“Airbases in Co Down have always fascinated me… During the war, pilots had been billeted in the house where I was brought up in in Kilkeel. Pilots had written their names on the rafters upstairs and there was a yellowed pin-up of Betty Grable on the attic door. The ghosts of airmen have always been with me.” (Eoin McNamee on The Vogue)
Anyone wishing to know more about the plot of Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue, and its connections to the Greencastle air base in County Down should read the interview in the Irish Times linked above, which offers excellent and valuable insights into McNamee’s writing life and process. I was particularly interested to discover that he does not think of The Vogue at all as a crime novel. I get his reasoning – The Vogue’s emphasis is not on crimes committed so much as the years and layers of history that conspire to obfuscate them, the collective acts of remembering that will eventually bring them to the surface – but thinking about the novel in terms of its relationship to crime fiction does reveal other aspects, most notably the form the novel takes, its complex web of clues, its fractured skeleton.
The Vogue is a brilliant crime novel. It is a brilliant, achingly evocative piece of writing full stop. While reading it I felt rage and tension and sorrow and above all endless admiration for the writer. To experience The Vogue is to experience giddy exhilaration at the risks taken, the tightrope-walk balance McNamee demonstrates in knowing when to keep us guessing, when to show his working, when to reveal the maggots at the heart of the apple.
Oh, the joy of reading a novel that doesn’t give much of a toss about ‘accessibility’. For the first fifty pages I wasn’t ever entirely sure of what was going on and I loved it. Thank f**k for publishers and editors who are still prepared to run with that, to not harp on about reader expectations, to understand that what they have is a fantastic novel, a marvellous writer, to put their money where their mouths are. I was talking to someone the other day about how important music has always been to me, how my love for music has from a young age influenced the way I read, the way I look for meaning in texts – first find the rhythm, the tone, the way the language resonates, through a novel’s structure come to understand its melody – and the first thing any reader should notice about The Vogue is its music, which had me catching my breath with excitement – excitement that writers are doing this – on every page:
Upritchard dreamed of the girl in the pit. His surroundings mocked him. The posters in dirty frames, men and women frozen in mid-season gaiety. He lagged pipes with old jumpers and pushed teatowels into the gaps between frame and window. Rime frosted the inside of the single windowpanes, starred and crystalline and aglitter when he turned his torch on them so that they seemed their own nebulae, something cold and far away. He sat alone by a paraffin stove in the kitchen. There was a leather suitcase on the table in front of him, the lid covered in yellowed travel labels for Skegness and Brighton, the sea on shingle beaches, lights strung out along Victorian esplanades, pierside amusements. Long-gone summers.
The Vogue seems to me a quintessentially Gordon Burn-type book, the kind of novel the Gordon Burn Prize was set up to champion and celebrate. This has been my first encounter with Eoin McNamee’s writing, an experience that has ensured I will be working my way through his backlist as a matter of priority.
Heads of the Colored People, Naffissa Thompson-Spires (Chatto)
Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot (Bloomsbury)
Lanny, Max Porter (Faber)
Lowborn, Kerry Hudson (Vintage)
Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine (Stinging Fly)
The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton)
The Vogue, Eoin McNamee (Faber)
This Brutal House, Niven Govinden (Dialogue)
The only one of the twelve I’ve read so far is Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, which I think is brilliant. It is still a complete mystery to me (and, it would seem, to many others) why it didn’t make the Women’s Prize shortlist, and it is therefore all the more wonderful to find it showing up here.
Of the others, I own the David Keenan (Keenan’s debut, This Is Memorial Device, was a standout for me, and this new novel looks even more compelling) and the McNamee has been on my to-read list ever since I saw Anna Burns recommending it shortly after she won the Booker. Lanny, Lowborn, This Btutal House and Sweet Home are all similarly on my to-read list for 2019, and I am very curious about the Will Ashon.
I have found increasingly with the Gordon Burn Prize that the longlist tends to be made up of books that I have either read or earmarked for reading – this kind of radical collision between fiction and non-fiction, memoir and poetry is very much where my interests lie at the moment. The only book on this list that I have not come across at all so far is Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir Heart Berries, which looks incredible and has a blurb from Kate Tempest – what more recommendation do I need?
The shortlist is announced on July 17th, which gives me seven weeks to read it. It’s going to be tight, but I’m going to try. I will also try to blog every book, followed by a round-up post including my own predictions and/or preferences for the shortlist. This will actually be the first time I’ve attempted to read an entire prize longlist, and I’m looking forward to the challenge. At this moment I have no preconceived ideas about what might get shortlisted and that is the best possible basis I can think of to go in on.
“A place on the longlist is recognition of work that stands out in the scale of its endeavour, often challenging readers’ expectations or pushing perceived boundaries of genre, sensibility or even the role of literature itself.”
In her thoughtful and persuasive introduction to the Folio Society’s 2014 edition of Josephine Tey’s final novel The Singing Sands, the crime novelist Val McDermid makes a splendid case for Tey as the bridge between the Midsomer cosiness of Golden Age crime fiction and the harder-edged suspense novels of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. I enjoyed McDermid’s essay – her love for and knowledge of crime writing bleeds through into every piece of criticism she writes – but it leaves me perplexed. Why don’t I see what she sees? The Franchise Affair was published in 1948. It would be easy to argue that it is more or less impossible for a writer and critic of my generation to properly understand the subtleties and subtexts of a novel that appeared almost twenty years before she was born. And yet still I am perplexed. Why does it seem to me that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights – both published a hundred years before The Franchise Affair and long before any of the twentieth century’s social and cultural revolutions could reasonably have been imagined – seem less straitjacketed by class prejudice and more feminist by far than anything I have so far encountered by Josephine Tey?
Well, the Bronte masterpieces are in a sense fantasies, I hear you reply. Tey is writing about the society that surrounds her – she is reflecting reality.
OK then, I counter. But that reality comes across as pretty ugly, and I don’t see Tey putting up much of a protest about it. She is wonderfully witty in places, waspish even, and I’m all for that. What I don’t see is irony.
*
The comparison with Midsomer Murders is not entirely spurious. The Franchise Affair is very much a small town mystery, with a restricted cast of characters and only a cameo appearance from Tey’s regular detective, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. Our hero this time is Robert Blair, a somewhat unadventurous local solicitor. Unaccustomed to criminal cases, when one unexpectedly comes his way his first instinct is to push it off on the sharp-suited and (therefore) less scrupulous lawyer Ben Carley. It is only his growing admiration for one of the accused, Marion Sharpe – the damsel in distress, though to be fair Tey does make substantial efforts to portray her as anything but – that forces Blair to change his mind. How far this decision will affect Robert’s life in the long run is left to us to surmise. I did admire Tey’s courage in not providing a typical happy ending. If only she could have shown this kind of grit and ambiguity in more open confrontation of social norms.
Marion and her widowed mother are what are most usually referred to as distressed gentlefolk. They live at The Franchise, a house they have inherited from a distant relative at an inconvenient location some distance from town. As the novel opens, they have been accused of kidnap and abuse by a sixteen-year-old girl, Betty Kane, who swears blind the two Sharpe women abducted her from a bus stop, then held her prisoner at The Franchise in an attempt to force her to become their maid-of-all-work. Betty is well mannered and pleasing to the eye. What’s more, she can describe the house and the attic where she says she was held in every detail. Her case seems watertight. But Robert Blair cannot believe it – not Marion! – and his friend, the somewhat disreputable but nonetheless good egg Kevin McDermott, a London barrister, does not believe it either. How can the Sharpes possibly be guilty when Mrs Sharpe is the sister of the horse breeder who sold McDermott his first pony?? Together, they set out to Save the Women. And so the mystery laid before us is gradually revealed.
