booklit

A.L. Kennedy is one of Scotland’s greatest contemporary writers who, over the last twenty years, has produced a body of work spanning novels, short stories, non-fiction, screenplays, and more. In recent years she’s been a regular feature in comedy clubs, something which polarised opinion at the start, and since 2007 her stock has risen with a string of prizes and awards, including the Best Book at the Costa Awards (for fifth novel, Day) and the Austrian State Prize for Literary Fiction, putting her amongst distinguished names like Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, and Milan Kundera, not to mention two recent British Nobel laureates.

Other than a few short stories from her first collection, I’ve read little of Kennedy, owing to an increasing preference for world literature over what’s on my doorstep. Recently I’ve felt the need to survey home soil writers, and so it is that I read What Becomes (2009), a new short story collection, her fifth to date.

The collection is named for the opening story which opens with Frank taking his seat in a small, empty cinema and waiting for the movie to start. In the prolonged time it takes to gear up, he finds his mind wandering to recent events, to one night in particular that accelerated the fall of an already splintered marriage. As he prepares a soup, slices some squash, he accidentally cuts his finger and here Kennedy provides us with a fantastic piece of subtle foreshadowing, noting that “he hadn’t been paying attention and so he got what he deserved” and, later, when the denouement comes, the echo of “funny how he didn’t feel the pain until he saw the wound” assumes a satisfying symbolic power.

Frank’s a detective,  a catalyst in his failing marriage, for his mind deals with things differently than his wife (”she’d never known the rooms he’d seen…”) and communication between them is strained. While they share the grief underlying the story, each handles it in their own way. She fails to realise he’s hurting, while he retreats inside, forensically trying to overcome the insurmountable.

Invisible rooms - that’s what he made - he’d think and think until everything disappeared beyond what he needed: signs of intention, direction, position: the nakedness of wrong: who stood where, did what, how often, how fast, how hard, how ultimately completely without hope - what exactly became of them.

This sets the stage for what’s to come. The title recalls the old song that asks what becomes of the brokenhearted, and in the twelve stories that make up What Becomes, Kennedy sets out to examine scenes of hopelessness and heartbreak that are at times funny, other times uplifting, yet always underscored with melancholy.

In Edinburgh we meet Peter, a greengrocer, who finds his passions aroused when a younger woman starts hovering around his shop, more for him than his wares. And when he offers her some apples, saying, ‘They’re fine to eat, they’ll be fine for days. But everything’s going off in the end, isn’t it?’, Kennedy once again shows her flair for foreshadowing and picking the precise symbol that reinforces the effect of the overall story. Similarly, in Whole Family With Young Children Devasted, the title appears on a poster about a missing cat, but it readily applies to the wider issues of the story.

The telling of the stories is varied, Kennedy seemingly happy in first and third person modes, and getting into the heads of men and women. There’s also some mild experimentation, where Sympathy, about a woman having sex with a stranger in a hotel room, is told entirely through dialogue.

‘…if we keep talking, we’re going to end up –’

‘Getting to know each other?’

‘That wouldn’t work.’

‘Fine.’

Aside from the symbolic power of the stories, where the success is achieved is in Kennedy’s characters. Her understanding of them is second to none. As she describes their actions and feelings, their thoughts seem to take life of their own, interjecting, pondering, and reflecting on the hopeless situations that circumstance has dealt them. In Sympathy, which follows the death of a children’s entertainer (”Barry with the fake face for parties, Barry who loved to flirt”) who, like a fair number in this collection, was no stranger to an unhappy marriage. The child between is someone for his wife to love, “a consolation for his inability to love her”, a flesh and bones creation made without thinking.

Although, Lynne had been thinking: otherwise, she wouldn’t have stared at her husband as he first picked up his daughter, hefted her tenderly, gracefully, feelingly — so the nurses could not help but remember the scene, believe it — and she had thought — Got you. She’d seen his eyes: the wide, unfamiliar chill that was settling in them and she had thought — Got you. Fuck you. Deal with that.

A highlight of the stories is the humour that runs through the. As God Made Us, in which a group of British soldiers who met in hospital (”Hospital — great place to meet folk, get new mates.”) have their annual meetup, shows this in its dialogue, following the lads will be lads mentality that until the collection’s theme catches up with it in an explosive outburst. Other stories show a subtler, truer humour, such as in Vanish, where Paul finds himself sitting next to an annoying person in a theatre and experiences something we can laugh it, because it’s the way we may think ourselves:

It was ridiculous and unfair to imagine a person like Simon could unknowingly drain each remaining pleasure from those around him and leave them bereft. ‘Do you know his work? Amazing guy. I’ve seen every show.’ Even so, as Simon cast his hands about, shifted and stretched, Paul found himself taking great care that they didn’t touch, didn’t even brush shoulders, just to be sure that no draining could take place.

