Island Home - Tim Winton

Title: Island Home – a landscape memoir

Author: Tim Winton

Publisher: Penguin         

Publish date: 2015

ISBN: 978-1-926428-74-1

Book Quote:

‘But at the first glimpse of the King Leopold Rages, as gold as roo fat in the afternoon light, he jerks upright and slaps his thigh like a man who’s just won a chook raffle.’

From an unpromising start of swept-together generalizations, this collection – I’m not sure either ‘memoir’ or ‘book’ would be entirely appropriate, despite the title – moves from high-handed assumptions to meditative observations in a curve that suggests not so much a story-plan as an imperative from a publisher. The production of something touching and memorable by sheer force of incorrigibly good writing and a genuine listening mind rather than an initial need to ‘say something’.

It’s unfortunate that the most bombastic bits are huddled towards the start. It’s irritating to read statements like the light (in ‘Australia’, mind – the whole of it) being ‘like no other’ and being ‘big’, comparing it to Northern European light. Well duh, latitude and climate. For some reason Winton singles out Europe as the one and only possible counterfoil to Australia – and mainly Northern Europe at that. Possibly consciously or unconsciously, because that’s where settlers mainly came from initially. If consciously, it’s disingenuous. If unconscious, it’s sloppy. Having lumped all of Australia as a comparable, he goes on to negate an earlier comment about even the natural mountain ranges in Europe to present a finite barrier as opposed to the open sea and desert near Perth, in detailing residence in another area of Australia where mountains loom just as oppressively. It’s not the European mountains or the Australian desert that are oppressive, it’s the writer’s perception, and no checks and balances seem to have been made in the headlong dash to write something. The destruction of the bushland to build Perth is decried, but the text is joyous about going out into the bush to fish turtles or crayfish. He deplores urban sprawl but the first chapters show him buying a sprawling house, complete with turtles, which (to add to the irony) he makes sure are ‘gone’ before he moves in. It’s all very irritating. In this mash, occasionally a vivid and Wintonesque simile is thrown in to keep the punters going.

Then the pace slows down from the Publisher-Hop to some more considered reminiscences on boyhood experiences. There is increased illumination from the trademark similes and expressiveness here. Nonetheless, the ego-centric nature of autobiography is off-putting. Who cares what this particular person did in their youth, and why would they make the assumption that I’m interested? For me it raises hackles and hostility. Were the same material presented in the form of fiction, it would be another matter. I find ‘a child did this, saw this’ is much more acceptable than ‘I did this, saw this’. I’m more open to suggestion and persuasion through fiction. Interestingly, I rather wonder if Winton was having this debate internally while writing. There’s a curious passage describing the specific quality of the joy of surfing:

‘… but the beauty of these things lay in how they worked, how they caused stuff to happen elsewhere. The way a storm in the Antarctic produced an echo that became a completely distinct event in my own world. From some unspeakable terror across the horizon came a day of pleasure for me. Surf was old energy transformed.’ 

It’s a perfect description of the creation of fiction. All fiction is memoir. It must needs be, as however acrobatic our rearrangements are, we are but creating from materials we have to hand. It seems that at this point in the writing process the author realized this, and the rhythm changes again.

From here we are given what are more a series of persuasive texts: political and ecological pieces, which break with increasing frequency into meditations on the minute details of the natural landscape. This portion is much more measured, with a reserved, humbler approach that’s infinitely easier to accept. As the pace decreases, the accuracy of the descriptions increases exponentially, bringing the reader painfully close to the dust and spinifex, the very air of the land the writer is so passionate about. In an episode about tracking black-flanked wallabies, great care is given to precise naming of all the flora and fauna. ‘Stygofauna’, ‘black-faced cockatoo-shrike’, ‘zebra finches’, ‘white-bellied sea-eagles’, ‘euro’, ‘spinifex’ and ‘spinifex-pigeon’. The respect accorded to flora, fauna and geological and meteorological formations directly mirror the care with which Winton uses adjectives and similes: precise to a pinpoint. At the climax of the wallaby scene, the cave he finds the wallabies in is ‘the size of a child’s bedroom’. The comparison masterfully brings the alien scene into acute intimacy, bypassing all between. 

It is interesting also, that although throughout the volume (and in line with the title) Australia is obdurately referred to as an ‘island’, presumably to emphasize its isolation and uniqueness. Towards the end it suddenly becomes a ‘continent’. A step made together with the acceptance of its great variety and abundance, and a much increased hopeful outlook towards to future, barely stated but definite. 

In all, 3.5 out of 5 Moose-Hoofs up. The annoyances are such that I can’t give it more. However, despite all, it was worth the read, and provides some potent food for thought.

To The Islands - Randolph Stow

Title: To The Islands       

Author: Randolph Stow

Publisher: Text Classics 

Publish date: 1958 (Original), Revised edition Angus and Robertson Sydney 1981, Text Classics 2015

ISBN: 9781925240290

'He fed her until she was satisfied, and then she reached out and touched his shoulder with her hand, and leaned over and rested her forehead there. In that way they sat for what seemed like a long time in that timeless place, naked brown woman by naked white man, and he stroked the loose skin on her back with tenderness, wanting to laugh, wanting to weep.'

___________________________________________

This novel won the Miles Franklin Literary Award when it was first published in 1958. It was written after Stow worked for a few months as a ration storeman at the Anglican-run Forrest River Mission in far north Western Australia, and draws heavily on the experience. This edition was re-edited by Stow in 1981, with some portions of the original deleted (according to his own introduction to this edition). I have to say, it doesn’t strike one as a novel written by a 22-year-old. Not this life-time round, for sure.

