booklit

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.

With Christmas in mind I fancied reading something festive to try and get me out of the humbug spirit and, while the obvious choice would have been Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I thought it more interesting to try Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal (1845). It’s a novella, with the subtitle A Christmas Tale and, given how blank and frosty the cover is, I went in with little idea as to how the story would go, knowing only that it concerned village life and two children lost in an icy landscape. And, having read Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace earlier this year, the prospect of lost children and icy landscapes is always a welcome one.

Rock Crystal takes some time before its main narrative gains control to look at the tradition of Christmas (”…when nights are long and days are short, when the sun slants toward earth obliquely and snow mantles the fields…”) in rural Bohemia which Stifter presents with warmth, bringing the touch of a fairy tale to the snowy mountains and valleys:

In most places, midnight as the very hour of Christ’s birth is solemnized by ritual of great splendour, to which bells wring out their heartsome invitation through the still darkness of the wintry air; then with their lanterns, along dim familiar paths, from snow-clad mountains, past forest-boughs encrusted with frost, through crackling orchards, folk flock to the church from which solemn strains are pouring - the church rising from the heart of the village, enshrouded in ice-laden trees, its stately windows aglow.

The story tightens its scope from exploring village life at this time of the year to the marriage of the beautiful daughter of the dyer of Millsdorf to the shoemaker of Gschaid (and she hasn’t done too bad for herself since shoemakers are “indispensible the world over where human beings are no longer in the primitive stage”) and this one just happens to be the only one in the whole valley. But despite their marriage, the dyer’s daughter is still considered a stranger to the people of Gschaid, where, like all villages, customs hold dear to a place. Even the children soon borne of the marriage are considered strangers.

It’s not long before the children are older and the eldest, Conrad, is allowed to escort his younger sister, Sanna, across the mountains to Millsdorf in order visit their grandmother. This Christmas, returning with presents and pockets stuffed with bread, they find themselves lost on the mountains when the weather takes a turn for the worse and they find the blizzard of snow is filling in their recent footprints so that they are “going on with the dogged endurance that children and animals have, not knowing what is ahead or when their reserves may give out”:

…on every side was nothing but a blinding whiteness, white everywhere that none the less drew its ever narrowing circle about them, paling beyond into fog that came down in waves, devouring and shrouding everything till there was nothing but the voracious snow.

Stifter does well to present the icy landscape in Rock Crystal, dominated as it is by the snowy mountain with its “dazzling horn-shaped peaks” and rock-faces “coated with a white velvet map of hoar-froast and glaze with ice-tissue” making it “the inspiration of many a tale”. The alpine meadows sparkle white, too; and the trees that speckle the mountainside are “drooping with the weight of snow”. Reading around the novella, it seems that Stifter is renowned for his depictions of landscapes and the knack he obviously had for them is demonstrated here with depth, variety, and genuine appreciation.

While the children’s adventure in the story brings them close to death, their will to survive drives them on further into the night, into the ice. And meanwhile, the people of Gschaid come together to bring the children to safety, their selfless hunting a significant act that shows that these people considered strangers are not so after all and that the mother can enjoy “the same familiarity and warm intimacy that existed between the people that belonged to the valley.”

The finest moment of Rock Crystal is certainly the descriptive passages, especially over the typical 19th Century exposition where you get the whole family history before the story is allowed to happen, as they bring an immediacy to the prose, a sense of actually being present in the valley (and on the mountain) as snow falls. My inner sadist was hoping for a different conclusion, but the charm of Stifter’s novella is that it ties faith in with the spirit of Christmas. Not so much faith in the religious sense, but the unquestionable duty to other people for which we should hope to depend on when needs must. And for a Christmas tale, it was good to put my faith in Stifter.

There’s a common misconception that Eskimos have an inflated number of words for snow. Probably because there’s various Eskimo tribes, all speaking their own languages. I have no idea how many words there are in Norwegian - or Nynorsk, to be more precise - but I reckon there’s a good number of them, otherwise Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace (1963) would be a repetitive novel.

And how, then, without being repetitive, would it translate to English, if we only have one word for snow? That word being, well, snow. Thankfully, the English language has a large enough vocabulary to describe frozen water in all manner of ways - ice, icicle, frost, slush, etc. - all equally evocative, and its a mercy indeed for without them The Ice Palace would not be the evocative beauty it is.

Siss and Unn are two very different young girls. The former is popular in their rural school; the latter, recently arrived in the area, is very much alone. But something attracts them to one another, and one winter evening Siss heads over to Unn’s and their getting to know other - secrets shared, and promised to never tell, aside - is an awkward affair. So awkward, in fact, that Unn skips school the following day to visit the ice palace, a structure built from the errant streams and spray of a waterfall, and is never heard from again.

And as the search for Unn begins amongst the villagers the snow begins to fall. In fact, the snow falls all winter, each successive layer covering up the earth and any tracks Unn may have left. But it’s not quite so simple as that, for the snow is both physical and metaphorical, a representation of the way in which Siss becomes snowed in, emotionally isolated in her need to preserve the memory of her friend:

They’re not thinking about Unn any more.”

“Who isn’t?”

