The Spring of Kasper Meier by Ben Fergusson

How do ordinary people survive in their native city after losing a war? The familiar civilization they've known all their lives has crumbled and must slowly be rebuilt brick by brick. People either give into despair or use their ingenuity to adapt and survive. In the aftermath of WWII, Berlin was jointly occupied by the Allied powers. American, British, French and Soviet forces patrol the city. Food is scarce, many buildings are partially-demolished and a thriving black market arises where cigarettes take the place of currency. Kasper Meier is a man in his early 50s. His age is somewhat immaterial as the effects of war have prematurely aged everyone: “In Berlin, a face full of lines carved out by dirt, fear and exhaustion didn’t tell you anything about someone’s age anymore.” Kasper has learned to navigate this devastated city landscape by bartering to obtain tins of ham or whatever foodstuff he can obtain in order to feed himself and his elderly father. He tries to keep a low profile and he has a good reason for doing so because he’s gay. Homosexuality was still criminalized after the fall of the Nazis and even those who were “gay Holocaust” survivors faced being re-imprisoned if they continued to engage in homosexual activity and their names were kept on a list of sex offenders. But Kasper has obtained a reputation for being well-connected and able to obtain information. This is when he’s approached by a mysterious woman named Eva who needs his help to find a British pilot. From this encounter Kasper is unwittingly drawn into a complex and suspenseful plot of revenge and murder.

1945 Berlin is a city rife with suspicion and paranoia. It’s haunted by the devastating consequences that war has brought to it and the people left behind (both German citizens and soldiers in the Allied forces) painfully mourn the loss of their loved ones and the life they led before. The end of winter doesn’t bring with it the hope of renewal. Rather it’s a city where “the warmth of spring had begun, in places, to bring back the smell of buried death that had plagued the city the previous summer – a sweet rotten fragrance carried on the searching gusts of April wind.” This season which traditionally brings with it the promise of new birth instead awakens the spectre of all that was lost. A group of skilfully written characters are plagued by difficult painful memories and the bleak reality of a ruined city. The most powerful character is Kasper himself who forges ahead despite images of his lost lover Phillip reverberating in his mind. He shies from talking about the past or the reason why he was scarred during the war (losing one of his eyes). Whenever he is asked about his eye he deflects the question by producing a comic answer such as: “Hindenburg did it with his Pickelhaube when I pulled his moustache.” He carefully continues to hide his sexuality from his elderly father and fears being exposed if he doesn’t assist Eva and her enigmatic employer. As the story progresses, Eva’s tale takes on a greater degree of complexity and the full terror of her difficult past comes out in a highly dramatic scene. Here “her hatred overwhelmed her and she let it come and she enjoyed it like biting down on an aching tooth.” The intensity with which this scene is composed is made all the more powerful from the outflow of bitter feelings which have been carefully concealed by her character for so long.

“As the sky darkened, the rough castellations at the tops of the buildings became silhouettes and, if the destruction below them wasn’t so total, they might have appeared like melancholy ruins in the haze of a Casper David Friedrich painting.”

Before the war, Kaspar used to run a bar which from small descriptions I gather was a sort of low-key version of Christopher Isherwood’s famous cabaret portrayed in “Goodbye to Berlin.” The story in this novel follows a similarly colourful cast of characters who have been trodden down, but still retain their flair. It’s interesting coming to this novel after having read Audrey Magee’s novel “The Undertaking” earlier this year. Before reading either of these books I can’t remember having encountered any stories of post-war German life (Magee’s book partly follows a woman’s story throughout the war and after). Something both novels deal with is the rape of women in the city following the occupation from Allied forces. In his novel, Fergusson explores how rape isn’t a side-effect of war, but an active instrument used in the systematic way a nation is defeated. But for all the misery, betrayal and horror that comes with war, “The Spring of Kasper Meier” shows the surprising resilience of individuals as well as their ability to believe in the good of humanity and rely on each other for support after achieving a hard-won trust. Ben Fergusson has produced a really impressive debut novel that deserves to be read.

Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant

Towards the end of Linda Grant’s new novel, the narrator Adele asks her friend “How do we get people so wrong… when we are so intensely curious about them?” This is the question which seems to have plagued her entire life after losing her friend Evie while at university. There is a central mystery which is literally about what really happened to Evie upstairs after the narrator’s birthday party on one fateful night. Adele pieces together what might have occurred through meeting with various people involved when she is an adult. But more than this is the question at the heart of this novel of trying to understand Evie’s essential being and how Adele’s love and fascination for her friend can’t be put to rest because she will always remain obscured by the narrative of history. In this way the novel resonates with how our consciousness attaches itself to certain individuals we fall in love with. There is a wonderment to them which grips our imagination. We want to assimilate aspects of their identity to our own, know everything about them, revel in their contradictions and make their story a part of our own individual narratives.

