booklit

Following on from a recent review of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger at Mookse, I was struck by something read in the comment - that Camus took his inspiration from an American crime novel. Now, I’d heard of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), was aware it had been adapted for the screen, but still knew nothing about it. In all honesty, when I thought about it, all I could recall was a Sesame Street spoof from the Monsterpiece Theatre series with Alistair Cookie.

That the title, at least, had ingrained itself in culture made me curious enough to read it, my previous indifference to Camus’ acclaimed novel aside. In preparing to do so there was the feeling, not having read much crime fiction before, that it would be best to understand what ‘hardboiled’ meant in relation to the text, to get an angle on it. Interestingly, I came across a quote by Raymond Chandler, himself a name from the hardboiled stable, calling Cain “a Proust in greasy overalls”, amongst other things.

The Postman Always Rings Twice was Cain’s first novel, following on from a collection of essays, and is arguably one of the most important crime novels of the 20th Century. Where most crime fiction would follow the detective, Cain’s novel throws out such characters and instead zooms in on the people that matter most: the criminals and their victim.

Much of the action here takes place at the Twin Oaks Tavern, “a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California” run by Nick Papadakis, commonly referred to as the Greek, and his attractive young wife, Cora. It’s the presence of the latter that leads the narrator, a drifter called Frank Edwards, to quickly change his tune about the ubiquity of such joints.

Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.

The speed of the prose is exhilarating, for having only just spotted Cora a couple of pages into the book, they have a furtive relationship cooked up in little more than a few pages of terse dialogue, a relationship simmering with so much steam that when she implores him to ‘Bite me! Bite me!’, you believe she means it. It’s what the moment will do for you.

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

Relationships built to last were never meant to have a third person and in all this, marriage or not, the Greek falls foul of the nefarious plans of wife and her beau. Once again, Cain’s performance in all this is high octane approach to his prose and it’s a matter of mere pages before the couple are plotting his death so as to ensure she . Over-plotting is more apt, for the meticulous detailing of the perfect murder unravels due to an unforeseen - and unforseeable - cicumstance, becoming a botched operation. Thankfully, the Greek remains blissfully unaware of the conspiracy around him. It’s only when they get up the courage to have a second attempt at dispatching him, on a road trip this time, that the novel’s greater complexity kicks off.

She got in, and took the wheel again, and me and the Greek kept on singing, and we went on. It was all part of the play. I had to be drunk, because that other time had cured me of this idea we could pull a perfect murder. This was going to be such a lousy murder it wouldn’t even be a murder.

Prosecutions, accidents, murder, blackmail - all these comes together in a lattice of twists and turns that solidify the novel as a whole, even if a passage on the ins, outs, and bucking of the legal system proved a tad confusing for this reader. Even when Cain has seen his characters go through hell and back he delivers a final twist that, to be honest, was probably more of a twist at the time of publication. Likewise, in a day when sexual content in a book barely causes the batting of an eyelid, the tame nature of the sex in The Postman Always Rings Twice, what was once considered controversial, makes it hard to gauge objectively the impact of its force.

It’s easy to see what Chandler meant when describing Cain in greasy overalls as there’s a certain roughness to the prose, although the colloquial style feels right here, feels believable. This is Cain’s strength, that he can get to the heart of people, capture their basic impulse, and make a wider story from a  patchwork of dialogue and snappy sentences. While the novel’s effect may have worn with age, there’s no denying that in The Postman Always Rings Twice Cain delivers, which is more than can be said for the postman, who doesn’t even make an appearance. Not in person, anyway.

In 1958 Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, the novel that helped usher in a new wave of African literature. Until that point literature concerning African had been written by European colonials, and was rife with derogatory depictions of African people and their varied cultures. With the contributions of Camara Laye, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua Achebe, amongst others, there came a rebellion of sorts - the African novel, going against “an age-old practice: the colonization of one people’s story by another.”

African literature is the subject of Home And Exile (2001),  a gathering of three lectures Achebe gave to an audience at Harvard University in 1998. Across these he uses his podium to to discuss the effect of colonialism on African letters and the need for balance. Of particular interest are the autobiographical elements peppered throughout, which give insights into Achebe’s early life in Nigeria and the beginnings of his adult life as a writer.

Achebe starts with his own people, the Igbo. He dismisses the notion that, in numbering over ten million, they can be a tribe by dictionary definition. He finds nation fits better, acknowledging that it’s not a perfect fit. In describing the Igbo culture, a culture of stories, he finds room to open up the differences wrought by colonialism, impressing upon the reader a little tale about a meeting of animals where the chicken, instead attending to a personal matter, is voted man’s primary sacrificial animal in his absence. It’s a fitting parallel with the native in colonial African literature whereby a portrait of the continent has been drawn up by outsiders, at least as far back as 1561, when John Lok, writing of his voyage to West Africa, describes Africans as:

…a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion … whose women are common for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie … whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes: for these are their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat as writeth Plinie and Diodorus Siculus. They have no speach, but rather a grinning and chattering. There are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts.

