Fall by Colin McAdam

FALL by Colin McAdam

Book Quote:

“Like most private schools it was part fantasy, part reality, and therefore all reality. (…) We were boys who wore suits, monkeys with manners. We didn’t have parents but were treated like babies. We were left on our own but had hundreds of rules to abide by.”

I’d seen Fall described as a “literary whodunit,” and was looking forward to some good sleuthing. It’s not quite like that. Mystery is involved, but plot and intrigue are entirely secondary to the study of adolescent development.

The two main narrative voices are Noel and Julius, both students at St Edbury’s – a Canadian high school for the children of the wealthy. Julius’s narration is an unpunctuated stream of consciousness, immediate and sensory. He’s good-looking, not overly bright and (as the story progresses) increasingly shown to be good-natured.

By contrast Noel’s prose is highly structured – more so than would be possible for the age group. This is excused by the account being written retrospectively from an adult standpoint. Within the novel, it’s only Noel that is examined in detail and whose changes are viewed. Most of the other characters are almost static emotionally. There’s also a nominal contribution from William, Julius’s father’s driver.

The “Fall” of the title is the name of one of the few girls in the predominantly male school, and is short for “Fallon.” Fall is dating Julius: they’re the ideal couple, both popular and attractive. Noel is obsessed with Fall as well, though he never declares it to her, but instead continues to state in the narrative that his turn with her will come later. The plot (such as it is) revolves around the disappearance of Fallon from the campus grounds, with both Julius and Noel being questioned about it.

What the novel is concerned with is the development of Noel from a weedy sixteen year old who won’t retaliate if pushed down in a corridor, to a seemingly self-confident, possibly self-knowing sociopath, prone to explosive violence at rare moments. When he visits his family in Sydney near the outset of the book, he describes himself:

“One day I came out of the pool and saw myself reflected in our sliding door. I was a pale and skinny sixteen-year-old who had forgotten to put sunblock on one of his shoulders. My lazy eye was swollen shut, my face was ugly and drained, my shoulder was livid, and I was still unformed.”

It’s the “unformed” that McAdam is concerned with. The environment the teenagers are put into is portrayed as artificial, unhealthy. Despite being highly supervised, there are effectively no adults in the children’s lives. It’s noticeable that Julius’s mother is dead (she committed suicide), Fallon’s father is absent (her parents are divorced) and Noel’s family is supposedly intact but they’re as far away as they can be, in Australia.

The implication is that growing up in this unnatural environment, the children inevitably miss out on vital components of life. Like plants deprived of isolated nutrients, they’re prone to becoming emotionally stunted – lop-sided, etiolated.  In Sydney, as Noel prepares to leave his parents’ house for school at the end of the holidays, his mother says to him:

“I don’t like seeing how much you’re changing. … I’m missing all your changes.”

When adults don’t keep a watch on the changes children go through, undesirable developments multiply unnoticed. There are key incidents that serve as markers along the road to Noel’s increasingly antisocial tendencies. The first is an incident in 9th grade, mainly described by Chuck, a close associate of Julius and Noel’s. The incident involves Noel (still in his “unformed” state) being bullied by a larger boy, and after a fair period of non-retaliation suddenly turning and biting his tormentor’s arm. Chuck says it wasn’t even the fact that he physically bit a piece out of a fellow student’s arm, but that afterwards Noel was absolutely unaffected by it. “…like it was all normal for him. Like he just forgot about it.” It’s not the incident itself that the stolid Chuck finds disturbing, but the separation from a workaday mentality.

Nuances and hints are brushed in lightly but deliberately. In the corridor of a quiet Friday afternoon when not many other people are about, Noel passes Mr Staples:

“who taught Algebra and Functions, nodded at me and said, ‘Mr Reece.’ His lips were tight and there was a look in his eyes that had developed a few years earlier whenever he saw me. Distrust or caution or just that squint of a half-formed opinion. I never liked him.”

Here Noel is narrating, but he doesn’t refer to the biting incident specifically, but simply as “a few years earlier.” In the lop-sided world of the semi-abandoned school, even the teacher’s opinion is possibly “half-formed.”

There’s also an ambiguous encounter with a girl at the gym in Sydney, where Noel first starts working out. Meg is a no-nonsense girl and is pointedly stronger than Noel at the time, but after an encounter at a midnight beach suddenly stops turning up at the gym. Noel writes her a letter of apology for “frightening” her, but as far as Noel’s own account relates, there has been nothing to justify this apology. One is left to wonder what happened after Noel’s pen stopped writing.

