Two recent thrillers: ‘Liar’ and ‘Tender is the Flesh’

Choosing what to read in isolation has been all about escapism. Even if the big Morrisons has run out of flour, toilet roll and any decent stewing lamb, worry not, books remain plentiful. You can’t go out, you can’t go the library, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy books! This really handy map shows you which local independent bookshops are still open, taking orders online or over phone and posting books out for a small fee – and you can always buy from one of the big boys, too. 2020 was shaping up to be a great year for books and, thanks to the ingenuity of booksellers, publishers and writers all over, it is still going to be. How exciting! Here are two recently published thrillers that I’ve enjoyed this year.

If anything, the last few weeks have shown how easily small problems can spiral out of control. Liar is a familiar story: Nofar is a teenager dismayed at her averageness and desperate to escape her dull summer job in the ice-cream parlour. Her younger sister is far more glamorous and popular than she is, and it’s humiliating to serve ice-cream to kids from her school who barely recognise her. One day, an arrogant celebrity starts shouting and berating her when he comes in for ice-cream. It’s all too much for Nofar; she runs crying into the alley, he follows her, and when the police find a distraught girl in an alley with a violent man they naturally assume the worst. But now, cast in the media as a survivor and a hero, Nofar finds that lying is the best thing that’s ever happened to her. She doubles down.

From then on Nofar’s life is shot through with self-doubt, shame and envy; Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is excellent at drawing her world through her characters’ eyes, using their warped perspectives of themselves and what they are doing to obscure the consequences of being a liar. But despite the fear of getting caught, Nofar is better, braver, more fun and more assured in the new world of the lie. It’s seductive, and worth the risk.

as she spoke – how strange – her eyes became bluer. Her lips grew fuller. Her shoulders, usually stooped, suddenly spread like wings. And her breasts, usually concealed by those dropping shoulders, now appeared quite attractive […] Water plants need the heat of summer in order to blossom. And Nofar Shalev needed the excitement of the story to redden her cheeks.

Gundar-Goshen likes to extend metaphors – occasionally I found myself a little lost in a paragraph – which lend Liar an unexpected, dreamy quality. The world really does revolve around the characters; the city lights ‘blush’ for Nofar’s beautiful sister; the lie is a ‘newborn story’ literally with a life of its own; during an interrogation scene, a wooden table begins to reflect on its miserable life being constantly thumped by detectives and wonders whether its brothers from the factory are doing any better. Credit goes to Liar’s translator, Sondra Silverston, who’s captured the breezy humour of Gundar-Goshen’s original.

Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. 

Yet the ongoing focus in Liar is on the romance between Nofar and Lavi, the boy who knows her secret and wants to be her boyfriend. This is where seeing the world through the characters’ eyes really comes into its own. Being blackmailed by a boy gives Nofar a frisson of pleasure; to an adolescent, this is all just a game, and lying about who you are and the kind of person you want to be is just another way to negotiate growing up. As it pitches towards the conclusion Liar becomes steadily more gripping, and the question of whether Nofar’s conscience will catch her before it’s too late is kept dangling in the balance.

If subtlety is the great strength of Liar, Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh goes the other way. This book is brutal. In a future world, a global pandemic has rendered all livestock deadly to humans. Eating meat kills you. Once the crisis is over and the virus has been contained (oh! we can but dream), rather than pivot towards a plant-based diet the world has started breeding and eating human beings. In the new world, questioning the morality of cannibalism is a surefire way to end up in an abattoir. Marcos had been an abattoir worker before, so now he slaughters humans (or ‘heads’ as they’re known) despite his disgust, for himself as much as the meat industry. But when he ends up with a female head in his barn, turning a blind eye to the monstrosity of the world becomes harder and harder.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica.

Do be warned – Tender is the Flesh isn’t for the faint-hearted. Much of the first half is given over to tours of various abattoirs, tanneries and breeding centres, in the typical manner of dystopian novels (“guiding” the reader through the world’s topsy-turvyness). Bazterrica wants to highlight the cruelty and immorality of the meat industry and she’s not shy about making it. The extreme violence of an abattoir certainly speaks for itself, and the novel is shot through with wicked irony toward the sometime double-standard of meat eating:

the farmhands are roasting meat on a cross. El Gringo explains to Egmont that they’ve been preparing it since eight in the morning, “so that it melts in your mouth”, and that the guys are actually about to eat a kid. […] “We’re celebrating because one of the guys became a father,” he explains. “Want a sandwich?”

Before the virus, Marcos’ experiences of death close to home drives his desire to leave behind normalised slaughter and retreat into a more humane, more connected meaningful past with the ‘head’ in his garden. But there’s no sentimentality from Bazterrica; abusing living beings that we have power over, it seems, is human nature.

Cattle farming is a cornerstone of Argentina’s economy and culture, and I imagine that to the initial Spanish readers of Tender is the Flesh the link between where food comes from and where it is eaten is clearer. For city people in the UK, it can be easy to forget how meat gets to the supermarket.

To mask the simple reality of cannibalism – to make it easier to swallow – human meat is sold as “special meat” and comes in shanks, rolled joints, trotters and so on. This kind of cognitive dissonance when it comes to meat and livestock lets us to turn a blind eye to the bare facts of slaughtering and eating animals. The less oversight and awareness we have of where our meat comes from, the more standards will drop – the more animal abuse is overlooked, the longer unsustainability is allowed to continue . Tender is the Flesh is a satire in the old sense, in that Bazterrica seems to shame us into better standards with our meat – or cutting it out altogether.

Liar and Tender is the Flesh are both thrillers, then, of different stripes: Liar unfolds as a slow-burn, while Tender is the Flesh is a short, sharp shock. Both novels have acquired an uncanny relevance to the recent politics: Liar a prescient reminder of the #MeToo era, Tender is the Flesh an uncomfortable look at the consequences of a pandemic. If you’re looking for some variety in your reading, check out Pushkin Press’ website – one of the advantages of reading fiction in translation is that you’re guaranteed something different with every title. Besides – how else were you planning to travel this spring?

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s ‘Liar’ and Agustina Bazterrica’s ‘Tender is the Flesh’ are both published by Pushkin Press and are available for order through Daunt Books. 

Picture Credits:

• Both cover images are taken from Pushkin Press’ website.

“I am never bored” – ‘Patience’ by Toby Litt, reviewed

‘To be is to be perceived’, wrote the philosopher George Berkley.  Forget cogito ergo sum – what if “meaningful existence” – living a purposeful life – was only achievable when other people perceive us, when they’re there to see us, laugh at our jokes, touch and smell us and understand what we mean when we speak?  It’s a slightly terrifying prospect, especially to an extrovert. As usual, art can help us out. Art should connect us: it should make us feel less alone and it should teach us to better communicate and empathise with other people, and their experiences. To live without understanding other people is sad – to live without ever being understood, or valued for who you are, is tragic.

Patience, by Toby Litt.

Elliot is the narrator of Patience. He was born with a condition like cerebral palsy and, at thirteen years old, he is unable to walk or move his body with any control, nor speak in a way that the people around him understand. It’s 1979, and nobody at the orphanage where he lives has noticed his intellect or his playful personality. Every morning the nuns that look after the disabled children wheel Elliot to the corridor and park his chair facing the window (if he’s been good) or the whitewashed wall (if he needs “calming down”). In the face of all this banal cruelty Elliot has learnt to be patient, to combat his boredom by painting the white wall with daydreams, memories and fantasies, chief among these a desire to escape the orphanage and experience a little bit of freedom for the first time in his life. Nobody perceives Elliot.

Until Jim comes along. Jim is physically strong but blind and mute. He is popular with the other children on the ward but he isn’t a bully, like knife-wielding Charlie. Together, Jim and Elliot might stand a chance of lifting the baby gate at the end of the corridor, calling the lift and running down the road. They’d never get far, Elliot knows, but it’s enough of a chance to be worth the massive risk. They could achieve anything. But Jim can’t see Elliot, and Elliot can’t reach out and touch Jim. So how do you communicate with someone that doesn’t even know you exist?

Patience is a surprisingly joyful novel. Despite Elliot’s rather limited experience of the world, he has learnt to find joy and he delights in sharing that joy with us. ‘I am never bored’, he tells us, ‘Because I am now so full of experience and potential experience and because that experience is itself so full even thinking of what I used to think about my lack of experience is enough to think about for a week’. A speaker without the privilege of speech, Elliot doesn’t need regular punctuation or the conventions of written language. We’re listeners more than readers, at the receiving end of a stream-of-consciousness:

I was more fortunate more lucky than most of the other children because I knew how to entertain myself and because I had found a way to find myself entertaining not by doing anything or getting anything new to occupy my attention but just by being able to sit and see how much was going on that was hilarious and tragic and ironic and painful within an activity that most of the children would have seen as inactivity.

