Now deservedly shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize,
This probably represened the most predicted book on a longlist which otherwise largely avoidNow deservedly shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize,
This probably represened the most predicted book on a longlist which otherwise largely avoided the expected and established literary choices in favour of readability, the inclusion of new genres/media and a theme of a “world on the brink”.
It is a book whose first chapter ends with a startling image, for me perhaps the most powerful of the longlist. As a prisoner is en route to serving two consecutive life sentences and reflecting on what bought here there, the bus passes of caged Thanksgiving Turkeys. America's foundational family feast relies on the incarceration of thousands into a system from which they never emerge; which I saw as a metaphor for how American society seems to have as its dark side, in a parasitical symbiosis, mass incarceration.
This is Rachel Kushner’s third novel, and continues her idea of moving forward sequentially in time - her two previous novels being set in the 1950s and 1970s, this is set in the early 2000s, a time period I think chosen to ensure her key character could share her own upbringing.
The novel stemmed from the author’s decision in 2012 to investigate California’s penal system in its entirety after some years of reflection on the use of the prison system in the structure of that society - a decision which I feel was not necessarily motivated by wanting to write a book, but which given her identity as a novelist was inevitably going to find an outlet in her creative art.
Her years of immersive research, included visiting courts to watch trials, joining prison tour programmes with criminal justice students, arranging specific prison visits and then moved from the purely observational to the participative and includes Involvement with an activist prison reform group, partly run by prisoners serving life sentences (http://www.justicenowprisonabolition.org), visiting and corresponding with prisoners with life sentences at Chowchilla (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centr...), mentoring prisoners with writing projects, sending prisoners books and assisting with the parole appeals those convicted for life as juveniles (for example http://articles.latimes.com/2002/mar/... the length of whose sentence is mirrored in that of this novel’s central character.
I believe that the author had five aims in this book, which largely dictate its sprawling structure (one which I know a number of my Goodreads friends have criticised):
to draw on her own childhood to identify the back stories of her characters and in particular the underlying circumstances that in her view underlying reasons they may have ended in jail;
to draw on the stories of prisoners both male and female she met over the years;
to give a realistic insiders view of life as a prisoner based on her conversations with those she befriended;
to include an outside character, one tangential to the prison system so as to bring something of the outside view of the system and the prisoners in it;
to consider the wider environment in which the California prison is set.
The book’s main character is Romy - convicted for the murder of a stalker, her case not helped by a well meaning but over worked and inexpert Public defender who effectively rules out from court the immediate reasons for her actions. Romy’s sections are the only ones in the book written in the first person, and I think this is important to an understanding of the book. Romy’s teenage years are based around those of the author and her friends (Romy being I think six years younger). For example Kushner was a member of a group who styled themselves White Punks on Dope. Kushner has said that some of her friends ended up in prison, and puts this down less to the immediate wrong choices they made in their lives, as the wrong choices that were made for them by their class and privilege lead lack of a support network. She, I think, uses Romy to come to terms with this on a personal level and also to provoke her readers with the same idea. In a memorable moment in the book, as Romy explains an assault she suffered as an 11 year old, one that was the start of her journey which ended in prison, she breaks through the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly.
You would not have gone. I understand that. You would not have gone up to his room. You would not have asked him for help. You would not have been wandering lost at midnight at age eleven. You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and your father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations. Everything for you would have been different. But if you were me, you would have done what I did. You would have gone, hopeful and stupid, to get the money for the taxi”.
In terms of characters she met in the novel and which feature in her book some are based on more Proustian movements. A five minute meeting with a former police officer convicted for acting as a contract killer, his pictures of Harley Davidson’s, his admittance to undiscovered quasi-legal killings and a memory of expensive cologne mixed with prison cleaning solution (Cell Block 64) lead to the character of Doc. Others are based around specific prisoners whose story she has understood, with for example Rosie Alfaro (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie...) forming the inspiration for Candy Peña, one of the death row characters and her friend and consultant in the book Theresa Martinez appearing as Sammy, Romy and our guide to prison life.