This is the case throughout Noel’s account. How self-aware is he? Although it’s deliberately left unanswered, the fact that he’s writing after (what is obviously) extensive discussion and analysis, as well as brief pointers, suggest that Noel is quite aware of his own nature. When he’s sitting in a café with Fallon, he narrates:

“I’ve often tried to see the world through her eyes. I know that café looked different to her than it did to me.”

This brings us to the issue of lack of empathy. Critics of the book have pointed out that characters are not rounded, they’re cut-outs. Particularly Fall, the prime object of desire. We’re not at all clear  what she looks like, or anything about her other than she’s a reasonably attractive, decent girl with a slightly troubled family background. The point about Fall is, however, not why she is desirable, but that she is. In the two-dimensional mind of an underdeveloped human with an insufficient intake of adult stability, the fact that she is desirable is much more important than what she actually is. As readers, we need know no more. In a world reduced to symbols and arbitrary black-and-white areas, protagonists are unable to function when they collide with real life or emotion – the “grey” areas, within themselves and in the external world.

The premature separation from parents caused by boarding school is juxtaposed with the infantilisation of physically mature boys. The school imposes rules, often ineffectual and seemingly arbitrary. Julius says:

“Chuck’s bed is here and Ant’s bed is there and I’m wondering why I’m eighteen years old and sleeping in a bunk bed.”

These two aspects of the evils inflicted by the school seem to combine to create a small vortex strong enough to suck susceptible minds into an emotional limbo. McAdam himself went to a similar boarding school, and there is without doubt a great deal of catharsis and self-healing within the volume. This does not make it less worthwhile a read.

Once again, on hearing the novel was a “literary whodunit” with the title of Fall, I expected perhaps a detective’s journey into the abyss of a killer’s mind, which drags the detective into a biblical “Fall” in the process. In the first analysis, one might be disappointed going in with these expectations. However, in retrospect, this is precisely what it is – except that the detective is the reader, and McAdam tries his best to share the “fall” in a manner that will be participated in, also by the reader. Here, though, the state before the fall is not some prelapsarian innocence. It’s more mere ignorance, unformedness. The protagonists lurch from being unformed to being malformed, no pause inbetween. It’s perhaps more chilling for this, as for all their two-dimensionality, they are in their own way entirely believable.

(Book Review originally published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, Dec 2010)

WHILE THE WOMEN ARE SLEEPING by Javier Marias

WHILE THE WOMEN ARE SLEEPING by Javier Marias

Book Quote:

“Someone who has not been born or, even more so, someone who has not even been engendered of conceived is the one thing that belongs to death entirely. The person who has not been conceived dies most. […] He or she is the only one who will have neither homeland nor grave.”

This collection of short stories is intriguing and memorable, firstly for its peculiar themes and obsessions, secondly (contrary to what one might expect) because the earlier pieces seem far “better” than the later.

Let’s qualify “better.” The title story “While the Women Are Sleeping” is by far the longest and most self-indulgent of all the pieces, as well as being a relatively “late” piece. Pages of almost-monologue punctuated only by random, unnecessary actions do not constitute a well-crafted short story, in my view. The observations and tension do keep one reading, but in a sitting-back-with-eyebrows-slightly-raised sort of way. Arguably, the feat of retaining reader attention through the obstacle of such a construct is more impressive than if the story were crafted in a manner more conducive to the short story format. However, the bottom line is that it rambles. It’s introspective and ultimately inconclusive.

The short story is an unforgiving mistress. It has certain criteria, one of which is to swallow the reader instantly into its own specific setting and situation. This is the aim of all stories, of whatever length, but the demands made of a short story within a collection like this are far greater than those made of a novel with 300 pages to wallow in. All the stories in this collection do meet this criterion. Each one is vivid and memorable – sometimes unpleasantly so, as in the title story (it leaves one with a kind of “icky” feeling, which is undoubtedly entirely intentional).

The short story demands something else, though. It has to have thrust. If the tale drifts along in a nightmarish river of introspection, possibilities and hypotheticals, before leaving one stranded on a muddy shore with nothing more than a queasy stomach and uncertainty as to what just happened, it can never aspire to being more than mediocre. It is in this respect that the earlier stories outclass the later. They may be gawkier, but their undisguised obsessions have an energy that loses its way in the more convoluted sentences and oblique references in the later works. Though, having said “later” the latest piece in the collection is from 1998, so they are all relatively early works. There’s a certain breathless audacity needed to be able to write of a main character: “Derek Lilburn was a man of little imagination, ordinary tastes, and an irrelevant past” and still expect your reader to stay with you.

