booklit

Ever since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road came out, Jim Crace’s tenth novel, The Pesthouse, itself dealing with a future America, has had less attention. But, Picador have recently released his back catalogue in new paperback editions and, since I’d never read him before, I thought it better to start way back at the start of his literary career rather than cut in so late. So it was that I came to Continent (1986), winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize.

Personally, I’m not sure that this is a novel, being a series of short stories, seven in total. But if David Mitchell is getting away with it today, there has to be a precedent. And Continent may just be it. The short stories are all told outwith any particular over-arching storyline, the only constant thread being the continent of the title: a seventh, somewhere in our world, with its own customs, languages, and history; its own flora and fauna; a selection of animals, exotic and not so.

This other land, however, is in no way hermetic and the influences of the western world are infringing upon it. In the opening story, Talking Skull, Crace sets out the stall that characterises the book, introducing the dual themes of trade and superstition. Here a man returns from a western education eager to impart his new found capitalist ways, only to learn that he can exploit superstition in order to make his money, as regards bogus freemartin milk, which some believe aids fertility:

“You and science would tell me that coffee doesn’t sober, doesn’t relax, doesn’t revive, doesn’t welcome, that it shortens my life, costs a fortune, disrupts the economy of Brazil, and if left to long in the pot will corrode the silver. But try to stop me drinking it! I don’t care for the dictatorship of science. Nor do your neighbours. Freedom of choice. Deceive yourself at will, that’s the motto of the nation. Harness superstition. Turn it to your advantage. Milk it dry!”

It’s a multi-layered story, taking in both the effect of modernisation upon tradition and the differences between rural and urban life along the way, all the time mixing myth with the hard-hitting reality of our world. In fact, this is the pattern for all seven stories, each varied in content, holding a surreal mirror up to our world and putting words to the reflection, whether it be looking at the effects of introducing new customs to a culture (Cross-country) or the repercussions of supply and demand (Sins and Virtues).

While the stories for the most part are subtle in their underlying ideas, Electricity hits you with all the subtlety of…well, an electric shock. Unashamedly blatant story it accounts a time when a town, after much petitioning of office by someone called Awni, is connected to the grid, the villagers amazed at this new magic line the streets to see the “mangoes of light”. Regarding this, the local teacher has a grim prediction:

‘Soon’, he says, ‘thanks to Awni’s obsequious petitions, this town, with its oil lamps, its hand pumps, its long nights, its stillness, will be a powered cauldren of heat and light and sound. It will spin with electricity. And it will disappear.’

That the town could become like any other brings the question of identity to communities and what they stand to lose from ongoing commercialisation. And the notion of spinning with electricity foreshadows the eventual disaster in which the story culminates, once again landing on a bed of superstition.

There were times in reading Continent that I found Crace’s voice too similar from one story to the next, especially on those employing the first person. While it keeps the tone of the book consistent I couldn’t help feel that individual voices needed to be heard. But, that grumble aside, each story is a wonderfully crafted piece of layered fiction that complements the whole, making a landscape that is fantastical and believeable at the same time.

Don DeLillo is an author I’ve been wanting to read for some time but have never got round to, for two reasons. The first, stupidly, is that his novel Underworld sticks in my mind as too large to entice me to read him just yet, despite there being plenty of other novels to choose from. And the second? Well, he’s considered heavyweight in the world of American letters, past and present, so - like Saul Bellow, who I never get far with - I considered myself not yet ready for him.

Not so, it seems, although I did choose a novella as my entry point. The Body Artist (2001), on reading internet scraps, is not typical of DeLillo’s work in that its canvas isn’t wide reaching but, instead, contained. Minimal, even. And, in keeping things minimal, the plot is fairly thin on the ground, too, preferring to tell the story of Lauren Hartke, a performance artist; and doing so with a fine display of writing that charts her grief, mixing in a thread of metaphysical intrigue.

The Body Artist begins with a wonderful scene where Lauren and her husband, the thrice married film director, Rey Robles, have breakfast in their rented coastal home. Over the course of this meal, described in intimate detail, they concern themselves with mundane things, such as shaking the orange juice to loosen the pulp, studying the newspaper, and turning the radio on and off…and on and off. And through all this there are stuttered conversations as they half-hear each other because they are struggle to break away from their own thoughts:

She took a bite of cereal and looked at another story. She tended lately to place herself, to insert herself into certain stories in the newspaper. Some kind of daydream variation. She did it and then became aware she was doing it and then sometimes did it again a few minutes later with the same or a different story and then became aware again.

