booklit

When the first edition of John Boyne’s The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas appeared, the blurb gave little away, noting, “Usually we give some clues about the book on the cover, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book.” On Chris Cleave’s second novel, The Other Hand (2008),  the blurb begins “We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book” and continues, cards close to its chest, to say “It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.” As oblique blurbs go, it’s not a patch on Boyne’s which hinted at the book’s content, rather than second guess the reader.

The cover - available in two colours - continues the gimmickry,  fetishising its collectability, noting that it’s a signed first edition. Most baffling is a page by Suzie Dooré (”I’m Chris Cleave’s editor, and I’m writing to tell you how extraordinary The Other Hand is…”). The intended effect is presumably drooling anticipation, but dislike seems more of a foregone conclusion.

Thankfully, the novel opens brightly, with Little Bee riffing on how she’d rather be a pound coin than an African girl:

How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalisation. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western civilisation, my good man, and make it snappy.

Rather than take that airport taxi, Little Bee has fled Nigeria for the United Kingdom by more illegal means and, having been stopped at immigration, has found herself detained for two years, an experience that has made her who she is today, a well-spoken young lady, in tune to the world around her:

I was born - no, I was reborn - in captivity. I learned my language from your newspapers, my clothes are your cast-offs, and it is your pound that makes my pocket ache with its absence. Imagine a young woman cut out from a smiling Save the Children magazine advertisement, who dresses herself in threadbare pink clothes from the recycling bin in your local supermarket car park and speaks English like the leader column of The Times, if you please. I would cross the street to avoid me.

As Little Bee tells her side of the story, the chapters alternate and intertwine with the story of Sarah O’Rourke, an editor for a women’s magazine that doesn’t quite know what it should be. At the outset Sarah tells us that her husband Andrew, himself a journalist, has taken his own life, for reasons unknown. Other than a young son - who dresses as Batman and quickly becomes tiresome - there doesn’t seem to be much understanding between the two, Andrew’s mind never being readable:

I had been standing on a bare concrete slab in our garden, asking Andrew exactly when the hell he planned to build his bloody glasshouse there. That was the biggest issue in my life - that glasshouse, or the lack of it. That absent glasshouse, and all other structures past and future that might hopefully be erected in the larger emotional absence between me and my husband.

Sarah regularly drops hints about her missing finger, never feeling the need to expand on them. It’s here that it becomes apparent that Cleave is telling the story rather than his characters - as the characters have little reason to hold back on expanding, the only reason can be that the author is deliberately withholding the information until he’s ready to share it. On page 132 we get the admission that “it was finally time to face up to what had happened on the beach”.

Similarly, Little Bee’s narrative, in constantly referring to how she learned the Queen’s English from newspapers, seems a cynical device to avoid the trouble of crafting a believable voice in a Nigerian dialect. Since usage of the Queen’s English only really features in two dealings with public servants, it can hardly be said that it’s crucial to the story, other than to raise her lingual skills above all around her. The question of what newspapers were read to get such a poetic flair to her voice lingers, too.

It’s clear to see that in writing The Other Hand Cleave wants to tackle hard hitting topics such as immigration and the effects of globalisation on the other cultures but he has a knack for unashamedly dropping his research into dialogue (”‘They gave you a pink form to write down what had happened to you. This was the grounds for your asylum application…’”)  Not to say that he doesn’t get things across more subtly, such as this exchange between Sarah and Lawrence, her lover, discussing Little Bee and British attitudes to immigration:

‘A detention centre? Christ, what did she do?’

‘Nothing. Asylum seekers, apparently they just lock them up when they arrive here.’

‘For two years?’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘I don’t believe her. Two years in detention? She must have done something.’

‘She was African and she didn’t have any money. I suppose they gave her a year for each.’

At the heart of The Other Hand is the notion of identity and all of the characters are, like Sarah’s magazine, trying to find who they are. After the hyped beach scene - yes, it is grisly - the book does become more interesting, but it can’t get away from a slim thread of grating humour - the O’Rourke’s son; Little Bee’s observations - and a glaze of sentimentality that ensure this little bee is more the bumbling sort whose buzz precedes it.

If the unnamed narrator of Andreï Makine’s The Woman Who Waited (2004) was of the same era as the titular woman he would have been packed up and sent off to war and learnt a bit about the harsh realities of life. But the war was thirty years ago and in the Russia of the 1970s, under Brehznev, this young man has instead been packed up and sent off to university, only to have his disdain for the government shaped by the enclave of of writers, artists, and other liberals he finds himself amongst.

