Don't read this without first reading Malarky (1) Do read this before reading the Goldsmith (or New Statesman) write ups of the shortlisted books (2
Don't read this without first reading Malarky (1) Do read this before reading the Goldsmith (or New Statesman) write ups of the shortlisted books (2)
These serve as my first two warnings
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize – a prize for which the author has been previously shortlisted with her second novel “Martin John”. Both books are set in Ireland which in the eyes of the Goldsmith prize (which I sometimes think should be relabelled the Celtic Prize) seems to automatically increase their eligibility.
(1) There has been some discussion on this year’s Booker longlist of whether its appropriate to list a book which is part of a series and then debate about whether you actually do need to read the rest of the series to follow the book. In this case although the book is not billed as part of a series I find it very hard to argue that you don’t have to read the author’s rather underwhelming debut novel “Malarky” before reading this. It is not so much that the book tells the story of a prominent side- character from that novel (and her sort-of-son) but more the frequent footnotes referring the reader to the previous book.
Bina has we learnt spend some time on remand and is now awaiting a possible trial, although a group of young activists are supporting her cause and surrounding her house. All of this connected with her meals-on-wheels volunteer position and “The Group” a secretive, organisation that have recruited her to add their illegal cause. And all of a little obscured by the shady activities of her “pretend son” – who deliberately it seems crashed his motorcycle into her hedge, inveigled himself into her house on his discharge from hospital and then used her house as a cover for all sorts of dodgy schemes, which now he has fled to Canada and the authorities are taking a more active interest in Bina, are coming to light.
Another oddity with this book and its shortlisting is the question of spoliers. Much of the book – in the author’s trademark circular style – relies on Bina almost but not quite telling us what she is suspected of and that The Group asked her to do – and how this relates to her past relationship with Phil, the now departed and by Bina much missed, heroine of “Malarky”.
I have given you several facts so far. Add them up and I might give you a prize to send away for at the end.
(2) However the Goldsmith shortlisting and the New Statesman (the prize’s sponsor)’s write up of the shortlist both give away what Bina is doing in the first line. I had not read either but had already by osmosis picked up what the book is about. I would strongly recommend to avoid spoilers if possible.
As an aside some books look accidentally prescient with COVID – this the opposite, for the line “no one suspects people in choirs” albeit the line “Arsenal giving away goals and THIS GOVERNMENT … [he] never stopped going on about THIS GOVERNMENT and he was very angry about the Arsenal Manager” summed up the week I read the book quite nicely (added to by my reading an autobiography of that same person in the same week).
Overall I thought this was the best of the author’s books I have read – as I think it was a better treatment of the difficult topic it covers without the rather crude approach of the first two novels. It also had probably the only time her sense of humour has really appealed to my own (the final quote of my review).
The book I felt had a very strong overlap with Caolinn Hughes's "The Wild Laughter" although I much preferred the poetic language in that.
I didn’t like their [the Canadian] Prime Minister, he was flighty. Looks like it take off if he went rolling up an escalator too fast. But he’s a good coat on him. I don’t like our [Irish] prime minister. He is an awful man. I can’t remember his name but he’s very hairy ears though. A bit like a wolf.
I’ll be honest I’m only repeating what a woman I delivered Meals on Wheels to said about him, because I’m not much for television. Her name was Mary and one day out of nowhere she said, would you look at the ears on him. She was pointing at the television channel claiming it was the Taoiseach. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was actually a badger and now I’m after repeating the story myself without remembering the woman was confused
Now winner of the 2020 Goldsmith Prize. I have proposed in the past that given its rather obvious lack of diversity the prize should be renamed the CeNow winner of the 2020 Goldsmith Prize. I have proposed in the past that given its rather obvious lack of diversity the prize should be renamed the Celtic Prize. So how appropriate to have a “state of the nation” book where the only characters not white are green.
Essex Serpent (by Sarah Perry), River (by Esther Kinsky), Fen (by Daisy Johnson) thrown in a food blender with a dash of Dr Who.