The insider view of female prison life are many and varied and lend the book a compelling level of realism - for example ad seg and its sanitary pipe communications with Death Row, prison cheesecake, the popularity of Danielle Steele’s Malice in the prison population, the school age books given to prisoners to read). It is however one of the most disappointing aspects of the novel that this meticulous attention to detail and to realism is rather ruined by an unnecessary and unbelievable ending to Romy’s imprisonment.
The outsider view is provided by Gordon Hauser, an English literature graduate who after the failure of his dissertation on Thoreau takes a job as a prison teacher. Through his eyes we see the prison system and the routines and bureaucracy involved in it, but we also get a wider view of the prisoners, conflicted between seeing them as human beings and understanding the horror of the crimes they have committed (something which is only ever the subject of rumour and misdirection amongst the prisoners themselves). He also is our and Romy’s connection to the fate of her son Jackson and the state’s view that she has effectively by her actions disqualified herself from parenthood (a view commonly held and repeated by the prison officers abiut all of the prisoners).
The environmental part is I believe the last successful; the author has Hauser living Thoreau style in a log cabin surrounded by the same industrial style Almond farms as the prisons. However she also tries to crowbar in the similarities between Thoreau’s retreat from society and that of the Unabomber as outlined in a film made by a friend of hers (http://glasstire.com/2013/04/18/decod.... In particular Hauser’s chapters are followed by an excerpt from sections of the Unabomber’s diary as decoded by Benning. I struggled to see any justification for this part, although I did note that the sections from the diaries show the Unabomber effectively usurping the right to impose his own justice system on others.
The ending of the book as Romy reflects on her son is both beautifully touching
He is on his path as I am on mine. The world has gone on for a long, long time. I gave him life. It is quite a lot to give. It is the opposite of nothing. And the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.
And deeply sad.
Romy’s actions, and the State’s reaction to them has surrendered Jackson to a system which has already let down so many of the other characters.
And so it continues .....
This is far from a perfect novel but it is a memorable and important one....more
As per the end of my review, the book has now deservedly won a medal but for lots of reasons (not least that the Booker really does not need another AAs per the end of my review, the book has now deservedly won a medal but for lots of reasons (not least that the Booker really does not need another American based male author winning it) I hope it does not win the gold.
This book begins by giving the stories of a disparate group of individuals with different professions and backgrounds, and their interactions with the world of trees.
And so I would like to start my review by commending the reviews of a number of my Goodreads friends - a photographer with a passion for nature; an actuary (who unlike one character in the book actually qualified rather than taking drugs); and an ex music critic, now librarian and art blogger.
And then to add my own brief thoughts on a few other areas which I think are not captured in their reviews.
The first is the concept of different timescales and in particular the link to Artificial intelligence; something which I think was vital to the very conception of this book which arose when the author was based around Silicon Valley but walking amongst ancient trees.
The theme is first captured in a science fiction story that one character loved as a youngster (and later part remembers as an adult, albeit forgetting the ending).
Aliens land on earth. They’re little runts, as alien races go. But they metabolise like there’s no tomorrow. They zip around like swarms of gnats, too fast to see - so fast that Earth seconds seem to them like tears. To them, humans are nothing but sculptures of immobile meat. The foreigners try to communicate, but there’s no reply. Finding no signs of intelligent life, they tuck unto the frozen statues and start curing them like so much jerky, for the long ride home.
The parallels with humans and trees are clear and later (in a related story) a character visiting an airport is drawn to the movements of birds rather than the static scene of departure boards - a symbol of how humankind is hardwired to focus in movement/change.
Then as the first mentioned character starts to creates the artificial worlds in his MMORPGs and eventually diverges in his aims from those playing the games, and those around him in his old firm and, at the book’s end starts to use artificial intelligence for different purposes than those his game has been hijacked by, we see the dichotomy that Powers is exploring, one he has explained in early interviews.
Cultural transmission is orders of magnitude faster than genetic transmission, and digital transmission has accelerated the speed of culture a hundredfold or more. We may soon seem, to our artificial intelligence offspring, as motionless and insentient as trees seem to us. And here we live, trying to make a home between our predecessors and our descendants. Will we double down on the great migration into symbol space, our decampment into Facebook and Instagram and Netflix and World of Warcraft, the road that we have already traveled so far down? Or will Big Data and Deep Learning allow us to grasp and rejoin the staggeringly complex processes of the living world? The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they’re inseparable aspects of the new ecology of digital life.