Elliot has learnt to make inactivity into selfless activity, transforming his limitations into strengths. For Elliot, reflecting on his own sense of self and exploring his interior states is a productive activity. He remembers his favourite “soundworlds” – whether that’s ‘the radiators gurglingly ticklingly filling with hot water always a deep joy […] a rich series of unpredictable sounds’, or the ‘beauty-eruption’ of a greenfinch that stayed so long on the windowsill: ‘I calmed my surging heart to settle on the greenness of the greens of the greenfinch’.  It makes you want to notice more beauty-eruptions in your own life.

With such carefully-evolved powers of observation, Elliot is a tender, thoughtful friend to the other children on the ward – most of whom don’t know it. He can gauge the moods of a girl who wails on the floor by the colour of her knees:’what went on with Lise’s skin was always the same or a broadcast version of what was going on inside her in her soul’. A lot of pleasure of reading Patience comes from enjoying these minutely-observed facets of life on the ward, and the beauty, grace and understanding that it’s possible to find even in someone’s knees.

The boys start to work out a language of noises and half-words. I read Patience almost like an escape thriller, with the relatively short arc of the story drawn out and made tantalising by the agonising patience; it’s gratifying to watch the boys work out a language of noises and half-words: ‘Vroo I said Vroo and at the same time I wriggled my bottom from side to side to shake the wheelchair and Jim answered using the strength of his hands to shake me in my wheelchair and so for the moment Vroo meant Shake which was wrong but at least another word’. 

Berkeley believed the world is made up only of ideas and perception, so that a wheelchair doesn’t exist as a material object beyond how we see, smell, hear or touch it, how it feels beyond us. When Jim and Elliot learn to appreciate and notice more about one another (Elliot perceives Jim’s ‘meaty smell’, Jim gives Elliot a hug when he’s hurt) their lives and their experience of the world literally gets bigger. That’s the power of communication and empathy. This was a unique book, with a lot of depth.

after the first really meaningful communication with Jim […] I found myself living within a horn concerto of emotions like a Mozart confection including happiness love glee regret joy embarrassment and any sudden combination of these […]

Even a little empathy goes a long way, Elliot shows us. Eminently readable and richly humane, Patience is the book I gave at Christmas (to three people!). Elliot’s remarkable because he can generate such rich experience from his confined surroundings, and the same goes for Toby Litt as an author, that he can make such drama from so much inactivity.

Patience is shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, a literary prize for fiction from small publishers, and is published by Galley Beggar Press. Get a copy here – buy many more books from Galley Beggars, they’ve got some absolute slammers (like Ducks, Newburyport). 

Sources:

• Toby Litt, Patience (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2019).
• As you can probably tell I’m not a philosopher. My sources for George Berkley came from the entry on him here in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), this YouTube video from Radio 4 and the Open University, and this early video from Oliver Thorn’s Philosophy Tube.

End of Year Review, 2019

I think 2019 has been something of an Annus horribilis (horrible arsehole). I’ve passed a few important milestones in 2019: I graduated my MPhil from Cambridge, I got my first full-time job in Communications at a local charity, and in the summer I cycled one-hundred and thirty miles around Suffolk and Norfolk – not a world-shattering feat, but one that brought me a lot of joy and fulfilment. Yet for all that it’s been hard work. My master’s has made me a better learner, writer and editor, and I will feel fonder towards the experience of being at Cambridge etc. when there’s more distance between then and now. But Cambridge is badly run and its environment of learning isn’t accommodating. I will say more about Cambridge at some point, but this isn’t the place for all that. Suffice to say that I wouldn’t be talking honestly if I reviewed 2019 without acknowledging that it’s been tough year.

But the books! I’ve read more books in 2019 than I ever have before (sixty to be precise). We as readers are really lucky at the moment because there have been some phenomenal books out in the last couple of years. From smart non-fiction to the emergence of new, more diverse novelists, we’re spoiled for choice. At least for readers, the book world is more exciting than it was a decade ago, when everyone was predicting the death of the novel.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how culture shakes up and evolves in the 2020s.

Because I’ve read quite a few more books than in 2018, and because I’ve read so many good ones, it’s a tough and also slightly futile job to try and judge or compare them against each other. Instead, I’m going to walk through what I’ve read and what’s stood out for me in 2019.

The Books of 2019. Blank books represent books from libraries or that I’ve loaned to people; yes, I’ve cheated by reading lots of little ones and short stories…

Fiction

2019 started strong, with me burning through a load of course books for my last two modules on the MPhil. This brought me back to one of my favourite periods in British writing, the 1950s (also subject of my undergrad dissertation) – I particularly enjoyed John Berger’s A Painter Of Our Time and Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy. We had some great discussions about how realist writing can address political and social fracture: I wonder how contemporary writing will evolve and do the same, without relying on stylistic experimentation. It was Anna Burns’ Milkman, however, that took the crown and set the stage for most of my reading in the early part of 2019. “Complex without being complicated” is what I called Milkman in my review: at times seriously chilling, Milkman is easily one of my favourite books I read this year. Anna Burns builds up a weird, uncanny setting which her characters populate in a believable way – it feels like a world which makes sense according to its own rules – and once you’ve begun to accept the reality of those rules, the rug is pulled from you and the real terror sets in of what it’s like to live in a world where silence and suspicion are the norm.

I went through a bit of a French period in March, reading Les Grand Melaunes, Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby and Édouard Louis’ (then-latest) novel History of Violence in quick succession. Reviewing History of Violence started me on a trend of new releases about trauma and recovery, related, I suppose, to the research I was doing on art and trauma for my thesis. I burned through Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels in about two weeks as well, and that has got to rank as one of the sharpest, most brutally engrossing series about addiction and recovery that I know. Talking about identity troubles in Melrose was one of my favourite things to write in 2019.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

A new release from 2019 that hit hard was Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which I reviewed in August, and which has got me seriously excited to read more about recent and contemporary immigration to America. On Earth was a strong start, but I need to read more queer writing in 2020 – recommendations, as always, are actively encouraged. Will Eaves’ Murmur was a brilliant re-imagining of Alan Turing’s queer experience, and I’m curious about how you depict the lives of real people in a way that’s tasteful and illuminating.

One of best things I discovered in 2019 was the amount of great literature being published by independent publishers in Britain and Ireland. I don’t know why – maybe it’s because, at smaller presses, editors have more freedom (and risk) over what they commission and how they work with authors – but publishers and authors at Galley Beggar Press, Influx, Fitzcarraldo and Salt have been smashing it recently. Like many others, I ploughed through Lucy Ellman’s Goldsmith-winning Ducks, Newburyport, a process which took me nearly six months and which I’m still digesting.  It’s proved difficult to write about Ducks because, as it took so long to read, what I’ve thought is worth saying about it has changed a lot since I started it. Expect a full review/think-piece on Ducks in the new year. For now I’ll say that I liked Ducks very much, and I definitely think everyone should have a crack of it – if only to join the conversation.

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. 

Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead was another triumph from small publishers – big congratulations to Olga for her Nobel Prize win. Of this year’s two awards, Olga, at least, really deserves the recognition. I was a huge fan of Gareth E. Rees’ Car Park Life, and I can’t wait for more Influx titles in 2020 like Eliza Clarke’s Boy Parts and Anne Vaught’s Famished. If 2019 started on a high with Milkman, I’m happy to say that it’s ended on one too: Toby Litt’s novel Patience (also from Galley Beggars) was phenomenal. From the perspective of a physically disabled boy unable to communicate with his carers, Patience was heartbreaking, smart, and stylistically inventive (in the best way!). This is the book I’ve been giving out for Christmas.

So many great novels in 2019!

Non-fiction

I’ve been big into literary biography this year. Once again, this came from my studies: I read Thomas Dilworth’s biography of David Jones (David Jones: Writer, Painter, Engraver, Poet) which is unfortunately the only Jones biography yet written but which suffers from the author’s clear, often clouding attachment to Jones. I read Jonathan Coe’s inventive biography of B.S Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which really started the biography hype. Johnson was such an unusual person, and because he allowed his life to totally govern how he wrote and what he wrote about is really worth your time if you’re a Johnson fan. I followed this with Bernard Crick’s classic George Orwell: A Life, and I’ve got a few other biographies ready to go next. It’s probably for the best if I start reading about the lives of people other than white British male authors who died before I was born.

I’d recommend No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference, Greta Thunberg’s speeches from her various protests and strikes since 2017, as an appetite warmer to educate yourself about climate change. It’s happening whether you like her or not, and, though Greta’s not exactly Martin Luther King, her straightforward, no-bullshit speech cuts through about the reality of global warming.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane.