The other intriguing aspect of the collection (from an English reader’s point of view) is the seemingly near-stereotypically Spanish preoccupation with death and mortality. Eight of the ten stories deal directly with death, from a bewildering multitude of viewpoints. Add to this that the majority of the pieces are in the first person and you will get the (correct) impression that overall the collection is a head-on confrontation with issues surrounding mortality.

These issues are of a curiously philosophical nature. Mortality as connected with identity is a recurring theme, and the book is crawling with doppelgangers, mirrors, transfigurations and shadows. The self is lost, stolen, misplaced, and unknown in myriad variations. Generation and ancestry is a theme closely linked here, as ancestors and progenitors occur as echoes of the younger generations, haunting and forever directing them, even if unwittingly.

Yet these echoes, though fateful and often baleful, somehow seem to be taken as part of a natural process. Many of the outcomes in the stories are pretty dismal, but there’s a certain satisfaction of a destined, if not a just, end met: as if the Weird sisters were writing a report on the day’s activities.

This brings me back to the title story. One of the central characters is an entirely self-absorbed 23-year-old female. She has abandoned her parents and is currently seemingly content to be the idolatrous object of worship of an older man. She lies on the beach, staring into a hand-mirror, examining her perfect skin for any tiny blemishes. She says not a single word throughout the story. Such progenitor-less self-absorption is seen as a full-stop in the continuum of the general struggle of existence, and as such, more to be pitied than idolised. Perhaps this is the core paradox between Marías’ writing and his philosophy: a short story must be complete of itself, like the Midgard Serpent. His personal philosophy (as it appears in this collection) indicates that this would be the worst of all possible fates, so how could he reconcile the demands of the form to the thrust of the content? With difficulty, it seems.

I enjoyed this book, and will be carrying its images around with me for a long while, I suspect. I would recommend it to anyone interested in short stories.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)

FRAGILE by Lisa Unger

Book Quote:

“It didn’t take long for tensions to build. The three of them – the pretty cheerleader, the sexy burnout too old, too knowing for her age, the geek with gothic leanings – they were all there, these representative of the perennial high school subcultures. Squirming and pink beneath the shells of their adulthoods. Maggie thought that childhood things would be left behind, these silly groupings would fade and become meaningless, but they never were. Not in a town like this. Those teenage girls, each awkward and unsure in her own way, never left the Hollows.”

Fragile is set in a small town 100 miles from New York City, called “The Hollows.” The dynamics between family clusters, over the generations within the sometimes stifling small-town boundaries, form the emotional backbone of this well-crafted thriller.

The central group is the Cooper family. With Jones (the father) being the chief detective in the Hollows police force and Maggie (the mother) being a psychologist, they are strategically placed to know what’s going on in town when something out of the ordinary happens. Their son Ricky is a high school student, and the disappearance of his girlfriend Charlene is the signal for the mystery to begin in earnest.

There are two other main family groups. The first group is that of the Murrays: with moody Melody the mother, Charlene the disappearing would-be rock star, and Graham the stepfather with dubious intentions. The second is the Crosbys: the family with a strong current of violence and intimidation, which includes the mostly absent mother Angie, Travis the bully policeman father, and Marshall their deeply troubled son.

The childhood histories of the generation now in their prime are insolubly linked. As their past actions seem to have become part of the silent fabric of the Hollows, a unique dread, like a recurring nightmare, stalks the story as the plot unfolds. Unspoken terror of retributive karma lends the narrative a tinge of ghost-like fear.

Two entwined themes weave through the novel with the intensity of obsession. The first of these is the theme of the lost girl.

No fewer than three lost girls wander through the pages of Fragile. Charlene Murray, the current missing girl, is the novel’s immediate raison d’être. Sarah Myer, from a generation back, brings the weight of the past to the narrative. Charlie the pest-control guy’s Lily brings a resonating chord from the world outside the Hollows.

