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Through the dark labyrinth

Through the dark labyrinth

Category Archives: reviews

A taxonomy of reviewing

08 Tuesday Feb 2022

Posted by Paul Kincaid in history of ideas, reviews

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Anthony Burgess, Christopher Priest, Iain Banks, Nicholas Ruddick, Robert Holdstock

In the last few years, I have written a series of short articles for Foundation, and a pair of articles for Focus, all on the subject of reviewing. And yet I still don’t feel I’ve got anywhere near to the heart of the matter. Part of the problem is that we have no clear language with which to talk about reviewing. What’s the difference between a review and criticism? Where do you draw the line between review, review essay, and critical essay? Is criticism, by definition, negative? Is a bad review the same as a negative review? We have no generally agreed upon way of answering any of these questions, and any general writing about reviewing is liable to get hijacked by trying to define terms.

I keep worrying away at the issue, without really getting anywhere. And yet there is a dearth of writing about criticism. So, I’ve started going back in my mind to the basics. What follows is a first shot at a list of the sorts of things we talk about when we talk about reviewing. I suspect it is not comprehensive. I also suspect that a lot of people will disagree with a lot of my characterisations. But if this is anything it is just the start of something that needs to be much bigger.

I’m going to start with what may be the most controversial statement of all: reviewing refers to any piece of writing about a text that isn’t written by the author of the text itself. (Sorry, bit of jargon in there: by “text” I mean any created work, whether it is a story, a book, a play, a film or whatever. I tend to write criticism about books, so my automatic inclination would have been to say: “a review is any piece of writing about a book that isn’t written by the author of the book itself”, but that excludes all sorts of other creative endeavours that can be reviewed. So, I used “text” as a catch-all term. But you begin to see the problem here.) I know that, for instance, Anthony Burgess once pseudonymously reviewed one of his own novels. It’s misleading, but I think in the long run I would not count that as a genuine review (it is more in the nature of a joke or a jeu d’esprit, but that is not to say that jokiness has no part in a genuine review). On the other hand, Christopher Priest once reviewed a book by Nicholas Ruddick about Christopher Priest; this does indeed count as a review, and a valuable one at that, because of the privileged information it contained.

Therefore, if I write about something that I haven’t myself written, then I am engaged in reviewing. Note that in this definition I say nothing about length, purpose, or critical content. All those things are important, but they can muddy the water, and what I am trying to do here is start from absolute basics (“I think, therefore I am”), and we can bring these other factors into the picture as that picture begins to develop.

By this broad, loose definition, reviewing can cover anything from a blurb to a monograph. And that’s fair enough, because these are all ways we have of writing about creative texts. They are not all critical ways, they are not all analytical, they are not all objective, but they are all to some degree an outside eye upon the text in question.

Let me start with the issue of purpose, because there is little in the way of specialist language involved here, but at the same time how we regard the purpose of a piece of writing can have a profound effect upon how we regard that writing.

Thus, we might write in order to announce the text. This is reviewing as a branch of publicity or advertising, its primary purpose is to let an assumed audience know that the text is available for them to consume. It is the sort of thing you are most likely to encounter in a blurb, in a catalogue (which often just reproduces the blurb, or, more likely, the blurb on the book just repeats what has already appeared in the publisher’s catalogue), or in a capsule review (some of which also do little more than reproduce the blurb).

In their purest form, such announcements contain no evaluative language whatsoever. But more often than not they overlap with writing to extol the text; that is, the writing of largely uncritical praise that is designed primarily to excite the audience about a new text. Again, this is writing more akin to advertising and publicity than it is to criticism, and is generally found in blurbs and capsules. (A blurb might, occasionally, offer a more measured view of the text. Probably the most famous example of this is the first UK paperback of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, which gathered a number of the most biting attacks that the novel had received. But this is rare, and is almost invariably the result of a careful calculation by the relevant publicity departments about how to best reach the intended audience for the work.) When we encounter such over-enthusiastic writing in a blurb we learn to take it with a pinch of salt; it also appears in some reviews, where it is generally a sign of a less experienced or less than competent reviewer.

This approach to extolling the text rather than evaluating it is also often associated with that curious phenomenon of the modern internet age, the cover reveal, the book blog, or what I have recently seen referred to as the “book influencer”. It may be unfair to tar all who indulge in these activities with the same brush, but that recent coinage, book influencer, suggests that this is how they are viewed by the publishing industry: an unpaid adjunct to the publicity department who can be relied on to manufacture uncritical excitement for the next product. But I suspect that the purpose of the writing here is slightly different: to express a personal relationship with the text. And this is something that you find in many forms of writing, from the book blog up to and including the critical essay. The text is something to be discussed not objectively, but subjectively, almost intimately. This expression of a relationship can take several forms. For instance, some seem to consider that liking a text is the equivalent of being best friends with the author; while for others, the text in question has had some profound, life-changing effect upon their private life. The common factor is that judgement is suspended in favour of personal preference: you have to read this book simply because it meant so much to me. Done well, such relationship writing can be engaging or even thrilling to read, though it is not always the most reliable way to judge a text.

Almost the polar opposite of this approach is what is, or at least what used to be, the standard form of review writing: evaluation. At its simplest, the writer who ends a capsule review saying: “Buy this book!” or, “Avoid like the plague!”, is evaluating the text. That is, they are standing back from the text to consider how it stands up against some critical standard. What that standard is might not be entirely clear, there are times when you just have to take it on trust. But any act of evaluation is a step away from taking the text on its own terms.

However, simple declarative statements – this is a good book, this is a bad film – are not very satisfactory for the reader, and, from experience, I can say that they are not very satisfactory for the writer either. What is needed is the next step: analysis. Evaluation can come in a capsule review, but analysis requires something a little longer (length is not the defining characteristic of different types of review, but it is a factor in what the review can achieve). Analysis is understanding why you have arrived at a particular evaluation, why you think the text is a good book or a bad film, and then conveying that explanation in what you write.

Of course, analysis is never simple, and those of us who have gone that route have found it to be a very slippery slope indeed. Because it is rarely as easy as saying that this text is good because of X, or bad because of Y. Indeed, the more carefully you look at any text to answer, to your own satisfaction, why you actually like it, the more things you are going to find. It can quickly get to the stage where not finding a complex multiplicity of things to consider counts against the text: it is too simplistic to be truly satisfying. That confusing multiplicity of things to consider will, in the end, get in the way of evaluation. If you determine that elements A, B and C are done well, but elements X, Y and Z are done poorly, how can you decide whether, on the whole, the text is good or bad?

All too often, reviewing is considered to be a simple matter of making a judgement. But the more you get into reviewing, the more you realize that making a judgement is a very small part of the job of reviewing. Evaluation and analysis are both acts of comparison, but the more analytic you become, the more you realize that what is being compared and how it is being compared are fundamental to your own understanding of the text being reviewed, and therefore to your readers’ understanding. This leads, inevitably, to context. Again, while not invariable, this does tend to require more space than the types of writing we’ve considered to this point. Context, of course, can mean many things. It can be as simple as comparing the text to previous things by the same author, or you may look at how it fits with other works on the same topic, or other works from the same period. You may even fit the text into a broader artistic context: the art and literature of the Civil War, film and writing in the Great Depression, artists respond to the Cold War, that sort of thing.

