booklit

Science fiction has been in the news a lot these days, most notably with Kim Stanley Robinson’s much publicised criticism about the lack of recognition awarded to the genre by judges of the Man Booker Prize (although it’s likely that sf publishers don’t submit the works for consideration). It’s a genre that seems to want to break away from being ghettoised and obtain respectability, to prove that it’s a genre of ideas rather than, as stereotypes imply, the domain of nerds.

It’s not a genre that I would consciously gravitate to, put off as I am by the notion of space operas and many a sf cover, but I see no harm in sampling from time to time, although my preference would seem to go to those recognised as good examples of what science fiction is capable of, and it’s for this reason that I turned to Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell To Earth (1963). It’s probably better known for the film adaptation starring David Bowie but the original novel is an enjoyable journey in its own right.

The book opens in the year 1985 with our titular ‘man’ wandering around Kentucky and having his first experiences of interacting with human beings:

It was a woman, a tired-looking woman in a shapeless blue dress, shuffling towards him up the street. He quickly averted his eyes, dumbfounded. She did not look right. He had expected them to be about his size, but this one was more than a head shorter than he. Her complexion was ruddier than he had expected, and darker. And the look, the feel, was strange — even though he had known that seeing them would not be the same as watching them on television.

It is through television - and FM radio - that he has observed humanity before arriving on the planet from Anthea, his own world. To understand their ways helps in dealing with the “complex, long-prepared plan” he has come to effect. Said plan isn’t immediately explained but forms part of the novel’s mystery as we watch the rise of Thomas Jerome Newton (his assumed identity) from selling gold rings to small jeweller’s for lows sums to becoming a wealthy man by patenting and producing advanced technology for the market to consume under the umbrella of World Enterprises Corporation. The only hint as to what Newton needs the money for — his target amount is five hundred million dollars in five years — is in his answer to his patent lawyer, that it’s for a research project.

Being a novel set during the Cold War it’s no surprise that suspicion towards foreigners should feature in the novel, and with his meteoric rise in status, Newton begins to inspire the doubts of many people, notably Robert Bryce, a chemical engineer who, upon seeing one of the W.E. Corp’s new products - a self-developing camera film - concludes that it “It’s got to be a whole new technology…somebody digging up a science in the Mayan ruins…or from some other planet…” and burrows his way into Newton’s employ in order to sate his curiosity.

The relationship between Newton and Bryce is an interesting one as the initial suspicion over Newton’s true origins leads to an eventual friendship, and also allows us into Newton’s existential quandary. He’s a man alone in the world, different to everyone on the planet and losing his identity the more he lives as a human and yearns to out himself as an Anthean.

Then he spoke aloud, to himself, in English. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘And where do you belong?’

His own body stared back at him; but he could not recognize it as his own. It was alien, and frightening.

While the novel’s title could be read literally, about a man falling to Earth, the truer premise lies in Newton’s decline in purpose. From intentions to serve a masterplan his Anthean self begins to disintegrate under the gravity of human ways, accelerated by a certain closeness to his low status housekeeper, who introduced him to gin and taught him “that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever”, and the thought of his own people loses its importance:

…he, the Anthean, a superior being from a superior race, was losing control, becoming a degenerate, a drunkard, a lost and foolish creature, a renegade and, possibly, a traitor to his own.

Tevis’ prose isn’t particularly showy, he deals mostly in facts and details and drifts through the minds of his characters. But in Newton he lingers longer and captures well the loneliness and sorrow that can affect a man who stands alone, obsessed with “vague guilts and vaguer doubts” and with no real confessor in his midst. His decline almost feels inevitable and with the ongoing questioning of himself (”…was it merely that a man surrounded by animals long enough became more of an animal than he should?”) Tevis achieves an agreeable balance of depth alongside pacier sections.

Toward the end of the book there is a mention of the Watergate scandal that, for a book written in 1963 is remarkably prescient, and would hint at Tevis having made later amendments to his work. The pictured edition doesn’t make mention of this and one wonders what other changes may have been made to the original text. But original text or updated probably doesn’t matter for The Man Who Fell To Earth is a satisfying tale that contains a wholly science-fiction premise but delivers it lightly with little emphasis on the science and much more on the fiction..

When it comes to writing a novel, there are two approaches: doing it for the art and doing it for the money. In James Meek’s novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008), Adam Kellas is doing it for the money. And why not? His career as a warzone reporter is fraught with danger and journalists in his line of work go from one contract to the next. Writing a commercial thriller and the subsequent sales would give him the security he needs in order to sit down and write the books he really wants.

And security is what he needs, what with a divorce behind him, adding to a history of relationships which never work out and he finds difficult to get over. One such affair was with an American journalist, Astrid, during his time in Afghanistan. Yet one day, while boarding a helicopter, she jumps out as it’s taking off and he never sees her again. It’s no surprise that such a lack of closure should play on his mind. That he should let it guide him, well that’s another matter.

