A Cautionary Tale

Ian McEwan's latest novel, The Children Act, shows us what can happen when you dare to listen to your inner desires, when you take risks and try new paths, when you rock the boat.  According to McEwan the result is not pretty.  Better to stay inside by the fire, repress those nagging urges, and get on with your conventional pale existence.

That's a depressing message in a number of ways. Desire and fantasy are often the breeding grounds for future adventure and happiness.  There are times when the boat needs to be rocked because like it or not the boat is on a disastrous course.  And of course so many people don't have that comfortable well stocked and fortified position to hide in.  They're out there in the world without the protection of an approved and comfortable role.

The Children Act is a novel about a judge and the law.  What could be more conventional, more about restrictions, prohibitions, and societal approval?  The three main characters (a female judge, her husband, a teenage boy whose illness and religion create a legal controversy) each take a tiny step outside their conventional boundaries.  The husband has a short and abortive affair (reminiscent of the sad and funny wedding night scene in On Chesil Beach), the teenager temporarily abandons the protection, limitations, and comforts of a strict religious lifestype, and the wife (childless herself) opens up to a true emotional bond with the young boy. All three beat a hasty retreat.  They are simply unwilling to endure the hardship of finding their own way and dealing with the contradictions and discomfort of reconciling inner and outer lives.  How sad.

The same goes for McEwan as an author these days.  The prose is crystalline, very carefully laid out. The plot is very well ordered.  It's all so well put together, and yet devoid of passion and raw emotion.  I lose patience after a while.  I want someone to scream, someone to make a serious error that they will learn from, someone to dig inside themselves and be uncomfortable for a while.  It just doesn't happen.  It's a depressing and limited world view that even in late middle age makes me bristle.

It's the quintessential conservative message.  I didn't like hearing it from my parents, and I still don't like hearing it as an adult.

Iambic Tetrameter

A novel in verse?  In old-fashioned iambic tetrameter?  Who would dare to try?

Vikram Seth did in 1986.  The Golden Gate is a novel written in traditional stanzas of iambic tetrameter. Experimental, retro, daring, historical ... all rolled into one.  The story takes place in the Bay Area in the early 80's.  Yes, it's a bit dated now, but many of the same issues are still kicking about out here.  Tech boom, the intersection of politics and technology, income inequality, sexual identity, personal integrity.  The more things change.

For me there was plenty of delight in the verse itself. It's at times corny (especially the rhyme schemes), pleasingly rhythmic, and often very clever.  Following a traditional plot through a few hundred pages of verse is an unexpected pleasure. Indeed, prose is only one way of skinning the cat. Sometimes particularly good prose, prose that offers its own pleasures is the real point.  And here it's verse, to be appreciated for its own merits. Words for words sake.  There's pleasure in just putting words together in pleasing and clever ways.

I don't think the character and plot issues are particularly profound, but Seth offers us a very pleasurable verbal pastry.  Savor it.  Enjoy it for what it is: a forward looking retrogression, a look at the present through an ancient literary lens.  The Brits endowed India with a brilliant literary heritage, and here Seth exhibits a rare fluency and reverence. It's like a modern composer writing a traditional fugue.  It's a tribute to the past, a reinterpretation, a new version of something old.  That kind of constraint has its limits, but it's an interesting niche.

Next, a new short story in Middle English?  A 21st century Yiddish classic?

Meanwhile, anxiously awaiting Seth's overdue A Suitable Girl, the sequel to his epic novel A Suitable Boy. Originally expected in 2013, it is now slated for publication in 2016. No matter how long, I'll read it.  Total immersion in another world.  I'm ready.

Enon

Sometimes just plain really good writing is enough to carry the day.  Tinkers won the Pulitzer, and I can't quibble with that decision.  Enon, Paul Harding's next novel is equally as good.  A small family is utterly destroyed by a cycling accident that kills the 14-year-old daughter.  This short novel follows the father for the calendar year after the incident.  It's not a pretty picture.  The marriage ends quickly and abruptly.  He descends into a hell of guilt, grief, and substance abuse.  By the end he does reemerge into the light, but very much wounded and transformed.  Life will never be the same.

Of course the roots of much of the trouble were there before the accident, but sometimes fate has a way of intervening and tipping the balance. The book contains many reminiscences of his relationship with his daughter.  Of course they are slanted and a bit unrealistic.  But that's the nature of grief.  We mourn what we've lost at the same time that we're figuring out what that loss might be.

Maybe the best way to recommend the writing is to quote a few passages at length.  These appear near the end of the novel. I hope that the act of copying them here will teach me just a little about good writing.

