- But that’s just borrowing. - The author does it - But she has writing talent unlike you. What I want to know is how is your review going? - I was thinking of writing a review in the style of the book itself - Why, you always do that – no one likes those reviews - Yes they do - They don’t – you think it makes you look clever but it’s not. People think you are just copying writers with more ability - That’s not what people think – that’s what you think, isn’t it
- One thing I don’t understand - What? - What causes someone to pay to read a book review? - How do you mean - In a paper or magazine. Why would someone do it the first time? - Maybe the novelty – the reviewers do things that Goodreads reviewers aren’t prepared to do - Or because they don’t resort to cheap gimmicks and actually review the book properly - ?
- What will you include in your review? - I was thinking of describing how I am going to meet with a group of Goodreaders to discuss the book face to face – a fictional group to discuss a fictional review - That’s very predictable. Who will be in your fictional group and what will they do? - I was thinking of having someone that works in insurance like me, two experts in IT, maybe a photographer called Neil, perhaps an owner of an office services business - People will think you are talking about real people - I will use disguised names like Gumble’s Yard - Gumble’s Yard whose twin brother uses his real name on Goodreads and makes frequent references to Gumble’s Yard being his twin. I think people will see through that - Gumble's Yard is only a working name - although it does seem to fit
- One other interesting thing about the book - What? - It’s published by Salt – a small press based in Cromer, Norfolk - I know. They are great – but you said something interesting? - the fact that it’s on a shortlist with a book by Galley Beggar, the fact they are from Norwich, Norfolk - Another great small press but what’s interesting about that? - I am writing this review about 10 miles from Cromer and 10 miles from Norwich - Typical - What? - You make yourself the centre of the literary universe and detract from the excellence of this book...more
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2019 Goldsmith Prize. I had previously borrowed it from the library close to the announcement of the I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2019 Goldsmith Prize. I had previously borrowed it from the library close to the announcement of the 2019 Booker longlist – but reading review of it and seeing it not make the longlist I returned it unread.
I was glad that the Goldsmith bought me back to the book (and the library) as I realised that I had read all of the author’s previous adult novels.
His first novel – “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” was of course hugely (and in my view completely deservedly) popular. A classic book. His next two “A Spot of Bother” and “Red House” kept to a similar family drama setting but were less successful (in both a literary and commercial sense).
In a recent Guardian review, Haddon talked about wanting to exercise his writing muscles.
Plus, he says, he wanted to do more with the endlessly capacious, flexible form that is the novel. “It was Sean O’Brien, I think, talking about poetry, who asked how you move from the here and now to what he called ‘the weird zone’. I always want to get to the weird zone – the place where magic can happen believably. I’m not talking about children’s books or science fiction or fantasy but that numinous thing, that sense that there is something more. And with a novel you can do crazy shit. If you can hold the reader’s hand and make them feel safe you can take them anywhere.” He adds: “I thought to myself: ‘If I’m going to write another novel about a family, particularly one about another lower-middle-class family from Swindon, it’s a bit like having the Millennium Falcon but only using it for going to Sainsbury’s. I thought: ‘I want to know what all these knobs and levers do.’”
And I think this serves as an analogy for the book. If someone had only ever used the Millennium Falcon to go to Sainsbury’s but decided to test it to its full capabilities you can imagine that they would indulge themselves in a wild ride, exploring as much of the (fictional) universe as they can, moving from one area to another but with only a limited sense of control, and probably creating a bit of a mess in their wake. And while they would probably have huge fun piloting the ride – you would not really enjoy being a passenger.
Welcome to “The Porpoise”.
My second observation would be that Haddon has of course drawn very heavily on Shakespeare and “Pericles” – Shakespeare himself drawing on his co-author George Watkins and Watkins drawing on various mythological sources and more recent retellings. Co-incidentally of course Ali Smith drew on the same play for “Spring”.