I’m being flippant of course, which is unfair to Tey. As a piece of mystery writing, The Franchise Affair is deftly woven, economical, entertaining, pleasing in its attention to detail and satisfying in the pulling together of its clues and leads. Why then does it have to be such a blatant and depressing exercise in class prejudice? Of course what Betty does is horrifying – but it is horrifying because it is deceitful, damaging and unheeding of the consequences for innocent people. Contrary to what the novel seems to suggest, Betty’s criminality is not the inevitable result of her being ‘no better than she should be’, the child of a mother who enjoyed ‘dancing with officers’ instead of scrubbing down the kitchen floor, presumably, and – oh my God, worst of all! – someone who openly and lasciviously enjoys a good meal. ‘Eating like a young wolf at my hotel’. Good lord, whatever next.
Betty and her deceased mother are portrayed as persons who are likely to go off the rails because they don’t know their place. Bad blood, in other words, and blood will out Similarly, the witnesses for the prosecution – a servant named Rose Glyn and a farm girl Gladys Rees – are variously described as ‘slut’, ‘moron’, ‘illiterate’, ‘little rat’ – all epithets casually thrown about by the fine, upstanding men who are defending the Sharpes – poor ladies – from the evil machinations of the lower classes. Even Ben Carley, the wide-boy lawyer from the wrong end of the High Street, with his ‘town clothing’ and his love of a risque joke, is shown in no uncertain terms as an arriviste and, to paraphrase Marion, ‘not our sort’.
I liked the portrayal of Marion and her mother – the mistaken ‘witches’ on the wrong end of a village witch hunt – but why does Marion’s hard-won pluck and insistence on her independence (Val McDermid is perfectly right about the way in which a woman like Marion transgresses the gender stereotypes of the period) have to be at the expense of every other woman in the book? Silly Aunt Lin, Bible-bashing Christina, Betty’s mother and of course Betty herself: she’s lost her parents in the Blitz, now she’s losing her step-brother as well. Of course she’s messed up, and is potentially every bit as interesting a character as Marion. Instead, Tey chooses to portray her – lipstick in pocket – as a painted whore.
The only ordinary working people that come out of this OK are those – like Stanley who works in the garage and his own widowed mum – who doff the cap with a smile and respect their betters.
Yes, I’m disappointed. Maybe that’s unfair of me – maybe it really is impossible for a critic bitching in 2019 to properly grasp the rigid and unforgiving hierarchies of post-war Britain – and contrary to appearances I shall be reading more Tey. I’m intrigued by her odd, slightly off-kilter mysteries. In spite of my harsh judgement I can see, through the cracks, what she is driving at, and I want to see more. The thing that does terrify me is the thought of what I might find when I come to reread Dorothy L. Sayers. I devoured her books in my early twenties. They seemed to me then paragons of progressiveness and sardonic wit. What if I discover them to be full of the kind of unthinking bias that so thoroughly snarls up the workings of The Franchise Affair?
For now I shall put off the moment of truth, continuing in the hope that they are still perfect.
People didn’t know what to make of each other any more. People didn’t know what to make of themselves. And you couldn’t explain that away. You couldn’t say that this was a bad area. You couldn’t blame unemployment. You couldn’t blame the EDL with their march and their rootless anger and their banners. You couldn’t blame the small houses and the narrow streets. Eva was right. People see what they want to.
How best to sum up this book? There is an ex-police officer in this novel as well as a serving one, yet to call Black Car Burning a crime novel would be to stretch the envelope some distance beyond what even that most accommodating of genres could reasonably stand. It is a novel about landscape that is inalienably about a city. It is a novel haunted by violence in which the dominant role is played by compassion. It is a prose work written by a poet. It is poetry in the form of prose.
In Black Car Burning we meet Alexa, a serving police officer who keeps having nightmares about Hillsborough, a crime that was committed while she was still a small child. Alexa’s father is Pete, who resigned from the police force in the immediate aftermath of Hillsborough and resigns from being Alexa’s dad when he finds he cannot accept her polyamorous relationship with Caron and Leyton. Pete now works in a shop selling climbing gear with Leigh, who thinks she is falling in love with Caron. Caron is in love with Black Car Burning, a notoriously difficult climbing route that tests the nerve as well as the physical stamina of most climbers.
Above and behind them all, the gritstone of Stanage. At their feet, the city of Sheffield, scarred by Hillsborough, its rapidly evolving communities stretched almost to their limit by increasing austerity.
I was writing to a friend about this book the other day and the word they used to describe it was humane. Black Car Burning is one of the most deeply humane explorations of community, class, history, landscape and the absolute now that I have read. I have not felt so deeply, so personally invested in a novel since Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border. Black Car Burning is more difficult, more austere than The Wold Border but it is equally the kind of writing that might save us.
It is no coincidence that Helen Mort has chosen as the epigraph for Black Car Burning a quotation – a radiantly humane one – from M. John Harrison’s 1989 novel Climbers. It must be a coincidence that Black Car Burning happens to be published exactly thirty years after Climbers – writers don’t plan these things – but what could be more fitting, more beautifully apposite? The huge changes that have taken place in those decades – in the climbing community, in the makeup of both our urban and rural environment, in the political climate, in who might be writing about climbing, and landscape, and the feel of granite dust under the fingernails – are searingly observed and catalogued in these two novels, framing the late Thatcher period with Late May like bookends, revealing also and as importantly the ways in which little has changed, the ways in which, though lost, we can still fight, we can still come together, we can still show that we see what is happening, and do not consent.
How significant and how hopeful it is that Black Car Burning was written by a woman. I took to the book so immediately and so naturally it never occurred to me, through at least half the reading of it, to frame it to myself in those terms. But it is important, and it is worth saying.
Please love this book with all your hearts. It is a keeper.
My
relationship with the work of Ian McEwan has been going on for almost the whole
of my adult reading life. I first encountered him in The Cement Garden, which my mother brought home from the library in
the early eighties. She read it and pronounced it ‘weird’. I read it and found
it weird, too, unlike anything I’d read before (I was fourteen) and compelling
in its breaking of taboos, its willingness – one might say its eagerness – to
shock. More than that, The Cement Garden
seemed somehow to chime with the world that was unfolding around me: my parents
were splitting up, I was discovering unpalatable truths about people and
relationships and the wider world of politics and social division. I can’t
swear to this – it’s too long ago – but The
Cement Garden might have been the first adult novel I read by a young,
contemporary writer that dealt explicitly with the fractured and aberrant
nature of modern Britain. McEwan seemed risky to me, and important. I formed an
attachment to his work on the spot, even as it unsettled me and probably
because of that.
