August 26, 2012
Suspicion by Rachel Wyatt
Of course, there’s been that one book that everyone’s been talking about this summer, but in more discerning circles, that one book has been Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. I was sold on it by buzzing from reliable sources, as well as back cover blurbs by Kate Atkinson, Laura Lippman and Kate Christensen, which is some kind of pedigree. I devoured Gone Girl the first day of my vacation last month, and adored how Flynn sent-up and played with tropes of the mystery and thriller genres in her smart, funny, and very contemporary novel. It was a “whodunnit” in which we (thought we) knew “who”, but the “it” remained the question, compelling us through a whirligig of twists and turns.
In her new novel Suspicion, Rachel Wyatt has given us a Canadian version of Gillian Flynn’s summer sensation. Similarly, a woman has gone missing, and suspicion falls upon her husband. The backdrop to the story is a troubled economy that might drive anyone’s desparation, and it turns out that few people in the supposedly close-knit community of Ghills Lake know their neighbours quite as well as they should. And that those who do know a little too much…
The twist in Suspicion, however, is that the “it” in “whodunnit” is precisely nothing, and the “who” is no one. Candace Wilson is missing, not because her husband did her in to get sympathy for his unpopular development project that threatens to mar the waterfront in their BC interior community, and not because her ex-lover’s wife killed her out of spite (and besides, how could she from her wheelchair?) and not because her resentful sister had finally had enough. No, as Wyatt makes clear from the start, Candace has stumbled into a deep hole hidden in the ground (not metaphorical) and she has broken her leg. She is trapped in the hole with no hope of rescue, what with everyone being all-consumed by far more dramatic theories involving murder, kidnapping, and scandalous trysts.
As with Flynn’s book, the characters in Suspicion find themselves unwitting players in a plot well-recognized from books, movies and TV. Against all their instincts and best intentions, they find themselves playing to type, the suspicious husband looking even more suspicious after he gets arrested for driving drunk, acts strange in police interviews and sleeps with his sister-in-law. The sister-in-law too is pulled between her own suspicions, her feelings for her sister’s husband, and her shameful feelings of relief about her sister being gone.
Other characters begin to manipulate the story for their own purposes, the wheelchair-bound wife of Candace’s ex-lover sharing her own theories on the internet forum where she commands authority, Candace’s sister’s husband finding himself overwhelmed by visions of Candace’s whereabouts which he employs in his mediocre art, and a journalist who’s turned up in town searching for some local colour is spinning her own impossible version of events. The police chase up one hopeless lead after another, all the while Candace is lying underground, cold and hungry and losing consciousness.
Suspicion is a literary trick masquerading as a great suspense novel, a story with meta-elements in which characters must reconcile the fact that they’ve become characters. Some resist, others revel, and we are shown how story, plot and drama are born in ordinary places, in ordinary lives. The only problem with this approach, of course, is that Wyatt’s characters acting as stock-characters can begin to seem a little too much like stock-characters, at times more to due sloppy plotting than a literary sleight-of-hand. There are a few too many scenes with hysterical women fleeing rooms in tears, with men struggling to contain inexpressible rage, smarmy types too eager to capitalize on Candace’s misfortune. There is a fine line between those characters who think they’re people on a page, and the people on a page after all. Even if they’re actually people on a page (and here is where my argument begins to look like the girl on the Borax box who’s holding a Borax box on into infinity).
But for the most part, Wyatt has drawn this line well, and ultimately, Suspicion is successful. Like Gone Girl, it’s a book very much of its time and place, very evocotively “there and now”. And while readers will come for the promises of gripping suspense, they’ll stay for the literary play, and the novel’s reflections on modern life, and love and marriage.
August 20, 2012
The Book of Marvels by Lorna Crozier
The most disappointing book I ever received was a book of household tips containing such wisdom as how to clean decanters and select bathroom soaps, and poet Lorna Crozier’s new book The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everday Things is that disappointing book’s most polar opposite. Fitting for a book that renders ordinary objects extraordinary, Crozier’s book itself is an extraordinary object, one of the few books I’ve ever encountered that dazzles you when its dust jacket falls off: the book is argyle. Its design is splendid, and the contents will not disappoint, guaranteed to appeal to anyone who loves words, and stories, and the thingy-ness of things.
