Corrag

Title: Corrag
Author: Susan Fletcher
ISBN: 978-2-00-732159-9
Published: Fourth Estate (HarperCollins)
Date: 2010

Book quote:


“I walked. I made my way further down into the dusky glen. My skirts dragged their branches, which dragged their own branches now. It was a noisy load to pull which grew louder with each step as it gathered more leaves, more peat and stones. I looked back on my trail. It was tatters and cow muck, and I turned to rid myself of it but by turning so did my skirts, and I turned like a dog that seeks its own tail. I could not reach the branches. I stretched, but they moved away as I stretched. For a moment or two I turned, and turned.

I stopped, considered this.

A spider hung down from my hair on its thread.”
___________________________________________________________


Corrag, having been condemned as a witch, is in prison awaiting her execution. The setting is Scotland, 1692. Charles Leslie, a clergyman from Ireland, interviews her regarding the events at the historical Glencoe massacre of 38 members of the McDonald clan just prior to this. Charles has Jacobite sympathies and is gathering information to incriminate the reigning Dutch king, William of Orange, with an aim of re-instating James 2nd exiled in France (William is thought to be ultimately behind the massacre). Corrag agrees to tell him of the event, with the proviso that he listen to the story of her life as well – which he consents to. For about two weeks he visits her daily to listen to her story, the transcript of which forms the bulk of the text. Interspersed amongst these are his own letters to his wife back in Ireland, which describe his own, increasingly sympathetic, reactions to Corrag’s narration.


Corrag describes her own life as being in four parts – her early life with her mother, (Cora), her ‘running life’ with her mare as she travelled north, her life in Glencoe and her life in the prison. While the description of life on the margins of village life in England is engaging enough, the second chunk describing the journey north is the point at which the novel starts to become tedious. It is in severe need of editing. Just how many times do we need to be told how her hair flies out behind her, or how her skirts billow out, or how her mare gallops on? An originally effective passage is rendered dull by the time it’s been recycled so many times. Even the exchanges and interactions that occur are more noted for their (much-discussed) emotional impact on the narrator than being simply laid out and described adequately.


Luckily, there’s a marked change in the quality of writing as Corrag settles down in Glencoe, and Fletcher feels free to do what she seems to be best at – minute observation of sensory input: olfactory, auditory and visual. It’s noticeable that tactile and gustatory senses are barely represented, and indeed this can be seen as appropriate for a character who lives on the very remotest margins of society and whose interaction with others is a strictly non-contact sport. The stillness of the life in the glen seems to allow for some very good passages, which are mercifully free of reflection on emotional effects they induce in the narrator. The colour of a buttercup, if described well enough, is more than sufficient to keep the reader engaged. The passage I picked for the book quote almost marks the start of this phase.


Unfortunately, just as we’re being lulled into appreciation, in pops Charles Leslie with his letters to his wife. They would be a fine (indeed much-needed) alternative perspective, were it not that so much of their bulk is filled with his appreciation of ‘how well she speaks’. In effect, how well the passage preceding was written. One gets a terrible image of the author jumping up and down every now and then saying ‘look, didn’t I do that well, did you like that bit, are you sure you saw it?’ which is annoying, to say the least.


The other major problem I had with it was the anachronistic diction. 17th century diction verbatim would be hard on the modern reader for the duration of a novel, so I understand the need to update and simplify. However, certain very modern usages should really be eschewed. For example the use of ‘like’ as a conjunction in the place of ‘as’ (a modern American import to British English) leaped off the page and slapped me at some point. On a different level, the word ‘hag’ (much-repeated in the book) had, even by Spencer’s time, aligned itself with the connotation of ‘old’ and ‘ugly’ as well as Devil-inspired, so to imply that it was applied frequently to both Corrag and her mother (a child and an apparently very attractive woman) is not convincing.


There are also gross anachronisms in concepts. Corrag says of herself settling down in the highlands:


“I think, also that I healed. (…) I felt myself soften and tend to myself. I don’t think I had grieved, till Glencoe, or been kind to myself. I don’t think I had sat down and thought of Cora, and truly allowed myself to be sad.”


While the spiritually restorative virtues of the admission of grief were without doubt evident to people in the 17th century, they would never have phrased it like that, much less an unlettered herbalist. This is straight out of a 21st century self-help manual.


Which leads on to the lack of differentiation between the characters’ reported speech. Corrag has a vocabulary that far exceeds what might reasonably be expected. (What 17th century peasant would have a lexicon including Latin-derived ‘mucus’ and ‘grandeur’?) Mostly it’s not noticeable, but when she sits down with the McDonald woman Sarah and we have a rare moment of sustained dialogue, they more resemble a couple of college girls discussing ‘life n’ stuff’ than a witch who is so uncivilised she laps water from the lake like a cat, and a wild Highland lass. Discussing ‘politics?’ the term ‘politic’ might have been in relatively common usage (though as its meaning was different it wouldn’t have featured much in the oeuvre of the two women concerned) but ‘polyticks’ in its roughly modern sense had only really been around for about 30 years prior to this - and that in lettered circles. (There are mentions as far back as 1529 but very rare). This is not just quibbling on the use of a single word – it’s the concept, and the appropriateness of the subject’s consideration by the characters, which is disturbing.


All this is sounding like a very negative review, and indeed this was not a book I enjoyed myself. It does however have its good points, and I know that a lot of readers will like it and want more of the same. The sensory descriptive passages are genuinely effective and well-rendered. Overall, the tension is kept up more or less via the ever-present question of whether Corrag will really be burned at the stake – you can always tell whether you’re really intrigued by whether you’re tempted to flick forward (which I was). Sympathy for the character is created, we do care. I also found the images from the novel lingering in my imagination after closing the book, which is always a good sign.


I think this novel would in particular appeal to young females, who enjoy a good romantic read. If, however, you tend to be a bit of a nit-picker with semantics, or have much knowledge of realistic 17th century prose, or are much given to textual analysis, or indeed if you’re an editor, this book might well annoy you. Susan Fletcher won the Whitbread 2004 First Novel Award for her first novel Eva Green, as well as the 2005 Betty Trask Prize. Alas, I don’t think there will be many awards for Corrag, but the potential is definitely there for future works.