Sea change, taking place in damp air, foul weather, at a distance, at night. Everything liquidised. Where it wasn’t the moon shining on water, everything looked like the moon shining on water: it was hard to see what the artist had been thinking. Bathed in the transformational odours of care-facility cooking and floor polish, the traffic rolling in on the A316 like surf or tinnitus behind him, Shaw sat captivated until visiting hours were over and he was asked to leave. If all change is sea change, he thought on the train back to Mortlake, then he could describe his own crisis – whatever it had been – as distributed rather than catastrophic. Sea change precludes the single cause, is neither convulsive nor properly conclusive: perhaps, like anyone five fathoms down into their life, he had simply experienced a series of adjustments, of overgrowths and dissolvings – processes so slow they might still be going on, so that the things happening to him now were not so much an aftermath as the expanding edge of the disaster itself, lapping at recently unrecognisable coasts.
I read this book following its shortlisting for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize albeit I already had the book lined up to read, thanks to my brother Paul – who also tipped it as a Goldsmith contender. I first came across the author when “You Should Come With Me Now” was submitted for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize (for which I was as judge), that book while fascinating as an insight to this author being rather too patchwork a collection of writing to make my own (or the eventual) longlist.
This book is, slightly unusually for Harrison, a novel and equally slightly unusually set in modern times – functioning as something of a parable on Brexit/The Rise of Populism and in particular the way in which the middle classes (particularly those London based) seemed to be entirely unaware of the forces driving those developments, despite their own complicity in them.
The story has two alternating main characters – Shaw and his sometime lover Victoria.
Shaw who has suffered a kind of existential crisis (see the opening quote of my review) and who lives in a London bedsit, takes a job as a kind of under-utilised gofer (based on a river boat) to Tim, a peddler of odd and never quite defined merchandise to the towns of the midlands, and peddler or even odder (and never quite defined) conspiracy theories about a kind of fish/human hybrid. His work is also punctuated with visits to his dementia afflicted mother in her care home.
Victoria, after the (possibly mysterious) death of her mother, moves to Shropshire and the banks of the Severn to her mother’s rather odd house where she meets her even odder collection of acquaintances and friends in a town rather obsessed with under the cover copies of The Water Babies.
Their stories overlap and coincide – both find that the cast of characters they meet in their day to day lives seems to oddly coincide with neighbours that they had previously considered mysterious and unknown. Both find themselves drawn to, strangely repulsed by and above all surrounded by water, particularly the water of urban river-banks and bracken pools and ponds. Both feel like they are on the edge of but excluded from some conspiracy theory that almost all their acquaintances follow. Both are trying to re-discover the past: Shaw his own, Victoria her mothers.
There is a lot to admire in the book – particularly its simultaneous air of a book where the author knows precisely what is going on and the reader has really very little idea at all but always feels on the verge of making sense of things. Which of course leads the reader very much in the situation of the two main protagonists.
It is also a book which is on the surface too repetitive but where in depth the repetition and replication is integral to the book. It felt very much like the text was so dense that even at a sentence level there was complexity which could be unwound, but that the complexity was of a self-similar nature: the book where pretty well any subset of the book contained and replicated the whole novel – perhaps I have invented a new way of describing this type of novel: a fractal novel. And that I think is highly appropriate for a book whose main location and theme is the liminal – the shifting and complex boundary of water and land. And also how appropriate that the depth of reading the book is very different to its superficial impressions.
The book is shot through with imagery, simile and metaphors – but my experience of these was very uneven.
Some of these are impressive, especially those of landscape, for example I enjoyed “Last year’s muesli of oak mast, crab apples and damp leaves remained trodden into the ground under the trees” and the way in which the book captures the history of England and the way in which the geology of reasons quite literally fuelled their subsequent decline and fall;
the demented, unpredictable, immeasurably fortunate geology, fuel for the industrial light and magic that had once changed the world: the iron money, the engine money, the steam and tontine money, the raw underground money hidden in unconformable strata, secret seams and voids, in jumbled shales, fireclays, tar, coal measures and thinly bedded limestone – to exit as seeps and springs above the heritage museums and leisure trails and decommissioned railways; while associated subsidence gnawed quietly away at the superficial architecture of the Gorge
But too often (and particularly when describing people – I felt the language was impressive but the comparison simply did not represent anything I could recognise.