The brilliance of Shakespeare lies of course in his inventiveness and playfullness with language and in his profound insight into the human condition. It does not generally lie in his proposterous plots (of which Pericles is a particular extreme). Frequently during this book I reflected that whereas Ali Smith drew and built heavily on the first two elements, and on lightly on the third, Haddon does the opposite here.
Haddon has admitted that he deliberately drew on a bad play "I’d been toying with the idea of writing a novel based on a Shakespeare play for some time before I realised that if I chose one of his not-terribly-good plays then I would feel less reverence for my source material and more freedom to abuse it for my own creative purposes. I might then be able to write something which felt like an original work and not just an adaptation." - but this does not to me excuse his inability to draw in a more profound way from the source material.
My third would be on the source material for “Pericles” – Gower’s “Story of Apollonius”. Researching this story, the first summary of the plot I found said this:
At this point, the story is considerably less than half over, if we measure its length by its sheer number of lines. Yet what happens from this point onward bears almost no causal connection with what has gone before. With the death of Antiochus, the narrative element motivating Apollonius's wanderings disappear. Yet his wanderings continue and come to include his wife and daughter as well. What motivates these wanderings are random catastrophes which bear little relation either to the first part of the story or to each other. On the voyage to Tyre a storm causes Apollonius's wife to fall ill and apparently die ….
Again I say – Welcome to “The Porpoise”
Other thoughts:
- I really did not like the narrative style. It is very distinctive combining heavily portentous observations (both our omniscient narrator and many of the characters frequently evaluate the eventual consequences of future meaning of their actions while performing them) with an Ian McEwan insistence on making sure that all of his research is put into effect – time and again I received far more detail than I liked.
Now Haddon has said that "The structural conceit underlying the entire novel is that Pericles’ adventures are a fantasy concocted by Angelica / the daughter of the king of Antioch. She is being abused. The first young man to understand what is happening and who could therefore be her saviour instead rejects her and runs away. She comes to terms with this by telling a long and complicated story in which her would-be-saviour is punished and learns the error of his ways, in which a mother dies but doesn’t really die, and in which a family is torn apart then brought together again."
And given that the style begins from the first page we can only assume that even the first section - before the Pericles character appears - is Angelica's imagination. But while this might explain the portentousness it does not excuse it - it merely means that Haddon is channelling an imaginary bad writer (which to be fair does fit with his source material) and I am unsure about the research (unless Angelica drew on her reading to produce this).
- The vignette when Wilkins dies and is visited by the ghost of Shakespeare and both his physical and ghostly bodies are abused by the women that he made suffer as a pimp is interesting and a clear reckoning for that Haddon sees as both Wilkins terrible personal life and his downplaying of rape as incest in the original play. But I felt that it did not go anywhere – I was really expecting Wilkins and Shakespeare to begin to appear in both the modern day and ancient narrative, but if they did I missed it.
Overall very disappointing – I am glad the author enjoyed taking the Millennium Falcon for a spin, but I feel I made a monkey of myself being the passenger. I only wish he had gone Solo....more
Now shortlisted for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize for UK and Irish small presses.
This book published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe has been shortlNow shortlisted for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize for UK and Irish small presses.
This book published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe has been shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmith Prize – which I think could not be more appropriate, and in fact is overdue recognition of Isabel Waidner’s concept of a form of fiction which in line with the prize’s aims “breaks the mould … extends the possibility of the novel form …. embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best”.
In 2018 I was one of the judges on the Republic of Consciousness Prize for small press fiction. One of the more unusual and challenging entries we received was “Gaudy Bauble” - their previous novel. I recall at the judges meeting that its shortlisting was quickly agreed as it so clearly fulfilled the aims of the prize – to highlight small presses publishing groundbreaking fiction.
In my review of that book I referenced the author’s thesis (https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/...) which helped considerably with my understanding of what they had achieved with the novel. In my own words I believe that Waidner’s key idea is to link two areas: conceptual art (something which she feels has only had limited cross over into literature) and post-identity gender fluidity – this leads to their concept and invention of trans-literature.