I read The Comfort of Strangers a year or two later, First Love, Last Rites at some point between the two. I found both
of these – Strangers especially –
equally risky, equally compelling. The
Child in Time was the first of McEwan’s novels I remember buying at the
time it was published. I was by then an undergraduate and exactly the right age
for reading him. I was gripped by The
Innocent, even more so by Black Dogs,
which in my memory contains some of McEwan’s best writing. Enduring Love is the book I still believe to be his masterpiece:
intense, engaged, dense and ambiguous. Out of step with many, I also enjoyed his
mordant and clever Booker winner, Amsterdam.
Then came Atonement, the novel that made McEwan a household name but that
marked, at least for me, the beginning of an inexorable downward slide into
bland respectability. Compared with the idiosyncratic, vaguely disreputable books
that comprise the first half of his oeuvre, these more recent novels seem smug
and self-satisfied. They are novels that attempt to grapple with universal
themes, whilst appearing to lack the personal engagement and imagination to
convey much of anything beyond the superficial.
I have found this development sad, and shocking. Probably the seeds of doom were there all along – they usually are – and if I were to go back and read the early works now I would find them scattered all over the place. I don’t feel like doing it – I don’t have time to waste on a cause that now seems beyond redemption. Still, from the moment Machines Like Me was announced I knew my curiosity was bound to overcome my reticence. Ian McEwan, trying his hand at science fiction? Not that anyone, least of all McEwan, was going to call it that. In an interview for the Guardian, he is clearly at pains to emphasise that he has something more serious in mind:
“There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you. If a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference, then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest.”
I’m sure I’m not alone in finding it ironic that a writer who purportedly has no interest in science fiction is able to come up with such a neat and tidy description of what science fiction is and sets out to do. But if it’s dull and annoying to hear these misconceptions about SF trotted out yet again, it is equally tedious to witness another windy bout of performative outrage from the science fiction community, most especially when it is obvious that few, if any of those doing the yelling have actually read the text they’re so pissed off about.
Of course it is possible to respond to an interview in and of itself, which is what the critic Sarah Ditum did, again in the Guardian, a couple of days later. ‘SF is not a respectable genre’, Ditum states. ‘Its origins are brash and cheap, its richness often married to its slightly disreputable status.’ She goes on to give a neat and informative summary of science fiction’s hotly contested origin story, whilst at the same time opening up to scrutiny the misinformation about science fiction that continues to be disseminated throughout the wider literary world. Quoting the 1976 essay by Ursula Le Guin ‘Science Fiction and Mrs Brown’, Ditum reveals how science fiction is in fact not so much a category of literature as a mode of expression: “a crazy, protean, left-handed monkey wrench, which can be put to any use the craftsman has in mind”.
Ditum’s essay is refreshing and insightful. What it hints at also is the fact that the literary/SF divide is and always has been a war of two armies. For all those writers such as McEwan who refuse to touch the monkey wrench for fear it might be contaminated with genre radioactivity, there are an equal number of writers behind the SF barricades who continue to insist that science fiction is their monkey wrench, that no one else should be allowed to use it unless they want to be exposed to ridicule for using it wrong, and that they should especially not be allowed to use it unless they can tell you where the metal it is made from was mined, write a three-page essay on the smelting process and cite bibliographical sources attesting the canonical uses of monkey wrenches from Golden Age times.
To avoid torturing this analogy any further, we could just call this pointless posturing what it is: the science-fictional equivalent of a comic-book farmer, bellowing at the clueless townies to get off his land.
At this point I would like to posit my own counterfactual, a world in which Ian McEwan, when asked that inevitable question about science fiction, had the nous and the background knowledge to answer simply: ‘Yes, you could definitely say that Machines Like Me is a science fiction novel. At the very least, it makes use of science fictional materials. But then, this is nothing new for me. One of my early stories was published in a science fiction magazine. Several of my other novels make use of speculative conceits. If you look at my TV play, Solid Geometry, or read the story ‘Dead as They Come’ from In Between the Sheets, you will see I have been interested in these kinds of Ballardian themes for a long time. Science fiction is simply one of the many useful tools at a writer’s disposal’.
Such a response would not only have been more truthful, it would have been more interesting for everyone involved. Rather than simply reiterating familiar arguments, we could now be discussing how science fiction has impacted and influenced the contemporary novel. Faced with McEwan’s theoretical Damascene revelation, the science fiction commentariat (such that it is, these days) might have felt obliged to stop snarking from the sidelines and actually read his novel before damning it to hell.
*
The
protagonist and narrator of Machines Like
Me is Charlie Friend, a thirty-three-year-old one-time tax fraudster whose
brush with the law has left him determined to eschew conventional employment in
favour of earning a precarious living from playing the stock market. When a
family inheritance leaves him temporarily solvent, he indulges his inner nerd
and blows the lot on Adam, one of twenty-five new-generation AIs, designed to
look, behave and learn like a human being. As well as fulfilling his lifelong
curiosity about future developments in robotics, Charlie hopes that his
acquisition of Adam will serve to foster his relationship with his upstairs
neighbour Miranda, a postgraduate student whom, after months of supposedly
platonic friendship, Charlie has suddenly decided he is in love with.
So far, so near-future. As it turns out, we are not in the future, but in the past: an alternate nineteen-eighties where Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous Falklands campaign leads directly to a leftwing Labour government under Tony Benn, where JFK and John Lennon are both still alive, and most crucially where wartime codebreaker and mathematical genius Alan Turing was not persecuted to death by the government for his homosexuality. Instead, Turing lives on to complete his life’s work, accelerating the development of computers and information technology. Laptops and mobiles are as much a reality in this nineteen-eighties as the miners’ strike. ‘The near future of the real world becomes the present of the novel,’ states Sarah Ditum in her Guardian article, ‘giving McEwan the space to explore prescient what-ifs: what if a robot could think like a human, or human intelligence could not tell the difference between itself and AI?’
Machines
Like Me, in both its outline and its intention, is a
digital Frankenstein, a story that takes place – just in case we
were in any doubt about its SF credentials – in an alternate universe. It feels
deeply contrarian for an author to invest their energies in a premise like this
and still insist it is somehow ‘not’ science fiction, and it would be equally
foolish to waste time and space here arguing the point. It seems more
interesting and relevant to ask ourselves if the novel makes effective use of
those speculative materials.
One of the most common accusations
levelled at so-called SF tourists is that they insist on reinventing the wheel.
I don’t care about that, particularly, because it’s another boring argument,
and mostly specious – all writers and especially science fiction writers make
copious use of second-hand material. What matters, across all genres, is how inventive
the writer has been in their interpretation of familiar scenarios, how
rigorously they have engaged with the ideas they have chosen to explore. I find
it particularly ironic that Machines Like
Me, a novel that McEwan himself would appear to suggest is somehow better
than SF, relies so heavily on unmitigated exposition, more popularly known in
SF parlance as ‘as you know, Bob’ and held up by mainstream critics as one of
science fiction’s most egregious sins:
Speech-recognition software, a fifties miracle, had long turned to drudge, with entire populations sacrificing hours each day to lonely soliloquising. Brain-machine interfacing, wild fruit of sixties optimism, could barely arouse the interest of a child. What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cogntion-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set.
And that’s just a tiny portion of what’s
on offer. In examining the mechanics of Charlie’s narrative, we should ask
ourselves why he feels the need to explain all this at such length. More
importantly, who is he explaining it to? A science fiction narrative should not
depend on exposition, any more than a novel set in contemporary London should
depend on its narrator explaining the rise of the smartphone, the obsolescence
of VHS.