The story revolves around an Anglican minister reconciling his oncoming death with his faith, his self-doubts, and his environment. The Australian Outback provides a Shakespearean exile-setting of liminal harshness, peopled by the half-familiar, half-inscrutable Aboriginals.

The novel is extraordinary. One level of intrigue is that it tells of a case of extreme indigestion of The Wasteland, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Medieval Mystery plays, Shakespeare (Lear in particular, self-confessedly), Baudelaire, Cervantes, Walt Whitman, the Bible, and Aboriginal Dreamtime narratives among others. Gobbets and echoes from Western literature drop into the dust of the Outback, as incongruous and fascinating as the main character that stumbles through the narrative.

Another level is the sentence structure, and the narrative structure that inversely echoes it. On the sentence level, the initial third or so of the book is overtly fluid in construct, with multiple and inverted clauses, subjects far from their objects, and pronouns frequently ambiguously placed. There is little demarcation between scenes. Time is not linear, nor is much attempt made to clarify where or how the characters are moving or what they are doing. So we’ll suddenly hear of a protagonist stop leaning against a tree, when last time we 'saw' then there were inside a building. Even the names seem to be deliberately confusing, with most of the characters being variously referred to either by their first names, surnames, or their personal pronoun being misplaced altogether so that numerous re-reads are needed to guess who is doing what. The effect is a gauzy haze of impressionist prose with pinpoint ‘plums’ of clarity. As the novel progresses this pattern morphs, via poetic jumps and rhythm, into a much more consistently direct diction. It abandons the passive voice and looking-glass grammar. Utterly perversely, the more the diction straightens up, the more the narrative disintegrates into stanzas of what might be termed associative meditation. Clarity is insanity, and confusion is the real world.

A third level of uniqueness is the yearning portrayal of the many dissonances between the white settlers and native Australians. The gulf between them is tectonic, pushing up strange behaviours where they are least expected. It isolates not only each individual character with a cocoon of silence, but the reader as well, bouncing one about in a muffled cotton-ball through a suspicious and hostile dreamscape. But within the haze of the novel’s Gethsemane-like wanderings, the communication gap is sometimes a vast canyon, and then suddenly barely a trickle of water on a flat plane. Both the unbridgeable weight of  silence and the fervent desire for it to be gone are, I think, uniquely Australian, and something echoed repeatedly in the country’s literature, but rarely so accurately given emotional coordinates.

In short, the novel is indeed more than deserving of the accolades it has won and its status as a classic piece. Don’t pick it up if you want an easy read. It is difficult, and I haven’t even started to scratch the surface. Five moose-hoofs up out of five, with both ears up as well for emphasis.

Twice - Lisa Unger (Lisa Miscione)

Title: twice

Author: Lisa Unger (Lisa Miscione)

Publisher: Broadway

Publish date: 2004

ISBN: 978-0-307-95317-9

To describe a novel jam-packed with brutal death, revenge, maniacs, monsters and more as ‘delightful’ may seems wrong, but really that’s what it is. A fantastic, fresh, young zest for life bounces innocently through the pages describing (with considerable skill) horror after horror – and it’s a great combo.

It’s an early Lisa Unger book, and she’s still writing under her maiden name. Having read some of the later ones I was surprised initially at some of the tell-tale flourishes and pet-projects of a writer slightly less in control than they might be. The earlier chapters are peppered with description of what designer brand of jeans the main characters are wearing, what type of plush covering they have on their cushions, what upmarket ingredients they have in their salad, what their ‘taut’ bodies are like. The language oozes the writer’s own appreciation for these things, and it’s a funny little paradox that while the main character couple move in together they’ve ‘got rid of most of their own furniture and belongings’ because ‘new beginnings demand new objects’, one of them ‘never developed attachments to things anyway.’ A very New-York sort of Designer-Zen where you change your yoga-mat for the latest model every six months and have state-of-the-art surround sound system playing you waterfalls and birdsong in a very expensive, sterile apartment. (My description, not hers.) One laughs a little at this, but the fact is Unger is a very sensual writer, and everything is described in heightened ‘appreciation’: the stench of the subterranean network under New York, the way a policeman’s face is ‘dirty and round as a potato’, a slashed vinyl cover to a discarded table ‘gaping like a mouth’. They don’t stop coming, and it makes for an engaging read. There is, it’s true, quite a bit of doubling up, and the whole book feels as if it’s been written at breakneck speed, never looking back, as if the monsters in the book are running after the author. ‘Grey’ must be used at least 50 times throughout the novel (I’m reading on paperback, can’t do a word count). A lot of things are ‘musty’ and smell of ‘damp earth’. There’s a wonderful description of a librarian who’s ‘as dusty as an old unabridged dictionary’, but then half a page later the same librarian is interviewed and she’s neat and bright as a new penny. A certain house has an ‘evil smell’ – again a combination of ‘musty’ and ‘earth’ but no mention of the pipe that the owner subsequently lights up. A few homophone word-errors thrown in here and there simply season the ‘this is bursting out of my skull’ impression.