By examining a text within a particular context, you are starting to do something more than evaluate, analyse, and review. It is somewhere in here, for instance, that reviewing tends to give way to criticism, though you won’t find anyone able to pinpoint exactly where that change might occur. What you are doing (another inescapable jargon term) is offering a particular reading of the text. Reading, in this sense, is a curious term. It is not an impersonal, objective review (to the extent that any review can be entirely objective), but neither is it subjective in the same way that relationship writing is subjective. When you offer a reading of a text you are not saying that this is the single and definitive way to approach that text. Indeed, to offer a reading is implicitly to acknowledge that there may be multiple other readings, each of which may be valid in its own way. What you are saying is that when I see this, and this, and this, in the text, bearing in mind such and such a context, I am led to interpret it this way. This is how the text seems to make sense to me.

Another way of interpreting reading in this sense, therefore, is understanding. This is what tends to be going on in most long-form writing about texts. Long form because it inevitably involves a deep dive into the text itself, considering things like word choice, sequence of events, the way characters are presented, etc, while at the same time producing a broad sweep of all sorts of other things that might impinge upon the text, from contemporary politics to the state of scientific knowledge. None of this can be done briefly, which is why this type of writing tends to be the preserve of the long critical essay or, more often, the monograph. And the purpose of such writing is not to extol the text, or to judge it, but simply to explain it. By this I mean explain it to the writer; the critic is trying to understand why the text is structured the way it is, why that structure works or does not work, and why the critic responds to it the way they do.

All of these terms – announce, extol, relationship, evaluation, analysis, context, reading, and understanding – help to explain why people might write about a text. The list is probably not exhaustive, but it does serve as a series of way stations we might notice as we turn to consider how people write about a text. For want of a better identifier I have subsumed all of what follows under the term “reviewing”, but this is reviewing in the very broadest sense. Basically, whenever someone sets out to write about a text there are at least as many ways to do it as there are reasons for what they do. The list that follows is roughly arranged in order of ascending size from shortest to longest, but length itself is no determinant of how a piece of writing should be categorized. There are overlaps in both length and approach between each of these types of writing, and in several cases the differences between two entries on the list are so imprecise that it is impossible to say where the line can be drawn, or even whether it should be drawn. Again, this list is surely not exhaustive, but it is intended to help find a starting point for any informed discussion of criticism and reviewing.

Let me start with what is probably the most questionable item on this list: the blurb. How can I justify including this among the extended family of reviewing? But a blurb is designed to encapsulate a book, to draw attention to its most salient features, and to explain why a potential reader would be well advised to pick the book up. And those are all characteristics that we will encounter again and again in this list. By blurb, I mean a short piece of writing, generally no more than around 100-200 words, that appears on the dustjacket of a hardback book or the back cover of a paperback. Pretty much the same text will have appeared in the publisher’s catalogue, and will also appear on Amazon and other bookselling sites. (There are equivalents for other forms of text, on the back of a DVD box, on Spotify, on the label beside a painting in a museum, but blurbs on books is probably the form we are most familiar with.) Blurbs will often be accompanied by quotations, either solicited from friendly authors or pulled from early reviews (I’ll come back to this later), but these are not part of the blurb as such.

I have written a few blurbs in my time, and believe me it is not an easy thing to do. I know some publishers try to save time and/or money by getting the author to produce their own blurb: this is not a wise decision. If you could sum up your book enticingly in 200 words, you wouldn’t have needed to write 200 pages. It takes distance from the text to be able to pick out something so immediately engaging that by the time the reader opens the book to page one they are already committed to reading it. It is advertising copy, therefore, but it still requires a degree of objective appreciation of the text.

When I say that the blurb is the shortest item on this list, that is not always the case. The capsule review, also sometimes referred to as the notice, can be shorter. When I used to write for the late, lamented Good Book Guide, I had no more than 50 words per book. Most capsule reviews you come across these days are in the form of round-up reviews, where the reviewer is given a set number of words to cover five or ten new books, usually in a given category. The Guardian, for instance, has monthly round-ups of science fiction and of crime fiction. There is enough flexibility in this format for the reviewer to make some over-arching judgement, and more attention might be paid to the better works on the list while others may receive little more than a sentence or two. For me, the archetype for the capsule review is at the back of the New Yorker, where there are four unsigned reviews in a single column. It is easy to quarrel with these very brief reviews, but they are a model for how to give just enough detail to convey a sense of the book and still provide some evaluation.

As a way of moving on to the next category, this is a story I have told many times, but it bears repeating. I was at a launch party for a book and was introduced to the head of the publishing house. As a way of making conversation, he asked what I did, and I said I was a reviewer. Where? I gave a list of rather prestigious print publications: Interzone, Foundation, TLS, that sort of thing. I could see his eyes glazing over. Someone else approached. What do you do? I’m a book blogger. And the publishing head honcho literally turned his back on me. There was a time when reviewing would have aroused more interest, but now it is the immediacy and the (presumed) uncriticality of book blogging that gets attention. Because this can be used, this is an unpaid adjunct to the publicity department.

I don’t want to call this category book blogging because that is too broad a term. I have a blog where I sometimes write about the books I read, though I don’t consider myself a “book-blogger”. I think the term I came across recently (I’m not sure, now, where I found it or how much currency it has) is a better fit: book influencer. There are all sorts of blogs, vlogs, YouTube channels and the like out there where “influencers” spend all their time spreading the word to their followers about everything from fashion to holiday destinations to investment opportunities. Book influencers make books just one more commodity to be exploited in this way. The ideal, for influencers, is to make the audience excited about each new product, and not to ask too many questions about it. It is to greet each book with squee and to treat something as mundane as the revelation of the cover of a forthcoming book as if it were of world-shattering importance. There is no distance, no objectivity; it is advertising by enthusiasm alone. There is something almost incoherent about the worst examples of this (and it is a model still so new that it tends to be judged by its worst examples), which seems to me to be a very strange way of responding to a literary text.

The broader term, book blogger, of course, covers the influencers, but also a much wider territory from the capsule to the critical essay. In fact, it is a category defined not by its content but by its medium. So, when I heard that one blogger had allegedly said that they made sure that every single review they published carried at least one pull quote that the publisher could use to advertise the book, I knew that this person was admitting that what they wrote contained no critical judgement of value but was simply unpaid advertising. But I also knew that the same could have been said by writers of print only reviews. It is a dishonest way of writing about books (at least the blurb writers and influencers are honest about the intent of what they are doing), but it is a dishonesty you could find in every branch of reviewing. I have had occasional quotations lifted out of my reviews to appear in advertising, but the lines were never intended for that purpose, and in fact were not ones I would have expected to be used that way. To try and produce such lines deliberately and consistently in every single review can only do damage to the way you write about books in general.

Which brings us to the heart of this taxonomy: the review. Okay, I said at the start that reviewing covered any piece of writing about a text. In broad terms, and given how loosely we use the language, that is the case. But we also use review much more narrowly to mean a particular type of critical writing about a text. In general, what we call a review is a flexible enough definition to hide a multitude of sins. So, let us begin by saying that a review (in this sense) is a piece of writing devoted to one specific text. It is generally critical writing; that is, it tends to evaluate the work, and will usually provide enough analysis to support that evaluation. Where the text is fictional, then a plot summary is common; however, those reviews that rely excessively, or even totally, on plot summaries are generally less satisfactory, not least because they move the review closer to advertising. In terms of length, a review will sit somewhere between a capsule and a critical essay, but with quite a bit of overlap at either end of the scale. We might say they could be anywhere from around 200 words to around 2,000 words, though on average, depending on the venue, they tend to fall in the 400-500 word range or the 1,200-1,500 word range.