McEwan’s seeming lack of confidence in handling
speculative materials reveals itself even more glaringly when it comes to the
political background of his counterfactual. In drawing potentially insightful
comparison between the political turmoil of the 1980s and the chaos of now, McEwan
takes the fatal shortcut of simply telling
us: page after page of historical summary that reads like background notes for
a novel rather than the finished article. At one point, Charlie himself seems
to notice this, stepping forward with the following disclaimer:
I repeat this well known history for the benefit of younger readers, who won’t be aware of its emotional impact.
Even AE Van Vogt would have found it
hard to get away with that one. It is difficult to believe such ineptitude
exists in the work of a writer who professes himself too sophisticated for
pulpy old SF.
So much for the background, but how
successful is McEwan in exploring the potential and future implications of
sentient AI, and what are we to make his artificial human, Adam himself? Somewhat
incongruously, the book that kept coming to mind as I thought about this was
the peak pulp also-ran from last year’s Clarke Award shortlist, C. Robert
Cargill’s Sea of Rust. Set in a far
future where a war between humans and machines has left humans extinct and
machines in a decadent state of existential dread, the central problem – among
many – of that novel resides in the fact that for all the ‘machine
consciousness’ displayed by Cargill’s robots, they might as well be human, and I
am afraid much the same could be said of Adam. That he is by far the most
interesting character in the book should not be taken as a win. Whilst some
might argue that in the newly-awakened Adam of the first third of the novel
McEwan makes a credible stab at portraying the essentially alien processes of a
machine mind, the further we progress through the story, the more McEwan
appears to forget about his original intentions, retreating instead to a more
straightforward polemic concerning moral relativism that is not in the least
new or alien, but familiar from many centuries of novels and plays as well as
real-life situations. Indeed, McEwan himself has rehearsed similar arguments on
numerous occasions, most recently in his somewhat cursory 2014 novel The Children Act.
Questions pertaining to AI sentience, self
determination and social autonomy, though they are touched upon here and there,
remain largely unexamined. Similarly the implications for human workers of
increasing automation at all levels of employment – an issue that should lie at
the heart of current social concerns and that has already been the subject of
several recent works of science fiction – is quickly brushed aside so that
McEwan can concentrate his intellectual energies on the question that truly
interests him: whether Miranda should be considered legally and morally
culpable for the act of premeditated revenge that has marked her past and that
has the potential to shatter her future. Such an argument has much in common
with the staged philosophies that form the bedrock of many an Iris Murdoch
novel, and personally I would argue that Machines
Like Me would function better with an all-human cast, and without McEwan’s
clumsy deployment of speculative tropes, especially since Adam’s farewell haiku
reads like knocked-off Blade Runner.
Our leaves are falling.
Come spring we will renew,
But you, alas, fall once.
*
During the course of a forty-minute interview for Radio 4’s Start the Week programme, the presenter Andrew Marr asks Ian McEwan if he believes the territories traditionally occupied by literary fiction and genre fiction are beginning to coalesce. McEwan stands firmly convinced that they are not:
‘I think the distinction still holds, actually… I think there is still about the literary novel a kind of seriousness. No one writes them to get rich, and many people are devoting themselves to the study of them and the writing of them. So I think it’s still worth keeping that distinction, to come back to that notion of the small print of human interaction, of trying to see where we are now, what is the condition of this kind of modernity, the representation of subjectivity, flow of consciousness, all of that, and how that interacts with the social world seems to me a great pursuit, and I don’t find it in pulp fiction.’
Leaving aside his brute assumption that such subjectivities would have no place in a novel of science fiction, we are bound to ask how well Machines Like Me holds up, in McEwan’s own words, as a novel that represents the small print of human interaction. For me at least, Machines Like Me performs even more weakly as a literary novel than it does as science fiction. The novel’s portrayal of Charlie and of Miranda especially is stymied by the fact that McEwan clearly no longer feels comfortable writing about the lives and concerns of people who are younger than he now is himself. Charlie is meant to be thirty-two, yet with his confused politics (protesting the war one minute, feeling a lump in his throat at the sight of the departing taskforce the next), tendency towards nostalgia and bland ignorance of how ordinary people actually live their lives, he comes across as a kind of left-leaning Jacob Rees Mogg. His attitude towards Miranda is depressingly retrograde, the kind of unconscious, ‘benevolent’ sexism – ‘new shirts for me, exotic underwear for her’ – still routinely apparent in the speech and behaviour of too many men, even those who believe themselves enlightened.
Miranda herself is barely characterised
at all. She is an objectified cipher, the female bone of contention between two
sparring males. She is supposed to be twenty-two years old, yet McEwan would
have us believe she doesn’t know how to use a computer mouse. Almost every line
of writing about Miranda mentions her appearance. Adam, for all his superior
logic and absolute morality, is unable to give Charlie a reason for his ‘love’
for Miranda other than her ‘loveliness’. In this respect at least he is just
another predictable middle-aged man with bolted-on maths skills.
In the Marr interview for Radio 4, McEwan states that he has made the moral dilemma at the heart of the novel ‘as difficult as possible’, yet in practice it is depressingly facile, with a glibness that is made more problematic by the fact that it is founded on tropes that are rapidly becoming obsolete, even from SF. [SPOILERS AHEAD] When she was in her final year at school, Miranda’s best friend Mariam was violently raped by a fellow schoolmate, Peter Gorringe. Mariam is so traumatised, so convinced that her family, should they ever learn about what has been done to her, would retreat to antiquated notions of honour and shame and be bound to shun her, that she later commits suicide. Distraught and furious, Miranda decides to enact revenge on Gorringe by falsely accusing him of date-rape. Gorringe is eventually convicted, and spends four years in prison, his life and career prospects effectively ruined.
Adam believes that Miranda should go to
prison for the offence she has committed, that this kind of vigilante action
cannot be justified in a lawful society. The issue is further complicated by
the fact that Miranda and Charlie are trying to foster a child, Mark. Charlie
argues that Miranda’s transgression is a necessary subterfuge: even if Gorringe
did not rape Miranda, he is still a violent rapist. If Miranda ends up with a
criminal record, they will almost certainly lose the chance to adopt Mark, who
would then lose the chance to be part of a loving family.
Let us note first that Miranda’s friend Mariam
has no agency. Her sole function within the narrative is to provide a catalyst
for the main action, her rape serving only as a means of placing Miranda and by
extension Charlie and Adam in a moral dilemma. A trope that has been much
discussed and criticised within the science fiction community in recent years
has been the woman who has to be raped in order for the male protagonist to
grow or change. That Mariam is raped in order for a female character to grow
and change is not exactly an advance on the creative bankruptcy of the trope in
general. That Mariam is Pakistani simply adds to the mistake McEwan has made in
resorting to it. If this is an attempt by McEwan to make his cast of characters
more diverse, it is an ill-judged one. Mariam’s family is presented as perfect in
every way: warm, integrated, welcoming, cultured. Are we to take it that McEwan
believes such a family would have to be
Muslim in order for Mariam to fear they would reject her? I am sure this is
not the case, yet this is how it reads. It is uncomfortable to see McEwan make
such questionable narrative choices, seemingly unaware of how they might be
perceived by a wider readership.
