Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2021-booker-longlist‎ (13)

It’s not that Mahmood believes himself important, the past few months have put away that illusion, b

It’s not that Mahmood believes himself important, the past few months have put away that illusion, but he is extraordinary, his life has been extraordinary. The things he has got away with, the things that he has been punished for, the things he has seen …….

He wondered brought him to this place so far removed from the world he knew, what forces had led him to leave the life he'd created for himself in India, to come to this place he'd never actually lived, this place that had hardly figured in his life growing up. He wondered what movements of fate had led to his seemingly accidental encounter with Rani in the hospital ward, to her arrival in their home just a few months later, to her unexpected death two days before and his attendance now at her cremation, unable to shake off the sense that his presence in this scene of desolation had been decided somewhere long before, that something inside him had been driving him toward it long be-fore the end of the war, something more than just guilt, some-thing like freedom, even if he could not say what exactly freedom was.

He couldn’t help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he’d been advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.

People would remain who insisted on remembering, some of them activists, artists and archivists who’d consciously chosen to do so but most of them ordinary people who had not other choice … who, in the most basic sense, simply couldn’t accept a world without what’d they’d lost, people who’d lost the ability to participate in the present and were this compelled to live out the rest of their lives in their memories and imaginations, to build in their minds, like the temple constructed by Poosal, the monuments and memorials they could not build in the world outside.

It was only when looking at a horizon that one’s eyes could move past all the obstacles that limited one’s vision to the present situation, that one’s eyes could range without limit to other times and other places, and perhaps this was all that freedom was, nothing more than the ability of the ciliary muscles in each eye—the finely calibrated muscles that contracted when focusing on objects close by and relaxed when focusing on objects far away—nothing more than the ability of these muscles to loosen and relax at will, allowing the things that existed in the distance, far beyond the place one actually was, to seem somehow within reach.

And maybe it was for this reason, it had occurred to him at that moment, that eyesight weakened with the passing of the years, not because of old age or disease, not because of the deterioration of the cornea or the lenses or the finely tuned muscles that controlled them but because, rather, of the accumulation of a few such images over the course of one’s brief sojourn on earth, images of great beauty that pierced the eyes and superimposed themselves over everything one saw afterward, making it harder over time to see and pay attention to the outside world, though perhaps, it occurred to him now, four years later in the country of his birth, walking at the back of the procession bearing Rani’s body for cremation, Rani who’d seen so much that she would never been able to forget, perhaps he’d been naïve back then, perhaps it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.

He often had this same feeling in his own home, facing Isabelle: that the space, although shared, had been cordoned off, with invisible lines demarcating who belonged where. They spoke more than they had before, since the night she'd joined him at the table with Caleb and the brothers, but the cold front holding them apart was taking its time in dissipating, and meanwhile he walked around her like a child tiptoeing at night so as not to wake his mother.

What had he done, what could he have done … He felt the answer rise up in his chest. These memories, these memories, hunting him down, taking posse

What had he done, what could he have done … He felt the answer rise up in his chest. These memories, these memories, hunting him down, taking possession of him. These memories, and a word now, just a word remembered, that moved inside him, sat on his tongue, waiting there, until he spoke it out loud. He turned his face towards the woman, bent down to her, said, “Violence.”

I am an introvert at the best of times, but never more so than I have been in this country. Compelled to go where my husband found work, we ended up in the centre of Brazil in a city that is predominantly conservative, full of staunch supporters of the nation’s right-wing, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, dictatorship-adoring president, Jair Bolsonaro. I have very little in common with such people. .... With no friends or family to ameliorate the situation, it was lonely and challenging. While my husband went to work every day, I was left in the apartment with the general advice not to go outside as it was unsafe …….. I was alone for 10 hours a day in an apartment on the 17th floor of a tall apartment block. I hardly went anywhere. I saw no one but our building’s security guards. When I did meet people, I was unable to have any sort of conversation with them as I knew very little Portuguese and had no opportunity to practise …. I became obsessed with the order of things – everything had its place and time – and I became unsettled when my husband disrupted that order. In my mind, he began to feel like an interloper.

