Tag: literature

Pump Six and Other Stories (2008) by Paolo Bacigalupi

19th November 2009 / / 1 Comment

I have heard a lot about Paolo Bacigalupi, much of it good; and I thought it was about time I got acquainted with his work. I’ve started with what built his reputation – his short fiction. Pump Six is a collection of ten stories, presented in chronological order of publication, and dating as far back as 1999. From reading it, I’ve discovered that (with a few reservations), Bacigalupi’s work deserves to be spoken of so highly.

Right from the start, Bacigalupi shows himself to be a writer of great texture; he knows just how to bring his worlds to life. Here, for example, is an extract from the book’s very first page, describing the construction of a new ‘biologic city’, which is being grown as much as built:

It grew on lattices of minerals, laying its own skeleton and following with cellulose skin. Infrastructure strong and broad, growing and branching, it settled roots deep into the green fertile soil of the Sichuan basin. It drew nutrients and minerals frmo the soil and sun, and the water of the rancid Bing Jiang; sucking at pollutants as willingly as it ate the sunlight which filtered through twining sooty mist.

(‘Pocketful of Dharma’)

Time and again, Bacigalupi captures this disorientating sense of the future’s being alien-and-yet-not. And the futures he creates are typically under stress: a problem from now stretched into a crisis and beyond, until it shapes the world. So, in ‘The Tamarisk Hunter’, water shortages mean there’s a bounty on the stuff, and good money to be made by anyone willing to seek out the plants that store large amounts of it. In ‘The Calorie Man’, the problem is energy: with traditional sources (presumably) depleted, we have turned entirely to biofuels. In this world, crops have effectively replaced money, so even the smallest amount of energy is expended with caution – and the scale and structure of society have naturally been affected by this.

A particularly harrowing example of Bacigalupi’s futures is the world of ‘Pop Squad’, whose key problem was one of population. The solution was ‘rejoo’, a technique which halts the ageing process – with the side-effect of infertility. But who’d want to reproduce, when they could be immortal? Some still do, apparently, even though it’s illegal and (effectively) a death sentence – but there are ‘pop squads’ for dealing with the results of that.

This piece is a very effective portrait of a pop squad member questioning his assumptions. Bacigalupi’s control is superb, as the tale progresses from the initial shocking moment, through the growth of the protagonist’s doubt (though the ending doesn’t have quite the same impact). I also appreciate Bacigalupi’s refusal (as I see it) to reduce the issue of rejoo to a simple choice between good or bad (though I think the story is more of the opinion that it’s a bad thing). Leaving aside the issue that the utterly reprehensible pop squads were created because of it, there are both advantages and disadvantages to accepting or rejecting rejoo; and ‘Pop Squad’ is a stronger story because of that.

Another characteristic common to a good number of the stories in Pump Six is that they show how people have become distorted by what’s happened to the world, and often in ways that are deeply troubling to us. We see this in the protagonist of ‘Pop Squad’, and also in the altered humans of ‘The People of Sand and Slag’.  In this tale, environmental change has precipitated the development of ‘weeviltech’, which enables people to heal from even extreme injury (severed limbs can just grow back), and  to eat rocks and mud – but their mentality and ethics have become so far removed from ours that reading about them is a highly discomforting (though powerful) experience. It’s not really necessary for Bacigalupi to have one of his characters ask ‘If someone came from the past, to meet us here and now, what do you think they’d say about us? Would they even call us human?’ and another reply, ‘No, they’d call us gods,’  because the narrative itself makes the same ironic point forcefully enough. But it’s an arresting point all the same.

Bacigalupi’s characters with alien mentalities don’t all reside in the future. ‘Softer’, the one non-sf story in the collection, is narrated by a man who has just killed his wife – they were in bed, she nudged and chided him for not doing  the dishes, he retaliated with a pillow, and… well, there you go. What’s so chilling about this story is that the narrator is so casual about what he’s done; and that he convinces as a character, even though his thought processes are unfathomable.

And it’s not just minds which are transformed in these stories – so are bodies. ‘The People of Sand and Slag’ is one example, of course; but the physical transformation is perhaps even more dramatic in ‘The Fluted Girl’. Here, we find a society which has organised itself into fiefdoms, one of which is ruled by Madame Belari, an actress with ambitions to become an entertainment mogul, as it were.

Her star attractions are Lidia and Nia, twins whom Belari enslaved as children, and forced to undergo treatments that arrested their physical growth, sculpted their bodies, and left them with brittle bones. It’s the slow, elegant unveiling of the situation that makes this story work, along with the subtextual examination of the desire for ‘fame at any price’, and the effect it may have on others.