Returning to the title story, Frank ponders at one point the buttons on a personal music player, saying,

‘They’ve anticipated you’ll want to repeat one track, over and over, so those three or four minutes can stay, you can keep that time steady in your head, roll it back, fold it back. They know you’ll want that. I want that.’

It rings true for the stories in What Becomes and is perhaps a foreshadowing of the collection itself, for each story is a multi-layered affair that sheds its many skins with each reading. In its singular focus on the melancholy side of human nature, the whole is unified and it becomes a rounded work. And in those epiphanous moments where the stories show their cards, the revelations, through their believability, prove memorable. Kennedy knows you’ll want that. That’s what she delivers.

I’ve mentioned before how lovely Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series is and have been meaning for some time to read another. Bonsai (2006) by Alejandro Zambra felt like the timely choice, having recently been the focus of an article in The Nation (via The Literary Saloon) and to even the score for Chilean writers, what with Roberto Bolaño getting all the attention. According to The Nation article, “its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size.”

It’s a short book, weighing in at eighty-three pages, many blank as they split chapters, allowing the content room to breathe. But within there’s a complete story, a larger story, in fact, bursting to get out. In this it could be said that it resembles the titular bonsai, all the attributes of a larger work condensed into a miniature.

As openings go, Zambra makes a bold pitch, giving away the ending and letting the reader know from the off that the journey about to be taken is a metafictional one:

In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death, Emilia’s death. Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature:

Emilia and Julio are are university students that meet at a study group in preparation for their Spanish Syntax II exam and, despite initially disliking each other, their relationship quickly develops, Zambra detailing its journey, with occasional reference to previous lovers, in a beguiling mix of thick brush strokes and finely judged details.

As the opening declares, “the rest is literature:” and it’s literature that binds the couple and gives purpose to their relationship, a strange foreplay emerging whereby they working their way through Schwob and Mishima, Perec, Onetti, and Carver, amongst others, until they read Tantalia by Macedonio Fernández, a story about a couple who buy a small plant as a symbol of their love that ends in despair.

“That should have been the last time Emilia and Julio shagged,” the narrator says, but the couple continue on, having sex after reading pages of the classics (”They did terribly with Checkhov, a little better, curiously, with Kafka, but, as they say, the damage was done.”). Eventually, a shared lie between them - that they have read Proust - brings their relationship to a head:

It happened with Proust. They had postponed reading Proust, due to the unmentionable secret that linked them, separately to the reading - or to the lack of reading - of In Search Of Lost Time. They both had to pretend that their mutual read was, strictly speaking, a reread they had yearned for, so that when they arrived at one of the numerous passages that seemed particularly memorable they changed their tone of voice or gazed at each other to elicit emotion., simulating the greatest intimacy. Also, Julio, on one occasion, allowed himself to declare that he only now truly felt that he was reading Proust, and Emilia answered with a subtle and disconsolate squeeze of the hand.

In reading Proust for the first time, neither is prepared for the impact it has so their relationship breaks off, with Emilia heading to Spain - and dying! - and Julio getting on with his life. Julio’s path leads to an attempt to work for a famous writer, transcribing his latest novel and, on failing to do so, continues to transcribe the novel he imagines, based on a brief synopsis, that he would have been transcribing. In keeping with the metafictional style, he calls it Bonsai, and it bears a knowing similarity to the book we’re reading.

There’s so much more to this slight volume that comes to represent the bonsai. The authorial interjections force us to stick to the story of Emilia and Julio, with repeated messages to ignore characters for being “secondary” or observing a woman as she moves away “and begins to disappear forever from this story”, each potential thread of narrative routinely clipped so that all we have is this love story contained within the container its pages - Julio learns that “Once outside its flowerpot, the tree ceases to be a bonsai.”- that does represent the wider picture.

Caring for a bonsai is like writing, thinks Julio. Writing is like caring for a bonsai, thinks Julio.

Bonsai’s story is, to borrow a line from the book,”a common story whose only peculiarity is that nobody knows how to tell it well” and Zambra’s attempt to capture this common story is wholly successful. With prose aware of its shortcomings, that takes steps to address them - pruning its loose ends and carefully shaping its narrative - it takes that common story and reduces it to its finer points, makes of itself an artform, and contains it within a flowerpot of pages. The rest may be literature, but the whole is art.

