booklit

Long ago I’d expressed an interest in reading the works of John Steinbeck in chronological order, starting with Cup Of Gold, his account of Sir Henry Morgan’s piratic life, and then immediately lost track of that aim. I’ve returned to it now, albeit with a slight ‘administrative’ error, in that I’ve come next to To A God Unknown (1933), rather than The Pastures Of Heaven, published the prior year.

Year of publication aside, To A God Unknown took Steinbeck the greatest number of years of any of his works to write, so if the year of publication doesn’t precede The Pastures Of Heaven, the idea certainly does. In fact, as Robert DeMott makes clear in his lengthy introduction, the novel has its origins in an unfinished play by one of his classmates, and over the years saw many drafts and titles as Steinbeck toiled to get it under wraps. It may not be the best of the books he wrote, but it was the one that, through the toil of writing it, made him as a writer.

The novel begins on the Wayne Farm in Vermont, where Joseph Wayne expresses to his father an interest in following the westering crowds and claiming himself some land. (”If I wait, the good land might all be taken.”) where it’s preferred that he stay home a while and find a wife.

“If you could wait a year,” the old man said at last, “a year or two is nothing when you’re thirty-five. If you could wait a year, not more than two surely, then I wouldn’t mind. You’re not the oldest, Joseph, but I’ve always thought of you as the one to have the blessing. Thomas and Burton are good men, good sons, but I’ve always intended the blessing for you, so you could take my place. I don’t know why. There’s something more strong in you than in your brothers, Joseph; more sure and inward.”

In a Joseph, with brothers, singled out by his father there’s an nod to the Joseph of Genesis (no coat of many colours, though), enhanced by the skill of interpreting symbols and later incidents pertaining to the land he settles. On reaching this new pasture, verdant and teeming with life, Steinbeck foreshadows Joseph’s path and gives a first real taste of his intuitive ability:

The past, his home and all the events of his childhood were being lost, and he knew he owed them the duty of memory. This land might possess all of him if he were not careful. To combat the land a little, he thought of his father, of the calm and peace, the strength and eternal rightness of his father, and then in his thought the difference ended and he knew there was no quarrel, for his father and this new land were one. Joseph was frightened then. “He’s dead,” he whispered to himself. “My father must be dead.”

With his father indeed dead, the remainder of his brothers uproot their families to join him and together they farm this new promised land, raising cattle, breeding pigs. Joseph takes a young wife, an educated schoolteacher, and it’s all happy families for a time. Tensions rise, however, as one of the brothers, Burton, confronts Joseph on his pagan beliefs, namely his attitude toward a large tree that looms over the farmhouse:

“My father is in that tree. My father is that tree! It is silly, but I want to believe it.”

Through Joseph Wayne, almost shamanlike in his understanding of the land, we follow an exploration of man’s relationship to nature, for better and for worse. In he good days the livestock breeds, the crops grow, and the rains come; in the bad days, the opposite, and the land dries. When, knowing the harshness of the land, sticks are upped and people move to pastures new, all that remains is Wayne, stubborn to the last, which leads to a wonderfully ambiguous conclusion that leaves open a number of possible readings.

At times the abundance of description can, though evocative, be laid on thick, and the dialogue comes across as wooden, but there are still moments when Wayne reflects on the world around him that raise the book above mere catalogue of events and add a further depth to what could otherwise be a flat character:

High up on tremendous peak, towering over the ranges and the valleys, the brain of the world was set, and the eyes that looked down on the earth’s body. The brain could not understand the life on its body. It lay inert, knowing vaguely that it could shake off the life, the towns, the little houses of the fields with earthquake fury. But the brain was drowsed and the mountains lay still, and the fields were peaceful on their rounded cliff that went down to the abyss. And thus it stood a million years, unchanging and quiet, and the world-brain in its peak lay close to sleep. The world-brain sorrowed a little, for it knew that some time it would have to move, and then the life would be shaken and destroyed and the long work of tillage would be gone, and the houses in the valley would crumble. The brain was sorry, but it could change nothing.