On the first page for example and Shaw’s first impression of Victoria (presumably fairly important to the novel) is that she has “the studiedly flat humour of the high-functioning romantic” which meant nothing to me”. I felt very much when reading many of these images like Shaw did while reading the arguments and theories in Tim’s bizarre musings “essentially unrelated objects were connected by grammatically correct means [I would add and with beautiful language] to produce apparently causal relationships”
I think that I also struggled to really relate to the book. Some of this I think is perhaps never having lived or experienced the kind of urban river scenes in which the book is almost entirely set. I have never really lived near a river and those I do know are more like country streams. But I far more enjoyed Esther Kinsky’s “River” which covered (literally) similar ground.
And I think my bigger issue of identification related to the people – more that I did not really believe them at all. Shaw in particular, when looking back at his earlier life I found very unbelieavable . What sort of person aged 10-11 ”watching his cohort take control of its own destiny …. could easily imagine himself grown up: but less as the agent of self-change than as a an organism which – having reached some gate level he couldn’t be expected to recognise – would flip automatically into a thoroughly novel state” – I guess the same sort of person who when six thought of his mother as “like a sphinx or other savage mythological creature – charismatic, mood-driven, hard to parse, harder to defuse” - in other words the sort of person who only exists in books, particularly those written by someone many decades from their own childhood.
And I was also left with a sense of unease about the book.
On one level it can be seen as a pro-Brexit, pro England-ex-London book: what after all does the title represent except for (quite literally) levelling up? And there is nothing wrong with that – in fact in a literary world which is almost entirely left wing, anti-Brexit, liberal, secular etc – a different voice is welcome. But the author is more left wing, more anti business than even most of his contemporaries I think.
The Goldsmith Prize clearly has had an issue with diversity – before this year only 3 non-white authors had ever been listed for the prize. And even this year, after the annual Goldsmith lecture was by Bernardine Evaristo on a new manifesto for literary canons, and when two non-white authors were eventually listed, there was justifiable controversy around the shortlisting of DBC Pierre over Meera Kandasamy. And in this context I am not sure what to make of this novel (and to the extent I am, I am not very reassured):
- It is the second Goldsmith shortlisted book (after The Wake) to be explicitly inspired by Charles Kingsley – both in the title (and related epigraph) from his “From The Gravel Pit Lecture” and in the samizdat copies of Water Babies passed around. Kingsley a “fervent Anglo-Saxonist”. Now while The Wake very explicitly drew on this element of Kingsley’s writing, “Water Babies” was on the face of it a pro-evolution, anti-child labour satire and “From The Gravel Pit” about ancient ecology. But the former is not read today due to its anti-Irish/American/Jewish diatribes and the latter still has heavy references to very ancient Britain laced through it. And the problem is that (as a brilliant and brave New Statesmen essays pointed out in 2018 and 2019) much natural/ environmental writing (particularly when it harks back to a bygone age of England, and particularly when laced with anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation) flirts quickly (despite its clear left wing bias) with eco-facism.
- There seems to be something slightly off to me in a novel which seems to be a current state of England novel and in which, at least as far as I can see, the only people of colour are green. Evaristo’s description of “A limited pallete of writers who are mostly white and writing whiteness” seemed very appropriate here.
Overall a fascinating book which left me very unsettled – but not entirely for the right reasons....more
Now longlisted for the 2021 Walter Scott Historical Fiction and Republic of Consciousness Prizes.
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2020Now longlisted for the 2021 Walter Scott Historical Fiction and Republic of Consciousness Prizes.
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize and it is an excellent choice from the judges and my favourite on the shortlist – both innovative and fun but also of excellent literary quality.
The author is an internationally renowned writer on music, a librettist and an Oulipian author – and this book rather neatly manages to combine all three aspects.