As Unger states in a note on the text, the core idea for the narrative evolved from an incident in her childhood, where a student went missing from her own high-school. One is left with a distinct impression that the distance of the memory, its initial emotional impact and the diverse aspects in which it has reflected on in the author’s own life have a strong bearing on the general tone of the novel. How memory both changes the future and shapes our perception of what we now are is the subject of the other main theme of the novel: change.

In the most concrete sense, change and the lack of it are built up through family portrayals, in shards of continuity or broken lines. Maggie would like to paint but she’s too busy – meanwhile her mother’s attic is full of her father’s old paintings. Charlie would like to write, and eventually finds out that his father used to write. Charlie’s colleague Wanda knows all about cars because her daddy worked for Ford. The Crosby family are all policemen and bullies– “the gene gets stronger every generation.” Jones hates his mother for dominating his life, but dominates his son and disbelieves him in turn, reflecting his own fears onto Ricky without bothering to think about who the new generation really is.

Which links can or should be broken? What kind of change is possible? Through exploration of these relationships, so circumscribed by location and custom, the novel eventually posits that only by admitting the past – both our own deeds and those of our forbears – and incorporating it into our existence, can we “grow up.”  The crystallisation that hidden fear forces onto a character is a type of stagnation, a decomposition.

Through the pages of carefully-constructed prose one clearly sees a diligent writer taking enviable care in their craft: a writer who hates sloppiness and unintentional ambiguity. This preciseness for a long time seemed to sit at odds with a certain out-of-focus quality to the tenor of the narrative.

Initially I put this characteristic down to lack of immediate “need to write;”  it seemed to suggest meticulous but slightly mechanical work without a great deal of emotional force behind it. This conclusion was somewhat spurred on by the fact that character portrayal in Fragile is extremely female-heavy, and empathy for any character is late in coming. Not to say that we don’t know how the male characters look, behave or think – it’s that we don’t feel what it’s like to be inside them. Not even Jones, who is heavily analysed.

However, as the story progressed it started to become apparent that the emotional freeze imposed on the writing was precisely mirroring that which the characters suffered from. The thaw descends on the structure of the language, the plot, and the characters simultaneously. Such a demonstration of union between language, emotion and story is truly impressive.

I went in a sceptic, and came out a fan. Unger’s Beautiful Lies is already sitting on my shelf, waiting.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Review, 2011)

NATION by Terry Pratchett

NATION by Terry Pratchett

Book Quote:

“It is too lonely. It has too many memories! It has too much silenced laughter, too many unheard footsteps, too many soundless echoes since they died!”

In interviews, Terry Pratchett has said that he had to write Nation. He pushed aside earlier scheduled work to accomplish this. The momentum of this need translates itself into a headlong rush which the reader experiences quite shortly after picking up the volume… until the end.

Well. This is not to overlook the consummate skill with which Pratchett  prunes his work for ever-smoother reading. It’s easy for a reader to consume this 400 page book in a day, if not a sitting. After this we waddle off, fulfilled and glowing, thinking “what a wonderful story, and my what a fast reader I must be” while Pratchett sits in his customary shadow, snickering under his hat. Undoubtedly entirely pleased with the result.

The setting is not Discworld. It’s the equivalent of the 19th century, and the settings are a South Sea island and Britain (the latter but briefly). It’s a parallel universe, where (for example) Darwin exists but events and monarchs are slightly adjusted.

Mau is a South Sea Island boy undertaking his adulthood-initiation trial on a nearby deserted island, when a Tsunami strikes. In his canoe, he survives and makes it back home to his own island, but meanwhile his village has been wiped away. Apart from the harrowing remains of his tribespeople laced through the branches of trees (which he somehow manages to dispose of properly) there are no humans left. The one exception is a solitary aristocratic English girl (calling herself “Daphne” because she doesn’t like the name “Ermintrude”) who has washed up on the wings of the wave and is stranded in the middle of the jungle island, in her wrecked ship, with all her Victorian ideas of propriety intact. The coming together of these two characters is mesmerising, inventive and bizarre to the point of utter believability, chest-emptyingly funny and soberingly poignant.

Since Mau was interrupted in his adult initiation ceremony, he officially has no soul. He floats between the childhood and adult world, unable to finish the transition he started before the catastrophe. In the nightmare of disposing of the dead and wandering about the wrecked island on his own, he talks to the entities of  “the Grandfathers’” and “Locaha,”  the god of death. The Grandfathers are the spirit voices of the islander’s ancestors, accustomed to being placated with fresh beer, honoured, and having the “god anchors” in their proper place. Locaha, like so many devils, plays a constant game of intimidation with Mau.