The supposedly climactic confrontation with Peter Gorringe scales heights of ludicrousness not seen in McEwan since the endgame of Saturday. After that, any discussion of Miranda’s suitability as a foster-parent – she is a twenty-two-year-old student with no previous experience of fostering or connection to the child – would seem superfluous to requirements.
*
In
the Guardian interview, McEwan denies his novel’s likeness to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, insisting that ‘[In Frankenstein] the monster is a metaphor
for science out of control, but it is ourselves out of control that I am
interested in.’ In the Marr interview he develops this argument further,
stating that while Shelley’s monster becomes a murderer, his own Adam is
supposed to encapsulate the best in us.
Such an analysis depends upon a
fundamental misreading of Frankenstein:
the monster becomes a murderer not because of ‘science out of control’ but
because, being different, he is rejected and brutalised not only by society but
by his own ‘father’. In Machines Like Me,
Charlie enacts a similar betrayal: he rejects Adam not just for being
different, but because he belatedly comes to realise how that difference will
eventually impact upon his whole way of life. Unable to consider anything
beyond his own primacy, Charlie himself becomes the murderer.
In criticising any novel, we should
never assume that views and emotions expressed by the narrator are shared by
the author, which is why we must consider the possibility that McEwan has set
up Charlie to be unreliable. Yet to read Machines
Like Me as satire would necessitate the inclusion of a contrary view, at
least a hint that at some level, McEwan wishes us to see Charlie for what he
is: an entitled sexist driven almost entirely by self-interest.
That dissenting voice does exist, of
course – it is Adam’s:
“There are principles that are more important than your or anyone else’s particular needs at a given time… Of course, truth is everything… What sort of world do you want? Revenge, or the rule of law. The choice is simple.”
Yet in the Marr interview, McEwan positions himself firmly on Charlie’s side, confirming his desire to exculpate Miranda as ‘the warm-blooded thing to do… the little white lie that defeats the algorithm’ and suggesting that only a machine would insist on balancing the cold equations. He even goes so far as to wonder whether those humans who do take Adam’s side would mostly be men, those who remain in sympathy with Miranda mostly women.
I find this particularly crass. Setting
aside the fact that Miranda’s actions are damaging and reprehensible, not least
because they would have the potential to undermine the cases of actual rape
victims, Adam’s viewpoint is not chilling or machine-like at all. Rather it is
a reasoned legalistic response to a problem of law – in fact it is played out
as such in the closing stages of the novel, and with no machines involved. Are
we then to assume that lawyers are cold-blooded and that the legal system we
are so proud of has been concocted by AI, or that women are inherently unsuitable
to be lawyers?
Of course, McEwan never intended us to
think any of these things. But once again, what he has proven in a roundabout
way is that Machines Like Me is not
about the implications and possibilities of machine sentience at all, that as a
novel it has fallen short of the task it set out to perform.
*
What
does all this mean and why should it matter? Machines Like Me is just a novel; it is an issue of subjective
preference, nothing more, whether one admires it or not. McEwan can write, of
course – he has acquired the level of technical facility that is the rightful
earnings of a lifetime dedicated to a particular pursuit:
Perhaps biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the figure before me wasn’t fully alive. In my fatigue, I felt unmoored, drifting into the oceanic blue and black, moving in two directions at once – towards the uncontrollable future we were making for ourselves, where we might finally dissolve our biological identities; at the same time into the ancient past of an infant universe, where the common inheritance, in diminishing order, was rocks, gases, compounds, elements, forces, energy fields – for both of us, the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it took.
This could be the finest passage in the book, and I was happy to read it. What disturbs me is the disproportionate level of attention afforded by the literary establishment to this one author. Whilst I think McEwan is a good writer at the sentence level, he is not the literary colossus – the spokesman for our time, the ‘national novelist’ – we are being sold. He simply does not have the depth, the breadth, the originality, the idiosyncratic brilliance such a designation would require.
If he is anything, he is what I would call a heritage writer, representative of the national conscience and consciousness in the same way that National Trust stately homes are emblematic of British history: he is something, but he is not everything, and there will be many for whom he is irrelevant and even offensive. So why are we spending so much time talking about him? In attempting to speak for our times, McEwan not only sounds out of touch, he sounds out of date. There is age, but little gravitas. As a writer, McEwan seems so overtly concerned with embracing ‘big themes’, he appears to have lost contact with what truly matters, personally, to him.
McEwan does not need me to wish him well – he’s doing just fine – and I certainly do not wish him ill. He is just a writer, after all, trying to do his best. What I would like to see is more rigorous criticism, not just of McEwan’s work but of the arbitrary hierarchy he represents. Why is he so admired, and by whom? Why did he begin to attain his greatest success precisely when he turned away from riskier subject matter and towards these clonking stereotypes of what makes us British?
Could it be because he is not threatening, because he fails to adequately challenge our own received opinion of ourselves? His novels are easy to consume, and have every appearance of being serious, granting seriousness, by extension, to the reader. Yet he is essentially comfort reading, and I find the unquestioning, near-universal admiration granted to him concerning because of that.
I came to the end of Machines Like Me in the sad but certain knowledge that I won’t be reading his next book, or the one after that. There are so many more interesting writers I want to spend time with, and I no longer have hope that Ian McEwan retains the capacity to surprise me.
First, because I couldn’t put my foot on the ground. And then because I needed her words, her memories, to nourish the beginning of a novel she knew nothing about.
But I wasn’t afraid of this state of dependence.
It was justified by a higher project, which would develop without her knowing.
(Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller)
As her epigraphs for Based on a True Story, Delphine de Vigan chooses quotes from the Stephen King novels Misery and The Dark Half. Both are about writers who experience entrapment, Paul Sheldon at the hands of his infamous ‘number one fan’ Annie Wilkes, Thad Beaumont in the person of George Stark, a literary alter ego who takes on corporeal reality. There is a third King novel haunting the pages of de Vigan’s novel, and that is Bag of Bones, in which thriller writer Mike Noonan, thrown into turmoil by the death of his wife, experiences crippling panic attacks every time he tries to write. He can use the computer for other things – Sudoku puzzles, personal emails – but even opening a Word document is enough to make him vomit. Delphine, the narrator of Based on a True Story, experiences a similarly adverse reaction in the wake of publishing a highly successful novel based upon aspects of her own life story.
The only person Delphine can confide in is L, a ghost writer she happens to meet at a party hosted by a friend. L. seems to embody everything Delphine feels she lacks: a polished beauty and ease of manner, a way of existing among others that does not get in the way of her thirst for freedom, a writing career that, although wrapping her in a mantle of invisibility, nonetheless leaves her firmly in control.
L. is eager to know what Delphine is working on, what kind of novel she will write to build on the triumphant success of her prizewinning bestseller. Delphine is adamant that she will not write another autobiographical novel. Her success has also brought her anxiety, the sense of being owned by her audience, poison pen letters. L. is equally adamant that Delphine should not let what she insists are minor inconveniences get in the way of her true calling as a writer of autofiction. What is more, L. is here to help, to smooth the passage of the ‘phantom novel’ she is certain Delphine has it in her to write. Delphine should not worry – L. will see to it that she has space and time to work, that she will not be bothered by interruptions from friends and colleagues. Yet the more L. becomes indispensable, the fiercer the panic attacks. As the months pass, Delphine finds herself at crisis point, transfixed by the dawning awareness that she may have surrendered more of her own identity than she ever intended.