I walked across the meadow and into the woods, into the Enon River sanctuary near where my grandfather and I and Kate and I had fed the birds from our hads so many times. I imagined the birds dropping dead from the trees until the ground was covered in a tangled mass of corpses, the beak and broken wings and soiled feathers and needle-thin bones of one animal interlaced and looped with those of the next and all the bodies knitted together. And I imagined that the plaited bodies might be lifted in a single pane and draped over my shoulders and clasped together at my throat with claws and worn like a cape or robe. It would be very light, made as it was from feathers and hollow bones. It would be very long and I would wander from the tame boundaries of the sanctuary out into a real wilderness with a great train following me that would comb up insects and grass and bark and snag on stumps, and that would constantly force me to stop and turn to gather or yank free or untangle, only to have it catch again a moment later on another barb. Bones would snap and wings unscrew from their sockets and I would leave a trail of looping feathers and scattered limbs. My thrashings would knot the garment as much as they rent it. The garment would attract living, wild birds as I passed below their nests and they would alight on it and become entangled. Over time, the garment would be transformed, expelling those first, tame birds and accumulating dark pheasants and crows and elusive little songbirds. After many years, the cape would no longer contain any of the birds from which it had been originally formed. It would become more and more gruesome as it metamorphosed from entirely dead birds to a mixture of the dead and the living. It would writhe and twist with black and brown and flutter scarlet and yellow and purple.  The snared birds would peck one another bare and pick out one another's eyes and preen themselves and eat one another an defecate upon one another and couple, all while they screeched and sang and made nests and brooded over eggs that were not theirs but had boiled up beneath them through the thickets of bones and plumage, even as their own eggs had sifted away to hatch somewhere else or fallen from the cloak onto the ground or in cold puddles, where their quickening yolks would cool and cloud to mere jelly.  Sparrows would raise waxwings and crows beget finches and there would be generations of birds that were born, lived, sang, struggled, and died wholly ensnared in that monstrous cloak.

And from just a little later:

My grandfather always told me that whether or not I believed in religion or God or any kind of meaning or purpose to our lives, I should always think of my life as a gift. Or that's what he told me his father had told him and that his father had told him, In a tone of voice that suggested that such a way of thinking had seemed to him as remote and as equally magnificent and impossible as it did to me, even as he passed it along as practical advice. But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and set stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.

The writing takes on a life of its own.  The rhythms and sounds are often more important than the meaning of the words.  Yes, nothing much happens in this book.  Bur read it as poetry, and enjoy the creative use of language. I'll happily read anything he publishes.

 

Extrapolation

The Tenth of December made such a splash (and was IMHO so good) I'm continuing to catch up with Saunders's earlier work.  In Persuasion Nation (2006) is another collection of stories.  While not as varied, far ranging, and ambitious as The Tenth of December, these stories nonetheless are inventive and provocative.  Saunders excels at creating a particular slant, a certain view that is key to each story.  He requires a bit of trust and patience from his readers. At first you may not know where you are, what is real, what is not. But through skillful and creative use of language Sauders manages to paint a singular picture in each story.  It's a picture you view at first from only an inch away. Gradually you pull back and get the full image and the larger significance.

Saunders is particularly good at positing new future realities based on extrapolation of troubling trends observed in our present. In other words, if we take these disturbing present-day tendencies and follow them into the future, we might get this peculiar picture. He presents the image with verbal nuances and tricks, and part of the fun is gradually figuring out in each story what we're actually reading: working back from the strangeness of what we read and finding today's familiar reality embedded in the narrative.

It's a formula that can get tiresome, but there is plenty of inventiveness, humor, pathos, and just plain good writing here. My Amendment is a brilliant satire of conservative view on gender.  In Persuasion Nation is a terrific send up of ubiquitous marketing images. Brad Corrigan, American is a telling exaggeration of current trends in reality television and pop culture.

For someone so solidly entrenched in academic and highfalutin' literary circles Saunders is surprisingly in touch with popular culture. His eyes are open, and he's not spending all of his time in the ivory tower.  He's out among us observing, indeed perhaps taking notes as a secret agent that reports back the latest to headquarters. I hope HQ is listening.

Father Knows Best

Mention the name Amis to a reader today, and everyone assumes you're referring to Martin.  But let's not forget Kingsley Amis, Martin's father.  OK please,  we're not exactly talking Chaucer here. Kingsley was born in 1922 and died in 1995.  He wrote his fiction from the 50's to the early 90's.