The novel is moreover a coming of age story about how Adele learns early on certain life lessons from her fascinating con-artist father and his flamboyant gay artist friend Yankel Fishoff. Although the father’s story is a tragic one, it has the vivid excitement and delinquent pleasure I felt when reading Joyce Carol Oates’ novel “My Heart Laid Bare” about a family of con-artists. Adele understands from her father and Yankel that you have to craft a story about yourself and decorate your identity if you are going to stand out and get what you want from life. But she also learns certain things, specifically to do with gender that she will later question: “From my father I learned that when men were around there was more of everything, more luxury and abundance, and that women had to learn forbearance in the face of their big appetites, and manage the domestic economy.” These gender roles are ripe for dissection and the formation of a self-consciously feminist movement which Adele witnesses at university.

When Adele arrives there she really asserts herself as an individual, but only as a sort of transparency through which we learn of the colourful people she befriends and encounters. As readers our knowledge of how Adele appears from the outside comes from reactions by friends later in her life who recount that Adele was always slightly removed picking at the rips in her jeans, rather intimidating and haughty. Grant acknowledges that identity is never something stable and “That is what we are, reflections of reflections. We think all the time about what we sound like and how we appear.” We try to project a certain image of how we want to be perceived and simultaneously other people perceive us as something else. The two perspectives are not often in sync.

At the newish (un-named) university the administration’s “plan was to defeat ideology with a quiet, humane liberalism of human right, equality and a spirit of public service.” However, she and her friends spend this formative period of 1970s Britain exploring evolving ideologies as they collectively discuss and appropriate kinds of feminism, Trotskyism, homosexuality and Freudian ideas. It’s a period of intellectual fervour and inventive experimentation which the narrator later claims to be “a now-discredited decade.” Yet the passion and excitement of the group of intelligent individuals described groping their way through this jungle of ideas makes them all really come alive.

The next two sections of the novel take us into Adele’s adult life where she lingers on reflections about university, uncovering what happened to her friend Evie and catching up with how her companions turned out. Some of her friends hold fast to the principles formulated during that vital time of young adulthood and others find themselves turning completely against what they once so fervently stood for. Adele’s personality asserts itself as she carries on a tumultuous and doomed affair with Evie’s brother. Although she knows it’s an insensible coupling she makes the beautiful observation that “You can be completely axed to the ground by love, that’s the only explanation. You’re down to your roots.” Later on, her blunt observations about motherhood give witness to what aren’t often acknowledged emotions: “Having a child pushed me sheer away from the centre of my own life into a corner of it and I resented it. I was outraged.” It’s a sharp observation about the indignation a woman can feel at having to sacrifice certain freedoms to take on the identity of being a mother. Rather than offer a neat account of life’s cycle, we are aware that Adele is a person in active rebellion against it and all the loose ends life leaves. What comes through in Grant’s narrative is a sincere desire to understand - not compose a traditional story arch. Rather, the themes “Upstairs at the Party” explores percolate in the background as the narrator gropes for truth through a retrospective survey of what is the noisy train-rattle and messy pile-up of life.  

For instance, during the university years Evie confesses that her mother was once raped. The information is met with an almost stunned silence from the other girls. The story of the mother’s rape is presented more fully later in the novel. This time the truth of it is seen through the lens of history as if the fact of it was too much of an aberration for them to take in at that early tender age – despite their active desire for women to have an unimpeded truth-telling voice. Adele tracks down a diary account of the rape which is initially transcribed, but which Adele then interrupts and summarizes. She does this for practical purposes to cut out superfluous detail, but also to be able to state plainly what happened where the mother couldn’t bring herself to articulate the stark injustice of what was done to her. The reader is made aware of the way the mother’s stifled voice later impacted her daughter and the way stories can be skewed by the values of the time period in which they are told. 

This is a novel concerned with the nature of story telling – all the inventive power, overriding pleasure and sly danger of it. In recounting the accumulation of details about her own life Adele finds that “A story was building and as with all stories, it was better in the telling than the living.” As narrator, she is in the position to tell it like she saw it and uncover what happened by interviewing those involved, but filter the details through her own system of values. Although she seems to be striving for some kind of transparency Grant reminds us “That is the power of stories, never forget: they make the truth.” One such story that is evidently imbued with Adele’s own values is when she relates how her friend Bobby died from having Aids. While mourning his loss she observes: “There had to have been a point, when everyone knew about Aids, when he could have said, ‘Stop, enough.’” She is angry that he didn’t change his sexual behaviour or take as many precautions as were necessary to protect himself from contracting the disease. This judgement rides dangerously close to inhibiting Bobby’s personal freedom and doesn’t engage with the complicated sexual politics that surround the advent of Aids. As well as wanting him to have lived a full healthy life, she wanted the narrative of her life to include him. Bobby’s choice to take certain risks over-ruled her ability to carry on her story with him in it. From Adele’s perspective, all that Bobby demonstrated in his actions were recklessness. I’m guessing Bobby wouldn’t have seen it that way.

