The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less. – Socrates

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realise there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. – Lao Tzu

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. – Seneca

Sell your possessions and give to the poor. – Jesus Christ

A Greek, a Chinese man, a Roman and a Jew over five hundred years apart all came to the same conclusion but Confuciusprobably says it best for me:“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” A couple of hours ago Carrie and I watched, as is our wont of a Saturday lunchtime, the latest edition of Click,the BBC’s weekly news programme covering recent developments in the world of consumer technology and I wondered, as I often do when the programme comes to an end, how I am managing to survive with so few bits of technology in my life; why am I not utterly miserable?

[C]hildren born in the last decade and half [are] the first generation that has never known a world without hi-tech. These tweens and teens were born with dial-up internet, learnt to crawl alongside the PC and practiced writing the alphabet on the desktop. To them, a world without keypads, joysticks, digicams, headphones and LCD is unimaginable. For them, the Dark Ages are the time when television was black and white. – Happy Children’s Day, Mission 2020: Developed India

In 1975 I was sixteen and just about to leave school. The only tech I owned was an electronic calculator. I don’t even think I had a digital watch at the time. I look back at that time with a certain degree of nostalgia, I have to say. Life was simpler then. And yet at the same time my parents were looking back twenty-five years to the fifties and feeling nostalgic for that time. And, as we can see from the opening quotes which date back hundreds of years, people have always felt that life could be simpler than it is. In the fifties my parents were coming out of a period of great austerity, far worse than what we’re going though at the moment, and it was their generation that saw the rise of Consumerism in the sense we know it today; lives that revolve around, according to the OED, an "emphasis on or preoccupation with the acquisition of consumer goods." Things, for a time, really did seem as if they could make people happy: new fangled contraptions in the kitchen, flat-pack furniture, three television channels, fast cars, skimpy fashions and the end of rationing. It was a brave new world. But by the mid-seventies the lustre had gone a bit: in Britain a three-day week was imposed during February 1972 to save on electricity at the start of the miners’ strike; there was a recession from 1973 to 1975 and there was an oil crisis and a stock market crash. Novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term ‘Me decade’ in his article The "Me" Decade and the Third Great Awakening.

And while all this was happening, a thirty-three-year-old Laplander called Arto Paasilinna was having his own problems. He was working as a journalist at the time, which he found was growing "more superficial and meaningless" by the day and he was looking for a change. So, what did he do? He quit his job to write a novel. That novel, The Year of the Hare, became an overnight hit and has since been translated into twenty-five languages and has been made into a film, twice, a Finnish version in 1977 and an inferior 2006 French version. Since then Paasilinna has produced a book a year almost. His publishers say, "The annual Paasilinna is as much an element of the Finnish autumn as falling birch leaves." Now here’s the odd thing. I’d never heard of him, not even this, his most famous book. On top of that, The Year of the Hare wasn’t even available in English until 1995 and only then because it was included in 1994 in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works which funded the English translation by Herbert Lomas. The first American edition only became available in 2010.

It is a timely release.

This is how the book opens:

Two harassed men were driving down a lane. The setting sun was hurting their eyes through the dusty windshield. It was midsummer, but the landscape on this sandy byroad was slipping past their weary eyes unnoticed; the beauty of the Finnish evening was lost on them both.

They were a journalist and a photographer, out on assignment: two dissatisfied, cynical men, approaching middle age. The hopes of their youth had not been realized, far from it. They were husbands, deceiving and deceived; stomach ulcers were on the way for both of them; and many other worries filled their days.

They’d just been arguing. Should they drive back to Helsinki or spend the night in Heinola? Now they weren’t speaking.

They drove through the lovely summer evening hunched, as self-absorbed as two mindless crustaceans, not even noticing how wretched their cantankerousness was. It was a stubborn, wearying drag of a journey.

On the crest of a hillock, an immature hare was trying its leaps in the middle of the road. Tipsy with summer, it perched on its hind legs, framed by the red sun.

The photographer, who was driving, saw the little creature, but his dull brain reacted too slowly: a dusty city shoe slammed hard on the brake, too late. The shocked animal leaped up in front of the car, there was a muffled thump as it hit the corner of the windshield, and it hurtled off into the forest.

“God! That was a hare,” the journalist said.

“Damn animal—good thing it didn’t bust the windshield.” The photographer pulled up and backed to the spot. The journalist got out and ran into the forest.

“Well, can you see anything?” the photographer called, listlessly. He had cranked down the window, but the engine was still running.

“What?” shouted the journalist.

The photographer lit a cigarette and drew on it, with eyes closed. He revived when the cigarette burned his fingers.

“Come on out! I can’t hang around here forever because of some stupid hare!”

The journalist went distractedly through the thinly treed forest, came to a small clearing, hopped a ditch, and looked hard at a patch of dark-green grass. He could see the young hare there in the grass.

Its left hind leg was broken. The cracked shin hung pitifully, too painful for the animal to run, though it saw a human being approaching.

This is very much how the Finnish film begins. The French adaptation decides we need to know a bit about the protagonist (who has now become the photographer by the way) and so we see him visiting a crime scene and being terribly moved by what he has to photograph. (What exactly he’s doing being allowed into a crime scene I have no idea – the version I managed to lay my hands on didn’t have subtitles.) I can see why they did this but to my mind it’s heavy-handed; it makes this man exceptional because how many of us have had access to the scene of a violent crime? The second paragraph of the novel tells us all we need to know. They could be a couple of insurance salesmen just as easily. And I think it is important that the protagonist of this novel be seen as an everyman because the less we know about him the easier it becomes to fill out his character with bits of our own. Ideally he’d be genderless but that’s asking too much of any author.

So what happens next?

The journalist picked up the young hare and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little fore-paws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.

In the meantime the driver who has been honking his horn in impatience decides, on a whim, perhaps, to teach the journalist a lesson; to drive off without him which he does.

The journalist put down the hare on the grass. For a moment he was afraid it would try to escape; but it huddled in the grass, and when he picked it up again, it showed no sign of fear at all.

“So here we are,” he said to the hare. “Left.”

That was the situation: he was sitting alone in the forest, in his jacket, on a summer evening. No disputing it—he’d been abandoned.

What does one usually do in such a situation? Perhaps he should have responded to the photographer’s shouts, he thought. Now maybe he ought to find his way back to the road, wait for the next car, hitch a ride, and think about getting to Heinola, or Helsinki, under his own steam.

The idea was immensely unappealing.

The journalist looked in his briefcase. There were a few banknotes, his press card, his health insurance card, a photograph of his wife, a few coins, a couple of condoms, a bunch of keys, an old May Day celebration badge. And also some pens, a notepad, a ring. The management had printed on the pad Kaarlo Vatanen, journalist. His health insurance card indicated that Kaarlo Vatanen had been born in 1942.

In the whole book this is the only oddity, the fact that he would have gone running into the forest with his case; it’s not as if he was chained to it by the wrist. But I could live with it.

The photographer gets to town, books into a hotel and then when Vatanen fails to appear heads off back to the spot where he left him to see if he can find him but he can’t; the man and the hare have vanished.

Now if I was to ask you to name another book which begins with a person heading off into the undergrowth in chase of a leporid I’m sure only one would come to mind: Alice in Wonderland. And there is a definite parallel between the two books because both Alice and Vatanen, without a second’s thought, abandon the safety of the real world and head off into a new one filled with eccentric and fascinating characters most of whom are welcoming and accommodating but a few of which are not. In a radio interview the essayist Pico Iyer, who wrote the foreword to the Penguin edition of The Year of the Hare talks about the author:

[H]e was a journalist and in fact the story that he beautifully unfolds in the novel is a reflection of his life. He sold his own boat in order to get some free time to try to write this novel, took a huge risk and lo and behold … the novel became a huge best seller; it’s been in twenty-five different languages. He threw himself into the abyss and the abyss caught him and he now had a wonderful life. – Pico Iyer, Radio without Borders, 15 March 2011

Is there any difference between throwing oneself into an abyss and diving headfirst down a rabbit hole?

In the same interview, the interviewer, Jean Feraca, made this statement about the book: “This is a parable about scarcity and abundance and the lesson we can draw from it is that in scarcity we find abundance.” Hence my opening quotes. Had I been the one interviewed I would have fallen back on my old favourite quote from Huxley’sBrave New World:

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

Vatanen has not vanished down a rabbit hole or into the hare’s warren. He’s simply headed off into the forest. The next morning we find him awakening in “a sweet-smelling hayloft. The hare was lying in his armpit, apparently following the flitting of the swallows under the barn’s rafters.” The man, however, is going over his life in Helsinki: the egocentric wife he didn’t much care for, the home full of “huge posters and clumsy modular furniture” he didn’t much care for, the job working for a weekly magazine which had sucked out his soul, the spiralling cost of living, the constant debt. Like I said, he could be any one of us.

He heads west. With the hare in his pocket. He doesn’t have especially large pockets; it’s just a very young hare. In time he comes to a village where he buys some cigarettes and a lemonade from a red kiosk. The girl asks him if he’s a criminal because he came out of the forest. He says no and then “Vatanen took the hare out of his pocket and let it bumble around on the bench,” and any issues the girl might have had vanished: “Hey, a bunny!” This sets a pattern that is repeated again and again throughout the book. Any guy who is happy to wander around with a hare like this can’t be a bad guy. The girl directs him to the local vet who bandages the hare’s paw and instructs Vatanen how to care for the creature. The two of them stay there for several pleasant days, the hare getting tamer and tamer all the time.

Vatanen then gets the bus to Heinola, a municipality in the south of Finland where he calls his friend Yrjö:

“Listen, Yrjö. I’m willing to sell you the boat.”

“You don’t mean it! Where are you calling from?”

“I’m in the country, Heinola. I’m not planning to come back to Helsinki for the moment, and I need some cash. Do you still want it?”

“Definitely. How much? Seven grand, was it?”

“Okay, let’s say that. You can get the keys from the office. Bottom left-hand drawer of my desk—two keys on a blue plastic ring. Ask Leena. You know her, she can give them to you. Say I said so. Do you have the money?”

“Yes, I do. Are you including the mooring?”

“Yes, that’s included. Do it this way: go straight to my bank and pay off the rest of my loan.” Vatanen gave him his account number. “Then go to my wife. Give her two and a half thousand. Then send the remaining three thousand two hundred express to the bank in Heinola—same bank. Is that all right?”

Unlike Paasilinna, Vatanen has no plans to write a novel. But his past isn’t willing to let him go so readily: his wife and his boss learn where he is and are waiting for him when he goes to collect the money. He manages to avoid them and skips town leaving only this short note in his hotel room:

Leave me in peace. Vatanen.

For the rest of the book we see a strange transformation take place. The feral hare becomes domesticated and the civilised man becomes wild. Vatanen moves from job to job, mainly manual work: “billhooking and chopping excessive undergrowth from the woods on the sandy ridges around Kuhmo and living in a tent with an ever more faithful, almost full-grown hare,” breaking “up three log rafts on the Ounasjoki River, north of the village of Meltaus” for “the Lapland branch of the TVH, the Water and Forest Authority,” he then takes “a forest-thinning job five miles from the highway that crosses the deserted forest tracts north of Lake Simojärvi,” and while he’s “[s]pending a few days resting at a hotel [in Sodankylä], he [meets] the chairman of the Sompio Reindeer Owners’ Association, who [offers] him a job repairing a bunkhouse in Läähkimä Gorge in the Sompio Nature Reserve.” He then gets “a job repairing a summer villa at Karjalohja, a lakeside hamlet about fifty miles from Helsinki” before returning to Läähkimä Gorge where he gets offered “a job constructing an enclosure for reindeer” north of the Arctic Circle. All goes well – he’s content, the hare is content – until the appearance of the bear. And then we get to see a different side to Vatanen. Up until this point you might be forgiven for thinking that he was only really interested in running away but suddenly we see him in hot pursuit – and, no, before you think the worst of the poor bear, it’s not gone and killed the hare – but how things are going to end is a mystery. Actually that’s true. How the book ends is a mystery and I’m not going to spoil it by telling you but I didn’t see it coming. The Finnish film copes well with its magicalness; the French one not so much.

This is a lovely book. It is a book I wish I’d written. It is a book I could have written.

Dromomania, travelling fugue, ambulatory automatism, poriomania– psychologists have come up with a variety of terms based on the fact that some people simply walk out of their lives one day, often, it seems, for no good reason; they go walkabout and often don’t go back. Some take up different identities and occupations and months may pass before they return to their former identities. The most famous case was that of Jean-Albert Dadas, a Bordeaux gas-fitter, who would suddenly set out on foot and wind up in cities as far away as Prague, Vienna or Moscow with no memory whatsoever of his travels. Vatanen is not like this. He never forgets who he is, but once he has tasted freedom he has no desire to go back. I use the term ‘walkabout’ in the casual sense we westerners do but this is no vision quest. One day he’s simply had enough and that’s it.

As of December 31, 2010, the National Crime Information Centre’s Missing Person File contained 85,820 active missing person records. Only a tiny fraction of those are stereotypical abductions or kidnappings by a stranger. It is estimated that 35,000 people are reported missing each year in Australia. This equates to one person every 15 minutes. This is a rate of 1.7 people per 1,000 Australians. It’s hard to find statistics for missing adults: because they’re adults they’re perfectly at liberty to abandon their lives; it’s not a crime. The fact is, though, that, for a whole host of reasons, there are people who decide they don’t want to be a part of the rat race any more. I did. When I walked out of my job back in 2007 I knew in my heart of hearts that I’d never go back to the nine-to-five grind (or in my case the seven-to-four-thirty-plus-a-couple-of-hours-in-the evening-and-most-weekends grind). I didn’t know what I’d end up doing – being a fulltime writer seemed a bit idealistic – but I knew I’d have to start living more for myself and not for others or I was going to kill myself through overwork.

I was lucky and things worked out for me. The whole thing could just have easily gone belly up. And that could have happened to Paasilinna too.

Not everyone can walk out of their jobs, let alone their lives; reading about someone who did is the closest they’re going to get. So if you are looking for a piece of escapist literature, rather than reading about aliens or supernatural creature or equally unbelievable romances, give this wee book a go.

***

Arto Paasilinna was born in Kittilä in Lapland on April 20th 1942. Paasilinna ("stone fortress" in Finnish) is a name invented by his father, who changed his from Gullstén, following a family conflict.

From the age of thirteen, he took various jobs, including those of a woodcutter and a farm labourer.

"I was a boy of forests, working the land, timber, fishing, hunting, the whole culture that is found in my books. I was float wood on rivers in the north, a sort of aristocracy of these homeless fixed, I moved from physical labour to a journalist, I went to the forest to the city. Journalist, I wrote thousands of articles seriously, it's a good practice to write more interesting things." [direct quote from his website – not sure if his English is bad or the translation is poor]

He studied general education at the Graduate School of Education People of Lapland and then worked as an intern with the regional newspaper Lapin Kansa. He worked from 1963 to 1988 in various newspapers and literary magazines. He is the author of thirty-five novels but I can only find one other in English apart from The Year of the Hare: The Howling Miller.

Since the publication of Hare Vatanen, the novel that truly launched his career, the writer from Lapland likes to send his characters walking around in Finland, like vagrant existentialists who head off in search of the one thing that is missing from their lives – freedom:

"The Finns are no worse than others, but bad enough that I have something to write until the end of my days."

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
– Emily Dickinson

This is a problem all of us who write have to face: How long do I expect my words to last? Some of our words will, of course, go out of fashion—who, today, knows what a wittol or a stauroscope is or was?—but that’s not really what I’m thinking of. When I submit poems to magazine—when I can get my act together to send out poems is what I mean—I find I tend to work backwards starting with my most recent poems and the stuff I wrote even as recently as ten years ago I often don’t to get round to considering. Okay I have made progress as a poet and I’d like to think the poems I’m writing nowadays are an improvement on those I was writing ten or twenty years ago but while some of the poems I wrote even thirty years ago were quite decent, I act as if they’ve gone off; that no one would want to read that stuff anymore. It’s the same when it comes to book reviews. I’ve stopped asking people to consider reviewing my first two books and, to be honest, a lot of sites say they’re only interested in recently-published stuff; how recent is recent varies but it’s not years. The fact is when Living with the Truth was first published it was already about fifteen years old and my most recent book was written six years ago but if we think about that one, which is set in the Thirties, would it matter when it was published? A novel about the 2012 Olympics on the other hand obviously only has a limited shelf life.