At the heart of Based on a True Story is an extended literary argument about the value of fiction. L. insists that only writing rooted in reality and known by the reader to be rooted in reality can be truly compelling. The rest is so much flim-flam, entertainment:
“Your readers don’t expect you to tell them stories that send them peacefully to sleep or reassure them. They don’t care about interchangeable characters that could be swapped from one book to another. They don’t care about more or less plausible situations deftly stitched together, which they’ve already read dozens of times. They couldn’t give a fuck. You’ve already proved to them that you know how to do something different, that you can take hold of reality, have it out with it. They’ve understood that you were looking for a different reality and were no longer afraid.”
Delphine insists there is no such thing as ‘reality’ in fiction, that the very act of putting pen to paper is a prelude to invention. Moreover, the writer has the right to toy with facts or not to draw upon reality at all – the reader instinctively understands that is part of the bargain they enter into when they open a novel. How much or how little a story is based upon events experienced by the writer is of lesser importance than the story’s internal verisimilitude:
Didn’t a character have the right to come from nowhere, have no anchorage, and be a pure invention? Did a character have to provide an explanation? I didn’t think so. Because the reader knew what to expect. The reader was always up for yielding to illusion and treating fiction like reality… The reader was capable of weeping over the death or downfall of a character who didn’t exist. It was the opposite of deception.
These arguments and counter-arguments seem especially powerful at the present moment, when autofiction – novels and stories that have their origins in lived reality – is experiencing a resurgence and writers such as David Shields and Rachel Cusk are using their fiction as a kind of reality manifesto. Caught in the middle, I find both arguments equally compelling and equally true. With its use of doubles, imaginary companions and invisible enemies, Based on a True Story is a literary thriller in the most complete sense, a novel-length philosophical argument about what fiction is for.
“I’m almost certain that you, all of us readers, all as much as we are, can be totally taken in by a book that presents itself as the truth and is pure invention, disguise and imagination. I think that any halfway capable author can do that: ramp up the reality effects to make you think that what he’s writing actually happened. And I challenge all of us – you, me, anyone – to disentangle true from false. And in any case it could be a literary project, to write a whole book that presents itself as a true story, a book inspired by so-called real events, but in which everything, or nearly everything, is invented.”
And in fact this looks to be exactly what we are reading. We know that Delphine – the real Delphine de Vigan – wrote a bestselling novel based around her experiences of coping with mental illness within her own family. We can only guess at the sense of personal exposure de Vigan experienced in writing and publishing such a novel, just as we can only guess at how much the lives of Delphine the author and Delphine the protagonist might or might not converge. What we can surely agree upon is that for the purposes of the novel we are reading it does not matter – we are invested regardless.
It would seem almost impossible that such a complex and determinedly intellectual book might work equally well as a thriller, but such is the piece of trickery de Vigan has pulled off. This is an unnerving, page-turning book that keeps you guessing and wondering, inventing alternative scenarios, worrying about the characters. Even when in the final act de Vigan ramps up the action – a broken foot (hello again Paul Sheldon), a cobwebby cellar, rat poison, a dark and stormy night – the book remains stalwart and skillful in its use of reality effects. We as readers never stop believing, even when the reality we have been inhabiting is revealed as a lie.
Towards the end of the book I read the following passage
After her mother’s death, L. stayed shut up inside the apartment. I haven’t managed to find out how long. Some time. I don’t think she went to school.
Need to dig further. I think L’s father forbade her to cross the threshold except in an emergency. I think she was so afraid of him she went for several weeks, or even months, without going out. Alone in the apartment.
This triggers a memory of something I read, some time ago, about a woman in France who was kept a virtual prisoner by her father. Hadn’t he been religious, or something? Was there a cult involved? I couldn’t remember in detail but the connection between this passage in the novel and the half-remembered memoir keeps bugging me. After a couple of minutes’ online searching I find what I am looking for, an interview with a woman named Maude Julien who became the subject of an experiment conducted by her sociopathic, alcoholic father designed to make his daughter ‘superhuman’. Reading the interview again now, I notice how her story also bears similarities with the events portrayed in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 film Dogtooth. The article was published in February 2018, to coincide with the release of the English-language edition of Julien’s memoir The Only Girl in the World . Based on a True Story came out in 2017.
Quickly i check the respective publication dates of the French originals: D’apres une histoire vraie by Delphine de Vigan, August 2015, Derriere la grille by Maude Julien, September 2014. Going by the dates alone I know it’s not possible for Julien’s story to have influenced de Vigan’s – by the time Julien’s was freely available to read, de Vigan’s would already have entered the production process. But what if de Vigan knew of Julien’s story already – it’s a small world, publishing. Or perhaps she knew Julien personally, had interviewed her even?
So what? It’s a tiny passage, a nod, a reference, not remotely important. But still, in less than five minutes I have constructed an imaginary narrative in which Delphine de Vigan is actually the ghost writer for Maude Julien and Based On a True Story is the book she wrote afterwards, a heavily disguised account of the peculiar experience of inhabiting someone else’s story and then being erased from it. I am sure this is a fantasy but I let myself believe in it, at least a little. Why not? It’s a great little narrative. It would make a good story.
What Delphine de Vigan most playfully demonstrates in Based on a True Story is how genre – in this case the thriller – can be subverted even as it is greedily enjoyed for what it is. This is a captivating, clever book that leaves its neatest trick till last, as we remember that L. sounds just like elle, the French for ‘she’.
I’d already logged off by midnight last night, when the Women’s Prize longlist was announced, but I caught up with it first thing this morning with mixed reactions. I was actually very surprised to find that I’d succeeded in guessing four out of the sixteen titles – but the flavour of the longlist as a whole felt so different from my own wishlist that my overall feeling has been somewhat muted.
There are some books on the longlist that I did not get on with at all – My Sister, the Serial Killer, for example, failed for me entirely as a crime novel and felt gauche and deeply retrograde as a novel of relationships. ‘I could help Tade bleach his whites, if he would let me’ is the quote that best sums up the book’s many, many issues for me, and if I had to choose one word to describe it, it would be overhyped.
There are two books I don’t feel tempted to read because we seem to be drowning in Greek myths retellings at the moment – did the judges really have to pick The Silence of the Girls and Circe? This is just a personal bugbear and conversely I am always excited by novels that take mythology more as a starting point, resetting archetypical stories in a modern context – Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie is a prizewinning example, see also Laurence Norfolk’s masterpiece In the Shape of a Boar. Neither the Barker nor the Miller feels essential to me.
It is interesting to note that there is no dystopian fiction on this list – could this enthusiasm have run its course, at least for the moment? – and the most openly speculative novel in contention is not, as many seemed to predict, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under but Melissa Broder’s The Pisces. I have enjoyed the vigorous debate sparked by this book, but haven’t read The Pisces yet and don’t feel in any particular hurry to do so.
