Neil Bartlett - Skin Lane

It’s hard to write to much about this book without giving away it's secrets, and I'm going to do that even though it’s one of those rare novels where I really feel I shouldn’t. So, you've been warned!

Skin Lane is set in 1967, the year in which homosexual acts between consenting adults, as the terminology goes, were decriminalised. Mr F, (the F stands for Freeman) lives a life that is the opposite of his name, and is surprisingly innocent and middle aged when he experiences desire for the first time (the imagery that captures this – a series of dreams that are literally an awakening– is a stroke of macabre brilliance that makes me rethink doubts I’ve had about the potential of dreams in fiction). A furrier, surrounded with the blades and the blood that are the accoutrements of his trade, Mr F becomes obsessed with the sixteen-year old nephew of his employer. For most of its progress, the novel seems to be treading a path of sexual obsession and violence and approaching horror with which readers of novels by Patricia Highsmith or Ruth Rendell might be familiar – and to be praiseworthy chiefly for doing it so well.

Then, in a moment of startling grace Mr F and his potential victim are spared what seemed inevitable. The slow build up of tension, and then the withdrawal from absolute violence and horror in a way that is both believable and not anticlimactic is brilliantly handled. It’s not until the ending that the motif of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast is finally explained - Mr F identifies both as Beauty and as Beast, and Beast is just a label, beneath that lies the wasted potential of someone who has not learned to express his desires, yearning somehow to break free. And of course, there is a climax, here Bartlett borrows the gothic convention of the fire that explains why the building at 4 Skinner Lane is now a copy of the original.

There are other aspects of this novel that are quite brilliant. The way that London comes to life as a place that changes and grows almost like another character, for instance. And the way you realise that in Bartlett’s world, the real horror is the unlived life. Bartlett has been shortlisted for the Costa for this (as he was shortlisted in its previous incarnation as the Whitbread, the year Beryl Bainbridge won for Every Man for Himself) and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he pulls it off.

Haruki Murakami - After Dark

From the beginning of this sad, brilliant little novel, the city after dark is a creature that seems to live, breathe and pulse. Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the places: it’s not the same as in daytime, Murakami’s narrator tells us. But what is it?

Odd things happen to two sisters, one who can’t sleep and one who can’t wake. The sleepless sister, Mari, is spending the night in fast food restaurants reading from a thick book when trombone-player, Takahashi, stops to talk to her. Later, each is involved in the questioning of a Chinese prostitute who has been beaten up at a nearby love hotel. Meanwhile, Mari’s sister, the beautiful Eri, is watched while she sleeps and as she and her bed are transported somehow inside her television set. And with what seems miraculous discipline, very little is explained, we (the narrator uses the first person plural, inviting us to observe the action as though we’re jointly a camera) move from one scene to another, each section told in a spare and elegant first person prose.

The novel is filled with screens and mirrors and strange connections. Shirakawara, responsible for beating up the prostitute, returns to his office and works on his computer, he wants nothing more than not to go home, like Mari, who can no longer bear to watch her sister. Mari’s image somehow remains in a bathroom mirror in the long moments after she has turned and left the room. Eri threatens to be lost forever as the screen behind which she is trapped flickers, its reception waning. The room where she is trapped, looks like Shirakawa’s office. Shirakawara buys a fishcake, and Takahashi later has a fishcake. But why?In the closing pages, morning approaching, we are offered some sort of solution,

a cycle has been complete, all disturbances have been resolved, perplexities have been concealed, and things have returned to their original state. Around us, cause and effect join hands, and synthesis and division maintain their equilibrium. Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure. Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light. None of our principles ahs any effect there. No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out. (176)

Is this enough of an explanation? It is all that we are going to receive. And it works, beguiling us into believing in this pitch-perfect, mysterious little book.

Nicola Barker: Darkmans.

Darkmans begins with the apparently coincidental gathering of father, son, chiropodist and chiropodist’s narcoleptic husband in a café and -- there is no other word to do it justice -- explodes from there. It’s physically a heavy book, with bright white pages (the colour of mourning in China!) and death’s face grinning, almost consolingly, on the cover. If history is a sick joke, we are asked on the cover flap, then who is telling it? Nicola Barker -- and the book designers have gone along with her in this -- seems to be playing with the entire idea of what a story is. And it’s a big, sprawling, joyous, gaudy game. Life is brutal, manipulated by the brutally amusing court jester John Scogin whose interjections are confusing until you work out that’s what they are, then really quite brilliant. Lives of the characters are presented in minute detail but with such care expended over that minutia that you see how the small relates to the whole -- this isn’t a story about a single family or even about a family representing all families, this is a story about history itself.

It seems foolish to get into a description of what actually happens, other than to say it’s a bewildering and amusing mix of the trivial and the potentially life-shattering (only the children and the insane in the story itself seem to have a glimmer of understanding) so I thought I might join the game and throw a few adjectives at my screen and see if any stick. It’s insane, absurd, (a little long-winded, a bloated take on a bloated world? The physical size of characters is as apparent as the physical size of the book; from the bulimic, bone-breaking girl to her enormous mother to the diminutive Kurd who is given his own font so that, in his own eloquent language - none of the English is rendered as elegantly as his -- he can say exactly what he thinks, and we have the privilege of overhearing), it’s clever, crazy and very, very exhausting. Nicola Barker breaks every rule there is. In particular, dialogue is rarely said when they can wonder or demand or expand or observe or volunteer (these are all from one page! (564).

