RE-READ DUE TO ITS LONGLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
- It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time - It is q
RE-READ DUE TO ITS LONGLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
- It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time - It is quite obvious to me that we do - We don’t - We do - This is going nowhere - Can we agree on a point of intersection - Shshshhhhhhhh!
In the dining room, in the yard, in the auditorium, here on the page, wherever and whenever we read, we experience the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous
Tenses are mythologies, futile attempts to fix time and sequence, faked co-ordinates for points that do not exist. Tense past and tense future present as imperfect
- What’s your source? Do your dates tally? - It’s pastiche. Don’t underrate it
Playing Possum was the surprise entry on the 2017 Goldsmith Prize. It is published by the UK small publisher Aaaargh! Press, who describe themselves as “a shoestring operation, but we can run to producing an e-book every couple of months and a paperback every year or so with a bit of luck …….. there’s no subject-matter that’s barred, but we’re socialists of a countercultural, libertarian bent and we ain’t planning straight policy pamphleteering.”
The plot of the book is perhaps best explained by the Goldsmith judge’s citation
90 years after the first publication of The Waste Land- and perhaps far too late – a modern day protagonist seeks proof of a murder and flight. A fictional investigator pursues a fictionalised – and murderous – T.S. Eliot from London towards a perhaps fictitious night spent at a hotel in Whitstable in 1922. The aftermath of his deed may have been immortalised in a suitably shocking painting by possible accomplice Otto Dix
The quote with which I opened my review captures one key element of the book – the intermingling of tense and sequence, and the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous”: our unnamed investigator is retracing TS Eliot’s (Thomas/Tom in the book) fictional journey after a fictionalised murder of his real-life partner, some 90 years after the imaginary murder and journey took place; however at the same time he is present in many of the same frames as Tom.
A classic example of this is when Thomas (pursued by the investigator) arrives at London Victoria – a station at the same time set in the 1920s and the 2010s.
Thomas enters a smoke-shrouded chaos: coal porters, luggage porters, rough sleepers, horses and distressed livestock, automated announcements, mailsacks, uniformed staff, sushi bars, label stickers, Southern Rail apologists, queuebusters with wifi dispensers, fruit sellers, trolley pushers, commuters, milk cans, Chinese tourists, commercial travellers, an Italian crocodile, clover kickers up to haggle mortgages, womankind with hatboxes, rent boys in designer swag, parasols and bonnets, police officers in stab vests with strap-on semiautomatics, infantrymen slouched by carbine stooks.
Another other key element of the book is its liberal and complex use of allusions both to literature (most notably links to “The Waste Land”, but also references to an Agatha Christie mystery) and to other art forms. The fictional murder is linked up with two real-life paintings, one by Magritte and one by the (to me much lesser known) German painter Otto Dix – these paintings are later taken as evidence in a trial for murder which takes place many years later and seems to be interwoven in the plot. There are also detailed references to silent cinema of the age – Charlie Chaplain, a real-life film shot in Whitstable at the time when Tom is there – and at times also the action of the book is explicitly witnessed as though part of a film (either by allusion to an audience watching the film or by imagined filming instructions). The book also features conversations overheard in a pub.
Nearly 50 years after its publication, the original drafts of “The Waste Land” were found, and published – and it was found that the poem had an initial title of “He do the Police in Different Voices”, which was quickly discovered to be taken from a quote in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend and is an admiring reference to a boy who reads out the papers to his illiterate employer. The working title was taken as capturing the spirit of “Waste Land”, with its range of different voices, mixing overheard conversations with literary allusions and quotations (as well as quotations from more popular culture, albeit many of the more popular cultural allusions were cut from the final version of “The Waste Land”) – of course the same technique that Davey is using here. Further it is hard not to see this original title as providing some form of inspiration for this book with in fact police and detective characters forming an important part of the story. TS Eliot, in his own literary publication Criterion (which is frequently referenced at the start of the novel, and even, as or her reviews here set out, provides a literary justification for the fictional murder of Emily's wife) included a list of rules for great detective fiction, rules which Davey systematically seeks to undermine in another example of the layered approach to this novel.
