booklit

The American writer Robert Coover would appear to be a dot on the landscape of British literary consciousness - I don’t know how well known he is in the States - but a small number of his better known titles, such as The Public Burning, The Origin Of The Brunists, and short story collection, Pricksongs And Descants, have recently been appearing on the shelves of my local Waterstone’s.

Curious to know more, but without immediately buying, I read about him online and found that he is a postmodernist of some repute and that his novel The Public Burning was the first major work of fiction to use still living people as characters (it was narrated by Richard Nixon). So, intrigued enough to wanting to sample Coover but not intrigued enough to get bogged down in a lengthy wedge of postmodern trickery, I opted for one of his novellas, Briar Rose (1996), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty tale.

Although there are many variations on the Sleeping Beauty story, the common thread follows a girl on the cusp of adulthood forced to sleep for a hundred years after pricking her finger on a spindle, and who can only have the spell broken by a kiss. To this end Coover tells us the story from the point of view of three characters, told in alternating sections: Beauty, the handsome prince, and the evil fairy whose spindle is responsible for Beauty’s condition.

Briar Rose opens with the story of the prince on a quest to reach a castle after hearing rumours of a sleeping princess (”for all her hundred years and more, still a child, innocent and yielding. Achingly desirable. And desiring.”). What else can he do, as is the hero’s vocation, but race to her rescue? The castle has seen better times and a briar patch has grown around it, preventing easy access. Nevertheless, in an opening tinged with sexual imagery —

He is surprised to discover how easy it is. The branches part like thighs, the silky petals caress his cheeks. His drawn sword is stained, not with blood, but with dew and pollen. Yet another inflated legend. He has undertaken this great adventure, not for the supposed reward — what is another bedridden princess? — but in order to provoke a confrontation with the awful powers of enchantment itself. To tame mystery. To make, at last his name.

— the task is there to be undertaken, despite statements that he’d had been better off searching for the Golden Fleece or “another bloody grail”.

Soon we are with Beauty, high in the castle where she sleeps her century’s sleep. But it’s not without a serious of recurring dreams “each forgotten in the very dreaming of them” although some elements produce an “ambient familiarity”. Her dreams see her wandering the castle, its myriad locations amorphous and unspecific, and longing for “the one”. And tucked away in these dreams is the evil fairy, her lone companion who regales her with tales of other sleeping princesses:

Whe she woke up— What was her name? What? The princess: What was her name? Oh, I don’t know, my child. Some called her Beauty, I think. That’s it, Sleeping Beauty. Have I heard this story before? Stop interrupting. When she woke up— How did she wake up? Did a prince kiss her? Ah. No. Well, not then.

Where fairy tales are prone to a form of Chinese whispers, so too do the evil fairy’s stories take on new forms and variations with each telling while remaining true to the original. In her ever forgetful dreams Beauty is ignorant that the stories are her story, albeit garnished, and Coover takes these fantastical tales - of incest, rape, ogres…and bears! - and injects a sense of real world logic into them —

Has that smug sleeper paused to consider how she will look and smell after a hundred years, lying comatose and untended in an unchanged bed? A century of collected menses alone should stagger the lustiest of princes.

— that, in turn, seems to influence the characters into becoming more logical themselves and begin to develop self-consciousness whereby they realise they are archetypes and struggle against it. The prince, for example, knowing that there isn’t a hero’s life once you are living happily ever after (”What is happily ever after, after all, but a fall into the ordinary, into human weakness, gathering despair, a fall into death?”) finds himself almost happy to be trapped in the increasingly aggressive briars (”he slashes, a branch falls; it grows back, doubly forked”).

The question is who’s mind are we in, if we are in anyone but the author’s mind? Is the princess in the castle a myth that drives the prince onward? Is the prince always, but never, coming to the rescue simply an instance of wishful thinking? The questions play back and forth with each other, placing us back with prince at the start of the book: in a tangled briar of words that seem to part easily at first but eventually keep us rapt in their embrace.

Gilbert Adair, in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, by opting to throw himself into the mix and tell the story of And Then There Was No One (2009) as a fictional memoir. Set in 2011, Adair has found himself at a literary festival in a Swiss town by the Reichenbach Falls, setting for Conan Doyle’s attempt at ridding himself of his popular detective character.

The influence of Sherlock Holmes plays as much a part in And Then There Was No One as that of Agatha Christie has for the triptych of Evadne Mount novels, and fans of Holmes may be interested to know that Adair reproduces, in full from his fictional new book of Sherlock Holmes stories, his take on The Giant Rat Of Sumatra, first mentioned in The Adventure Of The Sussex Vampire (cf The Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes) as “a story for which the world is not yet prepared”.