It seems sometimes that there are two ways of reading a book - going along for the ride, appreciating it, letting it go, or those who like to tease out its strands, work out what it all means. You can see something similar at an art gallery. Who are we to say that the person who stands and gapes wordlessly is feeling any less appreciation than the critic who investigates and describes? Art is, after all, art, to be appreciated as an aesthetic more than as an intellectual pursuit. Yet in terms of books like this, I struggle to stop myself constantly trying to work out what it all means. For instance, why was the cat strangled? There is a joker in scenes like this, and we aren’t given an answer. As if to compensate, I found myself inventing meaning in odd connections -- for example, a roof tile also features in The Secret River. The puzzle of what is actually happening makes it a far from simple read, although slowing down doesn’t make it any easier to work out. I’m quite pleased to report that I learned something -- after a year spent living with a phone number that used to belong to a chiropodist, I finally know what one is (it’s the same as a podiatrist). But I’m exhausted and I suspect Barker found Scogin attractive as a character because of a shared cruelty of imagination. They laugh together at our attempts to understand what the hell is going on, to impose meaning out of wonderful randomness. God, I hope it doesn’t win the Booker, because then I might feel obliged to read it again. But I loved it and wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach.

I just finished reading On Chesil Beach and also place it quite highly in the McEwan canon. not with Atonement perhaps, but certainly ahead of Saturday.It's insightful and wise. Early in my reading, I wanted to write that it is one of those rare books that could have been longer but for reasons I will explain, I do think after all that it is just the perfect length. The background sections into which readers are suddenly plunged in the second chapter to me aren't extraneous although they did seem to lack the vivid life of the honeymoon sections -- but then the quick summation of Florence and Edward's later lives in the final chapter do act as a kind of balance. After all, this is the story of what happens On Chesil Beach, on the night that is the pivot around which their lives turn. To me, McEwan is the Master of the Moment, by which I mean that central to his fiction is the critical juncture at which tragedy strikes (the child goes missing, the untruth is told) after which life can never be the same. To that extent this book is a distillation of the work of his that has gone before.I loved it.

Other thoughts:
After some discussion about whether Florence had been abused by her father, I had another look at thenovel and came up with this;

I considered sexual abuse as a possible explanation for Florence’s behaviour quite early in the novel although some suggestions only became more apparent in retrospect. Florence’s father is involved in their experience of their wedding; Edward has never been at a hotel but "Florence, after many trips as a child with her father, was an old hand". Something mentioned on the first page of a text is almost bound to have repercussions for what follows, as this does. The text abounds with suggestions that Florence has repressed memories. For instance, she experiences nausea and an inaudible voice ‘on the verge of telling her something’ (and what else could this subconscious message be?) and McEwan tells us that ‘sometimes, in a surge of protective feeling and guilty love, (Florence) would come up behind (her father) where he sat and entwine her arms around his neck and kiss the top of his head and nuzzle him... and loathe herself for it later’ this, to the father who ‘aroused in her conflicting emotions’. It’ seems very odd for a daughter to find her father ‘physically repellent’.

What’s gone on, either on her father's boat or in the expensive hotels they travelled to seems made almost explicit in the crisis moment of the novel and of Edwards and Florence's failed intercourse: in bed with her new husband, Florence tries to think of courtly love (that medieval, notably asexual ideal) but the sound of Edward undressing and 'the smell of the sea' summon 'the past and a trip at 12 with her father. He's undressing and she's trying to think of a tune she liked. Or any tune ...she was usually sick many times on the crossing, and of no use to her father as a sailor, and that surely was the source of her shame'. The word surely interrupts the thought and introduces doubt. There is or could be another source of her shame, as now, she may be ashamed because she finds sex distasteful or because Edward may discover she is not a virgin. Then McEwan delivers a clever surprise, in case we’re reading too much -- or not enough (I love the ambiguity) -- into this. He seems to invite an alternative reading when Florence is unfamiliar with human testicles until we realise her barely explored memories of the moments with her father are in non-visual senses (e.g. sounds) and she may well have been abused without seeing anything. The most significant suggestion of the nature of her repressed memories follows almost immediately; Edward, out of control, ejaculates. It’s a catastrophe and not only because he so feared ‘arriving too soon’. The experience finds Florence 'summoning memories she had long ago decided were not really hers ...now she was incapable of repressing her primal disgust ...(at its )... intimate starchy odour, which dragged with it the stench of a shameful secret'. Now, we could read this as Florence realising Edward feels shame, but shame and secret are already words we associate with her, since she offered to tell him a ‘secret’ and says she's scared though its "not strictly accurate". Florence, she thinks, ‘has two selves' this perhaps stemming from her deepest problem being that "she could not have named the matter to herself", although in her subconscious, she knows. Of Edward, she thinks that she ‘sometimes loves him like a daughter’ and considers his penis, when seeing it, as sinister ( -- as an aside -- don’t most girls, seeing one for the first time, actually find it a little comical??) which is a significant word choice for McEwan to have made and in any other reading makes little sense.

