My Tango with Barbara Strozzi

It is tempting just to say, ‘another new book by Russell Hoban!’. After all, like Alasdair Gray he has such a distinctive voice that his work is instantly recognisable, and anyone who knows his stuff will need no further information.

Linger Awhile

I suppose the thing to remember is that, as far as Russell Hoban’s work is concerned, Riddley Walker was the exception not the rule. And I’m not talking about the language (that had to be a one-off) but about the structure. Apart from that novel and, to a lesser extent, Pilgermann, his novels from The Lion of Boaz Jachin and Jachin Boaz all the way up to Linger Awhile (Bloomsbury 2006) have been structurally similar. They are short books composed of short chapters that alternate viewpoints and that emphasise the skew of their perceptions rather than the clarity of their vision. To this extent, therefore, the new novel fits precisely into the pattern of all the rest.

Come Dance with Me

I will take the time to write about about Come Dance With Me by Russell Hoban (Bloomsbury 2005), because this was one book I read purely for pleasure. I refered to Gwyneth Jones’s book being schematic, but that is even more a description you would apply to Hoban’s work, particularly what he has done since Angelica’s Grotto. They are, for a start, short books made up of a large number of very short chapters (there are inevitably several chapters of a page or less). They tend to follow the pattern established in Turtle Diary, a mis-matched man and woman, alternating as narrator, describing the unlikely circumstances that bring them together and somehow manage to keep them together. The familiar catalogue of writers, musicians and painters put in an appearance (Odilon Redon is yet again very important), the bat from The Bat Tattoo puts in an appearance, as does Amarylis from Amarylis Night And Day, and inevitably one of the characters (a different one every time) lives in what is recogniseably Hoban own home (looking out across open ground to where the District Line heads south above ground). You can either read his books ticking off a mental list of traits and repetitions, or you can read them as if you are returning to visit an idiosyncratic elderly friend. This is not recurring images in the manner of a series (as in Lindsey Davis’s ‘Falco’ novels, for instance, where the same characters are expected to reappear every time), This is rather visiting the mental landscape of someone with a finite number of obsessions, but which are brought together in slightly different combinations each time. And though he makes every effort to present his characters as being deeply ordinary, they are invariably unlike anyone you will meet outside a novel. Hoban’s characters always talk in symbols and allusions, and the person they are talking to is always the only person who might catch the allusion, understand the symbol. The unlikeliest people are thrown together in museums where they are drawn to the same symbolist painting and understand the same passing quotation from a German folk tale – at least that is what happens here. One the one side we have a 60-odd year old bachelor, an American long resident in London (Hoban wiping a few years off his age), and in this instance one of the top specialists in diabetis; on the other we have a 50-odd year old rock princess who also happens to be an art expert. Our rock’n'roll star is obsessed with death, because all the people she has been close to, including her young child, have been killed in unusual circumstances (her son fell off a cliff in Hawaii when they went whale watching), as a result she is afraid of entering a new relationship. The doctor is simply afraid of relationships, period. But in his younger days the doctor wrote poems under a pseudonym, and wouldn’t you know it, the rock band adapted one of his poems for a hit song without either of them knowing the other. But now it’s coming up to the anniversary of the child’s death, and as the rock star flies to Hawaii for a personal pilgrimage, the doctor has to work out his own feelings to decide what he really wants to do about the relationship. And that is the story, all taking place in just a few days between first meeting in the museum and redemptive reunion in Hawaii (and even so Hoban manages to get the dates muddled up so that my edition of the book contains a rather charming little erratum slip). The whole book is charming, not very deep, not very realistic, but an unalloyed joy to anyone else, like me, who loves Hoban’s work.

First published at Livejournal, 12 April 2005.

A Feast of Hoban

I suspect Russell Hoban is an acquired taste. I acquired it years ago when Riddley Walker appeared, and I keep coming back for more. But I suspect that his readership has diminished somewhat over recent years, mostly because he hasn’t written Riddley Walker or Kleinzeit all over again. Though, curiously, what he has been doing over the last few years is writing Turtle Diary all over again, but with sex instead of turtles. There was Angelica’s Grotto about a professor of art history who becomes addicted to a pornographic web site; then Amarylis Night and Day about the romance between a lecturer at an art college and the woman who keeps invading his dreams (the professor from Angelica’s Grotto has a walk-on part here). Then come the two further books I’ve just been reading: The Bat Tattoo (2002, Bloomsbury 2003) and Her Name Was Lola (Bloomsbury 2003). Of these, Lola is the more inventive, but they are both pretty good. The hero of The Bat Tattoo makes crash-test dummies with working genitals for the delectation of a strange multimillionaire (shades of Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer here, but then there are resonances across all of Hoban’s books. His characters all live in the same house (Hoban’s own) near the Piccadilly Line, visit the same shops and museum, listen to the same eclectic selection of music, love the same authors (M.R. James, Oliver Onions, H.P. Lovecraft), and pin up the same pictures). Our hero decides to have a tattoo in the shape of a bat from a Chinese bowl, and when he goes to the museum to take a photograph of the bowl he meets a woman who has a tattoo of the same bat; inevitably a prickly romance starts. Meanwhile the sinister multimillionaire is pressing our hero to embark on some art of his own, and he ends up creating a life-sized crucified crash-test dummy. He enters it in an art competition; it is rejected, but then becomes the centre of a cult when people swear they saw the dummy crying. It’s a fairly slight story, but full of Hoban’s usual obsessions.

The art lecturer from Amarylis has a walk on part in The Bat Tattoo, and the professor from Angelica’s Grotto has a walk on part in Lola, but that doesn’t really make them part of a sequence. Lola has a wonderful conceit: unsuccessful author Max is walking along the street one day when he picks up a smelly dwarf that no-one else can see. The dwarf is an Indian characterisation of Forgetting, and when he investigates max recovers his memory of Lola. Lola was the perfect girl for Max, but while he was involved with her he strays with a ‘Homecoming Queen’ type. He gets them both pregnant at about the same time, which causes Lola to break up with him and the Homecoming Queen to return home to Texas. Then he forgets. At the same time, he is trying to write a novel in which his central character picks up the Indian dwarf of Forgetting. It’s a novel with far more resonances between fiction and reality, far more twists and turns of controlled fantasy, far more complexity than anything Hoban has written for a long time. it is, of course, wicked and funny at the same time, and it touches upon all the familiar pubs and museums and shops and operas that you expect to visit in a Hoban novel.

First published at Livejournal, 27 January 2004.