“Would it hurt to stop now? To slide back down into the dark and let the current take him? It would be the end of all grief, a blanketing of all bad memories.”

“Does not happen!”  is Mau’s assertion of life to this sibilation of Locaha’s as he slips into the depth of the sea while rescuing the ‘”ghost girl’” (Daphne).  The pain of self-discipline and the subjugation of the needs of the self to the needs of others are two central themes within this reverberating coming-of-age novel.

Like any good piece of this genre, it has its work cut out for it, as it has to encompass nothing less than the Whole of Life. No problem. Disillusionment with (and respect for) parents and ancestors, self-reliance, loss of the known ground, sacrifice of self, acceptance of responsibility, human understanding that transcends cultural differences, madness and the struggle with death, questions as to the very nature of time, surviving the uprooting of the most fundamental beliefs. All of these and more are easily ensconced within the masterful cocoon of the narrative, and the reader swings from thread to thread without any knowledge of how carefully he’s being handled. Or would do, if he kept his eyes shut and just enjoyed the ride.

This is why the novel is so adeptly written for the young adult market. Pratchett wishes the ride to be easy, but also for you to admire the view, and learn. The themes and continuity are not meant to be ignored: he carefully positions mirroring passages (typically regarding Daphne’s life and Mau’s life) sequentially. If Daphne thinks about her problems with her ancestors, Mau think of his mirror issues. If Mau wonders why so much responsibility is suddenly thrust on him, Daphne considers her case too. Nature echoes it, other protagonists support it. This description may make it sound overly simplistic in structure: this is utterly untrue. It is merely guiding younger readers on a smooth path of fine literary mastery.

As the days and weeks pass, more stragglers accumulate on the island (good and bad) and Mau finds that despite his “demon” status with his lack of an official soul, his youth, inexperience, recent exile from state of dependence on his parents, his spiritual confusion and paralysing doubts as to the state of the universe (in short, his state of being a teenager), despite all of these he is being nudged irrevocably into a role of leadership. Daphne travels her own mirror road, roughly in the same direction. A climax of pirates and cannibals is resolved before a ship from Britain turns up bearing Daphne’s father and much more.

At this point it might be wise to glance at another novel of the same genre, Lord of the Flies. The parallels (and differences) between the two are certainly no coincidence. Nation is perhaps the diametric opposite of the earlier book. Nation’s bereft islanders deal with their own climax of barbarism (inflicted on them, not produced by them) before the British arrive in their shiny uniforms. When they arrive, they do not rescue the stranded before being rescued (spiritually) by the “savages.” The demon of Death is no flapping parachutist on the mountain but a vivid confrontation of the darkest forces within ourselves – and is overcome conclusively, not run away from. If Lord of the Flies leaves the reader with grief and believable horror, Nation leaves only hope in the regenerative, not the destructive power nascent within the human psyche. It is no coincidence that the last chapter is entitled “The World Turned Upside Down.” In an age crammed with post-apocalyptic foreboding and doom, it is a radical statement of belief in the possibility of fundamental triumph of positive over negative.

I cannot think of any age-group or social group I would not recommend Nation to. It has material enough for absolutely everybody.

(Originally published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2010)

Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow

HOMER & LANGLEY by E. L. Doctorow

Book Quote:

“There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.”

As one reads Homer & Langley and is swept along on its strange tide, one tries to raise one’s head intermittently to admire the craft. But that craft is, like the shoes made by the elves in story, so seamless, so perfect, that it’s hard to grasp until one is deposited on the other shore and left to linger for a while.

The novel uses the theme of the real-life case of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, who lived on 5th Avenue in New York from the 1880s to 1947. A case of great notoriety, the brothers (suffering from extreme compulsive hoarding disorder) effectively mewed themselves up within their house. Over the decades this filled with newspapers, collections of mainly non-functional items, and garbage. They disassociated themselves from the outside world to the extent that their electricity and water supplies were cut off – a situation they did not attempt to rectify. After their death (caused directly by the accumulated items within the house), over 100 tons of hoarded rubbish were removed from the house.