Florence’s escape is into music where emotions are expressed without words) a defence mechanism important to the plot which will hinge on the need to put words to her experience -- something she can’t do; we are told she is adept at concealing her emotions and trapped into silence since those boat trips with her father, which were never discussed 'and she was glad’ but her relief at not having to discuss these trips with her father spills into her marriage when she can’t discuss it with Edward either; 'all there years she hid lived in isolation within herself... her problems with Edward were already present in those first few seconds, in their first exchange of looks’.

There are specific word choices from her perspective that allow us to guess what she herself would deny; although Edwards has first night nerves, her troubles are 'unutterable';. Also, she thinksthe word 'stain' suggestive of the ancient correlation of cleanliness with virginal purity. Following this are a couple of religious references; Florence considers Jesus’ mother without using word virgin ( and decides that she herself is ‘no lamb to be uncomplainingly knifed’ (this is religious in terms of its choice as metaphor, Jesus being the lamb of God sacrificed by his father). The sound of a bleating lamb is ominously echoed in the creaking of bedsprings. What Florence contemplates offering to her husband really is a sacrifice in a physical sense because the word 'penetration' to her means only pain.

We see Florence’s current relationship with her father largely through Edward’s eyes. His aggression in a sporting match is notable yet 'she seemed to be able to get her rather frightening father to do what she wanted' There is something not quite natural in the way father and daughter rarely speak but seem to exchange secret glances, and in his keenness to give his daughter away, but the most revealing passage is where McEwan indulges in that no-no that in creative writing classes we call ‘head-hopping’ (and he does so in such a successful way that I’ll add it to my list of evidence that in writing there are no rules except to do it well, anyway --) writing that Edward ‘was a little frightened of his girlfriend's father, worried that (he) thought (Edward) was an intruder, an impostor, intending an assault on his daughters virginity, and then disappearing -- only one part of which was true'. The final part of sentence takes us out of Edward’s perspective and into the father’s. Which in turn makes us wonder, which part is true? His having offered Edward a job with his company and making him so welcome at his house make it unlikely he considers him a possible impostor, although he might be worried Edward will run. It seems extremely unlikely he thinks Edward might make an assault on his daughter’s virginity. (Why? Because it is already lost.

In this reading, Edward is singularly inadequate to deal with Florence’s problems: his proposal itself was inspired by a misreading of her sexual signals and he's unfamiliar with psychological ideas Perhaps this might be expected at the time, but she has read Freud ('Perhaps what I really need to do is to kill my mother and marry my father', she says) although perhaps she hasn’t thought enough about the subconscious to consider that we sometimes in jest say what we really mean.

It is not only women who might marry their fathers but men who might marry their mothers and Edward’s tragedy is compounded because of the possibility that not only has he misread Florence’s sexual signals but that he is attracted to her precisely because she is the sort of damaged woman who might behave in this ambiguous way. One of Edward’s significant early memories is realising there is something wrong with his mother. One of the gestures that he most loves in Florence, brushing a hair from her face, is something he first sees in his mother(and we witness his mother’s connection to music when she ‘fumbles’ through piano pieces. She is ineffective yet her actions ‘felt like love’ and this is almost identical to the way he misreads Florence’s physical signals. The conclusion I come to is that Edward’s mother and Florence are similar because they are both damaged. In an example of the intricate patterning that is one of this novel’s real strengths, Edward copes much better with his mother once he realises there is a name for what is wrong with her in the expression ‘brain-damaged’, acknowledging ‘the power of words to make the unseen visible'. Florence, as noted above, remains unable to name her problem and thus to communicate it with her husband.

There is other evidence of abuse too, some of which I’m happy to concede might be too much of a stretch. For instance, there are intertextual nods to ‘the new Nabokov’, which in 1962 would have been Pale Fire -- but the first film version of Lolita was made in 1962. And on the same page as this reference, Edward’s desire for Florence is described as ‘inseparable’ from her setting, which is so reminiscent of the way Gatsby loves Daisy (also while conscious of his lower social standing) and of the way Dick Diver loves the wealthy Nicole whose father explicitly abused her (who can forget the horror of reading we were like lovers.. and then we were lovers) and who in her insanity seems based on the probably abused Zelda). (Gatsby is also explicitly, though falsely, called an Oggsford man ...okay, I’ll stop pursuing this line, but McEwan and Fitzgerald are favourites of mine...)

As far as I can tell from one quick check, this is the evidence that I was aware of as a possible reading while first perusing the book. The more I consider it, the more I’m convinced. (And the more I’m convinced that this is another great McEwan book.)

Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Not a bad book, but not particularly interesting or skillful and I doubt it would have made the longlist had its subject matter not been so topical.The main issue to me seems to be the reluctance of the fundamentalist. Was he? I don't think so. And I also didn't think there was any serious attempt made to understand why fundamentalism may have appealed to him, apart from the obvious disillusionment with Western corporate life (which must be fairly common) and a disappointed affection for the irritatingly named Erica (I kept expecting her to say I Am Erica) who in turn has lost the love over her life, Chris. Jesus! -- or Columbus, I don't know. But it was hit-over-the-head-ingly obvious about those matters whilst avoiding the more subtle ones. I thought the structure was mildly interesting but left feeling disappointed.

