booklit

Ryu Murakami is an author I’ve been aware of for a while now, partly because of his literary namesake, Haruki Murakami, and also through noting a positive response to his In The Miso Soup, translated to English in 2005, although I’d never really felt the need to read his work. Then, by chance, I discovered that a film I like, the teeth-gritting Audition (1999), was based on one of his short stories and he had, in fact, written the screenplay, too. Well what else could I do but hunt down the man’s books after all? And in doing so I choose Piercing (2007), published in Japan in 1994, on the basis that I preferred its cover over In The Miso Soup’s.

Billed as “a dark psycho-thriller” by the Daily Mail and by the Times as “creepy and gripping”, Piercing is certainly that. Or, perhaps, was. It’s been thirteen years between the original and the translation and in that time Asian cinema has enjoyed wider popularity, especially the more violent material, and as a result, the novel’s effect is lessened as the content is what’s expected of Japanese thrillers of this ilk, and therefore it comes across as more schlock than shock. Still, if you can pleasd innocence of Japanese cinema in recent years, then the novel’s intended effect may apply.

Kawashima Masayuki lives with his wife and newborn child in their apartment, which doubles as his wife’s class for teaching bakery to locals and is therefore “permeated with the buttery smell that for Kawashima had come to symbolise happiness.” While to all extents and purposes they are a happy couple, Kawashima suffers a form of panic attack and for the last ten days, with the wife asleep, has found himself standing over his child’s cot with an ice pick, sweating:

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you’d think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don’t understand, he thought. They don’t realise that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip.

It’s an implausible scene, the type you’d expect in movies, and there’s a knowing reference thrown in to Basic Instinct, to show that Murakami knows exactly how implausible it is. But he doesn’t care, this is a thriller after all, and so Kawashima’s panic attacks inspire real fear for himself and of what he is capable:

You wouldn’t do something like that, you would never stab the baby, he told himself hundreds of times, but the voice inside him never stopped replying: I just might.

The fear that he may harm his own child leads Kawashima along a dangerous road as, like the major players in this Piercing, he has a past, and the only way to protect his child is to take himself off elsewhere and what begins as a sadistic urge soons becomes a feat of meticulous planning, horrifically mixing the inhuman with the mundanity of everyday living:

There was no way to be one hundred per cent sure of not getting caught - this had been his first thought on waking - but merely wounding some woman was out of the question. If she lived, she’d surely go to the police, and that would be it for him. He’d mulled over such problems while brushing his teeth and washing his face.

The story builds from there, chapter by short chapter, and then, when all hell breaks loose, Piercing opens up into a non-stop catalogue of cat-and-mouse drugs and violence that, in a single chapter consuming half the novel, leads to a conclusion that’s hard to accept, yet strangely fitting.

The piercing of the title, while it could relate to puncturing someone with an ice pick, relates to the thoughts of Kawashima’s eventual target, a young woman who has pierced her own nipple, but these reflect the novel’s wider concerns:

To be able to choose your own pain - it’s a little scary, she thought, but it’s wonderful, too.

Murakami’s delivery is deadpan throughout, never passing judgement on the events in his novel, regardless of how wrong or stupid they seem, as if to say, this is the story, accept it. Sadly, it’s too pulpy to stir a sense of wrong or right in aligning with characters, but the weaving in and out of their perspectives is done well, increasing the dramatic irony with each incident, and is what makes Piercing particularly gripping and worth having a stab at.

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.

Road Story by Julienne Van Loon is not a novel I would have ever picked up by free choice. I’d never even heard of it when it was given to me. And as the cover proudly proclaims, it was the 2004 winner of the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, Oz’s largest prize ($20,000) for an unpublished manuscript, previously launching the career of Orange Prize winner, Kate Grenville. So it has some pedigree, at least.

It begins, where else, but on the road as Diana Kooper abandons her best friend, Nicole, in a car crash. Without looking back she hitches a ride west of Sydney and, determined to start over, finds employment at a truckstop called Bob’s in the heart of nowhere. Serving food, stocking fridges, bantering with drivers passing through. She soon assimilates into this life but as the days go by a series of events occur (a butchered dog, an “accident”) reminds her that she has a past and it demands to be dealt with.

While I was never really convinced that Diana’s character could just leave her friend (even after the closing revelations) I was also suspicious of the time it took for the consequences of such an action to catch up on her. Perhaps that’s the way it is out in the middle of nowhere, but with people passing through all the time, surely someone had seen a news report, heard something on the radio. But it just felt like the time elapsed since car crash and closure was drawn out only to add event to Diana’s life. She does, after all, find a partner for casual sex, and develop suspicions about the depth of her new employer’s gambling habit. But other than what seems a temporal anomaly in this day and age, I couldn’t find much to grumble about.

The prose is light and pacy, perhaps too just-the-facts for my personal tastes, although it shows the occasional stylistic indulgence, and Van Loon uses this to conjure up some decent images, notably of the truckstop life:

Inside the little restaurant truckies congregate along the length of the orange laminex bar, coming and going at irregular intervals. Their conversation is scant, limited to short complaints and the occasional bad joke, which Bob immediately adds to his collection. Mouths never open all that wide. If Diana comes around the front of the bar to wipe the tables and mop the floor, she can see a whole row of boots twitching uneasily on the stool rests, knees flicking up and down, up and down, up and down. The drivers are nervous, preoccupied. This place is only ever some place on the way to somewhere else.

The dialogue is convincing, characters repeating phrases, their words short and snappy. It’s obviously a strength of Van Loon’s writing, although I did think sometimes that some characters were given vocal motifs that were used too often (Bob’s “mate”, her friend’s “you know”) but this didn’t really become noticeable until near the finish line. And the characters felt alive in their own way, whether it be Andy West, her sometimes lover, employer Bob, or, in flashbacks, Nicole. But the main focus was on Diane and while there was action in her life at Bob’s, and much musing on the nature of stories - indeed of becoming a road story herself - I found the central premise and her concern for Nicole to be the least believable aspect. Maybe I just didn’t accept her reason for running in the first place.

Road Story, however, does have much going for it. I particularly liked the notion of it, the narration feeling like someone was just sitting somewhere - at Bob’s perhaps - on the road relating it to me. It was a story of friendship, of new beginnings, both tinged with the darker worlds of drugs and addiction, and how they impact on others, but where it worked best for me was in the evocation of the truckstop life, stripping off the overalls smothered in grease and oil, and showing the lonely nature of the road and how stories connect. It was a satisfying enough read, quick like a meal you’d enjoy at Bob’s, but it was just another story on the way to somewhere else.