While To A God Unknown is a minor Steinbeck, it’s important in light of the works that would come later. In its California setting, the hardship of a devastated land, and Biblical allusions we are given a dress rehearsal of major Steinbeck novels. Apparently less than six hundred copies of the novel sold on its initial release. Dress rehearsals were never meant for the public anyway.

As the opening to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina makes clear, unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, and in dealing only with its own families it leaves a wealth of stories about unhappy families to be told. 1933 Was A Bad Year (1985), a posthumously published novel by John Fante, concerns one such unhappy family: the Molises, a three generation family with its roots in Italy and branches in the United States.

It should be noted that Fante himself was the son of an Italian immigrant and his fiction bears a  semi-autobiographical signature. The hardships of life in the Depression and his Catholic upbringing are readily present in his fiction, and in a life that stretched over seventy years he produced a paltry amount of it: not because he took his time, but that times were hard and he drifted into movies, penning scripts, like him, long forgotten, because the money was better. Indeed, it was only once Bukowski declared him “his God” that he was ‘remembered’ again.

As the title of the book makes clear, the action is set in 1933. At that time our narrator, Dominic Molise, is a seventeen year old with dreams of becoming an American sporting legend, a southpaw pitching for the Chicago Cubs. His poverty stricken situation doesn’t deter his dreams - after all, some of the most successful names he can rhyme off were once like him.

I could feel my future making waves around me, the promise of days to come, the exciting years that lay ahead. It was always this way with great men, a stirring in their bones, a mysterious energy that set them apart from the rest of mankind. They knew! They were different. Edison was deaf. Steinmetz was a hunchback. Babe Ruth was an orphan, Ty Cobb a poor Georgia boy. Giannini started with nothing. People thought Henry Ford was crazy. Carnegie was a runt like myself. Tony Canzoneri came out of the slums. Poor young men, touched with magic, lucky in America.

Molise’s left arm is his ticket to the big time, so much so that it’s a character of its own, which he refers to as Arm throughout ( “Oh, Arm! Strong and faithful arm, talk sweetly to me now.”). While he would use it for baseball, for “fame and fortune and victory”, his father has other ideas - like training him up in the family trade, bricklaying, so that they can be father and son, working together, paying debts and, with their savings, some day going into the lumber business.

So, there it was. The whole book. The Tragic Life of Dominic Molise, written by his father. Part One: The Thrills of Bricklaying. Part Two: Fun in a Lumber Yard. Part Three: How To Let Your Father Ruin Your Life. Part Four: Here Lies Dominic Molise, Obedient Son.

Molise has had a stint working for his father before, a summer job, and what he recalls most is that “the Arm resented it and was sore all the time”. To his mind, it wouldn’t make sense to toil away with bricks chasing a dream of lumber yards when, observing his father, he notes:

He himself was a very good bricklayer, laying them as expertly as he shot pool, fast and neat and with a rhythm, but he stayed poor just the same, no matter how hard he worked, until it was plain that being poor was not his fault but the fault of his trade.

Why put your back out when other dreams are less intensive? Molise, with his friend, Ken Parrish, a richer kid from the other side of town, contrive a plan to earn the cash to travel east from Colorado. The only problem is that in raising the cash, the effect on the family could be catastrophic, especially such a tightknit family living in a single house, all dependent on the income of an ailing business.

The focus on family, another of Fante’s staples, is drawn well in 1933 Was A Bad Year. Molise’s siblings come and go, more than can be said of his father. The tensions brought about by debts (”‘the rent, the lights, the gas, the butcher, the doctor, the bank, the lumber yard’”) threaten to implode the family. And, always at home, never making things any easier, are Grandma Bettina (”She had not wanted to come to America, but my grandfather had given her no other choice.”), and Molise’s mother, too rapt in religion to truly care for what’s going on around her:

Prayer! What good was it? What had it done for her? My father beside her in bed every night, listening to the clicking of her rosary, finding her on her knees, shivering in the cold, what the hell are you doing down there, come to bed for Christ’s sake before you freeze to death, her prayers a snapping whip at his ass, reminding him of his worthlessness, his wife like a child writing letters to Santa Claus, collapsing from life into the arms of God, of St Teresa, of the Virgin Mary….God’s victim, my father’s victim, her children’s victim, she walked about with the wounds of Christ in her hands and feet, a crown of thorns about her head…I longed for the day of revolt when she would break a wine jug over my father’s head, smack Bettina in the mouth and beat us children with a stick. But she punished us instead with Our Fathers and Hail Marys, she strangled us with a string of rosary beads.

