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.