Perhaps if you want something a bit more engrossing, definitely read or listen to Robert Macfarlane’s magnum opus, Underland, an epoch-spanning survey of how the human race lives in relation to the underground world. We bury our dead, extract our treasures from and hide our crimes in the underland: what does that say about us, our times, where we’re headed as a species and where we’ve been? Underland is always clear and digestible, whether Macfarlane is talking about literary theory or geological history. The best non-fiction is like Underland: it’s direct without skimming details, and it inspires in the reader the same passion and fascination that so clearly drives the author. The last chapter gave me chills.

Poetry, Philosophy and Food

I never read as much poetry as I’d like. I’ve been lucky to review two books of poetry this winter for SPAM, one of my favourite poetry zines that you should definitely be reading. Get following SPAM and look out for my reviews of Rowan Evans’ The Last Verses of Beccan and Cathy Galvin’s Walking The Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva in the new year. I hope I can write more about poetry in 2020, and in more interesting ways.

Philosophy? Who do I think I am? I haven’t read philosophy in a serious way this year, but one book that’s stuck with me (I read it for my thesis) was Rowan Williams’ Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love. Based on a series of lectures Williams delivered in 2005 on David Jones and Flannery O’Connor, Grace and Necessity is an extraordinarily universal insight into what makes art good or bad. To distil this in one sentence: “bad art is art that does not invite us to question our perceptions or emotions”. I’m grateful for it and, alongside On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Grace and Necessity has had a big impact on my taste and critical judgement this year.

Another huge impact on my life in 2019: Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s The Complete Nose to Tail Eating, a cookbook-cum-food philosophy that is said to have revolutionised British cooking. Henderson and Gulliver are the founders of St JOHN, a restaurant which has (if food writers are to be believed) resurrected traditional British cooking and the use of offal and off-cuts in fine dining. Expect pigs’ trotters, oxen tongues and potted goose alongside favourites like cabbage, parsley sauce and new potatoes. Trust me, it’s better than it sounds! I’ve been working my way through the recipes in Nose To Tail Eating for a few months now and it’s immensely satisfying to make these complicated, vile-sounding dishes, which haven’t yet failed to be delicious. The St JOHN cookbooks have been a much-needed salve in 2019.

The Complete Nose to Tail and The Book of St JOHN, in all their glory. Easter egg: spot the shadow of my hand and phone over The Book of St JOHN!

Closing Thoughts & Resolutions for 2020

I need to read more diversely! There’s no excuse really: I haven’t read enough non-white authors, but at least I’ve got some great reading ahead of me. I’m going to start with authors like Bernadine Evaristo (of course!) and Jeffery Boakye and then add to my 1950s repertoire with The Lonely Londoners and The Pleasures of Exile. Stormzy does so much good with his platform and influence – after he told people to register to vote on Instagram, 45,000 people registered in ten minutes. Stormzy’s imprint, #MerkyBooks, is publishing some great stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading their writers.

I have to mention politics, sadly! The election has got to be one of the bitterest and worst-fought in generations. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the People’s Prime Minister, lied through his teeth in the election, because there’s a difference between making a promise that you know you can’t keep and saying something that you know is untrue, like 88% of Conservative Party adverts did. They have already walked back about protecting the environment, they’re still selling off the NHS piece-by-piece, and we will continue to turn away child refugees (something we were proud to do in 1939).

Regardless of your stance on Brexit, or anything else, the facts are obvious – the people in charge have attacked the courts, the Royal Family, Parliament, and the other institutions that safeguard Britain’s democracy, and that is cause for alarm. It’s going to get worse before it gets better (and I’m not talking about Brexit) and now, more than ever, we need to be wise to the efforts of the far-right to destroy anything decent, progressive or morally admirable about Britain.

Paul Klee, The Twittering Machine (1922). Just a piece of art I like; Hitler called it “degenerate”.

All the more need for robust criticism and good books. I want to do a series on responses to totalitarianism in literature, how writers who have lived under different despots have found a way to articulate their outrage and fight back against tyranny. With the rise of Modi, the repression of Uighurs in China, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Salvini in Italy, fascism is on the rise around the world and I want to learn how it can be stopped. At the moment I’ve got Hannah Arendt, Etty Hillesum and Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the reading list – exciting stuff ahead!

To end on a happy note: I have some really fantastic books to read in the new year and I can’t wait to share my thoughts on them with you. I want to do more creative writing and I want to write more about food. Something I love about not being a student is that all of my reading, learning and writing I do for my own pleasure. I really do feel freer now than last December. Let’s keep our chins up and think of all the brilliant books that are going to be released in 2020. It’ll be our year, lads!

 

Images:

• Image of Ducks, Newburyport, came from the Galley Beggar Press website.
• Images of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Underland belong to Penguin Books.

Contact me for any copyright infringement.

Debauchery and Despair at Morrisons: Gareth E. Rees’ ‘Car Park Life’, reviewed

‘Everyone has a car park story’, says Gareth E. Rees towards the end of his new book, Car Park Life. Have you ever heard a great story about a car park? Who hasn’t. Mention this book to someone and I guarantee they’ll start telling you their story. You probably think you know about car parks: they’re everywhere, and, like coal, so long as there are cars and capitalism people will always need car parks. Yet remarkably few writers have given them any serious thought. But why not? It’s estimated that there are three to four million parking spaces in the UK. Assuming that most spaces are an average of 4.8 metres by 2.4 metres, car parks therefore account for forty-six million, eighty thousand square metres of Britain. The more you think about it, the weirder it seems that no one’s written about car parks like this before. Car Park Life is here to address that need.

Gareth E. Rees’ Car Park Life (Influx, 2019).

Gareth E. Rees has set out to test a hypothesis: that the car park is not, as often presumed, a place of emptiness, but is instead one of potential. From road rage to drug deals, dogging to dodgy DVD-sales, a lot goes on in a car park. They bring out the worst in us, and Car Park Life is one man’s attempt to figure out why the concrete wilderness exerts such a ‘strange energy’ on its inhabitants. Each chapter explores a different car park and, as Rees illustrates, every car park has some unique quality that makes it as worthy of exploration as any jungle, desert, or underland. Outside a Somerset B&Q we discover a water channel dug by Sir Francis Drake; the sculptures in a Wiltshire retail park try to claim the car park as the decedent of Stonehenge; and there’s something deeply, deeply wrong the Leyton Mills Industrial Estate.

Gareth E. Rees.

There’s something of J.G. Ballard in Car Park Life – the idea that landscape (and especially Brutalist architecture) changes our psychology for the worse. In Ballard’s novel High Rise, life in a gleaming new skyscraper is enough to send residents into a state of violent anarchy, fighting for bloody control of the lifts and roasting dogs on the balcony. A psychogeographer is a researcher who’s interested in how places are shaped by our ideas of them, and how those ideas shape us in turn. Car parks are places where lots of people meet and interact, but where we rarely seem to get along:

There is unrest in the car park. People want their shopping done, and they want it done quickly, without impediment by those they deem to be lesser-skilled in the ways of parking.

What sets apart Car Park Life is its sense of humour, which in my experience (Robert MacFarlane and W.G. Sebald) is something that a lot of psychogeography lacks. There’s no pretending that roaming a car park is particularly normal endeavour (though why shouldn’t it be). It’d be hard to write a book about what Rees’ friends and family call ‘this car park nonsense‘ without acknowledging the ostensible ridiculousness of the enterprise, and Rees’ blend of dry humour and weary insight gives Car Park Life a fresh, pacey feel.

I don’t known yet that talking incessantly about car parks and arranging a week-long holiday around a series of ca park visits between Hastings and the Scottish Highlands will contribute to the end of my marriage, but I cannot change the future.

J.G. Ballard with a little hit of Sightseers, maybe?

Chapter four gives us Rees’ five-point manifesto: 1) WALK THE TERRAIN, 2) CHAINS ONLY, 3) NO MOTORWAY SERVICE STATIONS, 4) NO INTERVIEWS, and, perhaps most important of all, 5) ONLY FIVE POINTS IN A MANIFESTO. Number two seems the crucial element to Car Park Life: as the high street dies and retail parks become ever more common, though themselves under threat from online retailers, we need to understand these whopping great parts of our towns and cities if we’re to understand those places at all.

From Car Park Life I learnt about the growing trend of Facadism – where developers buy a beautiful old building, gut it and build a modern interior, but keep the facade for aesthetic reasons – which characterises the Sainsbury’s in Glossop, Derbyshire. Supermarket developers have gone to great pains to fool consumers into thinking that warehouse-sized supermarkets are a natural part of our communities, which have had their libraries closed and their organic character demolished. Late capitalism has done some funny things to the human mind, as Car Park Life shows.