Arranged in alphabetical order, The Book of Marvels is a dictionary of sorts, each definition illuminating the extraordinary lives of objects that we rarely look at twice. Sometimes Crozier will regard a familiar object from an unusual point of view (“Bed: Solid. Immovable. It does little more than take up space in the room it gives its name to, but at night the bed could be any kind of boat…”), use it to tell a story (“The shoe the old dog dropped on the step at dusk… It’s a man’s shoe, black, with a built up sole, as if the owner is a 1950s’ child of polio. Perhaps he’s not lame, just short, and the partner of this show is also heightened…”), invent mythologies (“The first rake was a hand. The older the better, rachitic fingers permanently bent, a scraping tool of bone and flesh…”),or uncover the hidden life within (“All doorknobs are twins, joined at the centre by a bolt narrow as a pencil, inflexible, unvertabraed. Though they move as one, they never get to see each other. They are like siblings separated at birth by a war, by a wall of stone and razor wire”).
I can tell you that I delighted in reading this book on the bus last week, in being the woman seen reading an argyle book called The Book of Marvels, in nearly falling down every time the bus lurched because I’d let go of the hanging strap in order to frantically underline all the best bits. Sometimes the underlines were because the idea was so right, so perfect: “Flashlight: It feels neglected. Too often it’s merely a case for carrying dead batteries.”Or: “The mop lacks the mystery of the broom. No one thinks of it steering through the stars.”
Or the writing: “Shovel:… You’d swear it is a noun but it’s a verb, in stasis, waiting in the shed for a shift of circumstance or season.” And there is this: “Snail: It sails without sails in the garden, so slow, if it were a ship, there’d be no wind.”
The one I went around reading to everybody on Friday was from Fork: “It’s the only kitchen noun, turned adjective, attached to lightning.”
And oh, how I loved: “Whatever it’s called, its country of origin, in a past life the umbrella must have harmed the wind–the wind, without doubt, plots its undoing.”
The Book of Marvels was the title of Marco Polo’s travel writings, and also those of traveller/adventurer Richard Halliburton, and is a title that would set up high expectations for any book, even without the allusions. Lorna Crozier not only meets these expectations, however, she exceeds them, in her excellent argyle book which affirms with delectable language that the world’s wonders are all around us.
August 14, 2012
The Blondes by Emily Schultz
I appreciated Emily M. Keeler’s piece about pre-natal narratives and connections between Emily Schultz’s The Blondes and The Handmaid’s Tale, but it was actually Atwood’s The Robber Bride that The Blondes had me thinking of. Because while The Blondes certainly has a post-apocalyptic feel (as have so many other books this year, books as different as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Lauren Groff’s Arcadia), fundamentally, The Blondes is a novel about how women betray one another. From the first page: “For women, power comes by subtle degrees. I could write a thesis on such women–and I nearly did.”
The narrator is Hazel Hayes, and she is addressing her unborn child, mostly because she has no one else to talk to and nothing else to do. Also because she wants to put the pieces of her story back together, to understand the story for herself. She has been a graduate student in New York City, studying “aesthetology”, the study of looking. Her work has been unfocused, mainly because she’s just run away from an affair with her (married) professor in Toronto, Professor Karl Mann (born Karl Diclicker, and many of Schultz’ name-choices are so delightfully Dickensian– in New York, Hazel’s made her home at the Dunn Inn, Hazel’s own name with its ambiguous colouring and haziness, the woman who she appeals to for saving is called Grace). Things become even more complicated when Hazel discovers that she’s pregnant, and her attempts to get home to deal with the problem are stymied by the effects of a mysterious plague.
