‘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).
You’ll have heard of it by now. Ducks, Newburyport: something of a dark horse in last year’s Booker Prize, the 1,000 page novel made up of one quite long sentence, with no paragraph breaks, following the thoughts of a middle-aged housewife. Each new thought starts with the phrase ‘the fact that’, and interspersed every sixty pages or so is the story of a mountain lion raising her cubs, written in tight, economical prose.
Ducks was released on the 4th July last year. Early reviewers cast itas something like a writer’s writer’s novel, something that you’d enjoy if you were committed enough to see the project through. In The Guardian, Alex Preston said: “98% who pick it up will think it unspeakable guff, [but] the 2% who get it will really get it”.
Setting aside the slight undertone of gate-keeping in a claim like that, it’s a fair point: it takes a lot of time, thought and effort to get through Ducks and most of us can’t commit that. There are no apologies, though, for the novel’s style or its length – you know what you’re getting into when you read it. And Ducks is worth getting into.
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (2019).
The unnamed narrator of Ducks, Newburyport lives in rural Ohio. She runs a business selling pies and other baked goods to local restaurants and stores; before this she was a History lecturer at a university, a job she quit after surviving rectal cancer. It’s no easy task running a home business and raising four children, especially as her husband travels for work. There is so much to worry about – from her youngest son’s refusal to eat foods without holes in them to the pollution in the Ohio river, from the senseless slaughter of indigenous Americans to the awkward exchanges with other parents. An extract, nearly at random:
the fact that Leo and I both like Katherine Hepburn and I was sure her reminiscences would be an interesting read too, but I put my foot down for some reason, I’m not sure why, “Guess Who’s Coming to Write Her Memoirs”, fifty-foot totem pole, windshield wipers flapping, Pop-tarts, upstarts, ramparts, lion rampant, sejant, sergeant, run the gantlet, gauntlet, consensual sex, tic-tac-toe, don’t sweat the small stuff, the fact that I keep thinking about that little girl who wouldn’t drink her milk and died, the fact that she was thrown out of her house at 3 a.m. because she wouldn’t drink her milk, and she wandered off and got lost, the fact that it sounds almost like a fairy tale, scrimshaw, squaw, loose pages…
It took me six months to read Ducks from cover to cover! I stopped twice, first for about a month and the second time for a few weeks, and many more times I put it on hold to read other books that I wanted to review or talk to friends about. Hopefully it wouldn’t take a more devoted reader six months to get through the book. I bound my copy in manila envelopes (which had to be repaired a lot) so that should tell you about how long i was expecting to spend on Ducks.
I thought that, given how long it'll probably take me to get through, it made sense to make a protective cover for Lucy Ellmann's mammoth Ducks, Newbury port by @GalleyBeggars… pic.twitter.com/1ADhzRtcZh
Since then, what I’ve found interesting about Ducks and what I’ve thought worth writing about it has changed a lot. Ellmann’s publisher, Galley Beggar Press, are a two-person indie based in Norwich. Galley Beggars published Eimear McBride’s first novel in 2013, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing – and there was incredible excitement around Ducks’ being shortlisted for the Booker Prize (although no one was happy with the Booker last year. No one). Ducks went on to win the Goldsmiths Prize, however, which is awarded to fiction which ‘breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form’. That seems appropriate. If Ducks is one thing, it’s proof that indie publishers are bringing out the best stuff these days.
A lot of people have talked about Ducks as a modern Ulysses – and, while I think there’re fruitful discussions to be had about Ellmann and Joyce, I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been already said. (In capturing every facet of life, good, bad and mundane, Ducks is more like Proust anyway.) Nevertheless, Ducks is what a classic Modernist novel would look like if it were written in the 21st century. I’m ever skeptical of using genre labels arbitrarily – but what I admire most about the best Modernist writing is its intention to connect people, and the use of experimental forms and styles to find a new way of communicating something profound about modern life. In a promo video for the Booker, Ellmann said:
I wanted to trace someone’s thought patterns, and I don’t think thinking is punctuated in the brain.
What is good – and at times very sad – about Ducks, Newburyport is how accurately Ellmann conveys probably the defining emotion of the 21st century: anxiety. The narrator worries about everything, and in daily life there is rarely time to sit and digest a thought before you need to rush into thinking about cooking, money or family life. Ducks is centred around the defining problem of an age where we can know everything from the computer in our hand. How do you worry about so much stuff, all at once?
By making lists! Ducks is filled with lists: shopping lists, recipes, lists of all the creeks and waterways in Ohio, catalogues of films and TV – the narrator is a serial list-maker. Worrying about everything all at once is chaos, and reading Ducks often means being mired in chaotic detail. But putting these items into a list and reeling them off is one way to make chaos into order. If you listed everything in your life – your objects, friends, work and worries – you’d be overwhelmed in minutes. By following a narrator who does just that, Ducks achieves a Modernist hyper-realism that feels fresh. It’s as if that sentence never stops because the narrator can’t catch her breath, can’t get to grips with her anxieties because they never stop multiplying. Besides this, the pared-down language of the mountain lion’s story is almost a parody of straightforwardly “realistic” writing.
In the narrator’s relentless quest to catalogue everything, Ducks strongly resembles The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s mammoth tome of the 1600s that’s often regarded as an “encyclopedia novel”. Burton was a scholar who suffered from melancholy, a generic term for depression, and he set out to write a definite guide to melancholy: where it comes from, what it’s like, what you can do to get over it. Feeling depressed is part of being human, and so to catalogue every facet of melancholy Burton tried to catalogue every facet of human life, from Greek and Roman classics to French kissing and whether elves really exist. Despite its gloomy subject, The Anatomy of Melancholy is quite funny, a catalogue that throws all the wisdom and learning of the 17th century at the timeless problem of how to be happy.