That’s all backstory, however, to The Woman Who Waited, which begins years later, looking back at those years and, for the narrator, the event that lingers on in his memory. Back then he was an arrogant young writer who takes up an opportunity to head out from Leningrad to a desolate village in the rural north - where a handful of old woman and just enough childen to run a single room school live - to research the folklore of the people.

The village, however, has little folklore to share, any tradition it once had now in ruins due to the war:

For it was this that had erased all other legends from the popular memory. To these elderly inhabitants of Mirnoe it was becoming the one remaining myth, a vivid and personal one, and one in which the immortals, both good and evil, were their own husbands and sons, the Germans, the Russian soldiers, Stalin, Hitler. And more specifically, the soldier Vera was waiting for.

Vera, a woman in her mid-forties, is the woman our narrator becomes fixated by. Thirty years before her husband-to-be went off to war and never returned. Through all this time there’s little in her loss to suggest she has given up the ghost or that her unflinching hope has slipped into ritual:

At this crossroads there was a small sign fixed to a post bearing the name of the village, Mirnoe. A little below this a mailbox had been nailed to it, empty for most of the time but occasionally harbouring a local newspaper. Vera went up to the post, lifted the box’s tin flap, thrust her hand inside it. Even from a long way off I sensed that the gesture was not automatic, that it had still not become automatic.

To our narrator, she’s a simple person. Indeed all these village types are. While Vera continues the wait for her husband, she spends her time teaching the children, looking after the women of Mirnoe, and, when she allows herself time, taking off to the train station to wait once more. There’s nothing in their lives, from what he can intuit, that makes them his equal. On first meeting Vera, having heard about her story, he stupidly assumes that there is nothing about her that can surprise him:

I followed her with my eyes for a long time, struck by a simple notion that made all other thoughts about her destiny pointless: ‘There goes a woman,’ I said to myself, ‘about whom I know everything. Her whole life is there before me, concentrated in that distant figure walking beside the lake. She’s a woman who’s waiting for the man she loves for thirty years, that is, from time immemorial.’

But as the two spend more time together Vera continues to surprise our narrator, consistently challenging his every preconceived idea about village life, village people, and herself. When it was once thought fit for satire , it becomes clear that “these villages were quite simply abandoned or dying, reduced to a mode of survival not very different from the stone age”. He even finds himself, in relation to the world in which he grew up, coming to understand how irrelevant some things are:

‘I also realized that up here in Mirnoe all those debates we had in Leningrad, whether anti-Soviet or pro-Soviet, meant nothing. Coming here, I found half a dozen very old women who’d lost their families in the war and were going to die. As simple as that. Human beings getting ready to die alone, not complaining, not seeking someone to blame.’

Makine’s telling of the story is beautifully translated and eminently readable, the prose often lyrical, always engaging, the lightness of its meditations hiding the weight of their message which, like its haunting tone, echo long after the last page has been turned. To the narrator, by capturing Vera in prose “a kind of murder occurs” in the way that his attempt to portray her words prove a barrier to “this being of infinite and inexhaustible potential” - but it’s Vera who is able to move on by burying her past, while the reader just sits there, reflecting.

Looking at the cover of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen Of The Road (2007) I was reminded of similar volumes consumed in my youth wherein lay the swashbuckling tales of Robin Hood or fragmented accounts of Sinbad’s voyages, often accompanied by black and white illustrations that highlighted scenes from the text. The subtitle being ‘A Tale Of Adventure‘ confirmed what the mountains and men on horseback implied: that within there was a journey. Like most adventures, there is a reward so, seeking mine, I saddled up and hit the road.

As the title of his 2001 Pulitzer winning The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay shows, Chabon is no stranger to adventure, and I’ve wanted to read his work for some time. But ever since a 2002 essay decrying most literary short fiction Chabon’s work has, apparently, become increasingly genre inspired and I’ve been loathe to try it. Nostalgia for those adventure books of old, however, won out.

As we meet the titular gentlemen they come separate to a tavern in order to swindle the locals. The only thing that connects them is that they are both Jews, for the first is Amram, a large African, his skin “as lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle”, and his companion is, Zelikman, a “Frankish scarecrow” and surgeon of sorts. Fooling the locals they are strangers, their insults soon devolve into a staged brawl, which gives Chabon the chance to write action and he does so in a pleasing way:

It was a contest of stamina against agility, and those who had their money on the former began with confidence in the favorite and his big Varangian ax, but the African, angered, grew gross and undiscerning in his ax-play. He shattered a huge clay jar full of rainwater, soaking dozen outraged travelers. He splintered the wheel spokes of a hay wagon, and as the solemn Frank danced, rolled and thrust with his slender bodkin, the berserker ax bit flagstones, shedding handfuls of sparks.