The case is of such notoriety that dramatisations and fictionalisations of it abound. Novels include Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper (1954) and Franz Lidz’s 2003 Ghostly Men (a history of the brothers). Stephen King used details from the story in Salem’s Lot (1975). Movies either based on or inspired partially by the story include “Unstrung Heroes” (1995), a movie based on Ghostly Men. References to the case crop up in numerous TV serials, and at least six plays have been based directly or loosely on the story. It is so well documented there is little point in listing them all again here. Suffice it to say, the case is well-known.

Unlike the bulk of writing pertaining to this case, Doctorow does not focus on the squalor and scandal of the situation: those aspects which are most titillating to the popular media and the public. The first-person narrator, Homer (“I’m Homer, the blind brother”) recounts the past years of their life within the house with a diction so gentle, so unassuming, thoughtful and musical that it is well into the narrative before we start to suspect things are seriously amiss. The novel pretty much comments on itself when Homer’s “Muse” Jacqueline (the French reporter) tells him:

“There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking. (…) You think a word and you can hear its sound. (…) words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”

The sound of Homer & Langley is of a soft voice by a fireside, never too fast or too loud, and always considerate of the listener. The strange narrative is gripping not because of drastic happenings or fast action, but because one doesn’t want to get up from that fireside, or stop listening to the voice.

This is not to ignore the laconic humour that pervades most of the book. The tone is so deferential and quiet that quirky tongue-in-cheek moments creep up on us unexpectedly. It’s ambiguous, though, as to how much self-awareness Homer has. As to whose tongue is in their cheek, Homer’s or Doctorow’s, is not always entirely clear.

Despite its genteel tone and historical setting, the impression Homer & Langley gives by the end of the narrative is that it has more in common with typically post-apocalyptic settings and themes than with fin-de-siecle writing, the latter of which it more closely resembles superficially. Why?

One of its main themes is consumerism. Langley’s grand “Theory of Replacements” which leads to the disastrous accumulation of junk inside the house states that “everything is replaced.” Children are replacements for their parents, current events are merely a cycle of typecasts which endlessly repeat each other: as one is forgotten, another immediately takes its place. Langley, however, is a mass of contradictions. Despite his cherished theory, none of the myriad of items he brings into his own house are ever “replaced” – they merely get buried. The brothers cannot find anything useful they know they have (such as candles in a black-out) because they have long-since been covered in other items.

Langley’s fatalistic view is that as humanity is such a polluter and exploiter, the sooner it blows itself up the better, as it will make way for some other more worthwhile species. This tends to be the conclusion that novels of apocalyptic devastation often pose, and generally stems (as in this case) from a direct disgust with consumerism and bureaucratised waste. Langley, however, is also the ultimate consumer: always acquiring, never passing anything on. It is in this way that Langley’s own theory of greed bringing about the demise of mankind is fulfilled in miniature within his own house, when he is finally overwhelmed by his own falling booby-trap of junk.

Langley’s more confrontational nature in response to the pressures of the modern is the perfect foil, however, to what is possibly the main focus: the world of Homer, the narrator. What seems at first to be a gentle narration of a stoic, romantic individual turns slowly towards us until we finally see it for what it is: a comment on the process of growing old. At this point, it is useful to look at which aspects of this story the author has decided to change.

Most pointedly, he has made Homer blind at a much younger age than in reality. Homer Collyer actually lost his sight at the age of 52, not 14 as in the novel. By depriving the character of visual input at this age, Doctorow effectively chrysalises part of his psyche into the innocence of a sheltered pubescent boy, to highlight his lack of culpability for the famous squalor surrounding him. It emphasises his idealism and romanticism. Another significant detail which has been altered is that it was actually Langley who was the musician, not Homer. Homer, on the other hand, was the one with law skills, not Langley as in the book. The allocation of all “sharper” capabilities like law to Langley, and the more sensitive ones to Homer again help to accentuate his romantic innocence.

So why is it so important that Homer is not culpable? His role is to observe the progress of time and not to alter it – and once again, here facts have been adjusted dramatically to accentuate the effect. In the novel, the brothers live on in their house well into the 1970s, possibly the 80s (making them almost a century old), when in fact they both died in 1947. Doctorow has extended their lives by decades to emphasise the difference between the life they knew as children and the situation they find themselves at the end of it. As boys they rode in horse-drawn carriages and the streets had the organic smell of manure and leather. By the end Homer is nearly knocked down by a passing car, the air is filled with exhaust fumes and the Cold War creates global fear.

The passage of time brings changes, which the brothers try to interpret in their own way. People come in and out of the house; lives are touched briefly, but always revert to the status of the two of them, together in their isolation. And as the junk accumulates, the isolation increases.