‘The Fluted Girl’ is hardly a rosy vision; but there’s a kind of cautious optimism towards the end, with the possibility that Lidia might be on the way to breaking out of her present circumstances. And this is an example of something else that features in several of Bacigalupi’s stories: characters and lives on the cusp of change.

Take, for instance, ‘Pump Six’, a somewhat uneasy but interesting fusion of two different kinds of sf story. It starts off reading something like a spoof of old-school sf, wherein our narrator has a few casual digs at the women in his life, then tries to work out why one of his city’s sewage pumps isn’t working – then the tale mutates into something rather more solemn, and we discover that this world is not as we thought it was. I don’t think ‘Pump Six’ is entirely successful – for example, the protagonist’s dismissive attitude towards women doesn’t get the comeuppance it warrants, which makes its inclusion more problematic – but I was certainly surprised where (I assume) I was meant to be surprised; and, in that sense, the story does its job just fine.

What can I say about the stories of Pump Six as a whole, then? They don’t make for easy or light reading; yet they’re not unwelcoming, either. They are snapshots of worlds and people in the midst of difficult times – one might even say at times that difficulty has become a way of life – but not without a sense of resilience. Life (or at least the world) goes on. I’m glad I discovered the work of Paolo Bacigalupi; if you haven’t yet, I’d recommend you do the same.

Three of the stories from Pump Six are available to read on Paolo Bacigalupi’s website:

‘The Tamarisk Hunter’

‘The People of Sand and Slag’

‘The Fluted Girl’

The Little Stranger (2009) by Sarah Waters

15th November 2009 / / 7 Comments

The Little Stranger is my first Sarah Waters book, and one about which I’ve heard mixed opinions. But the proof of the pudding is, of course, in the eating (or, in this case, the reading) – and, wouldn’t you know, I’ve ended up with a mixed opinion myself. Thinking about it, though, that’s quite appropriate; because this is, in a quite literal sense, a mixed book.

Our narrator is one Dr Faraday, a GP in rural 1940s Warwickshire, who becomes involved with the affairs of the Ayreses, a family struggling to keep the estate of Hundreds Hall, going; just as they’re struggling to find a place in the modern world. A series of strange events — the family dog biting a young girl, a mysterious fire, and yet others — puts the household under further strain. The occurrences become stranger still: is there a rational explanation for it all, or could Hundreds Hall be haunted?

The Little Stranger is, then, at once two things: a ghost story, and a portrait of the decline of the landed gentry in post-war Britain. Its problem, I think, is that these two aspects sit awkwardly together — and, at times, may even work against each other. As an evocation of a point in history, I find the novel to be very good: Faraday’s rather stiff narrative voice places the reader effectively in the period — I, for one, never caught a whiff of anachronism — and Waters lays bare some of the pressures (social, economic, and otherwise) at work; be they pressure on the Ayreses to sell off land for property development, of the awkwardness and difficulty of moving between social strata, as Faraday did when he became a doctor.

No, it’s the ghost story which is problematic. Waters keeps things ambiguous — which would be fine, except I can’t quite believe in the ambiguity. For it to work, both the rational and supernatural explanations must be plausible and implausible at the same time. The rational explanations put forward by Faraday and others achieve this: they’re plausible enough to account for what’s reported (Faraday never witnesses anything unequivocally supernatural himself); yet they also seem increasingly strained attempts to explain unusual events away.

The supernatural explanations, however, don’t have the same duality. I can believe, from the evidence in the text, that Hundreds Hall isn’t haunted supernaturally; but I can’ t quite believe that it could be. The house is described as decaying, but it never feels (to me) to be as though it’s more than just a decrepit old house — it never feels truly malevolent. And that makes it hard for me to believe that we’re (possibly) dealing with a haunted house.

But there’s more to this than ‘the ghost story doesn’t quite work’, because the issue cuts to the very metaphoric heart of The Little Stranger. I think Waters is trying to set up a structure where the ‘haunting’ of Hundreds Hall is a reflection of the way that the house has become a millstone around the necks of the Ayres family — in other words, the ghost-story aspect of the novel and its decline-portait aspect should intertwine, should work in harmony. However, since the ghost story isn’t as strong, statements like, ‘This house has sucked the life out of [us]…It wants to destroy us, all of us’ (spoken by Roderick Ayres, the son of the household) come across as heavy-handed attempts to drive the metaphor home (I suspect this statement might seem heavy-handed anyway, but it’s particularly so given the circumstances).