A long image of the frontispiece to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).
The narrator of Ducks often fails to block out the melancholy. As in real life, grief comes like a stranger in the night. Isn’t that the weirdest thing? When you’re washing up, or thinking about bus schedules, suddenly the memory comes back of how a relative died, or how awfully human beings treat one another sometimes:
hamsters never seem very happy, hurricanes hardly ever happen, but it’s hard to tell with a hamster, hampster, “Buck up”, the fact that I think they’re nocturnal, Mommy, the fact that i miss her, the fact that I never got over her illness, the fact that it broke me, the fact that you gotta live in the here and now, the fat that the sun still rises every morning, and there is twilight, when the sky glows, the fact that it happens twice a day, the fact that…
‘I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy’, wrote Burton. When you’ve got too many worries to list, well, start a new list, re-arrange the heap, and see if you can walk a little further before it crumbles again. It was moments like the above that stayed with me in Ducks, and which persuaded me to keep reading: you have to imagine Sisyphus happy in his task, because otherwise there’s only despair.
The catalogues in Ducks, Newburyport are double: they exemplify the unmanageableness of modern life and the necessity of putting your problems in order before they drown you. Despite what I’ve said, Ducks isn’t an especially gloomy book. Around page 645 the melancholy reaches a fever pitch, and the narrator forces herself to think positively, cataloguing about thirty pages of things you can depend on. This was a rewarding pause in Ducks, something I was grateful as a reader to have earned:
Beethoven quartets will remain Beethoven quartets
emojis will multiply
children will roller-skate
the sky will often be blue
bees will buzz
my cinnamon rolls will generally be a hit
bureaucracy
will scare everybody
There are at least some anchors. Like The Anatomy of Melancholy, Ducks is an encyclopedia of an entire person’s internal universe. The narrator is fighting a war on all fronts – from microscopic worries about faux pas to existential dread about global warming – and there is heroism keeping your head above the water when other people rely on you. Sometimes it takes a very big book to remind us of small joys.
Everyone has an inner life as rich and bizarre as the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport: remember that, Ellmann seems to suggest, and we might start talking to each other again. This is a catalogue that worries about not knowing enough, an incredibly specific narrator whose day-to-day obligations and fears are universal. Getting absorbed by the deep interior world of Ducks is a good tonic to the melancholy world. But however pleasant it might be to float away on a stream-of-consciousness, Ducks doesn’t let you forget that melancholy is just beneath the surface.
‘Ducks, Newburyport’ is published by Galley Beggar Press. Order a copy from their website here.
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 calledMilkman 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 Violencestarted 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’sOn 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’ Murmurwas 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!). Thisis 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.
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)
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.
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.
Although Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ series goes to some pretty harrowing places, there’s something arrestingly funny about the opening scene of the first book, Never Mind. Early morning in gorgeous South France and David Melrose, with his shades, cigar, and dressing gown hanging open, is drowning ants with the hose. It’s a cruel, slightly pathetic gesture, one which sets the tone perfectly for a novel cycle that perpetually teeters between horror and humour.
Never Mind takes place over a summer’s day in the eighties and follows the Melrose family – chronically apathetic, cruel David, alcoholic Eleanor, and their five year-old son Patrick – as they prepare for a dinner party in the evening. At only 150 pages Never Mind is a svelte page turner, and Edward St Aubyn has a wonderful talent for writing with a distinguished sense of beauty and an absolutely ruthless irony:
[David] had stopped his medical practice soon after their marriage. At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.
Jesus Christ! Into this horrorshow of a household comes little Patrick, consumed by the villa’s magical garden and largely oblivious to the psychological torment that his father inflicts on his mother. Edward St Aubyn is quick to draw you into the story and, because they’ve got less of the reader’s time to work with, short novels need immediacy, focus, and a plot that goes like a train (compare: We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age). Like the best short novels, Never Mindgives that pleasurable feeling of knowing that a dull afternoon is going to be filled with some phenomenal reading.
David Melrose is a monster, an upper-class doctor who has replaced his failed marriage and career with nihilist philosophy and the brutal domination of his wife and son.
‘In his world – a world of pure imagination – it was better if a person “could have been” Prime Minster than if he was Prime Minister: that would have shown vulgar ambition’.
David doesn’t blame Patrick for his failures; that doesn’t stop him from punishing his son anyway, rationalising the abuse as a perverse education. Certainly Patrick “learns” from his experience. Something terrible happens to Patrick in Never Mind, a violence that comes to define his life and which will haunt him for the next four books.
There are five books in the Patrick Melrose series: Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mother’s Milk (2005) and At Last (2012). Shorter than Proust, and I imagine punchier, it is hard not to feel for Patrick’s story of childhood abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, self-discovery and self-destruction. All five books except the fourth cover only a day or two in Patrick’s life, centering around some ghastly social occasion to be suffered through as a minor member of the British upper-class: a funeral, a garden party with Princess Margaret, collecting your father’s ashes. Even at their bleakest the Melrose books never lose their sense of humour, and ordinarily heavy events – shooting-up in a Men’s Club or being brought to the wrong corpse at the funeral home – are instead moments of intense black comedy. None of the novels push three-hundred pages, so don’t be put off by the commitment of having to read five novels. St Aubyn definitely has the leg over Proust there.