The plague is “Blonde Fury”, the media label applied with alacrity, as instances of fair-haired women acting out murderous fits of rage begin to take hold in New York and quickly spread through the world. And this premise was all I really knew about this novel before I read it, imagining the book as some kind of fashionable zombie romp, but I’d got it all wrong. First, because the plague itself is very much of this world, complete with scientific explanations involving melanin and double-X chromosomes. And second, because the plague itself functions just as effectively as metaphor as it does plot-driver, compelling the reader to rush through the pages (and I’ll put it to you like this: this was a 380 page novel that I read in a single weekend when I was out of town) and then to go back to the beginning and re-experience the story again in all its depth.
Just as in her studies (and in her life), Hazel imagines herself to be at a remove from womanhood, she situates herself on the periphery of the plague as well, consumed as she is by her personal problems. However, she is actually a witness to the first known attack, when a blond woman throws a teenage girl onto the subway tracks. When Hazel tries to back to Canada not long after, she’s injured when a pack of flight attendants go on a rampage at the airport. When she later tries to cross the border in a rental car, she’s detained and kept under quarantine, and though she seems to go unaffected by the virus, it’s unknown whether her own hair color actually makes her more susceptible–although Hazel has long dyed her hair an unremarkable brown, her natural colour is red. (“What was orange, but a variation on gold? Red-gold. A thing ablaze.”)
She also displays some of the symptoms of blonde fury herself– panic attacks, feelings of rage, depression. Which isn’t so surprising really, considering how general the symptoms are. “The threat becomes abstract, and the fear is almost as intense as the disease itself.” The public is urged to avoid contact with the apparently afflicted: “The thing about the disease is that it’s based on connection.” And so women turn on women in futile attempts to protect themselves.
But this is nothing new, of course, this idea that women are manipulated in order to undermine their power as a mass. Even before the plague, we see that Hazel’s study of female beauty is personal, that she admits to a fear of beautiful women, that she sees these women as “others”. In her affair with her Professor “Mann”, she has set herself in opposition to his wife. She smiles apologetically to men being harassed by women in the street. When she finds herself pregnant, she admits, “The academic feminist part of me felt defeated: devastated by biology, I had run out to get by hair done as a balm.”
Hazel’s few friendships and alliances with women are shattered as individuals try to navigate their respective ways to safety. When Hazel is put into quarantine, she leaves a friend at the border; she takes advantage of her oldest friend; she leaves vulnerable women stranded so as not to put herself in harm’s way. “Power comes in subtle degrees.” “If you come from very little, why give up privilege?” But Hazel ultimately finds herself entirely powerless to her biological destiny and to patriarchal tyranny when the plague and its circumstances make impossible her choice to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. Schultz shows how change creeps in little by little so that to a feminist academic, lack of access to abortion can become almost remarkable.
The Blondes is powerful and solid, gripping and scary. And if it had a soundtrack, I”ve no doubt that this song would be on it.
August 13, 2012
The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny
Louise Penny’s latest Chief Inspector Gamache novel The Beautiful Mystery was a present I gave myself, the nicest way to come down after returning home from a perfect holiday. My second Louise Penny, after A Trick of the Light, but this time far removed from Quebec’s Eastern Townships. When a murder occurs at the remote Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups monastery, the cloistered monks are forced to break their vow of silence and open their doors to outsiders, because the murder has been committed by one of their own.
The entire novel takes place over just two days, during which Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir have been stolen away from their domestic arrangements in Montreal to take the case on. The separation is particularly significant for Jean-Guy who has just made solid his relationship with Gamache’s daughter Annie, though they’ve not yet told the world of their plans. Unable to access the internet or get a phone signal at the monastery, Annie and Jean-Guy send missives of love via Blackberry messenger.
It’s a challenge Penny has set for herself, to situate a detective story in such a closed community in such a short period of time. All suspects present and accounted for, all identically clad and, until recently, silent. The challenge is heightened for Gamache and Beauvoir as well–the monks know their own world better than anyone, rarely betray themselves with errant words, and are adept interpreters of the police officers’ own gestures and facial expressions, skills learned from years of silent community. They’re a tough lot to crack.