Peter Ho Davies: The Welsh Girl

Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl is a beautiful, haunting, deeply human book based on a certainty that whatever war or tragedy unfolds in the wider world, it is what happens to the individual human being that continues to be the measure of it. I’ve hesitated for days over what to write that is at once expressive of that and also acknowledges its imperfections. The story is fascinating and important, the setting believable and real, the characters (for instance, the raped girl who admits that whatever she feels about the Germans... seems pale compared to what she feels about Colin) are breathing, loving, suffering people portrayed with convincing motivation so that you learn much about their backgrounds without the text being filled in with blocks of exposition as clumsier writers can. They seem to have life that exists beyond the pages, there is something about our lives that they reflect back to us, they are a mirror on the world,

...this really is what Esther wants, what she dimly suspects they all want. To be important, to be the centre of attention

for these are lives that might have been ours, apart from the luck of circumstance. I found myself really sorrowing for Esther and the brave way she deals with the consequence of rape, Besides, what was it to be forced to do something she didn’t want to do? She’d been forced all her life by one circumstance or another- by poverty, by her mother’s death, by the needs of the flock and the novel shows war’s peripheral scenes in fully imagined awfulness, stepping far beyond what you expect of conventional and limited war narrative to show us scenes like POWs sending notification postcards home, and to examine how the limited choice in what they could say may have been a relief.

The novel is a romance but again, not in the conventional and limited sense. The place that characters belong to means as much to them as do those people whom they love, an exploration of which idea must lie behind the choice of title. In so much as you can say such a dense book is about something, it is about belongingness and place and how this might be connected to the relationships between parents and children. Davies describes (and then describes, and describes, which repetitiveness can get irritating, people being identified with sheep, too much so at times) the Welsh concept of Cynefin, the identification of the flock with its territory over generations, passing from mother to daughter. These concepts sre linked to an interesting discussion of nationality - Rotherham is called Jewish though Judaism is matrilineal and when his mother who was spat on in Berlin, it was because she was not German enough - she was Canadian. And Esther’s name itself is interestingly reminiscent of the Biblical character who risks her life to save her adopted father and the Jewish people, just as her father takes on the legendary name Arthur.

As important as parents are for the plot, it is motherlessness and fatherlessness that really drive it. We are very aware of Karsten growing up without a father and Esther without a mother, in his Vaterland and her Motherland. In these parallels you see them wedded to their countries despite the circumstances that bring them together. Esther’s father cannot survive without her, and Karsten appreciates his own position; Karsten’s father’s loss has always had about it an air of desertion as his mother sees it; he can’t desert her, too. And Esther ultimately makes meaning for her own life out of the place where she is from. She’s connected to her Welsh town to the place because of history, because of being female, matrilineage is what matters here, even the two male characters (Rhys, who dies, and Karsten, who returns to Germany) live with their widowed mothers. Meanwhile, Esther takes in Jim, the war child who becomes a link between them because he says he has no mother and she identifies with that -- although this turns out not to be true. One of the ways the novel deals with this theme is showing how an inability to express parental affection and loss could lie behind violent acts, with the war child being torn between being unable to admit he misses his father in front of the others, and unable to say he doesn’t for fear of seeming disloyal. Nationality is in every case shown as being less significant than the family and blood ties that prove where we really belong. And people's individual lives can step beyond all group expectation; despite the war against Germany, it is an English outsider who rapes Esther, a German outsider who saves the farm at the end.

One particularly beautiful feature of the novel is its insistence on the possibilities of language and the beauty of words. There is repeated wordplay with the word Welsh, and references to the differences between Wales and England that are perhaps most apparent in their separate languages. Explicitly, we are reminded of Welsh having once been banned in schools, that using English is beneath her father’s dignity and that the nationalist view of the war is that it’s an English war, imperialists, capitalist, like the Great War. The limitations of language are also canvassed. Esther, believing that rape must end in murder, struggles to come up with a word for what has happened to her until, pregnant, she acknowledges that she may have been raped after all -- she might die from the consequences of abortion or childbirth or, perhaps even more horrifyingly, from shame.

Later, Davies writes that it’s as if the language is coming to life, talking back to her in its slippery English tongue - when she thinks about Colin being captured and facing confinement. The word itself is a cell to her - I wonder how a man knows to write this!! Davies’ cleverness with certain words makes you hear them as though for the first time. We have pacifist with emphasis on FIST - the English word containing its own rebuke , Esther considering impregnable shore defences and her mourning sickness play on words when telling Rhys’s mother that the baby is his. This wordplay seems to acknowledge that many clichés are rooted in a certain truthfulness -- universal life experiences (loss, desire) connect us together as human beings and despite the limited range of words we have in which to share them, are always unique.