So when he receives an email from Astrid asking him to come and see her, he doesn’t think twice about boarding a plane, without even so much as a coat. (”He had wanted to see her for a year and now she asked to see him, and he was coming.”)

The subsequent journey fills the greater portion of the novel, although little of the journey is described. Not because it would be boring, but because Kellas is too busy wrestling with recent events to notice what’s going on. Women have left him, he’s quit his job (the book advance is a six figure sum), the war is getting to him, and in one explosive set piece, he lays waste to his best friend’s house. It’s no surprise, therefore, to hear the announcement of ‘we are now beginning our descent’ as the plane comes into New York. But for Adam Kellas, he has already begun, casting off partners, his job, and friends along the way.

That Kellas was inadequately dressed for the season marked him as a loser. The suit and shoes were plain enough warning in themselves that here was someone in themidst of their descent from security to insecurity, a man yet to settle in his new location on the bottom.

Like Kellas, Meek is no stranger to reporting from undesirable countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. So, with the benefit of experience, the sense of place brought to the novel’s locations is impressive and feels authentic. One can almost imagine the half-buried Soviet machinery “digested by the tissue of the road” and the feeling of being there, as it happens, with other journalists pushing for stories in the face of tragedy really shines through:

A barefooted Afghan man in grimy grey clothes and a gold cap squatted in the dirt in fron of the bombed house. it was his house. The explosion had killed his wife while she was sewing clothes for a wedding, and wounded his two children, his mother and brother. He squatted near the ruins, with his long clay-stained red hands resting on his knees, and reporters came to ask him questions. He answered, although he could not meet their eyes. For hours he had a changing little group of people standing awkwardly in front of him in western clothes, taking his picture, writing down his words and filming him. The same set of questions would be asked, and the Afghan man, whose name was Jalaluddin, would answer, and when that group of journalists was halfway through, another set would arrive and get him to start again from the beginning.

The authenticity of the Afghan landscape is never in question. Meek has lived and breathed it. But there are occasions in the novel where he let’s his grip on the narrative slip and intrudes on the story. Dialogue is usually spot on but is sometimes guilty of pushing ideas rather than relaying believable statements and sentiments. And a couple of events are implausible, even if they do get the story back on track. And going off track, even if it mirrors Kellas’ descent, his mind a maelstrom of regrets, is the hardest part of reading the novel. That and regular passages of lengthy paragraphs that can be suffocating in their relentlessness.

Where it picks up - or takes off, should that be? - is when the ideas behind the novel come to the fore. At its core it’s a novel about love and friendship, and about how people are never - and never can be - who we make them out to be. Layered over this, using Kellas’ novel as its emblem, is a criticism of modern society that has dumbed down and gone in search of the dollar; that has, like Adam Kellas, been seduced by America.

It would subvert the genre by making America the enemy - not a group with America, but the American government, the American majority, and the American way…Readers would be made to believe in a limited war to save civilization…

With the current political climate involving efforts to bring “the American way” to nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Meek is perhaps right that culture has begun its downward flight. But We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is not the novel to combat it, being a lesser novel to Meek’s previous effort. One wonders if The People’s Act Of Love was him doing it for the money, allowing him the leisure of writing what he wants to write. And while he slips in some remarkable imagery and turns of phrase, and proves himself more than capable of penning effective set pieces, these are lost in an abundance of prose, forcing indigestion on the tissue of the page.

Having read a novel by John Fante a couple of years back I was interested in reading something by his son, Dan. From what I understand, Fante fils is more in the mould of Charles Bukowski, who was apparently inspired to write by Fante père. With an output spanning novels, plays, and poetry, the lazy comparison is there. And having not yet sampled Bukowski, I’m afraid I’ll have to remain lazy on that.

But what better way to introduce oneself to an author than by diving into a collection of short stories? Corksucker (2005), or Corksucker (Cab Driver Stories From The L.A. Streets), to give it its full title, is Fante’s first such collection (published as Short Dog in the US) and follows the thread of Mickey Di Salvo’s life, which centres around, as the title implies, taxi driving, as he goes from one scrape to the next, grasping each day by the scruff of the collar and trying to hold on, despite alcoholism, rocky relationships, and a perennial lack of cash.

Hack driver is the only occupation I know with no boss and because I have always performed poorly at supervised employment, I returned to the taxi business. The up side, now that I was working again, was that my own boozing was under control and I was on beer only except for my days off.

Di Salvo, an alter-ego of Fante, first person narrates each of the eight stories in Corksucker. While he wishes he weren’t a cab driver and depends on alcohol to get him through the day, he’s always working on his novel or scribbling down a poem a day. With literary dreams never being realised and a tendency to the bottle, Di Salvo isn’t the most stable of characters and this comes to the fore, often providing the stories’ impetus. And his style of narration is wonderfully crude, with good humour, and the occasional epiphany draped in expletives that, despite their frequency, never seem excessive.

