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).
(also now winner of the Book of the Year as well as Best Debut Novel in the 2021 British Book Awards/"Nibbies")
A desperately moving, heartbreaking book: one which places hope and despair, love and brokenness on the same page, treating them with equal weight and empathy.
I first read this book ahead of the Booker longlist and felt sure (see below) it would make that list and could even be a potential winner - turns out I was right.
Re-reading the book now 1 week ahead of the winner announcement I appreciated even more than the first time what a beautifully crafted book this is. Unfortunately though, from the rest of the shortlist (a good part of which I have re-read in the last weeks), one has to conclude that the judges are more interested in topicality and importance than they are in whether a book is actually well written and this feels a book more suited to a rather better Booker vintage.
Her body hung off the side of the bed, and by the odd angle Shuggie could tell the drink had spun her all night like a Catherine wheel. He turned her head to the side to stop her choking on her rising boak. Then he placed the mop bucket near the bed and gently unzipped the back of her cream dress and loosened the clasp on her bra. He would have taken off her shoes, but she wasn’t wearing any, and her legs were white and stark-looking without the usual black stockings. There were new bruises on her pale thighs. Shuggie arranged three tea mugs: one with tap water to dry the cracks in her throat, one with milk to line her sour stomach, and the third with a mixture of the flat leftovers of Special Brew and stout that he had gathered from around the house and frothed together with a fork. He knew this was the one she would reach for first, the one that would stop the crying in her bones.
This book is a remarkable well executed debut by a Glasgow born author, now living in New York where he works as a fashion designer.
In a Lit Hub article (recommending other books set in Glasgow) he effectively sets the scene for this book:
I grew up in a house without books, which was not unusual for the time or the place. The working men who surrounded me bent steel for a living, they built fine ships, or traveled miles into the earth to hack away at coalfaces. We sons took after our fathers. We kicked things—first it was footballs, then it was each other—and as we grew, we had little time for books. We sought apprenticeships or we learned trades. We were proud, we were useful.
But the ruling conservative government cared nothing for the honest, working poor. They set about privatizing most manufacturing, removing all support for nationalized labor. In doing so Margaret Thatcher decimated the working man. Her policies swept all heavy industry from the west coast of Scotland in the span of a single generation and did it with all the disregard of a government separated by distance and several social classes. Steel, ships, coal, all gone. The men had nowhere to turn and they became chronically unemployed. They were emasculated and sent by a woman (no less) to rot away their lives into rented settees.
A theme also taken up in a recent New Yorker interview discussing a short story published there (as well as this book)
The Glasgow I grew up in was rife with drink, drugs, and gang violence. Margaret Thatcher and her remote Tory government closed all the heavy industry in the city within a generation; ships, steel, coal—all gone. This had a terrible knock-on effect on all employment, and working families had nowhere to turn; fathers and sons were all put out of work, with no hope, and it ushered in some of the worst addiction and health crises in western Europe ..
The book is effectively two intertwined stories – an autobiographically inspired story of the Bain family (particularly the mother Agnes and her youngest son – Hugh or Shuggie) over the period 1981-1992 (with Shuggie between 5 and 15); and a portrait of what was working class Glasgow in the early aftermath of what I can only really describe as the evils of Thatcherism – with (as the quotes above imply) its heavy industry male workforce becoming unemployed en masse (as collateral – possibly even deliberate - damage in Thatcher’s attempts to modernise Britain and break the power of the Unions) with poverty and addiction taking over.
Agnes (as she confesses at the rare AA meetings she manages to attend) is an alcoholic – but also a strikingly beautiful woman and a proud one (both in her speech – when she is not slurring – and her appearance – when not dishevelled by drink). When her first two children Catherine and Leck were still toddlers, she left their father and her first husband – a solid Catholic – for a reprobate (an appropriate term for a non-believing Scottish Protestant), charming, womanising taxi-driver Douglas (Shug) Bain.
For years they live with Agnes’s parents – until Shug (by now father to Shuggie) persuades Agnes they should move to a new development in the outskirts of the town – more it seems as a test of her loyalty as by now he claims to be tired of her drinking (or at least sufficiently bored with it to no longer even pretend to be conducting a serious affair with one of the dispatchers) – and he abandons her and the children there, to what turns out to be a devastated community, built near to a now almost closed mine.
Agnes is both desperately dependent on others, but also fiercely independent and the resulting combination of neediness and aggression causes all those around her to plot to escape her – over time Shug, Catherine (who escapes first to marriage to a step-cousin and then to emigration), the one true boyfriend she has (her sex life otherwise being either assaults on her when she is under the influence, or quick fumbles exchanged for drink or money to buy drink) and Leckie (who retreats first into himself and his drawing and then to a job and flat as soon as he is of age).