Burning Bright

Title: Burning Bright
Author: Tracy Chevalier
ISBN: 978-0-452-28907-9
Published: First Plume Printing
Date: 2008
Book quote:

“My songs and pictures do not become memories – they are always there to be looked at. And they are not illusions, but physical manifestations of worlds that do exist.”
_________________________________________________________________________

Burning Bright is a pleasant, enjoyable read. It’s a good story that follows the fortunes of the Kellaway family from Dorsetshire: chairmakers come to Lambeth in 1792 London at the invitation of flamboyant Philip Astley, the great circus owner. The friendship and interactions of the son Jem, and Maggie, the London girl who lives nearby, form the emotional backbone of the plot.

Unfortunately, their reason for existence is their peculiar friendship with William Blake. “Unfortunately”, not because Blake is an unsuitable subject for a historical novel, and certainly not because the novel is underresearched. Quite the opposite.


For me, this book falls between several seats. The primary impression it gives is that the author is fascinated by Blake and his works. The main motivation behind the novel seems to be to paint scenes from his life, and to bring our understanding closer to the nuances and feelings, the sights and sounds, of his London. It feels like a Blake student writing a heavily-disguised essay on Blake's life and works, while being ceaselessly interrupted by the very lively characters that have almost inconveniently sprung into life to illustrate it.

The long walks that take up a great deal of space within the novel are typical of this. A good example is Jem and Maggie following the funeral procession for Blake’s mother, all the way from Lambeth, through Soho, Smithfields and on to Bunhill Fields. The section takes up 20 pages of the total 308, and its purpose is almost entirely to describe different areas of London – by extension, areas that Blake wrote about directly or indirectly. Now, there is a wealth of first-hand descriptive material on London life from this period, as well as almost endless commentaries in the social, political and literary contexts. Were I studying Blake, I would rather refer to these than to a historical novel, and were I simply reading a novel, I would prefer it not to meander about into places it has no need to. Again, if one knows the references the book alludes to, the narrative merely appears strained – and if one doesn’t then the references are simply lost.


Fair enough, the central theme of the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are linked throughout the novel with Jem and Maggie’s struggles to reconcile themselves to the ‘grey’ areas between black and white, good or bad. Likewise, the topics the Blake works deal with are fundamental to the process of growing up, both for individuals and for countries, and as such are appropriate for a central core to a book featuring adolescents and the French Revolution. The plot is woven carefully, the details painstakingly accurate. But the overall impression is of someone dancing round the central maypole of the themes, not really looking where they’re going because they’ve got their nose stuck into a reference book.


That not only Jem and Maggie, but even the peripheral characters are in Technicolor 3D and empathy (or antipathy) for them is created seemingly effortlessly, despite the obsession with the literary subject, bears witness to Chevalier’s prodigious talent as a writer. The briefest mention of any personae who step through the book is believable, the lightest touch brushing in a coachman, a passing button salesman.


Compared to this virtuoso technique in creation of unseen worlds, the sticky-tape-and-superglue attitude to combining the Blakes with the Kellaways and Butterfields appears even clunkier than it is. I was wondering whether the infamous Blake couplings in the garden would crop up, and sure enough there they were, right at the forefront to grab the reader’s attention. Although in a sense this could be used perfectly to illustrate differences (fitting in within the Innocence and Experience theme) between this and other sexual encounters, it is abandoned with only the lightest of references, which anyone unfamiliar with Blake’s philosophy will probably not pick up on.


On the whole, I’d say if you’re not overly familiar with Blake and want a good read, I’d recommend the book. It slips by pleasingly and is a delight to the imagination. If you’re an avid Blake fan you’ll probably enjoy it, too, as you’ll pick up on all the little pieces and not mind the children running through it making a noise. It’s only if you like your historical novels to be woven into place with some security of perspective that you might run into a bit of trouble.

The Murder Room

Title: The Murder Room

Author: PD James

ISBN: 0 141 01553 5

Published: Penguin Books

Date: 2003

The reviews snippets on the cover-jacket of this book promise that its:

“Genuinely chilling, a delight”
“Wholly engrossing, scintillates from the start”
“A totally absorbing read, a detective thriller of superb quality.”

Don’t be fooled.

I can’t remember a more soporific read. By comparison my school geography textbook was thrilling. I did make it though to the zimmer-frame supported end, but only after a limp of a read during which Hubby exclaimed many times he’d never seen me take so long over a book.


This was the first honest-to-goodness plain murder mystery I’d read, and I was expecting… well, a few murders, and a bit of detection. Was that wrong? The first victim doesn’t even come along until page 151. Almost the whole bulk of the book is made up of characterisation. There is some slight movement, but really the barest minimum possible. Some would say, far less than would be sensible. Particularly under the circumstances – that is, that of it being a supposed thriller.

There’s nothing wrong with characterisation. I’m all for it. It’s when its characterisation at the exclusion of absolutely everything else that it may be a problem. The plot… well as there’s precious little of it I won’t give anything away but suffice it to say it’s an investigation around murders connected to the Dupayne Museum, an establishment dedicated to the history of the inter-war years in the UK.


To give it its due, the book was extremely useful to me at the time, as I had to write a piece on the theme of “creating a detective” - and indeed it’s a great model of construction and well worth studying in that context. However, I don’t expect this particular aspect will be of much use to most readers.

While reading the novel, I couldn’t help reflecting how much of it is geared towards the television series. I may be mistaken but it felt more like a background character guide for the actors than anything else. Indeed, were the action sliced down to that which is actually there, it could make for a reasonably choppy bit of text. Sieved down to a screenplay of less than a quarter of the length, with the novel as background reading, it might start to make sense. I’ve never read a PD James before (outlook’s pretty bleak for future readings, too) and barely glanced at the TV series but even so it all strikes me as the only reason anyone would want to tackle ‘thriller’ writing in this way. Some passages in particular ring little alarm bells. When the pathologist enters the scene, there’s an in-depth passage about how he’s aged, looking different. Different from what? He’s only just appeared. Of course, the novels too are part of a series, but even so it reaches out like a slap in the face. Was it geared towards the actor’s changing characteristics, or perhaps a change of cast?

Also surprising was the fact that some of the descriptive passages are very evocative, not to mention almost lyric. Once again I don’t know the background, but in the absence of such knowledge I’d guess the writer was primarily a poet, who’s had to change tack for practical reasons. Again, not something I was expecting, but at least a pleasurable surprise this time.

If you’re a PD James fan, you’ll probably think this review is heresy, utter a few exclamations of disgust and move on. If however you’re not, and are looking for a thrilling read, this is not a book I’d recommend.