The Beautiful Mystery of which the book’s title speaks is the effect of the monks’ Gregorian chanting, recordings of which had made their way into the world and made the reclusive order world-famous. In different ways, Gamache and Beauvoir fall under the spell of the chanting as they conduct their investigation. The chants themselves also take on significance as it’s the choir director who has been murdered. Could the chants themselves be key to understanding what stirred one of the monks to murder? And what of the mysterious music notation the choir director had been clutching in his hands when he died?
The investigation is further complicated by the unexpected arrival of Gamache’s superior, who’s determined to cause trouble in Gamache’s relationship with Beauvoir. What are his motives? Will the still vulnerable Beauvoir remain loyal to his boss? Are Gamache’s own motivations as innocent as they seem? In the other-worldly Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, it’s hard to tell who is friend or foe.
Penny’s distinctly stilted prose can be’ difficult to warm to, though it flows easily once the reader gets a sense of her rhythm. The novel is peppered with Gamache’s literary allusions and with pop culture references also, which add extra texture to her already substantial story. Its characteristically strong sense of place and connections to current events drive this point home even further, so that yes, as it begs to be said, Louise Penny has crafted another “beautiful mystery” of her own.
August 7, 2012
Above All Things by Tanis Rideout
Ever since I started thinking about these things, the question has occurred to me: what is this literary reflex triggered by books so far away from here and now that convince us that said books are great? Even though some of our best writers write books with titles like Small Ceremonies and or depict parents picking nits from each others’ heads, why are Canadian readers (and awards juries) so swept away by sweeping, by largeness, by grandeur?
And it doesn’t come any bigger than the the Mount Everest in Tanis Rideout’s first novel Above All Things. The second-biggest topic she tackles is the British Empire and its crumbling. There is a mention of Toronto in the novel, guaranteed to get us all a little giddy, but then George Mallory really doesn’t think much of the place: “Cold. Even after Everest. And grey and dark. The cold there pinned up down.”
That Rideout’s book and its inevitable acclaim will serve as fodder for brand new versions of the “Is Canadian writing un-Canadian?” argument, however, should not undermine the fact that the novel is actually quite extraordinary, really wonderful. Smartly designed with an arts and crafts font, a cover image meant for mass-appeal, marketed as “The Paris Wife meets Into Thin Air“, but yet there is a singularity to this novel. As I read it, I kept thinking, “If every book was as good as this, maybe publishing wouldn’t be in trouble after all.” It’s an ambitious task she takes on, what with empires and mountains, but Tanis Rideout pulls it off, takes the summit. I’ve been disappointed by so many novels lately whose mechanics have been evident beneath their surfaces, whose writer’s stretching has been all too clear, but Above All Things is so perfectly formed, not only a novel to get lost in but one whose literary-ness will surely take you higher.
Above All Things comprises the parallel stories of Ruth Mallory, and her husband George, the latter the mountaineer whose infamous ill-fated Everest attempt makes the novel’s outcome clear from the start. There are several links to Virginia Woolf– the novel’s opening chapter is titled “The Voyage Out”; Woolf herself appears as a character in the book, a contemporary of the Mallorys, well-known thanks to George’s Bloomsbury connections; and Ruth’s own story is told in a Mrs. Dalloway fashion, the hours in the day of a woman with a party to plan, who will buy the flowers herself.
Though it’s not a party she wants to have, necessarily, but she’s having it anyway to put a brave face to the world, to attempt to distract herself from her husband’s absence. It’s his second Everest attempt, though he’d promised he wouldn’t try it again. There is also the time he spent on tour in America, and the years he spent away at war, and so Ruth is accustomed to his absence, but it doesn’t make it easier. It doesn’t make her less resentful either, or less angry, as she meditates on all he’s chosen over her again and again, what it is to come second to a mountain.
Meanwhile George’s own story is told in alternating chapters, taking place over months where Ruth’s is in a single day. His pace furious, the stakes high, and he’s able to avoid meditation for the most part. Rideout goes into considerable detail about the practicalities of an Everest climb in 1924, the minutiae necessary to complete the task, and we begin to see that the boundaries between domestic and wild, between men’s stories and women’s, are not as solid as they seem. George’s single-mindedness means another point of view is required to complete his sections, and Rideout uses that of Sandy Irvine, a young climber only too eager to follow in George Mallory’s footsteps.