Words don’t go off and yet we act as if they do. I’ve seen it with myself in a bookshop where I’ll buy an author’s most recent book rather than an older—and often cheaper—book. Why would I do that? Yeah, sure, one would hope that as an author he or she has upped their game, but I don’t actually think my reason is anywhere near as rational as that. I just want something new. New is good. New is best.

I know at school I couldn’t see the sense in them force-feeding us the Romantic poets—what on earth could they possibly have to say that would be relevant to a schoolboy in 20th century Scotland?—and I felt the same about music. It’s perhaps a bit too strong to say that I hated covering the history of music at school but the quicker we could get by the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic composers and onto modern composers the better and it’s really only in recent years that I’ve developed a true appreciation for anything written prior to Stravinsky. So shallow of me!

As far as literature goes I have read precious little of anything written before the 20th century apart from Kafka who was ahead of his time anyway. The only poetry I covered was what they made us read at Primary School, stuff like Robert Burns, although I’ll be honest I can’t actually find it in my heart to hate ‘Scots Wha Hae’. I can still remember a boy in our class called Neil declaiming it in front of our Primary 6 class and he had just the right angry tone to make it come to life; I’ve never heard it read better.

All ages have a very high percentage of art that doesn’t last. Even the great poets of our past find themselves remembered for a single poem or a few lines in a book of quotes. Everyone knows “I wandered lonely as a cloud” but what comes next? And can you name me any other poem by Wordsworth? And if, like me, you can manage the whole first verse (give yourself a pat on the back) what about the rest of the poem? And, no, I can’t think of any other poem by him, not a one, even though Wikipedia lists eight volumes by him. And we’re not talking chapbooks.

Now, here’s a question for regular readers: How many of you can remember a single poem by me? It’s not a trick question and I’m certainly not asking any of you to tell me but I bet most of you won’t be able to think of one, certainly not a whole one (hell, I’m lucky if I can remember a whole poem and I wrote the damn things) but I bet you’ll struggle even to remember a few lines. And that’s fine because I can’t remember any of your poems either. So there! Why is that? I have the perfect excuse, the world’s worst memory, but I don’t think that’s the only thing. I suspect none of us read, especially poetry, like it was meant to be read. We don’t live with a poem. When was the last time you meditated on a poem? That’s not what we want in the 21st century unless we’re geeks and have watched all three Lord of the Rings films (the extra special fandabydosy editions) eleventy-nine times and know the entire scripts off by heart. Most of the rest of us watched the vanilla prints that came out in the cinemas just so we could say that we had and if we never see them again well that’s just fine. (You can, of course, replace Lord of the Rings with Star Wars or Star Trek or Harry Potter or Twilight or any other franchise as you see fit.)

There is too much to read, to watch and to listen to these days. I have so much music on my shelves that I would be able to listen to something different every minute of every day for over two months solid. And I’m still hankering after new music. New: that’s the keyword here. New = good. Old = bad.

Now think about something (this is addressed to all of you poets out there): When you write a poem how long do you expect it to last? I have a friend called Vito who used to post poems, leave them up for a couple of days and then take them down. He didn’t even keep copies and it was only because Google Reader remembered all the deleted blogs I was able to salvage some when he decided he wanted to bring out a book.

I could never do that. That’s like binning photos. You just don’t do stuff like that. When my parents died my siblings and I made sure that every photo they owned found a home with one of us; not a single one was discarded and I would hate it—absolutely hate it—if, when I shuffle off this mortal coil, my daughter chucked out my big red binder full of poems. She won’t (she’d better not) but the thought of my words being lost forever is something I find really upsetting. And it’s not even happened. I know they say the Internet never forgets but that’s not true. It’s just not been going long enough for any of us to know how long it might hang onto stuff.

Does that mean that everything I’ve written is worth remembering? Absolutely not. Even in recent years I’ve written a few meh poems and the further back you go the less there is that’s really worth keeping; the less there is that I would keep, but it won’t be me that decides their ultimate fate.

The bottom line is that few of you reading this post will write anything that will be remembered by anyone for any length of time. And it’s not that what you’ve written isn’t worth remembering it’s simply the fact that none of us has the time to remember it and that is tragic. That is criminal. I’m thinking now about some of the poets I know and have followed for years online, people like the aforementioned Vito Pasquale, Marion McCready, Dick Jones and the prolific Dave King and I can hardly remember a thing they’ve written. And a part of me is ashamed to own up to that fact. I do have a lousy memory. I’ve mentioned this already but I don’t think any of you quite appreciate just how bad my memory is and that’s all I have to judge others by.

If we’re not going to be remembered then why are we writing? Clearly because being remembered isn’t the only or even the prime function of writing. It certainly isn’t for me. I write to work things out and once the thing has been worked out the poem has served its purpose; it could be tossed. I keep it as a record. It’s like when you sit a maths exam at school and they tell you to show your workings, well, these poems are my workings. That other people can get something out of them is lovely but that was never why they were produced apart from a handful that were specifically written for individuals.

Live for the moment. That’s what some people do, not dwelling on the past or gazing off into the distant future. They live one day at a time and it pleases me when someone reads one of my poems and it helps then through the day. It might not have been why the poem was written in the first place but it’s a welcome bonus because poems are a bi-product of my life and which of us wants to think that our lives are meaningless?

How long does a book last? Online figures differ. For a paperback it can be as short a life as three to six weeks. Apparently a mere six to eight weeks. That's right. After a couple of months tops the book is whipped off the shelf. It has to be. More than 120,000 books are published each year in the United States alone. With the amount of books being released all the time (329 a day), bookstores simply can't afford to keep the same books up week after week, unless they're really good sellers. That’s a horrible thought. Especially if, like me, you take three or four years to finish a book and then in a matter of a few weeks any interest you might have managed to drum up has gone; you’re old news. And that’s novels. One can only imagine how the poor poetry chapbook fares.

What started all this rolling was a quote I read months and months ago. The only reason I have it is because I saved it and my computer remembered it for me. It was by Ron Silliman:

. . . it was clear that giving it your all, writing exactly what you thought needed to be written, regardless of whether it looked comfortably familiar or not, was the only way to go. Anything less really was just too boring, too timid. Why even bother?

I read it in an article here under the title ‘Why Do You Write?’ In one of the comments, Justin Evans says, “Is it then our duty to wait a certain amount of time before assigning artistic merit to the work, until our personal feelings can be sorted and dealt with?” And that just shifted me up a gear. I’m taking the quotes in isolation and you would do well to read the whole discussion to see the context but it does make me wonder: Why bother?

Why bother? Because I don’t know how not to bother.

Why did I bother writing this? Because it bothers me that we are living at a time when probably more great writing will be forgotten than at any other time in history. More crap will be forgotten too but then it’s always been forgotten and good riddance. But we like to think that the cream rises to the top. That used to be the case and early morning tits would peck holes in the silver foil to get at it. Now who even gets their milk delivered?

All books by Gerald Murnane, if you can find them, are fascinating. Obscure and fascinating. One feels as though the grit in one’s reading eye has been thoroughly cleaned out with…something. – Genevieve Tucker (comment made in a thread talking about difficult books)

In 2005 the publisher Giramondo—an independent university-based Australian literary publisher of award-winning poetry, fiction and non-fiction, renowned for the quality of its writing, editing and book-design—published a collection of essays by the “curious and eccentric” writer Gerald Murnane, a long-time resident of Melbourne. The seven books that he had published prior to this had all been works of fiction. The expression “curious and eccentric” I took from the blurb on the back of the book and, in fairness, whoever was responsible for writing the blurb is referring to Murnane’s imagination and not the man himself, but I don’t think it unreasonable to assume that if a man’s imagination is curious and eccentric then the rest of him probably is too.

The press like to depict the now [73]-years-old Murnane as “obsessive” and “eccentric,” focusing on his unusual habits: collecting marbles, studying Hungarian (although he has never left Australia) and maintaining a vast archive of his private writing and artwork. But precisely this obsessive quality gives his work its thematic unity.[1]

I am as guilty of that as anyone—they’re far too interesting not to mention—and you will find references to them in my three earlier articles on him: The Plains, Inland: common ground between Gerald Murnane and Samuel Beckett and Tamarisk Row (listing them in the order in which they were written) and I cannot promise that I won’t mention them in this article because Murnane himself talks extensively about them in one of the essays in this collection, but I hope to take care when I reach that point that these quirks don’t overshadow everything else in this book as they easily might.

Within this book Murnane, himself, refers to his “wandering, eccentric father” and so it’s probably not unreasonable that his son would demonstrate a propensity towards eccentricity sometime in his life. As it happens it manifested early on, but more on that later.

Eccentricity is one of those terms that people often use without always fully appreciating what it means and there is a slightly-disparaging edge to the expression; people snigger at eccentrics. The English have a long history of producing eccentrics; we Scots not so much. It’s a term that you really need to understand before we proceed so forgive me for dwelling on it. According to Wikipedia:

Eccentricity is often associated with genius, intellectual giftedness, or creativity. The individual's eccentric behaviour is perceived to be the outward expression of their unique intelligence or creative impulse. In this vein, the eccentric's habits are incomprehensible not because they are illogical or the result of madness, but because they stem from a mind so original that it cannot be conformed to societal norms. [italics mine]

Conventional Gerald Murnane is not, nor does he wish to conform to a general perception of what people regard as normal. ‘Normal’ changes all the time anyway. 96.7 percent of American households currently own television sets, the figure having plummeted from 98.9 percent previously. How long, however, will it be before people with old-fashioned TVs are regarded as eccentrics when everyone else has gravitated to watching everything online? Needless to say Murnane is one of the 1% of Australians who don’t own a TV. Is that eccentricity or simply a lifestyle choice?

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is a book comprising thirteen essays, all previously published in literary journals such as Age Monthly Review, Meanjin and Tirra Lirra between the years 1984 and 2003; they are arranged chronologically; two are edited transcripts of talks. They are all stand-alone pieces, nevertheless, viewed as a whole, they present a fascinating insight of what it means to Murnane to be a writer. There are other books by writers out there looking at their craft and if you’re a newbie seeking insight this is most certainly not the one you should tackle first, second or even third unless you find yourself writing stuff that doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere and yet you can’t give it up no matter how non-commercial you realise it is. If that’s the case, read on.

This is a long article even by my standards—not exactly a review—but I spend a little time on each essay talking about what jumped out at me.

Meetings with Adam Lindsay Gordon (1984)

This is the first essay in the book.

Adam Lindsay Gordon was a 19th century Australian poet, jockey and politician. He was actually born on Faial Island which is a Portuguese island of the Central Group of the Azores, but he moved to Australia when he was twenty, after receiving an English education, and remained there to the end of his life. He was the first to capture Australia and her people in the words of poetry. But he was also a bit of an eccentric. This is what his friend William Trainor had to say about him:

Oh, Gordon was, I think, the noblest fellow who ever lived! Very queer in his ways, though. I have ridden ten miles with him at walking pace, and he didn't say a word the whole time, but went on mumbling to himself, making up rhymes in his head.

As Gordon died in 1870 and Murnane was not born until 1939 the meetings he refers to are metaphorical. His first ‘meeting’ was in 1946 which would make him about seven years old. He gets to see Gordon’s house with his father while waiting on a bus during a holiday trip. For some reason he thinks the poet who once lived there was Robert Burns whose poetry he has already been exposed to “and found, of course, unreadable.” What is interesting to me is how this young boy views this house:

I recall my childish sadness that day for things lost or detained far from their rightful surroundings. I imagined that the house itself had been shipped many years before from Britain. Hearing that a man had composed poetry behind the locked doors, I thought of the poet as a sort of prisoner there, writing to pass the months or years of his sentence or exile.

Doubtless his seven-year-old self did not express his thoughts as succinctly as the man who wrote this in his forties but it gives us an early glimpse into the thought processes of this writer. Twenty years later when looking at a photograph of the house he realises something he had not back then, that this house was uncannily similar to “the house where [he] had spent the Bendigo years of [his] childhood” and which form the basis for his first published work of fiction, Tamarisk Row. The house front, identical to most others in the vicinity, reminded him of a face: “a pair of eyes and a nose under a frowning forehead” but I’m more interested to see what this symbolised to the young Murnane:

Those were the eyes of all the people detained where nothing could ever be a subject for poetry or fiction.

He could have been one “of those blankly staring people” had it not been for his father who introduced him, his imagination first and then the boy himself, to the plains that have become a fixture throughout his work.

Gordon crops up a number of times over the years. He is after all regarded as “Australia's acclaimed national poet”—at least that’s how his website introduces him. Murnane is not so sure. What he’s really looking at in this essay is what it means to be an Australian writer. Does one have to have been born there? Perhaps not. It is more to do with one’s attitude towards Australia. Gordon saw Australia “clearly enough for his purposes” but the problem for Murnane is that he sees Gordon as “a poet in the landscape and not a poet of the landscape.” Does this mean that Murnane is holding himself as an—or even the—Australian archetypal writer. Strangely enough, no:

[W]hen I tried to think of myself as a poet of the Australian landscape, I had to imagine as the place where my words came to me the library of a large homestead with windows overhung by English trees.

Gordon had every right to feel a little “homesick for England” but Murnane was born in Australia and has never left. The fact is that although to the world refers to him as an Australian writer that isn’t how he sees himself. This is something that becomes clearer as the essays progress. The nature of Murnane’s Australianness is taken up in Paul Genoni’s article The Global Reception of Post-national Literary Fiction: The Case of Gerald Murnane.

On the Road to Bendigo: Kerouac’s Australian Life (1986)

I watched perhaps twenty double-feature programs from 1946 to 1948. The films were mostly cowboy films, in black and white, and I watched them on Saturday afternoons in the Lyric Theatre, Bendigo, of which I remember only that the floor was quite level, so that the screen always seemed high above me and remote.

Why so few? He explains:

The films I watched made me discontented. Scene after scene disappeared from the screen before I had properly appreciated it; the characters moved and spoke much too fast.

Most people assume that writers are life’s great observers, hoovering up images—everything is fodder, nothing is sacrosanct—but I have to say that in many respects I am one of the least observant people you could ever meet and so, although I don’t understand why Murnane was not captivated by the silver screen as I have been ever since I saw the Disney film The Legend of Lobo back in 1962, I do get his explanation of what the problem was:

What I looked for in films was what I called pure scenery. I thought of pure scenery as the places safely behind the action: the places where nothing seemed to happen. – italics mine

This is why I struggle to find a correlation between someone who is a reader and someone who is a writer. When you read a book you are straight jacketed into a universe created by someone else. He or she tells you only what interests them. Murnane tries to explain how he wanted to respond when he saw a “banal arrangement of grassy middle-distance and hilly background”:

I tried to do to it something for which the simplest word I could have found was swallow. I wanted to feel that waving grass and that line of hills somewhere inside me.

[…]

I was not so literal-minded that I was troubled by cartoon images of a greedy boy with his cheeks swollen by a segment of landscape-pie. Yet the word swallow was not inapt. Getting the scenery from outside to inside seemed to engage me in some kind of bodily effort.

The nearest I can come to understanding the physicality of what he is talking about is opening my eyes wider to ensure that I absorbed as much of the image before me but since my writing is not image-centric I can’t pretend to fully grasp what he is talking about. I do, however, hone in on what interests me: moments, aspects, snippets. It is as if I’m tuned into a very narrow band and only what drifts into that wavelength is of any interest to me. Clearly Murnane was much the same. But why was he attracted to the scenery?

I had first been attracted to my scenery because nothing seemed to happen there; my grasses and hills were never the site of the frantic action that took place in the foreground of films. But when I was tired of waiting to understand my empty spaces, I allowed certain things to happen there. My scenery became the setting for most of my imagined adult life.

By 1960, when he would have been twenty-one, he “thought he was running out of space.” Not unusual. It happened to me a little earlier than that but every generation gets that bit more impatient than the one that preceded it. I imagine most eight-year-olds have gone through that kind of existential crisis these days. Looking back Murnane writes:

I wanted to be someone other than I seemed to be, and I thought I had first to surround myself with a new space. Writing this today, I see that what I needed was imagined space and not, as I thought then, actual space.

