There was a lot to like in this book. I enjoyed much of Side A – I liked the way in which the author broke the fourth wall so consistently (and on balance appreciated, rather than was annoyed by, the idea of her acting as her own Wikipedia guide in the footnotes); I felt the book captured really strongly the loneliness of exile and different cultures (Parisien, Iranian intellectual, Iranian traditional aristocracy); I appreciated the nature of the memory as it unfolds – both the non-linear digressionary jumps and the slowly inwards spiral around THE EVENT; I liked the way in which the book combined a more Middle Eastern family epic (with the saga of the blue eyes) and a European autofictional approach – with rather cleverly the narrator’s sexuality combining both aspects (the first in her grandmother’s explanation for it, the second in the way she discovers herself).
If I had an issue with the first half it was perhaps the fact that the family featured in the book were a rather privileged family in Iran and her parents secular liberal intellectuals who rather naïvely seem to have played an important part in ushering in a theocracy that despised them (although I do feel the author turns this around a little to the French – and the US – and their own role in playing a game of unexpected but perhaps foreseeable consequences in the region).
The second half – as perhaps the author strongly hints with her Side B footnote is weaker I think. While the exploration of her own life in the West is interesting – it is I think simply far too rushed. Seemingly complex and interesting characters around her life (particularly from the European music culture she gets involved in) seem to leave the story on the same chapter (sometimes the same page) that they appear. Overall it feels like there was the making of a different but distinct novel in this second part
Like many debut novels, particularly those with a strong auto-fictional element like this one, she simply crowds too much in. And interestingly, I think some of the most successful elements of the book (the ancestral family history, the Armenian background, the fate of her father) are the most fictional.
Overall I feel that this could have been 2-3 excellent novels, but ended as one good but overcrowded one....more
True story: once many years back, and together with my brother Paul, I had breakfast in a hotel on the table next to Bjarne Riis (1996 Tour de France True story: once many years back, and together with my brother Paul, I had breakfast in a hotel on the table next to Bjarne Riis (1996 Tour de France winner turned cycle team owner).
So this book felt very meaningful to me as I know all about sharing mourning rituals with Great Dane.
However it is one I was always put off reading by a misconception that the book was solely about animals and grief, and (based on what I know now to be a classic in incorrect book review headlines) a review in the Irish Times - “The Friend” by Sigrid Nunez https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/bo... which says the book is narrated by a dog – something which could not be further from the truth as the narrator at one stage decries attempts to write in the voice of animals.
I only finally read it due to its shortlisting for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
This partly autofictional novel/literary meditation/memoir is indeed an examination of grief, of the dog/human relationship and of suicide but despite its short length (I read it cover to cover in 2-3 hours) it is so much more and in particular is both an examination of writing, of literature and the teaching of writing (the narrator, the suicide she is mourning and whose dog she know owns and the author are all teachers of creative writing courses); and further it consistently uses literature to examine its themes.
Within these pages we find authors
Great: Kundera (a novel is featured but one is reminded of his writing on writing), Woolf, George RR Martin (the cause no offence school of college writing courses captured by a student who submits and discusses a completely non-sexist and on-sexual fantasy-war novel but who is for his actual novel adding back everything he excises for the class; later the narrator binge watches "Game of Thrones") Unknown (at least to me) ) JR Ackerley and his bizarre “My Dog Tulip”, Terrible: James Patterson (and his “become a bestselling writer” adverts) and JM Coetzee who’s execrable “Disgrace” is featured heavily both for the protagonist’s self-destructive behaviour (something of a template for the narrator’s friend) and the treatment of dogs.
These references are all deliberate, but any lover of literature will find some more accidental resonances I think. For me the narrator’s ex-mentor’s musings on the author as flaneur and his practicing of the same (alongside provocative views on current literature) cannot help read like Will Self’s rambling (in both senses of the word) New Statesman columns.
The passages on Rilke and his illness fitting with Ali Smith’s “Spring”; and the passages on the suicide of Heinrich von Kleist so reminiscent of Hari Kunzru’s “Red Pill” published the same month I was reading this.
The narrator shares the author’s views (and her actual practice) that Edna O’Brien best captured what it should mean to be a writer - as a lifelong vocation akin to being a nun or priest.
She therefore decries the “everyone must write”, “I have a right to be heard” modern school of writing as therapy – although is also self aware enough to find a quote expressing a similar view from some time in the first half of the 19th Century!