The only one who remains loyal to her – convinced, against not only all the odds but all the evidence, that there is some hope for her, is the growing Shuggie – who (as the opening quote shows) has to take on tasks and responsibilities well beyond his age.
At the same time he is struggling with his own burgeoning sexual identity. The affected mannerisms and snobbery he adopts from his mother (and which are also mixed up with his almost superstitious as well as guilt-ridden beliefs about how he has to avoid any behaviour which might worsen her chances of recovery) – only make him stand out more from the determinedly masculine culture around him, and lead to bullying, ostracism from his peers and incidents of sexual exploitation from older boys and possibly adults (which Shuggie himself largely tries to suppress from himself and so from the reader).
Shuggie’s main struggle though remains with his mother
”Ah just feel angry for the bad things they say about her. You should fight for her.” “I do fight for her!” he said. “Mostly with herself, but it’s still a fight.”
And weaved around the tale of the Bain’s (as I said above) is a remarkable portrait of Glasgow. One senses that Shuggie’s troubled but deep relationship with his mother is an echo of the author’s relationship with the City of his birth.
As I remarked above this book is very impressive for a debut – showing huge writing maturity.
The dialogue is often rendered in dialect – it would be imprecise to say the book is written in a Scottish dialect, instead it is in a variety of Scottish (mainly Glaswegian) dialects – and for a closely observing reader, the gradations of accent and dialect are key signifiers of class/status/religion and also, importantly, aspiration.
The narrative though is not in dialogue (this is not say a James Kelman “How late it was, How Late” despite clear commonalities) albeit slang terms are scattered throughout it. For any British reader I would say the book was entirely comprehensible without any need to check terms – and for anyone of a British working class background of the right age, while much of the book may go way beyond poverty they experienced, there will I think be many familiar elements.
The writing itself is on one level straightforward, this is no stream of consciousness or different style of writing (like say “Milkman” – another book with strong commonalities) or experimentation, but it is extremely well rendered, with deeply rounded characters, with a vivid use of language and many striking and original similes.
One overwhelming impression I had of the book was of time and space: the time it must have taken to write and to craft, and the space it gives the reader to really get to know the characters and to experience the life they lead. This is a book where the length of the narrative and the apparent circularity of the action is crucial to conveying the character’s experiences.
I would be disappointed if this does not make the Booker longlist and far from surprised if it progressed further.
My thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Now shortlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize and the Orwell Prize for literary fiction.
I doubt that any UK readers of literary fictiNow shortlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize and the Orwell Prize for literary fiction.
I doubt that any UK readers of literary fiction, who engaged with Akwaeke Emezi’s extraordinary debut novel “Freshwater” did not feel that they were reading something genuinely different to what they had read before – a very different perspective and way of telling a story, a different worldview based around Igbo spirituality, with its multiple self/spirit narrators.
In many ways, this, the author’s second novel, is much more conventional than their first.
It contains many of the same themes: gender fluidity, otherness, identities, prejudice, the interactions of Igbo tradition with an innate (if perhaps Western taught) conservatism. This latter is particularly between the ideas of reincarnation and gender fluidity.
However, the more spiritual aspects, while not absent, sit in the background to the novel, rather than largely in the foreground.
The book begins “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died” – and then proceeds to tell the story of Vivek’s life and death, in a series of chapters which are mainly third party omniscient narrator, but interspersed with some narrated by Vivek (including some short chapters narrated by him after his death) and a lengthier series of chapters narrated by his cousin Osita (the only son of Vivek’s father’s brother, Vivek himself an only son).
Other main characters include: Vivek and Osita’s grandmother (who dies on the day of Vivek’s birth and with who his life seems intertwined, beginning with a scar he was born with that matches one of her own); their parents (and their changing relationships); a group of girls they befriend – mainly the son of other (like Vivek’s Indian mother) Nigerwives (foreign born wives of Nigerian men, who form a mutual support group) – the girls including Juju, Elizabeth (whose relationship with Osita leads to an initial break between he and Vivek).
We learn of: Vivek’s blackouts; his increasing (although largely hidden to his parents) gender fluidity; the complex relationships between Vivek/Osita/Juju/Elizabeth (I think 5 of the 6 two-way interactions turn sexual at some point); and as the book develops the circumstances of his death during the riots – a revelation which does seem to be slightly artificially withheld from the reader (who can largely guess it).
Themes/issues such as necklacing, second wives/polygamy, North/South tensions, riots, churches practicing exorcisms, prejudice against same sex relationships and cross-dressing and so on are all included whereas I felt their debut novel, presented an entirely different worldview on what say a Western liberal/atheist might call mental illness – this felt like veering more towards a more conventional take on Nigerian society.