While this might serve as a template for a review, however, there are considerable variations (I’ve written reviews up to 5,000 words, for instance). The venue where the review is to appear might well have word limits, of course (when I’ve written for the Times Literary Supplement they tended to ask for around 800 words, while Strange Horizons tends to prefer around 1,500), but the text being reviewed will also affect the length. I’ve reviewed books where it has been a struggle to find as many as 1,000 words to say about it, and others where 2,000-3,000 words feels like I’m not doing it full justice.

Also, there are different types of review. What I have described here might be taken as the standard: a relatively concise critical appreciation of a single work. But you might also be writing about several different works in a review column, which is a sort of grown-up version of the round-up mentioned earlier. As with a round-up, you would have a certain number of words in order to write about a certain number of texts. There would be flexibility within this, so that some texts might receive more attention than others. And there is also the flexibility to provide either an overall critical judgement, or to make a judgement on each book in turn.

On the other hand, if you are reviewing a single text and find that 2,000 words or so doesn’t do it justice, then what you are writing may well be considered a review-essay. I recently wrote a review of around 1,500 words, but when I submitted the review I mentioned that I had enough notes to at least double that word length. I got an email in reply saying, effectively, go for it. The revised piece finally came in at around 5,000 words. To my mind it is still a review, a critical discussion of the pros and cons of one particular work, but the length alone makes me think it should probably be classed as a review-essay. But the distinction is, at best, fuzzy.

If it is hard to say where a review turns into a review-essay, it is even harder to distinguish between a review-essay and a critical essay. In fact, in many cases I think they are just two names for the same thing. Consider it as a spectrum: the majority of the spectrum, the middle ground, is where review-essay and critical essay overlap. But at one end, where review-essay shades into review, the term critical essay doesn’t really apply; while at the other end, where critical essay shades into academic writing, the term review-essay doesn’t really apply.

For me, a critical essay tends not to focus on one individual text, but rather looks more at context. This may mean the essay considers a body of work, a particular theme, a certain period, or some other idea. Therefore, any individual text is of interest more for how it relates to other texts than for how it achieves its own peculiar effects, but again this is not a hard and fast distinction. As I’ve noted before, venue may have a lot to do with where the writing sits on this spectrum. A journal like Science Fiction Studies, for example, divides its contents into three main groups, essays, review-essays, and reviews. Here, the review-essay is a slightly longer form of the review, but is not necessarily much shorter than any of the critical essays. And while the essays tend to be more thematic in structure, they are quite likely to deal with just one work; the difference between essay and review essay, then, tends to be that the review-essay addresses a recently-published book, while the essays turn to a somewhat older work. A review or review-essay, therefore, implies an immediacy in looking at something hot off the presses; while a critical essay implies a temporal distance, a cooler appraisal.

Should a critical essay be written for a book rather than a journal, it may well be referred to as a chapter. There is really no substantial difference other than venue.

The sorts of essays I’ve been talking about are likely to find their way into such (relatively) popular magazines as the Times Literary Supplement of the New York Review of Books, but they are probably most readily found in academic journals and books. For that reason, they can merge into critical theory. I’m inclined not to include critical theory as part of my excessively broad understanding of “reviewing”, because in the main it is not writing about texts, but rather writing about how texts are written about. I’m open to persuasion on this, and this paragraph is included as a marker on that score, but at the moment I’m not inclined to take this already overlong essay down that particular rabbit hole.

There is one more category to be included in this catalogue of how people write about texts, and that is the monograph. Monograph is just a fancy way of saying a book-length work by (usually) a single author on a single subject. Within the terms of this taxonomy, that single subject may be a creator’s entire body of work, but it may also be a single text. I am at the moment engaged in writing a short book about Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (when finished, my text is likely to come in at close to half the length of Holdstock’s original novel). Again, this is only a difference in length from the critical essay, though the various chapters of the monograph may well come across as a series of interconnected essays.

So, writing about a text can be done at any length from 100 words or so to 100,000 words or so. The infinite gradations between these two extremes tend to come under a whole string of different names, but the differences are not always readily apparent, and there is so much overlap along the way that the different terms can bring confusion rather than clarity.

There were a few other confusing terms I wanted to consider in this taxonomy. The first of which is criticism itself. The reason I called this a taxonomy of reviewing rather than a taxonomy of criticism is because of the problems with that word. In popular parlance, criticism doesn’t just have a negative connotation, it is actively antagonistic: to be criticised is to be attacked. In terms of reviewing, however, criticism is a much more neutral term. Criticising a work may involve both praising it and decrying it. But nobody outside what I suppose we might term the reviewing fraternity really grasps this nuanced difference. They may recognise that a film critic or a literary critic is concerned with looking at both good and bad within their chosen remit, but the practice of criticism continues to be negative. That’s why I wish we had another word for criticism. I am happy to include the word “critic” in my email address, but when asked what I do I invariably say I review books. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can entirely escape the word “criticism”, so we need to use it with care, wearisome as that may be.

I have sometimes wondered whether the practice of criticism derived in some way from the study of moral philosophy. Certainly, as critics we are very free with words like “good” and “bad”. But we must be wary of the fact that these, too, are ambiguous terms. What do we mean by good? Morally uplifting? Well achieved? Satisfying? A particularly fine example of its type? Some or all of these at the same time? And when we identify a particular piece of writing as a bad review, do we mean a review that is overall critical (that word, again) of the text in question? Or do we mean a notably poor example of a review, regardless of the text in question? We use good and bad liberally, indeed carelessly, to mean all of these things, often at the same time.

One of the things we look for as critics is the quality of the writing. How clearly concepts are expressed. How succinctly complex ideas are put across to a non-specialist audience. And yet the language of criticism itself is so full of ambivalence, so open to myriad different interpretations, that it sometimes seems impossible to write criticism clearly and succinctly. That’s why, whenever I write about reviewing or criticism, I feel that the language is working against me. I can write criticism in plain English with no problem, yet the moment I write about criticism every word seems to be freighted with ambiguity. Can I talk about analysing and contextualizing as though they are the same thing? Is there any relevant difference between a review and a critical essay? What on earth do I mean by saying something is good? These are words we use all the time, but we use them badly(?) because we never stop to think what the words are saying. And if we can’t be precise in our language, if we can’t disentangle words so that their meaning is clear to a lay audience, is it possible to write about criticism at all?

Living in the Past

06 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews

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Sarah Moss

Back in 1978, I remember watching a BBC television series called “Living in the Past”. In it, a group of volunteers spent a year living in a recreated Iron Age settlement. It was the first time I came across the phrase: experimental archaeology. (By this time I had long since read The Kon-Tiki Expedition and The Ra Expedition, but it would be some years later before I associated those adventures with experimental archaeology.)

I mention this only to suggest that there is nothing new in the idea of living in an Iron Age roundhouse. The various couples in the BBC series were not archaeologists themselves, but nor were they playing with the idea of being pre-Roman Britons. The programme showed it to be an often harsh and miserable existence. One family left part way through when their child fell ill, but everyone else stuck with it to the end. And if I remember rightly, there was a follow-up programme in which all of the participants insisted that they had learned from the experience.