But what Lauren doesn’t realise is this is the last she’ll see of Rey as, as the obituary following this opening chapter states, he dies of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in the apartment of his first wife. The rest of the novel investigates Lauren’s grief, taking us deep inside her head where it seems she’s most comfortable.

With the story being this thin, DeLillo needs to generate interest somehow and he does so by having Lauren discover a young man holed up in a little used room of the house. As to who he is, she doesn’t know, and any attempt to address this is complicated by his speech being out of time, flitting from mimicked snatches of conversations between her and Rey to the words she has yet to speak in a voice that is “reedy and thin and trapped in tenses and inflections, in singsong conjugations”.

Where The Body Artist starts off as a delight it soon slides to a steady stream of Lauren’s mind working away at the nature of time and reality and, to be honest, I was lost. Bored and lost, yet this is probably the author’s intention as, in a journalist’s take on Lauren’s latest performance, I feel like part of her audience:

The piece, called Body Time, sneaked into town for three nights, unadvertised except by word of mouth, and drew eager audiences whose intensity did not always maintain itself for the duration of the show. Hartke clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully. This is what happened, causing walkouts among the less committed.

They missed the best stuff.

Thankfully, I was committed despite not truly “getting” The Body Artist, perhaps because I never felt it was well concluded and my mind would wander from all the philosophical content at crucial moments. The best stuff was the prose, which certainly wasn’t missed, even if I didn’t know what the hell it was all saying. But despite all the temporal discussion, I still think I enjoyed this novella and believe that I may yet get something from it. With the benefit of time, of course.

With the Man Booker 2007 being over, and Self Help (Pravda, to US readers) long since fallen from the competition I approached Edward Docx’s second novel with indifference. The cover, being as basic as it is, didn’t scream out to be read and at over five hundred pages I wasn’t exactly looking forward to ploughing through it. I’m glad I did, if only for completism as regards my (unenforcable) pledge to read all thirteen longlisted titles. But I’m left to leave this novel the same way in which I came to it: indifferent.

Set in varying stages across London, Paris, and St Petersburg, it tells the story of the Glover family, scattered as far afield as the story itself. There’s the twins, Gabriel and Isabella, in London and New York, respectively. Over in Paris is their estranged father, Nicholas. And, in St Petersburg, the twins’ mother, Maria. Also skulking about in the storyline is a Russian named Arkady Artamenkov, for whom life has been spent growing up in orphanages.

With all these characters Self Help takes a serious number of pages just to introduce them and it does so using with the predicament that Maria has died. And so it goes that these scattered players come to look at their lives, make plans - sometimes, even, make changes - and come together to find that:

…when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat, but rise from their sarcophagi instead, and move out across the borders of the mind…

Gabriel has two women in his life, Isabella is prone to giving up on things - jobs, relationships - at a whim, and Nicholas, since separating with Maria ten years previous, has been enjoying a bi-curious and lavish lifestyle. And Arkady? Well, even the dead have secrets.

The storyline, for the most part, is enjoyable and believable; the dialogue between similarly. There are occasional flashbacks given chapters in their own right to fill in history - and there’s even more backstory when attempting to flesh out minor characters. Ultimately, given all the strands making up this story, Docx does a fine job of seeing them all to a logical and apt conclusion with some fine plotting.

But my biggest problem with Self Help was Docx’s writing. There’s no doubt skill there but he likes to indulge - strain, sometimes - in over elaborate metaphors and similes:

The naked body of this other human being entranced him, engrossed him, bewitched him like a river god rising in vapours of jasmine and myrrh with a different violin sonata for each of his senses.

And, when not indulging, Docx has the habit of thickly layering his metaphors, one atop the other, as if asking the reader to pick whatever suits them best. A better writer would pick the most illustrative example, discard the others, and move on. Here, the many instances of said deed pad out the novel way beyond necessity. Further padding comes by way of overlong meditations and an annoying stylistic tic that frequently sees the author either repeat or run through all permutations of a phrase. But there are many occasions when the writing works, to capture the sense of a place, such as a Russian bar where :

…there were no drinks on display save single example cans or bottles of the range available - one Russian beer, one Polish beer, vodka, vodka, vodka, cheap, cheaper, cheapest - each standing strangely spaced across the solitary shelf.