I’m not sure how well the ‘haunting’ fits in general as a metaphor for the family’s misfortune, actually. Hauntings perhaps best represent acute problems — exorcise the ghost, and healing can begin. Yet the Ayreses’ troubles are fundamentally chronic: they’re caused by social changes, for which there can be no ‘exorcism’. So, instead of going hand-in-hand with the tale of decline, too often the ghost story seems like a distraction from it. All of which is to say that The Little Stranger doesn’t work for me as an aesthetic whole.

Yet there are still ways in which the novel does succeed. To give one example, I’ve mentioned its historical portrait; to give another, Faraday is an interesting creation, by turns both a rounded individual and an empty vessel. Sometimes he’s barely there, just a window through which we can view the events at Hundreds Hall; yet the halting growth of his attraction to Caroline Ayres (the daughter of the household) takes a convincing course. In some respects, Faraday mirrors the Ayres family, as his life too is threatened by changes in society (he fears that the coming National Health Service spells the end for private practice); and, in the end, he becomes so bound up with Hundreds Hall that Faraday can be seen as ‘haunting’ the place himself, in a way.

That was my first Sarah Waters book, then: how did it go? I don’t think she achieves everything she set out to in The Little Stranger; but what she does achieve suggests to me that Waters is a very good writer when at her best — so I’ll be reading more of her work in the future.

In This Way I Was Saved (2009) by Brian DeLeeuw

11th November 2009 / / 0 Comments

In his début novel, Brian DeLeeuw brings us a story about two boys. One of the boys is real, while the other isn’t – but you may have a hard time deciding which is which. Our narrator is Daniel, who met Luke in the playground, when the latter was six. Luke is the only person who can see him; yet Daniel seems no common-or-garden ‘imaginary friend’, having apparently attained consciousness. Daniel returns home with Luke, to find a household under strain: Luke’s mother, Claire, is fragile, still affected by her own mother’s suicide; when an incident brings matters to a head, she leaves, taking Luke with her.

One day, Claire has a surprise for Luke – she’s bought him a pet dog. This new friend starts to take Daniel’s place in Luke’s life, so much so that Daniel finds his very self disintegrating. In a bid for survival, Daniel tricks Luke into poisoning the dog with some of Claire’s medication. She, of course, doesn’t believe her son when he says that Daniel told him to do it, and takes Luke to see a psychiatrist. Soon after, Luke is able to restrain Daniel, eventually locking him away inside his head, for twelve whole years. But, when Luke is eighteen, Daniel re-emerges – with his own ideas of what Luke should do, who Luke should be.

In This Way I Was Saved is quite a difficult book to evaluate. How do you judge characterisation, for example, when you can’t even trust that the narrator is – well, is, full stop? Well, let’s see: DeLeeuw has created a chilling presence in Daniel, a narrator who’s just that bit too knowing, whose voice is that bit too articulate. Not to mention that his opinions are also pretty vile; Daniel has little patience for humans and their messy emotions: when Luke finds a girl in whose company he can relax and forget his cares, Daniel just takes the view that Luke is being insincere – and the situation Daniel then engineers is not a pleasant one. As a portrait of such a cold individual, the book is a great success.

Yet there’s ambiguity here, too, as it’s possible to read Daniel as being entirely a product of Luke’s delusion. This is a more difficult reading to make, because the narration naturally invites us to view Daniel as a separate entity; and I’m not sure that the novel sustains its ambiguity through to the end. But it’s fascinating to read a scene and see it happening in two different ways simultaneously; DeLeeuw interweaves the possibilities well. The reading of Daniel-as-delusion also deepens the book’s portrait of people and lives unravelling; it’s harrowing for characters and readers alike.

In This Way I Was Saved is not without its flaws. I feel a sense of distance in the progression of the plot – as though it’s happening rather than being made to happen – which I think arises because neither Luke nor Daniel is able to truly drive the story directly. Nevertheless, I am impressed with what DeLeeuw has done in his novel. It’s easy to assume, from the first few pages, that you know who Daniel is and what has happened. I read most of the book thinking, it can’t be that simple – and, happily, it’s not.

No more of that, though, for it’s the road to spoilers. To conclude: In This Way I Was Saved is an intriguing puzzle of a book which takes you into a mind that’s not a comfortable place to visit, but that visit is compelling all the same. Whose mind is it, though? There’s a question to ponder…

Acts of Violence (2009) by Ryan David Jahn

8th November 2009 / / 6 Comments

Queens, New York: 1964. In the small hours, Katrina Marino heads home from her job as night manager of a sports bar. In the courtyard of her apartment, she is attacked and stabbed by a man who has followed her. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of several other apartments in the block are awake. and going through their own personal dramas. Over the course of three hours, relationships are forged, broken, and re-negotiated — but no one comes to Katrina’s aid, even though they heard her screams and saw what was happening. No one even calls the police, assuming that someone else would have already done so. The outcome, of course, is that Katrina dies from her injuries.

