse to help an attack victim (with the inevitable result), Jahn’s follow-up is almost the reverse. Low Life focuses tightly on one individual trying to puzzle out what’s happening to him, and the outcome is far from certain.

Simon Johnson is marking time at 34, with a dead-end job and no social life, when he’s attacked in his LA apartment. He fights back and kills the intruder, only to see that the man bears a striking resemblance to himself. Identification on the body reveals that this was one Jeremy Shackleford, who turns out to have been a mathematics lecturer. Why would he possibly have wanted to break into Simon’s home and kill him? To find out, Simon adopts Shackleford’s identity – and the lines between his two personae start to blur.

In Low Life’s early stages, Jahn skilfully evokes the bleakness of Simon’s existence. The novel then comes to focus more on its protagonist’s personality – the title refers to dark thoughts that a person may have but would never normally act upon; Simon finds himself becoming more and more consumed by this ‘low life’ of his. The reader’s journey with him is disturbing and thrilling by turns, as we wonder how far Simon will go, where this will all end up – and how much is even real.

Zadie Smith, NW (2012)

14th September 2012 / / 8 Comments

Zadie Smith’s new novel takes its title from the main postcode area of north-west London, and it’s at least as much about the place as the characters. Smith portrays her setting as a place where past and present, different classes and cultures, coexist in adjoining and overlapping spaces. In a brilliant piece of contrast, a bland list of directions in one chapter is followed by a dense, impressionistic passage covering the actual journey:

Everybody loves sandals. Everybody. Birdsong! Low-down dirty shopping arcade to mansion flats to an Englishman’s home is his castle. Open-top, soft-top, drive-by, hip.hop. Watch the money pile up. Holla! (p. 34)

The characters of NW embody that same complex web of coexistence. The event anchoring the novel is lottery-fund worker Leah Hanwell’s being scammed on her doorstep by Shar, a woman who went to the same school. When first we meet Leah, just before this, she’s clearly feeling somewhat insecure about her life. She is repeating to herself a line she hears on the radio: ‘I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me’ (a line which has no small amount of irony in a novel concerned to show how other people can affect individuals’ lives).

She’s pregnant at thirty-five, having undergone two previous abortions, and still uncomfortable with the idea of motherhood. She’s a white woman of Irish descent married to a French-Algerian, Michel; not everyone she knows is happy about this: ‘no offence’, Leah’s Afro-Caribbean work colleagues say, ‘but when we see one of our lot with someone like you it’s a real issue (p. 29).’ Leah looks at her best friend Natalie – a black girl from Caldwell, the same estate, who became a lawyer, and now seemingly has the perfect middle-class family life, including kids – and now feels left behind: ‘While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became (p. 58). Her search for Shar and the stolen money is therefore driven by the desire for at least one small victory in life.

Towards the end of the opening section, Leah overhears a news report of a local murder. The second partof NW focuses on the victim of that killing: Felix Cooper, a former drug-dealer with no stable family life, who also grew up on the Caldwell estate at the same time as Leah and Natalie. The encounters Felix has during this section illustrate the overlapping spaces I referred to earlier: for example, he buys a car from a posh young man who’s clearly out of his depth talking to Felix; and though Felix’s on-off girlfriend (and ex-customer) Annie comes from a wealthy background, she seems almost relieved to have left behind the world of privilege for her current life. Though Felix is ostensibly rather less well-off than Leah Hanwell, he is actually in his element in the city in a way that Leah, arguably, could never be. As Annie puts it, he ‘finds life easy’ – not that he has everything on a plate, but that he has the right temperament and outlook to deal with what life throws at him. However, even that is no defence against chance, as Felix ultimately discovers.

The novel’s third section focuses on Natalie Blake – or Keisha, as she was known before adopting her new name at university. 185 short chapters chronicle her life from childhood to the present day, in particular her relationships with her family, Leah, and her husband Frank. An interesting effect is created by this section’s starting so early in time. The scenes of Keisha/Natalie’s and Leah’s younger days have an expansive optimism about them, the sense that both girls feel they’re heading for greater things as they leave the estate for university. But there’s a certain dramatic irony here, because we know that the thirtysomething Leah and Natalie won’t find life such plain sailing. It also becomes clear in this part that Frank’s and Natalie’s home life is not as rosy as Leah assumes. The structure of this section – with its short, snappy chapters – gives a driving sense of moving forward through time, which in turn creates a heightened feeling of urgency.