A second theme is suicide.
Of the characters whose individual stories start the novel and then interleaf throughout it: one’s father commits suicide; another contemplates it but is dissuaded by voices at the last moment; another makes an enfeebled attempt in hospital observed by a second character; another is thankful that the opportunity does not present itself in prison. And of course the book culminates with a lecture planned to end in suicide as advice on the best thing than a human can do to save the environment, before taking a late and different course.
I saw two angles to this - firstly a view that the current obsession with consumption and new flirtations with climate change denial and rolling back environmental protections is itself a form of suicide; and secondly a counsel of hope against despair and that humans still have a role to play in serving the planet (what role does life want humans to play is of course the aim of the new Artificial intelligence established by the aforementioned character at the book’s end).
Very much a book of ideas, if as has been pointed out in Paul’s review and the comments below it, ones that have largely been adopted from elsewhere and, slightly oddly, unattributed albeit Power himself seems to acknowledge that omission.
The judges award him no medal - even a bronze. They say it’s because he has no bibliography. A bibliography is a required part of the formal report.
A bibliography is not required for a novel but I think it would have been useful given the campaigning nature of the book, so I will add my own.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman is the definitive guide to the field of Behavioural Economics that underlies a lot of the book
Will the judges award this a medal - I would be very surprised and a little disappointed if it does not achieve the “bronze” of a shortlisting given the stimulating ideas it summarises; but equally not surprised and certainly not disappointed if it does not win the gold, not least due to comments in the book which in my view range somewhere on the spectrum of ignorant to insulting about my profession, industry and faith....more
Now deserved winner of the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award (one which acts as a kind of after publication year “best of” award - this year piNow deserved winner of the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award (one which acts as a kind of after publication year “best of” award - this year pitting in the shortlist winners of the Booker, Women’s Prize, Giller, NBA and Nobel).
PREVIOUS a COMMENT
One year on from its win and this book’s sales and reputation go for strength to strength. Anna Burns gave a moving speech at the recent Booker award dinner for 2019 which I was lucky enough to attend. The 2019 longlist had many strong books but nothing to match the brilliance and distinctiveness of this one.
UPDATED THOUGHTS
One of my top books of 2018 and after a re read (which I enjoyed even more than first time around) likely to be one of my top reads in 2019.
This was also the Winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Purely in my view this was always the standout book on the longlist and the best winner for years - however (just as I predicted in my original review) this is not a book for everyone as can be seen in some of the reviews of this book.
I do find something meta-fictional about the fact that a book about a divided community, with the two sides holding entrenched positions, generating a similar reaction among my literary friends - I have visions of the fans of the book manning barricades in its defence, while its detractors chant "No surrender to the Book-r-prize" and “Le ciel est blu”
And I have posted elsewhere - it seems that say 2/3rd of people absolutely love this book and 1 / 3rd simply cannot tolerate it. This is in line with scientific evidence - Wikipedia estimates 35% of the global population are lactose intolerant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose...)
OPENING QUOTE
The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’ and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one.
ANNA BURNS AND HER LITERARY DEVELOPMENT
Anna Burns’s debut novel – her first No Bones was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002 – 15 years after the author moved from Catholic Belfast to England as a 25 year old in 1987. This is only her third novel (with one novella) since then and the acknowledgements hint at a trying life story. (update: this difficult back story has now been confirmed interviews since the author won the prize).
No Bones covered the story of a young girl growing up in the Troubles in Belfast; Little Constructions – her second novel - an Irish criminal family.
In a New Statesman reading and interview at Foyles in the week of the Booker award - an event I was fortunate enough to attend - Anna Burns discussed her three books. My recollections and understanding of what she said was that: her saying that her first book "No Bones" was dealing with her issues as an individual; her second “Little Constructions” with her issues with the family unit; and that finally now in her third book “Milkman” she was able to consider her issues with the society in which she grew up
I think it’s because I’ve resolved something about family issues that I can now do the “bigger” issue – which actually, for me, is the lesser issue.