Yet there’s a surprising amount of philosophical depth to the series. After a while I felt that the books seemed to be asking one question: who is Patrick Melrose? Or – putting it more existentially – what is the nature of identity? What makes a person the way that they are?
The Melrose books, arranged slightly asymmetrically.
Patrick’s story becomes more shocking when you learn that St Aubyn based the novels directly on his own life. All the abuse, heroin addiction (and, thankfully, Patrick’s attempts to recover) are subjects with which the author has first-hand experience. As an adult, Patrick struggles to decide how to live with his trauma – how far it should define who he is, whether his sarcastic attitude and chronic insecurities are attitudes that he’s adopted or whether they’re inescapably part of who he is.
It’s a good question though, one that’s worth stopping and thinking about for a moment. Am I the way I am – do I like the things I like, do the things I do – because I was born this way, or have I been shaped by my parents and my upbringing to be who I am? Maybe the more important question that Patrick (and we) should ask is: are we able to change who we are? This is what Patrick wrestles with, throughout his drug-fuelled twenties and alcoholic thirties, into fatherhood and right up until his mother’s funeral in At Last.
What we might call ‘the problem of identity’ crops up throughout the books, in different moments and characters. The first of these is Victor Eisen, one of the dinner guests in Never Mind, an Oxford don who’s trying to find a non-psychological approach to identity (ha). Unsurprisingly Victor doesn’t have the answer – after a long day’s thinking and not-writing he’s still no wiser, and he still needs his wife to cook for him. More prominent across the five books – also more stupid – is the opinion of Nicholas Pratt, another dinner guest and a bitchy snob, who makes the tenuous claim that:
nothing that happens to you as a child really matters.
Which most people would instantly disagree with; anyway, the evidence of the next four books proves otherwise. But by refusing to see the infant Patrick as a fully-fledged person – in other words, a person with a strong sense of identity – Nicholas doesn’t have to empathise with him. It becomes easier to be cruel if you don’t think your victims as much a person as you are. There’s no surprise that in Bad News, the second book in which Patrick is sent to New York to collect his father’s ashes, a character quotes Larkin’s famous lines: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to but they do’. When he becomes a father Patrick is tormented by the fear that the memory of his childhood will mess up how he raises his two sons, and the constant presence of people like Nicholas Pratt at important occasions don’t help Patrick’s attempts to let go of his past.
A moody Benedict Cumberbatch on the new edition of Never Mind.I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t want to diagnose Patrick Melrose like he’s a real person. I read a lot of trauma theory as part of my Master’s, however, and I want to use some of what I know about war trauma to understand how “the problem of identity” is approached in the Melrose books. Memory is flexible and changeable: every time we remember the past we remember it a bit differently, and when we look to our pasts (private or historical) for answers this is because we’re looking for a precedent of how to act in the present. Therefore, when Patrick Melrose struggles to decide what kind of a person his childhood abuse has made him, this dilemma – and his recovery – is all about understanding the past and learning how to grow from his memories. Look at how Patrick, in Mother’s Milk, describes his anxiety and self-hatred:
That was depression: clinging to an out-of-date version of yourself.
I should mention again that these books are really funny and entertaining. I felt that by Mother’s Milk and At Last – the fourth and fifth installments – the fast-pace had gone out of the story a little; but the characters are strong enough and the story still compelling that they carry forward the momentum of the first three books. Zadie Smith has talked about Edward St Aubyn’s masterful way of writing and his supremely English style of black humour, and to be perfectly honest getting over one’s childhood is an experience that I think everyone can relate to.
For all these troubles of identity the Melrose books aren’t heavy, in the way that Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or History of Violence are when talking about trauma and sexual abuse. What I find so compelling about the Melrose books is their light touch – how the books interrogate knotty ideas about what identity is and how abuse affects survivors, without miring the reader in the technicalities I’ve laid out above. There’s no “correct” way of talking about abuse – but I think St Aubyn’s way of doing so is one capable of reaching a very large audience, which is good. The HBO adaptation is also pretty good, too.
By the time Patrick’s children are old enough to be telling their own stories (book four) St Aubyn offers another perspective on what identity is: speech. Part of what’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that the way that we use language dictates the way that we think. Because our speech is the main way that we express who we are, how we feel and what the world is like, then our experience of the world is shaped by the structure of the language that we use. If our language is skewed in some way then our perception of ourselves and the world will be skewed as well; that’s why, in 1984, the government of Big Brother wanted to erase the word ‘bad’ from the English language. If there’s no word for something then it doesn’t exist.
As Patrick’s eldest son Robert grows up and acquires language – learning the names of things, being told how to behave around the world – he mourns the pre-verbal freedom that he felt when he was first born:
Something had started to happen as he became dominated by talk. His early memories were breaking off, like slabs from those orange cliffs behind him, and crashing into an all-consuming sea which only glared back at him when he tried to look at it. His infancy was being obliterated by his childhood.
No child has ever had the inner voice of Robert Melrose, but still. Patrick is a better father than David; and yet his son is equally ‘obsessed with his past’. Maybe that comes with being a member of the English nobility – you need to be obsessed with the past, if you’re going to go around boasting about how important your grandfather was. Aware that he’s coasting on the past, Patrick feels ashamed when he realises that he’ll remain rich for the rest of his life because his great-grandfather invented something a century ago. The past is inescapable, and it’s unsurprising that there’s an echo of the nihilistic philosophy of Robert’s grandfather in ‘an all-consuming sea’ which only glares back. Remember Nietzsche:
when you gaze long into the abyss […] the abyss gazes also at you.