The reason for this change in the style of the novels comes late, but is worth mentioning, as Adair regularly talks about his novels, past, present, and in translation throughout:

For all my efforts to have the second novel ring as many changes on the first as was organically feasible within the generic conventions I was pastiching, there remained a stubbornly samey something about A Mysterious Affair of Style which long afterwards nagged at me. And not only at me. One reviewer, praising the book, had also expressed disappointment that I had taken an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t fix-it’ attitude to the first of the cycle, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.

Like that novel, Adair begins by playing with the conventions of the murder mystery genre. Where the murder didn’t occur until late in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, the murder has long since been wrapped up here. The victim is Gustav Slavorigin,  a Booker Prize-winning author sent, after publishing a collection of incendiary anti-American essays, into hiding, Rushdie style, due to a contract on his head, courtesy of a rich Texan reactionary.

The prologue, seemingly extraneous to the mystery itself, fills in details that, to a first read, seem dry and dull, and in doing so recalls both the introduction to Eco’s The Name Of The Rose and the short foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita. This in itself is strange, given that Adair has mentioned in the past that Nabokov has “become something of an albatross about [his] neck”. The details of this chapter deal with the history of Slavorigin - his early days at university, with Adair, through the rise, fall, and infamy of his writing career. One notable book, and the reason Slavorigin is making a rare public pitstop, is his new thriller, A Reliable Narrator, which gives the game away without, if you catch my drift, doing so.

How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunnit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The idea of a reliable narrator is played around with too, as is Adair’s playful style. Personal views come into the fray, such  as calling the forty-five minutes of literary festivals “so much hassle for so little result” and his description of a book as being “a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American wunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves.” As a fictional Adair, he’s able to get away with it, even if, with reference to Slavorigin’s book:

The first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.

The usual alliteration, literary and cinematic in-jokes, and postmodern trickery are present and accounted for in And Then There Was No One. The unashamed use of puns (’Google Gogol’, a delicatessen named ‘Salvador Deli’ and a few more Nabokovian references, ‘Son of Palefire’ and ‘Adair or Ardor’) adds to the fun, and I’d like to think that only Adair’s style, like a British eccentric, could get away with a metaphor like “the train tranquilly unzipped the country’s flies from Oxford to London”.

One of the more interesting ploys in the novel is how, as a memoir, Adair manages to introduce his sleuth, the Dowager Duchess of Crime, Evadne Mount, into real events. As the last novel was set in the 1940s and this novel is seventy years hence, and she should be the one dropping dead, he pulls it off well, and humorously, too, introducing her into a book that she should never be written, as per a Q&A session after his reading of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra:

‘You wrote two pastiches of Agatha Christie, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style? Will there be a third?’ Me: ‘Absolutely not. I have had my fill of cardboard characters and preposterous plotlines. What I desire to write now is something more personal, a work of genuine depth and ambition.

Amongst the answers at that session there are some interesting insights that, if we believe the reliable narrator, into Adair that show And Then There Was No One as being that personal work, bringing with it a few questions of its own:

‘I read a book, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Les Enfants terribles, Death in Venice, or whatever, I like it, I rewrite it. I am in short a pasticheur. Less by opportunism, though, than by superstition. I long ago discovered that I could embark on a new work of fiction only if its premise had already been legitimised by one of the writers in my personal Pantheon. Each of my novels is thus a palimpsest. Scrape away at its surface and you will find, underneath, another novel, usually a classic. I offer no apology for this.’

Apologies are not in order as Adair has produced his best novel since 1992’s The Death Of The Author. His funniest, too. It has more conceptual twists and turns than the labyrinth in Eco’s The Name Of The Rose, another novel that owes a debt to Sherlock Holmes, and probably why the Italian writer was also due to attend the same literary festival. In fact, in Eco’s essay, Travels In Hyperreality, he says that ‘once the “total fake” is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real’, and this is what Adair does with this novel, giving us a reliable narrator, so reliable that we can believe his every word, only to have the rug pulled out from under us, to see it for what it is, yet still believe.

While I’ve read a number of Gilbert Adair’s recent books, the older titles from his back catalogue are out of print. One of these titles, The Death Of The Author (1992), has thankfully been given a second lease of life in the United States, thanks to Melville House Publishing’s new Contemporary Art of the Novella series, a companion to its Art of the Novella, a series showcasing the likes of Joyce, Flaubert, Proust, and Tolstoy.