Once discovered, however, they find themselves on the road with an offer they can hardly refuse. A king’s ransom to deliver a youth named Filaq to the Khazars in Azerbaijan. What would seem an easy enough task is pandered by mercenaries sent to eliminate the youth for he is heir to the khaganate, although a rogue general seeks to sieze power. The road ahead is one of action and discovery - mostly action, though - and an ever increasing body count, culminating in a possible reason for why the Khazars converted to Judaism, something which history doesn’t know.

There are wonderful moments in the book, small lines here and there that force an image, Amran”reading the alphabet of horseshoe prints” after a scuffle, or humorous similes of doing something as “easily as a sailor handling a blasphemy”. But these snippets don’t supplement the whole in what is a boring, verbose, fool’s errand of a book, bogged down in Chabon’s efforts to emulate classic adventure books while adding a literary sheen.

I admit that on reading Gentlemen Of The Road I found myself reading passages again, trying to pick up the information they carried, but the many terms I found obscure (ostler? mahout) never allowed me to truly settle into the narrative. And every time I did so I wanted to quit the adventure, to pack up and go home. For all its flash pretensions of adventure and capturing the genre it seeks to sit alongside, it forgets to pack the most important thing for the road: excitement.

When it comes to fiction I tend to have a preference that excludes novels revolving around war. No real reason - it’s just a topic that has never interested me. But, looking back at some of the novels I’ve read, it’s hard not to see that I’ve read my fair share (Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day, for example, or John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down), even if the war element appears tangentially. So it seems ludicrous that I should have, despite glowing recommendations, wanted to bypass The Welsh Girl, the debut novel from Peter Ho Davies. I’m glad I didn’t.

The Welsh Girl is a universal tale told within a wartime setting and it does so with such ease that it’s hard not to be swept away at the joyous prose and warm to its memorable cast of characters. To add to this, there’s depth to be had in the novel’s exploration of love, nationality, identity, and loyalty, as it braids the lives of its three main characters until they all come together in a single strand.

Set in rural Wales in 1944, The Welsh Girl opens with Captain Rotheram, a German Jew working for British Intelligence, interviewing Rudolph Hess in an attempt to assess his sanity for trial. After a time he gets orders to go north to a village where the staunchly nationalist population haven’t taken too kindly to the English soldiers on their turf and are further enraged that there’s a prisoner of war camp being built on their doorstep:

…the sappers are still called occupiers to some. It’s half in jest, but only half. The nationalist view is that it’s an English war, imperialist, capitalist, like the Great War that Jack fought in and from which he still carries a limp (not that you’d know it to see him behind the bar; he’s never spilled a drop).

In this prisoner of war camp there’s Karsten Simmering, a German soldier with some English at his disposal, who suffers the weight of his decision to surrender, believing it cowardice and wondering whether it would have been better to die. There, through the wire fence, he befriends Jim, a young evacuee from Liverpool, their regular exchanges his one connection with the outside world.

And then there’s Esther Evans, the Welsh girl of the title. At seventeen years, she’s the interest of many a boy’s eye, notably the postmistress’s son, Rhys, who has gone off to fight and Colin, an English sapper who her staunchly nationalist father would object to. While she works at the local bar, Esther’s dreams reach beyond the Welsh valleys to the romance of the world beyond:

She has her own dreams of escape, modest ones mostly - of a spell in service in Liverpool like her mother before her, eating cream horns at Lyons Corner House on her days off - and occasionally more thrilling ones, fuelled by the pictures she sees at the Gaumontin Penygroes.

These three characters, by virtue of the war, are brought together in the tangle of wartime drama. Questions are asked: on the nature of what it means to be Welsh, British, German, or Jewish; on whether surrendering is an act of cowardice; and on whether love truly knows no barriers. And surrounding them all as Davies narrative gets to the heart of these matters, is a supporting cast that flesh, but by no means pad, the story out, given it further depth and instilling equal parts humour and pathos.