A third element of the book is its link to the politics of the 1920s – as Tom (and the narrator’s) visit to Whitstable, and the filming of the silent movie take place at the same time as real-life protest by local workers. Themes which come out in that protest and in overheard conversations of the locals include: anti-European sentiment, the need for a fair wage, anger at the treatment of ex-servicemen, the impact of the forces of global capitalism and multinational banks on local communities and the working class, a cry for nationalisation of the railways, industrial activism (with a threatened series of co-ordinated strikes), the somewheres versus the anywheres.
A simple look at this list, and a comparison to the last year or so in UK politics, immediately of course makes the reader “experience the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” in the political sphere.
A final element of the book – threaded through all of the above is the town of Whitstable and in a nice piece of meta-fiction, the investigator and sometime narrator claims to have been employed by the local business community of Whitstable to prove that TS Eliot did indeed visit the town (and one assumes took inspiration for his poems from there) as they could cover his fees from the resulting “proceeds from a marketing drive, events, merchandise, possibly an annual festival marking Stern’s visit to the town”.
Overall a complex book – one ideally placed on the Goldsmith list given its innovative approach. This is a book which will reward multiple re-reading or perhaps more specifucally, in depth readings of each page or even paragraph, as almost every metaphor, image, or choice of vocabulary in the novel turns out to offer up hidden complexities and allusions. The reader themself turns literary detective, or even finds themselves engaging with other readers on a combined investigative quest. I can only commend the reviews of Neil, Paul and Jonathan on this site. All three have uncovered a host of literary clues and mysteries in the novel. However I think all three would acknowledge that has largely been achieved with the extensive use of Google and therefore I would argue could be said to involve the use of literally (and literary) superhuman powers, and the slight uneasiness this induces in me (should an intelligent reader really be forced to rely on such a distance to truly and fully appreciate a book) was I think echoed by Eliot himself in the detective rules above.
The detective should be highly intelligent but not superhuman. We should be able to follow his inferences and almost, but not quite, make them with him
As an alternative to the use of Google, I was instead tempted to follow up on the various allusions in the book, by reading the poems, studying the paintings and viewing the films – to see what additional links I could discover for myself, without superhuman assistance. However an article in the 1971 New York Review of Books persuaded me against that. The article explains the literary furore that followed the discovery of the original drafts of “The Waste Land” and the inspiration for its title.
It was revealed that the poem was originally to be called He Do the Police in Different Voices, and this was soon identified (TLS January 1, 1969) as derived from Chapter XVI of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, in which Sloppy, a foundling, is employed by Betty Higden as a boy-of-all-work and reads aloud to her from some paper like the Police Gazette, apparently imitating the characters ………….. But the result of this new discovery was to give a new priming to the pump of the Eliot industry. It was now said that, in order to grasp The Waste Land properly, it would be necessary to study not only the books which Eliot mentions in his notes, but to reread the whole of Our Mutual Friend. Is Sloppy the same person as the Tiresias of the poem? Does not water, especially the Thames, play a recurrent part in both Our Mutual Friend and The Waste Land? Is the dust mentioned in The Waste Land not connected with the dust piles of Mr. Wegg?
Eventually after months of detailed correspondence in the letters pages, a correspondent asked for a halt to what he saw as a misguided search for the "true" meaning of the poem, and at least in my interpretation, called for people to simply appreciate “The Waste Land” in and of itself
A great deal of criticism of Eliot assumes that a quotation from another work implies that the whole of that work is to be borne in mind while we read the whole of the poem and that a complex unity will finally emerge from this accumulation of associations…. My argument is that Eliot often uses the quotations and echoes more locally than this
And overall I think this letter (from nearly 50 years ago) points at the best way to appreciate this innovative and striking novel – as one to be enjoyed in its own right, as one where a complex unity will not emerge, but as one where quotations and echoes have been used locally (in this case I think in two senses of the word “local”, given the Whitstable heavy nature of this book).