Plot? It’s the third in a series of four books featuring Lydia Strong, a crime novelist (ahem) who turns private investigator. Yeah, I know. But it’s charming.  The serial killer who murdered her mother 16 years back has escaped from a mental asylum, and is on the loose with Lydia in his sights. Meanwhile she and her partner in life and in the private investigation firm, Jeffrey, have been hired to look into the brutal murder of a famous artist’s husband. Lots of layers of history, family feuds, layers of New York, criss-crossing of both narratives, rich succulent sensory details throughout. The plot’s fairly intricate and though the story may be written fast it’s certainly not been pantsed. (I can relate to that a lot.) I was surprised, after the other books Unger books I’d read, that the tenor seemed so different, but then the twins flit across the screen and suddenly the language sharpens, just for a moment, and you know at once they’re at the heart of the matter. Lost children. Over and over again. It doesn’t get old, mind, they’re all different. Unger’s foreshadowing in this novel is a bit heavy-handed, and the main jist of the interwoven ‘twists’ are apparent in the early chapters but it’s all good, you can just see the general direction and there are endless details and mini-stories to keep you going. Page-turner? Definitely.

I was particularly grateful on a personal level to have had the opportunity to read this. Stymied myself in a Slough of Despond, not writing anything for months for no good reason, this bouncy narrative might be just the inspiration to get things going. Thank you Lisa Unger! Four happy moose-hoofs up… the one only taken off for the little errors and gleeful carelessness. Because one has to if one’s marking, but wouldn’t really otherwise.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Title: Slaughterhouse-Five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Publisher: Dell Publishing (Random House)

Publish date: 1969

ISBN: 3 2300 01771154 6

Book quote:

 ‘Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”’

So, you know how everyone has a long list of ‘classics’ they think they ought to read at some point? If this book is on your list of to-reads, get the hell down to the local library and get yourself a copy because it’s freakin’ amazing. The Mysteries of Udolpho: disappointment. This one: not.

I don’t want to write a 5,000 word review on this that would barely scratch the surface anyway. In short…

Summary: The main character is Billy Pilgrim, a gawky, ridiculous private American soldier in WWII, who gets taken prisoner of war and happens to survive the firebombing of Dresden because he ended up in a subterranean meat locker. He returns to the States, marries a rich girl and becomes an optometrist, then after a bump on the head caused by a plane crash, starts insisting he was taken captive by aliens years ago, and has been time-travelling randomly for years before that. The story is sandwiched by a couple of slices of narration from the author, who also makes a small cameo appearance being incontinent in a POW camp.

In a quick scout along the review circles, there’s a lot of noise about the humour, the oblique portrayal of the supposedly central event of the firebombing of Dresden, and what the ‘message’ is. Strangely, the copy I have has a review-snippet from The Boston Globe on it saying: ‘Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.’ Odd, because it seems that apart from compassion there is no moral statement made at all by the book. No claims, no pretentiousness.

The most extraordinary aspect of the book for me is the structure. The structure is, as far as I can ascertain, entirely unique, and mirrors the content and possibly the ‘message’ (if there is one) of the book. The little aliens that run through the novel have the peculiar quality of being able to see Time as a flat surface – that is, all points at once. So they describe their own novels as ‘There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.’ Which is pretty much what Slaughterhouse Five is. As Billy shoots about the linear timeframe, slipping from 1945 to 1969 is a morphine-induced haze or whatever uncontrolled state he’s in, we see pieces drift into place, slowly coming into focus, fitting in. It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting: a huge canvass with hundreds of participants, but nothing in central focus apart from a kind of whirling void, where the bombing is. You can look closely at each mini-scene, and there will be humour and pathos and grotesqueness and beauty. What they add up to is entirely open to the viewer, but we’re left damn sure it’s all part of an immensely bigger picture that couldn’t possibly fit into a 2d canvas. It also reminds me of a musical piece. A symphony, where recurrent motifs pop up in the middle of something. Ah, there’s that four falling notes on the oboe again, what’s it doing here? You’re not quite sure, but it’s definitely connecting those images. Orange and black. The POW trains crawling through the countryside, the boat outside the room on Billy’s honeymoon night, the stripes of the marquee at Billy’s daughter’s wedding. A hum, a buzz. Blue and ivory, on the feet and hands of corpses and those who are in some way coming close to death. This novel has abandoned both the linear form and straight descriptions, as there is no way to describe the central event. Instead we focus on the colour of boots, on the smell of ‘mustard gas and roses’.

The author’s words present the alien abductions and details as ‘the truth’, which simultaneously allowing the reader to note that all the extra-terrestrial details Billy experiences, as well as the whole aspect of time-travel and linear discombobulation, come from the writings of single science-fiction writer within the novel. We’re also told that many people found some solace in science fiction, as the normal parameters of morals and straightforward existence did not seem to function or be relevant in the aftermath of something like WWII. An alternate reality that may in some way make the completely irrational, acceptable.

Vonnegut comments about linearity and the nature of writing a retrospective narrative, comparing himself to Lot’s wife:

‘People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.’

I’m stopping there. The book’s an absolute rip-roarer of ingenuity and frankly genius. Five stomping moose-hoofs up. 

Novascapes (Volume 2)

Title: Novascapes Volume 2

Author: Various, compiled Cassandra Page

Publisher: Invisible Elephant Press          

Publish date: 2016

ISBN: 9780992554835

‘Novascapes’ is a showcase of speculative fiction short stories and poetry from the Hunter region in NSW Australia. I’m not sure why the wealth of talent in this corner of the world continues to amaze me. I should be used to it by now. Eighteen stories and poems, all startlingly individual, mostly from almost unknown authors. There is a fair variance in levels of expertise, but the overall standard is high. My favourite by far is ‘The Quiet Realm Of The Dark Queen’ by Jenny Blackford, with its visceral myth-telling, haunting lilt, which overshadows the whole collection for me. ‘Blake’s Angel’ by Janeen Webb touches a yearning and compassion with surreal earthiness that’s powerful and mystical. ‘Murirrugach’ by Megan Buxton has all the solid, creeping thrill of a good horror story, powered by the cold precision of calculated diction.