MILKMAN
This book is set in Belfast in the early 1990s, but a Belfast not named but described with a nomenclature which reminded me of the allegorical approach of a Magnus Mills novel:
At this time, in this place, when it came to the political problems, which included bombs and guns and death and maiming, ordinary people said ‘their side did it’ or ‘our side did it’, or ‘their religion did it’ or ‘our religion did it’ or ‘they did it’ or ‘we did it’, when what was really meant was ‘defenders-of-the-state did it’ or ‘renouncers-of-the-state did it’ or ‘the state did it’. Now and then we might make an effort and say ‘defender’ or ‘renouncer ….. that flag of the country from ‘over the water’ which was also the same flag of the community from ‘over the road’.
The opening paragraph of the novel – at the start of my review – sets out both the style of the novel and its limited storyline.
The book is narrated in a wonderful first-person voice by an unnamed girl, looking back on when she was eighteen years old.
The voice perhaps has something of Lisa McInerney and Eimear McBride (perhaps even Mike Mc Cormack) but with its own distinctive freshness and black humour.
Despite (or perhaps because of) her almost-boyfriend, the narrator has two unwanted admirers:
• The milkman – a older man and “renouncer” (IRA) intelligence office who uses his undercover skills to persistently engineer encounters with her, while accumulating and casually revealing his knowledge of every aspect of her life;
• Somebody Mc Somebody – the only surviving son of a renouncer family which has been struck by serial tragedy and who has self-delusions that he is a senior renouncer agent.
CHARACTERS
The novel features a wonderful cast of characters, known not by their names but identified with a similar nomenclature to that in the above description of Belfast.
Examples of individual characters include:
• maybe-boyfriend (her almost partner – a motor mechanic who hoards car parts and who sets off a chain of events by bringing home the super-charger from a Bentley – a car firmly identified as being from “over the water”);
• nuclear-boy (Somebody McSomebody’s brother – obsessed with the prospect of a Russia-America nuclear war to the bemusement of those around him); chef (her boyfriends best friend, a gay brickie and one time serial-victim convinced he is a top cook);
• third brother-in-law (street fighter, sanctifier of women, obsessive runner)
• tablets girl, a.k.a. girl who was really a woman (the unhinged district poisoner;)
• real milkman.a.k.a. the man who didn’t love anybody, (a stern and ascetic “deeder of the goodness”, who openly defies the excesses of the enforcers and is an object of lifelong desire for …;)
• ma (obsessed with marrying off the narrator, her daughter, to one of “the nice wee boys from the area”)
There was ma too, continuing her barrage of how I wouldn’t get married, of how I was bringing shame by entering paramilitary groupiedom, of how I was bringing down on myself dark and unruly forces, bad-exampling wee sisters, bringing in God too, as in light and dark and the satanic and the infernal.
Other characters are identified as collectives, for example:
• The wee ones (the narrator’s hyper-questioning, precociously intelligent younger sisters);
• The local paramilitary groupies (who attempt to induct her into their ranks);
• The issue women (a group of feminists resented but also protected by the traditional women).
• The ex-pious women – a group of ageing religious ladies who rival ma for the attentions of the real milkman
• The narrator, in a touch I loved and with which I could hugely empathise, is marked out as different and suspicious by the community, due to her habit of walking while reading:
It’s creepy, perverse, obstinately determined,’ went on longest friend. …. It’s the way you do it –reading books, whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages …. It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why –with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together –would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?’
The narrator challenges
“Are you saying it’s okay for [The Milkman] to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre [walking about] in public?’
to be told:
look[ed] at it in its proper surroundings, then Semtex taking precedence as something normal over reading-while-walking –‘which nobody but you thinks is normal’ –could certainly be construed as the comprehensible interpretation here …. So, looked at in those terms, terms of contextual environment, then … it is okay for him and it’s not okay for you.’
THEMES
The book brilliantly conveys the Troubles and the undercurrent of violence, the tribal suspicions, the oppressive conventions, the inter-community and community-soldier hatreds, and the oppressive gloom that it generates.
Take a … statelet immersed …. conditioned… through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger –well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that. As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on. All this too, seemed normality which meant then, that part of normality, here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see.
The narrator is both a product of her environment (she regrets that maybe-boyfriend does not have the culturally appropriate level of male-enthusiasm for football) and starting to strain against its restrictions.