Cloud Atlas

Title: Cloud Atlas
Author: David Mitchell
ISBN: 0-340-83237-1
Published: Hodder and Stoughton (Scepter)
Date: 2004

Book quote:
“I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.”

________


Cloud Atlas is not one book, but six. Moreover, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, so attempting to review this is (to use a gross understatement) daunting.


The several books in question are as follows.


1. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, an 19th century notary who is on a journey aboard The Prophetess, captained by the barely-human Captain Molyneaux with the aid of his barbaric first mate Boerhaave. This story is abruptly (quite literally, we later find) cut in half. The first part opens the novel (Cloud Atlas), and the second part closes it. The script is discovered in Belgium by the narrator of the next book in the sequence. He journeys from a set of remote islands near New Zealand towards San Francisco, though we never see him get further than Hawaii.


2. The second novel comprises the 17 (9+8) letters from Robert Frobisher to Rufus Sixsmith, in Letters from Zedelghem. This too is cut into two halves, the second part coming just before the final instalment of the aforementioned Pacific Journal. Robert Frobisher is a talented, louche young composer who travels in the 1930s to Belgium, with the aim of becoming an amanuensis to the ageing composer Vyvyan Ayres. His letters to Sixsmith (his lover back in England) describe his work with Ayres, his affair with Ayres’s wife, and his own composition work. Frobisher’s first-person narrative is a sensory cornucopia, abounding above all in auditory imagery.

3. The third piece is Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery – itself apparently (we later discover) a manuscript submitted to a publisher. This of course is also cut into two. Louisa Rey, a reporter for a low-brow newspaper, meets an ageing Sixthmith in 1975 when she is stuck in a lift with him. On his instigation, she starts an investigation into a cover-up of negative safety reports on a new nuclear reactor. The consequences of her attentions and those of others result in extremely aggressive protective measures from Seaboard (the company building the reactor) and Luisa is soon running for her life. This piece is written as a fast-paced thriller.

4. The fourth book is The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. This is set more or less in the present day, and is a first-person narrative by an ageing vanity publisher, Timothy Cavendish. Cavendish stumbles upon fame and fortune accidentally when one of his (as ever) unsuccessful authors defenestrates a hostile critic of his novel and is locked up in jail. The book becomes a bestseller via the publicity, but Cavendish is incompetent with the finances and after a while his publisher’s brothers arrive to dust him down for half the proceeds. To avoid this, Cavendish flees, picking up one last manuscript that has been sent in for his consideration for review: Half-Lives: the First Louisa Rey Mystery. He goes to his brother for help, who seems (eventually) to offer it but in fact has him locked away in an old people’s home, from which he cannot escape. This narrative is cut in half at the point where Cavendish is in the home and suffers a stroke.

5. The fifth is An Orison of Sonmi -451. Sonmi-451 is a fabricant (genetically engineered clone) awaiting execution for insubordination. She is recording her experiences for posterity on an ‘orison’ – an egg-like object that captures her narrative and hologram. The setting is Korea (now called Nea So Copros) some time in the future, after the ‘skirmish’. We learn that there are dealands (rapidly expanding) where life is no longer possible due to irradiation and complete depletion of resources. Fabricants are made for every necessity – Sonmi is a type engineered for service in a fast-food diner, others work clearing up deadlands, processing food, manufacturing – anything the humans don’t want to do. The job of humans is to consume, spend, and earn. They have ‘souls’ implanted as chips in their fingers, and are constrained to ‘debit’ them each month to a certain amount, or they get exiled to the unprotected outer world where they soon die of radiation poisoning. Sonmi’s narrative is interrupted when she is watching an old film of the narrative that has gone before, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish – the film itself being interrupted at the point where Cavendish’s narrative last stopped. Sonmi’s narrative is the transcript of the archivist’s questions to her and her answers.


6. The sixth narrative is Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After. Chronologically it’s the most forward in time of all the narratives. It’s also in the centre of Cloud Atlas and is narrated in a single sweep. The piece set at an unspecified time in the future, after the ‘Fall’. ‘Civ’lize’ has been wiped away, and scattered tribes inhabit the worlds in varying degrees of barbarity. The narration is made by an ageing Zach’ry, who recounts the events of his past to his son. The setting the big island of Hawaii. He tells of how a neighbouring tribe, the Kona, murdered most of his family, and then how the most advanced tribe, the ‘Prescients’ had one woman come over to live with them for a while, as an anthropological study. Zach’ry and the Prescient woman (Meronym) travel up to Mauna Kea, and find the old observatories – Zach’ry confronts his devils in the high atmosphere. The story ends in almost total devastation as Zach’ry’s tribe is wiped out by the Kona tribe, and the Meronym gets news that the Prescients have succumbed to a plague or disease and are almost extinct.


All of these except the inmost layer of the onion (and the one most forward in time) ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’’ are cut in half and stacked like a vast club-sandwich, so the transverse cut yields the pattern of:

1 2 3 4 5 (6) 5 4 3 2 1

Chronologically, the ‘older’ parts are on the outside of the novel, and the ‘newer’ parts on the inside. There are two comparisons which could be made with this. Organically, that would be the way a piece would grow, from the inside out (the youngest parts of the onion are at the core). It also reminds me of a description in the C.S. Lewis children’s series ‘Narnia’, where the equivalent of Heaven is depicted as an onion that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The further up the mountain at the heart of the novel you go, the larger the landscape. I have a funny feeling this particular structure might have been in the author’s mind when crafting Cloud Atlas.

The pieces have been called ‘pastiches’ and are certainly (mostly) in recognisable styles, but they are all so consummately crafted they’ve long since transcended pastiche into a crystallisation of the art form. I have to admit I can’t offhand think of a style equivalent for ‘Letters from Zedelghem’ – perhaps that’s Mitchell’s own contribution, perhaps could be called Sensory Interpretative because that’s what it does. I was going to add ‘Prose’ on the end but it’s more akin to poetry, mostly. Otherwise there’s the 19th century diarist, the thriller, the modern comedy, the dystopian future with the corporatised language, and the post-apocalyptic narrative with both language and understanding in tatters. They’re too well done to be being mocked. They’re being revelled in. As much as the narration of Sonmi is chilling, Half-Lives is thrilling, and as for Timothy Cavendish – well that was so funny I nearly had hysterics and had to be brought a glass of water and a bunch of tissues.