But the Contemporary range is no stranger to lesser known names itself - The Pathseeker, by Nobel laureate, Imre Kertész was the flagship title So, good company indeed. And, when my copy of The Death Of The Author dropped through the door, so impressed was I by the production values (glossy cover with flaps, bold colour, and nicely tactile pages) that I made the snap decision to purchase all the others within the series, with the intention of subscribing to future releases too.

But to the book. Adair’s work - his fiction, anyway - tends to fall one of two ways: the light entertainment, like his Evadne Mount trilogy; or the heavier entertainment, erudite, but still light. All come with an element of postmodernism. And The Death Of The Author, falling on the erudite side, is a postmodern book about postmodernism.

Although my reading of the book went without knowledge of the events that inform it, I daresay it’s not necessary in enjoying the novella. The reference point is Paul de Man, the Belgian literary theorist whose work had a different light shed upon it when it was discovered  he had written collaborationist articles during World War II, including one of an anti-Semitic nature. De Man’s life story, of living during wartime and teaching in the States, is given here to our narrator, Léopold Sfax.

Sfax is a celebrity in the world of literary criticism, having published two books, the first a study of Yeats:

That book, whose appearance produced quite a commotion, I may even say a scandal, in the advanced academic circles of the day, was Either/Either - I realized I had “arrived” when the Partisan Review reviewer wrote of it as having been wildly overrated, for to be described as overrated by one critic meant after all that I had been highly rated by several.

In it, Sfax argues that literary meanings are not intentions of their authors, no matter what they say - that it’s the reader and their interpretation, be it this or that, that makes the meanings. Following on from this book is the one that makes his career, The Vicious Spiral, the book whose arguments, not given a name, become simply known as ‘the Theory’.

The more closely a text is studied the more insidiously is it drained of sense or legibility, just as the more fixedly a word is stared at on the page the more too is it drained of legibility or sense, striking the increasingly bewildered eye as a mere weird disconnected sequence of squiggles. Words are far older and fickler and more experienced than the writers who suffer under the delusion that they are “using” them. Words have been around. No one owns them, no one can proscribe how they ought to be read, and most certainly not their author.

If de Man is the template for Sfax’s life, Roland Barthes is the inspiration for the Theory, being an echo of his essay Death Of The Author. And it’s the popularity of this book that brings us to the opening scene as Sfax talks with a female student of his who would like to write his biograph. Of course, rather than have someone else tell his story, The Death Of The Author becomes his autobiography, and he meanders off on events in his life, coming each time to the moment that spurred him to sit down and write in the first place.

With any Adair book, being vigilant is part and parcel of reading him, for his texts are not without their games, and there’s always that delight on realising, one again, that he is one, sometimes two, steps ahead. In The Death Of The Author he more than delivers, his games bringing together a beautiful spoof of literary criticism and memoir that, toward the end, adds a murder mystery that fulfils the promise of its title. And, when this cauldron of fun comes to the boil, Adair adds a stinging twist that had me screaming, “you bastard!”

To read The Death Of The Author is not unlike what it must be like to have subscribed to Sfax’s Theory:

The world had been turned upside-down - what had always been true was false, what had been important was marginal, what had been meaningful was meaningless - and it made sense, it made sense!

Following on from a recent post by dovegreyreader, I spotted a copy of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour Of The Star (1977) in Waterstones, knew I recognised the name from somewhere, and picked it up. Of course, The Hour Of The Star isn’t its only name, indeed there are a further twelve suggested titles, including I Can Do Nothing, .As For The Future., and The Blame Is Mine. Take your pick.

In this novel, written in the year of her death, Lispector uses the guise of a male writer - Rodrigo - to tell a story that “could be written by another…but it would have to be a man for a woman would weep her heart out.” Said story involves the sad life of Macabéa, a character borne from a face spotted one day by the narrator. From this glimpse arises an interesting novel of contrasts and the need for Rodrigo to put down in writing the story of this imagined girl, a story so immediate he even declares, “I am writing at the same time as I’m being read.”

From the off, Rodrigo addresses the reader of The Hour Of The Star with his concerns about writing. In a philosophical tone he discusses how his novel can never truly have a beginning, using a grander scale to illustrate his point:

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Things soon settle - in an unsettled way - as he agonises over the story to tell, supplementing concerns with apologies (”Even as I write this I feel ashamed at pouncing on you with a narrative that is so open and explicit.”), and all done in an engaging, urgent style.