In her increasing sense of awareness of the wider-world outside of the narrow confines she is expected to operate in she is aided by maybe-boyfriend who takes her to see a sunset and a French evening-class teacher who, in a funny but also pivotal scene encourages her class to look at the colours of the sky and explore both language and nature, despite their inherited ancestral scepticism.
After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.
Teacher started again. This time it was the fugacious (whatever that meant) black appearance of street trees owing to the crepuscular (whatever that meant) quality of the sky behind them, with the others –still in their own struggle –complaining that our town didn’t have fugacity, crepuscules or street trees, black or any colour, before being made to look again and conceding that okay, maybe we did have street trees but they must have been put in half an hour earlier as nobody here had noticed them before.
But she is worn down by:
• the unwanted attentions of the milkman;
• his increasingly explicit threats that maybe-boyfriend will be car-bombed if she does not drop him;
• by the neighbourhood gossip, innuendo and questioning which takes her non-existent affair with him as a matter of established fact and starting point for further conjecture;
• her increasingly strained relationship with maybe-boyfriend who still lives under the shadow of the Bentley incident
And all this spelled a serious turning bad for us, for me and maybe-boyfriend –in the way that the rumour about me and the milkman in my area was affecting me, and in the way that the rumour about him and the flag in his area was affecting him.
STYLE
This is not a book for all readers – the plot is limited and even within its narrow confines, the author wanders across time meaning the book has only a limited sense of linearity. It is distinctly in my view at the Goldsmith/Republic of Consciousness end of the Booker spectrum (albeit surprisingly not shortlisted for that prize, with two less innovative Booker books making the list); and therefore all the more enjoyable for it.
The style too is not consistent – this is a book which can be at times (but only at times)
• Visceral - for example Rachel Cusk like massacre of “our side’s dogs by the “over the water” army
• Dark – violence and death are an everyday occurrence
• Tender – with an unexpected gay relationship and “grey” love affair
• Surreal/absurd – almost Magnus Mills style as for example the security forces struggle with the infiltration of a hospital by sexually obsessed ex-pious women
• Imaginative and inventive in its use of language – in the style of Eimear McBride
But it was a book that I loved.
CONCLUSION
Overall a bold and innovative choice for which the Booker Judges must be congratulated.
A distinct and darkly humorous novel which serves as a literary reminder of the Troubles – a difficult time in British history, and one which answers its own question:
‘You never know,’ they said, ‘what might be considered the most sought-after paraphernalia of these sadnesses in years to come.’
I've travelled a fair bit. The Canadian Maritimes that's where I'm from. I know that coastline, down to Maine. I signed up, trained up in England, then I've travelled a fair bit. The Canadian Maritimes that's where I'm from. I know that coastline, down to Maine. I signed up, trained up in England, then fought in Normandy, then on through the low countries. Germany After the war I worked in New York City for eighteen months and now I'm here. I read all the time. Novels, history, I'm interested in films and jazz. Cities 'Cities'? 'Yes American Cities' 'What about American Cities' 'How they fail'
Now winner of the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the 2018 Goldsmith Prize as well as shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize
The book being short listed for the Goldsmith lead me to re-read as a result but which did not really change my overall views of the book, which I think is very good but not brilliant (the second time through like the first I found myself skipping the parts which read like a Film Noir influenced tour of Los Angeles) and a surprise shortlistee for the Goldsmith as I think it lacked the innovation I associate with that prize.
In respect of the Man Booker however, it was deservedly the only one of the "wider" literary forms on the longlist (graphic novel, crime genre fiction) to make the shortlist.
And it is these features that have persuaded the Goldsmith judges to shortlist - they commented "A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable – and unclassifiable – books of recent years"
I should say up front that poetry and movies (of any type, let alone a specific area) are two art forms that do not really interest me - and the book even has some jazz music thrown in to complete, for me, an trinity of disinterest.
Further Los Angeles is not a City I have visited (or to be honest wish to visit) and this book is almost encyclopaedic at times in its description of the City in the post war years.
However despite that quadruple handicap I really enjoyed reading this book.