A more positive echo is of Virginia Woolf, who similarly conjoined language with identity in the opening chapters of her novel The Waves. Woolf tried to depict the stream-of-consciousness of five young people as they learn language and grow up. As so common in Woolf’s novels, language is the answer as well as the problem – if only our language were better at letting us say what we want to say, then our lives would be more harmonious too. And that is what Patrick wants: better understanding through better communication, an end to the repression and stiff upper-lippedness so common to the British upper class but so counter-productive to overcoming trauma.
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931).
The Melrose books tackle all this and more, whilst remaining wittily entertaining to the core. As a cultural form the novel excels at introspection and the kind of self-interrogating of which Patrick is a typical example. In a way that makes me feel anachronistic the Melrose books feel very nineties – I’d be more skeptical of five books’ worth of self-reflection if they’d been published in 2019 . As much as I think that contemporary fiction should be trying to tackle external ideas and real-life threats (like totalitarianism and wage slavery) the Melrose books are some of the finest novels I’ve read in a long time, both well written and pleasurable to read. And they’re relatable. After all, doesn’t everyone wish they could be a different kind of person?
Words Cited
Phillip Larkin, ‘This Be The Verse’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 142.
Friedriech Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Value Reprints, 2018)
Edward St Aubyn, Never Mind (London: Picador, 2012)
Edward St Aubyn, Bad News (London: Picador, 2012)
Edward St Aubyn, Some Hope (London: Picador, 2012)
Edward St Aubyn, Mother’s Milk (London: Picador, 2012)
Edward St Aubyn, At Last (London: Picador, 2012).
If anyone’s interested, here are the books that gave me the backbone of my knowledge about trauma:
Nigel C. Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Patrick S. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 1993)
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Pandora, 1992).
Image Credits:
Amazon and Fifty Books Project. Please contact me for any copyright concerns.
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.
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.
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.
Milkman has all the hallmarks of what classics should be: clever, without being clever-clever; it’s simple in its plot and premise but it doesn’t over-egg what’s going on or decide for you what to think about the characters or their predicaments. Complex, I guess, without being complicated. Milkman starts as a wry story of manipulation and cloistered living in a cloistered place – and then about halfway through Milkman opens up and reveals that it’s a lot more than that.
First off, none of the characters in Milkman have names, and the narrator’s identity shifts depending on who is speaking to her. She’s usually called middle sister, sometimes maybe-girlfriend; once or twice she’s accused of being a double-cat. If she has a name for herself, she isn’t sharing it with us. Middle sister is a nondescript adolescent in 1970s Belfast. She – like most of her community – keeps her head down and tries to stay out of others’ affairs as much as possible, for ‘to be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous’. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Middle sister’s only oddity (which is, in this environment, a flaw) is that she reads while walking home from work, always nineteenth century novels ‘because I did not like the twentieth century’. Despite her efforts to remain as ordinary as possible, middle sister is powerless to protect herself when, one day while reading and walking, she is stopped by the Milkman and asked if she’d like to get in his van.
Milkman is not a real milkman – he’s an operative for the renouncers, one of those called criminal by the state police from the country over the water who does jobs better not spoken about in the open. Not someone you want to get entangled with. Yet it’s too late to be uninteresting, because even this passive non-action of middle sister’s, being spoken to by a dangerous man, has made her interesting, and soon enough the rumour mill has it that she and Milkman (married, don’t you know, and twenty-three years between them, so they say? the rumours go) are in a relationship.
This is manipulation, and it’s nasty. Milkman knows that he has this power over middle sister; knows that she has no power or agency of her own to refuse him. The implication of an entanglement is enough to make it fact in the court of public opinion. Not that Milkman is especially historical fiction, but like good historical fiction Milkman brings to live a different time and place which is different from, but still speaking to, the present-day. In this case that means #MeToo, and ongoing efforts to share stories and increase awareness of sexual harassment and sexual abuse: concepts unfamiliar to middle sister in Milkman. There isn’t any vocabulary for her to express her isolation. It’s quite clear that she’s being harassed, that what the Milkman and public opinion are doing to alienate her, make her vulnerable – but as middle sister herself explains
if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that isn’t there?
But that’s exactly how abuse works, isn’t it – by gaslighting a victim and making them unsure of themselves, then taking advantage of that vulnerability. Troubling stuff. And this is how Milkman starts as one thing and ends up being a lot more: if this were simply a story about manipulation and entrapment that would be one thing, but because the silence, the fear, and the keeping-your-head down is all interconnected and bound up with the Troubles in Milkman that the novel has a kind of totality, a broad feeling of something you can talk and think about for a long time.
Anna Burns has specifically stated that Milkman isn’t supposed to be set in Belfast or Northern Ireland in particular, just a place resembling the paranoid climate of Belfast in the Troubles. Possibly the novel is a bit more extreme than reality, but I wouldn’t know. In any case, Milkman is surely a dystopian novel, in the shocking normalcy of checking the telephone for state-police bugging or avoiding the buses in case they’re hijacked by one side or the other. People have always praised The Handmaid’s Tale for being a dystopia which contains no detail that hasn’t existed somewhere in the real world; Milkman does the same, except reading it with the memory of the Troubles still living shocked me far more than Atwood’s novel did.