Overall I feel some readers will feel a little underwhelmed by the novel; others may find it much easier to engage with then their debut: many (myself included) may feel a little of both.
My thanks to Faber and Faber Limited for an ARC via NetGalley....more
I re-read this book as part of a re-read of the Women's Prize shortlist having previously read it 13 months earlier just before the 2020 Booker Prize I re-read this book as part of a re-read of the Women's Prize shortlist having previously read it 13 months earlier just before the 2020 Booker Prize as I thought it might be longlisted (I read "Shuggie Bain" the same week and immediately realised it might win so at least I got 1 out of 2 predictions correct!). The book later became Goodreads Choice Awards Best Novel of 2020 and the NetGalley Book of 2020
My first read I had gone in assumed it was a "just" a book-club type book and was pleasantly surprised at some of the depth as well as the easy choices the author evaded. The fact the Booker judges then chose "Such a Fun Age" instead (or so it seemed) only retrospectively elevated it in my view by comparison.
Second time I had higher expectations - judging it against a very strong Women's Prize shortlist of which it is easily the highest seller even in the UK (I say "even in the UK" as the book is very American I think) and so felt more critical of the book but overall still impressed.
That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what captured [Stella] in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why [Kennedy] was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it. Maybe something in the girl was unsettled, a small part of her realizing that life wasn’t right. As if she’d gotten older and started touching the trees, only to find they were all cardboard sets.
The book opens in 1968, when one of a pair of identical twins returns to their home town of Mallard. (I am also an identical twin, born in 1968, our home village being dominated by a mallard pond)
The twin sisters are Desiree and Stella Vignes, Mallard is a Louisiana town with something of a mythical nature (although based on a town remembered by the author’s mother). Mallard was founded in the mid 19th Century by the ex-slave son of a slaveowner, who himself marries a mulatto and decides to build somewhere for “men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes” and who imagines a town where successive generations are “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before.”
Desiree and Stella are descended from the founder, by their mother: their father, son of a lower class family dies young like his three brothers – although in his case but a two stage lynching by a group of white men – the first witnessed by the twins as children (the second, fatal one, as he recovers in hospital).
At sixteen in 1954, Desiree persuades Stella to escape with her to New Orleans but there their paths diverge – as Mallard town legend has it “the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as the shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest main she could find” – the use of the separate twin trope drawing further on mythology.
Desiree trains as a fingerprint expert in Washington DC, meets a black man, has a child by him – Jude – and then when his beating of her becomes too much flees back to her hometown. There she is followed by a bounty hunter/detective hired by Jude’s father, who instead falls in love with her. Jude, struggling with acceptance given her dark colour (and the town’s policy) takes refuge in athletics and wins an athletic scholarship to UCLA where she meets, and eventually falls into a relationship with, Reece (who is transitioning) and friends with his group of part time drag queen friends.
Stella, passes as white to get a job as a secretary, marries her boss and moves with him to a prosperous Los Angeles private estate, entirely suppressing her past, a past she worries will be exposed when a black actor and his wife move opposite (despite the best efforts of the residents). Her daughter Kennedy, drops out of school and becomes a theatre actress.
An event whose improbability but not impossibility is discussed by Jude, now a statistics assistant at a college, with her students (a clever way to confront head on the coincidences which rather drive the plot), forces both generations to confront the lives (and lies) they have been living.
The book itself function on one level as an examination of “passing”, of what it says about the absurdity but also the stubbornly pernicious operation of racial hierachies. The author captured this idea in an interview:
What becomes really interesting about passing is that, on the one hand you have this character who is exposing the flimsiness of racial categories — because if you can perform whiteness then what does it mean to be white? If you can move between these categories because you decide that you will, what does it mean that we have systems that are built on reinforcing those categories? And so the passing character is really transgressive and maybe even kind of liberatory. But on the other hand, these characters who pass usually end up reinforcing the hierarchies that they are potentially destabilizing. When Stella becomes a white woman, she’s not attacking white supremacy. She actually ends up embodying white supremacy in order to maintain her role as a white woman. The tension within passing stories is between this idea of destabilizing race and then reaffirming race at the same time.
And the behavior of Stella and her respectable white neighbours (simultaneously able to claim sympathy for the ideas of Martin Luther King, and shocked at his killing, while ostracizing and then driving out the soap star’s family) – I think picks up on the author’s well known essay: https://jezebel.com/i-dont-know-what-... - and makes this a book which is about white privilege as much as anything.
Wider though this is a book which explores identity: what it means to hide yourself and your past, how can you reinvent yourself, what does it mean to become something new.