I was perhaps aided in this by a startling and vivid opening stanza, describing the third person narrators experience of sighting New York - a verse which captures an experience and reaction which applies equally 70+ years later and does not dim with repetition on what it is for me a monthly event crossing one of the bridges en route from JFK and catching a first glance at the City.
And there it was: the swell and glitter of it like a standing wave - the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising through the blue the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint, the glamour of buried life as the world turned around it
Our narrator is Walker, a name which captures rather too well his restless pedestrianism. He is a Canadian veteran of The D-Day landings, and feeling that his experiences and actions there disqualify him from returning to his previous life (and love) in Nova Scotia, decides instead to seek some form of anonymity in New York, before moving on to Los Angeles in 1948 where he finds work and some form of broken community, spending an interim period (1951-1953) in San Francisco before returning to Los Angeles where the book concludes in the next few years.
His experiences in all three cities are interleaved with prose flashbacks to his home in Nova Scotia (written despite their prose style with a poetic flourish)
The smell of stewed tea and wet clothes, smuts from the oil lamps, the valves in the radio like embers, glowing; the penetrating, nevertheless-ending rain - and winter, like a white door closing for six months .... Then the slow retreat of winter. Spring’s advent and reprieve.
and to his experiences in wartime France (written, not surprisingly, in a pared back unadorned style to suit their brutality).
The brief section in New York captures the City beautifully, and my favourite image and one I can relate to my regular evenings in Bryant Park when visiting the City for work, is of a lady reading a book
In the last splinter of sunlight allowed between the skyscrapers .... moving her chair every quarter of an hour
San Francisco is captured by
He doesn’t deserve this city its play of height and depth, this changing sift of colour and weather
But it is Los Angeles that dominates the story.
There he finds work as a newspaper writer, working on the City Desk - covering the increasingly brutal local crime scene. While he is in employment and accommodation, he finds himself drawn to Skid Row (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_...) and to the Cities homeless population of veterans, particularly coloured veterans.
His nighttime life is ambulatory, circling the City and watching its denizens, it’s constant cycle of destruction and incessant and insatiable development. He is a frequenter of the Cities bars, observing petty and organised crime, alcoholism and prostitution - these sections are where the Film Noir influence is heaviest and the strongest and recurring imagery is of the contrast of dark and light.
There were parts of the city that were pure blocks of darkness, where light would slip in like a blade to nick it, carve it open: a thin stiletto, then a spill of white; the diagonal gash of a shadow, shearing; the jagged angle sliding over itself to close; the flick-knife of a watchman’s torch, the long gasp of headlights from nowhere, their yawning light — then just as quickly their fading away: closed over, swallowed by the oiled, engraining, leaden dark.
He finds himself drawn to movie lots, outside scenes and to chatting to directors. In what was for me the least interesting part of the book there are copious references (detailed in the closing credits) to actual films, directors and scenes, as well as street by street, district by district detail of the City. Clearly the author has spent huge time on researching these parts and yet I found myself mentally skipping through them.
He persuades his boss to allow him to develop a sideline writing about this group and about the City zoning and expansion policies exacerbating their plight, against a background of Cold War hysteria and McCarthyism with the Korean War adding to the population of discarded and damaged veterans littering the Cities streets (and treated as litter by the Cities authorities in the pocket of property tycoons, crime and oil)
I mean the fact that this is country where there aren’t enough homes, enough jobs, where one in six Angelenos are ex-servicemen and they’re lying out on Skid Row - but all anyone ever talks about us waiting for the Russians, HUAC locking up half of Hollywood the government building more bombs We won’t he war, but we’re living like we lost
Walker we realise is suffering from PTSD and his memories of the war are triggered frequently, for example the July 4th fireworks in New York, the cacophony of construction sites in Los Angeles, the rolling fog in San Francisco.
On his return to Los Angeles, the by now constant destruction of the City to make way for new development, leads to almost constant flashbacks to the violence of the landings and the crimes he sees perpetuated on the City’s black population triggers memories of atrocities he witnessed in the Germans’ desperate last stand.