Not knowing what I was letting myself in for, when Adam Ewing’s narrative stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, I thought (my copy being a library book) some pieces must have dropped out, and started nosing about for scraps, ironically, under the bed (you’ll have to read the book to find out the reference). It was only after careful checking of the page numbering that I carried on, entirely doubtful as to what was happening. Another few hundred pages and things started to clear – just a little.

Mitchell has apparently said that the theme of the book is ‘predacity’. This he’s explained as people and nations preying on each other – but as there’s no such word as ‘predacity’ (it’s predation), I wonder if it was a joke on ‘predating’ as well. For those are the two main themes: consumerism and the nature of Time.

The books influence and reflect each other. The one distinguishing mark that most of the protagonists bear, the comet-shaped birthmark, cements the notion that they are the same souls being reborn over and over. Somehow, the memories of their past lives surface occasionally. Sonmi remembers Louisa Rey’s car accident as she sails off an embankment. Louisa Rey remembers the sounds of ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’ composed by Robert Frobisher, although she has never heard it before. In Sloosha’s crossin’ Zach’ry wonders how all the dead people are going to be reborn into his tribe again when there are no more children to be born – but it is he who decides that Meronym is a reincarnation of Sonmi. However, while they are all linked, there are doubts about the reality of all of them – only the tale that’s being recounted at the time seems to have any weight, by virtue of its immediacy.

Adam Ewing’s journal has some notations and hints in it from his son, so it’s slightly dubious as to whether it was really written as a journal, and Robert Frobisher mentions this. The same issues surround the ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ narrative – most of it is in the first person by Zach’ry but at the end we’re suddenly confronted by his son telling the story after he’s dead, and reflecting on how much of it is true. As he says, “Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true. The stuff ‘bout Meronym and the Prescient was mostly true, I reck’n.” Robert Frobisher’s letters don’t seem to show any cause to be doubted, but for some reason I can’t fathom Sixthmith does not read the last eight letters, making them in a sense invisible until Louisa opens them forty years later. Louisa’s story is itself a piece of fiction sent to a vanity publisher. Sonmi’s orison is no doubt recording truth, but the details of the story reveal hidden ‘truth’ behind ‘truth’ and one is left with the feeling that all the ground has been taken away and we’re not quite sure where to stand.


So the past influences the present, but the future seems to as well, by implication of the structure of the book. The only sure point is the present, what is happening now. Clues and threads weave through the tapestry, like the ships in the book. The ‘Prophetess’ that Ewing sails on (and Louisa Rey passes by on her travels and experiences an unknown tingle at) is still metaphorically sailing as the miraculously preserved ship of the ‘Prescients’. Foresight is in a way the same as hindsight – both transcend into the spiritual world when they span generations.


The other theme, less originally, is consumerism. In the world of empire, Ewing ponders the fate of aboriginal tribes wiped out of existence. Dr Goose opines that as they can’t keep up with the whites, they’re being given a helping hand out by being slaughtered. In a Pacific island they stop at, their host for the evening explains to them how they are inculcating ‘industry’ to the islanders by getting them addicted to tobacco.

‘You must understand, sir, your typical Polynesian spurns industry because he’s got no reason to value money. “If I hungry,” says he, “I go pick me some, or catch me some. If I cold, I tell woman, ‘Weave!’”. Idle hands, Mr Ewing, & we both know what work the Devil finds for them. But by instilling in the slothful so-an’-sos a gentle craving for this harmless leaf, we give him an incentive to earn money, so he can buy his baccy – not liquor, mind, just baccy – from the Mission trading-post. Ingenious, wouldn’t you say?’


The white humans' lust to spoil the Polynesian idyll (idle) is echoed throughout. More and more items are created, themselves creating a desire for their possession widening in ever-more-futile circles. A typical example of this is the doll-fabricant in Sonmi’s narrative, made to be played with by human girls. But like all fashions the doll soon pales and the girl’s parents dispose of this living being by casting it off a high bridge. Later, we learn that the whole scene itself has been structured and set before Sonmi in order to produce a desire for revenge within her. The desire for revenge itself is in turn engineered to create an enemy-figure for the humans where there was none in the first place. In a final twist, although the enemy-figure is created through this elaborate chain of artificial manufacturing, it also brings forth the seeds of the illusion-makers and arch-consumer-planner’s downfall. Thus the ‘Smart’ that upholds ‘Civ’lise’ is indeed also its destroyer, as Zach’ry finds out.


To attempt at comprehensive review of this book on a mere single reading is folly, and this review is certainly many miles from comprehensive. Cloud Atlas is vastly intriguing and written by a talent so vast one gets the image of someone with a head at least the size of a watermelon writing it – else how could all those threads possibly be brought together like that? It’s stunning. However, I wonder how many of Mitchell’s readers quite understand what is going on. I certainly felt I had missed many links, even though I could feel them there, pulling me along. I know from remarks and reviews on less taxing books that the average reader simply isn’t capable of dealing with this degree of complexity. However, that is where the original sheer brilliance of the mastery of the various styles comes in. It doesn’t really matter. The core messages aren’t so hard to grasp, even if you don’t know where you’ve got them from. Anyone can sit back and simply enjoy the ride. And when someone figures out how exactly it’s made and what it’s going on about, please let me know.

The Last Dickens

Title: The Last Dickens
Author: Matthew Pearl
ISBN: 3 2300 01461423 0
Published: Random House Group Limited (Harvill Secker)
Date: 2009

(Book quote)

Dickens laughed at his hesitation. “Oh, you may well tell the truth, Mr. Branagan! One more blasted ‘Dickensite’ and I may tip over from the weight. Nothing terrifies a writer like meeting his reader for the first time.”
_______



Alas, something seems to have happened to Matthew Pearl in between The Dante Club and The Last Dickens… and no, I haven’t read The Poe Shadow yet so maybe that was it. While his first novel was bursting with impassioned energy, this third one has more than a little of world-weariness to it. The love of words and tapestry has faded, and instead there is a plod-plod of pandering to popular taste, a rather bloodless hacking-out of a story. Perhaps the most depressing thing about it is that on my copy’s cover, there’s an endorsement of the book by that abomination currently smeared over the fair face of the written word (I won’t call it literature), Dan Brown. Dan Brown! He has about as much right to give weight to a fine writer like Pearl as a rooting sow has to give lessons to the Queen in etiquette – but endorse he does, as it helps sell books. To have submitted to this, Pearl must be willing to do anything.