Reading Fante is always a joy, his prose punchy, breezy, and warm with humour. That he can, seemingly without effort, make a light work of a time in history where life was downright miserable brings to mind Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, although the two could hardly be any further from each other in style. Like Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini, this novel is also a coming-of-age novel - bricklayers, poverty, Depression - but then, as I noted before, unhappy famililes are different in their own way, and, even though both books follow Fante’s themes, the Bandinis and the Molises are unhappy in their own way.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I have a hit or miss relationship with the Canongate Myths series. The contributions of Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood failed to excite me and, expecting no less from Ali Smith (see Girl Meets Boy), found myself suitably impressed. Now Michel Faber has entered the arena to present his reworking of the Prometheus myth, of how he stole fire from Zeus and gifted it to humanity, subsequently being punished for his crime.

Unlike the other writers in the Myths series so far, Faber is one I do enjoy reading: his style is always light, his subject matter nothing if not protean. One only has to read his story collections to get a feel for the variety he’s capable of. Introduced via his The Crimsol Petal And The White, a huge, postmodern Victorian tale concerning the rise of a prostitute to civilised society, I was quick to seek out his other works - another novel, two novellas, and three short story collections. Add to that The Fire Gospel (2008).

Faber’s Prometheus is Theo Griepenkerl,  a Canadian academic with a heightened sense of himself. He’s in Iraq, courtesy of the museum he works for, to tour a looted musem with the intention shipping artefacts home. The tour doesn’t last long as a bomb goes off killing the curator and, by chance, spilling forth some papyrus scrolls hidden for almost two thousand years. His talent being Aramaic, Theo recognises the potential power of the scrolls and smuggles them out of the country:

He could barely wait. Those papyri were burning a hole in his briefcase. They were like a stash of pornography that he’d been forced to delay getting to grips with. Not that there was anything kinky in his attraction to the scrolls; the porn comparison was just…a metaphor. A metaphor for the promises the papyri were urgently whispering from the back seat, of what they were going to do for him.

The scrolls are written by Malchus, the high priest named in the Gospel of John, and deviate from the accepted story of the Gospels.What makes them historically significant is that they are an eye witness account of the Crucifixion, predating the other Gospels by at least thirty years. What else can Theo do but publish them? In doing so, in his role as Prometheus, he brings fire to the world.

The tone of The Fire Gospels is satire. To a publishing industry that has seen Dan Brown’s odious The Da Vinci Code and Richard Dawkins’ confrontational The God Delusion upset the apple cart of Christianity,  generating huge profits as they go, it remains to be seen what the reaction to physical evidence dispelling the Christian faith would be. Faber imagines the likely scenario, that of outrage, and has great fun with the worldwide reactions to such material, nowhere more so than a pitch-perfect chapter of Amazon reviews, complete with the spelling mistakes, irrelevant opinion, or ignorance that someone always seems to find helpful.

I did not buy this book, so this author will not make a dime off me. I read it over a two day period in my local bookstore. The so-called gospel of Malchus is a blatant forgery produced by Muslims to undermine our faith. It’s been tried before. When will they learn?

Beyond the religious aspect Faber takes time out to send up the book industry, in areas such as remuneration, book tours, and marketing. Then, beyond that, the very decline in culture itself, be it in the vacuous array of choice television offers or in noting that the advances for those contributing to culture is low while sportsmen are signing $10m deals.