His own attempts to forget the war and his fond memories of a Nova Scotia to which he feels he can never return, are cleverly contrasted with the constant reinvention of Los Angeles
As he lay in bed, he saw that trying to forget was the same as trying to remember A lifetime's work, and damn near impossible He pulled out a smoke swallowed what was left in the heel of a bottle In cape Breton there was just the past Here in California, they're only thinking about the future - the past is being town down every day, so there's no past here to remember
Eventually his own memories of witnessing the massacre of his unarmed colleagues and his personal role in revenging that lead him to a downside spiral
In his room, he worked out where he’s been from the match books in his pocket, the drinks by the gap in his dollars, the hole in his life by his eyes in the broken mirror
And to closing lines which, drawing on the theme of contrast, are as dark to the light of the opening words
I can stop now he said putting his mouth to the mouth of the bottle “I’ll make my city here
Overall a memorable, powerful and impressive book, notwithstanding that the central Film Noir concept simply did not resonate for me.
My other criticism may I think, given their other choices, reflect exactly why the Booker judges longlisted it, which is a rather forced resonance with today’s events. I may be wrong but one paragraph of the book struck me as containing some anachronisms (although see the comments below).
This is our fear of ‘the other’ Indians, blacks, Mexicans, Communists, Muslims, whatever America has to have its monsters so we can zone them, segregate them if possible, shoot them They call this patriotism, Nativism but it’s racialism, pure and simple. And paranoia now that America’s gone abroad to fight a war - two wars we’re frightened, frightened that foreigners might come over here and do the same to us...more
Now shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker which gives rise to a nice matched set of compariNow shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker which gives rise to a nice matched set of comparisons (additional ones now added below).
2017 Man Booker novel about an unresolved mystery and set in the English countryside: Reservoir 13. 2018 equivalent: Snap.
2017 Man Booker allegorical novel about slavery and institutionalised racism. Underground Railroad. 2018 equivalent: this book. (*)
Perhaps even more disappointingly this has made the shortlist whereas Underground Railroad did not.
Now I have to say that I found that my immediate reaction to this book was that it reminded me of the sort of adventure novel I would have read as a boy and was: something of a farrago of fact and fiction; a mash up of Jules Verne and Roots; a distinctly inferior version of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque trilogy without that author’s originality or prescience (Avatar, Bitcoin ...). I also found that it was riddled with inexplicable coincidences, repetition (the eyes most definitely have it), plot discrepancies and character inconsistencies which seemed to distract from its message and what I would expect from a Booker novel, but .....
it was then I recognized that my own values—the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman—they are not the only, nor the best, values in existence. I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something. Everything is bizarre, and everything has value. Or if not value, at least merits investigation.
And others of my Goodreads friends have seen more merit in this book and done that investigation.
And then I read.
Some evenings I would take out my papers and leads and attempt to sketch the twins from memory, trying very hard to recall their differences so as to make them distinct. But at this I always failed. In life they were discrete as cane fields, each with his own character and history and way of talking. Yet when I sat down to draw them, they became one pale face, one beady, judging set of eyes.
And therefore it seems appropriate to take advantage of my own joint set of judging eyes and rather than provide my own review, refer you to one which I think does an outstanding job of setting it the background to, and investigating the value of, this novel.
2017 Man Booker Novel novel exploring identity in a multi-racial North London and featuring popular music - Swing Time (with the dreaded Aimee) ; 2018 equivalent - In a Mad and Furious City (with its vibrant Grime backdrop)
.... and much as I liked the 2017 Elmet, Everything Under is a much superior debut novel exploring legend, isolated family units and gender fluidity in the English countryside.
...... 2017 Man Booker multi-narrator, multi-story with no editor at all. 2018 multi-narrator, multi-story book in need of a stronger editor (“I am sorry Rachel but the Unabomber would make a good New Yorker short story but it has to go from this book”) Mars Room. And I am pretty sure Kushner did not ask Romy to pick the publisher.
And some closer matches.
2017 Man Booker Irish stream of Consciousness novel - Solar Bones. 2018 equivalent - Milkman....more
Now deservedly shortlisted, although I don't want to alter my original review and spoil the alliteration.
A literary novel of the liminal, language, lNow deservedly shortlisted, although I don't want to alter my original review and spoil the alliteration.
A literary novel of the liminal, language, leaving and legend, longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize.
The river cut into the land. It was no good. She walked and walked until she slept. She saw the people on passing or moored boats looking at her and understood she did not look like a boy. She looked like something in between, uncertain, only half made.