The books set up is that Beethoven rather than dying in 1827, survived long enough to accept an 1823 commission to write a biblical oratia – and the book is a record (or perhaps better described as an imagining) of his time in Boston from his ship voyage through the first public performance of the piece – which is based around the story of Job.
And the first constrain that the author imposes on himself is that, as far as possible given the lack of truth of the book’s central premise, everything has to be based around actual historical people, locations, events and possibilities. But the way he does this is very enjoyable – by directly addressing the reader to explain both the research he has undertaken and the resulting editorial and narrative decisions he has taken, or in some cases retaken as further research means either altering elements of the story to date or a certain amount of explicit hand waving over inconsistencies that are not worth resolving. I also found it an excellent piece of commentary on the role and importance of fidelity in literary historical fiction: in this case going to (and detailing) lengths to maintain complete fidelity but surrounding a central core which fails fidelity in the most basic manner (the central subject visiting a continent on which he never set foot, not to mention the small manner of being long dead at the time the novel is set).
The second and more Oulipian is to only attribute words to Beethoven which are taken directly from his letter – mainly as complete sentences, sometimes as complete clauses. All sources explained in the notes at the back of the book.
First of all I found this a fascinating approach.
More conventional historical novels (ones which bide by the convention of actually telling a true story) for all their fidelity can often be accused still of putting words in their subjects mouth. In this case the words are the subject’s own. And as a result, even if the comments are taken out of context, we actually get a fascinating insight into Beethoven’s character which despite its not just fictional but falsifiably so central story, relies in one side of the dialogue entirely on primary factual sources.
And secondly it is, again, tremendous fun. One of the issues with Oulipian writing is that while it can be fascinating and clever for a short period of time, I find the reader’s interest normally pales fairly quickly and one can be left wishing you could have contacted the author and told them their efforts were understood, their point made and that there is no need to carry on. Here though the author, while respecting his self-imposed constraints plays with variations. We have: a chapter entirely of dialogue marked up with musical notation; dialogue to accompany a game of draughts; a letter; an interview with a youngster which is pretty well entirely drawn up to imply via one odd line that Beethoven perhaps inspired Moby Dick; a monologue address to the chorus; and best of all and early on a chapter where Beethoven’s identical words are used in two completely differently developing dialogues (a mishearing of a German word driving the two courses). Even if some of these don’t work for a particular reader it is of little consequence as each chapter is short and a new approach sure to follow shortly.
The third aspect of the novel is the oratorio itself – reproduced in the book in detail, together with descriptions of the music. The writer of the text is itself part of the plot of the book (a Unitarian minister with rather plodding prose being secretly superseded by a widow who Beethoven takes as a confidant) – and again the author plays with this: remarking that everyone who heard it felt that the composer has managed to find a poet who is his equal (that poet of course being the author).
And there is even more to the novel than this – lots of ideas many of which are only explored for a brief period, before taking their leave before any risk they become irksome to be replaced by something new.
We have for example a brief 21st Century editorial intervention (possibly a nod to the intervention by Elihu in Job’s story?) urging the author to move the story on. We also have a brief visit to the area of the kind of historical research that takes up the time of factual writers with a brief foray into a story about a distinctive green ink and what it might prove or unprove. We even have a theological dispute between Unitarian and and Trinitairan laced with tit for tat bible verse quoting and with theology sourced from a real character’s sermons.
Inevitably any reader may find a false note among all the perfect ones (and maybe even here the author signs that by first of all having a dispute over who was the source of some incorrect annotations in the first printing of the score, and secondly by having a number of musicians and singers whose limitations, particularly when faced with the complexity of the composer’s work, quite literally leads to false notes).
For me the one false note was a visit by some Indian Chiefs to a rehearsal – the behaviour and dialogue of the native Americans seemed a little sterotyped to me, and while based on a real occurrence I noted that the occurrence was from a contemporary white American account.
However overall this is an excellent novel – not just full of ideas but also a very well written story which seemed to have a new delight at each chapter....more
The idea was that slavery was at the heart of a capitalistic system where reproduction was the main en
Now shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize.