“Nobody is!” said Siss, even though she had not meant to. It had gone dark, and then she had said it.

Her mother answered calmly: “How do you know, my girl?”

Siss said nothing.

“And then nobody knew Unn. It’s unreasonable, but it makes it seem different. People have a lot to think about, you see.” Mother looked at Siss and added: “You’re the person who can think about Unn all the time.”

As if Siss had been given a great gift.

This “gift” leads Siss to embody Unn, to become the loner at school. To keep the air of mystery alive - for that reason she’ll never tell another soul Unn’s secret. But as the winter leads into spring, Siss learns to accept that Unn is never coming back and in such situations one can be relieved of a promise’s obligation. And so, with the new season warming the land, Siss is able to take one step closer to adulthood and all the inner turmoil she has been suffering melts away, the metaphorical ice palace going the same way as the physical one:

It was just as alarmingly tall and strange from whichever angle you looked at it. Polished and sparkling, free of snow, and with a ring of cold around it in the middle ofthe mild March air in which it stood. The river, black and deep, moved out from under the ice, gathering speed on its way downward and taking with it everything that could be torn way.

Aside from the rather amazing story of The Ice Palace, with its layers of symbols and possible interpretations, what really captures the imagination is the prose: chilly, sad, and haunting; yet not without colour. It’s poetry, and what makes it even more special is that it’s a translation. Just how beautiful must the original be?

The Ice Palace really deserves more widespread attention. It’s a subtle gem, extremely unassuming, and, while it will no doubt mean different things to different people, they will all agree that it means something to them. Frankly, it’s nothing short of a work of art and I’ll be looking forward to reading more of Vesaas in the near future. As an introduction to his work, what a way to break the ice!

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.

Jill Dawson’s Watch Me Disappear takes as its backdrop the Cambridgeshire Fens around the time of the Soham murders, dropping references in all but name. That the narrator, Tina Humber, should be there is purely coincidental, as she’s attending her brother’s wedding. The current brouhaha does have an effect however, as it brings to mind the memory of an old school friend, Mandy Baker, who went missing thirty years before, never to be found.

The novel follows Tina’s account of events back then and while she does think regularly of Mandy, it’s not about the missing girl so much as it is about the development of her own sexuality, whether it be from browsing some porno mags, reading smut in the News Of The World, or encounters with her first boyfriend. Events that occur between the ages of nine and fourteen, within the range mentioned by Nabokov in the quote, from Lolita, regarding nymphets that prefaces the novel. As the story - well, backstory - develops Tina comes to unearth memories (or perhaps they are just delusions caused by mild epilepsy) about the past that forces her to confront the past, something that may just be closer to home than ever thought possible.

Throughout the novel Dawson looks at the subjects of girls and sexuality, covering many bases. Boys. Sex. The paedophile threat. While at the same time there’s the flagrant way in which children, innocent of their appeal, are becoming highly sexualised at younger and younger ages such as one girl mentioned with the word ’sexy’ plastered across the seat of her jeans. That and the feeling of needing to live up to the image of women presented, exclusively it seems, in boys’ magazines.

The prose in Watch Me Disappear is tight, the content engaging. And none more so than when Tina describes an image, detail by detail, adding character to an absent friend:

Mandy is splashing, then dragging herself out by her arms, shuffling on her bottom along the sun-heated concrete lining the pool and reaching for the Tupperware bowl of warm strawberries, strawberries that taste of plastic; dipping them in the bowl of stiff cream. Her flat fringe, wet against her forehead. Her foot, fine bones at the arch, the colour of a perfectly baked cake, golden, rising, her toes like ten bright birthday candles, dipping small circles, little yellow light flames, in the water. Her stubborn bottom lip, what my mum called her pet lip, peachier, fatter than mine.

Clever Mandy Baker, with her clever tongue, licking the cream from her very last summer.

The evocation of the seventies feels successful. Whether it be mentions of Spangles, The Benny Hill Show, or John Noakes on Blue Peter, all nostalgic references are achieved without straining, the way I felt David Mitchell did for the eighties in Black Swan Green. And the recollection of a childhood, from an adult perspective put me in mind of Hisham Matar’s In The Country Of Men, although I found that extremely poor and clumsy read.

Another well done device that adds to the novel is Tina’s career choice. She’s a marine biologist specialising in seahorses. And while we don’t see much of her at work there are a number of passages looking at the lives, habits, and very nature of these creatures, passages which blend in with the reminiscences and reinforce the ideas on show.

Despite the lack of here-and-now action within the novel, there’s much still to be enjoyed. The characters are rendered well, all three dimensions intact, and the setting comes to life too. Having been introduced to Lolita parallels prior to reading the novel, I was trying to be attentive throughout but know that plenty will have passed me by. If not most.

When it comes down to it, the lack of actual plot isn’t a great loss, for the narrative is carried well by an efficient narrator who never once loses the thread of their story, which is one of sexual awakenings set around the need to confront the past. When I read Milan Kundera’s Ignorance I thought it was amazing to think how our individual memories colour our version of events and Watch Me Disappear is no different in that respect. It’s a great read. But that’s just how I remember it.