A key element of their writing I believe (again in my words) is the rejection of the traditional novelistic structure featuring a main character, other key characters, minor characters and then passive objects with which they interact.
I believe that Waidner implicitly equates this rigid and hierarchical structure with a traditional patriarchal, gender-rigid society. In their writing therefore the dominant character is a fluid concept – and just as an hierarchy starts to form (often to the relief of the tradition-bound reader, who finally starts to be able to identify the book with conventional concepts of plot and character and feels they are returning to something they know), Waidner very deliberately overturns this hierarchy and introduces a new main character, including in many cases what initially seemed inanimate objects – often based around patterns or illustrations on clothing (clothing often described in detail, and all it seems based on items that Waidner or their friends have worn).
Other thematic elements of Gaudy Bauble which stood out to me on my initial read (and before reading the thesis) were: the clear use of Google as a tool to take an idea and extend in a kind of free-association exploration of an initial concept and a search for links or word plays that can be incorporated to alter the course of the novel or to facilitate the introduction of new protagonists; the slightly odd narrative which at times can read like a rather literal translation from their native German.
To my interest, both of these elements (which I initially may have regarded as criticisms) are dwelt on and examined and explained in the thesis as intrinsic to their situation and to their new literary concept.
All of these concepts are explored in this book – which is perhaps a more approachable and accessible version of their first novel but very recognisably from the same genre.
I think part of that may be due to my familiarity with Waidner’s very distinctive techniques and style.
A second element is that the book has a clear overriding and very topical theme of Brexit to go alongside its exploration of: class in Britain, hostility to immigrants, polygenderism – interestingly all themes also explored in the 2019 Booker prize winner Girl, Woman, Other.
It would be appropriate if this book – more of a Person. Jumper, Other – joined that book by winning the 2019 Goldsmith....more
the fact this won the 2019 Goldsmith prize, Golden Syrup, Golden Retriever
the fact that this is shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, shortlist, shorthe fact this won the 2019 Goldsmith prize, Golden Syrup, Golden Retriever
the fact that this is shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, shortlist, shortbread
the fact that this is longlisted for the 2019 booker prize, longlisted, longleat, lions of longleat, mountain lion
the fact that madeleines are like little memory sticks, but when you bite into one you get closure, the fact that all her life that mountain lion has been alone and free and unnamed, and now she has a name and she’s not free anymore, and that’s sort of spooky, or is it just the thought of the way she lived before, so alone and hidden from the world, that spooks me, the fact that I’m pretty alone and hidden from the world myself a lot of the time, but not the way a mountain lion, the fact that I think it’d be great if the right to bear arms thing turned out to be about wearing short sleeves, the right to bare arms, or else maybe they meant heraldry, like the right to a family crest, the fact that you get to have a pennant with a lion rampant or dormant on it, armorial, armed conflict, Ben’s book on heraldry, dormant, torpor, the fact that it would be really nice to see all these gun nuts just settle down and design their own coat of arms and get some plaques made, the fact that maybe they could have their own tartan too, get a whole Scottish thing going, a family clan, kilts, swordies, the fact that I wouldn’t even mind bagpipes if they’d just quit talking about the 2A for a while, and stopped killing people too
the fact that I started reading Ducks, Newburyport in Gander, Newfoundland, the fact that I came home and my daughter was reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, the fact that Mr Darcy, Darcey, the fact that BTP, MTBE, CTE, KRW, AES are all things I discussed while reading the book which featured in the book, the fact that Mary Ellman wrote the seminal Thinking About Women and this book will become the seminal A Woman Thinking, the fact that this book is in the tradition of Joyce and Proust but with a fierce anger purely of its own, the fact that Edna O’Brien said she had yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of Finnegan’s Wake except Richard Ellmann, the fact that unlike Proust Lucy Ellman’s narrator bakes as well as eats madeleines, the fact that I finished the book and my daughter bought a madeleine back from her school trip to France, the fact that Open Carry, Daily Carry, the ability to carry off a 1000 page sentence, the fact that baking and shooting in the kitchen, Galley Kitchens, Galley Beggar, the gall to publish such a rule-breaking fiercely-blazing book, the fact is Galley Beggar, beggars, beg/borrow/steal but best of all buy a copy, the fact that Jane Austen, Persuasion, I hope I have persuaded you to read the book, the fact that the Lucy Ellman does so much better a job
Now unsurprisingly shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmith Prize - perhaps a better fit for this brilliant book than the Booker Prize.