There is much in the book about the emnities between authors and in the creative writing industry.
There is plenty about reading also, a lot of it fairly harsh on readers.
I enjoyed a huge amount the line “There’s a certain kind of person without having read this far is anxiously worrying - does something bad happen to the dog” and the repetition on several other occasions of the last clause (as so many of my Goodreads friends are that “certain kind of person”) although this also later leads to a considered discussion of whether it is right to object more to violence on animals than humans.
I perhaps laughed a little more nervously on how the internet has meant that writers can now see the views of their readers and how it can be almost as bad as a reader who completely hates your novel, to have a reader who praises you in detail for themes and ideas that were not actually your intention at all.
In 2011 I was awarded a research fellowship at Harvard. I was a woman on a mission to make a difference. I wanted to write a novel about the tribulations of the innocent men who languish in America's prisons. I watched documentaries, read oral histories, and studied up on the law. I was horrified and angered by a justice system that criminalizes black men and destroys families. Outrageous statistics troubled my sleep.
The difficulties with turning that research into a novel
But when I sat down to write, my old-fashioned Smith Corona was silent. I had the facts, but not the story. When I was a very young writer, my mentor cautioned me that I should always write about "people and their problems, not problems and their people." After a year of research, I felt that I understood the problem, but what about the people? I wasn't sure how to go forward. Novels, like love, can't be forced. But also like love, novels can enter your life in an instant.
When I first started writing, I was thinking of it as a book about mass incarceration, and mass incarceration is not a plot. It’s not a story. It’s not a character. I was at Harvard doing research on this subject, and I felt like I had a lot of information, but I had not yet found my story because I had to realize that I am a novelist. I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a documentarian. I’m not an ethnographer.
I feel like I left so much of the research on the cutting-room floor, and I think it’s because the research, while horrifying, wasn’t, for me, inspiring. I don’t want to say that it wasn’t interesting because I was interested. The thing about novels to me is that novels take place in a space of ambiguity. Almost all the research I did on mass incarceration, let alone wrongful incarceration—there was no ambiguity there. If you arrest and convict an innocent person and subject them to the penal system, there is no second side to that story. I realized I had to write kind of to the left and to the right of the issue.
The incident which turned it from a concept into a book idea:
And I found the story, actually, through eavesdropping. I overheard a young couple arguing in the mall in Atlanta. The woman, who was splendidly dressed, and the man—he looked okay. But she looked great! And she said to him, “You know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” And he shot back, “This …. wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.” And I was like, You know, I don’t know him, but I know she’s probably right. I doubt very seriously that he would wait on her for seven years, and he is probably right that this wouldn’t have happened to her. And I realized that they were at an impasse because she’s talking about the potential for reciprocity and he’s saying this is a moot point. I was intrigued by them, and so I integrated this very personal conflict with the research I had done.
When I returned home, I wrote down everything I could remember about that encounter. I was intrigued mostly by her, as she reminded me of the women I went to college with — independent yet vulnerable, reserved and passionate all at once. I knew this woman. In many ways, she was a younger version of myself. I named her Celestial. I remembered she called him Roy. My imagination filled in the gaps. I decided that my characters were married and that Roy had been in prison those seven years — for a crime he did not commit.
And the process of writing and re-writing the novel:
I wrote this novel three times. The first time, I wrote it all from the point of view of Celestial — the wrongful incarceration of her husband is the creeping fear made real. She struggles under the pressure to stand by her man, which is exacerbated by the fact that he is innocent. She's talented and independent, and not cut out to be dutiful. These are the attributes that intrigue Roy, and me. For some reason, this approach just didn't work. After a frustrating year, I rewrote it from the point of view of Roy, the ambitious young man robbed of his liberty. This approach worked a little better — after all, a man's heroic journey is the bedrock of Western literature. Roy was like Odysseus, coming home from battle hoping to find a faithful wife and a gracious house. But this story seemed a bit too easy, familiar in a way that didn't address the questions in my mind.