At this point I’ll ditch the adjectives and leave the rest to the reader. Caveat to this review: as I’m featured in it, I’m not giving it a moose-hoof rating, ‘cause that wouldn’t be fair. (My own story’s OK, but blink and you’ll miss it.) At the moment it’s only available in digital form from Smashwords, but we’re promised a hard copy edition sometime soon. I’m honoured to be part of this exciting team and community. 

Weight - Jeanette Winterson

Title: Weight

Author: Jeanette Winterson

Publisher: Cannongate

Publish date: 2005

ISBN: 3 2300 0117 5777 6

‘Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important.’
______________________________________________

‘Weight’ is part of a series (of which I’d now like to read more) of re-tellings of myths by some of our great contemporary writers: Chiuna Achebe, Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt amongst others. Jeanette Winterson was allocated the story of Atlas and Hercules.

As a re-telling of a myth goes, it’s very free. Winterson intersperses the mythological narrative with an autobiographical account of the ‘weight’ or the ‘globe’ she (or ‘one’) carries around: the weight of expectations, hopes, regrets, and everything we’ve woven for ourselves in between. The nexus of the narration possibly comes when Atlas lies in his ruined Garden of the Hesperides, unable to get up, weighed down by the immense mass of the tiny golden apples from Hera’s tree, which are his past and his future. They crush him so much he can’t pick up the third apple he needs to get: his present.

But the message is not, by any means, to live only for the present. Indeed this concept is embodied in the figure of Hercules, the archetypal hero, the anti-Hamlet, the one who does everything right now, right away, without thinking. Pure action. But even Hercules is bothered by the ‘thought wasp’ that starts buzzing about his head once he’s marooned temporarily with Atlas’s heavy load. Even when he’s freed of the task of holding up the world, the thought wasp still troubles him occasionally.

Winterson’s hero, her ideal alter-ego, is Atlas. How to reconcile oneself to the burden of the 'world', how to learn to listen to the smallest things and feel a symbiotic life with the whole kosmos, and how to shoulder that unmoving oppression with grace. These are the questions that seem to be ‘answered’ with most passion. Perhaps the surprise ending is a reward for such good behavior, and the self-knowledge that the author at least seems to think comes with it.

I liked this book a lot. I read it twice, mainly because iteration is the point of the novel. ‘I want to tell the story again,’ says the author, and we get another aspect of the story, another sediment of autobiography. It’s a personal take on the psychology of introspection and self-creation, of the nature of choices and what they really are as opposed to what we perceive them to be. The read has a hypnotic, lilting quality to it, interspersed and syncopated with Hercules’s boisterous doings which bring brusque and bawdy syntax and vocabulary along with them. I’m giving it four out of five moose hoofs up, with the one taken away only because it’s more an experimental piece than a highly polished one. This is unfair, because being experimental is in its nature. But as Winterson notes within the pages, unfairness abounds, and polish is a criterion of a moose hoof.

In Other Worlds - Margaret Atwood

Title: In Other Worlds – SF And The Human Imagination

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Virago             

Publish date: 2011

ISBN: 9781844087112

______________________________________________________________________

Being neither fiction nor poetry, but a collection of essays and lectures, I feel out of place reviewing this but hey, it’s a book and I’m a reader. The collection explores Atwood’s lifelong obsession with Sci Fi and its influence on her writing.

As you can imagine, the prose does not disappoint. Quirky, imaginative, witty, incisive… All the Atwood usuals. But as far as readability goes, it’s abysmal. The book reminds me of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, a tome where this brilliant and restless mind shares with readers what books and influences went into the shaping of just such a mind. Theoretically it should be fascinating. But by its nature, it’s fragmented. Reading both the Biographia and In Other Worlds I feel I’m in a continual movie-time travel sequence, flashing from one point to another amidst jagged spurts of lightning. One sentence jumps from the next in tangential acrobatics, leaving you either agreeing, disagreeing or baffled, but without any holdfast or continuation. It’s like wandering about in an endlessly extended and built-upon castle complex without any idea which room you’re coming to next, where you’ve left and certainly not anything about where you’re going to come out at the end. Ok, supposedly, things are grouped into sections. There’s even an introduction (by Atwood), pointing out the organization. This raises alarm bells in the first instance, and turns out they’re justified. If you need an introduction to explain something, the explanation’s obviously not there in the text.

However, if you are game to follow through, go for it. More than enough food for thought for an evening in a quarter of a paragraph. It would be a good book for fans to acquire, and perhaps dip into a few pages at a time and mull over. Borrowing it from the library and chewing through in a few days as I did isn’t the best approach. If Sci Fi is your genre, it should probably be almost compulsory reading, just for the necessary discussions on what the genre is and isn’t (not that it comes to any conclusions or dogmatic precepts).

Alas, for readability per se, a mere one moose hoof up out of five. (Sniff.) For brilliance and potential inspiration and sheer insanity – such as leaping in one bound from Zeus to Wonder Woman’s belt -  and suggesting an overwhelming wealth of reading material and literary and cultural connections, five moose hoofs up out of five. You’ve got to want the insanity and brilliance to want to read it.