Fortuitously this was when Murnane first encountered On the Road and has what I’m going to call—not that I can recall that he ever has—an epiphany:

The book was like a blow to the head that wipes out all memory of the recent past. For six months after I first read it I could hardly remember the person I had been beforehand.

For six months I believed I had all the space I needed. My own personal space, a fit setting for whatever I wanted to do, was all around me wherever I looked. The only catch—by no means an unpleasant catch, I thought at the time—was that other people considered my space theirs too: my space coincided at last with the place that was called the real world. But the world was much wider than most people suspected. I saw this because I saw as the author of On the Road saw. Other people saw the same streets of the same Melbourne that had always surrounded them. I saw the surfaces of those streets cracking open and broad avenues rising to view.

Over the years, having read every new biography that was published on Kerouac, Murnane has come to realise that there are some surprising similarities between him and Kerouac, the most obvious being a love of horse racing; both boys invented their own racing games involving marbles, a central image in Murnane’s first work of fiction, Tamarisk Row.

Why I Write What I Write (1986)

Despite the title to the essay, the question he answers in the opening paragraphs is how he writes:

I write sentences. I write first one sentence, then another sentence. I write sentence after sentence.

I write a hundred or more sentences each week and a few thousand sentences a year.

After I’ve written each sentence I read it aloud. I listen to the sound of the sentence, and I don’t begin to write the next sentence unless I’m absolutely satisfied with the sound of the sentence I’m listening to.

When I’ve written a paragraph I read it aloud to learn whether all the sentences that sounded well on their own sound well together.

[…]

What am I listening for when I read aloud?

The answer is not simple. I might start with a phrase from the American critic Hugh Kenner…the shape of meaning. Writing about William Carlos Williams, Kenner suggested that some sentences have a shape that fits their meaning while other sentences do not.

He goes on to list what others have had to say about what a sentence may or may not be, but the core of what he himself is looking for seems best summed up by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh who once said: “This is genius—a man being simply and sincerely himself.”

He never really gets round to answering the question posed at the start of this essay. He only asks it ten lines before it closes but the key line for me in this entire, albeit short, essay is this:

Writing never explains anything for me—it only shows me how stupendously complicated everything is.

Some Books are to be Dropped into Wells, Others into Fish Ponds (1987)

Why do we read? Before I sat down just now I picked up the TV & Satellite Week that sits beside my chair to make sure there was nothing on that I might want to record. I couldn’t tell you now, five minutes later, what is on, just that there is nothing on that I need to set the machine to watch. When I was about twenty—at least that would be my best guess because I don’t keep the kind of meticulous records that Murnane does—I bought a copy of Don Quixote (in John Menzies in East Kilbride; that I do remember) and read the first volume; the second I started but lost interest in. I can remember nothing about the book bar the famous windmill scene and that only vaguely. About nine years earlier, in 1970, Murnane had also read the book but by the time he came to write this essay, all he had to say about it as he stood staring at its spine was:

I could remember nothing of the book itself or of the experience of reading it. I could remember no phrase, no sentence; I could not remember one moment from all the hours when I had sat with that bulky book open in front of me.

Ditto to all that. After some straining he thinks he recalls “a silhouette of a man on horseback” but then realised it was actually “a memory of Daumier’s painting of Don Quixote that had hung on the wall” in his office. I remember it because it was the image used on the cover of the paperback.

He gives up struggling to dredge up any memories concerning Don Quixote and decides to perform the same test on some other books:

From a sample of twelve—all of them read before 1976 and never opened since—I found seven that brought nothing to mind. If this was a fair sample, then of all the books that I had read once and had not read again, more than half had been wholly forgotten within a few years.

This, understandably, appalled him especially as from about 1960 to about 1990 he read more than a thousand books—he has a ledger where the titles and authors of all those books are recorded. And yet there were other books that he had not read for some thirty years that had left him with images that he sees nearly every day and not all of which are comforting. He illustrates by referencing the book Man-Shy by Frank Dalby Davison which he read when he was eight; the image is of a red cow dying of thirst and he has a good stab at recalling some of the actual text. He does better with Moby Dick but from there goes on to demonstrate how the images in Man-Shy and Moby Dick incorporate themselves into the landscape, the “pure scenery” in his head.

The Cursing of Ivan Veliki (1988)

Another short essay, a mere five pages long. Herein we get to meet the fourteen-year-old Gerald Murnane who thought he was a poet. The creation of Ivan Veliki is one that will make more sense to most writers than Murnane’s talk about “true fiction” or “pure scenery”. He sees the word ‘Veliki’ in a racebook—it was actually the name of a mare—but he imagines “a young man striding through tall grass. Ivan Veliki was the son of a lesser chieftain in one of the settled districts of the steppes” and he plans an epic poem featuring him. He composes the opening line as he “was walking north-west along Haughton Road toward the railway station then named East Oakleigh but now named Huntingdale. The time was early afternoon, the season was spring, and the year was 1953. […] I thought I had become a poet,” he says.

Murnane is not a poet now. I have no doubt that, like me, he has kept all his juvenilia, but although he spent the next ten years writing, or at least trying to write, poems he never became a poet. So why did he think he was a poet?

I thought at that time and for ten years afterwards that a poet was someone who saw in his or her mind strange sights and who then found words to describe those sights. The strange sights were of value because they brought on strange feelings—first in the poet and later in the person reading the poem. The faculty that enabled the poet to see strange sights was the imagination. Ordinary persons—non-poets—lacked imagination and saw only what their eyes showed them. Poets saw beyond ordinary things. Poets swathe virgin lands beyond the settled districts.

It is interesting to compare this to his last book of fiction, Barley Patch, in which the narrator tells us that “fiction is the art of suggestion” and that “a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction as long as his or her reader is able to imagine.” He writes in that book that he had “come to understand that [he] had never created any character or imagined any plot.” The simplest way he found “of summing up [his] deficiencies was to say simply that [he] had no imagination.”

Perhaps this is why the few poems he did write—a mere thirty in those ten years—irritated him when he read them. He was now in the position of the reader and yet no line of his poetry conjured up anything more than what he had seen. He gave up trying to be a poet and decided to write a novel. He thought of himself as “a failed poet who had turned to prose because it was easier to write.”

There is a long and not especially illustrious relationship between alcohol and writers. I’ve written about it but I’ve never used drink myself to aid or enhance my writing and I can only think of two lines written by me under the influence of alcohol that were any good at all. I’m not sure if Murnane’s approach is unique but I’ll let him tell it his way:

Each night before I wrote, I drank beer for two hours. While I wrote, I sipped whisky and ice-water. I hoped that the alcohol would blind me to the places that I did not want to write about and would allow my other organ of sight—my imagination—to operate.

It didn’t work. He gave up writing the novel and was unsuccessful in any further attempts at writing novels or short stories or at least he felt he was because when he discovered he was no longer using his imagination but simply writing about what he had seen, he quit. (Of course when Murnane uses the word ‘seen’ here he’s talking about what he sees in his mind but we will get to that.)

Birds of the Puszta (1988)

In the first essay in this book we saw the kind of world that the young Murnane was brought up in; perhaps not suburbia but certainly suburban and yet one of the constant themes in his works of fiction are “the plains.” In this essay we learn, or at least he tries to explain, about, “the quality of the plains.” He describes “one of the chief events of [his] childhood,” the discovery of a nest containing eggs belonging to a pipit, Anhus australis, not up on a branch out of reach like “the secrets kept from the eyes of children” but right there amidst the grasses. He doesn’t touch it; he doesn’t dare to touch it because, as he puts it, “I would have seemed to myself to be offering an insult not just to the parent-birds but to something that I can only call the quality of the plains." He tries to explain:

Plains looked simple but were not so. The grass leaning in the wind was all that could be seen of plains, but under the grass were insects and spiders and frogs and snakes—and ground-dwelling birds. I thought of plains whenever I wanted to think of something unremarkable at first sight but concealing much of meaning. And yet plains deserved, perhaps, not to be inspected closely.

The notion of plains is discussed at some length in his book of the same name but I would recommend you take the time to read Karin Hansson’s paper, Gerald Murnane's Changing Geographies from which the following quote comes:

The traveller in The Plains, for instance, finds himself in an enclave, “encircled by Australia” (P 6), that is space surrounded by place, “a zone of mystery enclosed by the known and the all-too-accessible” (P 77).

Then as the exploration proceeds, a number of seemingly unrelated geographical key concepts are introduced and the setting becomes increasingly imprecise, “the world itself…one more in an endless series of plains” (P 9). Motifs of space, territory and landscape are related to notions of identity and the very act of writing:

[The plains] are not … a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings. (P 92)

Pure Ice (1988)

Where do you get your ideas from? It’s a question that most writers will have been asked often in so many words. In some cases I could tell you and you would see the connection but whenever I’ve read Murnane describe the central image, the fulcrum on which his books rest, it is not always easy to see how the book emanated from that imagine. In the earlier essay, ‘Some Books are to be Dropped into Wells, Others into Fish Ponds’ he wrote:

It was a strange experience to discover, halfway through writing what I thought was a story about X, that I had really been writing the story of Y. I had thought for three years that I was writing a book whose central image was a patch of soil and grass, but one day in January 1987 I learned that the central image of my book was a fish pond.

The book was Inland which I have read and reviewed. The book does talk about “grasslands between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri” but I can’t honestly say that that image jumped out at me as the central image. In this short essay we discover what prompted the writing of the book. It was an image—it’s always going to be an image with Murnane—which he encountered whilst reading Peoples of the Puszta, a girl running out into the snow and being in such a rush to do so that she forgets her boots; this, of course, gets mixed up with his own experience of seeing snow for the first time “falling faintly on [a] schoolground for a few minutes in 1951.” Being aware of these things now makes me curious to read Inland again to see if I can understand his creative process but I'm not sure I need to; I'm content with the end result.

The Typescript Stops Here or: Who Does the Consultant Consult? (1989)

Here Murnane talks about some of the other jobs he has done to support himself. One of these was as a fiction consultant—as opposed to a fiction editor—for the literary magazine Meanjin. During the year 1988 the magazine received some 700 pieces of fiction all of which were read first by the editor and many also by the assistant editor; about one hundred of these were passed onto Murnane for his seal of approval. He gripes a bit about the title ‘consultant’ since he himself consults no one—ignoring the fact that he is actually the one being consulted—and then proceeds to talk about how he goes about the process of selection by himself ‘consulting’ his “better self.” As with other expressions he had co-opted to suit his own ends he has to explain what he means:

Readers of goodwill will understand me when I write that my better self is the part of me that writes fiction in order to learn the meaning of the images in my mind. The same readers will understand me when I write that my better self is the part of me that reads fiction in order to learn the meanings of the images in other minds.

He reads much as he writes, one sentence at a time, and his main criticisms of the hundred-odd stories that he read in 1988 were that the sentences were shoddy:

[They were] sentences that seemed to have been dashed down and never read aloud, let alone revised, sentences seemingly unconnected with human thoughts or feelings. Stories by previously unpublished writers most commonly made me suspect that the writers were nervous—that they had not yet learnt the value of their own memories and dreams and thoughts and feelings as material for fiction.

Perhaps the best advice he finds he can give, however, is not his own. It belongs to Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Before I write a story, I must have a conviction that it is a story that only I can write.

If that is the litmus test Murnane would use certainly I cannot imagine anyone else writing books like him.

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (1990)

That Proust would be a writer that Murnane would connect with comes as no surprise to me. Beckett certainly was impressed by him and I do see some similarities between the three writers. Proust suggests, in In Search of Lost Time, that in reality, as soon as each hour of one's life has died, it embodies itself in some material object and hides there. (The scene concerning the madeleine is well-known even to those who know nothing more about Proust.) There it remains captive forever unless we should happen on the object, recognise what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free. As it turns out, Proust's original model may have been a piece of soggy toast. In an earlier draft, the narrator is offered a piece of "dry toast" which he dips in his tea and it is the "bit of sopped toast" that triggers the familiar surge of memory. Murnane, I think, would not have changed the trigger which could just as easily be a place, a marble he owned as a child (and likely still owns) or some racing colours. I’m not saying this is the single key to understand Murnane but it will unlock the great gates and let you into the grounds of his imaginary estate.

In this essay, with his usual raw (and comical) honesty, Murnane recalls both the first time he encountered Swann’s Way:

When I began to read the first pages of Proust’s fiction, I had just opened the first tin of sardines that I had bought—a product of Portugal—and had emptied the contents over two slices of dry bread. Being hungry and anxious not to waste anything that had cost me money, I ate all of this meal while I read from the book propped open in front of me.

For an hour after I had eaten my meal, I felt a growing but still bearable discomfort. But as I read on, my stomach became more and more offended by what I had forced into it.

Eventually he is overcome by nausea and for the next twenty years found that every time he handled that volume he would feel, in his mind at least, a mild flatulence.

Although I am sure the expression occurred in some, if not all, of the earlier essays this is the first one where another of Murnane’s stock expressions jumped out at me: “in my mind”. He addresses the matter later so just hold that thought in your minds for now.

The rest of this essay charts the various connections that his mind has made emanating from this first reading of Swann’s Way jumping back to the forties (a photograph of him standing beside a sunlit wall), the fifties (a fly buzzing near a bush of tiger lilies), throughout the sixties (a “complex arrangement of vistas of green fairways”), into the seventies (another buzzing fly) right up until July 1989 when we find him writing the very text that we are reading. The sentences get more and more involved—Murnane has no problem with longer sentences—until, at the very end, it comes clear what he is trying to do here, to communicate the process by which he produces the kind of writing he does. It has the feel, however, of a translation. By that I mean although his English is perfect you—or at least I—feel that not everything is coming across in the translation. Murnane uses the phrase “in my mind” more and more as if by pure repetition alone we will understand what he is trying to get across.

Stream System (1990)

This is an edited version of a presentation to the staff and students of the English Department of La Trobe University which Murnane delivered on July 1st 1988. It’s not often that essays have twists in the tails but this one does and it is all to do with preconceptions. It’s a fairly long essay, thirty-one pages long, in which he talks about the slightly circuitous route he took from his home to the university, a route that took in two creeks, Salt Creek and Darebin Creek, which form a part of what the Melway Street Directory of Greater Melbourne refers to by the words STREAM SYSTEM.

This is a similar essay to the one that precedes it in the book, a wander through the mind of Gerald Murnane, and, like all the essays (and, indeed, all his works of fiction), we get interesting autobiographical details along the way. Here we encounter another of Murnane’s expressions, “true fiction.” So what’s “true fiction”? Creative non-fiction? Semiautobiographical fiction? In ‘The Typescript Stops Here’ he explains:

When I speak or write about what I call true fiction, some people think that I think of the best fiction as a sort of confessional writing. I deny this. What I call true fiction is fiction written by men and women not to tell the stories of their lives but to describe the images in their minds…

This is discussed at some length in David Pereira’s essay The Landscape of Gerald Murnane: The Fictions of Everyday Life. Writing, for Murnane, is very much a process of discovery, following a trail of images to see where they lead.

This essay concludes with the following:

If anyone were to ask me today what method I use for writing my fiction ... I would say that I write fiction by following the stream system.

The term is not defined but rather demonstrated in the preceding thirty pages.

Secret Writing (1992)

Up until four years ago I was a secret writer. I made no secret of the fact that I was a writer but for the most part I kept my writing to myself. I wrote novels and put them in binders and pretty much forgot about them. Many of you reading this will have similarly-filled drawers, hard drives or binders. Only not so much these days because these days publication is easy, so inexpensive that anyone can just go ahead and do it themselves. Back in 1962 in Australia it was a different world as Murnane relates in this essay:

If I were a young writer starting out in 1992, I would sometimes be tempted to despair when I thought of how many other writers are already being published. In 1962, what tempted me sometimes to despair was the thought of how few Australians seemed to be writing fiction or getting it published. I felt in 1962 that writing fiction was almost an un-Australian thing to be doing.

And yet he finds he cannot help himself but finding no one within his profession (he was a primary school teacher at the time) with whom he cared to discuss his writing—not that he has ever been terribly keen to talk about it—he did his writing on Sundays and on three or four evenings each week and kept what he was doing pretty much to himself for the next ten years until he thought he had something publishable—can you imagine anyone today waiting ten years before trying to get published or doing it themselves?—and from then on his name was out there and he was no longer a secret writer something that, at times, he regrets because of the attention that followed:

During the years of my secret writing, nobody ever asked me to look at their own writing and to comment on it. During those years, no editor of a magazine approached me at a party and asked me to write a piece for her magazine.