This longlist does feel diverse and surprising and – its most laudable quality – it does include something for everyone. I would defy any reader not to find at least one book here that they can get wholeheartedly behind! Personally, I’m pleased and satisfied to see Milkman in contention. It could be argued that as the winner of last year’s Booker Prize, Milkman is not exactly crying out for extra publicity. However, it is an important, innovative and truly great novel – perhaps the only truly great novel on this list – and a Women’s Prize longlist that did not include it in its year of eligibility would be a nonsense. I’m delighted to see Ghost Wall, not only because it’s a superbly achieved book but also because it’s high time Sarah Moss received this kind of recognition – I hope she goes straight to the shortlist stage. I’m glad to see Sophie van Llewyn, too – her novel Bottled Goods was also longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and both the setting and the sensibility make it an instant ‘yes’ for me. Similarly, I was reading a review of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive just a day or two ago and felt immediately that I wanted to read it, that this book’s autofictional approach would put it right up my street.
I loved what Akwaeke Emezi said in interview about inserting pages from their journal directly into the narrative of Freshwater: “There are a couple of things about writing it this way: first, the things that people think are fictionalised are not fictionalised. Second, I wanted to make clear it was autobiography, otherwise it would be considered to be very fantastical. I wanted readers to be sure that it was not magical realism or speculative fiction. It’s what has actually happened! I’m using fiction as a filter for it”. Yes, please! Diana Evans’s Ordinary People might almost be an alternative commentary on Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, its core quartet of characters moved twenty years into their futures and with a whole new set of problems. The plot summary makes it sound like yet another London mid-life-marriage-in-crisis novel, but the way it is written – free-flowing language, tumbling streams of cultural references, time shifts and jump cuts – makes it feel radical and new and very contemporary.
So that’s my kind-of preferred shortlist. I have absolutely no idea which book will go on to win. But that’s an exciting conundrum to have, and one that big prizes in literature should throw up more often.
With the longlist for the Women’s Prize announced on Monday, I thought I’d give a quick mention to some of the books I would like to see make the cut. I’m feeling excited about the Women’s Prize at the moment, mainly because both the longlist and the shortlist were so strong in 2018. I’d love to see some similarly eclectic and most of all surprising choices coming through this year.
This is not a longlist prediction. If I’m honest, I would be amazed if even one or two of these particular titles made it through. I’m deliberately going for outliers: books I think deserve more attention, books that feel resonant and exciting to me right now, books that do interesting things with language and form. I have by no means read all of these books! In some cases I’ve just sampled them, or read the author’s previous book, or have the book on my to-read list because I think it’s one I’ll respond to.
In terms of the number of books read so far, I’m doing well this year – but already I’m feeling overwhelmed by the number of books I feel I need to read but haven’t got to yet. So just to make things even more complicated, here are some more!
1. VIRTUOSO by Yelena Moskovich. 2. MILKMAN by Anna Burns 3. STUBBORN ARCHIVIST by Yara Rodrigues Fowler 4. CRUDO by Olivia Laing 5. PONTI by Sharlene Teo 6. FRESHWATER by Akwaeke Emezi 7. THE WESTERN WIND by Samantha Harvey 8. KUDOS by Rachel Cusk 9. WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews 10. MISSING by Alison Moore 11. ALL RIVERS RUN FREE by Natasha Carthew 12. NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney 13. MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE by Siri Hustvedt 14. MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh 15. GHOST WALL by Sarah Moss 16. SEA MONSTERS by Chloe Aridjis
I would also have chosen PROBLEMS by Jade Sharma, but I don’t think it’s eligible because it’s published in Ireland. Kind of like Normal People but more out there.
I look at this list of books and feel a thrill of excitement. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a longlist this dynamic and this bold? There is some incredible work being done and that – especially now – is an inspiration.
I hope to be back here next week with a reaction to the actual longlist, whilst reserving the right to pass over it in silence if I am really disappointed!
This past week has been rather unusual. I’ve been on the road doing some advance publicity for The Dollmaker, talking to booksellers in London and across the West Country – where the novel is largely set – and having a delightful breakfast meeting with book bloggers and magazine editors at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. The strangeness of finding myself in the company of a whole bunch of people who had read the novel was a sensation outdone only by its pleasure. Andrew and Bramber have been a special part of my life for more than a decade. To realise that they have also become special to other people is the most valuable reward a writer could ask for. This is the end point of the process and one that only ever becomes more mysterious and surprising.
I have always loved travelling by train. One of the chief joys this week of what might otherwise have been a long and tiring series of journeys has been the opportunity to read three very different novels, one after another and with the effects lingering throughout this cut-off little section of time in the same way a particular weather or aroma might unexpectedly attach itself to a particular place. First came Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, a novel I was aware of and intrigued by on publication, yet somehow never got round to reading. I started it the week before last, when our island was still covered in snow, and completed it during the train ride from Glasgow to London that comprised the first leg of my journey.
The prevalence of frost, the steely Clyde, the progression through the still-snow-streaked hills of Cumbria brought me close to this novel in ways I could never have anticipated, and what I felt most of all through the first half of Smilla’s narrative in particular was an increased appreciation of the landscape in which I now live and work, a joy in what I have started to think of as the Northern aesthetic. And yet – and I still feel the pain of this – Smilla turned out to be very much a novel of two halves for me.
The novel’s Part One concerns the discovery of a body – the body of a young boy – and the increasing conviction on the part of the eponymous Miss Smilla that his death is no accident. It is set in Copenhagen, in winter, and I have rarely met with such an exquisite evocation of place, such a deep dive into the strange alchemy of idiosyncracies and generalities that make personal recollection so resonant and compelling. The attention to technical detail, both in matters of meteorology and what might be termed common bureaucracy – that kind of in-depth focus on what might wrongly be construed as irrelevances – made this extended section of writing a joy for me. I felt mesmerised by the beauty of it, by the author’s willingness to take that kind of poetic risk. This part of the novel is also characterised by an intricate social commentary examining the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. The daughter of an Inuit mother and a mostly absent Danish father, Smilla feels irreconcilably caught between two cultures. The tension this induces informs the narrative in powerful and surprising ways.
The characterisation of Miss Smilla herself is a thing of wonder. Rarely have I felt so close to a character. Make of that what you will.
In the second half of the novel, Smilla smuggles herself on board a ship bound for Greenland and the eventual resolution of the mystery. There is absolutely no reason this section should not have been equally compelling – yet turning the page to begin this part of the narrative felt to me disconcertingly, almost shockingly akin to entering a completely different novel. The careful construction of a narrative edifice, the complexity, the minute observations, the fascinating web of relationships – whoosh, gone. Smilla barely seems to remember or think about her life and discoveries in the first section of the novel. What we have instead is a narrative that feels as if it is going through the motions: rather boring thriller elements, unnecessary killings, bare-bones characterisation, sketchy description that felt as if it had been bolted on at the last minute. I was literally open-mouthed with disappointment.
In the past two years or so I have become increasingly interested in new ways of writing crime fiction. What I rejoice in, more than anything, is the kind of novel that takes the detective story as its template and then makes something weighty and great from it, that nods to the tropes and enjoys them but that is driven to go that further mile in terms of literary invention: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, Katie Kitamura’s A Separation. While reading the first half of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, I had the same feeling I had when I first read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, close on thirty years ago – that I was in the presence of a genuinely important work of European literature.