Grant’s writing is a pleasure to read because it can be so focused and precise. She has an excellent ability to sum up complicated concepts in short pithy sentences. For instance, she writes “And we are animals with the heads of men.” This instantly conjures ideas about how we are really ruled by baser instincts although we always feign an image of civility. At other times her descriptive powers cast images in the mind that are strikingly vivid and gruesome: “Some people have a smile like a watermelon slice.” Sometimes the plain truth of her writing speaks so much more about the complicated dynamics of relationships than any specific story ever could: “The back of the head of someone you have slept with is one of the most familiar parts of their body.” The author has a talented ability for wielding language to create poignant flashes of recognition in the reader’s mind. It’s interesting that the author frames the novel as having been inspired by a particular time in her own life, yet didn’t want to compose an autobiographical account. I suspect that this is because Grant probably shares the sentiments of her narrator who states “I do not care for the current fad for misery memoirs. I don’t want to hear about your hard times.” By creating a great work of fiction, Grant is also able to artfully construct a tale open to an expansive sense of understanding and many interpretations that nonfiction doesn’t necessarily allow. “Upstairs at the Party” is the kind of novel where you want to flip back to the first page once you’ve finished the last in order to discover what layers of meaning you might have missed on the first time around.

Virago Press have created a fun Pinterest board of images inspired by quotes and themes from the novel: http://www.pinterest.com/littlebrownuk/upstairs-at-the-party/

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Sometimes the books you read can feel too abstracted from real life to have much impact. Even if it’s an engrossing read, you can close the book and think ‘Well, it’s just a collection of clever ideas.’ But when I was finishing reading William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” last week the meaning was made horrifically clear to me after an incident near my workplace on Thursday. I came back to my office block to discover the doorway surrounded by police tape and an ambulance parked out front. Paramedics were assisting a man on the ground who was covered in blood. A colleague of mine was outside and told me what had happened. Only shortly before I arrived someone across the street was surrounded by a group of young men who stabbed him repeatedly in what must have been a planned attack. The man on the ground was taken away in the ambulance and all that was left was a single torn sneaker and a large puddle of blood colouring the cement and tarmac red. An article by the Evening Standard last year reported that there are on average over 400 knife crimes in London per month which end in injury or death. The mentality of small groups who believe themselves apart from larger society can create their own rules with no common morality. The horrific violence that appears in “Lord of the Flies” is actually all around us.

I first read “Lord of the Flies” back in high school. What I was particularly conscious of when reading it this time was the small shifts of power play occurring between the boys. Ralph’s emergence as the nominated leader is accepted so totally at first, but gradually his authority slips away as his confidence wavers and Jack’s enthusiasm for the hunt grows. As a teenager the balance of power seemed to me totally natural. Those that are loud and exert power control the group. Of course, the boys want to chase down the pigs and gut them. Of course, Piggy is immediately betrayed by Ralph and mocked for his body size, his asthma, his intellectual prowess and social awkwardness. It’s what makes it such an ideal and easily-digested read for teenagers. This is the reality of school life where children segment themselves into groups based on superficial qualities like beauty or strength or charisma. Those that are easy targets become the butt of the joke. Those that are powerless hang about at the sides as helpless and innumerable as the “Littluns.” The key figure that emerged for me reading it this time was Roger. At first he appears as “a slight, furtive boy whom no one knew, who kept to himself with an inner intensity of avoidance and secrecy.” This description immediately endeared me to him. Yet, it’s he who emerges as the most “beastly” of all instigating violence against the other boys and savouring the mad rush of it all. More than any of the others, he seems to me to most represent the common man. Civilization reigns in all his worst impulses, but when it disintegrates totally he feels completely released from any kind of moral constraints. Roger felt to me to be the one capable of really making his own choice and what he chooses is unapologetic barbarity.