The 2017 Goldsmith Prize winner - ahead of a strong shortlist and now longlisted for the 2018 Women's Prize.
We [The Young] were given just enough c
The 2017 Goldsmith Prize winner - ahead of a strong shortlist and now longlisted for the 2018 Women's Prize.
We [The Young] were given just enough choices to make us feel as though we were free, but not so many that our minds (our still-fragile intellects) became overloaded. Doubt ended. The information stream was purified ……….. We live Now. We live in Light. And when darkness threatens (darkness? Can there ever truly be darkness again?) they simply adjust the chemicals. Sometimes – while we sleep, as we gently dream – they remind us of how it used to be so that we appreciate how good things are now. Now that we are Free From Desire. And we are H(A)PPY to be reminded of this because it reinforces our sense of peacefulness, of calm, of conformity, of equilibrium. They tell us about the lies of The Past. Of how The Young were told that the needed to rebel against the norm in order to feel Whole. That creativity is dependent on struggle and suffering.
H(A)PPY, in a way similar to Brave New World is set in what seems to its inhabitants a utopia but to us potentially a dystopia.
The core inhabitants of this post-apocalypse world, The Young, live in a largely asexualized society which has rejected emotion (particularly an Excess of Emotion). Instead The Young strive to stay In Balance, both individually, as small communities and as a broader society, this Balance being measured on The Graph. Their thoughts and actions are recorded and visible to all on their Information Stream, with dangerous concepts highlighted in different colours and a pinkening of their graph. Any inadvertent deviation is controlled by chemicals or if required by recalibration of physical Oracular Devices. Their access to information (particularly information which may disturb The Balance) is controlled by the Sensor.
In the past, The Old were completely awash with facts and non-facts. They asked a question and it was properly answered. A fountainhead of information was released. But was the water clear. Did it quench, revive or simply deluge?.
Clearly some of this initial set up can be regarded as a satire of Generation-Snowflake, of safe-spaces, of the increasing self-censorship of the internet, and of the increasing trend for public figures to have to issue a public apology if they ever give rise to comments which reflect their unguarded thoughts and which deviate from now socially-established liberal values. In the hands of Dave Eggers his book would have remained there.
The main plot development comes when the narrator Mira A, a musician, starts researching into a guitar player who she knows as 91.51.9.81.81.1.2, but who is the (real life) Paraguayan guitarist Agustin Barrios (whose works Barker recommends the reader to listen to while reading the novel). While viewing a picture she spots a small girl in the margins of the picture. Further information on Barrios, his music, his country and the language of that country (part Spanish, part Guarani) is dotted throughout the book. In the hands of Ali Smith– the book would then alternate between the narrative and reflections on the artist.
However Barker is neither Eggers or Smith and instead of remaining where she is and following through on these early directions, the book very deliberately spirals off (and largely out of control) in two different ways.
Firstly in its story. Shortly after the book starts she notes that the word Happy is coming out as H(A)PPY in her stream and tries to understand why the word is “Disambiguating, parenthesising” – something which seems to be linked to her enquiries into the past and which appears to threaten the entire edifice of the new order. From there we have a hardline faction within The Young, The Banal, a shadow twin Mira B (at times we are unclear which of the two is our narrator), a word or text Cathedral and much else even harder to explain.
Secondly typographically – the book is already unusual in mimicing the colouring of the words monitored by the Information Stream but we start to have blank pages, pages of repeated coloured text, different typefaces (including mirror writing), symbols (including some which we are lead to believe are written directly into the stream and therefore onto the pages we read by Mira’s hands in a dream like state).