And how that process was influenced by the negative feedback she received from readers – and how that feedback, and her reluctance to compromise on it, almost lead her to abandon the novel:
As I wrote An American Marriage, I was frustrated because I did not want to make Roy, my male character, so central. The first time, I wrote it all the way through from the point of view of Celestial, his wife. I was interested in the expectations of femininity and domesticity, the way that a black woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated—this archetypal racial problem—would behave. What is her role in supporting him? What does it mean to be a wife? I knew that would necessarily mean that, for Celestial, any decision other than organizing her life around his comfort would be considered treasonous. As I wrote, sometimes even speaking about this topic seemed treasonous. At a party, I ran into a black man who’s a friend of mine, and he asked me what I was working on. I told him I was writing a novel about a woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated. He said, “Oh, it’s about how she’s fighting to get him out.” I said, “It’s about a lot of things. And she doesn’t actually ‘wait’ for him in the traditional sense.” He jerked away from me. Just even imagining Roy’s story as anything other than the center caused him to physically recoil. And I was like: Wow, it’s that deep? I’m not even allowed to think about it? I mean, I don’t actually have a husband who’s wrongfully incarcerated. I’m not not-waiting. I’m just thinking about it. So I really resisted all the feedback from my beta readers who wanted more Roy, more Roy. I felt like the project was about complicating that narrative, and nobody wanted to indulge me in it. I finally did decide to write the book having Roy, as the first point-of-view character, to be more central. But I did it in a rage. I felt like Lena in Song of Solomon—as if I, as an author, was in service to Roy now. Like I’m working for him now. I was really, really angry. And I decided that if this was the only way that the story could work, then how about I just stop writing it?
And her eventual resolution of this issue, which in my view sheds a very interesting light on the intersection between the novels end form (effectively a relationship novel about two people trying to maintain their relationship while separated) and its starting origins (an examination of the effect of mass incarceration on black men)
When I first started to write this book, understanding that it was a story of a marriage, I wanted to focus on Celestial. I was fascinated by her dilemma. Here’s this woman, more bride than wife, married less than two years. And now she is expected to be “ride or die” for her husband—just as her art career is blossoming, as her dream is unfolding before her. For obvious reasons, I was into it. But as I wrote draft after draft, the pushback from my beta readers was overwhelming.
People think they are interested in women who don’t play by society’s rules, but when they see it in action, it is too disturbing. A question I kept getting was why is she “like that”? My question was “like what?” After all, in my view, Celestial is a person who wants the same things that anyone wants—to live her life in a way that fulfills her. This emotional limbo of being married but not really, of having one foot in her life as an artist and one foot emotionally serving the needs of her husband—it was too much.
Anyway, so I kept trying to make plot points that would justify her right to her own life. And I was getting irritated, and the book was getting clunky. And, truthfully, I was tired of what I processed as people’s really basic understanding of the conflict. Seriously. I stopped getting feedback because it was not helping me at all.
I started thinking about other novels by women that questioned the idea that women’s first (and only) priority is to be a good wife and mother. These novels were primarily by white women. They just get tired of being domesticated and go do something else. Trigger the applause. So why couldn’t Celestial?
And here is my big revelation. The reason is that in the novels by white women, all the characters have about the same level of material comfort. The husband that the woman wants to leave is in a comfortable position. You feel that he will be alright without her. He’ll probably be remarried in 25 minutes and there might be a custody fight or something, but you don’t worry about him. I connected this dot to understand that in a story the person with the most urgent crisis will always take the reader’s eye. You can’t revise around this. I could embroider Celestial all I wanted to but as long as Roy was wrongfully incarcerated, he would be the center of the narrative.
I regard the novel as something of the antithesis of “Mars Room” – another book which sought to examine mass incarceration in the United States.
In that novel, Rachel Kushner did extensive, immersive research – and she ended up putting all of that research (the characters she met, the anecdotes she heard, analogies she had drawn over the years) into the novel, with the result of producing a worthy book, but one in which the conventional novelistic elements (coherent and focused plot, readability, character dynamics) were completely crowded out.
In “An American Marriage”, Tayari Jones did extensive, desktop research – but she ended up dropping almost all of that research (other than small anecdotes and concepts) to instead produce a very competent and conventional relationship novel, but one in which the original theme was largely dropped (so that for example Roy’s lengthy incarceration is told purely in rather unbelievable, and exposition heavy letters rather than by any direct narration).
In my view neither form is entirely successful – at least for a book which is longlisted for a literary prize.
It is clear that Tayari Jones is a very talented writer.