Above all, it was not a game.

Which is where I start to have problems with Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. It is a highly-praised book, and I can understand and appreciate why that should be so. And yet I kept running up against doubts and questions.

ghost wall by sarah mossThe setting is an exercise in experimental archaeology that has been set up by a professor and three of his students. Also taking part in the exercise are a working class family, Dad, a bus driver who prides himself in being an enthusiastic and reputable amateur when it comes to ancient British history, his wife, and their daughter, Sylvie, who is the narrator. That’s rather too small a group to recreate Iron Age living, but it is just about acceptable for dramatic purposes.

The problem I have is that at no time do we get any notion of what the archaeologists are doing there. There is no aim to the experiment, and there has been no preparation for the experiment. When the students are sent out to forage for food, they have no notion of what foods might be found, or what might be edible and what poisonous. And the same goes for the professor, who has not prepared either his students or himself, and who seems to have no idea what he is doing from one moment to the next. As the supposed expert – he is, after all, teaching a course on experimental archaeology – it is as if he has suddenly found himself dumped in the Iron Age with no idea what to do next.

And because he is clearly not taking any of this seriously, neither do the students. They are all playing at the Iron Age, and by extension they are all playing at archaeology, even though for all four of them that is their chosen profession.

The only one taking any of this serious, and this is of course the point of the book, is Dad. Through him, of course, both Mum and Syl take it seriously, but only because they are terrified of Dad. And Dad is living in the past in more senses than one. He is the old-fashioned northern working class patriarch who rules his family by intimidation and violence. He is ready in an instant to thrash anyone who lapses from his strict and absolute rules. He is a monster, and far and away the most vividly drawn character in the novel. (But then, monsters do tend to leap off the page, don’t they?)

While the focus is on these three – horrific Dad, Mum cowed to inertia, and Syl more alert to what might trigger Dad’s violence than to anything else around her – the novel is chilly, sharp and powerful. But it needs the others. Or rather, it needs two of the others, the two male students are largely undifferentiated extras there to bulk out a scene as necessary. In the first place, it needs Molly, the careless, sybaritic student who gradually comes to realise what tortures, mental and physical, Syl is enduring. Molly is bright, mercurial, a flashing contrast to the dark, foreboding bulk of Dad.

But it also needs the Prof, because he is the one who enables the climactic expression of Dad’s violent and controlling nature. But the Prof is a non-entity, he has no character, at no point do we get any glimpse of why he is doing anything or what he thinks is going on at any point.

bog bodiesThe purpose of experimental archaeology, particularly of the living-in-the-Iron-Age type, is practical. How did they live? How did they do that? What was it like? But at no point does this particular exercise in Iron Age living consider such questions; Syl has learned hard lessons, and so knows how to gather burdock roots and bilberries for the group to eat, but even such essential practicalities seem of little interest to anyone else. But rather, Dad’s madness (is he mad? We are not told, but there is surely something not quite sane about him) quickly steers the professor and his male students towards that bugbear of archaeological interpretation: ritual. They construct a ghost wall, a wicker fence adorned with skulls to frighten away the enemy. And after that, Dad convinces them to take the next step, the sacrifice, the bog body, and nobody cries halt, nobody says that is not why we are here. And yet we have to take Dad’s domination over the Prof as a given, because we never see it in action. And because we never understand the Prof, we never understand why events might follow this path.

The only other book by Sarah Moss I have read is her first novel, Cold Earth, a book with which I was considerably less enamoured than most other people seem to have been. I like Ghost Wall much more than that, but it is still a novel that feels as if something is missing, a little extra depth, a little extra solidity.

Little and Black

27 Saturday Jul 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews

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Edward Carey, Esi Edugyan

My leisure reading this year, as an escape from the science fiction I’m contractually obliged to read, has been roughly split between spy fiction and historical fiction. Of the latter, two books stand out not because they are among the best of the bunch, although they are, but because there is a curious congruity between them.

One is set in the late-18th century, the other in the early-19th century. Each consists of a first person narrative by a child who is alienated from their society by reason of their person: one is female, of stunted growth and ugly; the other is black with a disfigured face. Each gains their eventual status by ability in art and interest in science.

The novels are both named for their narrators. Little by Edward Carey is the story of Anne Marie Grosholtz, born in poverty in Alsace in, as the first sentence of the novel tells us:

the same year that the five-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Minuet for Harpsichord, in the precise year when the British captured Pondicherry in India from the French, in the exact same year in which the melody for ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ was first published.

Little by Eadward CareyThat enjambment of oddly disconnected detail is typical of Carey’s distinctive style. I have read and enjoyed two of his novels before this, Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva, and though this new novel doesn’t have the same perverse air of unreality the writing has much the same curious quality. In this instance, though, the novel cleaves close to historical reality. Little Marie, who never grows above five foot, goes while still a young child to work as a housekeeper for an eccentric doctor in Berne. She becomes interested in his work, and through her preternatural abilities as an artist starts to make a contribution to his work in the study of body parts. So much so that she goes with him when two visitors, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Louis-Sebastien Mercier, persuade him to go to Paris. She plays a part in helping Doctor Curtius in setting up a business displaying wax heads of famous Parisiens. For a while Marie is taken up by one of the minor princesses in the Royal Family and spends a year living in a cupboard at Versailles. Then comes the revolution; Marie barely survives, and after struggling to pull together what remains of her and Doctor Curtius’s business, she eventually leaves for London. There, at some point after the end of the novel, she will become Madame Tussaud.

It’s a marvellous novel, full of curious details, vivid characters, snappy lines, all helped out by Marie’s own line drawings as provided by the author himself. Although this is a fairly straightforward historical novel it still has an air, familiar from Carey’s other novels, of being situated at a slight angle to reality. Yet at the same time it conveys absolute conviction, you get a sense that the young Madame Tussaud must have been exactly like this.

The other novel, which seems to parallel Little, is Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. Like Carey, Edugyan has written a couple of novels before this, though in this case I haven’t read them. I get a feeling that I should.

Also in apparent parallel with Little, the blurb on the back of my copy of Washington Black says “Inspired by a true story”. This, however, is the only reference to such a “true story” anywhere in the book. There is no author’s note to provide context, no hint of such a story in the acknowledgements, none of the quoted reviews make any reference to such a source story; so I really don’t know what to make of this claim. I am inclined to doubt it, though that does nothing to gainsay the quality of the novel.

Washington Black by Esi EdugyanWashington Black is ten when the novel opens, which makes him a few years older than Marie, but he is even more disadvantaged: he is a slave on the Faith Plantation on Barbados. At the time, around 1830, slavery on the sugar plantations of the British West Indies was even harsher than in the southern states of the USA, and Faith Plantation has just been taken over by a new owner who is particularly harsh. But Edugyan doesn’t spend too much time spelling out the familiar iniquities of slavery. The new owner’s brother, a tall, thin man known as “Titch”, has also arrived. He has a sort of soft, liberal sensibility that makes him uncomfortable about slavery, though he doesn’t act on this discomfort. However, Titch is also a naturalist and would-be inventor, and his latest invention is a balloon-powered flying craft. Wash, small and light, would be an ideal assistant in his experiments. The fact that Wash is sharp, a quick learner, and has untapped artistic ability, cements the relationship, particularly when an accident with the gas being used for the balloon explodes and permanently disfigures Wash’s face.