Though not a fictionalised account as such, Acts of Violence takes as its inspiration a real-life incident: the murder of Kitty Genovese, to which there were reportedly (the details have been contested), 38 eyewitnesses, none of whom did anything to help. Ryan David Jahn‘s first novel is a portrait of what such a situation might be like.

I use the word ‘portrait’ deliberately there, because I think it’s important to be clear what Acts of Violence is and is not. It’s not about the narrative, not in the usual way; it’s not a question of tension over whether Katrina lives or dies, and no mystery is solved. Rather, this is a snapshot of a few hours in the lives of  a number of people, with Katrina’s attack in the background (sometimes literally) of all.

Good characterisation is of course vital in a novel like this, but it’s even more so when the cast is so large (at least eight viewpoint characters). So it’s a pleasure to report that Jahn proves adept at drawing convincing characters in relatively few words. Here, for example, is Diane Myers, studying her reflection in the window while she ruminates on the passage of time:

Is her ghost happier than she is? Being disembodied but still conscious would have its advantages. Walls and locked doors could no longer stop you. No more back pain or neck aches. No more miscarriages with names.

Or Thomas Marlowe, an ex-soldier with thoughts of suicide:

He pulls the gun away from his head and sets it on the coffee table. He wonders who first called a coffee table a coffee table. He gets to his feet and walks into the hallway. He wonders who first called it a hallway. He wonders who first named anything. How did someone look at a dog and decide what to call it? It’s all so random. Everything is so goddam random.

This is not the only way in which Jahn is a skilled wordsmith. He builds tension efficiently when it’s needed; and not the cheap-thrills kind, but a more real tension. And, though naturally there is violence, and Jahn does not flinch from describing it, his treatment is sensitive, bringing home the brutality without tipping over into gratuitousness.

However, there are flaws in Acts of Violence, and I think they arise primarily because the parameters of the novel limit its possibilities. Perhaps inevitably, some of the story threads feel less well developed than others; for example, there’s one concerning a pair of wife-swapping couples where I feel the background could have done with being sketched in a little more.

Another problem is that Katrina’s murder doesn’t feel as much like the linchpin of the novel as is presumably intended. In the case of the paramedic David White, who’s faced with the dilemma of being expected to save a patient he’d happily let die (the teacher who sexually abused him as a child), it’s clear to see how Katrina’s dying on his watch affects him. But, for most of the characters, if there are psychological repercussions from Katrina’s murder, we don’t really see them – the timeframe of the novel is too short for us to see them. This makes Acts of Violence less satisfying as a complete piece.

Yet there is much to like and admire here all the same. Jahn gives a good sense of the milieu beyond his immediate focus. I’m not in a position to know how far his depiction of the 1960s reflects reality; but I can well believe that, for example, an interracial couple would have faced the same prejudice and difficulties that Frank and Erin Riva do in the novel. I would hope that the unspeakably corrupt cop Alan Kees and his Captain are not representative of the police at that time; but I’d also hope that a group of witnesses to an attack wouldn’t stand idly by and let it happen. Perhaps the key question is not whether something is likely, but whether it is possible.

As the book’s title may suggest, Jahn also shows some of the many reasons – malevolent or benign, comprehensible or not – people may have for committing violent acts. I do have a sense that the novel doesn’t leave enough room to truly explore all the issues it raises; but, as a portrait – as a début – Acts of Violence is a fine piece of work.

Ransom (2009) by David Malouf

5th November 2009 / / 4 Comments

9780701184155This is where I start from: David Malouf’s name was unknown to me before I received the review copy of Ransom, but I gather now that he is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers. The novel (Malouf’s first in ten years) draws on Homer’s Iliad, which I’ve never read; and the Trojan War is one of the aspects of Greek mythology that I don’t know much about. In short, I came to Ransom largely from a position of ignorance, which means I’ve probably missed a lot of the book’s subtleties – but let’s see what I can take from it all the same.

As Ransom begins, Achilles’ friend and comrade-in-arms Petroclus has been killed by Hector, the son of King Priam of Troy. Achilles takes his revenge on Hector and, attempting to assuage his grief, parades the body repeatedly before the city of Troy. Seeing this display, Priam first interprets it as a sign that the gods are mocking him. But then a vision shows him another way that things could be, and Priam resolves to travel in disguise to Achilles, taking a cart full of treasure with which to ransom Hector’s body.