In Wifebeater Bob, Di Salvo metes out justice to a hotel doorman who always wants a cut of the taxi drivers’ takings, while at the same time trying to raise the cash to retrieve his manuscript, which his girlfriend is holding to ransom. Then, in Mae West, our narrator leaves the taxi alone for a bit and deals with his relationship his girlfriend, a different girl from the previous story. If he’s going to go on living with her then she wants him to sort his drinking out, to try rehab, which he does, learning a trick or two along the way. And if he’s going to continue living with here, there’s the matter of her dog, Banana, which plain doesn’t like him:

In the beginning, the month I first moved in, I’d made up this game: I would hold up two fingers to the animal in a sort of ‘V’ for victory Nixon-type signal, then whisper his name. “Ba-Nana.” “Ba-Nana.”

It pissed the dog off. I knew it pissed him off, but I did it anyway. Mostly it was when I was on the juice that I did it but, in retrospect, I can see that I’m responsible for instigating our mutual hatred.

Caveat Emptor and Marble Man, one a story where sexually transmitted diseases are an occupational hazard and the other where Di Salvo takes a break from cab driving, tries telemarketing, and ends up taking his boss’s wife (”blond, silicon-titted”) to view a potential sublet. These were rather lightweight and, truth be told, I remember little of the latter merely hours after reading it.

Of the other stories, Princess is memorable for its tale of a junky couple feeding an insatiable python whose appetite for food isn’t affordable, especially when they’d rather spend it on getting high. And Thebobby lapses into an enjoyable screenplay which, given that a character mentions that Di Salvo should write a screenplay about him, is a nice little trick. Renewal, where he comes round from a blackout in a cinema, with trousers round his ankles and a transvestite nearby inspires a Did I? moment, but soon slips into a visit to City Hall to get his license renewed. And closer, 1647 Ocean Front Walk, brings Di Salvo the closest he’s been to love, ending on a sad, optimistic note, which takes him away from cab driving for good:

I hated being stuck driving a cab. Since taking the gig again, my life had been drained of meaning. Stalled. The taxi business extracts the vital fluids from a man’s body twelve-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week, a drop at a time. L.A. cab driving isn’t useful work. It is human refuse relocation, the transportation of decomposing flotsam from one plastic fast food neighborhood to the next.

While I prefer the US title due to its dual meaning - a cheap drink or Di Salvo, himself, who is touchy about his size - it’s no matter as it’s the contents that ultimately matter. And each page of Corksucker is a fun, booze-soaked exploration beneath L.A.’s shiny facade, showing, even amongst all the oddballs he encounters, the humanity within. It’s worth jumping in for a ride, and while I wouldn’t usually advocate it, it’s probably the safest you can ever come to recreational drink driving, from one book neighbourhood to the next.

Although it’s a stereotype, sometimes it seems all an Irish writer has to do is take a populous family, spice it up with alcoholism, suicide, some sexual abuse, and then garnish it with an undercurrent of Catholicism. Anne Enright takes this formula in The Gathering and bleaches the prose to the point that all colour is removed. If the spicy topics are grim by nature, then this novel is all the more grim thanks to its unrelenting bleak outlook on life.

Liam Hegarty has went the way of Woolf, weighing himself down with stones and drowning. After this, the remaining nine siblings of the family (three are dead, another seven miscarried) gather in Dublin for his wake. Closest to him is Veronica, our narrator, and The Gathering follows her attempt to confront an event, in 1968, she admits she is “not sure if it really did happen”. It’s this turning point in their lives that Veronica believes has led to her brother’s alcoholism and eventual suicide at forty.

Further to the contemporary story (which amounts to collecting Liam’s body and the funeral) Veronica Hegarty’s story heads back to 1925, where she imagines a love triangle between her grandmother and the two men vying for her heart - Charlie Spillane and Lambert Nugent - that proves the seed for Liam’s later decline. The hazy nature of that time, which Veronica couldn’t possibly know, is readily acknowledge and nicely given substance:

He must be reassembled; click clack; his muscles hooked to bone and wrapped with fat, the whole skinned over and dressed in a suit of navy or brown - something about the cut of the lapels, maybe that is a little too sharp, and the smell on his hands would be already a little finer than carbolic.

It all seems good, the family saga stripped to the essentials (”I lay them out in nice sentences, all my clean, white bones.”) and the parallel storylines, both of which are (or are not) imagined, that intersect. The only problem is that it’s boring to read. While there’s nothing wrong with Veronica’s merciless grey outlook she is also self-obsessed to the point of wrapping herself in her own story, the endless navel gazing proving tedious along with a phallic preoccupation that goes without explanation. One wonders if she isn’t just using her brother’s death to transfer her own history of sexual abuse to him in an attempt to move on with her life. But, if so, there’s no hint that her life has come to an obstacle. She has a family, she seems grateful - what’s the problem? Why so bleak?

The Gathering is probably the most pessimistic book on the longlist and seems to be collecting a wave of mixed reviews. Personally, I found reading it a fatiguing experience. There’s plenty of nice observations throughout on such topics as the nature of sex, travel, family, but there’s so much more given over to Veronica Hegarty who, rather than tell Liam’s story, seems more comfortable with her own. At least she’s comfortable.