The final quarter of the book takes on such a rapidly increasing velocity and power, that I was awed by the way Golding could write such carefully controlled scenes containing so much action and many characters. Using only a few short lines he conjured in my imagination a scene so completely that I could really feel the full panic and burning heat of the crisis taking place. In the lines “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now – and the ship had gone” there is the loss of a possibility for rescue but also the loss of something crucial that holds the boys’ shaky conception of government together. There is such a tragic inevitability to everything that takes place, yet there is the abiding sense of hope held mistily in Ralph’s mind which is shared by the reader. There is the hope that governance will return and the individual will no longer have to bear the brunt of decision making. Simply following the rules is so much more preferable than taking the initiative to galvanize a group of people into organizing themselves into civil behaviour. Though Ralph tries his hardest, he recognizes his own limitations and it becomes clear his authority is as fragile as the conch he uses to assert his voice. There is also the hope that people’s better nature will come through eventually – like the hope that the sun won’t ever burn your back. “Lord of the Flies” is a book I could write about endlessly as it’s laden with intricate symbols and metaphors and layers of meaning. But as I return to work each day and pass the stained tarmac outside my office it feels like a book that is all too frighteningly real.

Island Reading

Recently I spent a week on Kastellorizo, a tiny Greek island in the Mediterranean that is only five square miles of rocky land populated mostly by goats. The primary bit is a small bay which has a cluster of hotels, restaurants and cafes near which you can sit at tables on the water’s edge to watch fish and turtles swimming by while drinking retsina and reading. It was a wonderful break and I really needed some quiet offline disconnected time. I think being liberated from the internet, email, twitter and phones is good for the soul sometimes. Since I work two jobs over six days a week, I can sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed. But I’m also aware how lucky and privileged I am to be able to go to such a peaceful, beautiful location.

Since I was on an isolated island I thought I’d stay on theme with my reading and devour only island fiction. My first point of call had to be “Robinson Crusoe” which I had never read before and it’s my first time reading Daniel Defoe. I was expecting a tale which is part adventure and part meditative exercise about the state of aloneness. But I found it to be more a mash-up between Thoreau’s “Walden” and an imperialism travelogue. Crusoe is easy to identify with at first as he shrugs off his parents’ expectations and yearns to sail the seas. He’s aware of the perils and admits “I know not what to call this, nor will I urge, that it is a secret over-ruling Decree that hurries us on to be the Instruments of our own Destruction, even tho’ it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our Eyes open.” Good reason is easily shaken off when we want to plunge headlong into life. Even after severe seasickness, near-ship wrecks and a two year bout of slavery he suffers through after being captured by Turkish Moors, Crusoe still longs to set out on a ship and ride the seas again. Having escaped from slavery, he tries to evade being captured again by sailing down the coast of Africa in a small boat. All the while he’s apprehensive of the wild animals and “natives” he fears might be cannibals on shore. When he does encounter some Africans they are welcoming and give him a number of supplies. His small escape boat is finally taken up by a Portuguese ship which carries him to Africa. The captain of the ship buys some of the goods he’s procured and assists him in setting up a tobacco plantation in Brazil. After setting up this promising enterprise he desires to set out to sea again.

This is where I really started to take issue with Crusoe as he decides to sail again because he wants to profit from the African slave trade. Having spent two years as a slave himself and experiencing the kindness of the Africans he encountered on their shorelines, did he learn nothing about common humanity? Crusoe himself admits that: “a certain Stupidity of Soul, without Desire of Good, or Conscience of Evil, had entirely overwhelm’d me, and I was all that the most hardened, unthinking, wicked Creature among our common Sailors, can be supposed to be, not having the least Sense, either of the Fear of God in Danger, or of Thankfulness in God in Deliverances.” However, his guilt isn’t over the enterprise he tries to embark on, but the fact that he still can’t settle down as per his father’s wishes. Therefore I could only feel a sense of satisfaction when his ship encounters a storm and he must painfully drag himself on the shores of a Caribbean island.

Goats playing peekaboo

The narrative of the story takes a strange turn here as he enumerates the way he gradually settles himself on the island building shelter from tools he salvages from his ship, eating goats and turtles he finds on the island and accidentally grows then actively cultivates barley and rice. Being on Kastellorizo really helped the novel come alive at this point since there are goats scattered all over the hills and turtles swimming in the bay. All this business in the novel of setting up shop alone on the island is good, but Defoe then strangely switches the narrative to a journal format within which he repeats almost everything about settling on the island that he already listed. It became somewhat repetitive.

Years pass by and gradually Crusoe takes on a more philosophical attitude. Instead of raging against the limitations of his situation he finds some contentment in the bare necessities he does have. This is when he really starts to sound Thoreau-like: “That all the good Things of this World, are no further good to us, than they are for our Use; and that whatever we may heap up indeed to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more.” The narrative also slightly mirrors that of Walden as he becomes somewhat obsessed with enumerating his belongings and taking stock of what he has. As time goes on, he also acquires a very pious attitude as he unfortunately salvaged a bible from the ship which he takes to reading and ingesting. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but, as can often happen, he takes ideas from the bible and develops a rather ‘holier than thou’ attitude while picking and choosing teaching that suit him while discarding others. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if he didn’t have these “teachings” from the bible, but had to reason out and devise a system of principles about life all on his own.