In his afterword, Malouf comments that ‘[Ransom]’s primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling’. I’m generally wary of author statements like this, because I prefer the text to speak for itself, and allow me to draw my own conclusions. And I find that the theme of storytelling is not what stands out the most in Ransom; yes, it’s mentioned, but I don’t see that it is really being explored to such an extent (of course, it may well just be that I’m missing out on the interplay between novel and Iliad).

What I take away the most from Ransom is the portrait of a world which is not my own. I haven’t the knowledge to judge how authentic is Malouf’s depiction of ancient times (and it’s a legendary version, anyway), but it’s convincing enough for me. This is a society to which the idea of things happening by chance is an alien concept, where everyone is bound to the stations given them by the gods, even a king: he must be seen to be a king, becoming more ‘object’ than individual – which is why Priam’s plan to disguise himself causes such controversy. It takes some effort to connect with this world that thinks so differently, and so it should – but the reward is a fully immersive tale.

Although Ransom never comes across as pastiche, Malouf’s prose does give it a legendary quality; it feels at one and the same time as if the novel is taking place in the ancient world as it might have been (incidentally, Ransom is an excellent example of how to integrate historical detail without drowning the narrative), and in a timeless ‘land of fable’. It’s a singular reading experience, which is worth a look.

(This review was first published on BookRabbit.com)

The Manual of Detection (2009) by Jedediah Berry

1st November 2009 / / 1 Comment

I wouldn’t normally dwell on the book-as-object, but I have to say that The Manual of Detection is one of the most attractive volumes that I’ve seen in quite some time. You can’t see from the picture, but it has a laminate cover (i.e. the image is printed directly on to the cover, with no dust-jacket); and the whole package gives the impression of a book that has been designed with great care and attention. Furthermore,  it has been made to resemble the fictional Manual of Detection described in the novel; opening the book is an invitation to step into its own unique world.

And the text itself makes good on that invitation; what strikes me most about The Manual of Detection is the way that Jedediah Berry has woven his fictional world together. The setting is an unnamed city in which a thousand noir stories have taken place, crimes solved by the behatted, cigar-chomping detectives of the Agency, the greatest of whom is Travis T. Sivart. Now Sivart has gone missing, and his clerk, Charles Unwin, has been promoted in his stead. Convinced that this is an error, Unwin goes upstairs to the office of Edward Lamech, Sivart’s ‘watcher’ and the author of the memo apparently granting this promotion — only to find Lamech’s dead body sitting behind the desk. Unwin sets out to find Sivart; and, of course, it all gets more complicated from there…

Berry’s creation is fascinating, and his novel transporting in the truest sense, in that it takes one out of the real world, and into a sideways reality that convinces as a functioning world within the covers of the book, even as one acknowledges that it couldn’t function if it actually existed. The Agency itself is a huge, sprawling organisation whose absurd bureaucracy is a delight to imagine: the different categories of staff are so segregated that there are underclerks in the archive  who don’t even know what a detective is. And consider the thoughts it engenders in Unwin as he makes his way to Lamech’s office:

Imagine the report he would have to write to explain his actions: the addenda and codicils, the footnotes, the footnotes to footnotes. The more Unwin fed that report, the greater would grow its demands, until stacks of paper massed into walls, corridors: a devouring labyrinth with Unwin at its center, spools of exhausted typewriter ribbon piled all around.

(Incidentally — or perhaps not — I think that quotation also demonstrates Berry’s considerable  flair for writing prose.)

The Manual of Detection is set in a world where detectives’ cases get pulpish nicknames like ‘The Oldest Murdered Man’ or ‘The Man Who Stole November Twelfth’, and sound equally outlandish in synopsis; where bizarre things happen, such as Charles Unwin encountering a man who is apparently relaying Unwin’s every move down the telephone, before the following exchange takes place:

“Were you speaking about me just then?” Unwin asked.

The man said into the receiver, “He wants to know if I was speaking about him just then.” He listened and nodded some more, then said to Unwin, “No, I wasn’t speaking about you.”

Yet all has a perfectly rational explanation — rational within the terms of the novel, anyway. There’s less fantastication than that comment might suggest, but a little goes a long way in this case. I’m being deliberately vague about the details, because so much of the joy of reading The Manual of Detection lies in the discovery of what happens. But I will say that the final third takes a different tack as the threads of story come together; and I feel it sits quite awkwardly with the rest (then again, I did struggle to follow the plot a bit at this point, so it could just be that).