Lucky Jim was his first novel, and it remains my all-time favorite novel about academia.  It's simply hilarious but also dead serious.  If you don't know it, just get it and read it. If you've ever lived in academia, you'll laugh out loud.

The Russian Girl is one of his last novels (from the early 90's).  I vaguely remember reading it when it came out, but it didn't make much of an impression.  When I saw a paperback version in a used bookstore a few years ago, I couldn't resist picking it up.  Not sure why it took me this long to get to it, but I'm so glad I did.

First of all, Kingsley Amis has to be the master of the British comic novel of the second half of the twentieth century.  It's P. G. Wodehouse combined with Fawlty Towers. Yes, it's so so British and all that, very proper and buttoned down.  The contrived style can be a bit off-putting at times, but do try to go with it. Think Maggie Smith at her best. But there's real heart, genuine modesty, and strong opinions to be reckoned with.  And then there's the writing itself, which will delight you unexpectedly.

OK it's old-fashioned, it's a bit sexist.  Yes, he was an alcoholic with all the issues that come along with that particular shortcoming.  But there is also genuine craft here, a writer that took care with words, with structure, and with ideas. In The Russian Girl, Amis manages to express some very serious thoughts on how various worlds can collide in an individual life.  There's our everyday outer life (the face we show to society), there's literature (and art in general), there's politics, there's academia, there's our inner emotional life, there's sexuality.  All of these overlap in countless ways, and those overlaps while sometimes fruitful, often simply contaminate one another. How do we sort it all out?

Art is art; life is life.  We do our best with personal morality.  Why confuse morality with politics and literature?  We vote, we have political affiliations, as citizens we must make expedient political decisions.  Why mix that up with art or personal morality?  Sorting all that out is the real subject of this book, and Kingsley's advice is well taken.  Do the best you can at the moment.  Don't make connections between worlds that are not there in the actual real-life context.  Artificial and contrived connections are dangerous and may lead to serious error.  And real contradictions and conflicts are inevitable, and we must be prepared to deal with them, no matter how confusing.

Funny, but that's not the whole story.

Most of all, Kingsley shows tremendous faith in our ability to get it right in the long run, or at least be more correct as we stumble down the road of life.  Yes, the book has some plot contrivances. Yes, it all doesn't quite play out believably, but then again what's so realistic about Solzhenitsyn's fiction?  Yes, there are deux ex machina moments, characters that are introduced simply to express an idea, and then they disappear.  I get it.  In the end I was happy to know Amis's thoughts, and I was reassured with his assessment that though in the small scale we often get it so so wrong, we are always capable of growth and insight.  No matter what bad choices we've made in the past, we can continue to learn.  If we're willing to pay the price (without resentment) for those bad choices, we can begin again ... and again ... and again as needed.  Maybe it's the alcoholic needing forgiveness or trying hard to reconcile his capabilities with his failings.

Is it all about redemption?  Perhaps. I haven't read much of Martin Amis, but what I have read (and I get the tremendous intelligence, the literary skill) makes me despair that redemption is just another illusion.  For now I prefer Kingsley's outlook, and I will dream on. It might be painful to truly look at ourselves, but in the long run it's the only way to find a better path. Pain itself cannot be the only end.

I prefer to think of life as a comedy. Full of errors, pain and pathos, but nonetheless a comedy.

Once Upon A Time

Murakami has given us a little bonus, a little something extra for his American fans.  It's actually a new American edition of a 2008 Japanese novella, and it’s handsomely and cleverly designed with many colorful and striking illustrations.  Kudos to the designer, Chip Kidd.  The Strange Library is a modern fairy tale.  It contains none of the modern cultural references that Murakami is so fond of in his novels.  It’s quite abstract, timeless, yet narrowly focused.  The symbols are striking and thought provoking.  It’s about growing up (as so many fairy tales are) and the changes and sadness that come with leaving childhood behind.

The typical protagonist in a Murakami novel is a young adult male, alone, rather withdrawn and prone to contemplation and stillness.  This tale might be seen as a prequel of sorts, an account of how a more-or-less normal child might grow into that particular adult state.

It’s certainly not my favorite Murakami, but it’s worth a read. It will take you less than an hour.  You could almost read it aloud to a child, albeit not a very young child. At least it’s worth thinking about in that way, as if we were reading it to the child in ourselves.  Don’t look for the obvious.  Just let the mood and the crazy symbols resonate in your mind.

I’ll bet you’ll want to read it again.  Just like the child that wants to hear that same book over and over.