The momentum persists in the next part of NW, though here the sense is of movement through space, as Natalie walks around her local area. She runs into Nathan Bogle, another of her childhood contemporaries; their conversations highlight how far Natalie has moved from her roots, as do some of her other encounters (Smith writes at one point: ‘Natalie Blake had completely forgotten what it was like to be poor. It was a language she’d stopped being able to speak, or even to understand’ [p. 243]).

Towards the end of the novel, Leah remarks to Natalie, ‘I just don’t understand why [we] have this life.’ Her friend replies: ‘Because we worked harder…We were smarter and we knew we didn’t want to end up begging on people’s doorsteps. We wanted to get out…This is one of the things you learn in a courtroom: people generally get what they deserve’ (pp. 292-3).

Given the rest of NW, there’s a certain amount of truth to this as applied to Natalie’s and Leah’s lives. But there is also a sense that Natalie is willing it to be so by saying it: after all, the characters’ lives (including Natalie’s own) have been shaped by much more than their own efforts; just look at what happens to Felix. The ending of Smith’s novel could be read as an attempt by Leah and Natalie to exercise control over something that will help them move forward – but what they do will in turn affect someone else.  So the connections continue beyond the final page of an incisive portrait of life’s complexities.

Elsewhere
Read an extract from NW on the Guardian website.
John Self interviews Zadie Smith.
Some other blogs on NW: Words of Mercury; Muse at Highway Speeds; Valerie O’Riordan for Bookmunch; Just William’s Luck.

Man Booker and SI Leeds Literary Prize shortlists

11th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

The Booker shortlist was announced this morning:

  • Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon)
  • Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories)
  • Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
  • Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
  • Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
  • Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber and Faber)

I can’t really judge the quality of that shortlist, because I’ve read only two of them. I very much enjoyed The Lighthouse, so I’m pleased to see it on there (my review is linked above). I read Swimming Home last year and, though I didn’t warm to it personally, enough people have praised the book since that I feel inclined to revisit it at some point.

More generally, this shortlist is an enormous vote of confidence in British independent publishers – all three of the small presses on the longlist (Myrmidon, And Other Stories, and Salt) have made it through to the final six. I think that’s great news. This also seems a shortlist that’s in favour of unconventional approaches, which is interesting.

Which novel might win? The Mantel will probably be the favourite, but it looks to me like something of an odd one out on this list. I think the Self is a more likely front-runner – though actually I wouldn’t be surprised if the Levy or Moore books took the Prize. We’ll find out when the winner is announced on Tues 16 October.

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I want to mention another literary award shortlist, which was announced yesterday. The SI Leeds Literary Prize is for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women. Its six shortlisted titles are:

  • Katy Massey, The Book of Ghosts
  • Emily Midorikawa, A Tiny Speck of Black and Then Nothing
  • Karen Onojaife, Borrowed Light
  • Minoli Salgado, A Little Dust on the Eyes
  • Anita Sivakumaran, The Weekend for Sex, and other stories
  • Jane Steele, Storybank: The Milkfarm Years

The winner will be revealed on Weds 3 Oct at Ilkley Playhouse, as part of Ilkley Literature Festival.

Round Table: State of Wonder, Part 2

10th September 2012 / / 1 Comment

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This is the second half of an email discussion I held on Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder. The first part was posted yesterday. Note that we go into some detail about the book; you may prefer not to read the discussion if you’re not already familiar with State of Wonder.

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Alison Bacon: I’d be interested to know how you people think Marina plans to move on after delivering Anders home. First time of reading I assumed she would go back to the jungle – second time I was less sure. Pregnancy by Anders is an obvious possibility. Can we assume her relationship with Jim Fox at an end? Just interested to see if an ‘open’ ending has produced the same or different responses, or are we to look no farther than Marina’s ‘mission accomplished’?