When a visitor to the plantation commits suicide in Wash’s presence, Wash knows that as a slave he will get the blame regardless of what actually happened. So he and Titch escape aboard the flying craft, which almost immediately ditches in the middle of a storm. There begin a series of highly coloured picaresque adventures, aboard ships on illicit business, encountering the underground railroad in Virginia, being chased by a slave catcher, heading deep into the Arctic wastes where Titch wanders off alone into the snow. Edward Carey’s novel sticks pretty close to historical reality, but the way that the language is used suggests a heightened reality; Esi Edugyan writes a careful, factual prose, but the story she tells is full of the wild action, coincidences, chance meetings and extravagant settings of an early-19th century melodrama. In both cases, I find it fascinating that the style and the story seem at odds, yet work so well together.

At a later stage in the novel, Wash falls in with a noted naturalist and his beautiful daughter. Wash’s ability as an artist earns him the chance to illustrate the naturalist’s new book, and his interest in science helps him devise a way in which an exhibition of sea creatures can be staged in which the creatures are live rather than dead. It was at this point that I found myself wishing that, like Carey, Edugyan had found some way to include Wash’s drawings in the book.

Washington Black was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a worthy honour that I don’t begrudge it in the least; Little seems to have slipped by almost unnoticed, though I think it is at least as good a novel. Together, the two make for an intriguing and remarkably satisfying pairing.

Cloak and Dagger

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

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Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes

There is a line that has appeared on the cover of just about every Helen MacInnes novel I have ever seen. It comes from a Newsweek review:

Helen MacInnes can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.

I’m not so sure about Greene, I’ve not really read enough of his “entertainments” to know how valid the comparison might be. But Ambler!

There is a pattern that recurs in most, though not all, of the spy stories by both Ambler and MacInnes. The central character is an amateur, often a journalist or a writer of some sort, caught up unexpectedly in events way outside their normal experience. These events are usually triggered by a chance encounter, escalate at a rate that does not allow the protagonist time to get away, and despite being an amateur the protagonist proves to have reserves of ingenuity that makes him (always him) an effective player in a dangerous game. The drama plays out far from the protagonist’s familiar home territory, and there is usually a journey of some sort central to the action that keeps everyone off balance.

Let us take, for example, one novel by each that I happen to have read recently. Neither is among the best known examples of their work, but they are both typical of their author’s storytelling.

uncommon dangerEric Ambler’s Uncommon Danger (1937) was his second published novel (Ambler’s own preferred title, Background to Danger, is, I think, better). It is the story of Kenton, a freelance journalist, travelling around Europe in 1936. In Nuremberg he loses all his money playing poker dice and has to get a train to Vienna where he hopes to find an old acquaintance who might be persuaded to lend him more cash. But on the train he runs into Herr Sachs who claims to be a Jew escaping the Nazis, and persuades Kenton to smuggle an envelope of what he claims are bonds across the Austrian border in exchange for cash. But before Kenton can return the envelope Sachs is killed, and Kenton is framed for the murder. Kenton then finds himself caught in a spy game between a wily Russian agent and a ruthless representative of a British oil company.

snare of the hunterSnare of the Hunter (1974) is, on the other hand, a relatively late work by Helen MacInnes (her first novel had appeared in 1941, so she was a pretty close contemporary of Ambler). This is the story of David Mennery, an American music journalist, who, years before, had briefly befriended a Czech girl, Irina. Now Irina has escaped to the West, and because he once knew her David is recruited to help her on her journey across Austria and into Switzerland where she can be reunited with her father, a famous author in exile. But Irina’s escape has been facilitated by her ex-husband, a powerful figure in the Czech secret service who wants to use Irina as a way of getting to her father.

epitaph for a spyThough separated by nearly 40 years, there are familiar patterns in both works: David and Kenton play much the same role, with similar competence, and the drama is largely played out in the course of a journey. (There is no journey in another Ambler from the same time, Epitaph for a Spy, but the setting is a small hotel in the south of France and all of the characters are there at the mid-point of a journey.)

Of course there are differences between Ambler and MacInnes. For MacInnes the protagonist is always a hero figure, noble, bold, in the right; though she practically always includes a traitor among those close to the protagonist upon whom he must depend. For Ambler, on the other hand, the protagonist is not morally pure, he is an ambiguous figure who learns resolution only in the face of the danger he encounters. On the other hand, once he has worked out who he can trust, those characters remain trustworthy throughout the novel.

Both writers set their work in relatively exotic European locations; Ambler tending towards Eastern Europe and Turkey, MacInnes preferring glamorous places such as Paris, Saltzburg, Malaga and the Greek Islands. But the location was intimately tied to the romance of MacInnes’s work and she included lots of confident local knowledge in her often extensive scenic descriptions. Ambler didn’t really care that much for landscape, and his  scene setting could often be quite perfunctory. There is, for instance, no sense of France in Epitaph for a Spy.

The biggest difference between the two, though, is philosophical, or at least political. For MacInnes her early novels, written during and just after World War II, invariably featured Nazis as villains; but once the Cold War got started her villains were always of the left: any communist was bad, any fellow traveller was bad, anyone whose politics were left of centre was a fool who unwittingly aided bad people. Ambler was considerably less clear-cut in his choice of villains. In novels like The Mask of Dimitrios or Uncommon Danger the villain acts as an agent for big business, because it is business that shapes European politics more than anything else. Because international business is more corrupt and villainous even than the Nazis, the good guys tend to be on the left. I suspect that Uncommon Danger is one of very few British spy novels in which the Soviet spy is a hero. By the mid-Fifties, Ambler had become less comfortable with communism, and the Russians started to become the villains, but he was never as vehemently anti-left as MacInnes always was.

Ambler’s novels are shorter and tighter: he tends to get down to plot as quickly as possible, and spends little time on extraneous details that might decorate that plot. MacInnes is more expansive, her novels tend to be considerably longer than Ambler’s. She likes to take time setting the scene and situating her characters very precisely in their landscape, she also tells a romance as much as a drama. Nevertheless, MacInnes owes a clear debt to Ambler, both are exploring a common model of the cloak and dagger tale.

Pantglas

09 Tuesday Jul 2019

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Owen Sheers

Pantglas means “The Green Hollow”. It is one of the names, along with Hafod Tanglwys and Bryn Golau, for that part of South Wales where the Taff is joined by its tributary, the Fan. It is best known as the mouth of the Fan, or Aberfan.

I had just turned fourteen at the time. During the summer, despite my growing dislike of football, I had watched England win the World Cup while we were on holiday in Newquay. Over the following years I watched with absolute fascination the developing Apollo programme that would, in less than three years, land a man on the moon. Both of these events have their tangential part to play in the story. But in between came those devastating black and white images. We didn’t yet have BBC2, so we didn’t yet have colour television, but that was probably just as well. The images from Aberfan deserved to be in black and white; I’m not sure they could be understood or fully appreciated any other way.

aberfan

The coal tips that surrounded the village had been raised above groundwater that the National Coal Board consistently denied existed, though the villagers had played in those streams for generations. There had been reports that the spoil tips had been seen to move, but officially this hadn’t happened, and besides it would be far too expensive to move the tips, probably more expensive than the mine was worth. And the early part of that October had been wet, a lot of rain had fallen.