Above All Things is a love story, and also a puzzle– is it Mallory’s love for Everest or the love of his marriage that the title refers to? What is a love story whose trajectory is two people moving further and further apart? Rideout writes of her inspiration from the real life letters that George and Ruth wrote to one another, and of how she used the letters as a jumping-off point to change these historical characters to fictional people. She subverts notions of marriage to show it as a many-textured thing, rife with compromise and betrayals upon which love itself doesn’t necessarily hinge. The story also has contemporary resonance in our time in which men are still being urged towards a “duty” that involves dying for their country, in which we’re still learning how to be in a world whose corners are nearly all explored.
So what does it mean then, that I’ve been swept away again? Impressed that this Canadian writer has imagined her way into these historical lives, imagined her way to the top of the world? I’m getting savvier though, and I can tell you this: sometimes the same old arguments have nothing to do with the matter, and I also know a really good book when I see it.
August 6, 2012
The water was warm & the reading was good.
When I tell you that my vacation was wonderful, what I really mean is that I got a lot of reading done. Five novels, kind of six. I started with Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which was gripping and fun, the perfect beach read for a woman with a brain. The story of a man whose wife has disappeared but then we begin to see that he might have unabashedly been the one who disappeared her. It wasn’t a perfect crime novel– there were so many twists that I felt like I was chasing my tail– but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Next up was Bilgewater by Jane Gardam, which was a wonderful novel. I’d only read Gardam’s Old Filth before, and I’d found it weird, but now within the context of another of her books, I see that it was actually Gardam-esque. Bilgewater is the coming-0f-age story of a girl who has grown up without a mother, living with her eccentric father at a boy’s school, and must navigate her place in the world outside of that context. It would appeal to those who loved Jo Walton’s Among Others, minus the fantasy. Gardham absolutely trusts her reader and her text to light the way through the story, with no interference on the author’s part. She also so vividly illuminates such odd corners of Englishness, ones you never even imagined existed.
I remained Anglo-centric with a rereading of Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love, which is my favourite Pym and my first Pym reread since I finished the lot of them last year. I’m entranced by the novel’s meta-narrative, that Pym herself makes an appearence in a hotel dining room and one of her books is referenced as being on a character’s shelf (Some Tame Gazelle). There is much comparison to how life and fiction measure up, a statement that some people could walk onto the pages of a book and you’d never believe they were true. I also know more about Pym’s biography than I did first read, and see this book in connection to her own obsessive, usually unrequited love experiences, which were pretty much the story of my own (love) life for a substantial period. These aren’t stories that are put down in books so often, stalker-ish tendencies well-shy of bunny boiling. Pym is Austenish, certainly, but the solutions to the romantic problems she poses are less conventional than you’d think. She is a strange kind of mathematics that you’ve got to get a feel for to appreciate.
Next up was Tanis Rideout’s Above All Things, a Canadian novel but just as Anglo as the other two in subject matter. It’s very good and though it was a vacation book rather than a book for review, I’ve got much to say about it and will be posting a review this week. Felt just right to be reading it though as last year at the cottage, I read a biography of Gertrude Bell.
We made our annual trek to Bob Burns’ Books in Fenelon Falls on Monday while it rained, and I was so thrilled to find Barbara Pym’s unfinished novel Civil to Strangers. It’s almost impossible to find Barbara Pym books secondhand, so this was a find. I’m saving it for the future so I can continue to have unread Pym before me. I also was happy to find the book Fairy Tale by Alice Thomas Ellis, whose novel The 27th Kingdom blew my mind last year. I didn’t love this one as much, though the more I think about it, the more it gets under my skin. It’s a fairy tale quite literally, but also an English novel of manners. A young woman escapes to the Welsh countryside in search of a simpler life, and finds her general boredom relieved when she comes into possession of a changeling, tragic and rather hilarious results ensuing. Would appeal to anyone who admires Hilary Mantel’s supernatural stuff.