Breakfast With The Borgias - DBC Pierre

Title: Breakfast With The Borgias

Author: DBC Pierre

Publisher: Hammer        

Publish date: 2014

ISBN: 987 0 09 958623 4

Book Quote:

‘He was probably only in his fifties but a lifetime of disappointment seemed to hand under his eyes and drip from the end of his words.’

_______________________________________________________________________________

Like an idiot, I failed to observe who the publisher was on this little book, and like an even bigger idiot I (as I inevitably do) failed to read the blurb. Sometimes it’s good to be an idiot. It meant I approached the piece with no preconceptions at all – which, having a quick scan around the reviewing circles, shows instantly are what ruined the read for a great many.

It’s when the ‘Waiting For Godot’ ambiance really started raising question marks (about a fifth of the way through) that I flipped to the back and saw ‘Hammer’. Ah. Now what.

Plot? A quantum mathematics guru is stuck on the Sussex coast, en-route to a conference in Amsterdam where he’s also rendezvousing with his besotted protégée and lover. Ariel and Zeva, they’re called. It’s unambiguous to grasp we’re meant to be spanning some distance here, the Alpha and the Omega.

From being mildly amused (1/20^th of the way through) to mildly bored (1/5^th of the way) to mildly irritated (1/4), I passed through bafflement, intrigue, and via wonder and synaptic chaos to some kind of cohesion and at the end some disappointment at landing back in reality – though ‘reality’ is hazy as the fog that surrounds the Cliffs Hotel in this case. It’s certainly not a slap-dash piece, as many reviewers seem to conclude. Impressionistic, maybe. But that’s kind of the point, with the interjection of quantum theory woven into the text and grammar in a dizzying Beckett-Woolf modern hybrid of associative syntax and vocab.

The piece looks at the nature of human existence through the angle of modern telecommunications, AI and quantum theory. Again, many readers seem to object that this is not frightfully original. Maybe not, but neither is it frightfully hackneyed. In hindsight the concept itself (or the ‘twist’) is an old classic, and many say they guessed it but I was clueless until more than half way through… that’s the whole thing about not noticing it was a Hammer novella. Anyway I like the way it’s done here. Four moose hoofs up out of five, with the one taken off simply because there are few bits and pieces that simply don’t gel quite perfectly. The brains, the vocab and sentence structures tying in with the concept are quirkily great.

Every Day - David Levithan

Title: Every Day

Author: David Levithan

Publisher: Text Publishing

Publish date: 2012

ISBN: 9781921922954

Book Quote:

“… we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. […] For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.”

_________________________________________________ 

Head-scratching time. I read through this at break-neck speed, almost traumatized each time something forced me to stop and carry on with a bit of Life. “Gripping” is an understatement. This book takes you hostage and throws away the key. But why? And how?

Plot: the main protagonist is a 16-year-old being who jumps at the stroke of midnight from one victim’s body to the next – not through malice but as a way of existence. Falls in love with a girl, would really like to hang around, but gets transferred to the next host as usual. Struggles to make this extreme take on long-distance-relationships work.

The author says he wanted to explore the viability of loving someone who changed every day – but as so often, the real agenda is the diametric opposite to the author’s stated aim. The real question and interest is the necessity of sameness in love – and by extension emotional well-being. In a book where the narrator changes literally every day, the main theme is stability, and its role in human existence, examined through the lens of extreme instability.

The review circles make fascinating reading. Polarized opinions or what. Love, hate, confused, but one thing they have in common is that they all needed to read to the end. I haven’t seen a single mention, even from the worst detractors, that the novel dragged. I’ve seen the word ‘Boring!’, but this is used in the sense of I-don’t-like-the-subject-matter-and-I’m-objecting. Many found the internal logic of the novel questionable, and the logistics not explained sufficiently. It seems that in general, the older you are, the less you’ll find this objectionable.

The younger readers seemed to object to the ‘preachy’ authorial tone coming through, via the overtly non-judgmental and accepting attitude he gives the narrator: on gender issues, body image, class, you name it. I found this response interesting, because as I read the novel I thought ‘well this is a bit facile and banging things home with a seal-club, but I guess the audience is YA, why not keep it clear? After all every novel has some axe to grind even if it’s buried – it’s its raison d’etre. Every novel is in some way about How To Be Human, this one just tackles it ore head-on than most. That’s good, isn’t it?’ But apparently not always. Moral: never, ever, EVER condescend to kids. It’s disrespectful and insulting and they know it. Condescending to adults often works quiet well – and sells. They rather like being told what to do. Interestingly, as I read I was reminded of John Green, on a careless day. Then I found that David Levithan and John Green co-authored a book called Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Huh. Specifically, I was thinking of The Fault In Our Stars (it’s the only John Green book I’ve read) which blew me over with technical wizardry and literary acrobatics hidden under 20 feather beds of easy-readability – none of which would be visible to 99.9% of adults let alone YA, but was carefully and respectfully planted there anyway. (I wrote a blog post on it at the time – here.) Levithan doesn’t do this. But he does have the same forward impetus and urgency of tone that tugs the reader forward without remorse.

Perhaps the must-know factor comes from the simple intrigue of how-the-hell-are-you-going-to-solve-this-one as circumstances change every chapter. There’s absolutely no predictability and the parameters seem impossible. We listen in with the wide-eyed suspense of a traveler's tale, a Marco-Polo or Gulliver or Crusoe of overcoming obstacles. Is that it? Perhaps.