Because Homer is blind, he relies on his other senses to interpret the world. He is particularly proud of his sense of hearing, and Langley supports this by describing him as bat-like. Homer navigates by hearing the differences in sound patterns as objects are shifted around the room: as he puts it, by the volume of air they displace. “I feel shapes as they push the air away, or I feel the heat from things, you can turn me around till I’m dizzy, but I can still tell where the air is filled in with something solid.”

Homer’s ability to navigate the world around him decreases incrementally. As a boy, still fully sighted, he says of himself: “I was in the fullness of my senses, then.” Then he loses his sight, but with his fine hearing and his stoical acceptance he does not feel it to be too much of an impediment. As the years progress he realises more and more how much his lack of sight bars him from a normal family life, until towards the end of the novel he also loses his hearing and the world of utter isolation closes in with a totality that is unbearable.

Meanwhile, the diminishment of visual powers has been firmly tied to memory. He narrates: “My memories of our long-dead parents are considerably dimmed, as if having fallen further and further back in time has made them smaller, with less visible detail as if time has become space, become distance, and figures from the past, even your father and mother, are too far away to be recognised.” While Homer himself increasingly relies on memories, those very memories are described as having a finite number of uses. Each time a memory is used (remembered), it loses a little of its gloss, its immediacy, until the edges are vague and features are generalised.

As the potency of input sense capacity goes down and the material store of sustaining memories is used up, the house around him increases its clutter – a factor which directly makes his life difficult as he cannot navigate round the objects as he used to do. There is too much junk in the way, he cannot feel the displaced air as he did previously. The junk which obscures useful items like candles is the material equivalent of the “memory junk” that accumulates as a person ages, and itself forms a barrier between them and the outside world: in this case made literal by the absolute barricading of the front door so that all ingress and egress is barred.

Doctorow manages the tempo of the isolation carefully. The real-life brothers’ major utilities were disconnected in 1928, nearly two decades before their deaths, but the account of this in the book comes very near the end. The long-drawn-out downwards trend (masked to Homer partially by his own volition, partially by his lack of sensory input) continues steadily until, as in the decay of an aged body, things suddenly start to fall apart in good earnest. “Langley and I (…) had metamorphosed, we were the ghosts who haunted the house we had once lived in. Not able to see myself or hear my own footsteps, I was coming around to the same idea.”

In the latter stages, the two inseparable brothers are connected only by a small tunnel through the debris, and as Homer can neither hear nor see his brother he says again of him, as for his parents: “I sense the passage of time as a spatial thing, as Langley’s voice has become fainter and fainter, as if he has walked off down a long road, of is falling away in space. (…) It is almost as if the reality is his distance from me and the illusion is his presence.”

Diminishment of attachment to the living world experienced by so many millions of elderly people in our increasingly ageing society is manifested in concrete form by the vehicle of the Collyer brothers’ story. Homer and Langley is a small and mellifluous piece which leaves a haunting, reverberating note of sadness of ageing and regret at the transience of things, and is not easily forgotten.

(Book Review originally published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, Sept 2010)

Title: Writers Abroad Short Story Anthology 2010
Compiled by: Louise Charles
ISBN: 978-1-4461-7886-7
Published: Lulu
Date: 2010

Last year, online writer’s group “Writers Abroad” put together this fantastic collection of short stories of facets of expatriate life. The stories range from Spain and France to right across the globe. Some stories (such as ‘The Brood Mare Blues’) don’t even name a country, they simply extract some ‘essence of expat’ and speak directly about the confusing, powerful forces at work when an individual becomes uprooted, transplanted and watered in foreign soil.


Now, I have to declare my vested interest. Since the publication of this book I happen to have joined the group myself, and many of the stories have the added appeal of familiarity with the style of the author. Notwithstanding possible partiality on that count, this IS a genuine, bona fide excellent collection of short stories I would recommend to anyone.

For a start, when was the last time you picked up a book from Lulu (or any other self-publisher) and found NO typos? NO sloppy errors? These books are thin on the digital ground, and this is one of them.

There is not a single story that’s not at the very least, good. Most of them are exceptionally good, and some of them stunning. I guess your choice of which ones come out top will differ from mine – it’ll be a matter of personal preference, because technically there isn’t a bad apple among them. I’ve recently read several anthologies and compilations from extremely well-known authors, and frankly none of them come close to the overall quality of work produced here. The piece is a gem.