The novel is beautiful and intimate and flawed. There is so much signification layered on top of their lives that sometimes the sheer meaningfulness imposed upon everything threatens to suffocate. The sections about Hess are the novel’s weakest points, and perhaps it’s a sign of the author’s trembling faith in the power of the personal story that he feels politically important characters are necessary to bolster it. Early in the book, Rotherham has difficulty believing it’s really Hess and though this acknowledgement does helps readers over disbelief too I’m not sure he is significant enough to the text for all this effort at suspending disbelief to really pay off. (Admittedly, his presence does allow for discussion of Nazi films which, as Hess says, were beautiful and which must have played some significant part in Davies’ research for the book). Another aspect of imagery that becomes irritatingly self-conscious is that of imprisonment, linked most obviously to the POW camp being built nearby. And there are more that a few instances where the author can’t resist spelling out something that an perceptive reader must realise (for instance, after describing how a sheep whose baby died adopts another when her own baby’s skin is wrapped around it, Esther asks has she deceived, or been deceived? Is she the lamb, the ewe, the shepherd?) Clues that she is pregnant (morning sickness, eating picked eggs) are very obvious and clumsy. Instances of overly drawn explanation multiply until by end of the novel, it feels like Davies wants to explain the entire war, describing the German feeling about power as perhaps it was luck, but once you have enough luck, it starts to feel like fate. Then by third last page when he says sheep have lived in Wales for hundreds of years, my margin notes argh, let it go. It really is too much. I hope Davies will be more confident and trust his readers more with his next book.

It is greatly to the book’s credit that although it suffers from these flaws, there is enough beauty and truth in it for them to be borne. It’s a meaningful war story and a thoughtful romance, (with Karsten, Esther is allowed to link sex with free choice, with desire, and above all with sharing -- they are both shamed and have surrendered, and find comfort with each other). I found myself being glad they had their moment together because this seems to provide some sort of solace in a world where tragedy is played out on all scales, from grand war narratives to the smaller tragedies, Esther’s mother never getting to the end of Middlemarch, a man who can’t remember when he last touched another live thing, even to what happens to the sheep. One of the most vividly realised moments to me was Esther’s heartbreaking resignation to being raped and pregnant, that In the meantime, there’s nothing to be protected from any more and realisation that she is as much a prisoner as anyone.

The idea of surrender is a continuing motif within the novel. Karsten himself, who has no choice between surrendering and death, faces the devastating realisation that their surrender wasn’t that one moment already past, at the mouth of the bunker, but somehow will go one and on. He wonders what more they’ll have to give up before it’s over. Everything but their lives, probably. It’s only in glancing back through the pages afterwards that I appreciate the fine imagination Davies has demonstrated in creating a world where this doesn’t happen. German POWs help rebuild and former enemies are kinder to each other than you expect. A question is asked, will all surrendered soldiers be traitors after the war, or just Germans? And the answer is, just Germans, and more than that, just human beings, living out their individual lives in the way that to them seems best. The novel is perfectly set in wartime where those great human experiences of love and loss are condensed into a smaller timescale. This to me is where its essential worth lies, in a portrayal of lived human experience that struggles towards the authentic. It is an important and beautiful book, and I am very moved by it.

Catherine O'Flynn. What Was Lost

Modern shopping centres are anodyne, artificial shrines dedicated to the modern anodyne, artificial god of consumerism. Catherine O’Flynn’s achievement in What was Lost is taking this idea, and really running with it, creating an entire way of life within her centre, Green Oaks, a way of life that is complete with its own missing child at its core. Early in my reading I found myself wondering, does Western religion need a child sacrifice to get it going? The Celts threw heads down wells, the Jews escaped to Israel after the Passover, Christians have their god child grown to early adulthood and nailed to a cross. Shopping centres have their childminding centres and their posters asking for information about the return of Madeleine McCann or whatever her name is in the current year’s incarnation. In Green Oaks her name is Kate and her disappearance has taken on a particularly poignancy because in 21 years, she has never been found.

Architect turned crime novelist Barry Maitland uses a shopping centre in one of his crime novels, Silvermeadow, exploring its brooding and menacing qualities, the sense of its secrets, perhaps to greater effect. But O’Flynn has still achieved something interesting here. As she describes, real lives do happen in these artificial places. Here, people love, fight, suffer. Romances are born and die, teenaged gangs are rebels without causes racing with shopping trolleys on the car park roofs. We are so familiar with shopping centres, with the music that is piped in, with the scents of exotic soaps and hot chips, with advertising that reaches us through the television and radio at home, summonsing us there, that is thrown at us as soon as we arrive, telling us what we need, that if we have these jeans from River Island we will be happy, that buying body butter from the Body Shop makes us better people, that we really need a second, or third, mobile phone, that we don’t always consider how eerie the places can be. O’Flynn defamiliarises the place and does it well. Shopping, we are watched. Ghosts of times past linger, putting in a few appearances that may or may not be real, and that show O’Flynn’s knowledge of the concept of the uncanny as the ‘return of the repressed’ – secrets are repressed here, stored, you soon come to realise, as though relics in the shrine.