The island is visited several times by cannibals who come with bound victims that they murder and then consume. Crusoe struggles with his conscience about what to do and whether to intervene. He’s repulsed and thinks to attack, but worries about being captured himself or invaded by many more cannibals. For a while, he has a sympathetic attitude towards them reasoning that they are merely getting their sustenance from human flesh in the same way he does from goats. Only when one of the intended victims begins to escape does Crusoe offer some assistance. He helps kill the cannibals pursuing the escapee and takes him back to his shelter. This man who is a cannibal himself is the famed character Friday. Being grateful for helping save him from his enemies Friday immediately pledges everlasting servitude to Crusoe – demonstrating this by laying his head upon the ground and placing Crusoe’s foot over it. At least, that’s how Crusoe interprets it.

Crusoe teaches Friday to speak English and about the Christian sense of God. They work together on the island for over thirty years, but all the while it’s very clear that Crusoe is the master and Friday the servant. Of course, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable about the assumptions about this relationship and the multi-layered colonial and racial implications of it. Crusoe was aided in his escape from slavery by a Portuguese captain but felt no desire to serve him. Yet, he assumes that he can turn Friday into a servant or Defoe naturally felt it was correct to write Friday as submissive to Crusoe without ever desiring his own freedom or a life apart from Crusoe. Defore writes Friday pathetically despairing at the idea of returning to his community or ever leaving his service to Crusoe. You could argue that their relationship on the island is symbiotic and they rely on each other. But what really troubles me about the tale is that for all Crusoe’s moralizing he never questions the injustice of slavery. Is this simply because it was a novel first published in 1719 when questioning such assumptions could not even be imagined? Like in Thomas More’s “Utopia” could a conception of paradise exist or society, even a society of two people on an island, thrive without there being slavery? The story is deeply problematic and becomes all the more uncomfortable because it feels like Friday never becomes a fully developed character in his own right.

In fact, towards the end of the story he is merely a comic figure. Once Crusoe is able to depart the island with Friday there is a very tedious account of Crusoe reaping large profits that he’s accrued from the plantation he left in Brazil and how he distributes this money to various people in a dreary number of pages like reading from an accountant’s record book. After this there is a bizarre and hurried story about his journey from Portugal to England and attempting to cross the Pyrenees in a snowstorm with ravenous wolves and bears chasing their party. Their guide is attacked by a wolf and bleeding on the ground. Friday takes this opportunity to play a prank on a bear passing by who he taunts and draws up into a tree. Climbing out on a branch the bear comes after him but Friday bounces so as to make the bear appear to “dance” as it attempts to cling to the branch. This makes all the men laugh and, presumably, it’s meant to be funny for the reader as well. But this is all we’re given about Friday’s life after the island since, of course, he wants to continue serving Crusoe without pay. Hilariously, amidst his quick post-island summary, Crusoe also recounts in two short sentences how he takes a wife who bears him three children and dies. Such a dismissive account seems apt for a novel which is so unconcerned with women. I read that Defoe wrote a sequel to “Robinson Crusoe” where the marriage is further developed but I really don’t feel compelled to seek it out. 

It might have been this aspect of the story that partially inspired JM Coetzee to write his novel “Foe” which is an alternative version to the Crusoe story, but from a woman’s perspective. I also read this while on staying on Kastellorizo. The novel is narrated by Susan, a woman who washes up on Crusoe’s island and lives for a time with Crusoe and Friday before they are all rescued. Crusoe dies on the journey back to England. Most of the book is about Susan’s attempts to get Daniel Defoe to write the story of their time on the island hoping it will become a big seller and help her escape poverty. There are many crucial differences between Susan’s story and the one which Defoe ultimately wrote and which we in the real world know. One being that Friday is physically mute because his tongue was cut out (by slavers or Crusoe himself we never actually know). Coetzee might be saying by this that Friday’s story is one which can’t be told and that his story is in fact much more interesting than Crusoe’s. He notes: “On the sorrows of Friday… a story entire of itself might be built; whereas from the indifference of Cruso there is little to be squeezed.” This and all the other differing details symbolize the difficulty of the existing text of “Robinson Crusoe” with its imperial ideas and problematic issues about slavery. It’s an interesting play on the original and Coetzee is a compelling writer to read, but my lasting impression of the short novel “Foe” is that it is more an intellectual exercise than an impactful story.