Re-read following itsNow unsurprisingly shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmith Prize - perhaps a better fit for this brilliant book than the Booker Prize.
Re-read following its longlisting for the 2019 Booker Prize and upgraded twice to 5* as this is a book which relays multiple re-reads and has proved to be the most enigmatic and thought provoking on the longlist.
In three days I was travelling to East Germany, the GDR, to research cultural opposition to the rise of fascism in the 1930s at the Humboldt University. Although my German was reasonably fluent they had assigned me a translator. His name was Walter Müller. I was to stay for two weeks in East Berlin with his mother and sister, who had offered me a room in their tenement apartment near the university. Walter Müller was part of the reason I had nearly been run over on the zebra crossing. He had written to say that his sister, whose name was Katrin – but the family called her Luna – was a big Beatles fan. ….. It had been Jennifer’s idea to take a photograph of myself crossing the zebra on Abbey Road to give to Luna.
The book begins, seemingly conventionally in 1988. The first party narrator is Saul Adler is a 28-year old, narcissistic historian, son of a recently deceased, domineering communist father.
Saul’s mother was the Jewish daughter of a German University professor, and who was an escapee from Nazi Germany at the age of 8, Saul’s grandmother having given her a string of pearls together with her one suitcase. When Saul’s mother dies, Saul’s father gives him the pearls, only for Saul to insist on wearing them at all times, a sign of his emerging bisexuality, which alienates him from his working class father and bullying working class brother Matthew.
At the book’s opening Saul is lightly struck and flesh-wounded by a car on the Abbey Road zebra crossing under the gaze and lens of his photographer girlfriend Jennifer Moreau – while attempting to reproduce the Beatles famous Album cover.
As the German driver asks if he is OK and explains what happens three things strike us: alternative versions of history; a small anachronism; and perhaps an anomaly in the integrity of Saul’s account (numbering mine):
1 I smiled at his careful reconstruction of history, blatantly told in his favour ……
2 While he spoke, he gazed at the rectangular object in his hand. The object was speaking. There was definitely a voice inside it, a man’s voice, and he was saying something angry and insulting …..
3 When I told him I was twenty-eight, he didn’t believe me and asked for my age again.
Saul and Jennifer make love (Saul later finding some unused condoms), and then after he abruptly and rather unconvincingly asks Jennifer to marry him, she even more abruptly curtails their relationship, saying she is moving to America.
We, but not Saul, gain a hint of Saul’s narcissism and self-centeredness. He is for example convinced that Jennifer is obsessed with his appearance and body and that he is the muse for her photography (about other aspects of which he expresses a complete lack of interest).
We also see increasing temporal dissonance starting to emerge in Saul’s account – he is very confused that a local shop now seems to specialise in Polish food; he also starts seeing echoes of events in America and a son called Isaac.
In line with the opening quote, Saul goes to the GDR, starts an affair with Walter, buries his father’s ashes (which he carries in a matchbox) on his beloved communist soil, and is seduced by Walter’s sister Luna.
Luna, an intense ballerina, is obsessed with a Jaguar she believes is roaming near the family’s dacha (one Saul believes is silver rather than black). She is bitterly disappointed that Saul forgot to bring a tin of pineapple chunks he had promised to help feed her insatiable taste for the West (pineapple is mentioned no fewer than 30 times in Saul’s account of his trip); her seduction of Saul is effectively blackmail to secure a temporary marriage and permanent trip to the West.