Macabéa, the girl, is the main character in Rodrigo’s novel’s. Her introduction is repetitive, or at least his mentions of her, and the cyclical nature of this erratic mind - the opium-drunk narrator of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl came to mind - tells us perhaps one time too many about Macabéa’s mental make-up. About how she lives in the here and now. About how she has little ambition beyond being, despite her frailty and ugliness, Marilyn Monroe. And about how, such is the emptiness of her existence, she doesn’t know what it is to be happy or sad:

As the author, I alone love her. I suffer on her account. And I alone may say to her: ‘What do you ask of me weeping, that I would not give you singing?’ The girl did not know that she existed, just as a dog does not know it’s a dog. Therefore she wasn’t aware of her own unhappiness.

But her life is not wholly without incident. She has a job as a typist (”she was so backward that when she typed she was obliged to copy out ever word slowly, letter by letter”) and acquires a bizarre butcher-loving boyfriend along the way. One by one the novel’s tiny cast flits in and out of her life, each experience leading on to an unexpected conclusion that proves to be more shocking to narrator than his creation.

The Hour Of The Star’s joy is in reading the parallel threads as we learn of the narrator and watch him create his character with each page turned. Macabéa, our uneducated lead lead, blunders through life without a care having limited conversations and understanding. She can’t help being who she is, for it’s outwith her control. The blame can rest easily with both her upbringing and Rodrigo. On the other hand, our tortured narrator is educated and knows that he can intervene in Macabéa’s tale but, as the alternative titles allude, doesn’t. For this, he takes to defense:

As for the girl, she exists in an impersonal limbo, untouched by what is worst or best. She merely exists, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. Why should there be anything more? Her existence is sparse. Certainly. But why should I feel guilty? Why should I try to relieve myself of the burden of not having done anything concrete to help the girl?

Make no mistake, The Hour Of The Star, is a novella in which very little happens and while it may, at first, feel repetitive, hypnotic is more apt. A second sitting, with knowledge of later events, certainly rewards, and credit is certainly due to Giovanni Pontiero, for his vibrant translation. And such brilliance gives a taste of life in a Brazilian slum, only to remind us that tragedy is everywhere, especially ahead of us.

It’s not often that I read books by the same author one after the other but I enjoyed Gilbert Adair’s The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd so much that the only logical thing to do was dive straight into its sequel - and second book in the Evadne Mount trilogy - A Mysterious Affair Of Style (2007). I was hoping for more of the same, a murder mystery with a postmodern twist, and, in this, it delivered, although I was left feeling that I’d read it too soon after The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd, and this put it firmly in the shadow of its predecessor.

Where the action of the first novel took place within the claustrophobic environs of ffolkes Manor, A Mysterious Affair Of Style shifts to London, notably a film studio, in the 1940s. As expected, references to the golden age of crime fiction are there and, given Adair’s passion for cinema, are coupled with plenty of jokes (and in-jokes) pertinent to the film industry that generally work, although a few soon become tiring such as the ongoing confusion over the roles of director and producer.

It’s ten years since Evadne Mount solved the case at ffolkes Manor and, as Chief Inspector Trubshawe, formerly of Scotland Yard, notes when they bump into each other at the Ritz, recognising each other instantly as, in a nod to Agatha Christie, who never let Poirot grow old, “It’s almost as though time stood still”. From here these two old partners in (solving) crime renew their friendship and it’s only a matter of time before Mount’s actress friend, Cora Rutherford, is inviting them to watch her on the set of Alastair Farjeon’s (a thinly disguised Hitchcock) new film, If Ever They Find Me Dead.

Fittingly Farjeon has been found dead and his assistant is in control of the new film. As it is, the production is skating on thin ice and all it doesn’t need is more tragedy striking, which is exactly what happens when the aforementioned actress drops dead during filming. Now, while there are plenty of suspects for Mount and Trubshawe to bring to task for the murder, none of them have a motive. And the stakes get higher when the elderly couple challenge each other in the solving of the case with some drastic forfeits should either lose.

A Mysterious Affair Of Style hobbles along on its own momentum, pausing for long dialogues and passages on the nature of whodunits, throwing in all manner of jokes literary and cinematic, obvious and obscure. For examples. Mount’s favourite exclamation - “Great Scott-Moncrieff!” - is a reference to the translation award Adair won for bringing Perec’s La Disparition to English as A Void. Whereas a film titled An American In Plaster-of-Paris is bordering on groanworthy. Regardless, it’s all playful, even if it doesn’t alway pay off.