In continuing with the Prometheus myth Faber has to continue the parallel. The punishment meted out by Zeus was being chained to a rock and have an eagle peck out and consume his liver, once it had grown back, daily. With Theo interested only in money and sex, and never straying into likeable or unlikable territory, it’s hard to care for his predicament when his punishment comes. It’s a low point in the book, especially at such a crucial point in the story, but given the satirical tone Faber just about gets away with it.

Like other Faber works, The Fire Gospels remains an open ended affair leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. It’s good at what it does, spoofing the publishing hysteria over religious books in recent years, but all the time there’s the nagging sensation that Faber can do better.  However, as Theo notes, it’s a case of different strokes for different folks:

If there was one thing the Pandora’s box of Amazon customers had taught him, it was that there was no fiction so outrageously, laughably, arrogantly false that somebody somewhere wasn’t moved to tears by it.

Looking at the cover of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen Of The Road (2007) I was reminded of similar volumes consumed in my youth wherein lay the swashbuckling tales of Robin Hood or fragmented accounts of Sinbad’s voyages, often accompanied by black and white illustrations that highlighted scenes from the text. The subtitle being ‘A Tale Of Adventure‘ confirmed what the mountains and men on horseback implied: that within there was a journey. Like most adventures, there is a reward so, seeking mine, I saddled up and hit the road.

As the title of his 2001 Pulitzer winning The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay shows, Chabon is no stranger to adventure, and I’ve wanted to read his work for some time. But ever since a 2002 essay decrying most literary short fiction Chabon’s work has, apparently, become increasingly genre inspired and I’ve been loathe to try it. Nostalgia for those adventure books of old, however, won out.

As we meet the titular gentlemen they come separate to a tavern in order to swindle the locals. The only thing that connects them is that they are both Jews, for the first is Amram, a large African, his skin “as lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle”, and his companion is, Zelikman, a “Frankish scarecrow” and surgeon of sorts. Fooling the locals they are strangers, their insults soon devolve into a staged brawl, which gives Chabon the chance to write action and he does so in a pleasing way:

It was a contest of stamina against agility, and those who had their money on the former began with confidence in the favorite and his big Varangian ax, but the African, angered, grew gross and undiscerning in his ax-play. He shattered a huge clay jar full of rainwater, soaking dozen outraged travelers. He splintered the wheel spokes of a hay wagon, and as the solemn Frank danced, rolled and thrust with his slender bodkin, the berserker ax bit flagstones, shedding handfuls of sparks.

Once discovered, however, they find themselves on the road with an offer they can hardly refuse. A king’s ransom to deliver a youth named Filaq to the Khazars in Azerbaijan. What would seem an easy enough task is pandered by mercenaries sent to eliminate the youth for he is heir to the khaganate, although a rogue general seeks to sieze power. The road ahead is one of action and discovery - mostly action, though - and an ever increasing body count, culminating in a possible reason for why the Khazars converted to Judaism, something which history doesn’t know.

There are wonderful moments in the book, small lines here and there that force an image, Amran”reading the alphabet of horseshoe prints” after a scuffle, or humorous similes of doing something as “easily as a sailor handling a blasphemy”. But these snippets don’t supplement the whole in what is a boring, verbose, fool’s errand of a book, bogged down in Chabon’s efforts to emulate classic adventure books while adding a literary sheen.

I admit that on reading Gentlemen Of The Road I found myself reading passages again, trying to pick up the information they carried, but the many terms I found obscure (ostler? mahout) never allowed me to truly settle into the narrative. And every time I did so I wanted to quit the adventure, to pack up and go home. For all its flash pretensions of adventure and capturing the genre it seeks to sit alongside, it forgets to pack the most important thing for the road: excitement.

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.

When a novel centres around child who has a hard life, I can’t help thinking that it’s a fictional take on the author’s own upbringing. I could find scant information on Noel Virtue, but his first novel, The Redemption Of Elsdon Bird (1987), would appear to have details hinting that the Elsdon Bird of the title is a riff on the author: both grew up in Wellington, have a passion for telling stories, and zookeeping gets a mention, too. That he has written a volume of autobiography called Once A Brethren Boy points in that direction, too.