David Hebblethwaite: I got a strong sense of finality from the ending, with Marina back on her home turf, and Anders reunited with his family. The tone of the prose definitely suggested to me that she was drawing a line under it and moving on.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I think the key is ‘home turf’; there is a line on p.50 in my paperback, where Marina, with reference to Minnesota, is described as having the ‘finely honed sense of a native’ when it comes to judging the weather, not surprisingly, having lived there all her life. But set that against her desire as a child, on p.35, ‘longing [for] an entre country where, that place where no one would turn around and look at her unless it was to admire her good posture’, by comparison with Minnesota, where no one believes she’s from around there (or else think she’s Native American; I’m tickled that the gas station attendant would go so far as to ask ‘Lakota?’). And also the convincing herself that ‘she practically was from Indian’. The unspoken irony of course is that her paleness would be much admired by Indians, many of whom persist in seeing pale skin as preferable to dark skn (colonial influence, subsequent heavy marketing of skin whitening products) but would also mark her out as from not there. I’m not sure Patchett digs at that as well as she might.

Anyway, there is a clear sense that Marina is trying to find a place for herself, but having sampled various kinds of Indianness and indigeneity, I think the ending obliges her to recognise that she is a Minnesotan first. (And actually, I can’t help thinking, given her extraordinary reticence throughout, she is a living embodiment of Minnesota Nice).

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Round Table: State of Wonder, Part 1

9th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

Here’s something new to this blog, which I’m thinking of turning into a semi-regular feature. I was inspired by the round-table discussions that Niall Harrison used to do at Torque Control to try the same thing – to discuss a book over email with a few people, and blog the results.

The book we have on the table is State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. To quote the blurb:

Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson’s work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate. A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns.

Now Marina Singh, Anders’ colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope. Compelled by the pleas of Anders’s wife, who refuses to accept that her husband is not coming home, Marina leaves the snowy plains of Minnesota and retraces her friend’s steps into the heart of the South American darkness, determined to track down Dr. Swenson and uncover the secrets being jealously guarded among the remotest tribes of the rainforest.

What Marina does not yet know is that, in this ancient corner of the jungle, where the muddy waters and susurrating grasses hide countless unknown perils and temptations, she will face challenges beyond her wildest imagination.

Marina is no longer the student, but only time will tell if she has learnt enough.

Joining me in the conversation were Alison Bacon, Annoné Butler, Yvonne Johnston, and Maureen Kincaid Speller. Please note that we go into some detail about the book, including the ending; you may not want to read the discussion if you haven’t yet read State of Wonder. This is the first half; I’ll post the rest tomorrow [EDIT 10/9: and now here it is].

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David Hebblethwaite: What are your thoughts on the role of science in State of Wonder? I guess in a sense it’s at the heart of the book – the main characters are scientists, and the context of the story is a scientific study; but, even at the beginning, there’s a note of ambivalence, when Marina contemplates the blank space at the foot of the letter announcing Anders’ death: “How much could have been said in those remaining inches, how much explained, was beyond scientific measure”. How do you see science in the novel?

Annoné Butler: Ostensibly, Dr Swenson is with the Lakashi in order to discover the secret of their continued fertility. This is what will make Vogel rich, by providing a means for women of the first world to bear children unlimited by age. And it is certainly the primary aim of what the scientific team are doing. Dr Swenson has even tested the bark on herself and knows it works but, in the process, has realised that it is a mistaken and dangerous development. In the process of her own – ultimately catastrophic – pregnancy and birth she reaches the conclusion that such an aim is wholly misconceived – opportunities for birth should be limited as nature intended. This seems to chime with her original view that she is not there to involve herself with the medical problems of the Lakashi, on the basis that their natural state should not be interfered with.

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Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, Vol. 5 (2012)

6th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

Now in its fifth year, the Bristol Short Story Prize is establishing itself as a significant award with an eye for good stories. The tales on this year’s shortlist (anthologised in this volume) are no exception.

Top honours in this year’s Bristol Prize (announced on 14th July at ShortStoryVille) went to a fiction debut: ‘Naked as Eve’ by John Arnold. At first, this appears to be a gently humorous piece; the inhabitants of a small Australian town are putting on an act for a party of tourists, entertaining them with lurid tales of a cursed pool. But then we meet the narrator Olivia’s mother, who has dementia, and we realise that Olivia has been putting on a different sort of act as well. It’s this elegant mirroring, and Arnold’s deft shift to a darker mood, that make ‘Naked as Eve’ such a good story.