One of the back-cover quotes on my copy of Milkman makes the weird claim that ‘if Beckett had written a prose poem about the Troubles, it would be a lot like this’ (from the Daily Mail, of course) – silly to compare the three Irish writers you can name with each other (a sin I’m guilty of, too) – besides, I’d say that Milkman is nearer Kafka, with his workaday menace and helpless despair under the status quo.
Shankill Road in Belfast, 1970s – a strong Protestant area.
And it’s the language, too, which is great about Milkman. It can take a minute to get into the swing of the speech but when you’re on the same page as middle sister she’s chatty, scornful, given to going off on one with long-winded tangents about life and the gossip of the community, more important than they seem. It’s kind of backwards, and full of prevarications, which I think I love. Although maybe there is a relation to Beckett after all, in that so much in Milkman is unnameable: not only characters’ names, or the name of the ‘statelet’ middle sister belongs to or the country ‘across the water’, ‘maybe even that country across that water’. There seems to be no capacity (or willingness) to articulate the complete un-normality of everything about middle sister’s life. Thought comes from language, after all, and if speaking means thinking then perhaps life is too traumatic to bear thinking about. And so reality goes unnamed.
This is a clever, gripping book. I like to try to choose which novels I think will be taught in the future, thought of as zeitgeist-defining and brought up in relation to the late 2010s in the lit-crit seminars of the future – a bit like betting on horses except with horses I might actually bag a winner. I hope that Milkman is one of those books that gets remembered. Good fiction ought to be about finding a way of talking about what we can’t easily say, forcing us to ask questions about how we live, how we might live. It should articulate traumas and make us feel less lonely at the same time. That’s about as far as I’ll go in defining what a ‘good book’ is (rather than only a fun one) without getting academic or penning a manifesto, and Milkman ticks those boxes. It’s definitely worth your time, especially if you yourself have ever felt like a beyond-the-pale, a queer outsider whom strangers give a look askance when they pass you in the street. You never know, after all, what people might be saying about you.
Works Cited:
Anna Burns, Milkman (London: Faber and Faber, 2018)
Just before Christmas I was given W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) to read by a friend. The friend had read Sebald last summer in preparation for a module he wanted to take, about literature’s role in surviving the oncoming plastic apocalypse, but in the end neither of us got a space in the class. Nevertheless, so full of Sebald’s praises my friend was that he bought every copy of The Rings of Saturn he could find and parcelled them out to his friends to ensure that we all were duty-bound to read it. Without hope or despair, I dutifully started reading, and to my surprise I felt compelled to keep going. The Rings of Saturn starts like this:
In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. […] in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.
Originally written in German, The Rings of Saturn is the account of a walking trip Sebald made along the coast of Suffolk, passing through Lowestoft, the Orfordness nuclear testing site, and ending at The Mermaid pub in Ditchlingham. As he wanders, Sebald narrates the history of the landscape and its inhabitants, past and present. We’re shown that the apparently ordinary countryside has a rich, intricate life of its own. The drab streets of Lowestoft reveal the vanished history of the North Sea herring fleets; the iron railway bridge over the River Blyth has a distant, improbable link to the last Dowager Empress of Imperial China; and so on until the cows come home. Sebald’s digressions often seem to come out of nowhere:
I sat down on a beach on the green called Gunhill and looked out on the tranquil sea, from the depths of which the shadows were now rising. Everyone who had been out for an evening stroll was gone. I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre, and I should not have been surprised if a curtain had suddenly risen before me and on the proscenium I had beheld, say, the 28th of May 1672— that memorable day when the Dutch fleet appeared offshore from out of the drifting mists, with the bright morning light behind it, and opened fire on the English ships in Sole Bay…
In German, The Rings of Saturn is subtitled as “An English Pilgrimage”; indeed, walking with Sebald is like walking through history, time, and across the world all at once. The Rings of Saturn leaves a powerful impression on its readers in a way that I find difficult to express. I’m usually suspicious of postmodern books that try, usually with pretension and without success, to market themselves as “not quite memoir, not quite fiction, not quite fact”. Instead of ticking all the boxes you can risk getting them all wrong. But Sebald nails it without seeming pretentious or looking like he’s trying too hard. If you’re not a fan of fiction this one’s worth reading if only for the fascinating sections on history, wars, and the natural world.
Sebald is interested in patterns, and finding them wherever they may be in the world around him. It’s not that his journey through Suffolk is particularly special: any journey, big or small, can remind us not only of our connection to the world but of the world’s connection to itself. This map of Sebald’s route in The Rings of Saturn shows us exactly how many connections and links Sebald can find along his wanderings. One of the central images of the book is the quincunx pattern – a geometric shape that can be found repeated throughout art, science and nature. Early modern philosophers like Thomas Browne (discussed in The Rings of Saturn) saw the quincunx as evidence of ‘the wisdom of God’; if Sebald thinks the same he’s not telling.
The Quincunx pattern, as mentioned in The Rings of Saturn.
Which all leads me to a lecture I had a few weeks ago, called ‘Chance and the Contemporary Novel’. Through a discussion of the rather tedious work of Ali Smith (the lecture was good though; look, I’m writing an essay inspired by it), the lecturer made an interesting claim. Contemporary novels are more interested in ideas of chance, coincidence, accidents and random occurrences than they had been in the 20th century. Or, at least, our interest in the accidental is coming back into fashion. This is because, at a time when fewer and fewer of us feel like we have agency or control over our lives, the unpredictable elements of life deserve to be taken more seriously. The world is frightful and complex and people need to find meaning in it, whether from religion, Communism, chakra alignments or Brexit. We imagine that the universe is necessarily teleological – that it has a design and, if we could only find the right way of looking at it, all the pieces in the puzzle would fall into place. That desire to look into coincidences and off-chance encounters is fascinating, because it demonstrates our need to make the meaningless meaningful; there can be no such thing as coincidences, just happy little accidents.