The novel starts with the disappearance of a lonely young girl (her loneliness and fight against it is drawn with real pathos – you can tell this is a first novel when the author loses her nerve just once (p16) and says how lonely she is. A more experienced writer would perhaps have trusted her readers more) in the early 1980s. The lost girl is named Kate, so even more than is usual with first time novels, you wonder how much she can be identified with the person of the author, Catherine. Kate lives with her grandmother, maintaining some sort of contact with her dead father through living out the fantasy girl-detective life that just happens to have been the subject of the last book he gave her. The next part of the story is in the current century. Kate herself turns out to have provided the biggest mystery of all. There is something that we all lose as we grow up and that’s our childhood. In this novel, the shopping centre itself is about to turn 21 and has developed into a sinister character in its own right, with secrets of its own.

It’s a novel about loss and endings. Fathers die, children vanish, relationship after relationship fades to a ghost of its former passion and falls away. New ones are forged but with no sense of optimism, borne more of shared guilt and grief than anything else. Perhaps most frustrating is the conclusion, where all is explained away as if O’Flynn is paying more attention to tying up her loose ends than to providing us with something substantial to ponder. That there is something of a twist is no spoiler, because it doesn’t work and further than that, you soon realise that earlier unsuccessful sections are included to pave the path to this weak point. Joan Lindsay’s Australian classic about missing children, Picnic at Hanging Rock was famously published without its final chapter. Decades later a version of that final chapter was finally revealed and readers could see the point of leaving it out. This novel, too, would have been better without explanations that make the merely concrete out of interesting ideas readers have been able to have for themselves. It is not a great novel and I will be astonished if it is shortlisted for the Booker Prize (it has recently been longlisted). But it is a very good one and well worth reading.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

preliminary review, as I only read it yesterday, (except, for reasons I'll make clear, I may not bother ever considering it further):

The quotes that begin this book tell how seriously JK is telling it as she invokes the authority of no less than Greek tragedian Aeschylus’s grinding scream of death, before leading into a first chapter filled with issues critical to the future of witch and humankind and the secrecy with which we are familiar, invoked by that most English of defenses; the hedge. The book is not all disappointing. Although, after the exuberance of the early books, imaginative possibilitis seem to occur with pitiful rarity, here we do have dragonpox leaving pock marks and green hued skin (p21) and Hermione has perfect answer to tiny evening bag problem in her. extension charm. It seems literally anything can fit into her beaded purse from invisibility cloaks to tents to paintings and a library of books(p135).. For first time since flying broomstick, I think I want one of those. And there continues to be an interesting interaction between the magical and the muggle worlds which, despite the nonsense of so much else in the book, might keep children intrigued, such as magically tied laces that take ages to untie by hand (p96).

It’s not surprising that tying things up is an early image; Rowling uses much ink tying loose ends. For instance, now we don’t need them any more, because there are really bad baddies, the Dursleys are reducing them to rightful place as Harry’s relatives (p36). It’s a nice surprise that Dudley seems to grow up O. K, and that Harry is given a way to see his mother as a child (p532) and to realise his aunt’s hatred was partly routed in envy. She, too, wanted to go to Hogwarts (p537) and that Snape had not disappointed Dumbledore after all (p548).

Her book explains some mysteries of muggle tragedy that we attribute to ordinary bad luck, negligence or misadventure, transferring them to a world where such accidents are granted meaning. For example, wizard-caused deaths are seen as train crashes (P.34) and gas leaks (p356). Shifts in cultural mood can be attributed to the presence of dementors, whom muggles can’t see though we can feel their despair (p235)

Yet, the more you read the easier it is to believe that the author has lost control of her material. For instance, upon his first appearance, Harry cuts finger and reveals that can't heal even small wound (I wondered if this is his flaw? Or a challenge he will face?). Twice we are told how dangerous life will become for him in 4 days, creating a ticking bomb that is oddly dissatisfying. Perhaps Rowling could argue that she’s subverting convention, but there are other elements of the story that made me wonder if she really had time to imagine the most dramatic ways to use the material she invented. I will get to those in a moment. First, given what seems to be a staggering collapse of imagination, I want to look at where the interesting elements of the story come from? This might be a diversion but it won’t take long.

As befitting a book in the Biblical place of Revelation, the Deathly Hallows contains many, many images borrowed from eschatological (specifically, Christian) mythology, chiefly the rooting of the story in prophecy that the dark lord will, Messiah-like lead wizards to rule muggles and mudbloods (pp 158-9). Lessons about the power of the truth are told when Voldemort is revealed as the great deceiver, lying that Harry died running away (p583) Despite his split soul, we learn that Voldemort could be healed if he learned to feel remorse (p89) If he asked for forgiveness, is there a hint of possible redemption for Voldemort? An I am your father, Luke moment? No, Voldemort has already gone much too far for this. In the first scene, a prisoner hanging upside down from invisible rope like curing bacon or Satanic crucifixion. (There is a message in this image, meat is hung like this, and Voldemort has reduced the human to meat, later confirmed when he feeds his victim to his snake.)