The very subject of the book seems to echo the depression and subjugation the writer appears to be toiling under. If focuses around Dickens’s final (unfinished) novel Edwin Drood. Chief protagonists include Dickens himself (mainly on his American reading tours) and his entourage, James Osgood the Boston publisher (previously appearing in The Dante Club) and his bookkeeper Rebecca Sands. Also featuring members of Dickens’s family including Dickens’s son Frank (at the time in India) and daughter Mamie, Tom Branagan (Dickens’s assiduous porter), the ambiguous ‘madman’ who visits Dickens at his house Gadshill ‘Dick Datchery’, Marcus Wakefield the tea merchant and the Zoroastrian pirate-turned-hitman ‘Herman’. The main motivation for all movements within the book are either monetary gain, or narcotic oblivion. Ok so there’s a bit of altruism, a bit of interest in literature, even count a bit of fame-mongering as a positive force. But mainly, the characters are trying to latch onto the wealth-bringing powers of Dickens and his words like lampreys stuck to a fish. It’s depressing.


The novel starts when Rebecca’s brother Daniel (who also works for Osgood’s publishing company) is mowed down in a streetcar accident, which upon further inspection appears to be opium-induced. Like the plot of Edwin Drood, The Last Dickens circles round the vortex of struggles surrounding this narcotic. After the death of Dickens in the midst of Drood’s serialisation, Osgood travels with Rebecca as an amanuensis to England to attempt a detective-recovery of any fragments of the sequels left in existence. He beavers busily through what is left of the Dickens household (now being torn apart for auction to keep the large family in cash), trawls through opium dens, meets the originals of a few characters from Drood, gets beaten up, threatened, enticed, disillusioned, goes back to Boston only to find further clues there. Meanwhile there’s a romance (in the colloquial phrase) blossoming on the side, he’s growing up a bit, more layers of the mystery onion are peeled back and deception upon carefully planned deception revealed, but does one care? Yawn.

It’s heartbreaking to say this as it’s all so carefully plotted out and beautifully written but there’s no way out, it’s simply soulless. Falls foul of one of the most cardinal sins in writing: one doesn’t care about the characters. Dickens is portrayed as quite a noble character but unfortunately the knowledge that is real life he was pretty despicable makes it all a bit hollow. His crew and family are mainly detestable with few redeeming features. Osgood and Rebecca – although they’re both theoretically respectable and amiable as well as being believably rounded – are simply dull. If you met them at a dinner table and chatted to them for half an hour you’d move on and be glad of it. The villains are slightly memorable, but not fleshed out throughout the novel enough to give them weight. (For two of the three main villains, we get a stolid passage where their past lives are described, later on in the narrative. It’s not good enough). The one flash of liveliness perhaps lies with the ‘Bookaneers’, the strange pantomime-like characters who make a living stealing texts – marginal characters to say the least. To reflect that the glimmer of literary piracy is the most inspiring thing to Pearl throughout this novel clicks the lid on the piece’s coffin with a finality that’s a little grim.


Two final peves, as a gardener and a writer. Firstly, the opium poppy, papaver somniferum, is a beautiful plant. Not a soul could call it otherwise. However, grown in the British climate it is entirely unable to produce the narcotic sap for which it is famed, and is purely decorative. Not only is it highly unlikely that it would already be grown as a garden plant in Britain at the time of the setting, but the notion that an addict struggling to be free of the clutches of opium would leave an offering of one of the blooms on the tomb of an author he respected is preposterous and downright sloppy on multiple levels. Secondly, have you ever tried writing with a quill? It is not possible to write a novel (even in shorthand) with a single quill, let alone without sharpening it once. Compared to modern writing implements these are extremely short-lived items, and in need of constant upkeep. For such a major plot-twist to hang on such an obviously implausible thread is straining credulity much too far. I would have expected better.

Black Swan Green

Title: “Black Swan Green”
Author: David Mitchell
ISBN: 0-340-83926-0
Published: Hodder & Stoughton
2006
Book quote:

“Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything.”

_________________________________________


Black Swan Green is nothing if not beautifully fashioned. 13 chapters depict 13 months in the life of Jason Taylor, himself 13 years old.


As a coming of age novel, it’s absolute. The trials of adolescence encompass, by definition, everything life has to offer: family friction and lasting issues of origin, love and relationships, power, struggle for supremacy, comradeship and the nature of friendship, betrayal, the overturning of fundamental beliefs and values, disillusionment, realisation of parental fallibility, despair, hope, and much more. Black Swan Green covers them all; I felt I had endured every agonising detail over again.

Possibly one of this novel’s most lasting glories is its portrayal of 80s in Britain. The Falkland’s war takes a central position in the plot, along with the Thatcher ethos and the fragments of its downfall. The war, its causes and its solution are not only linked but absolutely welded to the other central theme of the book: ‘bullying’, in its very widest sense. What can one get away with saying and doing, and why, on both an individual and a national level? As the children explain it: “you can’t say that because it’s gay”. The adults say exactly the same thing in media spins and political manifestos. Jason’s cousin, Hugo, bullies his own brother, manipulating Jason into culpability to ensure compliance. Jason’s own father habitually psychologically bullies Jason’s mother by insisting on his supremacy as the breadwinner – though we are pointedly shown that the mother is perfectly capable of being a breadwinner herself but has deferred to him. For this picture, Julia, Jason’s sister, is the foil and mirror. She has inherited her mother’s brain but is not hampered by the sexual mores that her mother is – the result is portrayed as almost two-dimensionally positive. Bullying is a very effective personification for the 80s in Britain, and Mitchell makes the very best of it.


The central character of Jason is hugely sympathetic, with his over-active brain and precocious vocabulary, his terrors of (and battles with) social isolation, his psychological incarceration by the fear of stuttering, his moral crises and simple, delightful adolescent exuberance. The very scent of 80s pubescent life comes wafting through the changing-rooms in through the pages of this book, and it’s mesmerising.

On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach
Author: Ian McEwan
ISBN: 978-0-099-51279-0
Published: Vintage Books
2008
Book Quote:

“They were alone then, and theoretically free to do whatever they wanted, but they went on eating the dinner they had no appetite for.”

____________________


Chesil Beach is authored by a writer with the highest credentials, and has enjoyed many glowing reviews. It is also faultlessly crafted, delicate, and, in some ways, memorable.

I did not enjoy my reading experience one bit. The story pivots on the wedding evening of Florence and Edward. Careful flashbacks narrate their previous courtship and some of their juvenile lives – their ‘backgrounds’. The evening ends in disaster – but we only get to this near the end of the book. By this time, I posit we are so tired of the whole gamut of dislikeable, unremarkable characters that we would be inclined to conclude reading the book was a disaster as well.