She handles very well the multiple narrator aspects – each voice distinctive and convincing and impressively examining the love triangle from all three sides.
The opening chapters of Roy and Celestia’s relationship contain impressively zingy dialogue, description and asides (which also continues later in the novel) – for example:
“If you have a woman, you recognize when you have said the wrong thing. Somehow she rearranges the ions in the air and you can’t breathe as well”
Although, and perhaps a little like the surprise Booker winner “The Sellout” it does contain many US cultural references also, which I found harder to follow.
However I felt the revelations (seemingly in everyone’s life) rather piled up even in two chapters and as the pace changed (unsuccessfully I felt) to the epistolary jail years, the revelations do not stop, and a rather silly and I felt unnecessary coincidence almost caused me to stop reading.
And although I found the climatical scene a welcome change from the tree hugging of say “The Overstory”, its arboreal nature was rather heavily handedly signalled earlier in the book and rather overwrought with symbolism (as well as being rather spoilt by a tacked on happy ending for the tree in question).
So, overall not really a book for me – but still one that I can see fitting into a Women’s Prize tradition of having Book Club friendly books on the longlist as a way to draw in those same readers to the more experimental books....more
This book was I thhink shortlisted for the 2018 Costa Novel award, the 2019 Women's Prize for fiction and the 2020 International Dublin Literary AwardThis book was I thhink shortlisted for the 2018 Costa Novel award, the 2019 Women's Prize for fiction and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award - so it is perhaps appropriate that I have now read it three times (in 2018, 2019 for a Book Group and 2021 ahead of the publication of its sequel)
Now it’s full of frightened old men who think their day is over (and they’re probably right) and overexcited young men who jabber till the spit flies, though it’s only stuff they’ve read in the paper. The women have gone very quiet. It’s like the Iliad, you know, when Achilles insults Agamemnon and Agamemnon says he’s got to have Achilles’ girl and Achilles goes off and sulks by the long ships and the girls they’re quarrelling over say nothing, not a word … I don’t suppose men ever hear that silence.”
Even first time around I came to this book relatively late – but which time it had already received excellent reviews from a number of my Goodreads friends which both detail the book and discuss some of its strengths and flaws – see in particular these reviews from Paul, Neil and Trevor.
From my viewpoint, the concept of the book was similar in many ways to Philippa Gregory's retelling of The War of The Roses (Cousins' Wars) across a series of historical novels – featuring various female characters.
One thing that unites Paul, Neil and Trevor is their unease/disappointment in the abandonment not just of the first party narration, but of Briseis female viewpoint, and its increasing substitution with a privileged third-party narrator written instead from Achilles view (i.e a more traditional male viewpoint).
Gregory also has to deal with this issue of there being a limit to how much of the story a female character would have witnessed – her approach is to fill in the missing action by the heavy use of exposition - sometimes in narrative between characters and sometimes by the first (or third) person female narrator summarising their thoughts. That technique can be clumsy at times, when it works however it captures well the way rumours emerge and shift after a battle – and the fear of those waiting at home for news of those they love, and of the overall flow of the battle and how this will impact on their own lives.
Importantly I think Gregory never abandons the viewpoint of her female characters as Barker does here – and while I think I can see what she is trying to do (making it clear – as the quotes in Trevor and Neil’s review pick out – that really this can never be the story of Briseis when she is held as a pawn and sex slave, her story only really beings when Achilles is dead) I think ultimately it is to the slight detriment of her aims and effectively drowns out Briseis, something Barker acknowledges:
I remember how he'd held my chin in his hand, turning my head this way and that, before walking into the centre of the arena, holding up his arms and saying "Cheers, lads. She'll do"" And again, at the end [referring to Alcimus who Achilles instructs to marry Briseis so as to keep her safe after his own expected death] holding my chin, tilting my head: "He's a good man. He'll be kind to you. And he'll take care of you".”
That voice, always so dominant, drowning out every other voice"
PS – the irony that a group of men are choosing to criticise how a woman tells a woman’s story is not lost on me!
The other area I have seen criticised in the book is the anachronisms in the story.
Here I have to say the criticism was I think ill-founded.
Pat Barker has been very explicit that – unlike her World War I books which feature real characters and where she is scrupulous to try and make their behaviour conform to known historical facts, in the smallest detail – here she felt free to introduce anachronisms and enjoyed the freedom to do so.