The last third of the book is mostly a debate about the nature of storytelling between Susan and Defoe. Some of this was very interesting as it explores where the self exists within the written work. I was particularly taken with how Defoe concedes: “In every story there is silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.” As if behind all the stories we tell there are underlying ideologies which aren’t spelled out specifically, but which we must try to define with language if we’re to be truthful to our ideas. Susan sees Defoe as the master of language she needs to tell her story in a way the public will find palatable. But Defoe wants Susan to tell her own story and they try and fail to get Friday to tell his in writing. It left me with quite a sombre feeling about the succession of knowledge by those who control the power over those who cannot impart their experience.

I read a couple of other island novels while away, but I’ll deal with those in separate blog posts if I can since this entry is already so long. Spending time on Kastellorizo gave me time for some inward quiet contemplation. The state of being on an island is that of taking on a circumscribed state of mind and becoming hyperaware of the isolated self. It is, of course, possible to feel very alone in a big city but you are constantly aware that you are amongst the great mechanical process of society. It’s so easy to defer one’s goals and excuse your own lack of accomplishments because of the impediments of being lost in the greater system of civilization. Whereas, being physically on an island all that exists is your own agency. In “Foe” Coetzee writes that “the danger of island life, the danger of which Cruso said never a word, was the danger of abiding sleep.” Alone on an island you know there is no expectation or need to do anything but meet your own basic needs. You can sleep your life away. Who would know? It’s interesting that sometimes we need the expectations of others or what we believe in our minds to be the expectations of other people to prompt us to industriously use our time. Maybe nobody will ever read this blog entry of mine. But would I bother writing this blog if I didn’t think there was the possibility it might be read? The potential that someone might come across our footprint in the sand (to steal a famous image from “Crusoe”) might be the only impetus a person can have to not drift into endless slumber.

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey

Can there be anything more frightening than losing touch with who you are? “Elizabeth is Missing” is narrated by Maud, an elderly woman who sometimes forgets the names of things, what's happening around her and who people are. In the space of a single page where she only moves from one room to another she can have completely lost track of what was happening a few sentences before. When the symptoms of dementia become more acute she sometimes becomes dangerously lost and doesn't remember her own daughter Helen who helps assist her in her daily life alongside some other carers. Through Maud's eyes we see the world as disorientating, jumbled, frustrating and terrifying. Time becomes circuitous. Certain triggers pull her into the past. For instance, contact with a written letter or a craving for apples draws Maud back into memories of post-wartime Britain and her family life. Her sister Sukey disappeared and left indelible marks on the lives of her parents, Sukey’s husband and a lodger in the house. Maud’s  great respect for her older sister led her as a teenager to emulate her in dress and spend intense periods of time with Sukey’s husband. Being haunted by her loss, Maud practices a curious blend of envy and mourning which flows through the span of her life to the present day. I admire the complexity of a line like this which shows the way Maud’s reasoning works: “I'm always frowning in my memory, so no wonder my brow has set that way.” Time flows back and forth so that the past intrudes upon Maud’s present in a way that could be disorientating but is carefully controlled by the author. I felt deep empathy for Maud’s struggle, but wasn’t lost myself with what was happening in the story.

In the present, Maud is consumed with worry for her friend Elizabeth who has also gone missing. This loss sticks in her consciousness and she obsessively tries to track down details of where Elizabeth might be. We’re aware that the people around her understand what’s happened to Elizabeth, but they’ve presumably become so weary of Maud’s enquiries they don’t bother to tell her the truth anymore because she instantly forgets it and insists Elizabeth is missing again. On a narrative level this makes a very clever mystery since as readers we feel the intense frustration of not knowing what happened to Elizabeth alongside Maud, but we’re trapped in her perspective. Maud has a jumble of paper scraps she keeps in her pockets which she uses to help aid in her search, but more often than not she finds them even more confusing. This is a device which is similarly employed in the movie ‘Momento’ with a character who has short-term memory loss so tries to write things down as clues to lead him in the right direction. But in this novel the act feels much more human and tragic as the disease Maud suffers from effects so many elderly people.