Just after nine o’clock on 21st October 1966, with a sound like thunder, the coal tips slid inexorably down the hillside and buried the local school, where the last school day before half term had just begun. 116 children died, along with many of their teachers and several others. They were buried alive under slag, under thick black mud, mud that couldn’t be dug out because as soon as one spadeful was lifted, another poured in to take its place. 

Fifty years on, the film of antlike figures, miners and army and civil servants and shopkeepers and farmers and anyone who happened to live within reach of Aberfan moving across a black landscape that seems monstrously inhuman is still vivid in my memory. I was the same age as some of those victims.

the green hollowI didn’t set out to buy a book about Aberfan. I’m not sure I really wanted to read a book about Aberfan. But I  love the novels and plays of Owen Sheers that I have read; I account him one of my favourite poets, yet I have never read a book of his poetry. So, in a bookshop in Caernarfon, I picked up what seemed to be his latest slim volume, The Green Hollow. It was only as I read it that I realised what it was I was reading, and by then it was impossible to put down.

It started out as a BBC drama-documentary to mark the 50th anniversary of the disaster. Here it is presented as a verse play, based on the testimonials of survivors and imaginative reconstructions of the words of some of the victims. 

The book is in three parts, ‘Children’, ‘Rescuers’ and ‘Survivors’. The first part follows a group of children and their parents as they wake that morning (something in the rhythm of the words at this point reminded me of the opening of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas) and set out for school. It’s a mixture of the usual (plans to go and see a film or watch a football match, the ordinariness of stopping in a sweetshop along the way) and the aspirational (dreams of being an astronaut). 

The second part is the testimony of those who worked, desperately, hopelessly, to rescue the children. The medical student who had been on his way to a family christening, the young journalist on his way to what initial reports said was an outhouse collapsing at a school, the bank clerk in his best suit, the mayor’s secretary who found herself drafted in to go door to door and ask if there were any children who weren’t home. In Wales at that time the practice was to draw the curtains when there had been a death in the family; at one point the journalist realised that every house in the street had their curtains closed. Perhaps the most affecting moment came when rescuers got into one more or less intact classroom and found the teacher, a one-time rugby star who had been drafted in only a few days before as a temporary replacement for a teacher who had had a heart attack, obviously trying to protect his huddled class of wide-eyed, wide-mouthed children. Every one of them was dead.

The final part is the testimony of residents of Aberfan in 2016, some survivors and some of their descendants. In some ways this is a feel-good story, the town pulled together and most of the surviving children did quite well for themselves. But the shadow, the hollow eyes, the ghosts never go away. The past is ever present. And along the way we learn that after the tribunal that blamed no-one, prosecuted no-one, forced no-one to resign, the National Coal Board inspected the remaining tips at Aberfan and declared they were safe and there was no need to remove them. It took the formation of a local committee, and the sort of direct action that included sacks of slurry on the Welsh Secretary’s doorstep, before the tips were eventually removed. In a development that seems particularly Welsh, once the committee had been successful the members formed themselves into a male voice choir. The choir is still going.

The Green Hollow is an odd book, falling somewhere between oral history and epic verse, but it is one of the most powerfully affecting things I have read for a very long time.

Barry Unsworth, Mooncranker’s Gift

08 Monday Jul 2019

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Barry Unsworth

I first encountered the work of Barry Unsworth when I read Stone Virgin. I cannot now remember why I picked it up, perhaps a review, but I loved the book. Something about the mood, the tone of voice, the atmosphere, captivated me. I went back and picked up his earlier, Booker-shortlisted Pascali’s Island, and then bought most (though I have recently learned, not all) of the books he published subsequently. These include his Booker Prize winner, Sacred Hunger, The Ruby in her Navel, which I happen to think is the very best thing he wrote, and, of course, his last novel, a sort-of sequel to Sacred Hunger, The Quality of Mercy. When he died, less that a year after that novel came out (on the same day that Ray Bradbury died, as it happens, prompting one American commentator to say that Bradbury invented the future, and Unsworth invented the past), I made a promise to myself that I would read, or in most cases re-read, all of his novels and write about them. Circumstances get in the way, but as we were preparing for our holiday this year, Maureen asked me to recommend something for her to read. I thought she would really enjoy The Ruby in her Navel, and while I was taking that off the shelf for her I thought that it was maybe time to pick up one of the Unsworth’s I’ve not previously read for myself. Which is how I came to read Mooncranker’s Gift.

mooncranker's giftMooncranker’s Gift was his fourth novel, which makes it the earliest of his books I have yet read, it was also a book or two before he turned to the historical novel, which is where he was at his absolute best. The contemporary novels of his that I have read have never quite hit the spot in the way that his historical writing did. On the other hand, Mooncranker’s Gift is largely set in Turkey, as is Pascali’s Island, and he is at least as good at evoking a foreign setting as he is at evoking an historical setting. If this suggests a certain ambivalence about the book, well that’s fair enough: there are moments of beauty and moments of dazzling writing that clearly herald his finest work; but at the same time there are clumsy moments that suggest a writer still awkwardly learning his craft.

There is also an uncertainty about what he is doing with the novel. It is, in part, a rather crude 1960s sex comedy (the novel was first published in 1973), and both the sex and the comedy require a sprightliness that is not really Unsworth’s natural style. But intimately interweaved with this is a meditative work on guilt, corruption, and the distinction between love and desire. This is something that Unsworth is considerably better at, and it is in these passages that you get a glimpse of the writer he would become. The trouble is that this thematic heart of the novel requires a much better story to bear it up.

Mooncranker is a one-time academic turned television personality who is now an alcoholic has-been making a living touring obscure parts of the world to deliver lectures on his past glories. He is a pathetic, self-obsessed figure who has practically no awareness of what is going on around him in the world. He is in Istanbul when young Farnaby encounters him. Farnaby is someone who has never quite worked out what he wants to do with his life and is currently living in Istanbul to research aspects of Turkish history in which he has no interest whatsoever. Farnaby had met Mooncranker ten years before, when Farnaby was just 13 years old and living with his aunt and uncle while his parents divorced. He had, at more or less the same time and with the same excessive enthusiasm, discovered religion and masturbation. 

He had also discovered Miranda, a friend of the family who was a year or two older than he was. They partnered each other successfully at tennis, explored the grounds, and started hesitantly developing a relationship. Then Mooncranker appeared on the scene. Mooncranker also has his eye on Miranda, and for him young Farnaby is just a nuisance who is in the way. At one point Mooncranker gives Farnaby a crucifix, which turns out to be composed of sausage meat wrapped in white bandages, and which quickly begins to decay in the summer heat. I was, I confess, never entirely convinced of either the gift, which seemed particularly ludicrous, or of Mooncranker’s exact motives at this point. It is a significant moment that shapes Farnaby’s future, it is the moment that the entire plot hinges upon, and it made no sense to me. 

Be that as it may, the stinking, rotting crucifix is apparently enough to destroy Farnaby’s religious belief and allow Mooncranker to walk off with Miranda.