The runner-up was Alys Conran’s ‘Lobster’, which focuses on a father and son in a drowning future Wales where food is scarce. Conran evokes the boy’s innocence well through his narrative voice; and the ending – with an ambiguity that doesn’t allow for a positive interpretation – carries such an impact. Third place went to ‘Going Grapefruit’ by Ian Richards, whose protagonist speaks in nonsense after a car crash (‘You want to know about the grass my custard changed?’). What makes this work is that there’s an underlying consistency to the language, and enough context for us to understand roughly what the narrator means – which makes it all the more poignant to see other characters failing to do so.

Richards’ protagonist is not the only character in the anthology seeking to be heard and understood. Christopher Parvin’s ‘Ghost in the Machine’ tells of a future where robots (‘people of the Cog’) live alongside humans, but struggle to gain acceptance. There’s dry humour in the way Parvin reflects real-world discrimination, but I also find effective the story’s mosaic construction as a collection of blog entries and emails. The protagonist of ‘Beekiller’ by Ethel Rohan is fast losing patience with her husband over his obsession with beekeeping; she resorts to desperate measures in an ending that balances absurdity with an emotional believability.

Other stories carry a sharp sting in their tails. ‘Yoki and the Toy Surprise’ by Angela Readman is a spin on the classic ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale that shifts from an amusing beginning to a melancholy end. Avril Joy’s protagonist in ‘Meat’ knows where she’s going when she says goodbye to her neighbour at the start, but it’s almost certainly nowhere that readers may have expected. William Telford’s ‘The Attack at Delium’ sees a couple arguing over various academic points of history and science; matters are brought sharply and powerfully back down to earth at the end.

Further tales in the anthology revolve more around character. The narrator of Ellie Walsh’s ‘Jelly Feel Real’ takes a trip from Christmas Island to Perth with her friend Angel; it becomes clear for various reasons what a significant journey this is. The dry narration is very effective in illuminating the protagonist’s character. ‘The Swimmer’ by Lizzie Boyle is the story of Allan Fleming, who goes for an early-morning swim every day, pacing himself according to multiples of twelve. His ordered mind is reflected in the intense detail of the prose, and Boyle shows how Allan’s world starts to unravel when he comes across something he can’t explain – and a few too many prime numbers. Hilary Wilce’s ‘I Once Knew Salman Rushdie’ is about how chance encounters can have unforeseen consequences in life; its understated tone matches the mundane school hockey-game setting, but hides the stirring of some deep emotions.

Reading this book reinforced for me the notion that there’s nothing quite like a good anthology for variety and the potential for discovery. You may not know where you’ll be when you turn the page of a new story in the fifth Bristol Prize anthology, but you can be sure it’ll be somewhere interesting.

(This review also appears at Fiction Uncovered.)

Previously
Read my review of the 2010 Bristol Prize anthology.

M. John Harrison, Viriconium (1971-85)

3rd September 2012 / / 7 Comments

This is Viriconium: the city to end all cities; namesake of the dominant empire in Earth’s twilight. This is Viriconium: an omnibus of novels and stories by M. John Harrison. When you venture in, it’s important to bear in mind which of these statements is the more accurate.

By the way, this post is going to tell you quite a bit about what happens. I can’t really see that as a spoiler, because plot is not the point of Viriconium (except insofar as it’s an illusion, like much else in the stories). It’s the experience of reading Harrison’s work that counts, and nothing I say here can substitute that. Not that it’s going to stop me trying to give a sense of Viriconium, of course.

The first novel in the sequence, The Pastel City (1971), sees Viriconium under attack from the forces of the ruling queen’s cousin. One of the old king’s champions, tegeus-Cromis (‘who imagined himself a better poet than swordsman’), picks up his weapons and sets out to reunite his comrades-in-arms and defend the city. So far, so conventional, it might seem – albeit with a vividly realised setting of a decaying far future. Advanced technology from previous eras (the ‘Afternoon Cultures’) persists, but the world has forgotten how it works. The landscape is one of rust and garishly-coloured metal salts. The stars have been rearranged to spell the name of a past culture, but no one is left who can read it.

But the deeper themes of Viriconium are already becoming apparent. Some say that reality is becoming thin with age, forgetting itself. Cromis’s journey does not run according to plan, and he turns away from witnessing its ending, and away from greater knowledge. By the close of The Pastel City, individuals from one of the Afternoon Cultures have been resurrected – so Viriconium finds itself in danger of being superseded by the past.