Because it would be wrong to write about car parks and supermarkets without acknowledging their rampant environmental cost. Take ham, for example – where the hell does it all come from? Where is it cooked? How on earth can we keep living like this? When you think about the level of stuff that each of us consumes and throws away in a year it is pretty nauseating. The psychology of a car park is fundamentally designed to make us buy more stuff, and that’s not sustainable at current levels. Looking at car parks becomes yet another mirror to reflect late capitalism’s monstrous impact.

A car park.

Yet for all its ills, Car Park Life is proof that humankind will survive the car park. In one of the most entrancing chapters, Rees talks about his fascination with the ‘squiggly geometric patterns’ left behind on the concrete pillars of a Sainsbury’s in Penrith. They’re probably dried glue from posters, or abstract graffiti, but look at them without context and you would be forgiven for thinking they were markings left behind by an ancient civilization. It’s startling, and a bit scary, to think that car parks are one of the defining features of how we live today. You could imagine future historians preserving a car park in the way that current historians are keen to preserve something like a Roman bath house. Yet it’s all the dogging, murder, road rage and delinquency that makes car parks liveable, human places. At the launch of Car Park Life Rees said:

I want to find the shoots of the new folklore as it develops.

And writing about that is so, so exciting to me. Car Park Life marks the finale of a loose trilogy of psychogeographies that Rees has been working on for the last couple of years; the first two being Marshland and Stone Tide (both are also published by Influx Press). I’m excited to go back and read these two earlier works, which as far as I remember intersperse the narrator’s wanderings with both fiction and more direct autobiography. There is no reason why your critique of late capitalism and the destruction of public space shouldn’t be funny, or about car parks.

Car Park Life is proof that you never know a place as well as you think you do, and that the best way to find out what’s really going on is to go hunting for the truth yourself. And don’t trust the Leyton Mills Industrial Estate.

Gareth E. Rees’ ‘Car Park Life’ is published by Influx Press; buy a copy here.

Image Credits:

• Book cover and author photo taken from the website of Influx Press. Contact me for any copyright concerns.

“Writing to reach you” – ‘Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, reviewed

Is there such a thing as a ‘poet’s novel’? If there isn’t, and if making up a category like that wouldn’t be a waste of time, then Ocean Vuong’s first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous would rank as one of its shining examples. Vuong is a master of the light touch; On Earth is full of beautiful phrases, well-turned metaphors and short, powerful lines like this: ‘A bullet without a body is a song without ears’. The challenge of writing descriptively is always to get information across without overwriting and, as a guilty over-writer, I appreciate Vuong’s talent for summing up, in lines like these, ‘what it’s like to be awake in American bones’.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong (in case you couldn’t tell)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who can’t read, chronicling twenty-seven years’ experience as a Vietnamese immigrant in America. It’s a difficult portrait of love, trauma, and sacrifice, one that’s struck through with a commitment to find beauty even in these experiences. It’s a blend of autobiography and fiction, often in direct address to the reader. The narrator is writing to ‘reach’ his mother – even though she’ll never read his letter – and to unearth a family history stretching across two continents and thirty years, from the Vietnam war to Hartford, Connecticut.

The narrator ‘ha[s] had many names’ but here he goes by Little Dog, his grandmother’s name for him. The name is a form of protection: in the village where he was born the smallest children are given derogatory names like ghost, demon, or buffalo bead, so that evil spirits can be fooled into thinking they’re not worth abducting. The ways that we express love can be difficult to understand, and hard to explain to outsiders:

It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear.

Language, or a lack of language, becomes a way for Vuong to explore the power dynamics of migration. Not being able to speak English in America leaves Little Dog and his mum powerless at first, as in a humiliating scene where his mother is laughed at because she can’t describe what she wants in a butcher’s. But Little Dog learns to use even ignorance as a tool for survival in America, as when school bullies daub homophobic slurs on their front door and Little Dog assures his mother that they’ve written “Merry Christmas”.

It isn’t long before Little Dog discovers his love of language, or the power that mastering words can give you. On Earth is often delightful to read – as in this passage, where Little Dog marvels at the power of language at church:

I was enamoured with the verve, torque, and tone of the pastor’s voice […] It was, to me, a new kind of embodiment, one akin to magic, one I’d glimpsed only in [my grandmother’s] storytelling.

I was reminded here of James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, where, in a community that places its church at its heart, the power of religious language is intoxicating to a young protagonist much like Little Dog. Baldwin called his first novel: ‘the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me the most’. I don’t want to presume too strongly on Vuong’s own life and motivations in writing, but On Earth certainly deals with what hurts. It’s a special gift – and a kind of translation – to make pain into poetry.

As Little Dog grows up, the focus of On Earth moves from the complexities of his relationship with his mother to those between him and Trevor, a white boyfriend from the countryside. Among poverty and violence, the love between the two boys is yet another ray of beauty that Vuong is keen to put on show. On Earth isn’t a tragedy, not entirely. It was here however  where I felt Vuong’s anger most strongly – anger at the internalised homophobia and the outright bigotry of others, and anger at the caustic danger of America’s opiod epidemic. In short, On Earth is a powerful bildungsroman that is remarkably even-handed about injustice. Ocean Vuong hasn’t got time for your pity, or mine.

Vuong has stated that, to write about contemporary society, poets and novelists need to capture the sense of fragmentation that seems to characterise everything we do: fragmented politics, fragmented borders, fragmented identities. With the novel’s jumps between past and present, America and Vietnam, and frequent shifts between prose and poetry, Vuong is searching for a narrative form that’s true to these experiences, beautiful and traumatic. I haven’t yet read Vuong’s poetry but I’d like to see how he breaks and remakes poetic structures: his last collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, won the 2018 TS Eliot Prize. Take my money for the title alone!

Ocean Vuong. Credit: Tom Hines

To use a horrible cliche, reading Vuong felt like a breath of fresh air. I find a lot of canonical American writing can be a bit bland – and I’m excited that younger writers are coming of age and breathing life into literature. Some of the greats pale in comparison (can’t leave off with these cliches)  – how could you rate a novel as immature as On The Road over the sober sentimentality of Vuong? But I feel such comparisons (that no one asked for) – who is “better” than who – aren’t helpful for me to make. Writers like Vuong seem to be agitating for a new hegemony of culture, one based around compassion and communication rather than some masculine hierarchy of taste. I shouldn’t talk so much about my critical process in a review of someone else, but reading On Earth has made me question how I think and how I develop my judgement. Telling you so is a way of celebrating the book. I feel like I’ve spoken a lot in this review but I’ve said little; all I can ask is that you read the book and see if you agree. Literature should make you grow and expand your thinking, and I’m happy that On Earth has given me that opportunity.

When On Earth was published back in June, Max Porter said: ‘it seems obvious now that a gay poet born in Saigon would write the great American novel’. I’m very skeptical of the idea of ‘the Great American novel’, – it’s even flimsier than ‘poet’s novel’ – but it’s a truth that’s undeniable: America’s story, if it has one, is a story that belongs to immigrants. It’s stories like these that are going to make America great again.

Read more about Ocean Vuong and his work at his website.

Sources

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (London: Faber, 2019)

James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain [1954] (London: Penguin, 2001)

Picture Credits

• Tom Hines / oceanvuong.com/about
• Amazon 

 

Contact me for copyright claims. 

The Many Minds of Alan Turing: ‘Murmur’ by Will Eaves, reviewed

Writing about real people is hard. Where do you draw the line between fact and fiction? Especially if you’re telling a story about people who haven’t long been dead, or if they’re even still alive, there are all sorts of difficulties about what you can and can’t make up. You have to strike a balance between staying true to the lived experiences of people who were once alive and making sure that the story is worth telling. And when writers do dare to take creative liberties with hard facts, there’s often a slew of critics ready to trash good books for playing fast and loose with history, or warping the past to fit an agenda (as though that isn’t what historians do, categorically). As if storytelling weren’t about making stuff up. All the same – you can’t tell outright lies.

One way around this issue, and so far one of my favourite ways to re-animate the dead, is to be open about the fact that trying to imagine what went on in a real person’s head is putting words in their mouth. This is the approach taken by Will Eaves in his latest novel, Murmur, a creative re-imagining of the last years of Alan Turing’s life. The first chapter of Murmur was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story award in 2018,  and Murmur went on to win the Wellcome Book Prize this year. Strictly speaking I wouldn’t call Murmur historical fiction, less because it’s set in the fairly recent (1950s) past and more because it feels almost timeless, like the setting isn’t centre-stage. Yet we value the best historical fiction for breathing fresh life into the past, and Murmur is certainly a unique take on Turing’s life and work.