The second half blew that out of the water – almost literally. It felt desultory, by-the-numbers, filling in plot. Most of all, it felt to me as if Hoeg had refined Part One to a degree of perfection that pushed him to the boundary of his ability as a writer at that time, then for some unknown reason went on hiatus. Every writer knows what it’s like – leave a manuscript uncompleted for too long and something gets away from you. It is difficult, almost impossible, to re-enter the state that led to the creation of that particular narrative. Rather than trying to pick up where you left off, it is often better to start again from the beginning, to re-imagine the novel as the writer you have become in the time since you let it slide. Painful, but true.
I have absolutely no idea, of course, if anything of the sort happened. What I do know is that I just don’t get it. The novel’s resolution – the reason behind everything – I actually quite liked. It was sinister and frightening and unusual. But the hundred-and-fifty pages leading up to it were so much generic padding. The novel reads like a cut-and-shut. I’m still in mourning.
*
After that breathless roller-coaster ride of ecstasy and disappointment, it was actually quite weird to enter Looker, the debut novel from poet Laura Sims, a slim, present-tense, no-words-wasted novel of the perfectly-honed variety that is fashionable right now. The protagonist, a college lecturer, attempts to keep up an appearance of normality while her life collapses around her. As her personal crisis deepens, she becomes increasingly fixated on an actress who lives in the building across the street from her. The actress, it would appear, leads a charmed life. Our protagonist begins to collect pieces of it for herself – literally.
Hoeg’s aim – like Dostoevsky’s in Crime and Punishment, like Thomas Mann’s in The Magic Mountain – is to involve his reader, to draw them, through weight of words and argument, into the same philosophical and emotional labyrinth that enfolds their protagonist. In novels like Looker – think Sheila Heti, think Ottessa Moshfegh, think Gwendoline Riley – there is a distancing effect, achieved in part through the novel’s smoothly planed surfaces, in part through the author’s insistence on our stunned complicity. Like these novels’ protagonists, we do not act, we spy. We gaze, round-eyed, at the misfortune that inevitably unfolds. We are become, in fact, lookers.
I admired Sims’s novel for its perfectly modulated sentences, its mordant insights, its sharp analysis and demolition of traditional mystery tropes. It did suffer from being read straight after the Hoeg, though. You read Smilla and know in spite of everything that Hoeg was pushing himself to the limit. Looker feels studied and if not exactly arch then constructed by comparison. Too obviously aware of itself as good art. Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, though not dissimilar in some ways, takes more risks, reveals more personality, distills more real emotion and feels more mature generally. I liked Looker, but I didn’t love it.
*
Passing from Looker to Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales provided another jolt, this time in the opposite direction. Set in County Fermanagh in the first half of the nineteenth century. the novel tells a story of nascent sectarian violence, family secrets, betrayal and murderous revenge. It is a crime novel only in the loosest sense: by the time the action is over, a crime has been committed. Of the three novels I read this week, McCabe’s is the most traditional in form – the most staunchly realist. It is also the only one of the three you could point to and call flawless, or Dostoevskian, or both. In terms of page length it is as economical as Looker, yet in terms of the richness and passion of its language, its taut dissection of national schisms, the many unforgettable scenes at its heart it would seem to contain three times as much. One feels enriched and invigorated from reading it, certain in some sense that this is how great writing should taste and feel and be, equally certain that one can never and will never attain such mastery.
It’s strange, though, isn’t it? While I was looking up information on Eugene McCabe, I came across his appallingly unprofessional and, frankly, childish ad hominem attack on the critic Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times back in 2011. A salutary reminder that even the greatest writers are capable, on occasion, of being absolute dicks.
Having concluded his story, he opened the door to the church. Inside were ruins, on which bushes and saplings had sprouted. Through the broken windows we could see a bleak sky. A mute church bell hung above us.
We all looked up.
“See, ” our teacher said, “the bell had its tongue torn out. It can no longer ring.”
Later, by a campfire near the church, over sandwiches and tea, the teacher asked us what thoughts the bell had inspired.
As always, the wunderkind had to be different. He said that the bell had been lucky in a way, because it never had to worry about holding its tongue again.
Everyone, including Teacher Blums, laughed heartily.
“And what do you say?” the teacher asked me.”
Everyone gazed at me in silence. The fire was crackling. The flames and the silence burned my cheeks.
“That bell reminds me of my mother.”
The silence and the crackling grew louder.
*
The unnamed mother and the daughter in Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk are more or less the same age as me and my own mother. There are other parallels, too. As a student, I spent three months in the Soviet Union at the same time the daughter would have been in her final year at school. I lived in dormitory accommodation first in Leningrad – where the mother in Ikstena’s novel sets out to study medicine – and then in Kursk, not far from the Russian border with Ukraine. Already at that time there was a marked difference in atmosphere between Russia’s second capital and the moderately sized, provincial city in the heart of the Soviet interior. In Leningrad, people were beginning to engage openly in political discussion – there were demonstrations on the streets, excited gatherings of young people eager to discuss everything from God to McDonald’s.
In Kursk, we were still on Soviet time. The city’s skyline was still dominated by statues of Lenin and Marx and you felt they still meant business. Vast placards at every street intersection shouted Soviet slogans. The young people here had never met British students before. They were excited and beyond hospitable but you could also sense their caution – not at us, but at who might be watching them interact with us.
Most afternoons after our classes we swam in the river, like the mother and daughter and Jesse in Soviet Milk.
Ikstena’s novel is blisteringly beautiful and hauntingly sad but more, far more than that it is tenacious. It tells the story of what half of Europe lived through once they got rid of the Nazis. Reading Soviet Milk reminded me painfully of reading Christa Wolf’s Nachdenken ueber Christa T, which is a book of my heart. When I read Claire Armitstead’s review – ‘its powerful evocation of an era that seems almost unimaginable now’ – I felt sad and somehow cheated. For millions of people, on both sides of the wall and for different reasons, that era forms the spine of their being and is still very present. Would we say that the Thatcher era is almost unimaginable now? Sadly, I don’t think we would.
The mother in Soviet Milk reads Moby-Dick and 1984 – Ishmael and Winston Smith are her comrades in arms. The mother’s refusal to compromise – her inability to live inside a situation that demands compromise on pain of ruin – is tragic yet she is a great soul, a powerful intellect, a modern martyr. The daughter’s contrasting and ferocious desire to thrive – to win freedom – makes her equally so. I loved these two people. I loved the stalwart Jesse, an intersex woman living at a time that denied her very existence. I loved the constantly illuminating presence of the natural world, which sustained these women through their journey – even the cold.
I felt a particular gratitude for Peirene Press’s and translator Margita Gailitis’s decision to leave the text of Soviet Milk interlaced with different languages, sometimes in parallel text format: Latvian of course, transliterated Russian, even Old Church Slavonic. The power this brought to the novel as a whole – in terms of nuance, in terms of form – is inestimable and precious.
This morning I listened to a news item about a Saudi government app – now ubiquitous – that allows Saudi men to register their female relatives and receive text messages whenever their wife, daughter or sister boards a plane or passes through some other travel checkpoint. Yesterday I read about a 90-year-old man who is being forced by our government to return to the United States – a country where he has no remaining family or close friends – in order to complete a visa formality that will enable him to remain here in the UK with his wife and family. State oppression is not unimaginable – it is here, and everywhere. Soviet Milk may tell a story set in the second half of the twentieth century but it is a story for all of us, now.