But speculation aside, this novel dealing with a child growing up in rural New Zealand is a gem of a read and, while being reminiscent of novels like Ian Cross’ The God Boy and Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, it feels fresher because it’s told in the third person, and therefore the confusion of the main character in the world around him isn’t communicated via his naive narration, something that feels all too common in this type of novel.

Sacked from his job for trying to “save” his coworkers, Elsdon Bird’s father finds employment as a supervisor in a rural factory, a position that comes with a house. Elsdon is looking forward to the new place but he finds that things aren’t all that green on the other side. For one, his parents are hardcore Brethren and their rejection of all that’s fun in life confuses this enthusiastic ten year old, leaving him able only to confide in the animals around him. And as his parents’ fundamentalist values escalate, Elsdon becomes the focus of their frustrations, frequently ending up on the wrong side of uncalled for beatings:

…uncertain that Jesus could be his friend when his mum gave him hidings on His behalf - ‘The Lord’s so angry at you!’ his mum would yell as she beat his legs and bottom with the razor-strop - Elsdon found his world a confused, lonely place. No wonder he dawdled all the way home from school…

While life doesn’t get any better for Elsdon, the poor lad remains chirpy throughout. With friends, toys, and books all taken away from him, all he’s left with is his imagination. But with little inspiring it, it’s a wonder he can make it from one day to the next. Dealing with all that’s bad in life marks this short novel out as a wonderful read: the brutal removal of everything in the boy’s life proves Elsdon Bird is “pretty brave” as, with unflinching optimism, he pushes on.

Although it’s in the third person, The Redemption Of Elsdon Bird’s narration comes pretty close to telling the story from the boy’s point of view: the prose is light and easy to read and is shot through with local slang. Hidden behind its rustic charm, it tackles serious issues of religion, abuse, fanaticism, and tolerance, leaving the interpretation inferred from the story rather than being preachy, which, given Elsdon’s father and all the novel is against, would be hypocritical:

No one else on his mum’s side of the family went to the Gospel Hall. All his dad’s relatives went. His dad’s sister Aunt Biddy, who had never married, went to a Gospel Hall in Wellington. Then there was Uncle Judah, his dad’s brother, and his wife, Aunt Una. They lived up north in Masterton and were very strict.

Uncle Bryce didn’t go to any church and once told Elsdon that on Sundays he went to his best mate’s house at Titahi Bay and got shickered on beer. Elsdon pined for the day when he might be allowed to join them.

For a short novel, The Redemption Of Elsdon Bird packs a lot in, its themes popping up and recurring as life develops and then disintegrates for the Birds. The many rural locations in which it occurs give it a gothic feel, only substituting the Deep South for the southern hemisphere. Adding to this notion is the sense - and sometimes, admission - that its characters are “crook in the head”. So, for a novel that will delight and horrify in equal measure, it’s worth making a necessity of this Virtue.

Since the early nineties, it seems Warwick Collins’ writing career has gone largely unnoticed: most of his novels are out of print and Google returns scant information on him. Last year I read a favourable review of his 1997 novel, Gents, on Asylum and, now that The Friday Project has republished it, I decided it was about time I paid a visit.

Ez Murphy, to support his family, has started a new job in an underground London toilet owned by the local council. His colleagues, like himself, are West Indian men: Jason, a Rastafarian, and manager, Reynolds. It all starts well, Ez filling buckets with disinfectant and swinging his mop back and forth over the toilet’s floors, happy scrubbing away until he spots two men exit the same cubicle “curiously like a magic trick - two rabbits from the same hat”.

It seems these toilets are renowned in this area for the practice known as cottaging and the many complaints received forces the council, represented by Mrs Steerhouse, to demand that the three cleaners do something about it otherwise the toilets will have to close. And, as they come up with methods to purge the men they nickname “reptiles” the problem comes back to bite them, forcing a Catch-22 situation.