I won’t pick out any pieces, because then I’ll want to list them all and that would just be spoiling things. There is, however, a peculiar similarity running through all of these stories, wildly disparate in setting, tone, style and delivery though they are. They are all confident. It’s almost as if the daily need to stand one’s ground amidst constant questioning of what one’s identity truly IS once immersed in cultures alien to its own origin, has seeped through into the fabric of the stories. There’s a difference between ‘competent’ and ‘confident’. Reading the collection leaves one with the very ring of Babel (in the most positive sense), where each voice can be distinctly and unapologetically heard. It is a stimulating and an exciting read.


You can buy it here at Lulu in paperback, download a digital copy for free here or even read it online here. How much better does it get?

The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody

Title: The Four Fingers of Death

Author: Rick Moody

ISBN: 978 0 316 11891 0

Published: Little, Brown and Co.

Date: 2010


Book quote:

Morton no longer wished to be exposed to the battery of human intoxicants with which they seemed to fill their days. Now that he employed the English language in his own way, now that he was capable of the helix of desire and consciousness that enabled the one primate to feel that it can subdue the others, he had no interest whatsoever in dulling himself. He would, with a clear mind, with a will to power, wrest life to his purposes.

_________________________________


The book is written in three chunks – two main, one introductory. The introductory portion is narrated in first person by Montese Crandal, the author of the second two sections. They are a novelisation of a remake of the 1964 film ‘The Crawling Hand’: the severed arm of a crashed astronaut wrecks havoc and disease on a 2026 populace.



Where to start? The novel’s 725 pages long, and about 600 of them should be cut. It’s quite the most self-indulgent piece of wittering I’ve had the misfortune to clap eyes on in a long while.


The writing itself, if you happen to be chained to a radiator and have nothing to do for the next two weeks, is not too objectionable, and there are plenty of entertaining passages. It is, however, so endlessly repetitive, so utterly disregarding of the reader’s need to have a reason to keep reading, one really is left wondering how it came into print in the first place. One gets a distinct feeling that not even Moody’s editor could really be bothered to check through it properly, leaving tell-tale signs like allowing the use of the same adjective in two sentences running.

The first large section deals with the trip to Mars made by nine (rapidly dwindling) astronauts. This section is relatively entertaining, perhaps because the limited subject matter (or rather limited number of characters) forces the narrative into some coherent flow. Even so, satellite communication to Earth manages to siphon in numerous extraneous characters, including a computer-generated image of a gryphon in an online sex simulation. (Yes, this goes on for quite a number of pages). The disintegration of the Martian community and collective insanity that results in the second part of the narrative is moderately absorbing, if slightly predictable. Claustrophobia, agoraphobia, panic attacks, conspiracy theories, cover-ups, deadly microbes, fisticuffs, sex and violence of all sorts are freely distributed. It’s not bad. Lots of repetition too but one still forgives it – just.


Then there’s the last portion. Back on Earth, Colonel Jed Richard’s severed arm is the only piece of astronaut that’s made it back to Earth, and is now crawling about propelled by the bacteria it’s picked up on Mars, busily strangling people and spreading disease. Well, essentially that’s the pot of ‘The Crawling Hand’.
The two main problems are firstly (again) endless repetition. How many times do we need to be told about what the desert looks like or what the homeless people do? Lots, apparently. More than you’d imagine.


The second problem is that back on Earth, Moody simply cannot stick to one subject or character. He’s like an ADD child, wandering from one room to the next, picking up random things, looking at them, shaking them up a bit, and tossing them aside. While it may be entertaining to read as a snippet, it does not make for good novel-building. You rather tend to lose any relationship with your reader like that.

One of the central themes, the relationship between ‘higher’ life forms, civilisation, and the ability to speak, is quite interestingly put together. On the one hand, the Martian bacterium (which ‘disintegrates’ higher life forms) has the effect of rendering those it infects unable to speak. On the other, Morton, the laboratory chimpanzee, has suddenly acquired the ability to speak through an injection of human brain cells. With his newfound ability he also gains a lot of confusion, and desire, and will to overpower: to subdue.

One cannot but reflect that the garrulousness that Moody both exhibits and discusses is indeed, in his case at least, an impediment to forward movement and evolution. It seems his own bacterium has infected the novel and has quite dismantled it to piecemeal incoherency.