The sixth book was The Hunger Games, whose trilogy had kept Stuart as glued to the page all week as I am to books in general. I was happy to have a chance to read it as when we are at home, I have so many books to read that I don’t have the space for books like it. Predictably and disappointingly, however, I wasn’t very interested in it, and mainly skimmed the last two thirds. I kept comparing it to Bilgewater, which is a book about a similarly aged character and so much more interesting in terms of how it’s written. I found The Hunger Games so predictable, with a protagonist who we’re always meant to be on board with, who is obviously always going to win, and I was frustrated by how everything in the book required so much explanation, by how Katniss Everdeen is writing down to us. It’s sort of patronizing. I also don’t understand the YA preoccupation with post-apocalyptic worlds, how discussion of these books with young people is always meant to be issues based rather than about the book itself. It’s so prescribed. So there you go. I didn’t like the book so much, though I know I was approaching it wrong, I am not its intended audience, and I think I’d been spoiled by having read books all week long which were so brilliant.
Anyway, it was a fantastic week. We swam every day, played on the beach, I sat down so much it made my tailbone ache, loved hanging out with Stuart on the porch and playing games every evening, the weather was glorious, and Harriet was thrilled by not having to wear shoes for a week and running wild with a huge pack of kids to play with. It was perfect. We are lucky. And now we are also happy to be home.
July 19, 2012
Threading the Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry by Lorri Neilsen Glenn
“The essay wants to go its own way. In an unstable world, we want to know what we’re getting, and with an essay, we can never be sure. Partaking of the story, the poem, and the philosophical investigation in equal measure, the essay unsettles our accustomed ideas and takes us places we hadn’t expected to go. Places we may not want to go. We start out learning about embroidery stitches and pages later find ourselves knee-deep in somebody’s grave. That’s the risk we take when we pick up an essay.” –Susan Olding, The Trying Genre
In Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s essay collection Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry, we’re given a sense of what we’re getting with its first sentence, “This parcel of essay and verse and anecdote…”, and I love parcels. But it’s true that the reader embarks on the book with just just a vague idea of the parcel’s contents, unsure of where the sentences will lead. The title doesn’t help much either–my husband spotted the cover the other night, and was concerned a book exploring loss and poetry might send me melancholic (and as he has to live with me, he has a right to be concerned).
But it’s not like that at all; light is the word. The book takes its title from the painting by Mark Tobey which, Neilsen Glenn tells us, inspired John Cage to understand that “[w]hen we pay attention to anything–a bird wing, a man sleeping on an open grate, the horizon–it becomes a magnificent world worthy of your attention.” In her bookish parcel, Neilsen Glenn pays attention, digs to the foundations of her preoccupations, and most of these surround instances of loss, the irresolvable– a boyfriend’s suicide, her son’s disability, her mother’s death, the death of a friend, others’ losses, the crash of Swissair Flight 111 not far from her home ( a sound she thought was thunder). Compassion, late blooming (arm-in-arm with motherhood), war and sons, the domestic (“Whatever our differences, there is still laundry”), decades flying by, community and retreating, the art of losing, the gaps in women’s history, encounters with cultural others, on writing communities and the generosity and respect necessary for such communities to thrive. She is drawn to cemeteries, the graveyard in Halifax where the Titanic’s victims are buried, Margaret Lawrence’s grave. The shadows, of course, which come with the light. “The dead carry knowledge that the living cannot. It is we, here, now, who are in the dark.”
The book is the story of Neilsen Glenn’s own progress toward spirituality and poetry. Her narrative is circuitous, undulating, and if I traced it with a pencil, it would end up looking like the Mark Tobey painting. Which means that I’m having as much difficulty as the subtitle is in describing to you precisely what this book is, but I will tell you that the experience of reading it was was a pleasure. That it joins my list of amazing essay collections by Canadian women, books which I might line-up side-by-side and point to when I tell you, “Here’s my personal philosophy. Here’s what it’s all about.”