You’ll probably know that Alan Turing was forced to undergo chemical castration by the British State in the 1950s, as punishment for the “crime” of homosexuality. It is a disgusting story – not least because Turing, father of the modern computer, saved countless lives in the war in cracking the ENIGMA code – and there would be something uncomfortable about putting words into Turing’s mouth about his ordeal. Yet Murmur does something far cleverer: Murmur is about Alex Pryor, a fictionalised version of Alan Turing, undergoing the same ordeal and ruminating on the dreams and memories that are all he’s left with. Free to invent and imagine what Turing’s experience must’ve been like, Murmur is a brilliant meditation on alienation and empathy that doesn’t presume to write Turing’s story for him.

 

Murmur, by Will Eaves (2018). Image © Canongate Books

In Murmur, Pryor writes a journal and thinks through his dreams as his body undergoes the physical change of chemical castration. Once a week he is injected with hormones that render him infertile, destroy his sex drive, and cause him to grow breasts – all as a “cure” for his attraction to men. Yet Murmur is deeply poetic, with Pryor uninterested in going over the hard facts of his punishment:

It is strangely more instructive, for me, to imagine other conditions, other lives.

And so we explore the dreamscape of Pryor/Turing, and follow him as he imagines the different ways that life might’ve panned out: had he entered a marriage of convenience to a close friend and found himself an expectant father; how he might’ve explored his sexuality as a student in Cambridge; how things might’ve gone better between himself and his first love at boarding school.  What emerges is a humane, intelligent novel, which brings to life Turing’s story and honours his still-groundbreaking work towards understanding what consciousness is and how we value our personhood.

It is touching, and a little heartbreaking, to dream with Pryor. Eaves sticks close to the basic facts of Alan Turing’s life – his childhood, his time at Cambridge and then Bletchley Park, his almost-marriage to Joan Clarke, here renamed June and whose letters to Pryor frame each dream-episode. Transformation haunts Murmur. Characters and settings who were solid one moment can dissolve in an instant:

He’s partly transparent, a flowing space … Around him stillness; in him fusion and echo, the voice radioed, whispering.

This shapelessness mirrors the physical changes that Pryor/Turing underwent in castration; Murmur has a fairy-tale tone, drawing on Turing’s real-life fascination with the story of Cinderella. Murmur is rich with classical reference, mingled with the mathematical and philosophical concepts that Turing worked with as an academic. The novel’s epigraph is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, another work that reminds us that often it is only through a change that we can recognise our essential being.

Alan Turing.

The imaginative time of a novel is one such place, and, in offering up a free space to consider Alan Turing’s life, Murmur also provides an opportunity to think about the nature of consciousness more broadly. The quest to design true artificial intelligence is really a question of understanding what thinking is. We barely understand our own brains, let alone know how to make one out of lines of code. Turing devised what’s now called the “Turing Test” – a question and answers game where, if a machine can fool a human into thinking they’re talking to another human, then that machine is considered “Turing-complete”, or a convincing artificial intelligence. The question of ‘can machines think?’ seems to me less interesting than the one that Pryor arrives at towards the end of Murmur, faced by the constructed thinkers in his dreams: if machines can think, will they be compassionate to us? We’re hardly compassionate to one another. Just look at the way Alan Turing was treated. No amount of £5 notes with his face on them is going to change that.

Will Eaves has clearly given this a lot of thought (ha); with Prof. Sophie Scott he runs The Neuromantics, a podcast about neurology, psychology and language. It’s a genius conceit, using the constructed-mind of a fictional character to ruminate on what minds are like, metal or fleshy.. There was something of David Mitchell at his best (Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green) in how easily Murmur examines some fairly large concepts about empathy, connection and consciousness. As artificial intelligence technology becomes more sophisticated and more commonplace we will need to evolve our understanding of consciousness and how minds are constructed with it. Even the Pentagon wants to hire an ethics professor to help it decide which people drones should drop bombs on. It will take sane, intelligent works like Murmur to remind us of the value of empathy and the tragedy of not attempting to understand those who think differently to us. 

I don’t mean to make Murmur sound like a weighty tome, suitable only for philosophy discussion groups (though that’d be a fun afternoon). At only 176 pages, Murmur is a great distillation of these ideas in a readable, enjoyable format. It’s refreshing to see “historical” fiction that’s not afraid to be inventive with how we construct the past, and that isn’t afraid to take on big ideas in gorgeous writing.

‘Murmur’ is by Will Eaves and is published by Canongate. Buy it from Foyles here.

Credits:

• Murmur, Will Eaves (London: Canongate, 2018).

Images:

• Canongate Books and The British Library. Contact me for any copyright concerns.

Review – ‘The Fat Years’, Chan Koonchung

China has been in the news quite a lot recently. Whether it’s about the ongoing extradition bill protests in Hong Kong or fresh evidence of persecution against the Muslim Uighir minorities in the eastern province of Xinjiang, it’s becoming harder for the Chinese Communist Party to disguise evidence of its totalitarian control. It seems a strange coincidence, therefore, that this should be the week that I decide to finally read The Fat Years, a 2011 novel by the Chinese writer Chan Koonchung that’s banned in mainland China. The Fat Years has been sat on my bookshelf for five years, and seeing it there has been making me feel guilty for ages. The fact that my reviewing the novel should come at the same time as the Chinese Communist Party is under scrutiny is just an unhappy coincidence. 

The Fat Years is an unusual mix of detective story and dystopian parable, which to my untrained eye seems like a good starting point if you want to use fiction as a way of understanding China’s current political system. In an alternate version of 2013, two years after another financial crisis (far worse than the 2008 recession), the West’s hegemony over global affairs has collapsed. The People’s Republic of China has stepped up and declared a new “Golden Age of Ascendancy”, where even Starbucks is headquartered in Beijing. The twenty-first century belongs to China – and everyone is happy.

Except for the people that aren’t. A few oddballs have noticed that an entire month has gone missing – February 2011 – the twenty-eight days between the global crash and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. Although pretty much everyone in Beijing is happy, peaceful and content in the new world order, no one can remember what happened between the chaos and the calm. Worse still, no one even cares that a month’s missing. When the going’s so good, why worry?

The Fat Years, Chan Koonchung.

It’s a good pitch: who doesn’t love a high-concept mystery novel? The Fat Years resembles Phillip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, which is by now a staple of the alternate-history and dystopia-lite genres; the idea of searching for a lost month sounds like something straight out of a Pynchon novel. Our would-be detective is a writer called Lao Chen, a Taiwanese intellectual who has lived in Hong Kong and has long been a critic of mainland China’s government. Nowadays Lao Chen is happy to live a placid life of browsing bookshops and attending launch parties, even though he’s had writer’s block for the past two years. All that changes when his old friend Fang Caodi enlists his help to uncover the truth about China’s missing month, shattering Lao Chen’s easy existence once and for all.

The characters in The Fat Years are less concerned with exposing a government cover-up than they are in working out what could have caused nationwide collective amnesia. I suppose living under an authoritarian regime makes you wise to the danger of taking on an all-powerful government and expecting to win. In many ways The Fat Years is quite a gentle novel – there’s very little action or violence, and the romance between Lao Chen and the dissident Little Xi felt superficial – yet the disappearance of February 2011 is pretty clearly an allegory for June 1989, the real month that nobody is allowed to talk about in China. Last month was the thirtieth anniversary of the 4th of June Tiananmen Square massacre, which saw the Chinese Communist Party murder several thousand pro-democracy protesters in Beijing and use marital law to crackdown any criticism of their unchecked power. Even today the Chinese government basically denies that it ever happened, and it’s forbidden to search for information about the massacre on the internet. It’s pretty blatant censorship and the Chinese Communist Party should be ashamed; on the 4th June this year the biggest English-language (and state-run) Chinese news company described the massacre as a social ‘vaccination’. 

Probably the most famous image of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The fate of that man is still unknown. 

It is this kind of Orwellian censorship and state-sponsored violence that Chan Koonchung is trying to write about, I think. As a writer living in Shanghai, writing a alternative-history detective story about a missing month is probably the most direct way to critique the government and Tiananmen square without the threat of imprisonment. No surprises, then, that The Fat Years is banned on the mainland. When Lao Chen does decide to investigate what happened to the missing month he finds that any online records have vanished. The newspapers, too, seemingly jump from January to March 2011 without anyone noticing. As I say, these tactics have actually been used by the Chinese government to prevent anyone too young to remember 1989 from learning about Tiananmen Square for themselves.