Now, ten years later, when Farnaby reluctantly meets Mooncranker at his uncle’s behest, he finds a broken figure so far gone with alcoholism that his memory has been largely destroyed. He has no notion who Farnaby is. He clearly needs hospital treatment, and Farnaby finds himself in the unwelcome position of having to get him into a hospital and keep him company there. In one of his more cogent moments, Mooncranker begs Farnaby to go and find his secretary who has recently left him. Farnaby is minded to turn the request down, until he learns that the secretary is Miranda.

She, it turns out, has gone to a spa hotel in the mountains of Anatolia. Farnaby follows her there, and a little later Mooncranker discharges himself from hospital and travels there also. What follows, pretty much the whole of the second half of the novel, is also the best part of the book. There is some bravura comic writing when the various residents of the hotel take to the pool in the twilight and snatches of disconnected conversations twist in and around each other for page after page. There’s a remarkable sense of place as various characters explore the mountains behind the hotel with their ruins of former civilisations. There is rather crude sex comedy as the various guests try to get laid with varying degrees of success. And there is a complex examination of belief and trust that suggests something of what Unsworth would become.

It is not, I suppose, a bad book; but it is not a place to start one’s reading of Barry Unsworth.

The Moon and the Other

16 Thursday Aug 2018

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Ian McDonald, John Kessel

I wrote this review sometime last year, but so far as I am able to tell it was never published. So I’ve decided to put it here:

the moon and the otherWe begin with the title. John Kessel has already written several stories featuring the matriarchal Society of Cousins on the moon, one of which, “Stories for Men”, went on to win the James Tiptree Award. That story took its title from a book that played a significant part within the story. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that this novel-length work in the same setting (though some years later) also takes its title from a book featured within the story.

In this instance, the book within a book is something that was written after a mysterious youthful episode by one of the novel’s central characters. That book was called Lune et l’autre, and Kessel’s title here is a literal translation. But in the original French, Lune et l’autre is a pun, L’une et l’autre, which we might colloquially render as “one or the other”. In English, the pun is lost, but the spirit of the pun, the issue of choice that it represents, informs the whole book.

(Parenthetically, it is also worth noting that Lune et l’autre was the title given to a French collection of Kessel’s four previous stories of the Society of Cousins, so the repurposing of that title here has yet more layers to it: homage, wordplay, not to mention a nightmare for future bibliographers.)

But let us consider more carefully what the title tells us about this book. The moon, yes, has been a familiar setting for science fiction since the days of Johannes Kepler and Francis Godwin, but for practically all of that time the moon we have seen has been a single place, a unified polity; if there is a moonbase, a lunar society, then it is all under one central government. But of late, where we see the moon presented declaratively in a title, in Ian McDonald’s Luna, for example, the moon is far from unified. And that is also the case here. Aside from the Society of Cousins, at least half a dozen other independent, self-governing communities on the moon are mentioned. And though there is an over-arching Organization of Lunar States, these polities are far from unified in their background, beliefs or governance. The moon here in the title, as in McDonald’s diptych, signifies a place of division rather than unity.

If the moon provides the setting, however, it is the second element in the title that provides the plot. Because throughout the novel we are confronted with different understandings of what the other might be. In the quietus of the novel’s coda, the one and the other are seen to come together in a marriage, but that is a rare show of understanding and commonality in a novel in which the one and the other are perpetually at odds with each other. Indeed, one of the issues that confronts the reader is deciding what, in this context, the other might be. The other is, of course, the outsider, the rival, the threat, the one who is not like us, and the novel is crowded with contenders for that role. Indeed, one of the things that the novel insists upon is that everyone is the other to someone.

Thus, on one level, the Society of Cousins is the other. The Society started in California as a utopian movement, but has now been established on the moon for many decades. It is a society in which women, specifically a Council of Matrons, rule, while men are denied the vote. Sex is liberally available and men are valued members of society, they just have no say in its governance. But this social structure is anathema to the other lunar states, where men are in the ascendant, and which are dismissed by the Cousins as the patriarchy. So, to the other communities on the moon the Society of Cousins is looked on as the other, a curiosity, a disturbance in the status quo, perhaps a threat. The other states are not exactly uniform; the one we see most of, for instance, Persepolis, is a liberal Islamic democracy modelled on pre-Revolutionary Iran, but that religious strain is not found elsewhere. Nevertheless, these states are united in their dis-ease in the face of institutionalized female rule, and so one of the novel’s plot strands involves the establishment of a commission by the Organization of Lunar States ostensibly to examine the position of men in the Society of Cousins, really to provide an excuse for the OLS to take over the Society, and secretively to act as a cover under which enemies of the Cousins might smuggle in the means to launch an attack.

All of which might provide the most dramatic moments in the novel, but it is hardly the most important plot element. The Society of Cousins is, inevitably, far less utopian than it might have set out to be. It may be more peaceful than other states, but not by much, and at a cost of resentments and dissension that are now coming to the surface, and incidentally playing into the hands of the OLS. For instance, the distrust that the Cousins feel for everyone outside their literal bubble (the Society of Cousins is established within a dome, unlike some of the other lunar communities which are established underground) leads at one point to them removing every scientific paper published within the Society from all public channels, which in turn fuels the OLS suspicion that the Cousins have developed a secret weapon. There are reform movements that are becoming ever more radical in their rhetoric, causing the Matrons to become more determinedly conservative, while an extremist Spartacist movement is turning towards sabotage. The cross-currents of these political tensions produce a variety of others. The reformers demanding votes for men are largely women, who thus put themselves at odds with their own society. Men are automatically others within this society, but en masse they are divided between those who demand equality and those who are happy with the way things are.

These political tensions are personified on the individual level by the novel’s three central characters. Carey, the author of Lune et l’autre, is a one-time sports hero and a member of the leading families in the Society of Cousins (despite its self-image, this is still a society of hierarchies). In most respects he is happy with his place in society, except when it comes to his son. Social practice among the Cousins is for girls to leave the family home early to learn independence and authority, while boys are retained within the family and in a sense infantilised by continued mothering. Any child of a liaison is automatically the responsibility of the mother, fatherhood has no legal status. But Carey wants to be a father to his son, wants to take on the rights and responsibilities of that role, and his legal challenge over the issue becomes a catalyst for the reform movement, even though he resists all attempts to recruit him into the campaign.

Mira is another at odds with her own society, in her case her rather formless resentments have their origin in her sense of guilt over the death of her younger brother some years before. She makes angry, polemical videos, issued under the nom de guerre of Looker, which are appropriated by the reform movement even though she herself resists any active engagement with the movement. She is an on-again, off-again lover of Carey, but testifies against him in his fatherhood hearing. None of the characters in the novel are one-dimensional mouthpieces for a singly position or perception, but even in these terms Mira is a mass of contradictions. She is other to those closest to her, and other to herself, but this does make her far and away the most interesting character in the book.

The final member of the triumvirate is Erno. Once a member of a radical movement in the Society of Cousins, he was involved in a terrorist act that unwittingly killed his own mother, and as a consequence he was exiled. Since then he has drifted from state to state, taking on a variety of menial roles, living hand to mouth, and moving on usually just one step ahead of the law. Then, in Persephone, an accident that severs his hand also gives him an opportunity to marry into the richest family on the moon, and to establish his own successful biotechnology business. As an outcast he is perpetually the other, and his experience of the patriarchy from the bottom has made him increasingly sympathetic to the Cousins. When he unexpectedly finds himself on the OLS commission to investigate the Society of Cousins, he is in an awkward position somewhere between his fellow commissioners who have made their minds up even before they arrive at the Society, and the Cousins who still regard him with hostility because of his earlier crimes.