The same impulse – to investigate the spontaneous, untraceable, thousand-thousand variables which cause each and every interaction of our lives – crop up across literature. It’s not just Ali Smith (The Accidental, 2005), WG Sebald (The Rings of Saturn), or that Frenchman who wrote The President’s Hat (Antoine Laurain) who are after such answers. Almost all of the great Modernist novels experiment, in some form or another, with chance and coincidence and pattern-finding. A running intrigue in Ulysses (1922) is guessing the favourite runner of the Gold Cup race. When Leopold Bloom bumps into a friend and offers him his ‘throwaway’ paper, this is interpreted to be a coded tip-off about the name of the horse – Throwaway – that goes on to win the race at five-to-one odds. Bloom’s friends then hold a grudge against him for not letting them in on the secret. Even though this was nothing more than an off-chance coincidence it creates ripples anyway, taking on life and significance of its own.
Dublin in 1904. Image credit: The Irish Times
Perhaps more importantly, the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses follows nineteen different people going about their daily lives in the Dublin high street, with the narrative perspective flitting – seemingly at random – between unconnected bystanders. These characters are from all walks of life: boozers, a Catholic priest, even the man banging Leopold Bloom’s wife. Yet our movement through the city is not at all random, as Fritz Senn and others once proved by acting out in real-life each of the different scenes in ‘Wandering Rocks’. They realised that wherever Joyce leaves each wanderer and moves to the next was always the moment where the next character would have come within the eye-line of the person before them. The episode doesn’t bounce around like a stray tennis ball, as this wonderful map by Amanda Visconti proves: ‘Wandering Rocks’ is in fact a finely tuned balancing act, like a relay race. Look deeper beneath the surface of something as uncontrolled and unpredictable as a crowded city street and we find an intricate, finely-balanced network of chances and causality, all intimately linked. And even a bouncing tennis ball would have a trajectory that you could plot.
Other Modernist novels in with a chance: Mrs Dalloway is largely predicated on the ordinary and spontaneous circumstances Clarissa Dalloway experiences on a day (supposedly) like any other. In fact, most of the Modernist ‘day-novels’ – Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 and (at a push) Andre Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja – confront the accidental because they’re concerned with the stuff the makes up our everyday lives. For the Modernists, thinking about chance and accidents was more a way of making their novels more realistic than anything else. So much of the day-to-day is unpredictable and out of our hands that, if you’re going to write a novel about everyday life, then it’s important to consider the different ways that people can find meaning in the apparently meaningless.
I don’t just mean novels which feature coincidences or accidents as mere plot points. By nature nothing in a conventional novel really is unplanned. Someone’s sat down and worked everything out before hand. What I’m trying to get at is where and how authors try to replicate real coincidence; take the collage poetry of the Beats, or the exquisite corpse games of the surrealists. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac once tried to write a poem between them by each writing a random line without seeing what the other had put before them. The results – a poem called Pull My Daisy, which was put to music and sung at the start of this film – were negligible, but their hearts were in the right place.
A still from Ginsberg and Kerouac’s film, ‘Pull My Daisy’, 1959.
As with the surrealists, who tried to transcribe and recreate the stuff of dreams, the mere fact that poetry like this exists is as a reflection of the not-so randomness of the universe, which made such experiments worthwhile to their creators. It’s like how when a TV is tuned to no channel it gives you static, which scientists inform us is actually the cosmic background radiation, or the noise of the universe itself left over from the big bang. Okay, white noise might look or sound good, but my point is that even something as random and chaotic as static can make sense if we find the right way to interpret it.
And it gets stranger. At the risk of losing my point entirely permit me to digress even further. I recently visited the Ashurbanipal exhibition at the British Museum. There, I learnt about an ancient Babylonian “book” known as the Summa Alu (short for a very long name). The Summa Alu is, I suppose, a kind of almanac or book of superstitions written on 120 cuneiform tablets (which I’m thinking of as chapters), each detailing a different omen to be spotted and taken care of in the daily life of Nineveh, King Ashurbanipal’s capital city. If the astute Babylonian knows what it means when two people cross the street at noon, or what to do if a house is built at a wonky angle, or if a crow is spotted drinking marsh water before dawn, then a great many calamities can be avoided by the consulting of the mighty Summa Alu. If we can just find the right way of looking at things then daily life might just start to make sense.
A cuneiform tablet of the Summa Alu, British Museum.
Ascribing meaning to accidents and coincidences enables us to give meaning to our lives because it assures us that, even if we can’t always spot it, there is something much larger than ourselves at work. It allows us to confront the essential madness of the universe with a measure of comfort when we know that, alright, there’s not much I can do to affect it, but at least there is an ‘it’ in the first place. And – as a book like the Summa Alu proves – once we start believing there’s a pattern in place the sooner we can start trying to recognise it, start making predictions; we have the chance to take back control.
Which brings me all the way back to Sebald and The Rings of Saturn. Before the book begins, Sebald gives us a brief dictionary description of what the real-life rings of Saturn are:
The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.