This is firstly a book of the liminal.
Transitions and fluidity of gender, of family relationships and family status recur frequently, with the author herself switching between first, second and third person narrative, all in Gretel’s voice.
And reminding me of the fellow longlisted Warlight) boundaries are vital to this book. The boundary between land and water: the author’s previous and debut book (a short story collection) Fen was set in that eponymous district where water becomes land and land can lie below water; this book is set on a river and in the world of canals (again the parallels with Warlight are strong) and on the strips of land alongside them. The boundary between the surface and the deep and the dangers that lie under the water. Boundaries between communities - the canal and river folk have their own sense of community and self-sufficiency and clearly are carefully maintain their distance from the world, in a recurring theme we are told they don’t call the police or child services. And even the boundary that Sarah creates for her and Gretel through their shared childhood language,
I understood suddenly what you had done by creating your own language and teaching it to me. We were aliens. We were like the last people on earth. If, in any sense, language determined how we thought then I could never have been any other way than the way I am. And the language I grew up speaking was one no one else spoke. So I was always going to be isolated, lonely, uncomfortable in the presence of others. It was in my language. It was in the language you gave me.
Language is then the second theme.
Marcus is first attracted to Sarah and Gretel by their shared language: They had cut themselves off from the world linguistically as well as physically. They were a species all their own. He wanted to be like them, he wanted to be them.
Margot as a child finds words difficult Those words on the page, swimming in and out of one another. She would not read, told them the words were ants which crawled, would not hold still.. By contrast Gretel loved words as a child, tries to teach Marcus Scrabble and later she becomes a Lexiographer.
In Sarah’s early dementia we are told that her inventiveness with language begins to leave her a word becomes trapped in your mouth and you hack at it, trying and failing to spit it out and later The next day I watch the words leaving you. The pronouns are slippery and won’t stay still; objects go first so that you only point or shout until I bring what you want. Names are long gone.
Leaving is another themes which dominates the story.
Sarah leaves Gretel and the older Gretel is ever concerned she will leave again and wants to understand Marcus’s leaving. Fiona leaves her family and then Margot’s family, after influencing Margot to leave. It also features as as a euphemism for another underlying threat: When Gretel was a child, she said, she wouldn’t talk about death so we called it leaving. And I think it is no accident the word Gretel is occupied with as the book begins:
For a living I updated dictionary entries. I had been working on break all week. There were index cards spread across the table and some on the floor. The word was tricky and defied simple definition. These were the ones I liked best. They were the same as an earworm, a song that became stuck in your head.”
And of course this is a book of legend.
Primarily it is a fantastic reworking of a Greek myth, but rather than say “Circe” or Pat Barker’s upcoming “The Silence of the Girls”, both of which renarrate a myth from the viewpoint of a female character, or Shamsie’s “Home Fire” which uses the very detailed narrative of the myth but set in today’s world, here the myth is a starting point for a complex tale.
The Greek myth is and overlaid with Biblical allusion (Margot contemplates, unknowingly accurately, Moses as a name), fairy tale (Gretel and the recurring mentions of breadcrumbs) and even a familiar modern children’s tale, with a one word but I think very relevant mention of Julia Donaldson’s classic Gruffalo.
But added to all of this is invented legend. The character of the Canal Thief reminded me somewhat of The Essex Serpent, and in Sarah and Gretel’s language becomes or expands into the Bonak There were more Bonak in the water than could be counted: bodies whose ghosts might catch on the anchor and decide to stay, trunks of trees big enough to sweep the boat away, the canal thief who rose out of the rip-tide tunnels and hesitated.
The Bonak increasingly dominates their lives and its true meaning and significance becomes, at least to me, more obscure at the same time the parallels with the Greek Myth become clearer to the reader (at the same time the truth about the different characters emerges to Gretel). As if all along Bonak didn’t mean what we were afraid of, what was in the water, but watch out; this is what is coming down the river
Really a wonderful book and one which I can only congratulate the the Booker judges for longlisting. My review only scratches the surface of the novel (I could write more for example about the mythological parallels or the concept of destiny and whether one can avoid it).
My thanks to Random House for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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Books:
2018-booker-shortlist
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