I think it’s also because it’s a damn good love story. It has all the youthful hope and altruism and absolute blind need for forward thrust that comes with a good, deep, pure early love. Before we’ve learned to accommodate, or accept, or compromise, or differentiate self-projection and idealizing from the reality of what another person is. Before we’ve been beaten and weathered down and the world seems at best tinted, not polychrome. I’m not sure how a writer almost exactly my age comes up with this, but hey, good job. If you’ve never really fallen in love, don’t bother reading this. Save it for later.

I’m giving it four and a half moose hoofs up out of five. I simply can’t give a full five because of the condescension mentioned earlier, and because he mis-uses the word ‘enormity’ ELEVEN times throughout the novel. The fact that I’m giving this much even with that hideous fault stomping all over the book shows just how impressed and intrigued I am. But please, dude. I know that eventually enough dim-wits and language abusers will misuse the word for it to become accepted usage. I know language changes. At the moment ‘enormity’ does NOT mean ‘enormousness’ and authors should not be the ones to promulgate discord and misunderstanding. Use another freakin’ word.

Anyway, go read the book. If you’ve ever fallen in love.

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

Title: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Author: Tennessee Williams      

Publish date: 1940 – first performance 1955

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Holy moly. Although I’m now sweating with irritation I’m glad I re-read that one. I don’t think a teenager in the 80s got a great deal out of it.

For those of you who have completely forgotten it (like me) and are left only with vague images of Elizabeth Taylor looking young and black-haired-white-frocked, the story is a squabble between members of a Mississippi cotton plantation owner’s family, essentially over money. He’s dying and no-one wants to tell him, everyone wants in on his will – which isn’t made. The play sticks to the Aristotelian unities but that’s pretty much it as far as application of any normal or accepted standards of writing are concerned. And the thing apparently won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I didn’t even know there was one.

I started gagging right at the start with Maggie’s histrionic evil fist-biting routines, which Williams insists on finding charming. The stage directions are insane. They go on for so long you really wonder why the hell he didn’t write a novel or just get onto a soap box instead. The dialogue is shit – everyone has the same diction, only more or less of it, and we’re reckoning here on southern drawl interspersed with out-of-place formal or literary vocabulary to carry us through. I guess in productions the actors have to make it their own, gloss over some things, accent others. On the page it’s infantile.

But you keep reading and start getting over the initial gut-reaction shock of the insane objectification and downgrading of women. It’s hard to do this because Williams buys into it so much himself, you hate everyone on stage, and the playwright.

Then you start to look. Hang on, it’s not only the women being forced to beg and being incapacitated. Brick is isolated for the mere thought he might have homosexual tendencies – in fact he rejects any possibility of it in himself and would burn it down fast as any of the other characters. Big Mamma is demeaned for being fat. Gooper’s rejected for being sober, Brick is rejected for being drunk. Mae is rejected for having children, Maggie is rejected for having none. Everyone (apart from Brick, who’s a spoiled brat and is currently only interested in the bottom of the bourbon bottle) wants money, because they think it’ll lead to something good. And the fount of this money, Big Daddy, is left entirely on his own while they break the news of his cancer to his wife. He’s rejected because he’s a good as dead.

I remembered an internet-circulated mini-video I saw just yesterday, with the title ‘Objectification of women hurts everyone’. In which they proceed to list the ‘type’ of woman it hurts – mothers, daughters, friends, grandmothers. Further casting pigeonholes and roles onto the very people they’re trying to support, and completely ignoring the fact that objectification of women also hurts men, and vice versa. Objectification of men – as breadwinners, as strong, as whatever typecast you put on them – deprives women of those roles as well as dooming men into their allotted pigeonholes. We still can’t grasp this. We still buy into all the advertising and the commercialism and the nothing-is-good-enough that Williams was so sick of he wrote this bananas play nearly eighty years ago. Sick of but still part of it, trying to tear it off as the characters are without knowing what or where it is. Like Big Daddy’s cancer, ‘it’s past the knife’. The rawness of render and uncontrolled frustration channel themselves directly past the characters, turning the whole play into a soapbox where the playwright does an unconscious show-not-tell on the state of society which, alarmingly, seems not to have changed from the 1940s.

I can’t give this moose-hoofs. Glad I re-read it but would prescribe it with a health warning attached. Take as necessary. 

Breath

Title: Breath

Author: Tim Winton

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton / Penguin

Publish date: 2008

ISBN: 9870241015308

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This book is an object lesson to writers: superb prose and meticulous, visceral observations are not enough to make a good novel.

The story is not so much a coming of age as an explanation of the ongoing issues of a character, even though by the time we get to the ongoing issues they’re pretty much an epilogue and we don’t care anyway. Set in a fictional surfing community in WA in the 70s, the retrospective narrator ‘Pikelet’ and his daredevil friend ‘Loonie’ become surfing disciples to the surfing legend ‘Sandy’. (You guessed it, everyone has nicknames.) Relationships form and jar, adrenaline is pumped, and endless dangerous waves are surfed. Through it all runs the theme of respiration, from diving to sexual asphyxiation to drowning to sleep apnoea.

Plus point:

•         Incredibly delicate use of language. Forceps precision application of words to describe sensations.

Minus points:

•         Plot is carefully constructed and woven into the theme of breathing, but utterly lacks drive. It’s one incident after another which are supposed to ramp up the tension but because the incidents lead no-where, they don’t. The main ‘dramatic twists’ in the story we’ve seen coming from the first few chapters.
•          We don’t give a rat’s whisker about the characters because they don’t about themselves. NONE of the characters like themselves. The narrator admires some of them, with reserve. No-one shows any particular affection for the narrator. An utter lack of empathy ensues. You just wish they would all die faster.