Criticisms aside, though, what I’ll take away from The Manual of Detection is the singular experience of reading it, its distinctive feel and atmosphere — and I’ll be mightily intrigued to see what Jedediah Berry does next.

Ghosts and Lightning (2009) by Trevor Byrne

31st October 2009 / / 1 Comment

It takes only a few words to turn Denny Cullen’s life upside-down: ‘Ma’s gone. Jesus Denny, yeh have to come home.’ And it takes only a few pages for Trevor Byrne to establish himself as a writer who needs to be read. In that first chapter, Denny makes a hasty return to Dublin, leaving his life in Wales behind; the fragmented second-person impressions of the city, interspersed with the chatter of the twerp from the bus whom he’d rather ignore, convey brilliantly Denny’s sense of numbness at his abrupt loss and return.

The rest of Ghosts and Lightning is told in first-person, in Denny’s Dublin vernacular. It does feel a little awkward, structurally, that the initial ‘frame’ is never returned to; but this is a minor gripe when set against the way thaat the narration brings Denny to life as a character. More than that, actually, I’d say it comes to symbolise Denny’s situation — unable to leave his old life behind, just as his accent will go with him wherever he goes.

Not that Denny’s going anywhere right now. ‘I’m runnin and gettin nowhere at the same time,’ he says. ‘I remember feelin, when I first left for Wales, that I was in control. And I feel anythin but in control now.’ He’s stuck: no job, no transport of his own, living in his mother’s old house with his sister Paula (who has let the place go to seed), estranged from his brothers (one of whom legally owns the house, and may threaten eviction), friends mixed up in drugs… The list goes on. Ghosts and Lightning is a chronicle of how Denny tries to navigate his way through all this.

If all that sounds like hard going, rest assured it is not. The use of vernacular gives the telling an energy that keeps one reading, and there are some nicely amusing scenes along the way (such as when Denny goes to buy a clapped-out old car from his brother, and it turns out to be full of chickens).

However, Byrne’s novel has a serious heart, and is especially concerned (I feel) with how we may try to deal with tragic events, like the death of a close relative. One of the themes that really stands out for me is that of using stories to give shape to life. In Denny’s rather desperate words: ‘Stories though, man. The way they work on yeh. They’re a kind o spell, aren’t they? Or a prayer, maybe, some o them. An article of faith. How the fuck else can yeh make sense o things, like? […] There has to be meanin.’

But must there?  Ghosts and Lightning is (deliberately, I think) somewhat episodic in structure, its chapters feeling like a series of anecdotes; and it demonstrates how life’s uneven edges are usually smoothed off to create fiction. One sees this, too, in the way Bryne deploys supernatural and mythical concepts. Denny and other characters frequently refer to such things: most prominently, Paula thinks there’s a ghost haunting the house; but there’s also that last quotation above, and many other examples. Yet none of it turns out to be real, nor does it really feel as though Byrne wants us to entertain the possibility — rather, I see it as another manifestation of stories not working in the real world.

If there are problems with Ghosts and Lightning, I think they’re artefacts of the episodic structure to which I referred above. Maybe the plot is not as tight as one might wish, but that’s probably the point. And the structure sets up a particular rhythm of reading that (for me) lessens the impact of some of the shifts in tone (they become one small jolt among many).

However, these are easily ouwteighed by all the good things about the novel. I haven’t yet elaborated on Byrne’s sharp observation of charatcter. Take, for example, this description of two ‘old women obsessed with the clergy’, who attend a funeral: ‘two pious vultures, their eyes filled with gleeful sorrow.’ Or the comment about Denny’s brother’s wife, who insisted they erect a satellite dish because ‘she didn’t want people assumin she hadn’t the money for cable TV.’

Places, too, are strikingly described, with Denny suggesting that Ireland has issues of its own to work through: ‘We’re a shoddy country ourselves too, full o guilt and doubt and hidden nastiness. It’s just that, given a possibly brief period o financial well-bein, we happen to scrub up well.’ Denny and his country might, then, be seen as being in analogous situations. During the course of Ghosts and Lightning, we see the difficulties that both have — and, by novel’s end, that there may be a way forward for both. It’s a realistically optimistic end to a fine first novel.