Instead of helping her escape Saul tries, via Rainer (a University colleague of Walter’s) to arrange for Walter to escape, although realising too late that instead he has betrayed Walter to the Stasi.
But again during this tale, we see some apparent oddities and mixings of time:
A light breeze blew into the GDR, but I knew it came from America. A wind from another time. It brought with it the salt scent of seaweed and oysters. And wool. A child’s knitted blanket. Folded over the back of a chair. Time and place all mixed up. Now. Then. There. Here.
‘Listen, Luna.’ I felt as if I were floating out of my body as I spoke. ‘In September 1989, the Hungarian government will open the border for East German refugees wanting to flee to the West. Then the tide of people will be unstoppable. By November 1989, the borders will be open and within a year your two Germanys will become one.’
You know Walter, I don’t think that [1988]’s the right date So when are you living? Further on.
Someone had planted the tomatoes with me in the future soil of East Anglia
The book then shifts to 2016. Saul Adler steps onto Abbey Road and is struck by a German driver Wolfgang who attempts to blame Saul for the accident, while trying to ignore his own distracted driving and echoes of each of the same three issues as before emerge:
1 I smiled at his careful reconstruction of history, blatantly told in his favour ……
2 I was lying on the road. A mobile phone lay next to my hand. A male voice inside it was speaking angry and insulting words.
3 When I told him I was twenty-eight he didn’t believe me.
And then, in what is the final disintegration of any attempt at a conventional narrative, Saul finds himself in hospital, no longer sure of what time period he is in, surrounded by Stasi agents, with again history being disputed
I could hear him explaining to my doctor, who might also be a Stasi informer, that I was a historian. My subject was communist Eastern Europe and somehow I had transported myself back to the GDR, a trip I had made when I was twenty-eight in the year 1988. Now, nearly thirty years later, while I was lying on my back in University College Hospital, I seemed to have gone back in time to that trip in the GDR in my youth.
Saul is visited by a number of people:
Jennifer Moreau, now a famous artist, who has oddly aged 30 years whereas Saul believes he is still 28
His elderly and dying (but apparently not dead) father; when Saul points out he buried him in a matchbox some 30 years ago, his father says “I think you were remembering a very small coffin”.
Jennifer we learn, as a single mother, had Saul’s son Isaac. Isaac then died suddenly at the age of 4, Saul having visited Jennifer in America when Isaac fell ill, but then deserting her for a quick fling with her neighbour, just before their son died in Jennifer’s arms – something which lead to a final breach between them.
Jack – his lover, who lives, and gardens, with him in East Anglia
And we realise, if we did not already, that Saul’s accident has shattered his memory, leading fragments of different periods of history to flow through his mind, that his narcissism has turned into literal mental self-absorption, that even oddities are reflections of what he has seen.
A few minutes after he left, I head a mirror shatter. It was an echo of something that had happened on the Abbey Road crossing. I had glanced at myself in the wing mirror of the car, Wolfgang’s car, and it had exploded into a heap or reflective shards. Some of these were inside my head.
I realized there was glass everywhere and that some of it was inside my head. I had gazed at my reflection in the wing mirror of his car and my reflection had fallen into me ……
I’ve mixed then and now all up …….. “That’s what I do in my photographs”
Your head hit the silver cat on the bonnet of my Jaguar.
For a start, I had his Jaguar inside my head. His wing mirror, from which he had glimpsed the man in pieces crossing the road, had shattered. A thousand and one slivers of glass were floating inside my head.
I had been given a plastic bowl of tinned pineapple by the woman who wheeled the lunch trolley.