The idea was that slavery was at the heart of a capitalistic system where reproduction was the main engine. All the things I wrote about originality were kind of beside the point. Originality is a fetish of people who want to control the art market and the publishing industry. It’s also a fetish of academics, particularly the males and old farts. What I was really interested in – though right then even this was blurring in my mind – were the sweating workers in Chinese villages. It was their lives, their anonymity, their way of looking at Western classics, and their purely pragmatic attitude. I loved being with those artisans and feeling their energy and their lack of self-consciousness. They were not precious in any way about their work, or about their life. But they were full of heart, and at the same time they were not clinging to their achievements. They were part of the flow of life. I had come from the same culture, and I felt I could not make this clear or make Westerners understand. The Western language and mentality did not allow me to do it.
This book is the first I have read by the author – an award winning filmmaker, non-fiction writer and fiction writer and who was a judge for the 2019 Booker prize.
I know from having researched her background when having tried (and failed) to predict what influence it may have on that longlist that her best known fictional book is probably “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers” – and in many ways this book feels like a variation on the basic tenets of that book (Chinese woman immigrates to London, learns English, reflects on the differences between English and Chinese, forms a relationship with someone from a very different cultural background) but one that loses the broken English and dictionary conceit and is instead very explicitly based around (and even has the characters discuss) Roland Barthes “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments” – a book which the author stated in a 2018 Guardian Q&A as the book she most wishes she had written.
The narrator is an unnamed woman – bought up in the Chinese countryside (and I think of peasant background) who after an MA in Sociology and Film Making in Beijing, moves to London in late 2015 (against the background of the Brexit referendum) to do a PhD in Visual Anthopology – he PhD project based around a village in Guangdong Province which collectively specialises in copyings of famous Western paintings.
She struggles with London pub-culture (“What were we supposed to do at night in our rented rooms, if we didn’t drink or watch sports”), English language differences (she takes a doctor’s enquiry into her a family history as asking if she is of peasant/city dweller stock and if her family are Party members “I didn’t expect I would have to carry all this old baggage to England”) and sometimes both (“Liverpool versus Arsenal? I had thought arsenal was a weapons factory, I didn’t know it was a football place too”).
But she meets a man – who she first sees picking elderflowers – and forms a relationship with him. He was bought up in Australia and then Germany by an English mother and German father and works as a contract landscape architect. Whereas she is looking for (but failing to find) solidity and put down roots – he enjoys fluidity and non-conventionality. The two move into a houseboat together, she travels to China for her documentary, they go together to Australia and then Germany (where they live for a period), they have a daughter together.
Their relationship and the tensions/differences in it (as well as the three languages they share) form the basis of the book, which, like Barthes book, explores love in its widest sense but also language, art, landscape, belonging, nostalgia, identity and perhaps most of all the concept of home.
Like Barthes book – the book is structured around a series of short chapters, each starts with a fragment of their conversation and then explores the conversation and events around that fragment.
I was reminded a little of some of the early writing of Alain de Botton, partly of Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (although this is a much gentler book – note this book’s lack of a longlisting was my Booker failure referred to earlier).
Overall I found this a delightful read – a great way to re-examine a Western classic, full of energy and heart.
My thanks to Random House UK for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Now shortlisted (the fabulous) 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize as well as winner of the (rather better known) 2020 Costa Book of The Year prize aNow shortlisted (the fabulous) 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize as well as winner of the (rather better known) 2020 Costa Book of The Year prize and previously shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize and 2021 Folio Prize.
“Every afternoon, around three o’clock, David dropped Aycayia to Miss Rain’s for lessons. There at the table in the grand room with wooden floors, sat an indigenous woman of the Caribbean; cursed to be a mermaid by her own sisterhood, whose people had all but died out, slaughtered by the Castiilian Admiral and his kind; a woman who, as a mermaid, was pulled out of the sea by Yankee men who wanted to auction her off and if not that, stuff her and keep her as a trophy; a woman who was rescued by a Black Conch fisherman [David]; a mermaid who had come back to live as a woman of the Caribbean again. She sat quietly as she learnt language again, from another woman she wasn’t sure she could trust. This woman was white, dappled with freckles, and no matter what she wasn’t, she was of the type who had wiped her people out. Arcadia [Rain] was self conscious, because she only spoke Black Conch English, a mixture of words from the oppressor and the oppressed.