Compound that with centuries of unfair writing and you get to a moment in a Nigerian school when, having read Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, about a young Nigerian, it strikes as being superficial:

It was a landmark rebellion. Here was a whole class of young Nigerian students, among the brightest of their generation, united in their view of a book of English fiction in complete opposition to their English teacher, who was moreover backed by the authority of metropolitan critical judgment.

In talking of colonial literature, Achebe understands the treatment of African people as a way of justifying colonialism and the slave trade it produced, citing works by the likes of the aforementioned Cary, Joseph Conrad, and, especially, Elspeth Huxley. V.S. Naipaul, for whom much was made of his nastiness in Patrick French’s authorised biography earlier in the year, is also lambasted for his ignorant portrayal of Africa in A Bend In The River.

Although she’s not named, Buchi Emecheta, also gets a notable mention: not for her portrayal of Africa, but for going in the opposite direction. Having moved to London to pursue her writing career, she is quoted on the subject of African fiction and the dilution of her Africanness. (”After reading the first page you tell yourself you are plodding. But when you are reading the same thing written by an English person who lives here you find you are enjoying it because the language is so academic, so perfect.”) This notion of going in the opposite directon echoes an account opening the book of Achebe’s first ride in a car, in which he was seated so as to watch the road behind. It’s something he returns to in the third lecture, given that he, like Emecheta, no longer lives in Nigeria:

People have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about America since I have now been living here for some years. My answer has always been “No, I don’t think so.” Actually, living in America for some years is not the only reason for writing a novel on it. Kafka wrote such a novel without leaving Prague. No, my reason is that America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few.

Achebe’s focus now, unlike the child looking back, is squarely on the road ahead for Africa and its literature, noting his anxiety over “what remains to be done, in Africa and in the world at large”. From his podium he calls for writers to remain at home and write about it, to post their manuscripts rather than go overseas and risk dilution. Only with the right people contributing their own stories can literature find the necessary balance be made that will lead to a universal civilisation.

On literature he calls for a fair appraisal of writers’ work, comparing Dylan Thomas’ review of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard to Huxley’s, wherein Thomas praises it for its language, Huxley uses the opportunity to take a broad swipe at African art (”It is possessed by spirits and the spirits are malign.”) Regardless of unfair treatments, Achebe notes that to read them:

…is the strongest vote of confidence we can give our writers and their work - to put them on notice that we will go to their offering for wholesome pleasure and insight, and not a rehash of old stereotypes which gained currency long ago in the slave trade and poisoned, perhaps forever, the wellsprings of our common humanity.

That Achebe covers so much ground in just over a hundred pages shows a highly concentrated approach to African literature. Those seeking a true autobiography will not find it here, given that it only touches on his early years, but what it does provide is an interesting insight into Achebe’s mind, with him pointing out the little details that have made him the influential writer that he is today, home and away.

According to the back of Blaise Cendrars’ Gold (1924), the author spent fifteen years creating this, a fictionalised account of John Augustus Sutter - his debut novel. Given how slim the book is, one supposes that period wasn’t completely absorbed by this one endeavour. But, regardless, it was time well spent as Gold is a wonderful piece of fiction taking reams of fact and - as far as my understanding of the reported history goes - smudging it with a series of taken liberties.

At the age of thirty-one, the Swiss Johan August Suter (”bankrupt, fugitive, vagabond, thief and swindler”) has many debtors and, rather than pay them off, leaves his family - a wife, three young children - and heads for America, becoming John Augustus Sutter, to make his fortune. He departs from France and arrives drunk and excited in New York running “off into the great, unknown city, as if he were in a hurry and someone was expecting him.”

In New York Sutter works west trying his hand at an extensive number of trades (from draper’s assistant to drugstore clerk; from circus groom to sideshow boxer) and accrues enough cash to open a saloon on the western side of the city where he can keep an ear on:

“what kinds of business are carried on there, and which ones are creating the prodigious fortunes that are building up this city…of the progress of those slow caravans of wagons that cross the vast plains of the Middle West…of plans of conquest and exploration even before the government gets to hear of them.”

When the time is right, Sutter (”a man of action”) sells up and heads west. And why not? Especially when:

There are Indian legends that tell of an enchanted country where the towns are built of gold and the women have but a single breast. Even the trappers who come down from the North with their cargoes of furs have heard, in their remote latitudes, tales of this wondrous country of the West where, they say, the fruit is made of gold and silver.