Although he wrote few works in his lifetime, namely a thin volume of short stories (The Burning Plain and Other Stories) and a single novel, the name of Juan Rulfo is well respected in Latin American letters. His novel, Pedro Páramo (1955) broke from the traditional realist novel and with its unique narrative ushered in magical realism, popularised in the Latin American Boom by the likes of Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

Why he only wrote one novel - he died in 1986 - will perhaps remain unknown, however Susan Sontag, in her introduction, takes a guess, observing that “the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book - a book which will last - and that is what Rulfo did.” A small body of work is of course no barrier to greatness, with Rulfo being named, following a poll conducted by Editorial Alfaguara, alongside Jorge Luis Borges as the best Spanish-language writer of the 20th Century.

It begins with the narrator, Juan Preciado, heading to his mother’s home town of Comala, because his father, Pedro Páramo, lives there. Long before, not long after their marriage, Pedro Páramo had sent Preciado’s mother away to live with her sister. Now, on her deathbed, she makes a final request: “Make him pay, son, for all those years he put us out of his mind.”

To his mother’s mind, Comala is a boon for nostalgia. In his head echoes of her memories stir, talking of “a beautiful view of a green plain tinged with the yellow of ripe corn” and “the savor of orange blossoms in the warmth of summer.” However, on the road down to the town, Preciado meets a man, claiming also to be a son of Pedro Páramo, who says,

“That town sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell. They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket.”

In Comala, things take a turn for the strange. Preciado meets a woman, Eduviges Dyada, who claims that she hasn’t had much time to prepare for him as his mother, despite dying a week before, had only just informed her of his trip. From here we begin to see just how far Rulfo’s novel meanders from the traditional structure as the narrative begins to play host to other, seemingly unrelated stories. Voices come and go, uncredited, and tenses change. Where first we were reading Preciado’s account, we find ourselves faced with a third person narrative.

More and more voices enter the fray, providing distilled snapshots, into a narrative that becomes disorientating. As the fragmented stories abound, they start to come together forming a patchwork that illustrates the people of Comala. Only, what makes it more interesting, is that they are all dead. All that remains is the essence of the people, each whispering their thoughts, secrets, and reliving moments over and over. Such is the force of all this trapped experience that when, halfway through the novel, Preciado announces his own death (”The murmuring killed me. I was trying to hold back my fear. But it kept building until I couldn’t contain it any longer. “) the book continues on, unraveling more and more.

“This town is filled with echoes. It’s like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone’s behind you, stepping on your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years.”

The main thread of the novel is the titular, Pedro Páramo. “Living bile”, as the stranger Preciado meets at the start labels him.  Páramo is the son of a rancher who, after his father’s death, “flourished like a weed”. Considered a lost cause by his father, Páramo became an opportunist, stealing land from others and populating it through the rape of the woman working his land. Indeed,  Páramo’s marriage to Preciado’s mother only came about as she was his largest creditor - after the wedding properties were made out in both names.

Páramo’s story is the most linear within the novel, weaving in and out of his rise from hopeless child to vengeful old man. In creating such a vile character it’s easy to make him completely evil and deny him his humanity, and Rulfo ensure’s no moralising over the man’s actions here. In fact, to balance his ruthless nature we are regularly shown the unrequited love he feels for Susana San Juan, who even in marriage never loves him.

He had thought he knew her. But even when he found he didn’t, wasn’t it enough to know that she was the person he loved most on this earth? And - and this was what mattered most - that because of her he would leave this earth illuminated by the image that erased all other memories.

But what world was Susana San Juan living in? That was one of the things that Pedro Páramo would never know.

One of the biggest achievements Rulfo manages with Pedro Páramo is that such a slight volume can feel so epic. Years come and go in whispers, the story dancing back and forward between them. From the Mexican Revolution through the Cristiada we see lives lived and torn apart. As readers we are encouraged to fill in the blanks and join the dots of the story, a task that doesn’t come easily, thanks to the scattered narrative, the first time round, but is more than cemented with a second reading. There’s probably more in a third and fourth reading - who knows what in a fifth.

As one character, oblivious to their own revenant state, notes early on:

‘Nights around here are filled with ghosts. You should see all the spirits walking through the streets. As soon as it’s dark they begin to come out. No one likes to see them. There’s so many of them and so few of us that we don’t even make the effort to pray for them anymore, to help them out of their purgatory. We don’t have enough prayers to go around.’

You should see all the spirits walking through the streets. It’s a good thing novels are not prayers, as Pedro Páramo is one that needs to go around.