What had happened between thirty and fifty-six? Those years were lost to morphine
I’m trying to cross the road …. Yes, she said, you’ve been trying to cross the road for thirty years but stuff happened on the way
At times it is almost impossible to know whether memories are altering perception of reality, present day reality is distorting past memories, or whether both are bring influenced by something external. An example is a lady in a blue dress Saul chats to when he revisits Abbey Road in 1988: a blue dress also appearing in East Germany and in the hospital (where he reads the same poem to a Nurse as he shares with the lady) but all three of these perhaps being inspired by the famous blue dress on the back cover of the “Abbey Road” album.
This is an intriguing book. It is not a book about narrative, the story itself could be said to lack interest but that is because it has been sacrificed on the altars of ideas (for example the binary offset of feminine/masculine, East/West, past/present) and analogy (at one point for example Saul mentions that while he was oppressed by his father, Walter was oppressed by his fatherland).
Saul is a very unlikable character – convinced that everyone loves him other than those who cannot cope with his exoticism and physical beauty (and missing his own selfishness and snobbery)
I had been proud to have glamorous Jennifer Moreau on my arm, what with her exotic French surname, vintage powder-blue trouser suit and matching suede platform boots. I had watched Fat Matt and his shabby wife and their two young sons sitting in the front pew like they were the royals of the family, and wondered what it was that I had done so wrong in their eyes, apart from wearing a pearl necklace.
And the repeated motif underlying the dialogue between Saul and Jennifer only increases this sense
It’s like this Gumble’s Yard, this is how people talk to each other No it’s like this Deborah Levy, your characters are deliberately pretentious
However this is an intelligent and deep book – with multiple possible interpretations.
One key idea is of a spectre - the spectre of the past haunting the present.
Early on Saul mentions Marx comment on the spectre haunting Europe; Jennifer we are told believes that “A spectre was inside every photograph she developed in the dark room” – her own photos designed (like so much of the book) to mix “then and now” . In total the word “spectre” is mentioned twenty times in the book. But spectres are everywhere - subjects haunting photographs, associations haunting objects, past relationships haunting current ones.
A key theme for me then is the idea that our memories/views of the past are inevitably interpreted in light of the present; while our views of the present are necessarily coloured by our believes or memories of the past.
And I think that Levy uses this theme to obliquely examine Brexit and the attitudes and believes behind it – answering the challenge that Karel Tiege poses in the epigraph
“Poetic thought, unlike rootless orchids, did not grow in a greenhouse and did not faint when confronted with today’s traumas”
My thanks to Penguin/Hamish Hamilton for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Now shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmith Prize and re-read as a result.
‘Didn’t you feel vulnerable out there in the water?’ Kate asked. Papa used the
Now shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmith Prize and re-read as a result.
‘Didn’t you feel vulnerable out there in the water?’ Kate asked. Papa used the word vulnerable too, but it had three syllables when he said it. He only ever used it when he told me about birds, and once when he was talking about Mama, but he wasn’t talking to me. Kate used it all the time. Vul-ner-a-ble, vul-ner-a-ble. She used it the way most people use adjectives like good or nice. ‘Let people know what’s going on in that head of yours. Ash. Be vulnerable.’ But how do you do that? How do you make yourself into any adjective?
And Other Stories is a small UK publisher which “publishes some of the best in contemporary writing, including many translations” and aims “to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing”. They are set up as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company and operate on a subscriber model – with subscribers (of which they now have around 1000 in 40 countries) committing in advance to enable the publication of future books. This was one of the books to which I subscribed – and it is always pleasing to feel one has contributed, in a very small way, to facilitating a work of art.
And Other Stories is an appropriate title for a publisher which aims to increase diversity in the publishing industry:
Famously and admirably, And Other Stories were the only publisher to respond to Kamilia Shamsie (subsequent winner of the 2018 Women’s Prize)’s 2016 challenge to only publish books by women in 2018.
Further, having moved from High Wycombe to Sheffield in 2016, they have made a commitment to counterbalancing what they see as the London-centric bias in publishing.
And as part of this commitment they conceived a Northern Book prize “awarded to an unpublished book-length work of ambitious literary fiction either written by a writer living in the North of England or by a writer who has a strong connection to the North” – a book they then publish as part of the prize.