As a fictional city, Viriconium is a timeless mish-mash; but, in The Pastel City, one nevertheless has the impression of a coherent, functioning place. That impression is predicated on the structure of the novel, though, as A Storm of Wings (1980) makes clear. This is a much more fragmented text, which could be seen in some ways as a parody of its predecessor’s quest-fantasy. Various characters (some from The Pastel City, some not) assemble in the queen’s palace to begin dealing with a threat to Viriconium. But the sense is much more that they have been moved there, like pieces on a gameboard; the reasons for their gathering are not so clear, to them or the reader.

All those reasons, it turns out, are aspects of the same thing: an invasion of insect-people who have their own way of perceiving the universe, radically different from humans’ – and these alternative perceptions vie for supremacy. Reality in Viriconium (in Viriconium) is literally what you make of it. The scenes of A Storm of Wings slide between perceptions; the reader’s best hope is perhaps just to hang on.

In the third novel, In Viriconium (1982), part of the city has been afflicted by a ‘plague’ which causes reality itself to thin out: people fall ill, buildings decay, ventures fail. A portrait-painter named Ashlyme attempts to rescue his fellow-artist, Audsley King, from the plague zone – a mission which, perhaps inevitably, leads to disaster. Harrison shows the reality of Viriconium to be ever flimsier here: so much so that the real world (our world) is leaking through. The mundanity of the novel’s events, and the fragmented nature of its ‘narrative’, suggest that the coherence of The Pastel City was illusory, no more than a matter of perception.

It might seem at first glance that the Viriconium novels take place in the same chronology, but there are enough discrepancies to make clear that it’s not so. And the stories which were assembled as Viriconium Nights (1985) – and are scattered throughout the 2000 omnibus I was reading – demonstrate that even more emphatically. Characters and places (even Viriconium itself) can have different names or histories. This is revealed to the character Ignace Retz in the story ‘Viriconium Knights’, when he is shown scenes of adventure featuring warriors who bear his face. ‘All knights are not Ignace Retz,’ he is told – but, if all these scenes have happened, or will happen, somewhere, what does that make him?

In my omnibus, ‘Viriconium Knights’ is placed first of all (even before The Pastel City); so we know from the start that there can be no such thing as a definitive vision of Viriconium. Essentially, the Viriconium Nights stories are slices of life from ‘places’ that can have no life beyond their individual tales. In ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’ – the final story – Viriconiun is no more than an abstract entity for which people in our world may yearn. The protagonist tries vainly to make the mirror of a café toilet act as a portal to Viriconium. After images of the far future and tales of saving the world, that is all you have left. That is what’s real.

Viriconium represents a systematic destruction of the idea of fantasy as escape. It is bleak, even nightmarish at times – yet it’s beautiful, too. You’ll have to read it for yourself, though, to really see what I mean.

Book notes: Alison Moore and Christopher Coake

31st August 2012 / / 2 Comments

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (2012)

Time for my first foray into this year’s Man Booker longlist. Alison Moore’s name came to my attention when I read her short story ‘When the Door Closed, It Was Dark’ a couple of years ago. Her debut novel, The Lighthouse, shares that earlier tale’s unsettling atmosphere and intense focus on detail.

A man named Futh travels from England to Germany on a walking holiday to take his mind off the end of his relationship with Angela. Instead, he dwells on the past: his uneasy relationship with his womanising father; his friend Kenny’s mother, who didn’t act quite as you’d expect of a friend’s mother; those rocky times with Angela. Lighthouses are a recurring metaphor: the lighthouse-shaped perfume case belonging to his mother that Futh now carries, though it’s empty; the lighthouse Futh saw on a childhood holiday to Cornwall, and wondered ‘how there could be this constant warning of danger…and yet still there was all this wreckage’ (p. 56).

There was plenty of ‘warning’ when Futh was growing up, but it doesn’t seem to have made him much wiser about relationships. Similarly, Moore’s secondary protagonist, bed-and-breakfast owner Ester, is apparently stuck in a destructive cycle of having liaisons with her guests, and hiding the fact from her husband Bernard, who’s lost all interest in her. The narrative loops back and forth to different periods in the characters’ lives, gradually revealing more – all in precise, evocative prose. The Lighthouse is a fine first novel that deserves the extra attention it’s going to get from its Booker longlisting.