While the bulk of Gents is set within the limited milieu of a public toilet, Collins’ descriptions are varied enough to ensure they have enough personality of their own without being claustrophobic, whether it be their “flowing, bouncy light” or the sounds within:

It was possible to tell from the sound alone which cubicle had opened or closed. The doors of the seventeen cubicles were like a musical scale. Each hollow space they enclosed had a different frequency. The flushing of the cistern in cubicle three had a different sound from cubicle eleven. Sometimes he could tell the mass or weight of the individual occupying a cubicle by the shape of slight sounds within enclosed space, the click of a belt buckle, the slide of trousers, the sigh of peace.

And it’s not just the toilet that has a personality. The main trio are exceptionally well drawn, most of their character shining out through Collins’ ear for the West Indian voice, capturing the rhythm without slipping into caricature:

“Jason!”

Reynolds returned and leaned back against the table. He smiled, then seemed content to subside into patois again. “Him no dog - like cat, man. Call, him come in own time.

Each of the three has their own take on the casual sex happening in the toilets. While Ez is bewildered by it, Jason believes it’s the sin of “Whitey”, the white man, and Reynolds is more practical in just wanting to stamp it out. Thus Collins uses the men to tackle the subject of prejudice, with sidelines into religion, family, and careers. And he does it with a layer of humour spread over the lightest of prose.

At 172 widely spaced pages, Gents is a novel that is perfect for reading over a single sitting. So enjoyable is it, that its chapters fly by, but its true strength is in its subtlety - it gets its ideas across without shouting, and does so in style. That it went out of print is a shame; that it’s back in print is certainly more than a public convenience.

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.

Were it not for my rather unnatural obsession as regards collecting all of the Penguin Classics, I may never have heard of The God Boy by New Zealand journalist, Ian Cross. Written in the late fifties, this debut novel falls somewhere between Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye (which I am yet to read) and Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. I believe it is hailed as a classic in his home land - in much the same way Grassic Gibbons’ Sunset Song is in Scotland – and forms (or at least once formed) part of the school curriculum – but don’t quote me on that.

The story is told by thirteen year old Jimmy Sullivan who is recounting the events in his life two years previous when his world changed forever. His world back then was the coastal town of Raggleton where he lived with his parents and went to Catholic school. His elder sister, Molly, lived in Wellington. Jimmy’s day to day activities include going to school, hanging around with his friends, and talking with an elderly Raggleton resident (called Bloody Jack) down by the harbour. When not embroiled in such pursuits he turns his attention to the question of God.

Jimmy has a problem with God. While the sisters at school feed him all the usual nonsense, his interpretation is that God is a literal being. And, when he is told that God frowns upon bad behaviour by punishing those that sin, Jimmy believes that he is being reprimanded from up on high when the family life around him begins to disintegrate. His father’s a drunk, his mother has a secret abortion, and their disdain for each other grows throughout the novel. Jimmy, always thinking he is to blame, attributes their arguments to the new bike he begged for and received and even offers to give it back if that will stop the trouble.

Aside from such innocence, Jimmy has some methods for dealing with the strife in his household. He calls them his ‘protection tricks’ and whenever his parents devolve into quarrel he finds solace in singing songs and plunging his hands into scalding hot water. His confusion around Catholic ritual is typically shown here in that, while he doesn’t care for all that religious stuff, his songs sometimes include the Hail Mary.

All through The God Boy, Jimmy’s anger grows until one day he lashes out at God and finds a new mean streak (swearing at an old lady, throwing stones at a friend, smashing a window) which, when the novel’s end comes around, Jimmy believes is what he is being punished for until he realises that he is not to blame – he’s made all the effort and God hasn’t even lifted a finger.

Like Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the narration by a child makes for interesting reading as you are forced to interpret what you are being told. Jimmy, of course, doesn’t know what an abortion is but by reading the clues as he describes the scene (early in the novel) you get the gist of what is happening. His monologue is punctuated with local phrases that emphasise the setting and the inclusion of a few American phrases hint that Raggleton – at its remotest – is not safe from outside influence.

Overall, The God Boy is an enjoyable portrait of a family falling apart through a young boy’s eyes and for all his protests about how he doesn’t care there is emotion within that allow you to see past his objections. I don’t think it’s as engaging as Doyle’s Booker winner but its nevertheless a good enough quick read.