He rehearsed memories endlessly, and every repetition of the details made him happier. When he finished a book he liked, he’d start it again immed

He rehearsed memories endlessly, and every repetition of the details made him happier. When he finished a book he liked, he’d start it again immediately, from page one.

They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.

I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.

I never believed in the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong.

The suggestions were plentiful, including syndromes linked to the billion pounds of toxins sprayed on the country’s food supply each year. His second pediatrician was keen to put Robin “on the spectrum.” I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there’s a name for that, too.

I lay in our tent that night, thinking how Robbie had spent two days worrying over the silence of a galaxy that ought to be crawling with civilizations. How could anyone protect a boy like that from his own imagination, let alone from a few carnivorous third-graders flinging shit at him? Alyssa would’ve propelled the three of us forward on her own bottomless forgiveness and bulldozer will. Without her, I was flailing.

For me, the astrobiology and neuroscience in Bewilderment—two fields undergoing rapid and dramatic revolutions—are really ways into much older and more intimate human passions. Beneath the immense technologies and intellectual achievements of those pursuits are some primal questions built into human beings: Is life a one-off fluke, or is it inevitable and ubiquitous in the universe? What is consciousness? Can we know what it is like to be someone or something else? How do we land back on Earth and make a home here among the neighbours? Can we find contentment despite our bottomless hunger? How do we surrender the increasingly isolated self to the terrifying diversity of “endless forms most beautiful?” All these questions form the time-honoured heart of fiction. Bewilderment is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I’ve just updated the fable for the age of pandemics, exoplanets, and mass extinction.

There was one photo that I’d focus on,

There was one photo that I’d focus on, a small picture in a dark-wood frame. It was of my great grandmother, an old white haired woman who’d travelled all the way to England just so they she might hold me ………… The photo hung there quietly as I sat at the table, opened up my laptop and started to write ………… I’d been clearing the ground the better to see what was in front of me, which was the past. All sorts of pasts in fact, including the one that found me rehabilitating on a farm in India, in 1999, the summer after I turned eighteen.

For there is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans, and if you don’t believe it then listen to us speak. We sound no different from other voices, we sounds the same and we tell the same stories, in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in.

“Stream-of-consciousness…. Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him. But what about the stream-of-a-¬consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?”

Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connectoin had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.

….when we were building the second place, and had come to start calling it that in a way I knew would never change if we carried on doing it much longer, I said to him that ‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome. I ought to have accepted it at the beginning, and spared myself the effort! Tony listened to me, and I could tell he was slightly surprised by what I was saying, and that he was thinking about why he was, and after a long time he said:
‘For me it doesn’t mean that. It means parallel world. Alternative reality.’
Well, Jeffers, I laughed heartily to myself at this perfect example of the paradox that is Tony and me!

Because this is partly a story of will, and of the consequences of exerting it, you will notice, Jeffers, that everything I determined to happen happened, but not as I wanted it! This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it. That’s not to say that we don’t all of us have some compartment in which we too are able to achieve ourselves instinctively, to leap without looking, but the bringing of things into permanent existence is an achievement of a different order. The closest most people come to it is in having a child. And nowhere are our mistakes and limitations more plainly written than there!

One afternoon I came upon him standing by the prow of the landlocked boat, just as he had been the day of our very first conversation, and this coincidence led me to exclaim, somewhat absurdly: ‘So much has changed, and yet nothing has!’ When of course, Jeffers, it would have been as true – and as meaningless – to say that nothing had changed and yet so much had.

part of L’s greatness lay in his ability to be right about the things that he saw, and what confounded me was how, at the plane of living, this rightness could be so discordant and cruel

‘Who pays for all this?’ he asked. ‘The house and the land belong to Tony. I have some money of my own.’ ‘I can’t imagine your little books make all that much.’