In her view, the original story is a myth, and the idea of respecting historical detail in a myth - even the concept of an anachronism - simply makes no sense.
And the "anachronisms" are blatant, clear from almost the first page and I think important.
References to weekends or crowns or sweets are rather overshadowed in my view by the fact that the siege of Troy is blatantly lifted straight from the WWI Western Front, or Achilles and his fellow elite officers singing a real 20th/21st century rugby song at dinner.
And I thought it was clear what Barker was doing here – drawing a line from male dominated violence and casual disregard for women of the myth, through into the gung-ho attitudes to war of the officer class at the start of WWI (many in their heads inspired by classical battles) and further into the casual aggression and misogyny of many men today, all of it taking place against the silence of the girls.
The quote with which I start my review is from Pat Barker's Life Class set in 1914 London - a quote which appears to presage this book albeit a link of which Barker herself has said she was not consciously aware until it was drawn to her attention by a reader.
Now shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
I am hoping this is not the book cited for her Nobel Prize win.
Why is it that old
Now shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
I am hoping this is not the book cited for her Nobel Prize win.
Why is it that old women … women of your age are so concerned about animals? Aren’t there any people left to take care of?
I could sense his disgust as he ... cast negative judgement on my taste
This book is a noir style mystery novel written by the author of the Man Booker International winning Flights – and at first the clear mystery that the reader is faced with is how the author of such a complex, lengthy, erudite and Sebaldesque book can for their next book produce a short, sub-Nesbo genre book. perhaps only followed by the sub-mystery of its own MBI longlisting.
The author solves the mystery in this Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) where her explanation is disarming, involving a two-book deal and a handy fashion for detective stories – although I was a little disappointed to be an unwilling and unwitting victim.
I do not normally read much crime fiction – and the inclusion of “Snap” on the Booker list did not encourage me in that direction. However as part of reading the shortlist for the Guardian 2018 Not The Booker prize I recently read Dark Pines by Will Dean – a Nordic-noir crime book (by a UK author living in Sweden).
And I was very struck by the similarities between the two books: set in an isolated and wooded part of the country; a main character with a number of quirks; an isolated hamlet with a cast of eccentrics; the area dominated by a male hunting fraternity, who it is increasingly clear have links to all of the main players in the area including business men and the police; a shadowy brothel; a series of grisly murders with an underlying link – and all of men associated with the hunting establishment; an eventual motive fuelled by a twisted sense of justice not recognised by the conventional legal system.
Even though (or should that be because) “Dark Pines” was pure Genre fiction – I found it far more enjoyable and much better written.
My views on the writing of this book were not aided by things such as a Middle Eastern doctor called Ali who cannot speak great Polish and says “I’ll soon see what’s wailing you”; or a trite series of observations on male drivers of large cars and what they might be compensating for. These could be assigned to the quirky narrator - but I feel that the author identifies with her character.
And my key issue with this book was that I could not empathise with the main character at all – I found myself identifying more with those around her, which given my negative views on hunting, is really quite a feat on the author’s behalf.
I think there were two main reasons for this: the character’s preference for animals over humans and her obsession with astrology: the first made me found the book at best morally ambiguous; the second lead to me frequently skipping chunks of text.
The author calls her books like “Flights” constellation novels – to quote from the Guardian article just as the ancients looked at stars in the sky and found ways to group them and then to relate them to the shapes of creatures or figures, so what she calls her “constellation novels” throw stories, essays and sketches into orbit, allowing the reader’s imagination to form them into meaningful shapes.
I hope that the author sticks to constellations as a way of shaping novels structure rather than content in the future.
Rating rounded up due to the author's general (although far from uniform) excellence in "Flights"....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).
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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.’
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
I re-read this book - which itself was shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist - following the longI re-read this book - which itself was shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist - following the long listing of its prequel/sequel for the 2024 Booker Prize.
I would strongly recommend interleaving the two books in the order: Part 1 Wandering Stat, There There, Part 2 Wandering Star.
We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid - tied to the back of everything we’d been done no to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been coming from years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided blessed and cursed.
This astonishing debut novel draws its power and authenticity from the author’s own experiences but is told in a polyphonic series of interleaved third (and occasionally first) person point of view chapters chronicling the interlinking lives of a group of Urban Indians / Natives that eventually intersect explosively and tragically at a newly inaugurated powwow at the Oakland Raiders baseball stadium in California.