For a murder mystery there’s not much sleuthing either, Mount eschewing logical methods and instead trusting the intuition of her itchy bottom. But, as murder mysteries go, A Mysterious Affair Of Style doesn’t quite deliver and this may be because, as in Mount’s words, referring to one of her less successful novels, “it’s too clever for its own good. It’s what you might call clever-clever, which sounds twice as clever as clever itself but is actually only half.” This is certainly true of the conclusion which don’t really hit as hard as Mount’s formula for crime writing:

“When the revelations come tumbling out one after the other, the impact on the reader has got to be instantaneous. They’ve got to hit you - practically smack you - in the face.”

While it’s a readable, playful book - trademark Adair, then - it is capable of instigating the occasional smirk at its knowing humour and references, but as a whole it doesn’t really deliver. There may be more to it, as deliberate spelling errors - missing letters, additional letters - can be found at many points. To my mind the mysterious affair of style, aside from that within the novel, is the notion that Adair is emulating Mount’s style and the errors may hint that something is not quite right, and if so, then, through his main character, the author throws one last knowing wink to the reader:

“My publishers, my readers, my critics - well, most of them,” she qualified, not quite suppressing an embryonic snarl - “they all tell me that my latest book, whichever it happens to be, is wonderful, is terrific, is the finest so far, though we all know it’s a dud.”

Having fallen into a reading slump recently, which is somewhat criminal of me, I decided to look for something light, fun, and potentially enjoyable. So, who better an author to sit back with than Gilbert Adair, a man whose novels come laden with lingusitic tricks and twists? And what better a book than The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd (2006), if only because its subtitle is An Entertainment. Oh, I needed entertaining.

This book, then, is a pastiche of the murder mystery genre, the style fitting that of the Agatha Christie mould. In fact, its title is a play on Christie’s The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, which I’ve never read, so I’m sure there are plenty of in-jokes that went over my head, although ignorance of them is not needed in order to enjoy this novel. But, that one novel aside, there are many nods and winks to Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot that I was able to pick up on, if only through television adaptions.

Set on Boxing Day, in 1935, Raymond Gentry (”a professional snitch”) is murdered in the attic of ffolkes manor in Dartmoor. What makes it all the more intriguing is that the attic is locked from the inside. Snowed in with everyone suspicious of the other, step forward Evadne Mount, writer of the Alexis Baddeley series of whodunits, and Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, retired of Scotland Yard, to solve the case. And solve it they do, albeit with little sleuthing and much dialogue, making this somewhat reminiscent of Adair’s A Closed Book, while being nothing like it at the same time.

As you would expect, especially after he has unearthed much of their dirt, everyone in the manor has their own motives for killing Gentry, which Mount relates to Trubshawe:

You’ll excuse me, I trust, if I decline to go into greater detail about the painful things we all had to hear about each other. All I’m prepared to say is that, when we turned in that night, there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have rejoiced if Raymond Gentry had been struck down by a thunderbolt.

Or, for that matter (she concluded), by a bullet.

As you can tell from that passage, Adair enjoys playing within the conventions of the classic murder mystery, knowingly using stereotypes and clichés that would otherwise damn a novel, which Trubshawe lists in one of his fiction versus reality rants that I can only assume references actual Christie novels:

“…apart from locked rooms, you’ll find the whole trumpery bag of tricks. You know, a secret passage that only the murderer has a key to. A clock and mirror facing each other at the scene of the crime, meaning the dial was read in reverse. Some black sheep of a family shipped off to South Africa and supposed to have died there, except that nobody’s certain he really did. All the usual whodunit hoohah. Load of codswallop, if you ask me. “

So how does The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd differ from more cosy murder mysteries? Well, one way is to add a postmodern slant to the text, so that not only do we have a narrative but a conscious playing with the structure. Another is to include references to the author, the publisher (faber & faber) and observations of how it’s just like being in a book. And finally, there’s the ballsy unveiling, without being in any way a spoiler, of the murderer in the title. But while I never solved the crime myself, despite a few moments where I circled around the rather ingenious solution, I’m proud I wasn’t led along by the many red herrings scattered throughout.

In comparison to other Adair novels, The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd is lighter in tone, the verbal trickery not as intense as something like Buenas Noches Buenos Aires, but it’s still, just as it promises, entertaining. And being the first in the Evadne Mount trilogy, there’s thankfully two more acts to look forward to.