Finding Emmaus (2009) by Pamela S.K. Glasner

29th October 2009 / / 0 Comments

Finding Emmaus is a beginning. On a prosaic level, it’s the first volume in Pamela Glasner’s ‘Lodestarre’ series; but, more than this, the entire movement of the story is towards putting the pieces in place which (one assumes) will be played out in the rest of the series. The build-up is decent enough, but it leaves the book in an awkward position, as it feels to me that the most interesting stuff is yet to come.

The central conceit of Finding Emmaus is the existence of ‘Empathy’, a suite of psychic abilities (including, but not limited to, that of experiencing the feelings of others) which have been mistaken over the centuries for mental illness. Two narratives alternate: the first is the life-story of Francis Nettleton, an early settler of Conneticut. Tragedy stalks Frank’s life as he discovers his Empathic abilities; but he resolves as an adult to learn all he can about Empathy, and compile a ‘guidebook’ to the subject (which text he calls The Lodestarre). The second narrative is set in the present day, and follows Katherine Spencer; a parapsychologist friend suggests that her ‘bipolar disorder’ (which hasn’t responded to treatment) may actually be Empathy, and Katherine embarks on a journey in search of Frank Nettleton’s old house, Emmaus – and the lost manuscript of The Lodestarre.

The biggest problem with the novel, I find, is a lack of true involvement at the deeper level of the prose. For example, there’s a scene depicting a powerful sermon – but the preacher’s charisma stays on the page. We hear a lot about what Empathy is, what it involves… but I can’t say that the prose evoked for me a sense of what it feels like. There are other examples, but I think these suffice to illustrate my point: generally speaking, the words don’t do enough to create the affect of what they describe. There are some places where Glasner’s prose does work well – an early passage where Katherine hears an intruder in her house builds tension nicely, for example; and the book’s closing sentences stir the emotions – but they are too much the exception rather than the rule.

Another issue with Finding Emmaus is an awkwardness of structure. The alternation of Frank’s and Katherine’s stories sets up a nice rhythm for the novel; but, after Katherine finds the Lodestarre manuscript, the book changes gear – relationships change, and the issue of mistreatment of those deemed mentally ill (which has been bubbling under throughout) comes strongly to the fore. But all this is done rather too quickly, in a way that seems artificial and draws too much attention to itself, lessening the impact of this section.

The title of the novel doesn’t just refer to Frank’s house; to Katherine, Emmaus represents ‘shelter from the storm’ – a place where she can feel safe as an Empath and perhaps, by book’s end, a bastion against the coming storm… But to continue down that path would be to move beyond the present volume. And there’s the rub because, going back to what I said earlier, the present volume feels too much like the prelude to the main event – which is fine for the next book in the series, but less so for this one. Yes, Finding Emmaus is a beginning; but I wish it were a better whole.

Cheltenham Literature Festival Diary: Part 3

26th October 2009 / / 3 Comments

Part 1 of this diary is available here, with part 2 here.

Friday 16th

10.00 am: Today is deliberately light on events for me; but now it gets even lighter, as the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy is unfortunately now unable to attend. I was looking forward to his talk, but now I’ll have to find something else to go to instead.

6.00 pm: Last night, I pretty much abandoned the private game of ‘Guest Director bingo’ I’d been playing. And now I walk past Anthony Horowitz, today’s Guest Director; I could have had a full scorecard!

7.00 pm: Here’s the ‘something else’ I chose to attend – ‘Castaway’s Choice’, in which a panel are asked which book they’d take to a desert island (the name of a certain radio programme is apparently not allowed to be mentioned). Apparently Geoffrey Howe chose The Good Hotel Guide in a previous year, but we get three fiction choices here. Booker nominee Adam Foulds chooses Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal (a book I’d never heard of before, but it sounds interesting. Writer and Times Literary Editor Erica Wagner chooses Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. And PR agent Mark Borkowski’s choice is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I’ve never read any of those (I know, I  know…), but it’s an entertaining and interesting session all the same. (Particularly amusing is the moment when Borkowski tries to find the last page of The Catcher in the Rye on his e-book reader, so he can read a passage, only to give up in frustration and pull out his good old paper copy – there’s life in the printed word yet!).

8.45 pm: Rich Hall is interviewed, and reads from his new story collection. I was sitting at the wrong side of the theatre to get a really good view, but it didn’t matter. Hall was excellent, by turns both funny and insightful; and his book sounds like a good read, too.

Saturday 17th

3.00 pm: A late start, as another of my planned events has been cancelled, and my first choice of replacement was full. I go along first to the Highland Park marquee, where a number of Canongate authors are reading from their work – and free shots of whisky are being offered. The author at this session is a new novelist called Trevor Byrne, who reads from Ghosts and Lightning; I’m so impressed that I go to the book tent and buy a copy. [I’m reading it now, and if it finishes as well as it starts, you can expect a very positive write-up on this very blog before too long.]