Harry, of course, is the Good versus this Evil: there is even essential goodness in how he fights, refusing to invoke an unforgivable curse unless absolutely necessary (p64) and actually recognised by this attribute, which is a hint that Voldemort’s over-willingness to kill will be his undoing. And Harry suffers real, almost Christ-like despair in facing self-sacrifice after knowing for years that he might die. (p521 and 555 where he faces his inevitable death -- because part of Voldemort soul lies within him -- and feels forsaken) . There are signs that all is not completely lost when Harry asks his dead loved ones if death hurts and they think he means for Voldemort (p560) Satanic sacrifice is made; Voldemort kills the man who sits at his right hand (p527)for own power and for the opposite of salvation. Snape bleeds a substance that is not blood. Eucharistically, Harry consumes his memories from a magic cup.

But there is just as much, if not more, Arthuriana in the book as there is Christianity. The three children are on a quest for three objects, as on a grail quest (pp332-3). When Harry has to find out about them for himself (p351) this is very like having to ask the right questions (Parsifal’s task). Earlier, it is Ron who successfully pulls a sword from a lake (p303 -- where is the lady of the lake?) Later, disappointingly, the sword is simply stolen by a goblin, because it’s the Merlins, not the Arthurs, who are at the centre of this tale. (Am I alone in finding the human more satisfactory than the magical, after all?)

Perhaps most interestingly, Rowling disconnects the grail from the cup imagery and returns it to the stone it is in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (p 436) This is related to a huge disappointment in the book, and I wonder if Rowling might have been laying the groundwork for a more interesting story that she later abandoned? Because Percival is also the name of the oldest Weasley child, who separates from them but comes good in the end, prodigal-son-like. Ron Weasley has shown surprising powers of leadership right from the first book where he imagined himself as Quidditch captain (couldn’t Rowling have let him do this?). The Weasleys are purebloods, and as I mentioned, it is Ron who withdraws the sword from the lake. It seems as though they were being set up to be revealed as the rightful kings. But this story is not pursued.

This has to be considered as a book intended both for adults and for children. For younger readers, there are some empowering messages and ideas, for instance, that people’s nature or essence affects things (polyjuice potion to look like Harry is clear gold , and a bodyguard reveals that looking after a child can be more important than guarding the prime minister (p44). I wonder if under age wizards should drink firewhisky (p70) (as I recall first tastes, all whisky was like fire or maybe that was my conscience, since I stole it from my Dad and topped up his bottle with water so he wouldn’t notice. Clearly, I am more Voldemort than Potter.)

And there are some interesting ideas about growing up. Although Harry and his friends pack differently, they never really 'put aside childish things' (p74) and lessons from their childhood come in useful as adults. Harry has a new modesty and says that his stripping doppelgangers should respect his privacy (p49) He realises that you can’t go home again (p45), that good people are not all good (p164, Sirius is unkind to an elf and must suffer the consequences), Ron reveals himself as a talented leader (p354); and thinks of others less powerful than himself (the elves p502). He saves the boy who teased him – Draco – not once but twice (p518) After all this, Harry is now identified as the man with the lightning scar (p359).

But there are substantial elements of the story that only adult would understand, for instance author Rita Skeeter is secretive about her new book – Rowling indulging in a little self-mocking? (p27) and Vernon Dursley worries about real estate value (pp 32-3). Yet Dursley’s foolish establishment ideas are set up against some fairly serious issues. Chief amongst these is racism (it’s interesting that it was a German wizard school that also produced a dark one whom Dumbledore defeated and whose followers wore signs (p 125). The series is founded upon a timely anxiety about genetics, and eugenics (or maybe this is always timely). There are many racial categories in the Potterworld, not just purebloods, and mudbloods, also blood traitors and other magical beings like goblins and elves whose full powers aren’t taken seriously. Enmity and distrust between the races is returned. Goblins call wizards wand carriers and don't expect respect (p394). The twentieth century provides perfect models for political power based on insane racist ideas (p172) and what what’s perhaps most frightening within the book are images borrowed from real history: totalitarianist statues for example. Enemies of the state use the word resistance (p360) and there is illegal radio, on which they listen to Potterwatch .

The extent of Harry’s despair, which I mentioned above, and which begins at the side of his parents’ graves (p269), might well be hard for young children to read. (This was the first time I realised they were only 21 when they died. Why do witches marry and have children so young??) As would the crisis of disillusionment Harry undergoes when losing his faith in Dumbledore (p293). Yet there is a lesson for them too; Hermione is right in believing that people can change (p295) as is seen in Percival’s return (p487) which is related to another of the major Potter themes, that has run through the entire series; the power of love between parents and children. It is a love that Voldemort, an orphan, cannot understand (p282). Dumbledore himself doesn’t pity Voldemort when he’s reduced to being a half-flayed infant. (I found this very disturbing, especially since Dumbledore’s own tragic family background is revealed here for the first time p129). Other parent/child relationships show Harry betrayed by Luna’s father because of his love and fear for Luna (p340). Some balance is achieved later when Narcissa Malfoy lies to save her son (p581, incidentally saving Harry in the process)

The book does contain some good lines, for example, Hermione says, about the locket; There’d be some sign of damage if it'd been magically destroyed (p227); they realise their own limitations; they were three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead (p253); Dumbledore says to Harry; 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?' (p579) But there is some really bad writing, too, some of which I’ll go into below after quickly noting my frustration at the pointlessly stubborn refusal of an educated woman to use the subjunctive (eg if she was a witch p273) JK: why?