What really grounded me in Maud’s perspective was the way the physical world affected her. Healey has a way of describing Maud’s sensory experience so that what is tangibly real in the present like a handful of rich earthy soil in the palm of her hand becomes everything because that is all Maud can be certain of in that moment. It’s both emotionally touching and makes the fictional world so much more vividly real in the reader’s mind. Gradually as the mysterious story of Maud, Sukey and Elizabeth unfolds small things like a tin of peaches or a cracked compact mirror take on an accumulating significance that immerses us fully in Maud’s worldview. In time, Maud’s actions which appear erratic and pointless to the people around her become deeply meaningful to the reader. We’re also aware of the off-handed cruelty that can be inflicted on someone vulnerable who is suffering from the disease such as a sadistic care-worker who tries to verbally terrify Maud or a mocking neighbor. Other times Maud is treated with extreme sensitivity and kindness by others, especially her daughter and granddaughter. However, most people take for granted that Maud must not be capable of comprehending what other people are thinking. But Maud is highly sensitive to people’s reactions to her. She’s aware that people are amused or frustrated by her confusion through subtle reactions and facial expressions, but she’s powerless to prevent herself from breaking through the black walls of forgetfulness surrounding her. Despite all this sounding very grim, Emma Healey maintains a lightness in her narrative that made my intimate acquaintance with Maud strangely comforting. This book is a bridge to another generation as well as to someone who is sadly trapped in a cloud of confusion. There is a tenderness for the central character here so real it made me wish I could hold Maud’s hand and take her to the shop for more tinned peaches. 

Listen to an excellent interview with Healey about this novel from You Wrote the Book!:

I Am China by Xiaolu Guo

Anyone who loves reading knows that language can connect two people across divides as wide as continents, political systems, genders and centuries. The commonalities we discover when there is a chime of understanding can make us feel less alone. Suddenly, the words on the page feel more alive than the physical world we inhabit. That’s the experience of Iona in this novel. She’s a young translator living in a tiny apartment above London’s Chapel Market in Islington. Having long separated herself from the remote Scottish island she grew up on, Iona is content with working on translation jobs she’s been commissioned to write and occasionally bringing home sexual partners for a brief fling before showing them the door. One day she takes a job translating a jumble of Chinese letters and diaries that an editor Jonathan was handed while on a business trip. Slowly Iona begins to untangle the story of Jian and Mu, a Chinese couple who are separated but who maintain a strained correspondence over multiple counties. As Iona becomes more engrossed in the translation she has a “feeling that her own life has abandoned her.” The journey of this couple isn’t just a painful love story, but encapsulates the ideological divide for a new generation of Chinese citizens.

Jian is an artist/punk musician who feels guilty that he didn’t perish with his fellow students in the ‘89 Tiananmen Square massacre. He tries to find domestic harmony with poet/performer Mu, but they have different views about being political engaged. With Jian’s commitment to making a statement and fostering societal change he writes a manifesto that leads to him becoming separated from his love and cast out of his native country. As Iona continues with her translation she becomes desperate to know what became of these two passionate complex individuals and uncover the secrets which lead all the way up to the highest echelons of Chinese political power. Their story is one which could easily have disappeared with the attempts at censorship from the Chinese government and general Western indifference to the plight of refugees and immigrants. Iona is committed to making their story known.

The accounts switch between Iona’s experiences in 2013 and letters and diary entries between the Chinese couple over about two decades. Interspersed with the narrative are images of the Chinese text Iona is translating as well as occasional photographs or album covers. Letters are also reproduced in the text including (hilariously) an exchange between Jian and Queen Elizabeth. I find it really effective in a novel like this when photographs and documents can make the detective work of a mystery feel more tangibly real. It’s especially relevant for “I Am China” as the novel is particularly concerned with the question of translation. Even though I can’t read Chinese it’s interesting to see the characters on the page in a particular handwriting accompanied by Iona’s multiple translations of possible meanings. It lays bare the intersection between two cultures and frames of mind to find common understanding. The author describes that “it’s like Iona is building this bridge again, through her reading, her translation.” The place where two minds meet is through the cipher of language. When there are differences in language it must be modulated to most closely match the original author’s meaning rather than necessarily give a literal translation of the words.

Travel naturally makes people contemplate questions of identity as they are out of their natural environment and suddenly immersed in a culture whose values and way of life are different from their own. Thus when Jian and Mu travel through countries as different as America, the UK, France, Switzerland and Greece they become highly conscious of their sense of being. They question what it means to be Chinese and how that national identity melds with their own understanding of themselves. One issue is the way in which the political ideology of the collective filters into the Chinese citizen’s sense of identity which is very different from a Western sensibility more founded in individualism:  “Perhaps it is possible to live without yourself in China, but not in the West. Unless one invents oneself.” Equally Iona begins to lose her “self” when becoming immersed in the couple’s most private thoughts. The author uses this as an opportunity to ponder the philosophical question of identity: “To be a person is to imagine being someone, and the someone you imagine most of the time is what people call ‘you.’ How strange to be in time and space with something called a ‘character.’” The degree to which the “self” is malleable depends on the strength of one’s own character. When this is challenged or intruded upon by opinions of others that core of being wavers and identity forms anew.