The rings of Saturn are fragments of a larger whole; though almost completely unrecognisable to us, there is an overall pattern and shape that they binds them altogether. The idea of this moon having been broken up by ‘tidal effect’ suggests an inevitability to decay, as though all orders eventually give way to chaos. Yet Sebald has his preoccupations. More than once in The Rings of Saturn he returns to the same place, the same time: the Third Reich. As a German born in 1944, Sebald struggled to express the guilt and the burden of responsibility that Germans of his generation must come to terms with. He didn’t realise until he was a teenager, for example, that his own father had participated in the invasion of Poland in 1939. Sebald’s method of spotting patterns and detailing coincidences is not itself accidental: he is searching for the myriad factors which could make something as horrific as the Holocaust a factual truth. As Mark O’Connell says:
this is not so much a way of understanding the Holocaust, so much as it is a way of making us think about how we can’t understand the Holocaust.
Truthfully I don’t know enough about Sebald to say whether or not he was trying to prove there was a design and a pattern and all that other stuff (I think he wasn’t, to be honest) but he was certainly someone who wanted to look to see what he could find. On the Holocaust and a thousand other things, he was looking for answers. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with this disjointed ramble across literature and history. I’m definitely not as good at it as Sebald was. I am using this as a space to think through some things that interest me. A lot of these ideas about pattern recognition and analysing multiple factors to determine causality and outcome can probably be applied to fields like mathematics and computer science; fields that I’m more hopeless than fiction with. Isn’t this how Cambridge Analytica and Facebook like to help liars trick us about politics?
There is so much more to be said, but in the interests of finding a conclusion I am fascinated by the continued and varied ways in which writers of all stripes – be they Babylonian stargazers, German hikers, or even Ali Smith – share a common interest in exploring the logic of the unpredictable. I’m not really sure what to do now. Although I’m desperate to read the Summa Alu I can’t track down a translation. I think someone did one for their PhD in 2000 but I can’t access it anywhere. Maybe I should contact the British Museum? It’s title sounds like an Italo Calvino novel: Summa Alu — means “If a city is built on a height…”. I think I would like to talk to someone who believes in horoscopes next. Different kinds of logic are worth exploring, even if you don’t necessarily think they’ll hold water. The mere fact that I had a lecture on coincidences in fiction while I was reading Sebald and then I visited the Ashurbanipal exhibition (!) itself is probably more like all the stuff I’m writing about than my writing itself. Now that’s a coincidence.
Quotes
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: Vintage, 1995)
Mark O’Connell, ‘Why you should read W.G. Sebald’, The New Yorker, 14th December 2011.
Good December, any readers still with me, and sorry I’ve been quiet lately. I’m quite busy at the moment and as you’d expect “fun” takes a backseat during these times. Hopefully I’ll be able to make up for it throughout the rest of the month.
As with most of the stuff I talk about on here I bloody love Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, The Secret History. It was an immediate bestseller on release, with an initial printing of 75,000 copies (it’s usually about 10,000). For an author’s first novel that’s phenomenal, and in an article about someone else the Guardian recently referred to her as ‘one of those writers who emerge fully-formed’ (like Zadie Smith and, possibly, Sally Rooney?). I managed to bag a copy of The Secret History when I was in Bangkok this summer for just 100 baht (£2.39) in a foreigners’ bookshop on Khao San Road. I’ve held off writing about it because I intended to read it as part of a book club, and I had this idea of doing like a collaborative-response article to Tartt. But since it’s unlikely that review will ever be published I feel like talking about Catholicism instead.
The 1992 edition of The Secret History.
Plot details, as always, first off. The Secret History is a murder mystery told in reverse: the opening sentence tells us who’s gotten their neck snapped, as well as whodunnit (all of the main characters together, pre-planned ambush), and that they were never caught for their crimes. Why tell the story then? What follows is the narrator giving us his version of events, an explanation of the only question left unanswered: why they killed their friend Bunny.
Our murderers are all Classics students at Hampden College, an Ivy League university in scenic New England. Our narrator is Richard Papen, a young man from way out west in California, without wealth or family to reccomend him. Richard has stolen away to university to study Classics to escape the drudgery of his working-class parents’ lives. There are only five others students on his course, all dirty rich and extremely cliquey: twins Charles and Camilla; sallow-faced Francis; loud, happy-go-lucky Bunny; and Henry, the smart and mysterious figurehead of the group. For Richard, there’s nothing finer than the fabulously poetic lives that they all lead, obsessed in the way that only precociously intelligent young people can obsess about the Greeks, Beauty, and pleasure. Richard wants nothing more than to join their clique and to inhabit their elegant, decadent world. If he wants to gain their confidence, however, he’s going to need to keep their secrets. And we all know what’s in store for poor old Bunny.
It’s enough that The Secret History is a rich, slow-burning thriller. Read it on the basis of just that – but this is my blog, I set the agenda, and so I’d like to consider the Catholic features of the novel, or how a Catholic morality seems to inform the way the characters are written and how the plot unfolds. It’s something that only really occurred to me after I’d finished reading the book, and so if you don’t agree (or, like an Edwardian Britisher, you dislike Papacy) then it shouldn’t affect your choice of reading The Secret History or not.
