In Other Worlds - Margaret Atwood

Title: In Other Worlds – SF And The Human Imagination

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Virago             

Publish date: 2011

ISBN: 9781844087112

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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.’

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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.”

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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.’

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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.