Early on Mira A is examined by Kite, a Full Neuter who describes himself as a Mechanic to The System. He says to her
Of course you will be familiar with the narrative form ….. those curious narrative structures employed so often and so successfully in the past. The narratives of family and romance and adventure, the masculine and the feminine narratives, the narratives of class, of nationalism, of capitalism, of socialism, of faith and myth and mystery, historical narratives, science fiction narratives, experimental narratives, horror narratives, literary narratives, ‘reality’ narratives, crime narratives. The Sensor automatically deconstructs those stories for us, so that we may fully comprehend their full meaning, their immense reach and their invidious power, their ultimately deeply conservative urge to comfort and pander and bolster and reassure.
This passage seems to strike at Barker’s main motivation here (and in most of her writing), a rejection of conventional novels and stories. Instead in this book, she systematically seeks to undermine and deconstruct the very concept of narrative and story.
Kite says just before this to Mira A
I have inspected [your] narrative …. Its flow is, well its plodding – pedestrian – fluctuating - halting – occasional. It’s intermittent, at best. Narratives are not your speciality …… The real danger with your narrative … is that it is lazy. …. You are idly playing with random details. You are forcing things together. You are making strange connections. And you are struggling to make a kind of sense out of them
Barker clearly herself does not even seek to specialise in narrative. Her work though is far from lazy or idle-play, and the opposite of plodding or pedestrian. Instead it sparkles with ideas and invention. However, at times she (or at least I as reader) did struggle to make sense out of what seemed random details and strange connections. Ultimately once something is undermined and deconstructed what is left lacks real form. Nevertheless this was a stimulating read and one which seems entirely designed to be shortlisted for the Goldsmith prize....more
Works about Lower, Slower Views. I test myself: Richard Long “A Line Made by Walking”, 1967. A short, stra
Now shortlisted for the Goldsmith Prize.
Works about Lower, Slower Views. I test myself: Richard Long “A Line Made by Walking”, 1967. A short, straight track worn by footsteps back and forth through an expense of glass. Long doesn’t like to interfere with the landscapes through which he walks, but sometimes builds sculptures from materials supplied by chance. Then he leaves them behind to fall apart. Pieces which takes up as little space in the world as possible. And which do little damage.
In this loosely autobiographical second novel, Frankie is a 25-26 year old Irish graduate from Art College, struggling to establish her own artistic career and her wider sense of her life. Working in a Dublin art gallery while living alone in a bedsit, she suffers a sudden crisis of confidence and having initially moved back to her childhood home, asks her mother if she can instead live in her (three years deceased) grandmother’s rural bungalow, hoping that the solitude and the exposure to nature will allow her to lose her confusion and despair.
The book largely consists of her thoughts and meditations over her period in the house, often alone but occasionally interacting with her neighbour (and elderly born again Christian) and her family, particularly her mother with whom she has a remarkably functional relationship.
As thoughts and themes emerge to her, she tests herself by recalling conceptual art pieces of which her interpretation matches the theme, such as the example above which also provides the title of the novel, and which in interviews Baume explains as particularly important to Frankie as she interprets it as being about “searching, repetition, what we leave behind”. Around 70 of these interpretations, all with the phrase "I test myself" punctuate the novel.
At the book’s opening, Frankie comes across a dead robin, and meditates that she seems to frequently come across dead animals:
Somehow, they always find me. Crouching in the cavernous ditches and hurling themselves under the wheels of my Fiesta. Toppling from the sky to land at my feet. And because my small world is coming apart in increments, it seems fitting that the creatures should be dying too. They are being killed with me; they are being killed for me. I decide I will take a photograph of this robin. The first in a series, perhaps. A series about how everything is being slowly killed.”
And Frankie’s own conceptual art project becomes an integral part of the book. Each of the 10 chapters is named after a dead creature that she finds and photographs, and the grainy black and white photographs, which clearly acknowledge Sebald, are included in the text.