Xiaolu Guo is a writer highly interested in the intersection between the personal and the political. Her story documents different strategies one can take when wanting to challenge the structures of power one lives under. It traces the path of the immigrant with the accompanying feelings of intense isolation and the fragile hope of love carried over long periods of time and through foreign lands. It’s moving to see how her characters mature and become more conscious of what is most essential in life. She also testifies to how the weight of ideology can crush the lives of individuals in the single-mindedness of its overbearing logic. She questions “Do ideologies die as people die? I hope so, for the sake of peace.” The resounding effect of “I Am China” is a longing for connection and understanding that cuts through the dogmatic principles of any ideology that curtails individual freedom. It’s a moving and deeply-engaging read.

Read an excellent interview with Xiaolu Guo about the origins of her new novel and her documentary work: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/30/xiaolu-guo-communist-china-interview

Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Winner Prediction

I attended the readings by the authors shortlisted for the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction tonight at the Southbank Centre. Each author gave excellent readings as did the actor Charles Dance who stood in for Donna Tartt. Most authors got the chance to discuss the inspiration or process that went into writing their novels. I don't know why the event was only an hour long. It could have easily gone on twice as long to give everyone the chance to really talk in more depth about the brilliant variety of novels competing for the prize. Nevertheless, the readings and brief questions gave a good taste of each book. It was particularly pleasing to hear questions from the audience directed primarily at Eimear McBride as I assumed most of the questions would go to the more well-known authors. One man asked her if she was influenced by Robert Frost's poetry as he thought he detected hints of his style in her writing to which she hilariously replied, "No, never read him. Sorry."

So, who will win tomorrow?

Truthfully, I loved reading all the novels and I'd be happy for any of them to take the prize. Part of me really wants to cheer for both Eimear McBride and Audrey Magee as I think both books would benefit the most from the prize in terms of getting a bigger readership (which both books really deserve.) I haven't looked at any sales figures but I'm guessing the other four novels have sold a lot more copies than these two first time novelists. Also, thinking about which book I'd most like to read again it would be Eimear McBride's "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" as I think I would discover a lot of things I missed the first time. However, in terms of sheer enjoyment of reading and intelligence I think Ngozi's "Americanah" is my favourite. But I've decided I'm going with McBride to win - because I think that's the way the judges will go. 

The Quick by Lauren Owen & The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

Sometimes I start reading a book and after fifty or so pages I put it down. This could be for any number of reasons. I might not be in the mood for whatever subject or style the book is covering. Or the writing might not be very good. Or it just might not be speaking to me at that point in time. Usually I’ll put these books aside and won’t bother writing on this blog about them. They might be for someone else. I’d rather spend time writing about books that are really worthwhile and that I want to recommend. However, in the case of these two books I became very frustrated. I think both authors are good writers or have the potential to be good writers, but they make some unfortunate choices in these novels which make them unsuccessful on the whole. I also wanted to offer up a different perspective on books I’ve been reading so it doesn’t come across like I love everything I read.

In the case of “The Quick” the novel begins fantastically. It’s Victorian England and two children are practically left on their own in a dilapidated country estate. They spend their time playing games and exploring the library. It’s beautifully told completely immersing you in the strange spooky environment these curious children find themselves in. I was hooked. Then it moves further in time and takes an unexpected twisted when the boy turns into a young man first taking up residence in London. I was less convinced by this but stuck with it. Then an infamous twist comes along. I was thrown way out of the story, but kept going until half way through the book. To be clear, I’m not opposed to the supernatural. Unfortunately, the author relies on tedious genre elements and doesn’t do anything inventive enough to carry her characters through a plot that feels suspenseful or compelling. Owen is clearly a talented writer, but I think she made a major misstep and should have continued writing a whole novel about the first section.

“The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” also begins very well. Two quirky characters pass a day working in a used bookshop barely selling anything. The protagonist Tooly, who owns the bookshop, tries not to let her chatty loopy colleague get on her nerves while she attempts to read a biography about Anne Boleyn. It’s an excellent set up and I would have loved to read a novel mostly set here. The book then carries on to mine through Tooly’s past and the reasons that led her to this place. I wouldn’t have minded the author leaping around the past, but much of the language and persistent literary references come across as pretentious. Again, I think this book had a lot of potential and the author is talented, but he gets in the way of himself too often. I could only read half of the book before the style became too much for me.

I’ve read positive reviews for both of these books and it’s only because they’ve been so lauded elsewhere that I feel like they can take this kind of criticism. I would gladly try reading another book by these authors as I’m sure they are capable of great writing.

Have you read either of these books?

Did you like them? I’d love to hear arguments as to why they worked for you.

 Are there other books you’ve tried reading recently which had great potential or that have been really hyped, but didn’t work for you?