A fascinating exploration of a mermaid myth – this one from the Neo-Taino people (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigen... for some details), and which places its subject into mid 1970s Black Conch (a fictionalised version of Tobago) at a time of change and convulsion in that nation.
The story (which is summarised in the opening quote) is told in three interleaved sections: a conventional third party omniscient narrator telling the story of 1976; a journal written by David Baptiste (the local fisherman who first finds, then rescues Aycayia – and then falls in love with her) some 30 years later as he reflects on his feelings, actions and mistakes; and free form verse from Aycayia mingling her life in the sea, her time on Black Conch and her burgeoning memories of the time centuries earlier before her banishment, told in a mixture of the native tongue she is remembering and the Black Conch English she is learning (together – just like Arcadia’s deaf son David - with America sign language and book English).
At one stage Aycayia reflects on her time as a mermaid – “The sea was deeper than she knew or could swim … Her time had been spent mostly in the upper sea”: and I found that a good metaphor for the reading experience in this book
It is possible to stay closer to the surface and enjoy this book (in line with its subtitle) as an enjoyable if unique love story.
But it is also possible to go deeper and to see it as something which explores many of the themes and ideas that inform both Roffey’s other writing (female sexuality, pre-Christian legends – particularly foundational myths about womanhood, Caribbean history on a multi-century scale, colonialism, creolisation, fatherhood, outsiders) and her wider activism (particularly her XR involvement).
Perhaps for me, the most striking and topical passage of the book is when a vexatious local woman and her occasional lover (a corrupt policeman) confront Arcadia with how, for her all her insistence that they are in the wrong, her very life is built on white privilege and that she is literally living in and on the proceeds of slavery (but all against a background of a state founded on the prior eradication of the native peoples).
Now shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize, just like I absolutely do not predict in the comments under my review.
‘By six o’clock my local time a
Now shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize, just like I absolutely do not predict in the comments under my review.
‘By six o’clock my local time a hundred million people had focused their wills on a pair of runaway children in preference to matters in their own lives. As a proxy for those matters, breeding value in their brains without the risks of real life. And those children are unknown to them. They would stay unknown if they lived for a thousand years. The chemistry being deployed is there to encourage us to wave at the postman, meet a stranger’s eyes – this is how it’s relevant. Whereas their angst-by-proxy via advertising platforms designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the brain is making users happy to intrude until they crush to dust the status quo of anyone involved in the story …..
‘Do not use the words free speech! Free speech I practise with you directly to promote a meeting of minds. This is not free. Every second an arm like a blade combs the surface of the earth for dopamine, yours and mine, our whims and arguments, our relationships with others, our attempts at love, our anger, our caring, to embezzle it as revenue for a dozen male college dropouts.’
The book is set in an unspecified country – much (if not most) of it reads like America but (as a hurricane reference makes obvious it clearly is not America) – may be this itself is a satirical comment on how the internet firms are remaking the world in their image.
The book starts with a just made unemployed sewerage worker Lon(nie) – he lives in a town dominated in all aspects by a Big Tech firm (the Octagon), and increasingly home to refugees fleeing an increasingly nuclearised war in the Middle East. He is the widowed (his wife having died of lupus) father of two children – most noticably (see below) a young daughter Shelby-Ann (whose age serves as effectively the punchline to the book’s opening and introduced a key theme of the book – the widening generation divide and the clear winners of that divide).
Having previously lost custody of Shelby to his mother-in-law and regained it, his slap of her in the first chapter threatens to lose custody again – although it becomes quickly clear to him and us that he has largely already lost her to an online world (“the grid”) that he has tried to prevent either she or he joining. In an attempt to stave off authority intervention, he buys her a phone and then realises that if he is to maintain any form of connection with her he will need to join her in that world.