Florence is interested only in playing in her quartet and her love-life takes a very, very, in-the-dark backseat. The narrative implies that the backseat is for the physical side of love, but the undeniable conclusion is that music is her love and humans are really merely an intrusion. Edward is simply dull – no spark of anything except for perhaps a mild and boorish bonhomie. This is of course not to say that the characters are not believable – indeed, they’re exquisite. Perfect… like Chinese Water Torture. Who would want to spend time reading about such people?

Likewise, the character depiction is in complete harmony with the picture of the age in which it is set – the 50s in the UK. Oh, so believable. All the most awful bits. No, not those, I’m talking social repression, bad food, with all the accompaniments. Ugh.


Why the author wrote this is a mystery. The absolute and palpable lack of joy resonating through the volume is not just an exploration of pain or introspection or embarrassment. It feels like a beautifully crafted Frankenstien’s monster, put together for some artistic purpose and now imbued with life but oh so very wrong and miserable. And through the pages of the book, one gets the impression the author knows this.

The Haunting of Melmerby Manor

The Haunting of Melmerby Manor
Author: David Robinson
ISBN: 978-1-897442-15-9
Published: Virtual Tales
May 2008
http://www.virtualtales.com/Mystery/Crime/Haunting-of-Melmerby-Manor.html
Book quote:

“Scepter edged into the room and surveyed the scene. The TV, as Angie had said, lay face down on the carpet; the armchair had stopped its dancing and, along with its twin, had been upended and dropped onto the couch. The overall effect was that the suite had been made ready for the moving men. Like the hall, the walls were covered in flock wallpaper, which was hanging off in places. Above the fireplace, an Arsenal banner hung from a single drawing pin, as if someone had ripped the other end down. As she watched, the message Man. U. 4 Ever appeared across it as if sprayed by a hand wielding an invisible can of paint.”
____________



Melmerby is what one would call a “thumping good read”. It’s got something for everyone, and the story doesn’t hang about. There are gangsters, there are ghosts. Football fanatics (alive and deceased), con-men (nice and not-so-nice), technological shenanigans, spirits kicking up an awful rumpus while some of the living jump in on the act, a whole lot of boys running about and mainly just one girl.

The novel is the first in what is hopefully to be a series of ‘Spookies’ paranormal detective stories. The team’s name is made up out of the initials of the three (live) group members: Sceptre Rand, Pete Brennan and Kevin Keeley: S-P-K. Rather unsportingly, they haven’t included the fourth member of the team, Scepter Rand’s deceased butler Albert Fishwick (he was killed on the first day of the Somme but has been hanging about ever since). Though him, they’ve got a insider’s view of their quarry, rather after the style of ‘Randal and Hopkirk Deceased’. The fact that neither of the two men in the team are very inclined to believe in Fishwick's existence leads to some tensions within the group.

When Fishwick alerts the team to a paranormal disturbance at a council house, the team turn up for their first investigation. The poltergeist activity at the house is quite unrestrained, and when it stops they track it (again with Fishwick’s help) to Melmerby Manor, which is conveniently owned by a friend of the aristocratic Scepter. Here they set up their cameras and discover more than spooky goings on. As matters progress the team are on the run from both the criminals and the police.

The main characters bounce off each other nicely. ‘Scepter’ is an aristocratic Miss, Peter is a disgraced detective turned private eye, and Kevin is an overweight electrician turned wheeler-dealer. The characters they interact with - the police, the goons and gangsters, the long-dead nobles, enraged spirits, and the millionaire DVD pirating tycoons with very questionable family ethics, all fall into a tight web of conspiracy and fraud.

The settings range from the traditional draughty manor house to a seedy nightclub and a council house. This is a slice of ‘life’ (and death) that’s cut squarely top to bottom, with some icing, some filling and plenty of crumb at the bottom. In a story that ranges from remote-controlled espionage and trickery to 17th century bogus witch trials, it’s probably a good idea to just read the book and enjoy the ride, and forget about reviews that’ll just spoil the plot for you.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Title: The Road 

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Publish Date: 2007

Publisher: Vintage Books; 1ST edition

(Review first published in Mostly Fiction book reviews)

“Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping sates, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

What is the Pulitzer Prize winning The Road by Cormac McCarthy really about? The plot is easily summarised as a man and his young boy moving south on foot through a post-apocalyptic North America towards southern shores, in hope of better chances of survival. The core reasons for the novel’s existence may be a little harder to grasp.

The scenery they move through is burned and dead – there is no alteration in the state of the entirely annihilated landscape, and nothing at all living apart from a scattering of humans – the solitary exception is one bark of a dog. Whatever the catastrophe was, it seems to have wiped out something like chlorophyll or plant life at some fundamental level. The sea is entirely barren when they reach it. There is no moss, no grass, the trees are all dead and continually falling over, and of course no crops grow. Without the base of the food chain to work on, there are no animals – hence the only living things remaining are the alpha predators that are humans, now also predominantly turned into cannibals. Scavenging sustains the two main protagonists but the obvious implication is that almost everything has already been scavenged, it is only a matter of time before all nourishment finally runs out. There is no indication whatsoever that there will be any change in circumstances.

Opinions that have been mooted (along with many others) as to the core thrust of the novel are:

• It is a story of the love between a father and his child
• A story of every parent’s worst nightmare, of not being able to live long enough to secure your child’s future
• A story of biblical redemption
• A warning to the present generation to cherish the luxuries we have

I have to confess, I do not see any redemption in this story. There is no hope anywhere, and though at the end the child is “saved” temporarily, the implication does not change for the “long-term goals,” as the child himself puts it. The father and the child certainly love each other, but what the nature of that love is might be slightly different to what one would expect. There are a few passages that point what this might be.  For example, when the child gets ill with a fever and the man is sure the child is about to die, he is frantic with the fear of isolation for both of them. He tries not to leave his son’s side so that he will not die alone, and repeats to himself the oath he made that if the child dies he will not let him “go alone”– in other words, the father will commit suicide. Interestingly, he terms this the “last day of the earth,”  not the last day of his own existence on earth. As everything else has been wiped out, his perishing would demark the end of the world.