Having had the experience of reading Gordon Burn’s fiction - Fullalove, a novel about a hack journalist intruding on the bereaved to get a story - and his non-fiction - Best And Edwards, a literary account of the lightning quick and slow burn deaths of Duncan Edwards and George Best - and favouring the latter, it now seems Burn is intent on blurring the lines between both as his new book, Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel (2008), is exactly as the subtitle implies: the news…as a novel.

It’s a strange conceit, taking real life events and making a fiction of them, but in a roundabout way that’s exactly what happens everyday in the newspapers, on television, on radio. So here, with “the curiously intimate knowledge the world garners about an unknown figure” Burn, with himself as narrator, finds himself obsessing over important news stories and reporting back not the truth, but what susbtitutes for truth these days.

The news. Always something - usually unpleasant - happening far away to a stranger; to somebody else, somewhere that we’re lucky not to be.

The news, in this case, is predominantly focused around July 2007, in which Britain underwent “a summer of disappearances, absences, some voluntary, others not” and its cast of characters should be recognisable to anyone who followed the larger news stories of the year: Kate and Gerry McCann, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Smeaton, and Kate Middleton. Add to these the stories of floods, foot-and-mouth outbreaks, and meaningless stabbings and shootings and it shows the bleak landscape of a year fresh in the memory.

As is common in Burn’s work he turns his attention to the notion of celebrity and works with Warhol’s dictum that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And the fifteen minutes of many characters here come by horrific circumstances.

With John Smeaton (”working-class, Scottish, plain-talking man of the people”) it’s the terrorist attack on Glasgow airport and his taking the fight to a flailing terrorist that elevates him in the public eye, first as a media sensation, then political pawn:

By his second visit to number 10 in October, SuperSmeato was wishing he could just stay at home with his Xbox for a week. Have a few nights in his own bed. Even better, he would be up in the north of Scotland, fly-fishing. His mobile would be back at home, switched off, and nobody would know where he was.

In opposition to Smeaton’s media rise, there’s the tale of the McCanns, Kate and Gerry (”controlled, collected, articulate, focused”) who sought to use the media to help find their missing daughter, Madeleine, only to find themselves, because of the way the presented themselves, turned against:

‘We’re normal people,’ Kate McCann protested when her family’s transition from being unknown to well known, and the perks that come with the transition - a hotline to senior members of the government, for example - were just starting to raise resentments: the first signs of a backlash were beginning to become apparent in eruptions of public volatility and paranoia.

The largest news story running through Born Yesterday, however, is the handover of office from Tony Blair (”One minute [he] was part of the national static, and the next he was gone.”) to his Chancellor, Gordon Brown (”an analogue politician in a digital age”). Where the Blair government was much like the media in spinning on the truth to its own ends, always presenting an optimistic mask, Brown’s tenure started differently:

The crises that piled up around Gordon Brown in his first weeks of office - the attempted terrorist attacks on London and Glasgow, the summer floods in the midlands and the north, foot-and-mouth: fire, flood and pestilence, a marvellous start for a son of the manse, as a number of people pointed out - these gifts from the gods required him to be thunder-faced, decisive, dogged, statesmanlike. The one thing they didn’t require him to do was the thing he had always had a problem with: they didn’t require him to smile.

As narrator, Burn is regularly out and about, and in the opening scene is walking through a park sometimes frequented by Margaret Thatcher and it’s here that we get the first sense of the novel’s purpose:

In office, Mrs Thatcher never read newspapers. She only read what her press secretary Bernard Ingham told her was in them. Out of office, though, the rumour mill insists she has all the papers brought to her every morning, when she sets about them with a marker pen, highlighting idiocies, striking through innaccuracies, furiously scribbling comments and corrections in the margin.

One can only assume that Burn himself echoed this action, working his way through the news of 2007 to produce Born Yesterday and instead of making corrections, made connections. For while it ultimately means nothing, he can’t help but linger on the fact that Gordon Brown, Madeleine McCann, and the first suspect in her disappearance, Robert Murat, all have problems with their eyes; or that Gerry, Kate, and the terrorists in Glasgow and London were all, to some extent, involved in the medical profession. In getting behind these connections, Burn offers up musings that add depth to what we get from newspapers, television, and radio:

It is often said that today’s abundance of media images create a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything - but only images.

Despite how high profile the stories recounted in Born Yesterday are, they still make for compelling reading in the way, Burn as prose stylist, evokes the misery of somehow being involved. Sometimes it can venture into duller territory, when providing backstory, but overall its a interesting work, full of memorable characters, literary references, and an excellent eye for detail. By giving an account of exactly what was going on in 2007, it must surely be the definitive state-of-the-nation novel.

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.