This process is much wider than Stella – although she is key to it. With: Desiree trained in identifying people by their fingerprints (which of course do vary between identical twins); her lover a bounty hunter who specialises in hunting down those who hide from their past deeds; two actors – and frequent reflection on what it means to put on a persona on stage, or as a famous TV/soap star to be seen by others as effectively the character you play; “respectable” accountants and teachers acting as drag queens; a trans man and his physical journey of transition; a rebellious teenager playing around with different music/fashion identities; a group of wives of successful husbands trying to portray the best possible impression of their lives; an estate agent changing a property to match the potential buyers and inviting them to imagine the life they may live there .... and so on – these ideas return time and time again.
Returning to the resonance between me and the book, which features identical twins, their daughters and their education - my own identical twin’s daughter’s English teacher wrote in the Guardian a review which I think captures my thoughts on this aspect very well:
Some might find this repeated allusion to the theme of pretence grinding or overly emphatic. For me, it mirrored the daily self-policing and continuous effort required in order for Stella to maintain her facade
And in addition to these themes – this is a well written book. The stand-out central mythological conceits (the town of Mallard, the twins and their different choices) are complemented by a good use of language, natural sounding dialogue, a wide-ranging plot, a host of memorable characters and a repeated refusal to take the easy option of giving the book a redemptive ending or a tidily wrapped up resolution.
Now shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Re-read following its deserved (and predicted below) Booker longlisting.
I loved this book aNow shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Re-read following its deserved (and predicted below) Booker longlisting.
I loved this book as much on a second read as a first - its omission from the Booker shortlist was simply to the detriment of the prize.
Once upon a time …. Rami Elhanan, a Jew, a graphic artist … father too of the late Smadar, travelled on his motorbike from the suburbs of Jerusalem to the Cremesian monastry in the mainly Christian town of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, to meet with Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, a Muslim . father too of the late Abir, ten years old, shot dead by an unnamed Israeli border guard in East Jerusalem, almost a decade after Rami’s daughter Smadar, two weeks away from fourteen, was killed in the western part of the city by three Palestinian suicide bombers ..
This brilliant book, surely a serious contender for the 2020 Booker Prize, is a “hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling, which like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact and imagination”.
At its heart is the true story of Rami (and Smadar) and Bassam (and Abir)
One Thousand and One Nights is an explicit inspiration not just for the storytelling of the book (and the way in which that storytelling in some ways keeps the girls alive - tragically here only in memory), but for its fascinating structure. It is told in 1001 number paragraphs – firstly counting up to 500 and then back down.
The first half of the novel has as its narrative underpinning, the journey Rami takes on his motorbike to the meeting above, a meeting at which Rami and Bassam do what they do around the world – tell the stories of their daughter’s deaths, of their own mental journeys and of their plea for dialogue, understanding and peace.
Memory. Trauma. The rhyme of history and oppression. The generational shifts, The lives poisoned with narrowness. What it might mean to understand the history of another. It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.
The second half is underpinned by Bassam’s journey home after the meeting.
The middle part is the two lengthy, and powerful accounts, that Rami and Bassam give at the meeting – accounts which we have already largely pieced together from the first part of the book, and which are then further explored on in the second half, but which are set out here in full detail.
From the accounts and the book we get a strong sense of the kinship that Rami and Bassam have reached through their tragedies.
Amicable numbers are two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together – not including the original number itself – the sums of their divisors equal each other …. As if those different things of which they are compromised can somehow recognize each other.
All of the above would make for a memorable and powerful piece of writing – however what also makes it exceptional literature is the way in which the 500 sections take elements of the stories of Rami and Bassam as a point to weave a web of connections, connections which then in turn give us a deeper understanding of their stories.
These connections draw on modern and ancient history, geography, ornithology, mathematics, language, science, politics and so much more.
Borges said to his listeners that One Thousand and One Nights could be compared to the creation of a cathedral or a beautiful mosque … Their stories had been gathered at different times, in myriad places …and from different sources …[they] existed on their own at first .. and were then joined together, strengthening one another, an endless cathedral, a widening mosque, a random everywhere
It is really hard to do justice to the book and the way in which these connections are both scattered and then gathered together – sometimes via symbolism, sometimes bringing in the terrible reality of violence, and sometimes juxtaposing the two.
But perhaps one example will give an idea.