This is an extraordinarily subtle novel. Characters act wrong-headedly for the best of reasons, or act sensibly for the worst of reasons. Our sympathies are directed towards the Society of Cousins only because its innumerable faults and flaws are clearly displayed. No individual or group acts according to a simple, straightforward motivation. Those whose desires and actions place them most firmly on one side or another, actually want nothing to do with either side. Violence does not work, except that violence may be the only way to end an impasse. It is a novel filled with contradictions, because it is a novel about the other, and everyone is the other.

Oblong

01 Thursday Feb 2018

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Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, William Boyd

the dreams of bethany mellmothWilliam Boyd, of course, would never think of giving one of his books such a dull title. Would he? But several times during the course of his new collection of short stories, The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth, one or other of his characters will have written a novel, or a film script, or some such endeavour, called Oblong. It is clearly a joke, but not a very funny one.

The real joke is that Oblong would probably have been an appropriate title for the collection. It would, at least, suggest something of the continuity between the stories that he seems to be striving towards but signally fails to achieve.

These are, after all, virtually without exception, stories about novelists, film makers, art dealers, or would be members of such professions. Boyd has, himself, of course, experience in all three areas, so there is an insider feel to much of what we get here. But insider feel alone is not enough.

I hold Boyd in high esteem, he has remained one of the most consistent and reliable of the novelists of that generation. While some of his contemporaries, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, have become dull or irrelevant or self-satisfied, his work has tended to remain fresh, engaging, and well worth reading. Some of his novels (I would pick The New Confessions, The Blue Afternoon, Any Human Heart, and Sweet Caress) are, I think, particularly good. What makes them good is that Boyd is interested in story; there is always a strong plot thread running through his work which keeps us interested in the drama of what we are being told. Which may be why he is also so effective as a screenwriter and even as a director. The cross-over effect is obvious in his fiction not in the usual way, the jump cuts and dialogue that can make so many recent novels read more like film scripts, but in the way he focuses, the way small things acquire significance.

Unfortunately, he has never carried those talents into his short fiction (there is one exception in this collection, but it is an odd exception and I will come to that later). This is the third or fourth of his five short story collections that I have read (if I read On the Yankee Station it was so long ago that I have forgotten all details, hence the hesitation; the collection, The Dream Lover, I know about only because it is listed with his other works in this volume, I don’t recall ever even seeing a copy). And I think the fact that I persist is a perfect example of the triumph of hope over experience: I always expect better of Boyd, I am always disappointed.

Boyd simply seems to have forgotten the importance of story in stories. Instead he indulges in some overly familiar formal literary experimentation. One story of a relationship is told backwards from break-up to first meeting, adding nothing to the countless times we have seen exactly the same thing before. There’s a story told in diary entries, in which each of the diarists witness the same event, interpret it differently, and never fully understand what actually happened. Another story is told entirely through unsent letters. Actually this one is curious, an opportunity missed. Epistolary fiction is, of course, just about as old as English Literature, so the fact that the letters are unsent seems like a novelty, giving vent to rage and frustration. However, so much of the short fiction here is built around that good old typically English emotional experience, embarrassment; so if the letters had been sent the story could have acquired another emotional level as the author then rowed frantically back on his accusations and self-justifications. Maybe not; my thoughts turned this way only because I found the unsent letters themselves so unsatisfactory as a story.

When he is not playing with form, Boyd’s stories tend to be concatenations of vignettes that are vaguely linked without ever really seeming to form a whole. The prime example here is the longest piece in the book, the novella, “The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth”, which describes a series of brief encounters over two years in the life of a young woman. Bethany drifts from boyfriend to boyfriend, doomed to be disappointed by each one in turn and head back home to mother. She drifts from dead-end job to dead-end job, usually acquired through her mother who seems to be extraordinarily rich and well connected (this is not unusual, most of the stories are about rich and well-connected people, or people who move freely in such circles; it is an achingly middle class book). She drifts from artistic aspiration to artistic aspiration: at various times she is going to be an author, an actress, a photographer, a singer, without ever making much effort to pursue these aspirations. And at the end she drifts away from the story, and we re left to wonder what that was all about.

Occasionally, Boyd seems to respond to some atavistic memory that there is supposed to be story in here somewhere. Thus in “Humiliation” a novelist gets revenge on the critic who savaged his latest book by feeding the critic a tainted oyster, which somehow feels more petty than dramatic.

In all of this, Boyd remains a fine writer. On a sentence-by-sentence level the work is engaging; the problem is that the sentences don’t seem to add up to anything. But there is, as I said, an exception: the very last piece in the book, a novelette called “The Vanishing Game: An Adventure …”, which, after what had gone before, I fell upon with cries of joy (so one does vaguely wonder whether the contrast makes it seem more, but I dismiss such thoughts as irrelevant). The story begins, oddly enough, with a quotation from Isaac Asimov; I wouldn’t have Boyd pegged as an Asimov fan, and there is certainly nothing science fictional in this or anything else he has written.

This is, in all honesty, a piece of nonsense that never quite makes sense, but it is also a story of constant action and intrigue somewhat in the manner of The Thirty-Nine Steps. The narrator is a second rate actor who makes a living appearing in cheap action films where he is usually the one who gets bumped off. He has been burgled, his car has been damaged, and his latest audition has turned into a fiasco. Then he is offered £1,000 in cash to drive a car up to a remote village in Scotland. He is happy to accept the offer, but ten suspicious things start to happen. He spots the same hitchhiker at different points along the journey; he realizes he is being followed by a mysterious black car; and so on. Then, when he gets to the place where he is supposed to make his delivery, he finds the woman who hired him apparently dead, though her body has disappeared by the time he gets the police to the spot. What follows is a fast-paced adventure set in a bleak Scottish moor. What makes the story is that the way he responds to each new threat, and the complicated plans he puts into effect to solve the puzzle are all derived from the cheap thrillers he has appeared in. The effect is both ludicrous and gripping, in fact the whole thing would make a good comedy drama for TV; indeed, I wonder if it wasn’t originally pitched as such. It is not as subtly done as the spy novels he has written, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms, and the resolution doesn’t quite work, yet the story stands head and shoulders above everything else in this collection precisely because it is a story.

Reprint: Political Future Fiction

22 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews, science fiction

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Allan Reeth, Arnold Bennett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ford Madox Hueffer, G.H. Davies, George Chesney, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Buchan, John Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad, Kate Macdonald, Richard Bleiler, Robert Cole, Samuel Barton, Una L. Silberrad

This was a review essay I wrote for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol 26, issue 1, 2015, of the three-volume Political Future Fiction: Speculative and Counter-Factual Politics in Edwardian Fiction under the general editorship of  Kate Macdonald: Continue reading →

Reprint: Azanian Bridges

19 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews, science fiction

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Nick Wood

I read Azanian Bridges by Nick Wood very early in 2016. I thought then, and continue to think now, that it was one of the best novels of the year. I wrote about it as part of the Shadow Clarke project, but this was my earlier review for Vector 284, Summer 2016: Continue reading →

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