July 17, 2012
Mini Review: Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
I’ve been trying to appreciate the British author Penelope Fitzgerald for so long, because she seems the kind of writer who’d be right up my alley, plus she’s admired by readers I revere. But the novels I’ve read so far have failed to take with me. I’ve read her novels contentedly enough, but then been baffled by what to make of their shapes, of their wholes in the end. The problem has not been hers but mine, I think, and I’ve really been quite determined to make our relationship work. And I think we may have finally had a breakthrough with her novel Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979. Which had several things working to its benefit, as a matter of fact. First, that I read it while I was away last weekend, and I do find the books I read on pleasant holidays are always better thought of than usual. And further, I found a London Tube Pass stuck in my copy, which I bought second-hand (and whose cover is less attractive than this one). It was a weekend pass from 2003, and I love the idea that someone had this book on their own holiday. And while the Underground doesn’t factor so much in this story which takes place on its backstreets and on the Thames, it is still such a London book and so the tube pass seemed like the perfect prize.
Offshore is a messing about in boats book, about a group of Londoners in the 1960s who make their homes on barges tied up on Battersea Reach (which, obviously, has changed a bit since then). The boats are all in rough shape, their residents as unsteady in their lives as on land. The exception to this is Richard who has far more choice about where to live than the others, but takes to his boat anyway, The Lord Jim, much to the consternation of his wife Laura. He finds himself attracted to his neighbour Nenna James, who lives on Grace with her two precocious daughters who delighted me. Nenna’s husband has left her, and she’s unsure of how to get him back, or whether she wants to, which is not to say that she doesn’t love him, but she loves living on Grace most of all, even if she realizes that the precarious state of her life at the present has left her daughters troublingly vulnerable.
There is also Maurice, the male prositute who’s sheltering stolen goods in his barge for a shady character who’ll bring ill-fortune to the community, and Willis , a marine artist, whose boat is full of holes and who is hoping to get it sold while the tide is out so that nobody notices. And Nenna’s daughters, Tilda and Martha who swagger around the gangplanks, searching for treasure when the tide is out so they can buy Cliff Richard records, and who refuse to go to school because the nuns make a point of praying for them, for their father to come home.
The plot is small, but every gesture is inspired, with meaning. And often, even in its meaninglessness, the way life goes. One thing can happen, and then another, and another, with no connection between them except that each makes everything a little worse, and I thought of this when Nola is left without her purse and then is assaulted and has her shoes stolen so that she ends up coming home with bleeding feet. In its meaningless, the world is mean, but then there is illumination by human character and genuine connections between people, those moments when these people who are each adrift spy light upon the shore.
The ending is abrupt and unsettling, and reminded me of maybe why I don’t like Penelope Fitzgerald after all. For why can’t she tuck her characters safely into bed at the end of the story, on settled weather on dry land, but then that’s not how her books go, nor how life goes either. And I make sense of all of this with an analogy as to how I came to love the short story, by not yearning for more than what the author can give but making sense of that gift instead, of its limits. And acknowledging that it’s a powerful story after all whose characters are not finished with final page, that an author who gives us this really does give us something of enormous value.
And the the point is that Offshore‘s people are never going to find their proper moorings, really, which is the point of Offshore‘s people, of the Thames itself, running softly:
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
July 11, 2012
Valery the Great by Elaine McCluskey
“He loved the feel of a paperback tucked in his back pocket like an overflowing wallet,” is a line that turns up on the first page of Elaine McCluskey’s Valery the Great, the first paragraph even, and it had me thinking (rightly) that here is a book I would love. McCluskey’s stories are glimpses, conversations overheard, and collected they create a walking tour of small-town Maritime life. Her voice is scathing, very funny, her stories twisting at the end to leave me a bit stunned. And their stucture– you just hold on for dear life with no clue where the stories will take you, and sometimes you want to avert your eyes, but you can’t help looking, looking so hard you hardly know what comes next.
Here is a book that left me wanting to reread Joan Didion, because of how McCluskey similarly lays the facts out, the details pointing the way and never meaning what you think they mean. There is a similar coldness too, a brutality, but it’s easier to take, of course, because McCluskey is very funny at the same time, has a delicious feel for the absurd. I read Ramona Dearing’s collection So Beautiful recently, and McCluskey’s approach is similar. Both authors have a terrific ability to get into all manner of heads.