And at the point when Lon finally decides that he needs to engage with the future, get a smartphone and join the grid, we are told
He opened both eyes. Looked at the bedroom window. Then at the screen. One was real life. The other was the future. Or something. One was here and now. The other was – something else. Information. A binary life had started.
And from then on (apart from a couple of occasions when Lon decides to turn off his screen) our reading experience mirrors this. The page is divided in half
On the left we have a series of first party accounts (of varying lengths) many (and the longest) by Lon, but many by other characters (including: his mother-in-law, a childhood flame turned social worker, Shelby and her rival turned friend, some of Lon’s ex-colleagues: one a victim of an online pile-on, the other an overnight sensation, a key worker for the Octagon at the heart of their most advanced projects and an ageing academic reluctantly employed by them to stave off governmental intervention) - which advance the narrative at least partly conventionally.
On the right a series of grid articles – one per page – which largely match, and in many cases, neatly complement the narrative.
This effect works brilliantly – as a reader our eyes flicker from one side to the other – just as, of course, our real life experience is now divided with that of our phones. Perhaps even more cleverly, the right hand trail is easier on the concentration, more easily fulfilling, a quicker hit of reading pleasure – whereas the left hand side can feel convoluted and overly complicated.
The list of areas and ideas explored in the book - most of them simply satirical extrapolations (and not very far from the present day) of current trends, and some of which are more like running jokes, includes such things as: pregnancies induced from a discarded hotel tissues in a hotel room occupied by a single man; the abuse of menopausal halting drugs; a back lash against adults imposition of the artificial concept of childhood and a general advance of children’s rights and denigration of anyone over thirty; the use of vacuum cleaners to deal with infantile cellulite; Honeybeetox for pouty lips; a huge backlash against the insidious effects of beers; a social trust score taken to extremes; a backlash against medical expertise; confiscation of children’s phones ruled equivalent to isolation torture in POW camps; terrorist grooming of young girls; deliberately contracted gum disease to make teeth appear whiter by contrast; tigers as birthday party accessories; animal ear transplants for humans; overnight meme sensations; the replacement of conventional linear time with user-defined Quantum “Curlytime”; fennec fox fever; the rep(lication) of people from their selfies; and, my favourite – welders as sex symbols (displacing to third the current day winners).
The number of attractive foreign women listing welders as their top choice of partner for fun and marriage has topped nine thousand from just a handful of countries. Among respondents to the survey are more than two hundred pole dancers, as well as members of gymnastics and volleyball teams. Welders were once again the top pick over pattern-makers, actuaries, funeral technicians, glass installers and mechanics,
Whereas some of these ideas are used and discarded like the tissue (Pierre I think follows the “fail fast, fail often” Silicon valley mantra), some (a little like the used tissue) are pregnant with possibility and give birth to a whole series of other ideas. In the tissues case for example: Serviette roulette played by teens risking pregnancy, lawsuits about the ownership of DNA left by people in public establishments, identification of the tissue as a live weapon, men refusing to stay in hotels etc.
The book is a very long way from perfect. Too many story lines are simply left dangling – unexplored, unexplained or a little of both - weakest perhaps a rather bizarre late revelation about Lon’s neglected (both by Lon and the author) son Egan. And the book’s ending is decidedly bizarre. But as said above I think some of these flaws are very deliberate.
The author’s “Vernon God Little” was of course a Booker Prize winner in 2003. One of the judges commented 5 years later that “four of the other judges arrived at the longlist meeting convinced that DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little was one of the great masterpieces of the early 21st century”. Some of the reviewers I respect most on Goodreads hated the book – and a group whose members have read many (some all) of the winners, collectively rated it one of the 2-3 worse winners ever.
I can see many people really hating this book and many others using it to bemoan the falling standard of literary fiction over time – but as the book would say, that’s haners and declinists for you.
Consider me a DBCBae.
My thanks to Faber and Faber for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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