The novel is depressing on so many levels, but to me mostly because it’s such a crying waste to use such great technique to so little avail. It’s like drowning lobster tail in soy sauce and chili, or burning a fillet mignon into a hockey puck. Should never be done.

More could be said, but I've lost the will to live. 

Two moose hoofs up out of five, only for the verbal magic.

A Mercy

Title: A Mercy

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Knopf

Publish date: 2008

ISBN: 978-0-307-26423-7

Book quote:

‘These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves. (…) Or. Or perhaps no. Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow.’

________________________________________________________________________

A discussion on the theme of subjugation, possession and protection in late 17^th century America, this novel is like cobweb: both filamentous and strong.

The main timeline of the plot is a few days’ duration, while Florens (a Portuguese-African slave girl) ventures off on her own to find help for her mistress, who is afflicted with smallpox. The chapters alternate POV between the main characters in the book, and through their recollections and associative thinking a larger picture of their narratives before and after is depicted.

Many readers say that the central theme is slavery. It’s not. It’s oppression across the board, how people create their own ‘sanity’ within the confines of their individual circumstances, and above all how they communicate with each other. Florens is docile and eager to please – later terrifyingly independent when circumstances change. Sorrow creates her version of sanity inside seeming madness. Jacob within his hubristic new house. Lina within her re-creation of herself as an all-dependable fount of calm and knowledge. Their chapters send out filaments to criss-cross each other’s narratives like hyphae, intricate and fertilizing. Eventually, with the glue that binds them together gone, their connections dissolve like so much candy-floss in water. The tenor of the novel seems to intimate that despite the transitory nature of their connections, the depth of their emotions at the time etches significance into the bond that exists after dissolution like seared light on the retina.

From the Blacksmith down – so stylized he doesn’t even get a name - you could say the characters are cut-outs. Arranged for the purposes of plot and significance, tokens as representative as chess pieces. The white mail-order bride, the Protestant tradesman, the Popish ignoramuses, the black slave girl, the Noble Savage with flowing hair, the brutish slave trader, even an Irish (?) pirate’s daughter. Through the confines of their place in the plot, and their place in their circumstances, they sing a cantata more poetry than prose. They’re stuck there, sending out tentacles, and it’s a mesmerizing process to behold.

The breakdown of the relationships and their hyphae reflects the isolation that ultimately each character, and by inference every member of humanity, suffers. The most poignant isolation and communication breakdown is between Florens and her mother. Florens seeks her mother’s ‘answer’ throughout the novel but will never find it. Only the reader sees from above, only the reader can weep at the wasted struggles and pitiful, mismatched desires.

Five Moose-Hoofs up. Only set aside a good chunk of a day when you intend to read it because you won’t be able to put it down.

The Catcher In The Rye

Title: The Catcher In The Rye

Author: D. J. Salinger

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Publish date: 1951

ISBN: 9782253009788

Book quote:

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.” 

I re-read this recently after a gap of three decades or so, and a prompting from comments to the effect of What is the point of this book, why would I want to read about some crappy dude who’s hopeless at everything and screws up his life in every possible way? To be fair, my only recollection of the novel from last reading was a vague sensation of annoyance.

For starters, what comes out of Holden’s mouth and transpires in action is certainly crappy, but there’s no doubt we’re meant to have empathy for him – precisely because of his empathy for others. It’s this, and the inability to bear the monstrous injustice he starts to be aware of as he grows out of the viewfinder of childhood, that makes him turn away from the painful sight and start poking his finger in his eye or whatever moronic consequential action he decides on next. He can’t stand to see a stranger snubbed in the street, or a roommate he doesn’t like being excluded (even it’s for precisely the same reasons he dislikes them for). Certainly not even entertain the idea of a young girl whom he likes being treated in a way that – well, in a way that boys tend to treat girls. The moral struggle and culpability of not being able to right all (or any) of the wrongs in the world is an ongoing issue for any human with a conscience. The post-war environment of the early 1950s and the state of being an adolescent serve here as nexus for this anxiety to coalesce against. It’s not, however, a unique situation.

Critics sometimes cite the ‘shocking’ vocabulary as a milestone in literary freedom of expression. The only shocking thing about the vocabulary is the head-bangingly monotonous repetition. Whether Salinger set out to gain profanity-notoriety-points or whether he was merely using the inarticulacy as a show-not-tell for the powerlessness of Holden’s emotional state is a moot point. For sure, something written this self-indulgently and carelessly would never see past the inside of a garbage bin in an editor’s office these days. If writers today wanted to gain the same effect we’d have to use a whole heap of other tactics to keep the reader interested and validate the page count. The flat-footedness is accentuated in portions where other narrators come in. Strangely, they all have similar diction – minus some profanity, perhaps. It’s probably because of the shock-value that the volume ever got published. Moral mores are some of the hardest obstacles to transcend and often they’re so ingrained we don’t even know they’re restraining us. So I guess good on you Salinger. Does that make it a classic though? No, I don’t think so. It makes it a historical piece, worthy of note. To hold it up as a valid literary example to generations of today is erroneous.

