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.

Having already been longlisted for one award this year, Catherine O’Flynn’s debut, What Was Lost, has now found its way onto that of the Man Booker, something that will no doubt please her publisher, Tindal Street, now given their second sniff of the prize after Claire Morrall’s shortlisted Astonishing Splashes Of Colour back in 2003. And as fiction goes, it’s a highly readable story focusing on consumerism and disillusionment using a shopping mall as its milieu, but it doesn’t have the literary aura that the other novels longlisted sport.

The novel begins in 1984 and follows the life of ten year old Kate Meaney. She’s a bit of loner and, thanks to her elderly father, a tad obsessed with being a private detective. Indeed, she imagines her own agency, Falcon Investigations, its only employees being Kate and her toy monkey, Mickey. They spend their days hanging around Green Oaks mall, logging suspicious behaviour in Kate’s notebook.

Wednesday 25th April

Middle-aged man in tatty coat lost something in one of the bins. Saw him put his arm in and pull stuff out. Thought security guards were coming to help him, but instead they just led him off the premises. Noticed he had got confused and put old hamburger that someone had thrown away in his pocket.

Decided against continuing search myself.

Then, just as soon as the novel is getting into its stride, O’Flynn fasts forwards us to 2003 and leaves us in the company of mall security guard, Kurt and record story duty manager, Lisa. Kurt is having trouble sleeping and is having visions recalling 1984 when Kate Meaney vanished without trace. And Lisa, bored with her job - and life, really - is also haunted by the past - her brother, who she hasn’t seen in twenty years, was prime suspect in the Meaney case. Thus, with these two connections to the missing girl, these two characters are conveniently brought together and what was lost, I’m afraid, was my interest.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the novel begins in 1984. The shopping mall is an interesting microcosm where security cameras prod into everyone’s lives, monitoring their every move. It’s sad, therefore, that O’Flynn doesn’t really capitalise on this and instead gives us random snapshots - at the end of chapters! - of lives spent in the humdrum of such a place: mystery shoppers, anti-social youths, the mall DJ, and the guy dragged from one store to the next, his boredom invisible to his shopaholic partner.

What Was Lost does have its interesting moments as it explores the idea of a shopping mall from all angles. There’s the low paid nature of jobs, the customer experience, the ongoing development, and glimpses behind the scenes that we don’t ordinarily see. In the opening 1984 section there’s the comi-tragic butcher whose business is all but destroyed by the mall yet he soldiers on, a single case of how such buildings are having a detrimental effect on the high street.

Mr Watkin was an old man, Kate estimated probably seventy-eight. He was a nice man with a nice wife, but very few people bought their meat from him any more. Kate thought this possibly had something todo with the way Mr Watkin stood in his shop window swatting flies against the sides of meat with a large palette knife. It was also perhaps a self-perpetuating situation, in that the fewer customers Mr Watkin had, the less meat he stocked, and the less meat he had, the less he looked like a butcher, and the more he looked like a crazy old man who collected and displayed bits of flesh in his front window.

While I enjoyed What Was Lost’s 1984 storyline, I found it hard to warm to the 2003 section. I had bought into Kate Meaney’s story knowing, from the blurb, that it wouldn’t last. Having her cruelly whipped away almost seventy pages in, ensured that, like Lisa and Kurt, I would feel her loss, as was no doubt O’Flynn’s intent. Sadly the lives of Lisa and Kurt weren’t all that interesting and their entwined destiny was no doubt written in the synopsis, if not the stars.

That What Was Lost has made the Booker longlist surprises me. Sure, it’s accessible, but there doesn’t seem to be much style to O’Flynn’s prose or depth to the novel. When it comes down to it, all it seems to say are shopping malls are bleak places, as if we didn’t already know that. Even the storyline of a missing child, strong at first as its effects are explored, are stripped of their power when, in a rushed attempt to tie up the tale, we find out that her delusion of being a private detective went one step too far and curiosity killed our Kate.