What’s “decadent” about The Secret History is its obsession with Classics. The characters talk about Homer and The Iliad like it matters, like the question of whether Beauty must necessarily be also terrible is a matter of life and death, which I suppose for Bunny it actually is. Occasionally they quote Greek to one another. If you think that sounds pretentious, by the way, that’s because it is – they’re Classics students at an Ivy League uni, for God’s sake. The book’s classicism is foregrounded from the opening sentences of chapter 1:
Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw”, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
Putting aside the irony of a fictional character claiming something exists outside of literature for a moment, this is as much as you need to know about Richard in four sentences. That, and that he likes to quote Rimbaud without naming his sources or translating the French. The ‘fatal flaw’ to which Richard refers is the classical concept of hamartia, the Achilles’ Heel, the human error that tragically causes the downfall of a hero. However, the notion that ‘longing for the picturesque’ could in any way be ‘morbid’ seems to me far more Christian rather than pagan, as though coveting Beauty were something sinful. Granted he’s a guilty murderer, but in what world would a Greek God care if you wanted a beautiful life by any means necessary? Zeus certainly wasn’t one to talk. The God of Rome, however, well – he wouldn’t be pleased that you’d betrayed your friend for mortal desire.
Girton College, Cambridge. It looks like how I imagine Hampden is in the book; also I’m a member of Girton, so hopefully if I use their picture there’s less chance I’ll be sued for using unlicensed content on my blog.
Catholicism and aestheticism aren’t necessarily polar opposites, either. In my thesis reading I came across this quote by Eric Gill, talking about the idea that Catholic Mass and the Incarnation of Christ are the highest form of art:
Being an act of God [the Incarnation] is the greatest of all rhetorical acts and therefore the greatest of all works of art […] In the Incarnation we do not only know a fact of history [that Jesus was born] or a truth of religion [that he is good]; we behold a work of art, a thing made. As a truth of religion It is of primary and fundamental importance. But it is at as a work of art that It has saving power, power to persuade, power to heal, power to rescue, power to redeem.
For Gill, art is ‘rhetorical’ because though beautiful, good art should do more than just look good; art tells us something about ourselves. Eric Gill was an artisan craftsman and a huge Catholic, and his massive personal flaws aside he certainly raises an interesting point here, one that’s observable throughout the Church. Prayer, rituals, Easter and Christmas, these are all theatrical, aesthetic acts. They have costumes and pageantry, a codified formal structure as well as a rhetorical, instructive purpose. I see no reason why Richard’s love of beauty and the artistic can’t be viewed as a fundamentally Catholic thing; it’s not a contradiction, I mean, that a book all about pagan abandon shouldn’t also be extremely Catholic.
More than any of that though, The Secret History’s concerns with sin and fatalism set it within a very Catholic worldview. Richard has sinned, and Bunny’s murder was driven by earthly passions, feelings of jealousy, anger and revenge. Richard’s entry to the world of privilege and intellect resembles a communion, a kind of baptism in sin: he commits himself to learning the secret history, gaining the knowledge and belonging that he so desires, an act which transforms him irrevocably, as you’re transformed irrevocably when you’re baptised. It’s an inverted form of entering the faith, if you will. Even the novel’s overall narrative structure, a confession of sin, seems to me an inherently Catholic discourse.
If you compare Donna Tartt to other famous Catholic novelists you’ll notice how they use themes, fixations and ways of seeing borrowed from their faith to make interesting, well-made novels. Graham Greene uses that fatalistic ‘you’re going to hell’ attitude of the Catholic Church to suggest doom in his thrillers and to ramp up the tension: I once heard him described as a Catholic with all of the damnation, none of the salvation. Just look at the first line of Brighton Rock:
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
Almost the exact kind of fatalism as the prologue to The Secret History:
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
Do you see what I mean? It’s this fatalistic belief that destiny is fixed and that there’s nothing any one of us can do to alter fate. That’s quite Greek as well, granted, but that Greene coincidence is something, isn’t it? The other big English Catholic is of course Evelyn Waugh, and I could write an entire separate essay on the similarities between Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History: young man goes to university, enters exclusive clique, sins, falls, atmosphere of Et in Arcadia ego. Waugh loves the flirtatious elegance of what he calls ‘naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins’ (homosexuality, also in The Secret History). Do you know, the longer this essay continues the more convinced I am that I’m on to something.
It’d be a stretch to say that The Secret History was some kind of catechism, that it was entirely moralistic or “preachy” in the way that you could reasonably expect a religiously-oriented novel to be. I’m not trying to make a point about moral epistemology, really – I’m trying to dissect The Secret History and work out what makes it such a good novel. In any case, it makes a kind of sense to treat the characters as though they exist in a world where the moral framework of Catholic belief is taken seriously. The Secret History remains overtly Classical and Hellenistic, and reading it provoked in me that other great Greek concept, nostalgia, for my A-Level in Classics and the feeling of sharing in special learning that no one else cared enough to invest in. There’s nothing quite like Classics I don’t think, at least in my experience. Yet it does seem to me that The Secret History is also very Catholic, in its attitudes to sin, confession, doom and destiny – more so than its treatment of these themes is Athenian. Then again, I’m not a classicist, I could be wrong. I’m also not a Catholic; but Donna Tartt is, and by choice rather than birth. Surely that has some bearing?
At the risk of sounding blasphemous, the appeal of thinking about a novel as a ‘Catholic’ one is the same as found in ghost stories that take the existence of the supernatural as literal fact. There’s just more scope for interesting situations. And certainly – in a novel with a real-life bacchanalia and a murder – using the framework of Catholicism to ramp up the sinfulness and passion is a fantastic way to make your novel a better made thing. I would have thought so, wouldn’t you?
![Never Mind: Book One of the Patrick Melrose Novels by [St. Aubyn, Edward]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Ui6c0QbGL.jpg)
Entertaining Mr Petre 