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

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

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

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

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

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

Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. 

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

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

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture Credits:

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

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

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

Patience, by Toby Litt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

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

A Taxonomy of Melancholy – ‘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 it as 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

— Jon Petre (@JonPetreDish) July 22, 2019

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. 

Quotes:

• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2019).

 

Image Sources:

• Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy from its Wikipedia page.
• Ducks, Newburyport from Galley Beggar Press website.

Any copyright concerns, let me know.

End of Year Review, 2019

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

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

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

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

Fiction

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

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

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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

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

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. 

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

So many great novels in 2019!

Non-fiction

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

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

Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane.

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

Poetry, Philosophy and Food

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

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

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

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

Closing Thoughts & Resolutions for 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Images:

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

Contact me for any copyright infringement.

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

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

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

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

Gareth E. Rees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A car park.

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ocean Vuong. Credit: Tom Hines

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

Picture Credits

• Tom Hines / oceanvuong.com/about
• Amazon 

 

Contact me for copyright claims. 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Turing.

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

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

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

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

Credits:

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

Images:

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

Putting a pin through pretension: ‘Playing to the Gallery’, Grayson Perry

The world of contemporary art can be a baffling, hard-to-navigate place. Whether you’re an aspiring artist, or just conflicted about whether a visit to the Tate is really worth the exorbitant train fares, it’s difficult to judge the value of art if you think you don’t know anything about it. Playing to the Gallery, Grayson Perry’s short 2014 guide to the art establishment, is here to remind us that to enjoy art you don’t need anything except curiosity.

Grayson Perry.  Image: Swan Films / Channel 4.

I sometimes find myself in a double-bind when I talk about contemporary art, caught wanting to defend art from ill-intentioned attacks whilst also feeling frustrated by the elitism, pretentiousness, and the lack of opportunities that can proliferate in the industry. Grayson Perry has done some fantastic work, therefore, in writing Playing to Gallery to elucidate some of the harder-to-understand aspects of the art world.  There are some brilliant art and artists out there at the moment and it’d be a shame if, for one reason or another, people weren’t interested in going to see them. Perry puts it best in the introduction:

It’s easy to feel insecure around art and its appreciation, as though we cannot enjoy certain artworks if we don’t have a lot of academic and historical knowledge. But if there’s one message I want you to take away it’s that anybody can enjoy art and anybody can have a life in the arts – even me! For even I, an Essex transvestite potter, have been let in by the art-world mafia.

There are plenty of guides out there that offer readers an introduction to thinking about art, but few that I’ve read do so with the same humour and energy as Playing to the Gallery. Most people have a vague idea of what is ‘good’ art and what is ‘bad’. Harder to define is why we think this thing is good and that thing is ugly, an abomination, a total waste of time/money/sense. Not an easy task. Across four short chapters, Perry offers an insider’s perspective on why the art in museums and galleries has come to be called “good”, how the nature and purpose of art has changed in the last hundred-and-fifty years, and where we should start in forming our own ideas of what “good taste” is.

Playing to the Gallery (2014) Grayson Perry.

Perry is a funny, unpretentious writer, and Playing to the Gallery touches on some of the knottiest problems in contemporary art without simplification or condescension. Speaking broadly, one of the most important themes in art from the Moderns to now is self-consciousness. Artists like to make artworks that interrogate themselves, that force us to think about what we’re doing when we go to a gallery and put our hands on our chins, or post pictures of paintings on Instagram. A hundred years ago the Impressionists were asking: what does it mean to paint a portrait when a photograph is an infinitely more realistic way to capture someone’s image? Painting something non-realistically – capturing its essence, not just what it looks like – was the solution, and since then artists have been trying to push the boundaries in every direction. This is why so much contemporary arty is so different to what we’ve been taught is “good” art; that’s also why some if it is naff.  Although Playing to the Gallery dives deep into some complex debates but Perry has the advantage (over, say, a purely academic writer) of speaking from experience, which lends the book a chatty, conversational tone. Much better to discuss art with an intelligent friend than to sit through a tedious lecture. And there are drawings – funny ones.