Although I’m familiar with Eilien Chang and I’ve read a few traditional stories I know practically nothing about Chinese literature, which is why I’m thinking of The Fat Years primarily as a dystopian novel. Typically in a dystopia the illusion is shattered when a visitor from outside or a outcast from within becomes wise to the terrible side-effects of a supposedly perfect society; what’s unique about The Fat Years is that Lao Chen is quite happy to be under authoritarian control. Nevertheless, Koonchung is unambiguous about The Fat Years’ debt to Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Brave New World. Winston Smith’s job in Nineteen-Eighty-Four is to rewrite and destroy historical records, including newspaper stories that he knows are factually correct. The first concrete evidence that Fang Caodi unearths to prove the existence of February 2011 is also a newspaper report which has survived the cover-up. Later on in the novel, Lao Chen responds to someone by saying: ‘Just as in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World?’.

These little references aside, The Fat Years borrows from the narrative structures of these two progenitors in more significant ways. Koonchung’s long monologues detailing China’s international political manoeuvring recall the middle section of Nineteen-Eighty-Four, where Winston’s reading of Goldstein’s book gives Orwell an opportunity to shoehorn an essay into a novel. This part of The Fat Years is quite academic in tone, but it’s an unavoidable part of Koonchung’s message. And, without giving too much away about The Fat Years‘ ending, the novel’s last section very similarly presents the reader with a clear philosophical debate: what makes a good society? Brave New World similarly ends with an unsubtle debate on the same question, and addressing China’s problems with state control works well for readers unfamiliar with Chinese political history. Alongside Huxley and Orwell there are some quotes from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the philosophy which underlines modern Western democracy and “classical” liberalism. Apart from its clever mystery plot-line, I can imagine The Fat Years provoking some very good discussions about politics if you were reading it with friends.

Chan Koonchung.

At one point a government official in The Fat Years repeats the claim that there’s no such thing as “Art for Art’s own sake”. I don’t believe that for a second – art doesn’t have to “do” anything –  but in the context of a dystopian novel it poses a very interesting problems. Could a novel exist in paradise? Drama is driven by conflict, and there should be no conflict in paradise; in a utopia meaningful art would be obsolete. This was briefly touched upon by Ian McEwan in his recent novel Machines Like Us. If we were truly happy, as the people in The Fat Years believe themselves to be, then art would be obsolete because it relies on there being problems to solve. But then a world without art doesn’t sound like paradise to me.

Is happiness the absence of pain? This is an even bigger nod to Brave New World, where the conclusion is yes, it’s better that people give up their freedom in exchange for a quiet life, one without conflict or the stress of having to make your own decisions.  It’s significant that in The Fat Years the only people who can remember the missing month are the losers – drug addicts, victims of trafficking and prostitution, the physically and mentally unwell. During the 2008 Olympics the Chinese Communist Party closed all of the factories in Beijing so that tourists wouldn’t see how toxic industrial pollution had made the city. In real life as in The Fat Years, perfection is only ever an illusion; even if you sweep a skeleton under the rug someone is bound to trip over it. That is, unless you have the power to deny that such a thing as a skeleton ever existed, and call anyone still looking under the rug a traitor to the people. Now that’s scary.

I was pleasantly surprised that The Fat Years is able to do something new with the dystopian genre, which I think has become somewhat over-saturated. The latest series of Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale feel like there’s just going through the motions – when in reality we need to be aware of how totalitarianism is changing all the time. Kai Strittmatter’s book Life in China’s Surveillance State, is proof enough of that, while here in the West bad faith actors like Steve Bannon and the Brexit party are evolving in how they peddle blatant falsehoods. What’s enduring about Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Brave New World is their ability to make us question our own ideas about what freedom is and what a good life looks like. Judged as a detective story The Fat Years was rather dry, although I don’t know enough about Chan Koonchung or Chinese fiction to make any good claims about the way the book was written nor how it was translated. Yet this remains a novel about history and future, and what responsibility we as individuals have to remember the past and think more carefully about where we’re headed.

• The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung, trans. Michael S. Duke (London: Anchor Books, 2013).

 

Image Sources:

Penguin RandomHouse, Reuters, Chinafile.com. Please contact me for copyright concerns.

Review – ‘History of Violence’, by Édouard Louis

It seems to me that in the last couple of years auto-fiction has been the flavour of the month. Every author writes about themselves, directly or indirectly; the only advice I’ll take from Jonathan Franzen is that ‘nobody wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis’. Karl Ove Knausgard and Elena Ferrante have made their names by fictionalising their real lives in minute detail and, no matter what you might think of her, Rupi Kaur has made a killing as a poet who doesn’t pretend that her poems are about anything but herself. The narrative ‘I’ is in, and yet sometimes I question how helpful so much introspection is, for readers and writers who expect to be taking lessons from their books. It’s merely my opinion – but an author that’s going to write about themselves so explicitly needs to be careful that they’re not just navel-gazing. With History of Violence I’m wrong, and happy to be. Édouard Louis does all this and he does it well.

History of Violence is the story of a very real and a very disturbing episode from Louis’ life that happened a few years ago. Walking home in Paris alone on Christmas Eve, Louis was approached by a man, Reda, whom he invited up to his flat and spent the night with. Then in the early hours of the next morning Reda pulled a gun on Louis, strangled and raped him. The trial is currently ongoing.

So this doesn’t make for easy reading but it’s an important book, and quite an extraordinary one, too. In an interview, Louis has described his desire to talk about violence as a way of “undoing it” – because if we don’t talk about these things they’ll continue to happen and, as both a writer and a survivor of sexual violence, this is how Louis can respond. Louis is only 26, but this is his second novel: his first, The End of Eddy, is currently being adapted into film and has already seen the stage. The End of Eddy is just as autobiographical, and like History of Violence it holds nothing back in the story of growing up gay in one of Northern France’s poorest communities. Louis is clearly a novelist with strong political convictions who doesn’t hold back in writing for a cause.

History of Violence, Edouard Louis (2018). © Penguin.

It’s the language of History of Violence, as much as its hard-hitting subject matter, that makes it a compelling work. As far as I can tell (filthy monoglot I am) the translation from French by Lorin Stein is great, with lots of long, anxious sentences that convey the frustration of not having your story heard. The narrator – Louis himself, presumably – stands facing a door and listens to his sister tell her husband the story of how he and Reda met, how their evening went, and what happened next. We learn of the initial tenderness between the two men, the bond that forms between them – and then after that trust’s shattered, how Louis is treated alike by the Police and medical professionals with a mixture of suspicion, cruelty and indifference. Circumlocution, addressing a subject in a convoluted or roundabout way, is a way of reflecting how it’s sometimes impossible to confront trauma head-on. When it’s traumatic to think about something directly then our only recourse is to think around them – and so here we have other characters speaking on Louis’ behalf, or, as I suspect is the case with History of Violence, writing a novel about the experience so that it can be cast in a new light. In talking about violence Louis is able to take back control over what has been done to him.

Telling his story through his sister’s voice also works as an embodiment of how Louis’ story was no longer his, once he’d shared it with others and they’d forced him to go to the police. As soon as the crime is reported it’s fact, it can’t be avoided or buried anymore, now that it’s a Police report and a medical examination and a piece of gossip making the rounds of his hometown. Everyone else that tells the story makes it their own: for the Police the fact that Reda is a North African makes the crime racial; and the way Louis tells it, for his sister it’s evidence of her brother’s stubborn refusal to listen to reason. In other words, it’s his own fault. At the same time, it’s about letting go, as the narrator explains:

I’ve been trying to construct a memory that would let me undo the past, that would amplify it and destroy it, so that the more I remember and the more I lose myself in the images that remain, the less they have to do with me.

History of Violence, then, represents Louis’ attempt to reclaim his story and tell it in his own words. He’s conflicted about the harm that Reda has caused him, unsure of how to take it or whether his reaction is the right one – not that he believes, finally, that there’s a right way to survive sexual violence – but that’s not the only violence that is perpetrated in the book. The cold indifference of the law and medical professionals is an equally brutal kind of trauma that the narrator endures, not to mention the cruelty of his family and the brutality of his upbringing, which features prominently in moments of flashback and reflection. Ultimately, Louis seems to be saying, all kinds of violence become one, whether sexual, institutional, racial or personal: and unless we confront ourselves as victims and perpetrators of the systems that sanction violence to maintain control we will never overcome them.