I would like my next book to be published with a pseudonym on the cover. Better still, I would like the book to be published with no author’s name on it. But I would like more than that. I would like all books of fiction to be published without their author’s names. I would like all writers to be secret writers. Then readers would read books with more discernment. I believe many readers are too much influenced by the names on the fronts of books.

He then cites an instance where, at a seminar, he handed around photocopies of a typed page of prose and asked the editors to correct any errors of which there were many. He then revealed that he had copied the page from a recent prize-winning novel by one of Australia’s best known writers of fiction and had just altered the names of persons and places. I can only imagine what he would have to say today, twenty years down the road.

The Breathing Author (2002)

“I have for long believed,” writes Murnane, at the beginning of this essay, “that a person reveals at least as much when he reports what he cannot do or has never done as when he reports what he has done or wants to do.” It is a fair enough statement. For my part I think that spending too much time dwelling on such matters can contribute to a skewed view of the person under the microscope. So he doesn’t watch TV; so he’s never been in an aeroplane; so he’s spent his entire life in a small corner of Australia; so he doesn’t understand exchange rates or the workings of the International Date Line and has never been to the opera. Okay, I admit I find it strange that someone having grown up in as sunny a place as I’ve always assumed Australia to be has never worn sunglasses but I bet there are loads of people who have never voluntarily gone into an art gallery or a museum. That he has never engaged fully with many of the appliances that so many of us take for granted is not so surprising. Had I never worked in an office I would have seen no good reason to learn how to operate a fax and I have no particular interest in mobile phones; I have one but I could as easily do without one for all it gets used. When he wrote this essay he had never used a computer. Not so strange in 2002 and now I’m told he has given in and bought one although the World Wide Web is still something of a mystery to him.

I could go on. One thing I would like to quote is this, however:

I have read hurriedly Terry Eagleton’s book Literary Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell 1983. I have read much less hurriedly Wayne C. Booth’s book The Rhetoric of Fiction University of Chicago Press. … I do not recall having read any other book on literary theory or related subjects.

It is in Booth’s book he encountered the expression “the Breathing Author” or, elsewhere in the text, “the Flesh-and-Blood Author.”

This essay doesn’t simply provide us with a list of his personal idiosyncrasies. We learn more about the things that do stimulate and engage him, things like charts and diagrams, which he has used frequently to help him plan most of his book-length pieces of fiction even if, ultimately, he could never get his fiction to conform to the shape he had planned for it. I bet the list of authors out there who find their books go in directions they had not planned or conceived is a long one indeed.

Again he makes an attempt to describe how he writes and notes that his explanation might come across as “niggardly”—one might almost think he’s being facetious in his explanation which reminds me of something Stephen King is reported to have said: "When asked: How do you write? I invariably answer: One word at a time."I don’t think he’s being facetious either, incidentally. Murnane is, typically, a bit wordier in his explanation but essentially that’s what he’s saying. He thinks of himself as “a technical writer [and the] task of this sort of writer,” he says, “is to report in the plainest language the images that most claim his attention from among the images in his mind and then to arrange his sentences and paragraphs (and, if applicable, his chapters) so as to suggest the connections between those images.”

In the previous essays there have been numerous instances of images that have stood out in some way for Murnane. Typically he has co-opted a word to try and help others grasp the process that’s in play here; he calls it winking. Image after image passes in front of his mind’s eye and then one winks at him. In what way winks?

I choose deliberately the word winking to describe this primitive signal to me from some patch of colour or some shape in my mind. I so choose because my seeing the signal never fails to make me feel reassured and encouraged as many a person must feel after being winked at by another person. And I choose the word winking in this context because a wink from one person to another often signals that the two persons share a secret knowledge, so to speak…

I think most of us would describe what’s going on here as inspiration. Where, I think, he might differentiate between being winked at and being inspired by is that the winking is a purely internal thing, taking place within his internal landscape, his mind. The only time he uses the word ‘inspiration’ in this book is with reference to something a philosopher once wrote—unusually he has forgotten who—from whom he drew what he calls “a sort of inspiration as a writer of fiction. That statement was to the effect that everything exists in a state of potentiality; that is to say, anything can be said to have a possible existence.”

The Angel’s Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life (2003)

During his life Murnane has become competent, to varying extents, in six languages (Maltese, Latin, French, English, Arabic and Hungarian) although, unlike Beckett, he has been content to write his fiction in English. He learned Hungarian in order to read the book I mentioned earlier, Puszták Népe [People of the Plains], which he had read in translation, in the original language. Although that’s not really the reason. It goes deeper than that and it all boils down to an image he saw, or imagined (he is no longer sure), of “a certain dark-haired young woman” who has often appeared in his mind since that time, 1956, when he read in the newspapers about and, more importantly, “pored over … photographic images of the Hungarian Revolution.” He knew, and realised he would never know, even the girl’s name, let alone any of her history. The only thing he felt he could do for her was to learn her language.

You might wonder why he didn’t arm himself with “a teach-yourself guide book with an accompanying cassette” at that time. Well, apart from the fact that cassettes didn’t go into general distribution until the early sixties, it was because this is Murnane we’re talking about here. He has a long (a very long) gestation period, as he says in ‘Some Books are to be Dropped in Wells’ about the writing of Inland, “[H]ow could I have lived for more than thirty years without realising how full of meaning my fish pond was?” And yet in this essay we see that the reading of People of the Plains, which he first read in 1977, was another important component in the creation of this text.

***

Needless to say there is a lot I have not discussed or even mentioned that is covered in this book. To do so I would have needed to write a text every bit as long as the one he has written, probably longer. I have tried to look for a theme weaving its way through the texts even though each is a standalone piece of writing. I have now read five books by Murnane: The Plains, Inland, Barley Patch, Tamarisk Row and this collection of essays. There is much overlap and yet I feel I’m still a long way away from understanding the man. Not that I think that any of us can come close to understanding the mind of another purely by reading words on a page. What comes across in these essays, though, is a genuine desire to communicate the incommunicable.

I have never taken a creative writing class. I don’t pooh-pooh them but I don’t think they’re for me. They clearly weren’t for Murnane. And they may not be for you. I don’t know if Murnane ever read Bukowski. If he was drawn to Kerouac I might imagine that he might have been curious about his peers; anyway, I think, even if he hadn’t read it before, he might connect with Bukowski’s poem ‘So You Want To Be A Writer’which ends:

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

REFERENCES

[1] James Halford, ‘Fiction: Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane’, M/C—Media and Culture

[2] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography,p.48

[T]the line between fiction and confession was so fine it didn’t exist – Andrew McCallum Crawford, ‘When Iron Turns To Rust’

Just over a year ago I reviewed Andrew McCallum Crawford’s first collection of short stories, The Next Stop is Croy and other stories. As in that collection the characters in A Man’s Hands often appear in more than one story and although these stories stand on their own (and, indeed, have been published as standalone pieces) they do form part of a larger story arc and are enhanced because of this. That said, the Jacks, Johns, Andys, Matts and Seans all feel a bit like they all ought to be Andrews. I asked him about this and he said he thought I’d hit the nail on the head here:

Perhaps they all are Andrews. More precisely, perhaps they are all Andrew. Perhaps. The title of the collection is A Man's Hands, not Men's Hands.

When I read this the first time—at 60 pages it’s not exactly a long read—I didn’t pay too much attention to who the protagonists were in each of the stories. There was ‘the man’ and ‘the woman’ and that was as much as I really needed to know and I did find myself mixing them up. This has been something I’ve complained about before where there has been a cast of thousands—okay, a dozen or so—but never where most of the stories only contain two players. The fact is the names really are pretty much irrelevant and only serve to remind the readers which stories are (officially) linked. I add the proviso because, as I will explain, I think all the stories here are thematically interlinked.

The first thing I had to do when I’d finished the book was to go back and get the story threads straight in my head. There are eleven stories broken down into six sections:

SEAN The Canny Cyclist MATT Gimlet JACK Edinburgh Arrivals Arthur’s Seat Edinburgh Departures

JOHN Sofitel Gatwick Player ANDY Chicken Soup Gentlemen, We Have A Winner When Iron Turns To Rust CLIO A Man’s Hands

The longest single story, taking up about a third of the book, is the first one. It reminded me of Harold Pinter, specifically his play The Homecoming. Writing in The New Yorker, the critic John Lahr had this to say about the play:

The Homecoming changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defence. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes. […] The Homecoming offered no explanations, no theory, no truths, no through line, no certainties of any kind.

The play explores the nature of family. In brief: after having lived in the United States for several years, Teddy brings his wife, Ruth, home for the first time to meet his working-class family in North London and, of course, she is in danger of being the outsider. That’s not how Pinter plays his hand but I’m not here to talk about Pinter other than to get you thinking about the mood he generates in his best-known work.

Pinter was not a conscious influence however. Andrew says:

I am aware of Pinter's work, although I am not an aficionado. I have only ever seen one of his plays—The Collection—in Thessaloniki way back in 1991. I remember being struck by the things you mention. Having said that, I wouldn't cite Pinter as an influence. The four greats for me are Malamud, Kelman, Donleavy and, of course, Carver. Of these four, I would say that it is Malamud and Carver who have influenced my writing (meaning the way I write) the most.

Conscious or not this was what I saw/brought to these stories.

In Sean’s story, after only a couple of dates (if you include their initial meeting at a party in Edinburgh) Sean takes the train down to York to be with his girlfriend, Rose, a Geordie whose father’s a Dundonian so goodness knows what they’re all doing in York; we learn that Sean’s an east-coaster which is to be expected since Andrew hails from Grangemouth and, as I’ve said, all the male protagonists in the book feel like his proxies. We learn very little about Rose: she has long eyelashes, is prone to pouting, isn’t embarrassed by public shows of affection, is a newly qualified teacher, can drive, drinks Earl Grey tea, likes chocolate éclairs (the cake, not the sweets) and toast but not sausages and hasn’t seen her family in a while. We learn even less about Sean: he likes public shows of affection, owns an overcoat, is the kind of guy who’d buy his girlfriend a red, family-sized toaster on their second proper date and can play a bit of piano. So, if, like me, you’re not a huge fan of description and exposition then Andrew’s the bloke for you.

After a day out sightseeing they go back to her flat where Rose gets a phone call. The phone’s in the hall and so Sean doesn’t overhear anything; besides he’s busy watching the telly.

She was gone a while. When she came back in, she sat in the armchair on the other side of the room. She had crumbs at the sides of her mouth. ‘Fancy a drive?’ she said.

‘Eh?’ said Sean. ‘Where?’

‘I need to go home,’ she said. ‘It’s been a while. I’ve been putting it off. You’re welcome to come with me if you want.’

This was a surprise. ‘Of course I’ll come with you,’ said Sean. ‘I’d like that.’

No explanation is offered nor is any sought. It’s a fair drive from York to Newcastle (about 75 miles) during which one might’ve imagined Sean would ask questions about her family (I certainly would) but, no, the only eventful thing about the car journey is the fact that the left—and shortly thereafter—both windscreen wipers give up the ghost. This may strike you as odd especially if you’re a writer because we tend to be nosey besoms, but there are people out there who, even if they are curious, hold themselves back from prying and this is a characteristic of many Scots and northerners. So Sean finds himself in her parents’ house very much the outsider.

After a while Kevin, the titular cyclist, appears and the two men do not hit it off. So who’s Kevin?

‘He’s an old friend,’ said Rose. ‘We were at school together. He’s a bit clingy.’ She examined her nails. ‘But he’s been...never mind. He’s not important.’ She smiled, but he could see it was forced. ‘You’re not jealous, are you?’

Words. All you could do was listen to them. ‘Should I be?’ he said.

So, we missed out on the phone conversation, we miss out on whatever the ellipsis is hiding and later that evening when her drunken dad turns up and sticks a CD on repeat playing the same track over and over again (‘Lady Eleanor’ by Lindisfarne) Sean misses out on his lovemaking; she’s still up for it—‘It’s what [Dad] does. Don’t worry, he won’t come up here.’—but Sean’s too distracted to perform. The man’s drunk, blootered in fact—he looks like he might have been injured in a fall or a fight—and Rose gets him to bed before crawling into her own. Sean tries to talk to her but, predictably, she’s not up for it: ‘Just go,’ she said. ‘It’s something...you would never understand.’

In the morning good ol’ Kevin’s there—seems he’s found the time to fix the window wipers—and the two men get a chance to face off:

Sean leaned against the sink. He had forgotten to switch on the kettle. What am I doing? he thought. I’m bigger than this. ‘When did...how long’s her dad been...’

‘Didn’t she tell you?’ said Kevin.

‘No,’ said Sean.

‘No,’ said Kevin. ‘See, she’s like me. She’s canny. Come to think of it, she’s better than me. She knows not to talk to strangers.’

‘Okay,’ said Sean. ‘You broke it. Are you happy?’

‘Broke what?’ said Kevin. He bit into a crust and wiped crumbs from the corners of his mouth.

‘Don’t come it,’ said Sean. ‘You know what I’m talking about. I’ll be gone soon enough, don’t worry.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Kevin. ‘Champion.’ He got up and opened the door.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Sean. ‘It’s just the way it is.’ He heard him go into the living room, then their voices. He heard everything, but he was past caring.

Now, look at that scene as if it was a play and tell me you can’t see the Pinter in there:

By now you’re probably at screaming point, aren’t you? It’s like they’re talking in innuendoese. Why do these people have to say everything by not saying anything? Because that’s the way so many of these non-conversations go. By this time Sean’s sussed out a few things. He realises Rose’s mum’s dead which is why all her clothes are in the spare room. When was the funeral? That day? A week ago? A month? Presumably it was Kevin on the phone but just what’s the deal with him anyway and why did her dad, in his drunken stupor, assume he was Kevin? And how come Kevin painted everything white including the piano from all accounts? I can’t imagine. Don’t look at me for any answers because I don’t know much more than you and that’s all Andrew’s fault. Only I don’t see it as a fault.

Over on the Writer’s Digest site there are lots of friendly articles telling us what to do and not to do. In one of her articles Elizabeth Sims says, “resist the urge to over-explain … [your readers] can conjecture just fine” and in one of her articles Nancy Lamb writes, “allow [your readers] to intuit the meaning” of the text. There’s a great deal we never get to know about Rose and her family, even less than Sean because at least he got to hear her conversation with Kevin; we never do.

Jack’s story revolves around a slightly different male/female dynamic. In these three stories we have an older man and woman meeting up after many years apart. Really it’s hard to think of the first and last pieces as standalone pieces because they’re so short, a couple of bits of flash fiction really; they serve as effective bookends though. ‘Edinburgh Arrivals’ and ‘Edinburgh Departures’ are in the third person; ‘Arthur’s Seat’ is in the first person, Jack speaking. Although they’d like to think they know each other, after this many years—“half a lifetime”—they’re completely different people: “He had promised her the boy; she was confronted by a stranger.” So really the situation isn’t that dissimilar to ‘The Canny Cyclist’: there is an assumed familiarity that isn’t really there. Again there’s a difference—he’s a Scot, she’s now acquired a bit of an English twang. Non-Brits might not appreciate the significance of the UK’s north-south divide—we’re just one great big united kingdom after all—but the differences are many; to lose/give up ones accent is tantamount to losing one’s national identity. I don’t think Andrew’s making a political point here but I don’t think the decision to give Rose and Jill different accents can be considered as pure coincidence.

Touching is another issue these two men face, the desire to and the limitations of. When Sean is out with Rose at one point he squeezes her hand “but there was no response” and when Jill slips and Jack holds out his hand she chooses to grab his sleeve instead. The issue is one of control, i.e. power, another Pinteresque trope. Rather than visit the castle (just as Sean and Rose fail to visit the cathedral, the two biggest tourist attractions in Edinburgh and York) Jill suggests they walk up Arthur’s Seat which is an extinct volcano situated in the centre of the city of Edinburgh. Part way up, as I’ve said, she slips:

She grabs my sleeve. I feel the tug through the material. I want to touch her hand. I want to feel the skin of her hand in my hand. I want this woman, who was once my lover, to touch me. I want her to want to touch me. I want confirmation that I am still a man in her eyes, that I am still in the game. Back then, our relationship was defined by the word ‘control’. I couldn’t control her. I still can’t. I want something she won’t give, something she can’t give.