While none of the characters in Self Help are likeable, their story is interesting enough although there was one character, an Englishman living in St Petersburg, who felt extraneous - as if he were only there to help Arkady move the plot forward. There’s a suspicion that Gabriel may be a cipher for Docx himself, the twin of Isabella being there to balance whatever history he’s working out - no doubt a bad father. It makes the writing of Self Help seem cathartic compared to the Self Help! (note the exclamation mark) magazine that Gabriel works on.

Given its length and serial verbosity, it’s easy to see why Self Help didn’t make it to the eventual shortlist. While it’s a hard hitting story of identity, family, and relationships touching upon exile, drug addiction, and career disatisfaction, its cast of selfish bourgeoisie types makes it hard to give a damn about them. Unless that’s your thing then you’re better off helping yourself to something other than Self Help.

Alan Hollinghurst’s fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, follows the story of Nick Guest, a lodger of the wealthy Fedden family, through the landslide years of the Conservative government in the 1980s. A bildungsroman, split into three sections, it observes Nick over four years as he climbs the social ladder, led by his dreams of wealth, status, and beauty, which ultimately lead to his downfall.

Nick has engineered his rise by befriending, at university, the son of minor MP Gerald Fedden, Toby, to whom he is attracted. Post-Oxford, he has moved into the home of the Feddens, an invite from Toby. The tale follows Nick’s first romance with Leo, a black social worker, and then moves on to his relationship with a beautiful millionaire, before dwelling on his eventual downfall. Throughout these events, which make up the aforementioned sections, the author examines the 1980s socially, politically, and beautifully.

First, the language; The Line of Beauty’s prose is a homage to Henry James, and Hollinghurst has it perfect, his contemporary take allowing less ambiguity with description. And it’s the description that exemplifies this novel; long, sweeping sentences, realistic action, and colourful observations, of the players’ thoughts and expressions, all punctuated with enough dialogue to complete, without being indulgent, every scene. With such detail on display, the novel takes its time, but the gradually developing arena Hollinghurst is showing us becomes a world in its own right.

Throughout the narrative, running at an unhurried pace, the characters are exemplary. The aesthete Nick Guest, so aptly named, searches for beauty in everything around him while being less than perfect himself. The Fedden patriarch, Gerald, an MP and philistine, chases his ambitions of having the Prime Minister, referred to as ‘the Lady’, to his house, and having his likeness realised by satirical puppet show, Spitting Image. Nick’s lovers (Leo, comic; the millionaire, hedonistic) draw empathy, while all the others in his life, having their positives and negatives traits, walk confidently off the page. Even Toby’s sister, Catriona, fittingly nicknamed ‘the Cat’, being the black sheep of the family, is perfectly realised, from her early neurosis, passing her chemically induced crests and troughs, to her rebellion from the family and unerring desire to tell the truth.

And the 1980s, as a setting, provides a reflection on a depressing period in British history: unemployment is on the rise, the rich are getting richer, and AIDS is a grim shadow waiting to kill those who aren’t careful. Moving in closer, to the London locations, the novel is rife with upper class dwellings, in which airy rooms are decorated with striking aesthetics despite the ignorance, Nick being the exception, of the occupants. The art, vases, paintings, and furniture, in the Feddens’ house serves only to demonstrate status, something Gerald is always striving to improve.

When Hollinghurst won the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty, it became the first piece of gay fiction to take receipt of the award. There are, as you may expect in such a book, some scenes of homosexual sex, but the author, with great skill, doesn’t delve too deeply into being graphic, ensuring a comfortable read, and, in doing so, reveals facets of gay life that, to many readers, may have been unknown before. is a triumph for literature; its characters are complex and engaging, its setting real without being nostalgic, and its themes thoroughly explored. It takes no moral stance, allowing the reader to decide as to the motivations of its characters and to their comeuppance. Its set pieces are incredibly wrought, the scene with Nick, high on cocaine, dancing with Margaret Thatcher, when Feddens achieves one of his dreams, being of particular merit. The humour also, for it is incredibly witty, shines out from the events and the dialogue, and it gives that little bit of light to what is, in essence, a tragic novel. At just over five hundred pages, it is a long book, but taking the time to read it proves that each page is worth it; in fact, it’s a book of beauty.