After a lengthy journey, comprising land and sea, Sutter eventually comes to California, then under Mexican rule. Granted land for taking Mexican nationality he builds upon this by buying out further expanses from the departing Russians until he has, in his power, an army of workers and an agricultural wonderland producing vines, crops, and livestock, all of which are making him one of the world’s richest men. Yet a great disaster strikes in 1848 when one of his workers, James Marshall, late of New Jersey, discovers gold and what follows ” is triggered off by the simple blow of a pickaxe.”

The discovery of gold is too much of a secret to restrain and soon New Helvetia - Sutter’s farm - becomes a vicious no-man’s land where “in the struggle for survival, might is right” as it is invaded by:

“stampeding mobs of people. First they come from New York and all the ports on the Atlantic coast, and then, immediately afterwards, from the hinterland and the Middle West. It is a veritable flood. Men pack themselves into the holds of steamers going to Chagres. Then they cross the isthmus, on foot, wading through the swamps. Ninety per cent of them die of yellow fever. The survivors who reach the Pacific coast charter sailing-ships.

San Francisco! San Francisco!”

What then follows is Sutter’s lifelong hunt for justice, to be compensated for the land he has lost to the new cities and villages sprouting up and for his share in all the gold that was, by virtue of official deeds, his. The lawsuits sing to the tune of $275m, not including future minings, and as Sutter becomes more desperate to see victory, so he becomes a victim of his need to win.

Cendrars’ telling of the tale of John Augustus Sutter is accomplished, sifting through history and returning only the worthwhile nuggets, rich in detail. His prose style is pacy, the narrative racing along as quick as the Gold Rush itself no doubt happened; but mindful enough to stop sometimes and solemnly ponder the havoc it wreaked. A small treasure that’s worth rushing out for, Gold is an interesting prospect.

Novels from India are something that seem to make their way to my shelves but never get read (a few examples being Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, and last year’s Booker winner, The Inheritance Of Loss by Kiran Desai). So, going ahead with my intent to read all thirteen books longlisted for the Booker this year, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People was one Indian novel that wasn’t destined for indefinite shelving.

And for that happy I’m, as its narrator may say. Yes, such contortions are normal in Animal’s speech. They are a fitting parallel, for Animal’s body is physically twisted, forcing him to walk on all fours after “That Night” when the local factory exploded, its toxins killing thousands, harming many more, and polluting the elements. Although the novel is set in a fictional city called Khaufpur, it’s plain to see that it’s basis is in Bhopal, the explosion being a riff on the 1984 disaster.

Telling his story into a “tape mashin” left by an Australian reporter, Animal describes his life in Khaufpur. When he’s not scamming or drinking chai, he’s fancying himself a bit of a James Bond (”namispond jamispond”) in the spying stakes, which typically involves climbing up trees and perving on Nisha, his friend. It’s the delivery that makes Animal’s People special. For, aforementioned syntax aside, Animal is crude, comic, and at ease with his disability. His narrative practically sings off the page as he tells of his life, trades insults with his friends, and makes observations, passes judgement:

The world of humans is meant to be viewed from eye level. Your eyes. Lift my head I’m staring into someones crotch. Whole nother world it’s, below the waist. Believe me, I know which one hasn’t washed his balls, I can smell pissy gussets and shitty backsides whose faint stenches don’t carry to your nose, farts smell extra bad. In my mad times I’d shout at people in the street, “Listen, however fucking miserable you are, and no one’s as happy as they’ve a right to be, at least you stand on two feet!”

In the poverty stricken community where Animal lives, everyone has been affected by the negligence of the “Kampani”, and the main reason for living is to see it brought to justice, to see compensation paid to all affected. Of course, life here is unstructured, politicians are corrupt - the same old sorry story drags from one day to the next. And then, into the community comes Elli Barber, an “Amrikan doctress”, who opens a clinic offering free healthcare to all who need it. But the people are suspicious, for she may just be working for the Kampani, here to prove that they are not to blame.

Given the length of Animal’s People it’s testament to Sinha’s ability that he was able to maintain the unique voice although I did perhaps feel there were a few slips where, after being charmed by Animal, the story would briefly lose his likeable style. Toward the end, after following Animal for so long I felt myself wanting it all to be over; the closing chapters almost read as evidence Sinha was thinking the same, tying up the loose ends.

But overall, Animal’s People is a real achievement. While on the surface it follows one man’s journey in understanding his humanity, its concerns are greater in scope, using Animal to focus on issues such as poverty, religion, and corruption without being didactic. Given that not a peep was heard in the British press, its Booker longlisting will no doubt bring Animal’s People the attention it deserves. But, more importantly than literature, its content can bring about an awareness of the real disaster in 1984, the effects of which are still felt today amongst the real Animal’s people.