In Pinter's The Homecoming one of the important themes is power. Many of the characters try to exert power over others through various means such as sexuality and intelligence. You use the tools at hand. Information is power. Rose withholds it. Intimacy is power and although she’s open sexually their relationship still lacks intimacy; she refuses to confide in him. This is true of Jack and Jill and their hill and it was impossible to read this story without thinking of Scottish psychiatrist R D Laing’s book of poetry, Knots, which also feature Jack and Jill and their various power struggles.

In John’s story we have another similar encounter at an airport—this time it’s the Sofitel Hotel just by Gatwick Airport in London. There he meets an old lover and another power play ensues:

Slow down. You can control this. But these thoughts have a life.

She is standing in the space between the dressing table and the bed, looking for somewhere to sit. There is no need to sit down yet. He embraces her, but it is not supposed to be like this, embracing her ski jacket, embracing Gore-Tex and Velcro. It is her he wants to embrace, the essence of her. The smell of her perfume, but it is not her perfume.

A similar encounter takes place with Andy and his unnamed muse, another old lover. He has written a semiautobiographical work of fiction, a collection of short stories, one of which (which sounds exactly like the previous story in this collection, ‘Chicken Soup’) wins a major prize; a nice metafictive touch there. Much to his delight she turns up at the award ceremony in Plymouth sans husband and the opportunity—fuelled by nostalgia and alcohol—leads to the inevitable:

‘I want you to fuck me, Andy,’ she said. She sprang off the bed. The expression on her face. She wasn’t the girl he remembered. She was a woman. She pulled him upright by his belt. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got,’ she said.

Jump forward several months and into the next story. Andy’s dropped off the grid. In ‘When Iron Turns To Rust’ his muse turns up at his pathetic excuse for a flat a similar scene to the one involving John and Ailsa ensues:

He squared the sheet on the bed. He made it last longer than necessary, tucking the corners in just so. He could feel her standing behind him, next to the sink, taking in the state of the place.

The canister gave a final pop. The flame died.

‘I’d make you a coffee,’ he said. ‘But, eh...’

‘No, fine,’ she said. ‘I’m not...can I sit down?’ She wasn’t asking for permission. There were no chairs in the room. There was nothing in the room apart from the bed and the wardrobe.

Both could easily be stage sets.

Andy is a writer. But then so, it transpires, is John:

He wrote a book. It was a minor hit. Nothing major. It got a handful of good reviews. It dealt with a defining moment in his life. This defining moment had to do with things falling apart. It was a roman à clef [a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction], which was irrelevant in the great scheme of things, seeing as he was a nobody. A minor hit. The names, as they say, had been changed. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, he wasn’t that type of person. In any case, the names weren’t important, it was the facts, the event. He hadn’t written the book to examine other people’s motives. He had written it to understand the past, to understand how the past had affected the way his life had turned out

Unlike Andy, John doesn’t sleep with Ailsa in fact later on in the bar, in the next story ‘Player’, her husband, Michael, turns up and she leaves with him.

You can, perhaps, start to see how one could begin to get these characters mixed up.

The metaphor of tourism is a strong one and all the locations in the book—York, Newcastle, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London—are major tourist spots. In ‘Sofitel, Gatwick’ the woman looks out of the window and notes all the people. She projects sadness onto them. John suggests:

‘Maybe they’re tourists,’ he says. ‘People arriving somewhere. People at the start of something. Or on the verge of something. People like me.’

This ties in with the book’s dedication To Memory – the mother of the Muses. (In Greek mythology Mnemosyne (from which we get the word mnemonic) was the mother of the nine Muses by Zeus and was herself the goddess of memory and remembrance and the inventress of language and words.) Tourists are always out of place. How could we feel out of place in our own lives? By trying to visit or recreate the past as most of these characters try to do; the stage is still there but the players have moved on. John goes back to the college (Jordanhill if I’m not mistaken although it’s never named) where he first met his muse and ends up being ejected from the place by two cops who should IMHO get their own book. Just saying, Andrew.

There are two other stories in the book, the second one, ‘Gimlet’ (a cocktail made of gin and I would imagine here in the UK Rose’s lime juice) where the protagonist is Matt and the titular story, ‘A Man’s Hands’ featuring the book’s only female protagonist, Clio. Matt shares a flat which is much like the one Andy ends up living in: “the only furniture was a mattress on the floor and a kitchen like a bombsite.” He doesn’t live alone. There’s Yanni (probably not the Greek pianist though) and Alan. She—whoever she is—has left him and he’s followed:

The facts didn’t need much working on. She came over here. You followed her. It didn’t work out. She left. You’re still here. What’s the point? There’s no point. What are you going to do? Stay here. You can’t go back there because you’ve been here too long. You’re a stranger here and a stranger there. In Limbo. You sleep most of the day and go out barring it every night. You drink. You drink. It’s got nothing to do with forgetting. Memories are sacred, no one can take them away from you.

Matt could be either Andy or John in that middle period, the bit Andrew doesn’t feel the need to tell us about, and, several years down the line if he’s ever bitten by the writing bug, he could easily turn into one of them. This is all conjecture on my part—I’m using my intuition—but that’s what I like about this book, I can do that; who’s to stop me?

Clio’s story felt, to my mind, out of place. At least on a first read. But it’s really not. Yes, Jack can play the piano as can Sean, and the man sitting across the table from Clio—the man with “the hands of a musician. A female pianist, perhaps. Not a man’s hands”—may well be one too; we never know for sure. Yes, we have a man and a woman across a table but this is a softer story. There’s not the same level of tension, no real conflict, no vying for control of the board. There is, however, a lot of hand holding. And a lot of trying to talk about the past. And then something odd happens:

Despite myself, I press into the soft flesh. Something happens. The part of your hands, the part of your hands that I am pressing, disappears. I look at your face, but all you do is talk. You continue to talk of the past, of things I don’t want to hear. I give all my attention to your hands. My fingers. I make small, circular movements which grow larger. Soon there is nothing left. Your hands have vanished.

[…]

I reach for your face. You continue to talk, you persist, even as I stroke your brow. Your forehead is gone. Then your eyes, that piercing blue is no more. I caress your cheeks and touch your neck.

I run a thumb across your mouth.

Silence at last.

You sit there, mute, faceless and handless. I think of the words tabula rasa,but this has nothing to do with the future. I have already forgotten what you look like, although I remember your hands, like a woman’s. Not a man’s hands.

This story is unlike any of the others. A man and a woman sit at a table and she literally erases him. No one notices this moment of magic realism. Who is she? His muse? His memories personified? (Clio was certainly the name of one of the nine Roman muses, the muse of history, and Mneme was one of the original three Boeotian muses, the muse of memory.) If a writer were to have a phobia which one do you think it might be? Atychiphobia: a fear of failure? Catagelophobia: a fear of being ridiculed. What about vacansopapurosophobia: the fear of the blank sheet of paper? Writing is cathartic. I have no doubt this book contains many biographical elements—Andrew went to Jordanhill College, he works in Greece, I’ll bet he can play a bit of piano (I never asked because it’s not important)—but, at the end, after all the words have been said (or written down) would it not be lovely if his muse would come along and wipe out everything he’s just freed himself from through the act of writing and left him with a clean, blank slate to begin again? It’s what happens. I’ve no doubt he’s written several stories since these and every one of them began with a lovely clean page or screen. That’s what I made of it. You might make something different.

This is a lovely collection. I enjoyed Andrew’s first book but this was, for me, a better read. These are spare, intelligent stories that don’t talk down to you; they demand you engage with them and complete them. When I was a wee boy my dad and I had a jigsaw puzzle of the Forth Road Bridge—I’m guessing five hundred pieces, my first proper jigsaw—which we built together. One morning I got up to find it finished and I was bitterly disappointed only it wasn’t finished. He’d left one piece to be slipped into place. It takes a lot of self-control to leave stuff out and to know what to leave out. I was lucky. Within me I seemed to have all the missing pieces to ‘finish’ this book. Others may struggle. That’s life not bad writing. I heartily recommend this book. At 17500 words it’s not a hard read but because it’s only sixty or seventy pages (depending on how you’ve got your e-reader set up) you might be more inclined to reread it. And you should. We don’t listen to songs only once and say, “What would I want to listen to that again for? I’ve heard it,” and the same logic applies every bit as much to writing; a measure of good writing is its capacity to be read more than once and continue to deliver.

The book is only available as an e-book from Amazon but for a couple of quid you really can’t complain. You can read the following short stories online:

• The Canny Cyclist
• Edinburgh Arrivals / Edinburgh Departures
• When Iron Turns To Rust
• A Man’s Hands

***

Andrew McCallum Crawford grew up in Grangemouth, an industrial town in East Central Scotland. He studied Biology and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and went on to take a teaching qualification at Jordanhill College, Glasgow. He started writing when he was twenty and has been hard at it for twenty-four years now. His poetry and short fiction can be found on numerous sites online. His first novel, Drive!, was published in 2010. He lives in Greece where he works as a teacher.

Kathy Nightingale: What did you come here for anyway?
Sally Sparrow: I love old things. They make me feel sad.
Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad?
Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people.
— Steven Moffat, ‘Blink’, Doctor Who

In the 1970s the prevalent view among primary-care physicians and the public alike was that unhappiness, even in some cases everyday unhappiness, was the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain—which drugs could fix. Nowadays people are more willing to view sadness as simply a part of the human experience; a natural reaction to painful circumstances. All of us will experience sadness at some point in our lives. It’s a transient feeling that passes as a person comes to terms with his troubles. The general consensus, though, is that people should be happy and if they’re not happy they should still want to be happy and should be doing something about changing their circumstances so that they can be happy for as often as—and for as long as—possible. And, yet, here’s the thing: perfectly healthy (ergo presumably happy) people regularly go out of their way to listen to sad music or songs, watch sad films (boxes of Kleenex at the ready) and read sad books. Why?

Happiness, constant happiness, must get monotonous. The same could be said for never-ending sadness; that would be just depressing. Life is all about variety. We have a wide spectrum of emotions to pick from. Why stick with blinding white?

Glenn Schellenberg is a psychologist at Toronto University whose particular field of interest is music. Recently he analysed every Top 40 hit from 1965 to 2009 in terms of tempo and whether the song was in a major or minor key and the results were interesting: in 1965 every song in the Top 40 was in a major key but there was a radical shift in the eighties and nineties. By 2009 only 18 out of the Top 40 songs were written in a major key. He has some thoughts as to why the change:

I think that people like to think that they're smart. And unambiguously happy-sounding music has become, over time, to sound more like a cliché. If you think of children's music like 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' or 'The Wheels on the Bus,' those are all fast and major, and so there's a sense in which unambiguously happy-sounding songs sound childish to contemporary ears. I think there's a sense in which something that sounds purely happy, in particular, has a connotation of naiveté.

People have come to appreciate sadness and ambiguity more. Life is more complicated, and they want the things that they consume as pleasure to be complex similarly.[1]

There’s a lot of talk online about the positive benefits of sadness. Sad people do better in tests;[2] they don’t jump to obvious answers. According to Dr Birgit Wolz, a psychotherapist, author and "cinema therapist" based in Oakland, the painful emotions released by sad movies are often helpful:

What makes sad movies so 'enjoyable' is this: They allow us to confront very real and deeply sad feelings in a safe and protected environment. They allow us to confront real issues by experiencing 'reality' in a safe distance on the screen because our emotional responses feel real.

Movies draw us into the viewing experience but, at the same time—often more easily than in real life—afford a unique opportunity to retain a perspective outside the experience, the observer's view.[3]

The simple answer is that “negative moods make people more thoughtful,”[4] they, in effect, prepare us to get more out of a thing, be it a piece of music, a film, a book or even a test.

Now, what the hell has thing to do with Tim Love’s new book of short stories?

After I’d finished my first read-through Tim’s book I dropped him an e-mail letting him know I’d finished it. I know Tim a wee bit; the online British writing community is not exactly huge and it’s only a matter of time before we run into most of our peers. I read his blog and he reads mine and occasionally we even make an odd comment. So we’re not exactly besties but we get on fine. In part this is what I wrote to him:

I’ve just finished my first read-through of your book, Tim. Enjoyed it very much. Not sure what the hell I’m going to say about it but it’ll be fine I’m sure once I get started. [...] I really have nothing negative to say but I’m not sure how to talk about what I enjoyed about it without it coming across as negative. You see I enjoy sad things. ‘Enjoy’ is completely the wrong word—who in their right mind enjoys being sad?—but sadness resonates with me and there are a lot of sad characters in this book and all shades of sad too. It didn’t reduce me to tears or anything—I’m always a bit perplexed when I hear that people cry over books even though I know my writing’s had that effect on people and I am flattered by the fact—but it did affect me.

His response?

Just see what comes out. Your apparent negativity might interest others. I've had 2 comments about the book so far – [one at Tony Williams’s Poetry Blog] and a verbal one saying how gloomy it was.

I actually don’t think the book is gloomy but it’s all semantics, isn’t it? One person’s sadness is another person’s gloom. I do think it is a sad book, though. It’s not sad like A Child Called “It”; it’s sad because it’s real. I’m not saying that A Child Called “It” is all made up because it’s not but it takes too much imagination for me to relate to its narrator (I had the same problem with Sybil); it might as well be science fiction. The characters in By All Means I got.

Even though my mother never left my father I found Tim Love’s story ‘The Big Climb’ something I could relate to completely. Like everything I read I looked for ways into the piece. My parents did take me on a caravan holiday when I was about three—two years younger than the boy in this story—but I’ve only the vaguest of memories of it; what I do remember better were the many, many walks I went on with my dad, sometimes just the two of us as in this story, often with the whole family. Of course I don’t remember much about any one specific walk—other than one where my daughter came along and struggled to understand the concept of going for a walk for the sake of walking, that we weren’t going anywhere—but the notion of going for a walk with my dad and talking about stuff is something I’ve no trouble relating to. And that’s all that really happens in this story: a dad takes his son away for a break and they walk up a hill. We learn that his wife’s left him but little about the whys and wherefores.

“We’ll have to go home soon you know Sam.”

“Can we have chips with Sid and Doris?”

“No, I mean our real home. We’ll go back on the train, and when we open our front door there’ll be a pile of letters. One of them will be from mummy saying she’ll come back.”

“How do you know?” Sam says.

“Because I know everything.”

“Do you know where she is, papa?”

“She’s having a holiday.”

“In a caravan like ours, with bunk beds?”

“Yes, but with her clothes scattered all over the place.”

“And cups of tea all over the place too?”

“Yes, and the shopping and washing not done.”

“And the telly on all the time?” said Sam, “and her crying all the time?”

“Is that what she did Sam?”

“Sometimes. And she forgot things. But I don’t forget. I eat up all my food.”

“What else did she say?

“Nothing.”

“Did she ever say anything about me?”

“No. Can we look for her caravan now papa?”

“We’ll try. What colour do you think her caravan is? What colour does she like?”

“Pink I think. Can we go there?”

Everybody wants to know the truth but what if our conduit to the truth is faulty or limited? What if the truth can only be accessed through a five-year-old boy? This is a simple story, more of a character study than a proper plotted story with a beginning, a middle, an end and a nice pithy moral slipped in there for good measure. We get to tag along with these two for a couple of days and listen in. And it works beautifully. But despite the humour—kids do say the funniest things and Sam has yet to grasp the concept of puns—the sadness refuses to go away. It made me sad reading it even though neither of these people exists. Somewhere though there will be a dad of a five- or six-year-old whose wife has walked out of their life. I went online and on the first page of my search found this:

I have been married 19 years and my wife walked out on the night of her 44th birthday. I was blindsided and am still in shock. We have 3 teenage girls and the younger two are still in the house their mother walked out of. Anger, confusion, resentment, guilt, pity, still in love.......She just said she wasn't happy anymore. What is this all about?[5]

Over on Goodreads one of the reviewers, Lucille, in answer to the question ‘Why do we read sad books?’ wrote: “I read sad books to feel. To check if I'm still human, that I'm not bitter or heartless.”[6] There’s a term that came into vogue in the early eighties, ‘compassion fatigue’, and it’s never gone away. I’m actually wondering if sadness is actually what I felt when reading this story. Perhaps what I was feeling was compassion and empathy masquerading as sadness. If I can feel something for two made-up characters then I guess I’m still okay? Right?