I don’t want to make too much of grammar, though, because the book is truly awful in ways that mock that. Here are just a few of my main objections:
Bewildering lack of drama: Sometimes possibly connected to awareness of juvenile audience: Hermione is tortured but this has to be upstairs and out of sight. But there are too many other times when all we see is characters sitting around talking about what’s happening instead of actually doing it, or with Rowling suddenly telling us the action of weeks that we didn’t see(p190) Eventually a pattern in the narrative becomes clear. The three go to the Burrow. Stuff happens (mainly chatter, otherwise just as dull). The same (doesn’t) happen at Harry’s inherited house. Other people, and occasionally elves, pop in to fill in yet more of the backstory. There is precious little actual progress. Harry overhears that Ginny tried to steal the sword (p245) from new head master Snape's office – this would have been much more interesting to see than what we were shown. And very annoyingly, the most interesting thing to happen so far (the fall of the Ministry of Magic) happens off stage while we watch never-ending chatter and hand holdings. Which brings me to:
nauseating romantic relationships: dressing her couples in the literary equivalent of matching sweaters (p67-8) Rowling can never resist an opportunity to point out who is with whom. By the time Ron trying to get arm around Hermione (p107) I just wanted to yell, enough already! And fair enough, every long story needs a wedding and the protagonists being too young (in Rowling’s world, only just too young) Ron’s brother Bill and the irritatingly Rene Artois--accented (p 71) Fleur step in to fill the void. Real weddings are bad enough, this one is tedium infinitum (or it might be if there were a spell to create it, but why would anyone bother?) Worse still are
inconsistencies in Rowling’s conception of death: Rowling doesn’t seem to have a strong idea of what death actually means in her imagined world. She can't hold back from over- simplified expressions, for example, death is like a nightmare (p386) she writes at one point, which is utterly ridiculous. What must be one of the most real human experiences is best described as something that is unreal, and common? Rowling’s nightmare image strips the ultimate crisis of meaning and dignity and she fails most in her apparent unawareness of this. Later, despite continuous warning that death is the end and you can’t bring people back, when ever they are needed, the deadest of characters (Dumbledore, Harry’s parents) always – though cold, and not belonging (p332)manage to turn up.
Repetition:
How many times do we need to hear Hagrid's hankies are tablecloth sized? Editor, please! And especially, the
repeated use of Polyjuice potion: This transforming potion was refreshing when first used -- and Hermione accidentally turned into a cat -- but it’s past its use by date now, becoming as much of a get out of jail free card as Doctor Who's Sonic screwdriver and it's a relief when it runs out and fails though it doesn’t happen soon enough. And why do Harry’s enemies never figure it out or make some for themselves?
Disappointments: for instance the domestication of the main characters. Fleur, who once represented her country in the tri-wizard tournament is last seen worrying about dirty dishes and about where her houseguests should sleep. No, Fleur, no! Be haughty and superior and French and don’t do this! Please, JK, have something better in store for Harry, Ron and Hermione! (The ‘nineteen years later’ bit stuck at the end seems almost tragic).

Another most adult image that sits very oddly with the tediously juvenile romances is the phallic symbolism of the wand. I’ve never tried, but I imagine it would be hard to write a wand that isn’t phallic, but the extent to which the psychological manifests itself in this book is almost blush-worthy. In the first chapter, Voldemort demands Lucius' wand and compares its length to his own. Soon afterwards, an enemy conjures a white handkerchief from end of his and came quietly (p28). For his birthday, Harry receives a book from Ron: how to charm witches and proclaims with all the excitement of adolescent discovery, that ‘it's not all about wandwork' (p97) . Wands are put to other uses in the story (Harry’s has unique powers (pp73-4) Voldemort thinks his problem is his wand). But then we have wizards boasting of their wands (p337) in ways that make it surprising that it was written by a woman. Could it be an expression of penis envy? I really don’t think so, having lost faith in Freud after first hearing of this ridiculous idea (like Seinfeld's Elaine on learning about shrinkage 'I'm glad I don't have one of those' -- no psychologist needs to project his own fear of castration onto me ;) ). Despite knowing the power of a particular wand, Voldemort believes he can just break into Dumbledore's tomb and walk off with it. Of course that won’t work. But by the end, there has been so much discussion of wands, of what wood and which hair they are constructed from, that I couldn’t help but thinking of Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia. To misquote; Respect the power of the wand. JK, how could you?

Is there a moral to the story? How could there not be? Despite the death that Harry makes the most fuss off (throwing himself into digging the grave! Rowling can’t think he’s Hamlet, can she? This might go some way towards explaining the lack of action) that of the house elf Dobby, which is no great loss. Despite the lack of action, before many more than 500 pages have passed, we realise we must be nearing last battle, returning to the location of Harry’s earliest scenes. There, he wins, of course, learning that grief / love / loss protects him, though there are things worse than death. (I wonder if one of those is tedious domesticity?)