5.00 pm: What can I say about the great Steve Redgrave? Perhaps simply that he’s an engaging interviewee with a fascinating story. But I have to leave before the end to make it to my next event…

6.10 pm: More comedy, as today’s Guest Director, Mark Watson, interviews Armando Iannucci. But it’s like no other interview I’ve seen at the Festival, as they open to questions from the audience at 6.15, and get through about three questions in the next 45 minutes, each answer leading into wonderful digressions. I saw Watson in stand-up this January; he was hilarious then, and he’s hilarious now. I’ve never really followed Iannucci’s work, and am not really into political satire, but he wins me over at this session. Definitely one of the two funniest and best comedy events I attended at the whole Festival [the other is my final event tomorrow].

8.45 pm: Now, for a change, an author known for writing literature – and, moreover, the only event where I’ve already read the book under discussion. Iain Banks is as animated and engaging as ever; but I do start to wonder if Transition is really the kind of novel that lends itself to an interview of this nature, as some of the discussion feels a bit dry. And one questioner from the audience casually gives away the ending of The Wasp Factory, which I do not appreciate.

Sunday 18th

10.00 am: The Guest Director for this final day of the Festival is Jonathan Coe, at whose first event my day begins. The brochure says, ‘[Coe] introduces a varied programme of his own writing, including [a short story] reworked as a performance piece for voice and piano’. Sounds interesting to me. But, when Coe takes the stage, he announces that there’s a change to the programme. What we get is one single reading (by a female actor) of extracts from one of Coe’s novels, with a live piano accompaniment. This is okay, but I can’t help feeling disappointed, as the original idea sounded better; and I’m not sure how much the ‘soundtrack’ really added. Still, it was enough to make me interested in reading one of Coe’s books.

11.30 am: Back to the Canongate tent for a reading by Mari Strachan, another début author. Again, I’m really intrigued by this, and end up buying a copy of The Earth Hums in B Flat [though I’ve yet to start reading it].

2.00 pm: Another of Jonathan Coe’s events, this time a discussion on the place for ‘serious’/’literary’ fiction at the present time. I’m interested to see who will attend this session – the audience is (sadly) quite small; most of them are older than me, though (happily) I’m not the youngest; and I can’t help but wonder how many of the audience are just here as readers, and have no connection with publishing or writing. Anyway, the panel consists of Pete Ayrton (from the publisher Serpent’s Tail), Suzi Feay (former Literary Editor of the Independent on Sunday); and James Heneage (founder of Ottakar’s). Coe suggests at the end that the debate has been largely ‘optimistic’, though I’m not sure I’d agree with him. I’m particularly struck by how much the survival of ‘serious’ fiction seems to be dependent on other factors; it’s not whether there will be a demand for that kind of fiction (there will but, as ever, it will be a minority interest), but whether the industry will be able to support it, given that the money for it will probably have to come from elsewhere.

4.00 pm: A talk by former ambassador Christopher Meyer on his history of British diplomacy. I booked this event at the last minute, on a whim, but I’m very glad I did. Meyer is a wonderful speaker, his passion and enthusiasm for his subject really shining through.

6.00 pm: My original choice of event for this slot (Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis) was fully booked, but this one is just fine instead. The joint interview with novelists Patrick Gale and Marina Lewycka is a joy, the best fiction event of the Festival for me. I’ve never read Gale at all, and only one book of Lewycka’s (A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, which I quite enjoyed), so I’m not quite sure what to expect. But both are highly engaging (though Lewycka sounds exactly like an old French tutor of mine, which takes a little getting used to), especially when they spark off each other. Some participants in events at the Festival have been too ‘chummy’ for the good of the discussion, but here it’s an asset (I’ve no idea whether Lewycka and Gale are friends in real life, but they have that kind of natural rapport here). And my TBR pile grows larger still…

8.00 pm: Last event of the Festival – the great Barry Cryer, someone who’s been around all my life, yet I’ve never really appreciated the sheer range of his work. He’s brilliant here, with anecdotes from a lifetime in comedy, and some very funny jokes. At the very end of the session, the interviewer realises they haven’t even mentioned Cryer’s new book – but what does it matter after such a wonderful hour?

 ***

And that was my Festival. All in all, a highly enjoyable ten days. I’m glad I went, and would certainly go back. Then again, there are all those other literary festivals out there, just waiting to be explored. As ever, so many possibilities, and not enough time to choose them all…

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