We have a similar situation in Tim’s story ‘Definitions’ (which is broken down into eight sections each with a definition as a subheading) in which we accompany Dave as he goes for his weekly swim:

dure[7]– to fill

During lunchtime each Tuesday Dave would make straight for the Holiday Inn and buy a ticket from the receptionist for the pool which was open to the public in the morning. He'd been going there for months – it was secluded, tasteful, and he knew the staff by name (he had studied their badges). He would change into his one-piece, swim 20 lengths, then shower in the only cubicle. He'd use a palmful of almond soap from the dispenser for each armpit, one for his groin, then wash the chlorine from his hair and let the suds clean the rest of him. After, he'd treat himself to a traditional meal in the hotel restaurant ready to face work again.

Today he completes his lengths, returns to his locker, collects his towel and t-shirt. But someone's in the cubicle. He waits.

Sounds banal. Is banal. Tim could’ve described Dave changing a tire on his car or picking a Xmas present for his nephew. The thing about Dave is that Dave used to be called Diane and not in a Johnny-Cash-Boy-Named-Sue kind of a way. I was never a girl called Jemima nor have I ever felt remotely inclined to become a girl and yet I do get the whole being different thing. He’s got problems to deal with and gets on with them; life doesn’t stop simply because you wake up one day and realise that you’re a man trapped in a woman’s body. And yet despite Tim’s best efforts to present what must be a normal lunchtime-in-the-life-of-Dave I found it impossible not to home in on the tragedy of the situation even though Dave’s determined not to a tragic or ridiculous character. It’s the situation that’s tragic.

In 1968 British Pathé released a short documentary entitled Prague – The Sad City. The voiceover—male, Received Pronunciation—tells us that, “[t]he Czechs have a sad character: they knows about revolution, invasion, occupation.” Even nowadays it has the reputation of being a rather dull, sad city, grey like the weather. The film is only repeating what the Rock Hill Evening Herald reported on September 18^th, 1968 as thousands of Soviet guns formed a ring around the city:

The steel ring of Soviet artillery is evident to anyone travelling outside the now tranquil but sad city. Heavy cannon rockets and missiles point at Czechoslovakia’s capital from north, south, east and west.[8]

It’s no wonder Jonas’s aunt, Miss Kretchova, who his English friend Mike meets in Tim’s story ‘Prague ‘86’ comes across as a sad character.

"So you've seen the Old Town and heard how we cruel Czechs pull the plug out on the Christmas carps?"

"Yep. Jonas has told me all about that." As he gave me my cup he threw me a cautionary glance then retreated to a radio with fretwork of a palm-treed desert island over the speaker. He turned it down low then rushed on to another. The room was filling with soft music and mutterings. "I was looking out of your window while you were in the kitchen Miss Kretchova. The square down the road seems busy."

"October Square, yes, I often watch the people there, around the...oh Jonas, socha?...my English you know, it is not so good." She lowered herself painfully into a chair by the table. I saw how thin her white hair was.

"Statue", said Jonas distractedly.

"Ah yes, yes, around the Lenin statue. It is very sad, you know. I knew the artist who made it; Vladimir Stropoff." She reached for a photo beside her. "I'm sorry", she said, her voice trembling, "you must think me a silly old woman, but they were good times for me. It was in '68. You know what happened in '68 Mike? So often the foreigners they forget."

Once they’ve left Jonas explains to Mike that his aunt has been living in the past for the previous eighteen years. “It was her last assignment before the purge. […] No one employed her after that; she'd taken too much advantage of the freedom. She's never got over it.”

‘Olga, December '76’ sounds like it might be another Prague story. Actually it’s set in London and has a great opening line:

Not so much as a postcard for three years, then she phoned me at eight one morning to say that they'd tied a pig to Battersea Power Station and would I like to come down.

They’d been at university together but now are very different people:

I'd always been the quiet one, and in the years since I'd left for University I'd learnt more words and had become even quieter, but I'm sure I must have said something in the train, probably about needing a degree to do therapy. She was as unselfconscious as ever, a whirlwind giving me no time to think. You can't be like that nowadays without being diagnosed as on some kind of spectrum even if you're an artist. I wondered how many people had taken advantage of her openness.

What’s sad about this story is that all of us—all of us over a certain age that is—will have friends we’ve grown apart from. I certainly have and it’s impossible not to feel something about them. The biggest mistake any of us can make though is meeting up again and thinking it might be possible to recapture something of that past. That’s what goes wrong in ‘Late’ too. The narrator gets a phone call from an old mate telling him that their mutual friend—the third Bare (no I didn’t spell that wrong)—has died. This time it’s ten years since they’ve seen each other.

"Thought you'd better know", he said.

"We should visit, I suppose."

"His dad didn't say exactly where the grave was. It's a big place."

"Let's meet at 1pm on Saturday. It'll be like old times."

Needless to say it’s not. Alan arrives late and they end up wandering round a graveyard in the dark getting drunker and drunker on the cider Colin’s bought; they even manage to get themselves locked in. Like all the other stories there’s humour here but really I just felt embarrassed for these two. As one should.

Now, let’s see, there are nine stories in this collection, which ones haven’t I talked about yet? ‘Doors and Windows’, ‘Method of Loci’, ‘Dreams’ and ‘Fractals’. The first two involve gay men. The history of the word gay is a fascinating one—nowadays most kids think it means lame (I wonder what they calls gays then?)—but I’ve always thought of it ironically since so many in the past lived (and still continue to live depending on where they live in the world) sad and oppressed lives. I think about people like Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey—all of whom were actively gay whilst homosexuality was still illegal in the UK—and there isn’t one of them that isn’t more tragic than comic. As the narrator in ‘Doors and Windows’ says:

I had to learn from those around me, but my colleagues were inexperienced in love, my kind of love. I let myself be guided by cultural conventions, finding it useful to swot up on the arts and subscribe to mailing lists – that two men should go to the opera together or visit a gallery is nothing strange, I belatedly realised. Alas, I've never had much of a liking for the Arts.

Like Colin in ‘Late’ he ends up wandering around streets from his past and tries to look up an old friend, the man who’d introduced him to the gay scene and stopped him making a fool of himself. Predictably enough the man’s long gone but (conveniently from a storytelling point of view) the young man whose moved into his flat is gay and they make a date to visit and art gallery the next day, a date which our nostalgic narrator has no intention of keeping.

‘Dreams’ and ‘Fractals’ both focus on writers. It’s hard not to write about what you know and I doubt there are many of us who have resisted that pull. Tim writes:

Many writers had sad childhoods, or long periods of childhood illness. Those who write about childhood often do so to get out of depression. Tintin went to Tibet because Hergé was in therapy and wanted life to be simple, covered in eternal snow. The therapist said I had a good mind and should keep busy, so I'm doing this distance learning degree. Being childless helps with objectivity. That's the theory anyway.

‘Dreams’ finds another middle-aged man wallowing in his past—“My parents' loft is full of broken pieces of my childhood.”—and I have a story myself that says almost the same thing so this one felt like very familiar ground to me. I was also obsessed with origami for a time but I never got Rupert the Bear or Asterix the Gaul. I loved Blondie, Tangerine Dream, tried never to miss The Old Grey Whistle Test. Wasn’t that impressed with Fleetwood Mac’s‘Dreams’ but I had a copy of Rumours although I far preferred Tusk. So this could be me with a bit of tweaking and being the sad git that I am there was no way this story wasn’t going to make me feel sad.

‘Fractals’ also covers familiar ground, the act of writing. I’ve written more about it in poems but I do have one short story set on a train where a writer is debating adding a sex scene to his latest novel. Tim also has a thing for trains; they crop up in several stories. Not sure what to read into that. This one reminds me of Amos Oz’sRhyming Life and Death in which we watch an author weave the characters he interacts with into a work of fiction.

I'm not getting any younger. Nowadays all my drafts shrink to flash fiction. The lyrical ending remains in full while the rest rots away except for the plot-hinges and a sentence of description for each setting and person. It's not such a disaster though – delve a layer further down and each bit's ready to be expanded to fill the void – the broken-handled RNLI mug used to hold pens, bought in Torquay after their first night together; an overheard comment in the canteen that makes him realise he'll never get promotion; the row of sensible shoes by her door – little things that say so much, that say the deeper you go, the cheaper life gets. You see, I think the two states of existence aren't Life and Death but immortality (which for me lasted about twenty-five years, and for my aunt until she became a widow) followed by the knowledge that one's going to die. Really die. Nothing after. And not much before. Even those closest to you are chemicals. When I see people battling, fretting and laughing I play along. I don't have to believe in their hopes and dreams. She'd understand, the bus-stop woman. But writing's different. It's like watching a film – it's not pretending to be real so I find myself getting involved, easily moved. This year I've not written anywhere near enough.

Actually none of the pieces in this collection is short enough to get away with being called flash fiction. But I know exactly where he’s coming from. It’s literary impotence. We can’t get it up or if we can we can’t do much with it. Last year I wrote 11 poems, all within a seven week window, and a few hundred words of a novel I’m starting to think will never get off the ground. The pessimist in me—who is a majority shareholder of my psyche—is not optimistic.

One of my favourite quotes—regular readers of this blog will know where I’m going here—is by Aldous Huxley. It’s underlined in my copy of Brave New World:

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

I think happiness and sadness are far closer together than people realise. Most people assume they’re polar opposites—elation versus depression—and although such extremes exist (just ask anyone who suffers from Bipolar Disorder) the rest of us spend our time walking the tightrope of contentment, wobbling a bit to the sad side and then a bit to the happy but never staying in either for too long. Sadness is not regret. Sadness is not shame, guilt or embarrassment. Sadness is a counterweight; it keeps happiness in check.

Although written over a twenty-four years period (between 1987 and 2011) and, of course, never designed to be anything other than nine standalone pieces, some of which have already been in print, this collection works quite well as a unified whole. In a diagram on the companion blog site on which Tim is posting short essays talking about the writing on the stories he has uploaded a diagram showing in what ways the stories are interconnected but the other articles are interesting too. Like most—probably all—writers I’m always fascinated to hear about the genesis of a story. It always makes me feel better about myself when I realise just how much they’ve struggled and how unhappy they still are with what they’ve done.

Is this the quintessential short story collection? No, I think Borges, Joyce, Carver and… I dunno… Chekhov are safe there. But once you’ve read all of them and are looking for something else to accompany you on a plane or a bus or a train then I would recommend giving Tim Love’s wee collection a go especially if you enjoy the slice-of-life approach to the telling or stories and don’t mind the company of sad people. One last thought on sadness—I’ve already written more than I intended—sadness is like love, just as there are many kinds of love there are many kinds of sadness; there are at least nine kinds in this book, in fact that would’ve been a good title, Nine Kinds of Sadness (a bit like Eleven Kinds of Lonelinessor Four Kinds of Rain). I have no idea why he called it By All Means.

Only one of the short stories in this collection appeared online but the site has now folded. There are one or two stories by him out there though if you want a taste of his style:

• Nobody’s Perfect
• Met a Star’s Eyes / Metastasize
• Out
• The Economics of Despair
• Letter from Mel Vito

***

Tim Love lives in Cambridge, England, having lived in Portsmouth, Norwich, Bristol, Oxford, Nottingham and Liverpool. He works as a computer programmer and teacher, and is married with two bilingual (Italian) children. His prose has appeared in Panurge, Dream Catcher, Journal of Microliterature, etc., and has won prizes run by short Fiction and Varsity. His poetry pamphlet Moving Parts was published by HappenStance in 2010 and you can read my review of it here. He blogs at litrefs.blogspot.com.
 
 

REFERENCES

[1] Alex Spigel, ‘Why We’re Happy Being Sad: Pop’s Emotional Evolution’, NPR, 4 September 2012

[2]‘Sad People Do Better, Job Study Finds’, Daily News, 1996 (See also ‘Feeling grumpy “is good for you”’ on the BBC website)

[3] Michael Machosky, ‘Sad movies have therapeutic value, experts say’, TribLive, 25 June 2009

[4] Nick Nauert PHD, ‘Sad Movies Make Many People Happy’, PsychCentral, 28 March 2012

[5]‘My wife of 19 years walked out.......’, Men’s Health, 23 June 2006

[6]Comment on the ‘The Fault in our Stars discussion: why do we read sad books?’, 5 April 2012

[7] 1. Hard; harsh; severe; rough; toilsome. 2. To last; to continue; to endure. – Webster’s Dictionary

[8]‘Soviet big guns ring Prague’, Evening Herald, Rock Hill, 18 September 1968

Only things that have no value are free of charge; those things are worthless but nothing is meaningless. – Jim Murdoch, Milligan and Murphy

One man’s sunrise is another man’s sunset. It all depends on your point of view.

I have for a very long time been fascinated by words and their relation to meaning. I’m not the first to get caught up in this tangle and I have no doubt that I will not be the last. It never ceases to amaze me how as complex a society as we live in can function when so much of it is based on the vagaries of the communication process. I had never really considered that my novel Milligan and Murphy was a book about communication and yet, on closer examination, I find I do talk about it quite a bit:

Communication was a rudimentary craft when practiced here; there was no art in it. Words contained only their essential meanings and when they were emptied, someone filled them up again with exactly the same stuff.

“Say what you mean and mean what you say,” their mother had repeated ad nauseum throughout their childhood and so, if they were unsure what they were talking about which was much of the time, they tended to opt not to talk, at least around her. It was the course of least resistance; something they were practiced at. If they couldn’t call a spade, a spade they tended not to mention it at all.

If you've not read the book—which will be the case for a lot of you—let me give you a quick summary. John Milligan and John Murphy are half-brothers who have lived a secluded (and mostly idle) existence in a small, out of the way village in Ireland; physically they're grown men but with very little life experience. One day their mother sends them to a local farm on the outskirts of town to seek work but they never get there. At the road junction to the farm they meet an old tramp who gives them food for thought and they end up, for the first time in their lives, leaving town. Having left they have to decide where they're going and why but what they struggle with the most is understanding why they left in the first place. Throughout their journey they're helped by a variety of characters all of whom give more to think about as well as providing practical assistance.

Philosophers have long struggled to explain the correlation between words and meanings and it’s not surprising to find there is no easy answer. Let’s consider three points of view:

• the meaning of a word is the denoted object
• meaning is something in the speaker’s mind (idea, image, concept, intention)
• meaning is a set of conditions of satisfaction

All three can be illustrated with a single quote from Milligan and Murphy:

“I wonder if Mary will be in the pub tonight,” wondered Murphy out loud as he towelled his face dry. He would have been rhetorical but it wasn’t his way; mountains were there to be climbed and questions were there to be answered.

“Just Mary or The Two Marys?”

“Mary. Just Mary.”

“You’d be meaning Mary Maguire then?”

His brother sighed, folded the towel in half and folded it again over the back of his chair; it was its place. It flopped off onto the floor but he didn’t see fit to retrieve it. One place is as good as another.

“Milligan, are we acquainted with any other Mary? I mean, apart from The Two Marys and what would they be doing in a pub anyway?”

In Murphy’s mind the term ‘Mary’ is transparent. It is not that he doesn’t know there are other people in the world called Mary, it is simply that he didn’t mean any of them when he asked the question assuming the context would make it abundantly clear who he’s talking about.

At the very beginning of Herbert Clark’s book, Using Language, the author states his thesis:

Language use is really a form of joint action [...] A joint action is one that is carried out by an ensemble of people acting in coordination with each other. [...] When Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers waltz, they each move around the ballroom in a special way. But waltzing is different from the sum of their individual actions. [...] Waltzing is the joint action that emerges as Astaire and Rogers do their individual steps in coordination, as a couple. Doing things with language is likewise different from the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners – or writers and readers – perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles. – H.H. Clark, Using Language, p.3

Of course Astaire and Rogers were professionals, at the top of their game. Most of us can’t waltz to save ourselves but it always takes two to tango.