In Lisey’s Story King continues with one of his favourite subjects: writers. In a departure from previous novels like Misery, The Dark Half, and Bag Of Bones, the author is dead two years prior to the novel opening. Scott Landon, survived by his wife Lisey, won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award during his short life. It’s no mean feat for an author of horror novels. (Wake up, Stevie, you’re dreaming!)Now, as the story begins, Lisey is preparing to pack up Scott’s scribblings and move on with her life. But, as she enters his study she is taken on trips down memory lane by the objects therein to such events as the couple’s first date and an assassination attempt, John Lennon style, on Scott. The novel, however, isn’t just a nostalgic journey; Lisey’s Story is, at its core, about madness, and there’s a fair peppering of characters a slate short of a roof: Scott’s father, Lisey’s sister, and a loony fanboy who just happens to be in the area. Nice. And it’s this lunatic, threatening Lisey to offer Scott’s papers to the local university, that forms much of the drama within the novel’s here and now.

As a read, the first 150 pages were a disorganised mess. It is apparent that King has attempted something different to his usual work, grappled with stylistic decisions, and not managed to pull it off. What we have here is a collection of memories, one after the other, that serve to portray Scott Landon as the man Lisey loved. They are lifeless recollections, told in the present tense for immediacy, but they fail to connect with any empathy the reader may have for their predicament. And so it continues, stories told without lustre, which is disappointing given that, while told in the third person, the scenes often delve into Lisey’s mind. Aren’t her memories exciting? The reason, to take the assassination attempt as an example, is that King is trying to cram every detail into the scene (and one which happens all too fast) rather than giving only the pertinent details.

It picks up, however, with the introduction of the aforementioned fanboy as the drama begins to mount in the present, bringing Lisey out of her dull reveries. And, just as soon as the book becomes interesting, it commits literary seppuku and delves back into the past. The more we learn of Scott, the more Lisey remembers of him. So it comes to pass that, like King himself, Scott had a personal demon in the booze. Scott, also, to give the book a supernatural twist, has a place called Boo’Ya Moon in which he retreats. It’s a place that he finds both a relief and terrifying in equal measure.

The biggest problem with Lisey’s Story is that it is wordy. Not just verbose to the point where an editor’s red pen may have saved it, but wordy in the sense that it’s full of meaningless words. In an attempt to catalogue the interior language of the Landons’ marriage, King puts some of the stupidest twee phrases ever put in print into the mouths of his own characters. Thus Lisey, around fifty years old, goes around calling her elder sister ‘Big Sissa Manda Bunny’ and excessively using the word ‘smucking’. Scott, in the past, talks of nonsense such as bools, which seem to be some confused mess of clues and/or gifts. Attempts to explain it fall by the wayside and this reader was left just as confused as Lisey first was when Scott came up to her, his wrists bleeding on their first date and offered her his blood-bool. The biggest problem with this twee verbage isn’t that it’s utter nonsense, it’s that King actually declares it as ‘the interior language of their marriage.’ I guess he’s never read the show don’t tell part of his own On Writing.

I honestly think that the biggest problem that I had with Lisey’s Story is that King’s prose is just one big ramblesnooze. That, and the fact that it’s full of annoying phrases. Not signature phrases attributed to characters, as there’s nothing wrong with that, but the continual poor attempt at introducing them: ‘like so-and-so used to say’, ‘as they say’, ‘so-and-so used to call them’ ‘what so-and-so referred to as’, and so on ad infinitum. The other annoying aspect to the prose was the way that, rather than just tell the reader what the character was thinking, he would interrupt a paragraph with a bracketed sentence before continuing the narrative.

As for the characters, they just lacked spirit. Lisey, despite being the eponymous title of the novel, doesn’t have much of a story to tell. She wanders about, remembers a few things, and not much else until the denouement. Scott, as a character, came across much better but that’s because he had a more interesting past, a broken home, the death of an older sibling, and a father certifiably mad. The other major player, the lunatic, works, although his appearances are few, his spectre still lingers throughout. Lesser used characters come and go, some more believable than others, but King really needed everyone to be plausible for his work to be more credible.

While I didn’t like Lisey’s Story, I can find no fault with the idea, the notion of a spouse cleaning up the unfinished works of an author while grubby hands wait to get their eyes on them. And to catalogue a love that endures, even after death. It’s just a pity that King thought of it. But I think that the novel would have been much better if King could tighten his prose, ditch silly get-out devices like Boo-Ya Moon, cut the glut of phrases and just write, and finish the story when it has met its natural conclusion rather than just saunter about for sixty pages cleaning up the loose ends. Next time Lisey has a story to tell, I won’t be listening.