Elsewhere
Alison Moore’s website
The publisher, Salt Publishing
Some other reviews of The Lighthouse: Adam Roberts; Words of Mercury; Culture and Anarchy; Emily Cleaver for Litro.

Christopher Coake, You Came Back (2012)

I’d call Christopher Coake’s debut novel a ghost story, but really it’s more about believing in ghosts – which, in You Came Back, is partly a symbol of hanging on to the past. Coake’s protagonist is Mark Fife, who’s rebuilding his life several years after his young son Brendan died, and he separated from Brendan’s mother Chloe. Now, Mark is in a new relationship, with Allison; he’s contemplating proposing to her when the owner of his old house turns up, claiming that the house is haunted by Brendan’s ghost. What does it mean for Mark – and his relationship with Chloe – if that turns out to be true?

You Came Back works well enough as a portrait of parents’ dealing with life after bereavement. But what I particularly like about Coake’s novel is the elegant way that it can be read both literally and metaphorically. Take it literally, and you have an examination of how Chloe, Mark, and their relationships with others are affected by the possibility that Brendan somehow survives. Read the novel metaphorically, and it’s a story of grieving parents who won’t let go, even if that means dragging everyone else they love down with them. On top of this, You Came Back does not shirk its responsibilities as a work of suspense; Coake leaves open to the end the question of whether there really is a ghost. After all, the whole novel is concerned with what people might do when faced with something they’re almost certain is not true – but can’t help thinking that it could be.

Elsewhere
Christopher Coake’s website
Some other reviews of You Came Back: Little Words; Chasing Bawa; Dana Stevens for Slate; Christopher Bundy.

Pia Juul, The Murder of Halland (2009/12)

23rd August 2012 / / 7 Comments

It’s a crime story, but the crime is in the background; the real story is the effect of bereavement on Bess, Pia Juul’s protagonist. When first we meet Bess, she goes to bed shortly after her partner Halland. When she wakes, it’s to discover that Halland has been shot dead. For the rest of the novella, Bess has to live with the aftermath of Halland’s murder, and hope that she can come to some sort of new equilibrium in life.

The Murder of Halland is a fine character study (and Martin Aitken’s translation from the Danish is equally so) which, like a kaleidoscope, keeps turning to reveal something new. One of our first discoveries is that Bess’s personal life is not as happy and untroubled as we may have supposed. She left her husband and daughter behind for Halland, and is still not on best terms with her family (she says she has her mother’s number on speed dial ‘to warn me if she rang’ [p. 16]). But nor was she fully at ease with Halland – Bess loved him, but he could be possessive (‘if I hadn’t been besotted by him, staying would have pointless’ [p. 17]).

As the novella progresses, it becomes clear just how much of a hole Halland’s death has left in Bess’s life. She wants to keep his memory to herself, and treats interlopers with hostility. ‘He’s not your family!’ she tells Pernille, the foster-daughter of Halland’s sister – though, as the two never married, Bess wasn’t technically Halland’s family either; and she hasn’t exactly been concerned with her own family, either. That cry against Pernille is more about Bess than Halland. Likewise, she feels threatened by things which disrupt her image of Halland; like the office he rented in Pernille’s house, whose contents Bess puzzles over (including a poster for La Retour de Martin Guerre, perhaps a symbol of Bess’s not knowing her partner as well as she thought).

But it’s also the case that we as readers don’t know Bess as well as we might think. She is at pains to stress that she’s not telling us everything, but just what is she not saying? Bess’s motivations are not always clear, and sometimes we can see a gap between her words and reality (for example, the impression we gain of Bess’s daughter Abby from her descriptions is not what we see when Abby arrives in person). We’re left with a sense of incompleteness (though not, I don’t think, an unsatisfactory one), just as Bess feels the gaps in her life.

The murder itself is never fully cleared up (though, as I said at the outset, the murder is not the point); but there’s a sense towards the end that Bess has found her way forward. Whether we know everything she went through to get there is another matter – but Juul gives us a fascinating journey all the same.

Elsewhere
Video interview with Pia Juul
The publisher, Peirene Press
Some other reviews of The Murder of Halland: Andrew Blackman; Little Words; Reading Matters; The Little Reader Library.

Ten favourite books read during the lifetime of this blog

21st August 2012 / / 9 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. I’m joining in this week because I was really taken with the theme. I’ve been reviewing books online since 2004, but this blog started in 2009, and I’m concentrating on the period since then. What follows here is not a definitive list of favourites, nor is it in a strict order – it’s a list of highlights. It’s a snapshot of what I like to read.