Frankie knows that her own traumas and problems are minor compared to those of others and struggles with her own sense of self-absorption
These aren’t things which constitute a troubled childhood, not even close …………. And yet, here I am. Perceiving everything that is wonderful to be proportionately difficult; everything that is possible an elaborate battle to achieve. My happy life was never enough for me. I always considered my time to be more precious than that of other people and almost every routine pursuit – equitable employment, domestic chores, friendship – unworthy of it. Now I see how this rebellion against ordinary happiness is the greatest vanity of them all
But at the same time reacts badly to any attempt to suggest she is depressed and particularly the attempts of medical professionals to treat her situation as a diagnosable and chemically treatable condition.
After a disastrous attempt at small talk with a hairdresser, Frankie reflects
The ability to talk to people, that’s the key to the world. It doesn’t matter whether you are able to articulate your own thoughts and feelings and meanings or not. What matters is being able to make the noises that encourage others to feel comfortable, and the inquiries which present them with the opportunity to articulate their thoughts and feelings and meanings, the particulars of their existences, their passions, preoccupations, beliefs. If you can talk to other people this way, you can go – you can get – anywhere in this world in life
Frankie clearly lacks this ability, and even the desire to develop it, and this widens further into her difficulty in accepting the way the world works, and her problems into interacting with other people (her only really stable relationship is with her mother, as she knows there that she can be awkward and rude and that her mother will still love and accept her unconditionally).
This in turn drives her towards the word of conceptual art, and indeed to interpret the world around her as conceptual art, in her own words “I think: art is everywhere. I think: art is every inexplicable thing” and “Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behaviour is an act of performance”. Viewing a field of daffodils across from her grandmother’s bungalow she is unable to enjoy the view, instead reflecting “Daffodils only remind me of cancer, forget-me-nots of kidney disease, red poppies of the trenches”
She also conceives of ways to use art to represent her frustration at what she sees as the malfunctioning of the world.
Every time I take the train, I buy a coffee .. and the trolley attendant asks me the same question “sugar or milk”. And I reply “no, neither, thanks”. And he or she then presents me with, alongside my coffee, a stirring stick. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it had happened only once, or if it was the same attendant, but this is not so. Whoever it is, every single time, they make the same mistake. I’ve been gathering these sticks for seven years now … They are a project. I have not yet decided how to display them, but they are a conceptual art project about the way in which people don’t listen, don’t think
The novel at times teters on the verge of boredom, given Frankie’s drifting, but this is staved off by Baume’s imaginative use of metaphors and descriptive language, particularly relating to nature, only occasionally resorting to cliché (a rather odd rant about dental floss for example which would not be out of place in a hackneyed stand-up set).
Overall an excellent, different and memorable novel....more
The Costa beats the Booker and Goldsmith this year as second most perceptive judging panel of the year.
Re-read this bFinally recognised for an award.
The Costa beats the Booker and Goldsmith this year as second most perceptive judging panel of the year.
Re-read this book after its longlisting for the Booker. I can't add anything to my review below and it remained my firm favourite to win the Booker prize. I was therefore very disappointed that it did not even make the shortlist.
However delighted now that it's innovative approach was recognised by the Goldsmith judges; so much so that with a small group of Goodreaders we interrupted the head judge's formal announcement of the shortlist with a small cheer - only to be disappointed when it did not win.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
In his studio Geoff Simmons washed his hands at the deep stone sink, the clear water dissolving the clay and running in a milky stream down the plughole and into the trap beneath. The wet pots no the tray were drying off and the kiln was just beginning to warm. In the hedge outside Mr. Wilson’s window a blackbird waited on its grassy bowl of blue-green eggs as the chicks chipped away at the shells. On the television there were pictures of floods across northern Europe; men in waterproofs pulling dinghies through the streets, collapsed bridges, drowned livestock. When the tea rooms opened for the season the footbridge hadn’t yet been rebuilt. The parish council wrote to the Culshaw Hall Estate as a matter of urgency, and the estate said it was the job of the National Park. The National Park disagreed. The river keeper said he could only do what he was asked. The first small tortoiseshells began mating, flying after each other above the nettled beds until the females settled out of sight and waited for the males to follow. The National Park ranger from the visitors centre spent an enjoyable hour watching them and making a record and when he got back to the office he filed it carefully away. At reservoir no.11, the maintenance team went along the crest of the dam, looking for cracks in the surface or sinkholes. There were molehills on the grass bank to deal with. Along the river at dusk, there were bats moving in number, coming down from their roosts to take the insects rising from the water. They moved in deft quietness and were gone by the time they were seen. The Spring Dance ended early when a fight between Liam Hooper and one of the boys from Cardwell spilled back in through the fire doors. It was soon broken up but by then there’d been damage and the Cardwell boys were asked to leave. Outside in the car park Will Jackson was again seen with Miss Carter from the school.