This book was the winner of the inaugural book prize.
The author has I am sure drawn on her Neuropsychology degree in crafting the character of Ash, the first person narrator at the centre of the novel. Ash could be described as a vulnerable adult, who (as the opening quote suggests) is not prepared to make herself vulnerable – struggling to open up to those around her, her interior life being much richer than her exterior one.
Ash lives with her seven year old child Charlie, and her partner Abbott. The small cast of other characters include: Lynn, the mother of one of Charlie’s schoolfriends; Ash’s now-dead father who seems to have bought her up as a single parent; her elderly neighbour Joan; a yoga teacher of hers Kate.
We are used in literature now to the autistic/Asperger’s type character – taking refuge in numbers and patterns and collections; unable to identify with or understand the emotions and feelings of those around them – but this is a new voice.
Ash although having a fascination with numbers (for example asking something twice because two is the first prime and counting the Fibonacci sequence when stressed) takes internal refuge in language – loving to consider the sounds of words, playing with homonyms. Words can, if they possess sufficient merit, be added to her word collection.
However she finds words as used by others slippery and sometimes untrustworthy. Many of her struggles with understanding those around her also relate to language – and the often careless way in which they use it; she struggles in particular with the inherent contradiction between the linear nature of time and the circular way in which we measure it.
I’m trying to trick myself into swimming forever. I got the idea form the clock. The way it goes round and round and never shows more than twelve, because what would the time be now if it had gone beyond twelve and kept on going? Where would it go, I mean, where would it end, a clock like that?
And this confluence of linearity and circularity lies at the heart of her narrative – circling around common ideas and key incidents, returning to them, time and again to start to examine them, their meaning, her own intentions, the reaction of others, the impossibility of undoing them and the way in which as she remembers them she knows what is coming leaving her Waiting for something that has already happened”
These incidents include some that took place over a hot Summer – a brief affair with Kate, an incident with Charlie that Ash is seemingly trying to justify to herself as not ill-intentioned; others further back – the closeness of her relationship to her own father; and others seemingly more recent: with Lynn taking an increasingly prominent role in their family live as Abbott seems to feel Ash needs to be given space from her rather neglectful parenting of Charlie.
As her thoughts circle around – other common images and themes are interwoven: swimming – Ash loves swimming in a nearby deserted lake and is fascinated by breathing underwater and the rythym of strokes and breathing; an Ash tree that Ash and Abbott have adopted as their own; migratory birds – and their relationship to the way in which people (Ash’s mother, Joan) leave her life and the possibility or impossibility of them returning; the unending days of Northern Summers – Ash and Abbott watch a film set in Northern Finland on their first date and then Ash becomes obsessed firstly with the towns inside the arctic circle and later with an unnamed novel set in the Fjord’s (which is Jon Fosse’s “Aliss at the Fire”); sexuality and ambiguous sexual identity; hair colour and length; the poems of Walt Whitman and Keats.
And while I have said that she examines past incidents – her approach increasingly becomes one of avoidance – shying clear of a full examination of the incidents, leading an ambiguity not just in our own understanding of what occurred but in a reluctance on her own behalf to confront reality. And this avoidance and incompleteness is echoed in the text as ideas, then paragraphs and eventually sentences are left incomplete.
Further, Ash’s own seeming mental breakdown (as seen by the reaction of Abbott) is accompanied by an increasing breakdown of her language, and a greater retreat into the repetition of words and sounds for their own sake – although the author has gradually and gently introduced us to Ash’s interior so that we are able to accompany her on her difficult journey and its even more difficult ending.
This is a worth first winner of the Northern Book Prize - an ambitious novel and a very promising debut: one that brings what I think is a different voice to literature, while dealing sensitively and empathetically with difficult topics of generational abuse and trauma, and one which inventively disassembles language to capture its very themes and ideas....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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