A terrible section tells of the work of Zaka Orthodox paramedics to gather up body parts after the suicide bombing which kills Smadar – the paramedics have to return to pick up an eyeball (of one of the bombers) spotted by an elderly man – Moti Richter. The eyeball has parts of the optic nerve attached and reminds Richter we are told of a “tiny old fashioned motorcycle lamp with wires dangling”. Via discussions of eye surgery, we go to the hospital where Abir is dying and Bassam is asked if (were the worse to happen) he would consent to an eye transplant. Via rubber bullets (one of which killed Abir) we visit the death of Goliath, the mushroom effect of suicide bombers. The book explores the tightrope walk of the high wire artist Phillipe Petit (the subject of one of the author’s earlier novels) across Jerusalem, following in the path of a cable used by the Jewish forces to sneak supplies over hostile territory in the 1948 War. Moti was a guard for this cable – and at night would patrol under the cable to ensure it was still working on a motorcycle (which in turn reminds us of Rami’s journey) which had its headlight disconnected – and which sat by his bedside “with its wires dangling”.
Are these too many connections - not for this reader, and for me the concept of connection, of the constant search for commonality, of the need for unceasing dialogue - is absolutely crucial to the solution for peace that underlies the message of Rami, Bassam and this novel. The quotes above all show that.
Ultimately no connection - and the resulting increase in empathy and diminishing of enmity - can be too many. Something the book’s title (a countably infinite sided polyhedral) acknowledges.
At one point McCann discusses “The Conference of the Birds” (a story incidentally which is the second crucial inspiration for Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte”) – a story in which a long journey seeking enlightenment ends with the birds finding only their own reflections – an analogy I think for Rami and Bassam’s realisation that only recognising something of your own reflection in “the other” will ever really bring peace, as a bumper sticker on Rami’s motorcycle says “It will not be over until we talk”
And a final example – a lengthy section discusses the journey of an Dublin born Irishman – Christopher Costigin in 1835, tracing the River Jordan from the Sea of Gaillee to the Sea of Salt (Dead Sea), a rather foolhardy and ultimately doomed attempt to explore the region. This novel, by another Dubliner, another attempt to explore and understand the land via journeys is in my view anything but a foolhardy and doomed attempt.
One final comment on the structure of the book. The page numbering (and some comments I have seen from the author) almost imply that the book could be read backwards - which given its travel underpinning of the journey to/from the talk, would mean something of a chronologically backward reading.
Actually I think that would be appropriate. One of the many points that the book makes is that to understand current day conflict you have to return to historical roots - this is as true in Israel (for example a crucial point in Bassam's journey towards peace is when he watches a holocaust film in jail and suddenly realises what drove the Jewish need for a homeland) as for the Irish conflict analogies the author (understandably given his background) frequently draws, as in this passage (imagined as George Mitchell's thoughts).
Eight hundred years of history here. Thirty-five years of oppression there. A treaty here, a massacre there, a siege elsewhere. What happened in ’68. What supermarket was torched in ’74. What happened last week on the Shankill Road. The bombings in Birmingham. The shootings in Gibraltar. The links with Libya. The Battle of the Boyne. The march of Cromwell.
Very highly recommended.
There may be books in 2020 which give an equally brilliant literary treatment to an equally powerful story and with an equally important message. If so then 2020 will be a vintage year for literature.
My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC via NetGalley...more
I joined a Radio 4 Book Club virtual discussion of Jenny Offill’s 2014 second novel “Dept of Speculation” (Now shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize.
I joined a Radio 4 Book Club virtual discussion of Jenny Offill’s 2014 second novel “Dept of Speculation” (shortlisted for the Folio Prize); and, this, her third novel “Weather” appeared on a number of 2020-preview lists.
This book is very much in the style of Dept. of Speculation – which I described in my review of that book as an elliptical and aphoristic style.
Offil said in many interviews around Dept. of Speculation that she enjoys wandering the non-fiction aisles of university libraries, pulling books and random, and noting any facts which catch her interest and she can use in her books.
Here she embraces that idea by making her main character a University librarian.
Lizzie gets a side job supporting her ex research supervisor - a climate change podcaster Sylvia. She accompanies her to summits and meetings, meeting the super-rich and their response to the climate emergency, a world of rewilding, technological singularity, transhumanism, floating cities, geo-engineering. She also answers her emails and post, which in turn introduces her to a different approach to the same topic – the world of survival hacks, doomsteads, doomsday preppers.
Lizzie’s marriage falters a little – due to her excessive involvement (at one stage she takes an “enmeshment” test) with the life of her addict brother, which takes a more dramatic turn as he struggles with being a new-father. Her insistence on taking on the burden of her brother, is I think reflected in her views on climate change – taking on the burdens of the human race.
“I let my brother choose the movie for once, but then it’s so stupid I can barely watch it. In the movies he likes there is always some great disaster about to happen and only one unlikely person who can stop it.”
And climate change, in keeping with the book’s style is addressed elliptically and aphoristically, some examples:
First they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not coral
It is important to be on the alert for “the decisive moment,” says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.