At another point, they encounter a key moral dilemma. After a solitary traveller steals all their provisions, they track the thief down and the man makes the thief take off all his clothes at gunpoint, leaving him naked and stranded in the road, justifying it as being exactly what the thief had attempted to do to them: the biblical eye for an eye. The child weeps uncontrollably in pity for the stranded man and they eventually return the clothes, leaving them piled up on the road as there is no sign of the traveller. The father tries to explain to the son why he has acted so uncharitably, and that he too is afraid. He says:

“You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him. What? He said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes, I am, he said. I am the one.”

Why is the boy the one that has to worry about everything? He relies on his father for food, shelter, ideas, directions: everything. The implication is twofold. The boy is the true repository of “the flame” of charity and compassion that they both think they are carrying. Also, the boy is well aware of the insubstantiality of the status quo – that of his father being present and guiding him through the desolate world. He watches his father for the worsening signs of sickness, and knows it is only a matter of time before the father is no more. Once that happens, the father will have no further worries. Both protagonists are often shown envying the dead. Death is by no means an ultimate state not to yearn for; it is the dying that is the problem.

And here I think we get to the very heart of what this book is about. It is a book about dying. What are the ethics of dying? I think the insistently dead grey scenery of the world and all the post-apocalyptic implications are mainly a metaphor for the situation of truly having nothing to live for. There really is no hope whatsoever, there is no redemption in this life. The biblical resonances so often noted are not aimed at an immediate, earthly application but the workings of the soul. The two characters both seem to be believers in some form of afterlife, but for different reasons. For the boy, the afterlife seems to have to exist logically as there is no before-life. He tallies the differences between the typically upbeat stories his father tells him about how life was before the catastrophe with the reality that he himself knows. If the stories are not “true” now they must have some truth somewhere, but he makes it plain that he has no point of reference for his sort of “happy” truth. But where does the boy’s “fire” come from? The answer to this, it is implied that the father thinks, can only be divine. Perhaps that is where the belief of the father comes from, not from the world past or present, but from the boy.

Why do the two of them stay alive? Certainly, for the man, his reason is the child. He labours entirely to save the child, and were the child to die, his link with life would be entirely severed. But what of the child? This is where the biblical tones come in. Christ-like the child is innocent but knows he has to take on the sins of the world and keep living for as long as is allotted. There is no love of life, no thought that life as it is has anything to offer but pain but that one must keep going because one is “carrying the flame.” Just to cement this, there is the background figure of the boy’s mother who has some long time ago committed suicide already – as the only sensible thing to do.

So there are the three options: get out of the running quick because it’s the sane thing to do (the mother), stay in as long as possible because you’re morally bound to (the child), or find yourself a reason, a person, to stay alive for (the father). Bind yourself to something like a raft otherwise the logic of the “secular” (a word McCarthy uses frequently in the most surprising applications) world will inevitably push you into the direction of self-destruction. All of a sudden, we find that the narrative is not in some horrifying future, but right here in our own godless world: these are already our choices.

This once again brings one full circle back to the implication that the dead scenery is indeed a world, but it is the world of the soul. Where has God gone, and where has creation and the gift of life gone? As per previous works by McCarthy, the punctuation in the book has been severely pruned, though relatively few critics bother to refer to the fact. The fragmentation of the sentences. The press-ganging of verbs made to work as adjectives or adverbs – the narrative is one painful trail of action after action. Most apostrophes have been slaughtered, there are no speech marks. The result is a flow of words that seeks to eliminate differentiation between personalities, scenery, time and space. The landscape and the travellers, the state of the world, are all blending into each other, like the corpses of the people who burned to death and were combined into the tarmac of the road as it melted.

The travellers are in constant fear of being “lost,” and indeed even when they know where they are it does not do them much good. What is the right thing to do when you are in the middle of a spiritual wasteland with not the faintest reason to continue to draw breath in this harsh world for one second longer? I believe that the implication here is: there is no sense, and there is no God and no creation apart from what dwells inside us, and that the capacity to care for another creature is the only thing that separates us – in this case, literally – from death. Placed back in the relentlessly materialist, capitalist, selfish scenery that is the reality of today’s world (perhaps more so in America than many other places), these are strong conclusions to arrive at. It is not so much a cautionary tale but a handbook on the choices of paths between the dead shores or the beach, the road and the woods.

The Secret Scripture

Title: The Secret Scripture
Author: Sebastian Barry
ISBN: 978 0 14 311569 4
Publisher: Penguin, 2008


Roseanne Clear is a hundred years old, and has lived at Roscommon Mental Hospital for the last sixty years. The old hospital is to be demolished, the process of which has initiated a ‘review’ of the patients to see if any are suitable for transfer to the outside world, by the supervising Dr Grene. The narrative of the book alternates between sections of ‘Roseanne’s testimony of herself’ and ‘Dr Grene’s commonplace book’. As Roseanne describes her life from early childhood up till her committal to Sligo Mental Hospital, Dr Grene writes of his own attempts to find out more about her past, his emotions regarding the hospital, his marriage, and his ongoing fascination with Roseanne, the nature of which he can’t quite understand. Both narrators write in secret, though Roseanne’s text is half-addressed to Dr Grene – she hopes perhaps it will be discovered after her death. In the process of his investigations Dr Grene discovers different records and documents that offer a dramatic contrast to the version of Roseanne’s testimony of herself.

The clues to the nature of the relationship between the doctor and the patient are embedded in the very cadences they each narrate their stories in. At the outset, I found it rather unimpressive and was concluding that here was an author who was really not very good at differentiating between narrative voices. This develops as the work continues into a curiosity, then a doubt, a realisation of their interdependency, and finally an awe at the method by which the two characters have been sustaining each other with the most delicate, most intangible lines: a tracery of thought-threads and shared perceptions that logic and reason cannot account for. The trail of the squirrels of thought that leap from one branch to another and leave no tracks but have connected the trees nevertheless.

The emotional impact of the narrative is almost unbearable in the unmitigated forgiveness in the face of immeasurable cruelty and abuse. A forgiveness that is put forward so simply that it cannot but be believed, and it therefore all the more stunning.

The Lazarus Project

Title: The Lazarus Project
Author: Alexandar Hemon
Date: 2008

The narrative of The Lazarus Project is an ever-increasingly densely woven tapestry between the three main entities of:
a) the murder of a Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch approximately a century ago by the Chief of Police when Lazarus went to his house to deliver a message;
b) the travels of the writer-character Brik, who gains a grant to write the book and travels from Chicago to Europe to follow Lazarus’s tail and
c) the aura of the author himself, an undisguised mirror of the writer-character. Like the character, Hemon is a Bosnian who has moved to Chicago, none too certain about the cultural integration aspects of the transition. Like Brik, Hemon gained a grant to write the book in question, and like the character, he travelled on the course through Europe detailed, accompanied (just as the character was) by his photographer friend Velibor Bozovic (a.k.a. Ahmed Rora in the book).