Here, I think, is where Louis is a quite a French writer, his knowledge of critical theory present but never obtrusive. (the only reason that this is especially French is that English writers are famously afraid of flexing critical muscles in public). He’s edited a volume on the critical theorist Pierre Bourdieu, so that’s not surprising. Where the narrator faces institutional prejudice from the law and hospitals I’m reminded of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and on more than one occasion the narrative is interrupted by a short interlude that reads like an extract from a literature essay. These flashes of lit crit are always relevant, examining things like Faulkner’s Sanctuary,  another novel dealing with the shock of trauma. Louis uses every tool at his disposal to find a way of articulating what’s been done to him.

Edouard Louis. Author Photo © John Foley.

Normally I’d be skeptical of this. I try not to have inflexible opinions about literature (see: the shade I threw about auto-fiction, above) but I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to think that Postmodernism is on its way out, and good riddance. It was fun while it lasted but there’s nothing more infuriating than a book designed to show off how clever its author is. It helps no one and it’s frankly a waste of the reader’s time. That said, there are plenty of ways that petit PoMo can be done well – David Mitchell is a good example, W.G. Sebald another – and because History of Violence is so ruthlessly focused in its treatment of its subject Louis’ literary prowess is well deployed.

My current fixation is with finding the rising stars of late 2010s fiction and to latch on with everything I’ve got: see my reviews of Sally Rooney and Anna Burns for more gushing. I have been tired of introspection, and although History of Violence is about as introspective as it gets it’s refreshing to read someone who’s so straightforward about his politics and what he believes in. A few months back, Louis co-authored a manifesto – so French! – about how literature should (MUST) combat rising populism, as well as the liars and thieves that hold power. ‘Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive’ is brash and declarative, exactly what literature needs to be if it wants to keep on acting like a superior cultural form (a title it may not deserve). Alongside Louis, I’m excited to read Leila Slimani’s novels Lullaby and Adèle, because it seems all the bold and declarative novels are coming from France as well as Ireland these days. Exciting, exciting, exciting!

History of Violence is not entered into lightly, nor should it be. It is a powerful exploration of institutional and sexual violence, and a brave self-expression of one man’s experience at the hands of such injustice. I’ll avoid saying that it’s timely, or prescient, but it is both of those things. When the writer has something important as this to say then there’s something to be said for introspective fiction.

Buy ‘History of Violence’ here. 

Credits

• Edouard Louis, History of Violence [2016], trans. Lorin Stein (London: Penguin, 2018)
• Image of cover – © Penguin Books
• Author Photo – © John Foley

 

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Ekphrasis and the Ephemeral in Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’

Donna Tartt, the wisdom goes, leaves literary critics in an awkward position. That she writes bestselling thrillers seems excuse enough to have kept her away from high-falutin fancy book talk; but because her books are so good, and read by so many, maybe there’s a dereliction of duty if we don’t take them seriously. Perhaps I’m just late to the game. Searching Tartt’s name on the Cambridge University Library, however, turns up slim results, which seems to prove my point. The middlebrow is where it’s at, dear reader, and Donna Tartt’s third novel The Goldfinch does plenty of interesting things with ekphrasis, a fascinating and obscure type of writing.

The Goldfinch – presumably a superb, heart-rending masterpiece.

Ekphrasis – from Greek, meaning something like ‘to call out and proclaim an object’ – is a Classical rhetorical technique present in all ages of art and literature, from the Greeks to The Goldfinch. Simply put, ekphrasis is a detailed description of visual art, most commonly a poem about a painting. Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn is probably the most famous example; Keats describes a Greek urn as a way of thinking about history, art, how people from the past tried to communicate with the future through the things they made. Another iconic ekphrasis from the Romantic period is Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, where Shelley uses a description of a ruined statue in the British Museum as a way of saying that, no matter how mighty, all tyrants fall in the end.

Ekphrasis is a brilliant method of reflection because it responds to something that already exists, in this case an artwork: look at the painting while you read the poem, and you’ll see it in different way and gain a greater insight into what it’s trying to say to you. Ekphrasis is often a bit more flashy than normal prose; according to the critic Ruth Webb,

what distinguishes ekphrasis is its quality of vividness, enargeia, its impact on the mind’s eye of the listener who must […] be almost made to see the subject.

What does it mean to look through words? When we look at a painting, what are we supposed to see – the thing represented, or how the artist sees the world? Something like Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss is not powerful because it shows two people in an embrace, but because it gives us a new way to visualise how we feel about someone we love. Art is a way of seeing rather than a thing to see; ekphrasis in writing, then, is about examining how we relate to art and how it affects us.

The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, oil and gold leaf on canvas (1907-8), Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Which brings us back to Donna Tartt and The Goldfinch. The novel is about a real-life painting – also called The Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654 – and one man’s obsessive relationship with it, an obsession which comes dominate every aspect of his life. Theo Decker is only thirteen when his art-loving mother takes him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to see Fabritius’ Goldfinch. Theo idolises his mother, and through her he loves the art – especially after a terrorist bomb destroys the Met gallery and kills Theo’s mother.

In a state of shock, Theo ends up walking out of the gallery holding The Goldfinch, which he takes home and hides, ready to give to her when she walks through the door. In the days to come he is too traumatised by his mother’s death and the blast to tell anyone about his mistake. When he realises the seriousness of what he’s done, it’s too late to claim innocence. By not coming forward Theo becomes a criminal, a guilt made all more acute by his desire not to lose the last connection to his dead mother.

If The Goldfinch is a novel about a character with an obsession, Donna Tartt clearly has her own fixations as a writer. Right from the beginning of The Secret History – Donna Tartt’s phenomenal first novel, which I wrote about here – the murderous narrator Richard confesses a ‘morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs’. You could say that Theo in The Goldfinch suffers from the same affliction, except here the picturesque is literally a picture.

The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius, oil on panel (1654). Mauristhuis, The Hague.

There’s a clever parallel in the way that the novel’s plot revolves around a calamitous explosion at an art gallery: in real-life, The Goldfinch was one of the only artworks to survive the Delft Thunderclap of 1654, a gunpowder warehouse explosion which killed over a hundred people including Carel Fabritius, who was inside his studio with all his other (now destroyed) paintings at the time. Seeing The Goldfinch in the Met gallery, knowing that it’s survived three hundred years’ decay and destruction, Theo’s mother remarks:

…it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things […] I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

Which is exactly how Theo views his pilfered painting: it’s a kind of bulwark against history, a guarantee that, even if people die and let you down, then at least some things endure. As he grows older, leaving New York to live with his deadbeat dad in Las Vegas, Theo’s view of the world becomes increasingly pessimistic. He falls in with a capricious Russian boy called (predictably) Boris, and together they get drunk, smoke weed, steal things from supermarkets – a far cry from the clingy mummy’s boy Theo’s implied to have been in his “old life” before the explosion.

I actually found this part of The Goldfinch the most enjoyable – Boris is a great character, and their misadventures in the Mojave are great fun to be part of. As I say, Tartt does a great job of contrasting their picaresque youth with Theo’s close dependency on his mother as a younger boy – a change that leaves you with the feeling that, with the vodka hangovers and enough cigarettes for a French bordello, Theo might be going down the wrong path. But he’s too pessimistic to care – an attitude that certainly doesn’t help him lay to rest his trauma. Without his mother he’s lost; there’s no meaning in life, so why take it seriously? Which is where I want to draw this distinction between the ephemeral and the ekphrastic. If Tartt typifies Theo’s real life by change and impermanence, then the still-life of the painting anchors him, gives him something solid and reliable to hold onto.

And yes, art can do that for people. But The Goldfinch brings no comfort to Theo. He can’t share his terrible secret with anyone for fear of retribution, and so his guilt and shame grow. For years, in fact, he’s too terrified to even look at the painting or take it out from the layers of paper that it’s wrapped in. He is much like the feathery prisoner in The Goldfinch, chained to a wall for the remainder of his life: that anchor to the past is more like an albatross around Theo’s neck, or a millstone.

Perhaps there’s something about Tartt’s epigraph to the novel – a quote from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus – more meaningful than just a punchy opening. Camus boldly declares:

The absurd does not liberate; it binds.

This of course applies to Theo’s painting, which brings danger with its sort-of-psychological safety. In Sisyphus, Camus maintains that it’s not enough to realise that life might be meaningless, you have to make meaning for yourself, even if you know that we’re all going to die and nothing really matters in the end. You get the sense that, if someone were to come along and steal the painting, Theo would be a lot happier. He’d see that living in the past is unhealthy, that the life he ends up with as an antiques dealer living with a kindly old craftsman (Hobie, an unusually decent character for Tartt) is not such a bad one, and that holding onto our traumas only makes them more damaging and more traumatic.