My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay
Of the anthropological driver of climate change:
Sometimes I bring her books to read. She likes mysteries, she told me. Regular-type mysteries. But this last one I gave her was no good, she says. It was all jumbled up. In it, the detective investigated the crime, tracked down every clue, interviewed every possible suspect, only to discover that he himself was the murderer. You don’t say.
Of her own attempts to process the emergency:
The disaster psychologist explains that in times of emergency the brain can get stuck on a loop, trying to find a similar situation for comparison.
Of the difficulty of understanding the time frame over which climate change is emerging:
A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but (the turtle) couldn’t help them. ‘It all happened so fast,’ he said.”
It seems almost impossible to review this book – without comparing and contrasting it to Lucy Ellmans’s Goldsmith Prize winning, Booker shortlisted “Ducks, Newburyport”.
Both feature an American female wife and mother as a narrator, both focus almost obsessively on environmental issues, on the election of Trump and what the two together say about modern America, both obsessed that this is the worst-of-times (in direct contradiction to almost every possible statistical measure that can be used), both mix the profound with the mundane, both interleave trivia with domesticity and with world events.
However whereas Ellmann has a comprehensive, all-inclusive, stream-of-consciousness style, representing the narrator’s though process, with nothing edited or filtered; by contrast Offill’s style is all about the filter and edit – it is a book which has been edited down to almost nothing, where much of the action takes place in the spaces between paragraphs.
I am not clear which book I enjoyed the most. This is a much easier and more intellectually stimulating read, but also a more ephemeral and insubstantial one.
Why only four stars. My disconnect with this book, as with Ducks, Newburyport ultimately I think comes down to the narrator’s (and I assume author’s) worldview, which in its despair lacks a faith in the future that I feel. In “Weather” in particular this is captured in a dismissal of a profound challenge (which in the appendix is correctly assigned to John Piper) with a curt “Yup”. And that unfortunately is a “Nope” to a fifth star.
My thanks to Granta Publications for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Summer brother autumn sister Time and time again are gone Out of season I will find her With time’s fallen leaves behind her Every time I sing this son
Summer brother autumn sister Time and time again are gone Out of season I will find her With time’s fallen leaves behind her Every time I sing this song
[image]
Summer uses the characters of Autumn and Winter to explore the themes of Spring (while also making it clear that those themes ran through the full quartet) through a new shared experience for us all.
Featuring:
Wendy, Elisabeth, Zoe, Daniel, Hannah, Adrienne Albert, Klein, Pauline Boty - from Autumn Charlotte, Art, Iris, Sophia (in memory), Barbara Hepworth - from Winter Hero, Katherine Mansfield- from Spring
We learn:
- Why Sophia hid that stone under the shoes in her wardrobe and (and how by doing so she inadvertently saved Daniel’s most valuable possession and - this may be a stretch on my behalf - his life). - What inspired the lyrics of the one-hit wonder Daniel penned (the copyright fees for which, sourced by Elisabeth paid his nursing home fees) and the story behind who co-wrote the song. - Who lead Daniel to his love for Chaplin - Why Boubat’s “petite fille aux feuilles mortes jardin du Luxembourg Paris 1946” and the leaf covered Autumn girl came to mean so much to Daniel, and is so key to the Quartet. -How a graphologist foretold Daniel’s key role across the whole quartet (I showed him a piece in my own hand and he said “you are a man for many seasons’): with lover and child in Winter, lover and father of neighbour in Spring, and sister’s great grandchildren in Summer.
And we find:
How Einstein visited Cromer (see my picture above); how not being Einstein saved a future filmmaker's life - and how ein stein both reunites a mother and a baby, and a father and his son
How Einstein with his exploration of time and space, and his appearance "Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare", and his fleeing from persecution captures the entire theme of the quartet.
And how another Albert also links Autumn to Summer.
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Comparisons of recurring themes and concepts in the books:
SA4A
All of the books feature the firm SA4A (Smith, Ali, Quartet, Autumn) which has served as a symbol of the threat of faceless and almost unknown multinationals.
In Autumn, we see SA4A as a quasi-police private security firm (whose actual purposes we only discover later) In Winter Art works for their entertainments division to enforce copyright on emerging artists. In Spring book Britanny works for them at a UK Immigration Removal Centre. In Summer Robert's mother's door is forced by bailiffs from their power branch and we are also told the firm also operates a government approved service to busload homeless people down to London
Cover Artwork
A wrap around cover featuring a David Hockney seasonal picture of the same tunnel of trees: respectively: Autumn - “Early November Tunnel”, Winter - “Winter Tunnel with Snow” and Spring “Late Spring Tunnel”. Summer has “Tunnel 2”
Endpaper artwork
Endpaper artwork by a key female artist featured in the book: Autumn - Pauline Boty’s “The Only Blonde in the World”; Winter - Barbara Hepworth “Winter Solstice” and Spring - Tacita Dean’s “Why Cloud". Summer has Lorenza Mazetti's "Self Portrait"
Past Decades
A concentration on the modern day resonances of a historic 20th Century decade: Autumn - 1960s, Winter - 1980s, Spring - 1920s.