The book begins with Floyd Barkhouse, he of the back pocket paperback, media liaison for the Wahoo Volunteer Search and Rescue Team, who’s been feeling a bit redundant in the empty weeks since anybody’s needing searching or rescuing. The story, “The Favourite Nephew”, captures the sinister edge to a not-so-simple picture of rural life. “Maurice” follows a dwarf boxing manager from childhood to old age, contains the line, “No wonder I punched so many guys in the mouth. Half the bastards probably deserved it.” “Little Eric” is an unlikely love story, from the perspective of a loyal donut shop patron (and with an ending that made my heart soar).
And speaking of endings, oh, the title story, abouta a figure skater from a New Brunswick city (a place with one legion hall and a curling club) who ends up travelling with the Russian Circus on Ice (with two bears), humour and heartbreak entwined, and you never do see the GMC Suburban coming. And then the ending to “I Visited the Grand Canyon”, about a woman who’s cataloguing former boyfriends for a reason that will leave you in need of recovery. The ending of “Blossom” is the best punchline ever.
There’s a lot of death and injury in these stories, even murder. But then McCluskey tap dances around the tragedy in a glorious spectacle, and the routine is beautiful. Her characters are downtrodden, dealing with their own problems by taking it out on others. Two characters are small-town newspaper reporters who seek distraction in mundanity from the problems of their own lives. Young people who use sport as a vehicle to get into the world, but then the vehicles run out of gas. There are clandestine affairs and intrigue, keen younger brothers and stupid sidekicks. Plus a story named after Maury Povich, a boy whose fate is to receive Tupac-related gifts every birthday, and references to Twitter and Facebook (and how death is handled in the latter) which makes these stories seem so right now.
I loved this book, a short story collections whose curation had as much thought put into it as the stories themselves, a fantastic package with a gorgeous design. In addition to considerable talent, there is furious energy at work here, McCluskey giving it her all, and as a result, reading was a pleasure.
July 9, 2012
Acquainted With the Night by Christopher Dewdney
I’m not sure if last Friday evening was necessarily so enchanted, or if I noticed the enchantment in particular because I was reading Christopher Dewdney’s Acquainted With the Night. It was hot out, the city with all its doors and windows flung open, and we’d just come home from an evening swim at Christie Pits, where I would have liked to stay and watch the darkrise, as Dewdney notes that Christie Pits is a prime viewing location, but alas, we had a little one to put to bed. And once she was put to bed, we sat out on our porch catching whatever we could of an evening breeze, and we could hear our downstairs neighbours in the yard below us, and similar sounds from backyards and front porches up and down the street, the city alive with murmurs and bursts of laughter.
I read Christopher Dewdney’s Soul of the World last year, and delighted in its breadth. Acquainted With the Night is a previous book, but a similar approach, Dewdney taking a commonplace idea and illuminating its extraordinary and unknown aspects, tying together science, philosophy, literature, art, history and particle physics. So yes, it’s non-fiction, which means that I’ve spent most of the last week greeting friends with, “So, did you know that an owl can’t move its eyes in their sockets and that’s why their heads swivel round?”
Dewdney takes us through the night, hour by hour, discussing the physics of sunset, just why the night is dark, the night as portrayed in the works of Maurice Sendak, or in the adventures of nocturnal animals. Then onwards to the revolutionary advent of streetlamps, of night shifts, the science of sleep, of dreams and nightmares (and did you know that its possible for your nightmares to kill you?). On creatures of the night from Frankenstein’s monster to UFOs, to constellations and their accompanying stories, to insomnia and moonshine (and moonshine). The only thing I missed was a bit about the worst night-shift ever, which is sitting in a rocking chair holding a tiny bundle of baby in your arms whose wide-open saucer eyes refuse to fucking close.
To read Dewdney is to take a leisurely stroll with the smartest man you ever knew. He grounds the book in his narrator’s voice, this guiding character appearing in and out of the text to take the your hand and guide your through, giving the impression that this book which is seemingly about absolutely everything is also about the individual person and the experience of being in the world.