I don’t think that Donna Tartt wants us to think that Theo’s obsession is anything but toxic, but the novel’s use of ekphrasis – Theo’s relation to The Goldfinch – is all the more compelling because it’s so skewed. Everything we need to need to know about Theo is wrapped up in Tartt’s use of ekphrasis. It’s quite ironic that the bare fact of The Goldfinch‘s survival is a testament to human fragility – that our greatest treasures are only what we can save from the passage of time – and yet Theo can’t take that as a cue to live while he can.

A lot of the novel’s key ideas are brought into play in its final chapter, which functions as more of an essay than a conclusion. Granted, some of The Goldfinch’s best passages of ekphrasis come from here, but to be perfectly honest I found the ending to The Goldfinch a bit weak. My rule is to never give spoilers in an article so I’ll leave plot concerns aside (basically, I thought the ending was a wet firework) and focus on Tartt’s choice to shine a light directly on the novel’s Big Ideas in the last twenty pages.

Donna Tartt.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – plenty of novels leave the knockout punch for the finale – but I don’t know. When you’ve kept the reader’s attention for pushing 800 pages I’d be tempted to focus on the characters, not the ideas. If Donna Tartt were a lesser novelist you’d think that she were afraid we’d miss the point; but I was so impressed with The Secret History‘s subtle riffing on Classical themes that I think Tartt knows exactly what she’s doing, which makes me question why she’s done it. Novels aren’t essays – they’re more like thought experiments, running through ideas, or at least that’s what Camus used them for. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being a little unfair. Even if for me The Goldfinch ends on the wrong key I’m still enamoured with Tartt’s ekphrasis.

By far the most powerful message of The Goldfinch is to not take for granted the friendships that you make. Boris and Theo make a good team of misfits and as I say, the middle portion of the book set in Las Vegas is where Tartt’s eye for the complexities of relationships really shines. The characters often reference Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: a book I haven’t read but I’m sure there are all sorts of undertones that I’m missing there. Aside from the bond between Boris and Theo The Goldfinch is a rather gloomy novel, but then ekphrasis often is quite nihilistic – see for example Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts, with the cheerful opening:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters […]

A poem that Theo thinks of more than once in The Goldfinch. Because ekphrasis is all about how we look at art it’s an excellent method of self-reflection. It’s a really useful way of underscoring how narrators, writers and readers alike relate to others because it uses art as a catalyst for these relationships. Ekphrasis in The Goldfinch shows the irony – and finally the tragedy – of how Theo’s got it wrong, about art and life. Change is a natural part of life; if the Richard in The Secret History is doomed because he desires perfection, maybe Theo is doomed because he can’t – won’t – let go of a perfection that he’s made for himself. There’s no such thing as the perfect painting, even less so than a perfect life.

 

 

Sources

• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus [1942] (London: Penguin, 2005)
• Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, oil on board, 33.5 cm × 22.8 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1654.
• Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 cm × 180 cm, Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 1907-8.
• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (New York: Little and Brown, 2013)
• Donna Tartt, The Secret History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
• Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre’, Word and Image, 15 (1999), pp. 7-18; p. 13.

 

Image Credits

• Amazon.com
• Wikipedia
• Little and Brown.

 

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A review of ‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney and a polemic on contemporary fiction

I hadn’t heard of Sally Rooney until a couple of weeks ago, when The Guardian interviewed with her to coincide with the release of her second novel, Normal People. The article called Rooney the next big thing in literary fiction, mentioned the praise and acclaim for her first novel, Conversations with Friends (2016), and then tentatively suggested that she might be ‘a novelist for the Instagram age’. Now. Hang on. Usually a sentence like that, from a reviewer who almost certainly hasn’t come of age in the Instagram age (whatever that is) would make this reviewer vomit. But it didn’t. In the profile, Rooney came across as a nice, decent kind of person, and her books were supposed to be quite good – good for her, then, I thought, making a note to flick through Normal People next time I was in a bookshop.

They’re in a sardine can.

Since then Sally Rooney has been cropping up everywhere, to almost universally positive reviews (I haven’t found a bad one yet) and talk that she is, somehow, at the forefront of a new age in literature. The way they’re talking about it you’d think that Millennials had no culture to show for ourselves, which – even if it is mainly memes – isn’t strictly true. Still, Normal People has been longlisted for the Booker prize, and so clearly there was nothing for me to do but to see for myself.

I hesitate to call Normal People a romance – which, on the surface, it must be – because it overwhelmingly resists conventions and expectations (a good start). Let’s call it a story about a relationship: the on-again/off-again relationship between two students, Connell and Marianne. We follow them from their meeting in the last year of school through their time together as students at Trinity College in Dublin, with erratic leaps forward in time carving up the chapters. Sometimes there are six or seven months between chapters; sometimes a week, or a quarter of an hour. This constant back and forth structure could get tiresome, but Normal People isn’t longer than 300 pages and if you’re a quick reader it shouldn’t get in your way.

Connell is popular, athletic and well-liked, while Marianne is gauche, conventionally unattractive and rumoured to be mentally ill. Marianne’s family is extremely wealthy and Connell’s mum is employed as their cleaning lady – and so the pair’s meetings are conducted in the afternoons, when Connell comes to pick his mother up after work, and they are forced to make conversation. They couldn’t be more unalike, and yet. Sounds quite like a romance to me.

At first their awkwardness is what binds them together – Marianne is an obvious outsider but for Connell, it’s an emotional isolation and a feeling of being unable to share his emotions with his friends making him lonely. When they’re together, though, it’s like they’re in a private universe where they can both be themselves, a level of intimacy that neither of them believe they’ll ever recreate with anyone else. This intimacy and closeness is what keeps them connected to one another, before and after their romantic spells and throughout abuse, depression and other relationships: the sense that, even if they might not belong together, they have something that can only belong between the two of them.

With a title like ‘Normal People’ it’s an easy leap to notice that ideas of normality and its opposite, ‘weirdness’, prevail across the novel. This is quite obvious to spot in the beginning: Connell is normal, Marianne is weird. Being with Connell makes Marianne feel normal against her life of bullying and abuse, while for Connell their relationship is something that is weird and in conflict with his own anxieties and insecurities about being normal. These fears – and indeed, traumas – prevent Marianne and Connell from having a normal relationship; but to my mind, the whole point of Normal People is to say that being flawed and baring these flaws to someone else is an essential part of being in a relationship.

Sally Rooney.

I really enjoyed this book. There was so much detail in both of the characters that I recognised in myself, and in other people that I know. Rooney’s biggest gift is dialogue, and a sizeable chunk of Normal People is simply reported conversation and intricate detail as Connell and Marianne catch up or inform each other of the latest developments of their lives. Both of them change over the course of the book, in some ways good and in others for the worse. Normal People is also fairly explicit in how it deals with sex and depression, with descriptions of dark mental states and S/M in pretty fine detail. For me this does a great job of colouring in the characters and making them walk and talk like real people. Though it’s often said that male authors can’t write female characters Sally Rooney has gotten the male psyche nailed in this one. Or at least one male’s psyche.

It is too premature and gushing to call Sally Rooney ‘the forefront’ of anything, least of all my generation, but shit, she’s given it a pretty good go. On just a descriptive level there are some small touches that I don’t often see in books, like Marianne’s habit of staring straight at her phone when she wakes up and the fact that she scrolls through social media whilst also reading long articles about Syria and the economy. People do that nowadays, and I’m glad to see that the realist novel is starting to catch up to the new reality of the digital age. It’s really refreshing to read good books about people my own age. I can only look forward to more books like Normal People, or even to write some for myself.

Literature evolves by acknowledging its own shortcomings and then writing about that instead. When people in the 1900s saw that the slow-moving Victorian novels didn’t speak to them about their own lives anymore, they blasted the old way of writing books and made up a new way of writing that reflected the new way of life in the 20th century, with all its telephones and mass media and atom bombs. That was called Modernism, and when that died the Postmodernists took over from them, saying that the modernist method wasn’t relevant anymore. I realise that Sally Rooney isn’t Wyndham Lewis and that the last twenty years of fiction is hardly The Enemy Within, but from where I’m standing I think we’re ripe for literature to start evolving again. Life is changing, fast, and if literature wants to stay relevant it’s going to need to adapt to survive, like it always has done.

I am getting overexcited, I know. But isn’t it a rush when you read/watch/listen to something that really speaks to you and is new?

Since I started writing this review the Booker Prize 2018 has revealed its shortlist, which Normal People isn’t on. I think this is a scandal and a tragedy but as I haven’t read any of the books that Normal People lost out to I probably can’t say for certain. Let it be known, Booker judges, that I’m not happy with you. Even so. More books like Normal People please, that take a frank, well-written look at being in your twenties in the 2010s without being patronising or sycophantic.

Buy ‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney here.

 

Picture Credits:

• Normal People Cover, Faber and Faber https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571334643-normal-people.html

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