Summer features the 1940s.
Female artists from the decade
Autumn has Pauline Boty Winter has Barbara Hepworth Spring has Katherine Mansfield Summer has the Italian (and post war immigrant to London) filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti.
Interestingly whereas the other artists all died tragically young - Boty of cancer, Hepworth of a fire in her studio, Mansfield of TB. Mazzetti lived until 92 - dying this very year (2020). However she (as we find in the book) avoided an even earlier tragic Einstein related death in the Holocaust.
Art influencing characters
Actual works of art of the artist figuring in the book and sparking a character’s imagination
In Autumn Elisabeth looks at a book of Boty’s paintings; in Winter Art’s mother views a Hepworth sculpture (I believe “Nesting Stones”) owned by his father; in Spring Richard visits a gallery to view Dean’s work. In Summer Charlotte watches Lorenza Mazetti's "Together"
Contemporary events
Of course the key idea of the Quartet is the coverage of immediately contemporary events woven through the text - but each book has a concentration on key overarching themes: Autumn - the Brexit vote, Winter - Trump's election, Spring - the issue of borders (both the Irish border and those erected to deter migrations)
Summer - of course has COVID-19 and the continuing hostile immigration regime. It even (given it was the week prior to the book going for advanced proof printing) has George Floyd’s tragic death.
A link between past political actions from the crucial decade and contemporary events
This was a crucial part of the concept of seasonality that Smith set out to explore when she commenced the quartet
the concept that our real energy, our real history, is cyclic in continuance and at core, rather than consecutive and how closely to contemporaneousness a finished book might be able to be in the world, and yet how it could also be, all through, very much about stratified, cyclic time
In Autumn very deliberate parallels are drawn between the Profumo scandal and the Brexit vote – the concept of the lies of those in power. In Winter the environmental and climate-change activism of Charlotte (Art’s ex-girlfriend) and the refugee involvement of the modern day Iris are linked directly to the Silent-Spring inspired environmental activism of the commune where Iris lives many years before and her role in the Greenham Common protests.
In Spring the Irish border complications to the Brexit issue are linked to the death of Michael Collins in 1922. In Summer we see the immigrant camps of today and those of the 1940s (in particular that in which Daniel Gluck is interned. But most importantly of all Smith explores how COVID has given us a new shared experience of lockdown.
Rhythmic chapters
An rhythmical chapter, clearly designed to be read aloud: Autumn - the famous “All across the country …” chapter which Smith seemed to use in most of her readings; Winter the opening “ ….. is dead” chapter; Spring has two We Want ..” chapters (one opening and the other voiced by technology giants)
Summer begins with a "so?" chapter - capturing the way in which most people just shrug their shoulders at increasing injustice.
Shakespeare
A key link to a main Shakespeare plays (as well as an opening and seasonally linked Shakespearean Epigraphs and links to other plays).
The main plays are all one of Shakespeare's late romances: Autumn - The Tempest, Winter Cymbeline, Spring – Pericles.
Summer features - The Winter's Tale.
And the Epigraph is "O, she's warm" (from that play)
Dickens
A key link to a Dickens work: Autumn – A Tale of Two Cities, Winter – A Christmas Carol; Spring - The Story of Richard Doubledick and Summer is both David Copperfield and the Haunted Man (which also gives the book the epigraph "Lord, keep my memory green"
Dickens Opening Lines
Autumn starts: "It was the worst of times, it was the worst of time" A Tale of Two Cities starts "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"
Winter starts "God was dead: to begin with" A Christmas Carol starts: "Marley was dead, to begin with"
Spring starts "Now what we don't want is facts" Hard Times starts "NOW, what I want is, Facts"
Summer starts “Everybody said: so?” Just like The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
And then the next chapter starts “Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life, Sacha's mother says" David Copperfield starts "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show"
Eduardo Boubat
An reference to Eduardo Boubat’s “petite fille aux feuilles mortes jardin du Luxembourg Paris 1946”. A photograph which (as the opening song shows and as is confirmed by this book) surely is dear to Daniel as it reminds him of his beloved Sister Hannah.
In Autumn Daniel remembers the postcard of it that he bought in Paris in the 1980s.