"It is terribly difficult for me to explain these things to you. Jeffers, these tides and currents that compromise the relationships between people - the fluid come and do that constitute so different a reality from the solid, staring fixed appearance of faces"

Justine often asked me why Tony and I didn’t get a dog, since our life was ideally suited to having one and since she knew Tony had always had dogs before he met me. …. The truth was, Jeffers, I feared that if Tony got a dog, it would become the centre of his attention, and he would give it friendship and affection that should have come to me. I was in a sense in competition with this theoretical pet, many of whose characteristics – loyalty, devotion, obedience – I believed I already demonstrated ……….. I would say that this non-dog had come to stand for the concept of security, …. I mention this because it illustrates how in matters of being and becoming, an object can remain itself even at the mercy of conflicting perspectives. The non-dog represented the necessity for trusting and finding security in human beings: I preferred it that way, but Tony and Justine only had to get a sniff of that proposition to take fright. Yet the non-dog was a fact, at least for Tony and for me, and we were able to agree on it, even while it meant different things to each of us. The fact represented the boundary or separation between us, and between any two people, that it is forbidden to cross. …. all I could do was suspect, from my side of the boundary, that the two chief recipients of my love – Tony and Justine – both privately yearned for something mute and uncritical to love them instead.

November 1944. A German rocket incinerates a south London household-goods store, and five young lives are atomised in an instant. Jo and Valerie and Alec and Ben and Vernon are gone. But what if it were possible to resurrect them – to let them experience the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the 20th century; to live out all the personal triumphs and disasters, the second chances and redemptions denied them? What kind of future would there be for clever, impulsive Alec? What would happen to Val in the world of men, beckoning beyond her all-female household? What would become of Vern’s greed – and his helplessness in the face of song? Would light or darkness fill Ben’s fragile mind? And where would Jo go, with the music playing in her head?"

Q: Could you have written the book without the counterfactual element, that is, without showing the reader the ‘actual’ deaths at the beginning? And simply having the ‘possible lives’ as ‘lives'?
A: I could and it would have been quite like the Michael Apted series, Seven Up!, which I have not actually seen, nor was I influenced by, but I am now aware of. If I hadn’t put in the bomb, and the death at the beginning, I’d have got the story of five lives, but I wouldn’t have got that provisional quality, and I wouldn’t have got that sense of the gratuitousness of life, and life being something to be rejoiced in just because it is, life with its kind of frame of death around it. I wanted something which gave you enough awareness of existence as being not inevitable, and that you could notice the kind of ‘feel’ of existence itself between your fingers a little bit.

An idea is in his head, the mercury consenting to be chased slowly to a standstill. Who knows if it’s true. But if the different bits and pieces of his life, rising, lofted as if by a bubble of force from below, are arranged in a messy spiral of hours and years, then mightn’t it be the case, mightn’t there be a place, mightn’t there be an angle, from which you could see the whole accidental mass composing, just from that angle, into some momentary order you could never have noticed at the time? Mightn’t there be a line of sight, not ours, from which the seeming cloud of debris of our days, no more in order than (say) the shredded particles riding the wavefront of an explosion, prove to align?

Praise him in all the postcodes, thinks Ben. Praise him on the commuter trains: praise him upon the drum and bass. Praise him at the Ritz: praise him in the piss-stained doorways. Praise him in nail bars: praise him with beard oil. Praise him in toddler groups: praise him at food banks. Praise him in the parks and playgrounds: praise him down in the Tube station at midnight. Praise him with doner kebabs: praise him with Michelin stars. Praise him on pirate radio: praise him on LBC and Capital: praise him at Broadcasting House. Praise him at Poundland: praise him at Harvey Nichols. Praise him among the trafficked and exploited: praise him in hipster coffee houses. Praise him in the industrial estates: praise him in leather bars. Praise him on the dancefloors: praise him on the sickbeds. Praise him in the high court of Parliament: praise him in the prisons and crack houses. Praise him at Pride: praise him at Carnival: praise him at Millwall and West Ham, Arsenal and Chelsea and Spurs. Praise him at Eid: praise him at High Mass: praise him on Shabbat: praise him in the gospel choirs. Praise him, all who hope: praise him, all who fear: praise him, all who dream: praise him, all who remember. Praise him in trouble. Praise him in joy. Let everything that has breath, give praise.