We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work towards, for our jewellery, our songs, our dances, our drum. We kept powwowing because there aren’t many places where we get to be all together, where we get to see and hear each other.
The stories title is taken from Gertrude Stein’s often misunderstood quote about Oakland – “There is no there there” – which simply referred to the fact that her hometown has changed beyond recognition – a theme which the author adopts on behalf of Native people given how much the US has changed from the country owned by and taken from their ancestors.
Through the stories we read of the inevitable multigenerational curse of addiction (particularly alcohol) Natives after a “five hundred-year-old genocidal campaign” and how a new urban generation is attempting to reclaim its identity – to understand what it means to belong, what is home, what it means to be Native and also for many what it means to also be White.
Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure .... But the city made us new and we made it ours
We first meet Tony Loneman - whose foetal alcohol syndrome drives him into drug dealing and finds himself pulled against his will into a plan, hatched by the main dealer Octavio Gomez, to rob the powwow’s prize money using laser printed guns (made by Daniel Gonzales – who flies a drone over the powwow) - along with a number of other characters including Calvin Johnson (on the powwow’s organising committee – a committee that the author also was on).
Dene Oxdene, a graffiti artist. vows to take on the never started project of his uncle (who dies from alcoholism) to give documentary space for Oakland Natives to tell their story and who in his pitch for a grant effectively pitches the book we are reading (not least as the author himself acknowledges at the book’s end that he received a grant for “a story telling project that never came to fruition – except for in fiction – i.e. in a chapter of this novel”)
“I want to bring something new to the vision of the Native experience as seen on the screen. We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story. What we’ve seen is full of the kind of stereotypes that are the reason no one is interested in the Native story in general …..it’s too sad, so sad it can’t even be entertaining .. but more importantly because of the way its portrayed it looks pathetic …. [but] the individual people and stories you come across are not pathetic or weak or in need of pity, and there is real passion there and rage”
Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield attends the powwow surreptitiously to watch Orvil Red Feather one of her three adopted nephews (the orphaned grandchildren of her sister) compete in the dancing, a skill he has (in turn) surreptitiously taught himself from YouTube as a way of embracing his identity.
Her long distant sister Jacqui Red Feather was raped as a minor in the short lived Native camp on Alcatraz but is confronted by her past in unexpected ways at and after a conference for Native addiction counsellors (which features a hugely affecting polemic by another speaker on the plague of suicide – the author himself having been part of a Native suicide prevention programme).
Kids are jumping out of windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping … We’ve boarded up the windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, they one they’ve inherited
Edwin Black, struggling with obesity and internet addiction, motivates himself to join the organising committee of the powwow (held at the stadium where his step father Bill Davies has worked for years) as an intern when he discovers via Facebook that his Native birth father is the MC and he can finally understand his full identity.
For how many years I had been dying to find out what the other half of me was. How many tribes had I made up when I asked in the meantime. I’d gotten through four years as a Native America studies major. Dissecting tribal histories, looking for some signs, something that might resemble me, something that sounded familiar …. I wrote my thesis on the inevitable influence of blood quantum politics on modern Native identity … All without knowing my tribe. Every possible way I think that it might look for me to say I’m Native seems wrong
His boss Blue (who found out when she was eighteen that she had been given up at birth by her Native mother for adoption) is fleeing an abusive partner and has her own unexpected family reunion at the fair.
Thomas Frank has lost his job as a janitor at the Oakland Indian Centre (where the author worked for eight years) through drinking, struggles with his mixed race inheritance ( “You’re from a people that took and took and took and took. And from a people taken” ) but finds himself in big drumming.
These stories are introduced by a Prologue and include an Interlude (effectively in the author’s own voice) which powerfully contextualise much of the story (and provided many of my quotes)
This is a fierce and forceful story telling a story which for me at least has been hitherto invisible if not suppressed from literary fiction. If there is a weakness to the book it is perhaps in the heavily foreshadowed events at the powwow itself.
I think however this is a vital and essential novel, one surely destined to win literary awards but more importantly one that should and will sear consciences, and challenge our complacent, received view of history
If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you’ve learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning or clinging to little inflatable rafts .....
If you were fortunate enough to be born with into a family whose ancestors benefited directly from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive not to find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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