Meaning, of course, can apply to an action or a sequence of actions as well as a word and this is something the two brothers struggle with. When Milligan and Murphy want the priest they encounter to tell them if they did wrong abandoning their old mother he has this to say to them:

“Gentlemen,” [the priest] began and then thought to soften his message, “Boys … lads … not everything in this life is reasonable. It is easier when you’re talking about good things and bad things. You murder a man in cold blood, for example, and then you think to yourself, Self, did I do a good thing or a bad thing? And your self says to you, ‘Look up Exodus Chapter Twenty,’ and you do and there it is in black and white. It’s a lot harder when it comes to reasonable and unreasonable things.

“You’ll have heard it said that everything happens for a reason. Well, poppycock! Simply because someone makes a statement like that doesn’t make it any truer than my insisting that the moon is made out of green cheese which it may or may not be; I have no empirical evidence either way. Yes, God has His grand plan – I have to believe that (it’s more than my job’s worth not to) – but it will come to fruition despite what we do not because of it. Make no mistake, we are all spanners in God’s works, you and I and everyone else. That’s what free will is all about.

“People do unreasonable things all the time – and by that I mean things for no good reason at all – and when they start to look for reasons why they did what they did in the first place they find there aren’t any. That doesn’t mean that answers won’t ever exist for what they did, however, the answer comes at the end of the sum not before it. How would you feel Mr Murphy, Mr Milligan if your schoolteacher had asked you one day what equalled four?”

“Two and two equals four,” fired back Milligan.

“Which can be true,” said the priest, “but what about three plus one or seven minus three or the square root of sixteen?” He had lost them there. “Reasons, if they exist at all, are always to be found before we do things; answers, once we’ve worked them out (if we ever figure them out), always come into being after the fact.”

The emphases didn’t help.

“So did we sin or not, Father?” enquired a now more-confused-than-ever Milligan.

“That… is for each of you to answer.”

Knowledge is one thing. Meaning is another. How often does someone say, “Oh, I know what you mean!” when the odds are they don’t really.

When people have to cope with difficult situations in their lives, they sometimes reassure themselves by saying that everything happens for a reason. For some people, thinking this way makes it easier to deal with relationship problems, financial crises, disease, death, and even natural disasters such as earthquakes. It can be distressing to think that bad things happen merely through chance or accident. But they do.

The saying that everything happens for a reason is the modern, New Age version of the old religious saying: “It’s God’s will.” – Paul Thagard, 'Does everything happen for a reason?' Hot Thought, 11 February 2010

Milligan and Murphy wonder about this. In fact as one point Milligan asks his brother if he thinks there's someone up there looking after them.

Don’t you feel as if someone’s looking after us?”

“Someone? You mean someone… up there?”

“Precisely.”

“I do not.”

“It stands to reason. God, or possibly one of the saints, maybe; if He’s too busy.”

In their case there is someone watching over them. We're never told for sure who he is—unlike Dan Milligan in Puckoon who gets to have exchanges with his writer—but there is a godlike individual watching over them. So they don't have free will. So their actions don't mean anything. Or at least the meaning is not of their choosing.

Knowledge consists of learned facts and figures, the raw data, e.g. I know that E=MC² but I don’t understand it.

Understanding knows the meaning or reason of a thing. It is about knowing why something is, and how it is so. The more intelligent a person is the more they are capable of understanding but intelligence is not a guarantee of understanding; for starters I’m not interested in knowing why energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

Wisdom is the ability to look past appearance into substance, to read between the lines, to know the truth of a matter. Not everyone draws the same conclusion from the evidence presented however. The apostle Paul proposes that the physical world provides sufficient proof of the existence of God (Romans 1:18-20) but, if that is the case, why do so many people choose not to draw that conclusion? Wise people know what to do with the things they understand. Clever people worked out how to split the atom but it wasn’t wise people who built the atomic bomb.

Actually Milligan and Murphy know quite a lot considering where they’ve been brought up courtesy of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia. That said, they’re not very bright and they spend the best part of the book hoping that, by following things through to their natural conclusion (whatever that conclusion may be), they will end up understanding why they’ve done the things they have and can move on from there.

Murphy, in a burst of uncharacteristic eloquence towards the end of the novel does his best to sum up why they need to go on.

“People, Mr O’Fallon, rarely find the things they think they’re looking for. You could be searching for a missing button and find an old ha’penny. Most of us don’t know what we’re looking for out of life but we don’t look very far and so we don’t find much that might fit the bill; you can only find what’s there to be found so you marry the girl next door, you drink in the pub on the corner, you work in the farm down the road and get buried in the cemetery on the hill. There are no choices so you make none.

“Columbus wanted to find a new route to the Indies and he ran into America; De Soto hunted for gold and came to the Mississippi River, and Ponce de Leon wanted a fountain of youth, so that he might drink the waters and never die, and instead of youth and life he found Florida and death. I have no idea what my brother and I will discover about the world we’ve been born into or about ourselves, Mr O’Fallon, but we know this: there’s nothing to be found if you go nowhere or if we go back there to spend the evenings, when one hasn’t even the price of a pint to one’s name, thumbing through Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia trying to locate photographs of half-naked Africans.”

“I see,” said the detective, “Seek and ye shall find.”

In their case the journey is the destination because, as Estragon—or the ghost of Estragon or the pooka masquerading as Estragon (I never say for sure)—puts it to them:

“… It’s more … proactive, looking for what you know you’ll never find rather than waiting for what will never arrive. Don’t you think?”

By that he means going looking for Godot rather than waiting for him.

The notion is not a new one. People spend their whole lives looking for something they don’t expect to find whether it be the Holy Grail, Mr Right, proof of extra-terrestrial life or the answer to that question they should have asked when they had the chance. Pragmatists insist that the meaning of an expression lies in its consequences. If that is true then the true meaning of the brothers’ actions probably cannot be assessed until many years later, possibly not until they die and there are no more variables to factor into the equation. That said, in some cases the significance of a person’s words or deeds carries on well after his death, e.g. the teachings of Buddha or the writings of Shakespeare.

There is also the danger that people come along and try to impose their own meanings on the words. The narrator of the book – who may or may not be God (or me playing God or a fictitious narrator playing God) – makes an important point about the search for meaning when he says:

There are coincidences in this life. Sometimes they make a difference, mostly not. What is this thing with humans? Why do they insist on trying to read meaning into everything? They can’t look at the stars at night or the clouds during the day and not make something out of them that’s not there. And just as there are optical illusions so there are mental illusions where the mind thinks it sees or understands something. Why did the chicken cross the road? Have you ever looked into the mind of a chicken? It has no idea why it’s crossing the road. It doesn’t even register that there’s a road there. What’s a road to a chicken? Chickens only know the here and now.

Beckett told Sir Ralph Richardson that “if by Godot I had meant God I would [have] said God, and not Godot.” For years people have wondered who Godot was or what he symbolises but all the evidence we have is what's on the page. And there are those who still insist he is God. Again, as Beckett recalled that when Richardson "wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae, and seemed to make the forthcoming of this and similar information the condition of his condescending to illustrate the part of Vladimir ... I told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that was true also of the other characters." Is the narrator of my book Godot? Until two minutes ago I'd never considered that possibility but if he is then perhaps that's why he's manipulating the two brothers' lives to get them to where they need to be to take over from Didi and Gogo. Every generation needs two of its own to wait for its own Godot.

Meaning is often something we impose on an object or a situation. Take, for example, the penny they find on the way out of town:

“I saw it first.”

“But I recognised it first.”

“That you did,” he conceded. “Still, there’s not a lot of luck going around, Murphy. We should be careful.”

“In what way?”

“Well, is it the finding of the penny that brings the luck or the act picking it up?”

“Ah, I see.” Murphy retracted his hand, stood up and stroked his chin. He considered the matter for a moment or two, then a moment longer and then suggested that it might require both the discovery and the recovery of the coin for a portion of luck to be devolved upon the fortunate individual.

At the end of the book all they are left with is a single penny between the two of them:

Between the two of them they had nothing left bar one penny, as it happens, the very penny they had come across in the mud; not that it is of any consequence, but it will be of interest to those of you out there who like to read between the lines.

Is that significant? Or is it a coincidence? We're so desperate to attribute meaning to things that there's a danger of us fabricating meaning. As Freud is supposed to have said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" and sometimes a penny is just a penny. It's not luck that has got them from their home in Lissoy to the coast but sometimes it's easier to believe in luck than accept facts where they lead you.

All things said and done, I’m a writer not a philosopher. I’m interested in making people think, not in answering questions. I have no idea what happens to Milligan and Murphy and I have no interest in writing a sequel. What I set out to write was a book about where we see a pair of Beckettian characters at the start of their adventures rather than, with Vladimir and Estragon, at the end. I wanted to write Looking for Godot and Milligan and Murphy was the end result.

Milligan and Murphy is currently available as a paperback from FV Books or as an ebook from Smashwords.

Don’t be afraid to let the right brain off the leash. Don’t wait for inspiration to strike—start writing. And if all else fails, bring on a talking animal. – Jonathan Pinnock, ‘Anatomy of a Flash’

I’m not saying that Jonathan Pinnock’s as successful as he is because he’s not afraid of hard work but once you start to delve into this guy’s life the one thing that screams from the page is that he’s clearly not afraid of hard work or of being busy. Examples of his writing can be found all over the place online and he regularly wins prizes in short story competitions. His first novel, Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens, was published by Proxima Books in September 2011 and this was followed in 2012 by his Scott Prize-winning short story collection, Dot Dash, published by Salt. On top of that he writes music, draws cartoons, writes articles and poetry, maintains a blog and… oh, runs a software development company called Jonathan Pinnock and Associates which also involves a bit of writing. He somehow finds time to be married, be a dad and possibly sleep.

The Dots

This is the third short story collection I’ve read in a row. The first contained just stories, the second just flash fiction and now we have this where each story (the dashes of the title) is interspersed by a piece of flash fiction (the dots). I have to say I like this approach. I like flash fiction and I’ve read a few collections but, like poetry, I much prefer to run across one or two a day in my inbox or a news feed—a whole book of them feels like a bit much—whereas this way the piece of flash serves as a short respite; something light, a palette cleanser if you like.

There have been some very, very short stories published in the past, like this gem by Richard Brautigan:

The Scarlatti Tilt

"It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin." That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

but there’s a danger that, because of the brevity of the piece, it can come across more like a joke than a proper story:

A screwdriver walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Hey, we have a drink named after you!"

The screwdriver responds, "You have a drink named Murray?"

I even wrote a whole blog about it: Is flash fiction a joke?

Jonathan’s tiniest tweet-sized flash pieces definitely veer towards the set-up/punch line format:

Opposites

She was beautiful, sexy, made of antimatter. Best bang of my life.

Steaming

Terry peered at the steaming heap of undifferentiated cells and sighed. “Teleport engineer’s arrived,” he announced.

Less Than Deadly

His attempt to commit all seven deadly sins in one week ended in failure. On reflection, it was probably a bad idea to start with sloth.

Great literature this is not but it’s not aspiring to be. Like jokes they make you pause and smile but after you’ve watched a comic crack one-liners like this for an hour how many do you remember? I watched a fellow about six months ago whose humour rested on the pun and I only remember one joke he told. I know I smiled all the way through and enjoyed myself but only one stuck:

“My dog has no dictionary.”

“How does he spell ‘terrible’?”

I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a piece like that show its face in Jonathan’s collection. Not all are trite; most are clever and a couple actually thought-provoking. I enjoyed the short series: ‘Love Story, Day One’, ‘Love Story, Week One’, ‘Love Story, Month One’ and ‘Love Story, Year One’. They could easily have fitted on a single page (as is done here) but I liked the story split over four stories. These have more of a flavour of Hemingway’s famous

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Jonathan’s not actually been writing flash fiction that long. In an interview with Rumjhum Biswas he had this to say:

RB: Can you tell us about your first flash fiction experience? Both, the one you read and the one you wrote?

JP: Both happened at the same time, in late 2007. I’d never come across the term before, but I was taking part in an event for charity where you had to write something new every hour based on e-mailed prompts and the very first flashes I wrote came out of that. Also, we had to critique each other’s work, so I also had to read everyone else’s flashes. It was quite a learning experience, both from the point of view of opening my eyes up to a new form and almost immediately having my attempts at that form subjected to fierce critique!

Five years on he’s obviously has time to hone his craft and there really isn’t a bad piece of flash in the book but because he’s opted to focus on the tiniest examples of his craft I don’t think he quite shines here as much as he might. In the same interview he talks about what he personally looks for in a piece of flash:

Someone once told me that the most important thing about a poem was that every word had to earn its place, and I think the same principle applies to flash. It doesn’t need to make perfect sense but it needs to make me think. Or laugh. Or cry. Ideally all three, although that doesn’t happen very often.

[…]

It would have to grab me from the first sentence and not let me go until the end. There’s no scope for flab. Also, it doesn’t have to be a twist or a punch line, but the ending has to deliver something. Sorry if that sounds a bit enigmatic. A good ending is very tricky to define, but you know it when you see it.

None of the really tiny pieces grabbed me in the way he describes here and they were over too quickly. A better example is this one:

Misunderstandings

One our first date, she said she was an animal lover, which sounded promising until I realised that “animal” was not an adjective. However, at least I now knew how to win her heart.

So I bought a small white mouse for her, called Benji. After a week with him, I became quite attached and I felt unbearably sad at the prospect of giving him away.

On our second date, I presented the gift to her as she opened the door to her flat. She hesitated briefly. Then smiling, she took Benji from me and fed him to her python.

This is better. It could’ve ended after the first sentence—that would’ve worked—but those extra seventy-seven words make all the difference.

The Dashes

Balancing everything out are the dashes. These are better still, much better. None are especially long—the longest looks to be about 3000 words—but these are well-rounded pieces, proper stories, although, to be fair, he still likes to lead up to a punch line of sorts and that’s fine; it certainly didn’t do O Henry any harm. Humour is still a big part of this collection. Granted it’s occasionally a bit on the dark side—just what might bored spacemen really get up to on a long flight?—but there are no really heavy stories. The problem I’m going to have now is how to talk about these without letting on where the stories are going because they’ll be very easy to spoil.

On the whole the stories are based firmly in the real world. In ‘rZr and Napoleon’, for example (shortlisted for last year's Bristol Short Story Prize), we have a Banksy-style character hiding behind his balaclava and demanding (and getting paid) ludicrous sums of money for his more corporate work but it looks like he has his own agenda; ‘The Amazing Arnolfini and His Wife’ (which was read on BBC radio) features a husband and wife tightrope walking team who travel across America wowing audiences with their daredevil acrobatics and in the delightful ‘Return to Cairo’ (3rd prize, City of Derby Short Story Competition) a girl goes to extraordinary lengths to please her grandmother.

Others have a slight science fiction edge, like ‘Convalescence’ (3rd prize, University of Hertfordshire Writing Award) where a man’s received a partial brain transplant and there are complications (think The Hands of Orlac); ‘The Problem with Pork’ (Supplementary prize, Bournemouth Short Story Competition) is set in a future where, following two Epidemics, meat has become a rarity and ‘Anniversary Feast’ takes place on-board that spaceship I mentioned before which is transporting colonists to a distant world. (See what I mean? Your mind’s working overtime. What could they possibly be doing with their hibernating crewmates?)

Some, are just plain fantastic, like ‘Advice re Elephants’ (Shortlisted, Seán Ó Faoláin Competition) in which a couple deal with the (literal) elephant in the room, ‘Canine Mathematics’—which incorporates talking dogs and a talking cat—and ‘Fisherman’s Tales’ (2nd prize, Milton Keynes Speakeasy Competition) where a man sets out to reel in a mermaid.

And then there are a couple of slightly-experimental ones too, like ‘Possible Side Effects’ (3rd prize, Calderdale Short Story Competition) which is told backwards (when I got to the… beginning I literally read it back to the end to see if it worked better that way and, yes, the punch line is in the first paragraph) or the self-consciously postmodern and metafictive ‘Somewhat Less Than Thirty Pieces’ (Longlisted, Cadenza Competition).

In an interview with Dan Purdue Jonathan talks about how he chose the fifty-eight:

I'm not a big fan of themed collections. I'm more interested in seeing what a writer can do in different genres and styles. So it was a case of picking the best stories I had.

I am actually a fan of themed collections or, if not themed, then toned. Jonathan may jump around subject matter and even genre but there is still an overall tone to this grouping of stories; they felt like they were written by the same person.