The book opens with a short section as a 13 year old girl, on holiday with her family in a Peak District village, goes missing just before New Year, the villagers forming search parties to try and find her. Thereafter each section takes place over a year, opening with “At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks [or fire]", and then proceeding in lengthy paragraphs such as the one above, written from an omniscient narrator viewpoint and in a free indirect style, to relay the story of the next year (over a 13 year period).
These paragraphs (as above) capture:
The (limited) developments in the hunt for the missing girl and the girl’s parents interactions with the villagers;
The lives of a wide range of characters from the village; village politics – particularly the workings of the parish council and the interactions with other authorities;
The annual events of village life (fireworks at New Year, Mischief night, the annual pantomime, an annual cricket match against the next village, church services); the world of nature – both man influenced (farms, gardens, the National Park, the reservoirs) and the natural world (with animals and birds both as observed by the villages inhabitants but also their unobserved lives);
Rural economic developments such as the closure of shops and businesses;
Ageing of people (both children maturing to teenagers and middle aged people maturing into ill health);
The breakdowns, establishment and evolution of relationships.
Overall an outstanding book.
The book captures brilliantly how the quotidian dramas play out against the rhythmic seasons of village life and the natural world, while time continues to pass incessantly. A book which is a pleasure to read and demands instant re-reading.
The book is my favourite for the 2017 Booker Prize for which it has been deservedly longlisted....more
Now shortlisted for the Goldsmith to match its earlier shortlisting by the Bailey's prize - I have now re-read the book, but have little to add to my Now shortlisted for the Goldsmith to match its earlier shortlisting by the Bailey's prize - I have now re-read the book, but have little to add to my original review.
I thought of my mother, on the move. The energy for each flight, as for all of her lashing out, surely generated by the cowering cringe she lived in. Was I like that? Would I be? I’d hardly been unprone to impulsive moves. Dashes. Surges. The impetus seemed different, but perhaps it amounted to a similar insufficiency.
My father’s sprees were both a reaction to and the cause of his confinement. It was his debts which meant he couldn’t move from that house, even when the stairs got to be a daily torture. Was I too stupid – I couldn’t be – to take a lesson from that? Could I trust myself? Not to make my life a lair?
Too often that wretchedness came into me. A torpor. A trance. . And any idea I could do something about it was lost. It’s hard to account for …. but I just felt I had to abide .. Suffer
Neve, the first party narrator, is a writer and teacher, married to an older man Edwyn who subjects her to mental abuse by his passive-aggressive behaviour, and psychological dissections of her behaviour (he continually brings up an episode when she became very drunk after a part) and character (claiming that her attitude towards him is caused by her reaction to her father). She also reflects on her bullying father, his physical abuse of her mother and mental abuse of others, her own itinerant past including a previous relationship with an American musician characterised by verbal rows and her mother’s own desperate neediness.
Overall a fragmentary novella which does however give a striking view of dysfunctional relationships, the helplessness of those trapped within them (both abuser and abused). The prose itself can feel sparse but is simultaneously powerful and insightful, conveying the different ways in which relationships can descend into toxicity.
A modern take perhaps on Tolstoy Leo’s famous quote “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”...more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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