Throughout the narrative, the strands of past and present become increasingly interwoven. A discussion on the nature of the creation of history, literature and art is entered into directly with the reader, as the mirrors and resonances are made ever more apparent. Observations of a flapping foot, the glass eyes of a fox fur around the neck of a woman on a tram, people’s names, their motives, feelings of isolation and detachment, of ostracism and the motivation and consequences thereof – all these echo from author, to writer-character, to the newly-created and imagined past of Lazarus Averbuch’s day, and back to the reader. The work is so structured and organically knit together is seems to writhe into a self-evolved life-form between the pages. This is not a book or a ‘story’, it is a take-you-by-the-shoulders-and-shake-you invitation to consider what history is, who made (and is making) it, what cultural and social frictions consist of and what lessons we ought to learn from history but have failed to.

The title itself is key to one of the ultimate questions Hemon poses. He ponders on the resurrection of the biblical Lazarus – was Lazarus pleased to be raised from the grave, or was it just another exile from death? Did he ever return ‘home’ or is he still wandering the earth? It is another mirror for an oft-asked question of typically post-apocalyptic scenarios: if humanity rises from the ashes, is that existence worth inhabiting? From the wrecks of so many human tragedies – the pogrom of Kishinjev or the bombing of Sarajevo and all their associated horrors, people rise and walk away - but where will they go, and why should they. It is not a question that Hemon gives the answer to here, except for an aching longing to return ‘home’ – though the entity that was called ‘home’ as such no longer really exists. It is another mirror of the path from the present to the past, built on regret and barely understood, but desperately needed for the journey into the future. In Hemon’s own commentary in an interview: ‘memory metabolises the past’.

The Year of the Flood

Author: Margaret Atwood
Title: The Year of the Flood
2009


In a post-apocalyptic world where most humans have been exterminated by a man-made disease (called ‘the Waterless Flood’), the events surrounding the actual outbreak are narrated chiefly from the viewpoints of two females: Toby and Ren.

Toby has tried to eliminate sentimentality from her life in an effort to survive: when young, her mother is killed off by the first experimentations of the HelthWyzer company that is later to unleash the Waterless flood, and her father commits suicide in the ensuing despair and financial ruin. Toby works her way through employment at the dubious ‘SecretBurgers’ chain, only jumping ship whenher very life is endangered by the unwelcome attentions of Blanco the manager. She escapes and hides in the anonymity of the ‘Gods Gardeners’ group: the third main narrative source in the book. There, although she finds it difficult to accept all (if any) of the teachings, she becomes a respected member through behaving as if she does. Eventually her old nemesis Blanco find her, and she leaves the Gardeners group, and with their help buys herself a new identity. Her new hideout is AnooYoo the health spa. Here she will spend the time in hiding while the pandemic rages outside.

Ren is young and fragile from start to end. Her character does not change very much throughout the narrative. Brought to the Gods Gardeners group by her mother Lucerne (see below) she spends her early years there, before being taken equally abruptly back to the Coporation life – creating conflict amid her half-formed values and beliefs. Early on in her transfer back to ‘normality’ she falls in love with Jimmy, and never recovers from loosing his affections. Having been abandoned by her mother, she works for a short while with Toby at AnooYoo spa but finds the struggle of all the conflicting memories and influences too much, and gets employed at a high-end sex club Scales and Tails. Here she seems the happiest. Her most believable love in life is her affection for Amanda, a girl of about the same age whom she brought from the street into the Gods Gardeners group.

Amanda has fought her way through Texas droughts and through the streets, and later will fight her way into being an eco-artist. After the Flood she fights her way into the city from Wisconsin after receiving a call for help from Ren, to help her out of the room she is trapped in. Even when captured by the demonically murderous Blanco, she fights back when given any chance. Amanda is something of a beacon of hope to the characters in the novel as well as to us, as a signal from the author that it is possible to be an instinctive (and successful) survivor without loss of charisma and compassion. Unfortunately, Amanda as a character is more of a glitterring cut-out than a living entity - something I'm not sure was entirely intentional. Perhaps the ultimate message is that it is after all impossible to retain all qualities. What does this reflect on the future of the newly-man-made 'improved' humans? Perhaps, bleakly.

Themes:

Man-made. Possibly the most dominant theme. The new animal splices (liobams, rakunks, Mo'hair sheep), the new plants, the new diseases and supposed ‘cures’ all whirling round in ever-decreasing spirals for the purpose of profit. Juxtaposed with this is the ever-decreasing number of non-man-made animals, plants and objects. Connected with the theme of:

Recycling. The earth is being ‘used up’ (species extinction etc) but new things are constantly being made out of it. The gardeners insist on recycling everything, but what would happen if no-one ever made anything or used anything new? There would be nothing to recycle, as one of the characters opines. The carbon garboil vats which burn all carbon waste into a residue of oil and water is a corporate mirror of the Gardeners’ phrasiology of ‘donating protein’ for either eating meat or being eaten, and terming internment of a corpse as ‘recycling’.

Acting versus Speaking / Belief versus Reality

Toby is the main centre for Actions over words, likewise her beliefs are shaped not so much by theory as by physical repetition. The implication is that this is a very valid, possibly the most honest, way of forming beliefs. Despite her doubts she is trusted by the Gods Gardeners mastermind Adam One, and later her impulses and reactions to events show that she has indeed accepted the teachings of the Gardeners perhaps more than she realises. The counterpoint to Toby is Ren’s mother Lucerne. She has joined the Gardeners purely to be near Zeb, leaving her CorpSeCorps husband and pampered existence in fact but not in spirit. She makes no effort other than lip-service to muck in with work, and has effectively kidnapped her daughter Ren when she left, showing no interest in her whatsoever. We later learn that she blackmailed Zeb into taking her as a partner by threatening to reveal his earlier identity to the CorpSeCorps. When she becomes tired of Zeb, she returns to her earlier life and fabricates a story about being kidnapped. In a later twist, her husband is indeed kidnapped, but is not rescued by the Corporation – at which she moves on immediately to another man and kicks Ren out of the nest as there is now not enough money to go round.