1. The Rehearsal – Eleanor Catton

This is a tale of pure serendipity. I was visiting Cambridge, and saw the hardback of The Rehearsal in a bookshop. It wasn’t the subject matter that grabbed me, but the blurbs promising something different. I took a chance on it… and really didn’t get along with its mannered prose style at first. But I persevered and, once I realised what Catton was doing – how completely the novel’s different aspects embodied its theme of performance – I got into it, and ended up absolutely loving the book. The Rehearsal is the fondest memory I have of reading a book in the last few years, and it showed me a new way to appreciate fiction.

2. Pocket Notebook – Mike Thomas

A few bloggers enthused about Pocket Notebook in 2010 – and I really liked its Clockwork Orange-inspired cover – but I never got around to reading it. The following year, I started reviewing for Fiction Uncovered; when I saw Pocket Notebook on their review-copy list, I decided to try it. I was utterly blown away by the vividness with which Thomas created his corrupt-copper protagonist. My only regret is that I didn’t read this novel a year earlier.

3. Skippy Dies – Paul Murray

This book has 661 pages. I devoured the whole lot in a weekend. An Irish boarding-school comedy with added quantum physics, Skippy Dies goes from humour to sharp characterisation to social commentary to pathos to the borders of science fiction and back again, without putting a foot wrong. Stunning stuff.

4. Solo – Rana Dasgupta

When I started this blog, I was just beginning to investigate the parts of the contemporary British literary scene that would most interest me. The website Untitled Books was (still is) a great resource, and it’s where I found out about Solo. I love books with wide-ranging sensibilities, and Solo – with its account of a life that feels like a daydream, and a daydream that feels like life – is that sort of book.

5. Beside the Sea – Véronique Olmi

One of the great joys of book blogging has been discovering small presses. Peirene Press are one of the fine publishers who’ve emerged in the last couple of years, and Beside the Sea is one of their best books. Ostensibly the story of a mother taking her children on a trip to the seaside, darkness gradually emerges from behind the happy façade to build up a brilliant but tragic portrait.

6. Yellow Blue Tibia & New Model Army – Adam Roberts

Yellow Blue Tibia was the very first book I reviewed on this blog. I was wanting to catch up on some of the contemporary sf authors I hadn’t read, and my first Adam Roberts novel just blew me away. My second, New Model Army, did the same the year after – a novel that I can genuinely say did something I hadn’t come across in a book before. I can’t choose one of these books over the other for this list, so here they both are.

7. The Affirmation – Christopher Priest

Being surprised by an unfamiliar author is great; but so is reading an excellent book by a writer you already know. A Christopher Priest novel is a maze of realities and unreliable perceptions, and The Affirmation is up there with his best. Priest’s narrative shifts between realities, and his masterstroke is to make our world seem no more (or less) real than his fictional one.

8. An A-Z of Possible Worlds – A.C. Tillyer

You can’t explore the world of book blogs for too long without coming across books that you’re unlikely to hear of elsewhere. I first heard of An A-Z of Possible Worlds through Scott Pack’s blog, and it really ought to be better known. Lovingly produced by its publisher, Roast Books, this is a collection of stories in a box – twenty-six individual pamphlets, each about its own place. The stories are very fine, too.

9. Coconut Unlimited – Nikesh Shukla

Here’s another way of discovering books in the blog age: finding a writer to be an engaging presence on Twitter; then, a year (or however long) later, reading his or her newly-published book. That’s what happened with Coconut Unlimited, which turned out to be a razor-sharp and hilarious comedy. More interconnectedness: I met Nikesh Shukla last year at a Firestation Book Swap, which Scott Pack usually hosts (although he wasn’t there for that one).

10. The City & the City – China Miéville

The City & the City generated one of my longest reviews, and I can’t remember reading another book that had so many interpretations from so many different people. It’s a novel to argue with, and argue about. At the time, I hadn’t read one of Miéville’s adult books since The Scar; I remember thinking that The City & the City was good enough in itself, but too quiet to catch on as some of his earlier works had. Of course, I was wrong. It was fascinating to see how the novel was received beyond the sf field, and the book blogging community was a big part of that reaction for me.

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