It’s only towards the end that we’re told of the event that started Holden on his downwards spiral: the suicide of a boy in the first school he was expelled from. The boy jumps to his death one night having borrowed Holden’s polo neck jumper. The jumper and not knowing why he’d wanted to borrow it connect Holden indecipherably and unstatedly to culpability for the death. The still relatively new field of psychology that Salinger explores through this plot and structure is clumsy by today’s standards but as an early conscious assay in literature it probably has a laudable place. Not one we need to linger at.

In short, yes, there is a point to Catcher In The Rye. It says, take time to bear with obnoxious moody teenagers (and people in general) because they might well be trying their best to reconcile themselves to an insane world full of cruelty, and figuring out how to respond. Today, we’d try to say this on a budget of about 1,500 words max. If you wanted longer, you’d have to make it a damned sight more interesting.

Two Moose Hoofs up out of five – both for historical value.

The White Tiger

Title:  The White Tiger

Author: Aravind Adiga

Publisher: Atlantic Books             

Publish date: 2008

ISBN: 978-1-84354-722-8

Book Quote:

‘There are three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in. …. At the tea shop, the gossip grew furious. … Like eunuchs discussing the Kaka Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.’

This novel is a polariser. A glance round the review circuit will show fans raving at the satirical wit and galloping pace, and detractors growling at the unfavourable portrayal of the poor. The unsavoury exploits of the anti-hero, and the liberties with political and social facts that Adiga is supposed to have taken. The novel won the Booker for 2008 and is (unbelievably) a debut novel. Debut novel! Holy smoke.

Who is the novel’s target audience? I would say, people like me. We have no idea about India or Indian politics, or customs. Any small knowledge we have is third hand. The acrylic-colour sketches of life are a vivid backdrop to the story for us – intriguing but not the main focus. The human interaction and the social structure constructs a much more solid level for us to be guided around. The ‘coop’ is at first glance an entirely alien system of populace management. But as we look closer, and closer, it all starts translating into something much more familiar. Frighteningly similar to ‘Western’ culture control methods. You do something because it’s expected of you. If you don’t do it, you’re bad. People in power have exemption passes for doing bad things because well, how would anything get done otherwise?

Many readers drop by the wayside because they can’t take the ‘savage’ humour. Why is it often described as ‘savage’? Too painful? Too nasty? Too near the bone? Or great because it is all of these? The function of the satire is of course utilizing humour to speak the unspeakable. This overarching concept is verbalized wthin the novel in the recurring phrase (originating from Pinky Madam), ‘What a fucking joke.’ Balram says: ‘But to be called a murderer by the police? What a fucking joke.’ Pretty much the nub of the argument.

However both fans and detractors tend to miss the point. Aravind doesn’t describe India. He’s describing an imbalance of social acceptability and culpability which is global, and seemingly inbuilt to human nature.  He’s drawing attention to moral hypocrisy in a way that is too visceral for many, and too apparently localized for immediate transparency. Think Animal Farm. Without a doubt we’re meant to make the literary connection, with the insistent repetition of The Stork, The Raven, and The Buffalo and The Mongoose as character substitution names. They’re even called ‘The Animals’ collectively. Yet I haven’t seen a single reviewer mention this. The local colour is there for structure and interest. The story’s purpose is moral analogy, not a comment on India per se.

Five Moose-hoofs up. This one was a jaw-dropper. 

The Strays

Title: The Strays

Author: Emily Bitto

Publisher: Affirm Press

Publish date: 2014

This author has two problems here:

1. They are working out their own doubts through the medium of this story. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but in this case, they’re worried about whether their writing is interesting enough and whether they’re talented enough. Which automatically makes for boring writing, even if the fears are erroneous.
2. Their editors failed them.

The narrator Lily is a single child from an average family, who’s semi-adopted into a fledgling artist colony. Apparently she finds the whole experience terribly bohemian and enviably, talentedly shocking. Some bad things happen along the way. The end.

The story could have been fine. There’s nothing better or worse about choosing this particular setting. But Lily in her constant struggle to validate her vicarious existence through the Trentham family simply serves as a puppet mouthpiece for the author, who has decided that anything so out-there as an artistic community with paedophilic tendencies has got to be worth a second look. Bitto hasn’t grasped the concept that there is more pathos and empathy to be had in the spilling of a glass of milk than in the explosion of several galaxies, given the right storytelling.

For the story to have worked, Lily would have had to do one of two things:

• Validated herself independently of the Trenthams
• Been more of an unreliable narrator and transparently weak, so the author and reader could talk over her head

She does neither.

In addition to this, the jumping about in time, particularly towards the end, ensures dissipation of whatever tension there was well in advance of the close of the novel. The relief when the whole lamentable dirge is over is immense.

It’s a shame, because Bitto has a nice turn of phrase and a fine hand for painting pictures. Were her editors more on the ball, they would have encouraged a calmer approach that played to her strengths of observation and given in less to uncontrolled histrionics. Hopefully this debut novel will boost confidence enough (having for some reason won the Stella Prize) for fears to be allayed and something more sensible in the future. There is scope.

I do have one burning question, though. How, in this world of The Strays, does one roast duck feed a gathering of at least 11 people? In my house it will feed three at the very most. If I knew the secret, my housekeeping money would last till October on January’s budget. There are three explanations I can think of:

1.  Evan Trentham possesses Christ-like carving and serving capabilities.
2. The family lives mainly by photosynthesis and only sits at table for show. This option would validate some of the other household arrangements.
3. There is a species of duck the size of a large turkey.

Or there’s a fourth possibility. The author and the editors were sloppy. Here and elsewhere. Better luck next time, maybe.

One weak wave of a Moose-hoof up out of five.