The author’s prose, while seemingly dense, is actually light to read, and has a way of capturing a scene that with a few strokes, lets you know what’s happening, what people are thinking, in addition to colouring it with wonderful observations and attention to detail:

She settles herself, and he puts his hands in the small of her back and shoves firmly to set her off, and then as she swings he touches her lightly, his fingers spread across her hips, each time she passes. ‘Go on!’ she calls, and he pushes her harder and harder, until she sees her shiny toe tops rising over the indigo silhouette of the encircling mountains. When she finally comes to a stop, the strands of dark hair that have flown loose fall back and cover her face. She tucks them away, all but one, which sticks to her cheek and throat, an inky curve. He reaches for it and traces it, and she takes his hand for a second, then pushes it away. He’s on the verge of something, but she doesn’t want him to come out with it just yet, not until it’s perfect.

With The Welsh Girl being a debut novel (after two short story anthologies), it’s a huge surprise how assured and confident the author is with his material, with his characters, and with the questions he asks of his novel. It’s no surprise that Granta in 2003, despite not having a novel to his name, labelled Davies as one of Britain’s best young novelists, a tag he has surely delivered on. And with The Welsh Girl being on the Booker longlist, further plaudits and success must surely beckon for this fantastic writer. I certainly will be looking into his previous work - one promise I won’t be welshing on.

Jill Dawson’s Watch Me Disappear takes as its backdrop the Cambridgeshire Fens around the time of the Soham murders, dropping references in all but name. That the narrator, Tina Humber, should be there is purely coincidental, as she’s attending her brother’s wedding. The current brouhaha does have an effect however, as it brings to mind the memory of an old school friend, Mandy Baker, who went missing thirty years before, never to be found.

The novel follows Tina’s account of events back then and while she does think regularly of Mandy, it’s not about the missing girl so much as it is about the development of her own sexuality, whether it be from browsing some porno mags, reading smut in the News Of The World, or encounters with her first boyfriend. Events that occur between the ages of nine and fourteen, within the range mentioned by Nabokov in the quote, from Lolita, regarding nymphets that prefaces the novel. As the story - well, backstory - develops Tina comes to unearth memories (or perhaps they are just delusions caused by mild epilepsy) about the past that forces her to confront the past, something that may just be closer to home than ever thought possible.

Throughout the novel Dawson looks at the subjects of girls and sexuality, covering many bases. Boys. Sex. The paedophile threat. While at the same time there’s the flagrant way in which children, innocent of their appeal, are becoming highly sexualised at younger and younger ages such as one girl mentioned with the word ’sexy’ plastered across the seat of her jeans. That and the feeling of needing to live up to the image of women presented, exclusively it seems, in boys’ magazines.

The prose in Watch Me Disappear is tight, the content engaging. And none more so than when Tina describes an image, detail by detail, adding character to an absent friend:

Mandy is splashing, then dragging herself out by her arms, shuffling on her bottom along the sun-heated concrete lining the pool and reaching for the Tupperware bowl of warm strawberries, strawberries that taste of plastic; dipping them in the bowl of stiff cream. Her flat fringe, wet against her forehead. Her foot, fine bones at the arch, the colour of a perfectly baked cake, golden, rising, her toes like ten bright birthday candles, dipping small circles, little yellow light flames, in the water. Her stubborn bottom lip, what my mum called her pet lip, peachier, fatter than mine.

Clever Mandy Baker, with her clever tongue, licking the cream from her very last summer.

The evocation of the seventies feels successful. Whether it be mentions of Spangles, The Benny Hill Show, or John Noakes on Blue Peter, all nostalgic references are achieved without straining, the way I felt David Mitchell did for the eighties in Black Swan Green. And the recollection of a childhood, from an adult perspective put me in mind of Hisham Matar’s In The Country Of Men, although I found that extremely poor and clumsy read.

Another well done device that adds to the novel is Tina’s career choice. She’s a marine biologist specialising in seahorses. And while we don’t see much of her at work there are a number of passages looking at the lives, habits, and very nature of these creatures, passages which blend in with the reminiscences and reinforce the ideas on show.

Despite the lack of here-and-now action within the novel, there’s much still to be enjoyed. The characters are rendered well, all three dimensions intact, and the setting comes to life too. Having been introduced to Lolita parallels prior to reading the novel, I was trying to be attentive throughout but know that plenty will have passed me by. If not most.

When it comes down to it, the lack of actual plot isn’t a great loss, for the narrative is carried well by an efficient narrator who never once loses the thread of their story, which is one of sexual awakenings set around the need to confront the past. When I read Milan Kundera’s Ignorance I thought it was amazing to think how our individual memories colour our version of events and Watch Me Disappear is no different in that respect. It’s a great read. But that’s just how I remember it.