In Winter, Sophie - the recipient we later realise of the postcard is reminded of the postcard by the disembodied head she starts seeing
In Spring, a disembodied voice (perhaps taken, as we later realise is much of the book, from Florence’s Hot Air book) says “I’m the child who’s been buried in leaves” with a later reference to “children with clothes as ragged as suits of old leaves”.
In Summer we get Yeah and you with your the day will come when we’ll all be wearing leaves instead of clothes vision of the world, Robert said. It will, Sacha said. We’ll have to change everything. And leaves really matter.
TV relationships
Set alongside the literary references, relationships with TV stars from older years: In Autumn Wendy participates in a game show and forms a relationship with her minor celebrity participant (a former child TV star); in Winter Art’s step-father was a sitcom star; In Spring Richard, is an ex- Play for Today Director for TV and meets Paddy, his muse, confidant, closest friend and one-time (actually make that a double - two-time) lover through their collaboration as Director and writer.
In Summer Sacha's mother's one moment of fame as an actress was in an old TV advert for washing-up liquid.
A Love of and interest in Charlie Chaplin Both his work and his own life, introduced in each book by Daniel but then passed on in turn to other characters by those who Daniel infused with his love for Chaplin
In Summer we realise that this love originated with Hannah - and that perhaps Daniel took it on from her.
The symbolism of commons and fences
The image that Ali Smith first thought of when she envisaged the Seasonal quartet was a fence - and as commented in my opening remarks the key for Ali Smith throughout this quartet was to emphasise that "nothing is not connected" and that "division is a lie" ie we have much in common.
Autumn Elisabeth’s mother Wendy is shocked by a fence erected on a common near her home (the fence serving a metaphor for Brexit ... at least in Autumn).
Winter Iris chains herself to a fence at the very start of the Greenham Commons protests.
Spring the fences are in the Immigration centre and the replacement of the commons by enclosures was the first stage of the Highland clearances which feature in the novel.
Summer Grace looking for an old English church she visited three decades ago .. came instead to a massive wire fence that seemed to block off most of the common. The same fence we assume as Wendy found in Autumn with its purpose now revealed.
Internment of Aliens/Asylum Seekers
Something which (as I commented above) increasingly to me seems to be the crucial theme of the entire quartet.
Autumn One of the nurses tells Elisabeth about Daniel's childhood and him voluntarily joining his father in an internment camp in the war. Wendy's attack on the SA4A fence at the end of the book is prompted by her hearing an article on children being sent to adult centres.
Winter Iris has returned from Greece where she is working among asylum seekers - and at Sophia's house she discusses his, while Lux (posing as Charlotte) discussed her own family's life as asylum seekers in Canada and subsequently in her case as an immigrant in the UK.
Spring Much of the book is set in an Immigration Removal Centre, where of course Brit works, Florence visits. We have the Auld Alliance and their work.
Summer A large chunk of the book is set in the internment camp where Daniel meets Cyril Klein (as well as two famous life artists - Fred Uhlman and Kurt Schwitters), Hannah works helping people fleeing Vichy France, Grace walks past the SA4A internment camp which was the same one Wendy attacked, Iris brings her help of asylum seekers back to Sophia's old house where Charlotte joins her as does Hero (from the centre where Brit worked),
And of course with lockdown we all have a shared experience of internment.
Time Containers
When discussing the quartet, Smith commented
But we're time-containers, we hold all our diachrony, our pasts and our futures (and also the pasts and futures of all the people who made us and who in turn we'll help to make) in every one of our consecutive moments / minutes / days / years
In Autumn this concept was captured particularly in Daniel’s dreams and his memories of his fleeing from Nazi Germany and of his brilliant sister killed in the holocaust. In Winter the concept is even more explicit when discussing Art’s visions of the floating coastline, Lux explains what she calls her own coastline.
In Spring the idea is I think best captured in the almost interminable 11.29 on the railway platform in Kingussie as Richard reflects on much of his life
Is a single minute really this long. Is the clock that’s broken the one inside him
In Summer not only do we get the reappearance of Hannah but we get this passage (with a literal time container)
Time is dimensional. Robert Greenlaw has just demonstrated not just the curve and dimensionality of time but also its multiple nature and given himself a TOTAL HIGH by affixing irremovably a piece of curved and dimensional time into the curved dimension of a mortal hand. Heh. !
The song he’d sing if he could still sing would be about how time is more than one thing, time is glass and sand, time is brittle and fluid, time is fragile and tough, time is sharp and blunt, time is now and ancient, time is before and after, time is smooth and rough and if you try to remove your attachment to time, time will laugh out loud and take the skin off you.
And of course via Einstein an exploration of the nature of time and space....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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