I think I once got this as a birthday card. Copyright: Grayson Perry (2014).

It is important that people should enjoy art and be challenged by it, because as well as bringing us a lot of joy art can also get us to think more carefully about ourselves and the world.  As Perry explains, this need to give audiences a shake-down was why so many artists in the 1990s tried to shock or outrage their audiences, and why so many of those artists missed the point. Playing to the Gallery is peppered with examples from artists that you’ll be half-familiar with, which is an extremely helpful way of nudging the curious toward learning about more contemporary artists on our own initiative. It matters a lot that books like Playing to the Gallery should be accessible like this, because I recently saw an argument on social media that accused art theorists of deliberately obscuring contemporary art behind a wall of unnecessary jargon. Perry touches on this issue in chapter one, talking about the coded language of “International Art English”, and criticising the art establishment for almost “being scared of everyday clarity”. While I can accept that, like all professions, art requires a technical lexicon, the way that art is talked about can be so intimidating. Art-people must do better to engage people, especially when you realise that the Tate Modern is now the UK’s number-one visitor attraction, beating the British Museum by a few million for the first time in decades. Contemporary art has gone mainstream.

Above all Perry wants to remind us that art is experiential:

People want an outrageous and exciting experience from art and then they want to slightly puzzle over what it’s about.

There is no proscribed way of enjoying art and, despite what any self-appointed tastemaker or tabloid nay-sayer might opine, there is no such thing as objectively good art. Perry quotes Alan Bennett in saying that there should be a sign at the National Gallery: “You don’t have to like all of it”. I would have liked a more unified theory of art from Playing to the Gallery – I found myself thinking towards the end of a chapter, okay, now what? – but I think if Perry were giving us the answers then that would defeat the point. Don’t let people tell you how to enjoy. Here are some clues, but the point is that when viewing or making art you need to be your own judge, because authenticity is what makes the effort worthwhile. You should, however, always listen if someone wants to show you a way of appreciating something they think is beautiful.

Playing to the Gallery also brilliantly investigates whether the avant-garde really exists anymore. The avant-garde is supposed to be the “advance guard”, the cutting-edge: but are artists working in a publicly-funded institution, with their paintings on mugs and postcards in the gift shop, really at the forefront of culture? I don’t see why not, necessarily. Yet one of the biggest problems that we face today is that radical politics have been commodified – Amazon will sell you a T-shirt that says FEMINIST whilst treating their employees (of any gender) like shit. ‘Outrage has been domesticated’, Perry laments. When we live in a world dominated by global capitalism and where truly anything can be called art, are there any more meaningful boundaries to push? Perhaps we should return to authenticity, then: art that was made with integrity and honesty. Perry talks about how, as a child, art functioned as a means of survival for him – it was a place for him to escape to in difficult times, and that later creativity allowed him to express himself as who he was. If an artist has found themselves through their art then that, surely, makes it authentic and truthful and beautiful. Doesn’t it?

Copyright: Grayson Perry (2014).

Art should be fun, which is why children are good at it. Picasso is famous for having said that, at age four, he knew how to be an artist, and that the skill came from knowing how to preserve that creativity as you grew up. One of the loveliest lines in Playing to the Gallery describes the sound of LEGO being poured from a box as the “noise of a child’s mind working”. I really like that.

Get the book here. 

Quotes:

Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery (London: Penguin, 2014)

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• All images of artwork contained in Playing to the Gallery are copyright property of Grayson Perry. The drawings were scanned by me from my book; thumbs edited out.
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Review – ‘The Fat Years’, Chan Koonchung

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

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

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

The Fat Years, Chan Koonchung.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chan Koonchung.

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

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

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

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

 

Image Sources:

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

Who is Patrick Melrose?

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 Mind gives 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.