So, what is it about this guy’s stories that keeps getting him in to the finals of competitions? Not sure. On Facebook recently he had this to say (albeit about a poem):

Another day, another Highly Commended poem. This time it's ‘Seven Day Wonder’ at Newark. Would have been nice to make the winner's enclosure, but I guess I can't really complain. I have this feeling that the kind of stuff I do tends to be clever enough to make the shortlist but not really profound enough to go any further.

I think he’s hit the nail on the head here because the best of the stories in this book—and by ‘best’ I mean the ones I would want to read a second time—are the ones that exhibit an element of profundity. It’s an awful stodgy word I know so let’s try some synonyms: understanding, perceptiveness, insight, wisdom.

One of the ones that exceeds the sum of its parts is ‘Return to Cairo’. At the start of the book the publisher’s opted to include a ‘Praise for Dot Dash’ section and Tania Hershman includes a spoiler in her paragraph (although she doesn’t let on what the twist at the end is) so I don’t mind talking about this one.

I don’t know how we ended up with Nan living with us. It’s hard enough for Mum coping with Danny and me, but Nan’s getting more and more difficult all the time. Not that Mum notices. She’s so tired when she gets in, she’s in a little world of her own. It’s me who ends up dealing with Nan. And I’m the one she says it to.

“Want to go back to Cairo.”

“What? Can you lift your leg a bit more?” I’m trying to change her catheter bag. The district nurse explained to me how to do it, but I’m still getting the hang of it.

“I said I want to go back to Cairo. Liked it there.”

“Nan, you’ve never been to Cairo,” I say. “Have you?”

“Have. Nice place. Hot. Full of Arabs, y’know.”

“Nan, you’ve never been abroad. You haven’t even got a passport.”

“Have.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Want to go back to Cairo.”

As far as Jonathan’s writing style goes this is as good an example as any in the book. It’s clean, spare and captures the essence of the situation in as few words as possible. There’re no long and winding descriptions of Nan, her physical state or her living conditions. She’s a nan. Most of us have them. I like the fact the mother’s “in a little world of her own” as well as the grandmother and, of course, this is realistic and there must be a goodly number of schoolchildren out there—for that’s what she is—who have to take on the lion’s share of the care. She asks her mum:

“When was Nan in Cairo, Mum?” I say.

“What?”

“Nan. In Cairo.”

“Dunno. Never mentioned it to me. Why?”

“Says she wants to go back there.”

Mum laughs. “Well I’m not paying for the air fare.”

Again, we get exactly what we need to understand what’s going on here. The dialogue is realistic and believable. The mother is clearly working all the hours God sends to support her family—no sign of a dad—and so that’s the first thing she would think about, money; even love has to cut its cloth.

The rest of the story then outlines what lengths this girl goes to, what favours she call in—like putting in a good word with Saffron Henderson for her older brother—to recreate Cairo in Nan’s room. Turning up the heating is a start but the old lady still has a few marbles left:

“It’s hot,” she says.

“Course it’s hot, Nan. You’re in a hot country.”

“Where am I?”

“In Cairo, of course.”

“Doesn’t look like Cairo.”

“That’s because you’re inside.”

“Doesn’t sound like Cairo.”

“That’s because—” Sod it. “You’re not quite there yet,” I say.

The music helps—she goes down to the World Music section in the library and borrows a CD called Arabian Moods—then she nicks some incense from her brother’s room “that his last girlfriend, Moonbeam, left behind.” Street sounds pose a problem but a geeky Asian kid with thick glasses her friend Lorna knows helps out there, with the sand and—with the aid “of a dodgy Sky box … a free subscription to Al Jazeera [which is] basically Channel Al Qa’eda.” The effort they go to to recreate this environment is wonderful but what raises this story a level is the dialogue between the respective parties. It’s not completely in dialogue but it is dialogue-heavy; this is a wonderful way to compress a lot of action and detail into a small space. At the end of the story Great Aunt Mabel appears on the scene and the truth is revealed but I’m not letting on what it is. These are real people. These are believable people. I have a mother-in-law who could play Nan in her sleep.

When asked what his favourite story was Jonathan picked this one (in two separate interviews):

I’d probably go for ‘Return to Cairo’ because I think I managed to judge the emotional level about right without tipping over into mawkishness, and I’m quite proud of the central character.

[…]

[I]t combines humour and absurdity with pathos. But ask me again tomorrow, and I’ll almost certainly have changed my mind.

He’s right. This one could’ve gone badly in a few different ways but he manages to pull it off. Put it this way, I’d really like to read the stories that got first and second prizes in the City of Derby Short Story Competition that year; they must have been corkers.

In a third interview he picked ‘Mr Nathwani’s Haiku’ as his favourite, because, he says, “it’s intriguing and—in the end—an accurate description of where the story is leading to.” I prefer ‘Return to Cairo’ but this one has its charms too—and having a haiku as a punch line has to be a first. This one is also very different to ‘Return to Cairo’ in that there’s no dialogue in it at all. Despite that fact it presents an accurate character study, primarily of Mr Nathwani (who once owned the “most successful car dealership in Kampala” until his family is expelled from Uganda) but also his wife, Lakshmi, named, one must imagine, after the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity (both material and spiritual) and I’m sure that name wasn’t pulled out of a hat. The family wind up in England:

England was cold and wet, and Lakshmi suffered terribly from morning sickness. They lived with their relatives in Southall until they could find a place of their own. With what little money that they had managed to bring out with them, the put down a deposit on a corner shop. The man who sold it to them seemed relieved to have it taken off his hands, even if it was to one of “your lot”. Mr Nathwani said nothing. He was learning that to say nothing was often the right thing to do.

Selling groceries was not really like selling cars, but they had no choice. They hardly ever left the shop, except to stock up at the cash and carry. All they did was work and sleep. Lakshmi was stacking shelves in her final month.

Just as most of us have grandmothers most of his will have a corner shop at the end of the road run by Asians. We certainly have. Carrie and I have lived here for about ten years now and yet I don’t think I’ve ever done as much as pass the time of day with any of these men—there’re no women in our shop—and the same goes for every one I’ve ever shopped in. In Glasgow we call them Pakis—the shops, irrespective of the nationality of their proprietors—but then we can be an ignorant lot. This is why this story moved me because it’s really a portrait of a faceless man. And you don’t get much more profound than that unless you’re Ralph Ellison.

One I particularly enjoyed was ‘The Birdman of Farringdon Road’. This is a Bradbury-esque tale in the vein of Stephen King’sNeedful Things and by that I mean that, had Bradbury got the idea for Needful Things he would’ve probably turned it into a short story rather than a novel. It begins:

I don’t usually give money to beggars. After all, they’ll only spend it on drink. So I’m really not sure what got into my head that July morning. Maybe it was the sunshine, maybe it was the girls in short dresses, maybe there was just something in the air. Whatever it was, I went over to the old tramp outside the station and threw a couple of pounds into his bucket. Instead of thanking me, however, he stood up, reached behind my ear and produced a single feather, as if by magic. Looking deep into my eyes, he pressed the feather into my hands, closing them over with his.

“You’re a bird,” he said to me. The voice was quiet, steady and educated, with no discernible accent. He held my gaze for several more seconds before nodding slightly and releasing me. I didn’t really know what to say, so I simply nodded back and moved away, putting the feather in the inside pocket of my jacket.

Far from being discomfited by the morning’s strange encounter, I felt elated for the rest of the day. A bird! Yes! That’s what I was! I was an eagle, soaring with wings outstretched above the mundane pettiness of everyday working life, just waiting for the moment to strike. At last my destiny had been revealed to me.

At the end of the week the man—whose week has just got better and better since their first encounter—runs into the beggar again and decides to take him for a drink where he learns about the man’s uncanny ability: all he has to do is look at a person and tell what animal they are and what traits they might display:

He spent the next quarter of an hour identifying a bizarre array of animals who were apparently sharing the bar with us. Finally, I drained my glass, and made to leave.

“Er … your round, I think?” he said.

“Well, I was just leaving.”

“I’m not. And whilst you’re at the bar, have another look at that dark one. Trust me, she’s red hot.”

“But what’s so special about her? I still like the look of that blonde.”

“Nah. She’s a rabbit.”

“Sorry? Excuse me, but isn’t that …”

He leaned in close, and whispered in my ear. “The one in the middle is an octopus.” He tapped his nose in a meaningful manner, nodding slightly.

The beggar is right. After an “exhausting weekend” with the ‘octopus’ a plan forms in his mind. He has to hire a new team and decides to pay the beggar to vet the candidates. He tells him what he’s looking for—a fox, a dog and a cat—explaining his reasoning and the man agrees—for a rather hefty fee—to do as he asks. Now, ask yourself, what could possibly go wrong here?

Overall

This is a fine collection of short stories and well-balanced. I’ve mentioned my reservations as regards the dots but I also have one regarding the dashes. It’s not a big one but I feel it needs mentioning even though life being as hectic as it is nowadays I doubt anyone would be too fussed about it. With one or two exceptions there weren’t many stories here that I felt I wanted to reread and relish. They weren’t hard reads—and by that I mean they were so well-written that I slipped seamlessly from one sentence to the next and never once had to reread a paragraph to see if I’d understood him right the first time (with the sole exception of the story written in reverse) although there was a dot that I stared at for longer than I really ought to have before I could see where he was going with it; my wife when I showed her also took an extra few seconds before she got it. Who, these days, has time to read a book more than once anyway? Because of the ease of reading it’s tempting to treat these works as lighter than what they are though. Granted there are some that are deliberately light and fluffy (like the appropriately-named ‘Hidden Shallows’) and, really, what’s the point rereading them once you’ve got the joke? The book’s not full of them so enjoy them for what they are. The bottom line is that this is an enjoyable read from beginning to end. This would have been perfect bus reading for me because having to get off and go to work would’ve stopped me devouring the book in one or two sessions; I actually managed to spread it over four sittings. This wasn’t a review copy by the way. I bought an electronic version for 77p off Amazon and all I can say is that’s a ridiculously-cheap price to pay for a work of this quality. I imagine though by the time this review gets posted—I’m actually writing this on New Year’s Day—the sale will be over.

Stories from Dot Dash available online and not linked to above:

• Mirror, Mirror
• Nature's Banquet
• Piss and Patchouli
• Breath In, Breath Out
• The Guitarist's Inheritance
• A Plague of Yellow Plastic Ducks
• Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions (+ audio)
• The Last Words of Emanuel Prettyjohn (+ video)
• How I Became a New Man, and What Good It Did Me

***

Jonathan Pinnock was born in Bedford, England. After reading Mathematics at Clare College, Cambridge, he drifted into the world of software and has remained there ever since. He has written one book on software development and co-authored a further dozen, most of which are now almost entirely obsolete.

He is married with two slightly grown-up children and a 1961 Ami Continental jukebox.

He’s currently finished his third book which he describes as “the story of an offbeat real-life quest I undertook recently” and is looking for a publisher at the moment.

I like short stories’ implicit awareness that life has no neat endings, that it is comprised of many very small moments, all in their own way powerful and important, and that life is messy, it’s unclear, it’s about reading between the lines. – Tania Hershman, in interview

Where does prose end and poetry begin? A couple of hundred years ago that wasn’t such a difficult question to answer: poetry was the stuff that rhymed; everything that wasn’t poetry was prose. I’m not sure I trust a definition like that. It’s a bit like answering the question, “What’s a dog?” with the answer, “Not a cat.” The cover to Tania Hershman’s second collection hedges its bets and simply says it contains, “Fictions by Tania Hershman.” ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is a work of fiction but it’s also an epic poem so where does that leave us? If you assume for a moment that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme (which it hasn’t done since the sixteenth century, let’s be honest) then what’s the difference between prose and poetry? Well, up until the nineteenth century poetry was the stuff with the ragged right margin and then some Frenchman decided line breaks weren’t particularly important and the prose poem was born. It struggled a bit to gain popular approval, some big names spoke out against it—TS Eliot for one—and although it looked as though it’s time was done by the late forties since the nineteen eighties it seems to have found its second wind. Poets.org defines a prose poem as follows:

Though the name of the form may appear to be a contradiction, the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry. In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, "Just as black humour straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels."

While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.

So, is By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Canadian author Elizabeth Smart a prose poem or a work of poetic prose? And does it really matter? Are the poetry police going to come along and rap me on the knuckles for using alliteration in a short story or a metaphor or two in one of my novels?

If I were to go with Shalom Freedman’s definition:

The language of poetry is metaphor
And irony and ambiguity
And beauty –

then My Mother Was An Upright Piano is, indeed, a book of poems because Tania lays on her metaphors, ironies, ambiguities and beauties with a trowel and several reviewers before me have been happy to describe the works contained within this slim volume as at least poetic if not actual poetry.

When Beckett published a book of short prose pieces he called them foirades—“fizzles” in English which has always reminded me of sparklers although I’m not ignorant of its now-obsolete definition)—but I’d like to propose my own word for what Tania has produced here: novelties. We have the novel, the novella, the novelette, the short story and the relatively new term, flash fiction, which is what most people would settle on when describing these fifty-six pieces, but I like the connotation that these are something new and not just a flash in the pan. In his review on Amazon Garry Powel says some of these stories are, “mini-novels”—he cites ‘Manoeuvres’ and ‘The Lion and the Meteorite Can Never Touch You’—and this just underlines what I’ve just said.

And new things take some getting used to.

The first thing you have to get used to is how to read these pieces. I tried reading them as if they were short stories, skipped from one to the next but nothing stuck. It was like gobbling down a box of chocolates. Or going to a wine tasting and just chucking back the glasses: "Skål! Next!” I was not alone here. Over on his blog, Brian Clegg, notes:

I had to seriously slow down my reading style, which is normally very quick, getting the gist, almost ignoring anything descriptive. I needed to slow down and appreciate the words.

This reminded me of a comment my friend Marion McCready made recently on one of my blogs:

I'm a slow poetry reader, I mull over a poetry collection for months. When people write their top ten poetry collections of 2012 I'm still obsessing over a poetry collection I read last year.

Is it even possible to read poetry quickly? Of course it’s possible—most things are possible—but is there any point to it?

Of course ‘fizzle’ does not mean ‘sparkle’ and ‘novelty’ is not without its negative connotations. The title of the book—taken from a story—is slightly gimmicky (it reminded me of Oliver Sacks'sThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales); it has a novelty value and that’s what you want to capitalise on with a title so it was a good choice but having seen the book mentioned here and there for the past several months it’s stopped impressing me. But that’s just a title and a book is more than just a title and some of the coolest books hide behind really naff titles.

I don’t appreciate wine. I just don’t get it. It all tastes the same to me: awful. I listen to these wine experts on the TV going on about and it’s just laughable some of the words they use to describe wine: smoky, nutty, chocolaty. I don’t get any of that but I can appreciate the subtle differences between various performances of pieces of classical music: there’s a world of difference between Sir Adrian Boult’s (to my mind definitive) interpretation of Holst’sThe Planets and Karajan’s and even his later version differs from his earlier ones. But you need to have an ear for these things. And the same goes for Tania Herhman’s novelties: they need to be savoured; they need to be reread and read again. A page-turner this book is not unless you include a lot of turning pages back. And that will annoy a lot of people, the kind of people who don’t read an awful lot of poetry.

In broad terms I think the difference between poetry and prose boils down to this: prose states, poetry implies. Again I find myself agreeing with Brian Clegg who writes in his review: “about 90% of the story is implied rather than explicit.” These are stories that you need to think about and I found myself continually revising my assumptions as I read.

The Angle of his Bending

20,000 lead azide detonators could not tear me from you, nor 40,000 caesium-powered rockets, nor 60,000 men with flaming nuclear swords or women with their breasts to tempt me, and he shook his fist into her face as she sat thinking of the space between two chairs which was not enough to keep him from her and the days and days after with no tomorrow to take her away. The rope upon her wrists was tighter now than when he tied it, had some property, she thought, that made it so, and if they had real lives before this all real life was gone. He paced around her now and she tried to see behind him, up and up, but the staircase curved from sight and it was just her in the room with him and rope, and as she saw him bend and stretch she knew the angle a man shudders into with a woman, rope and chairs and all, is never equal to the angles of the opposite sides. And so she stayed silent.

No inverted commas—sometimes she uses them, sometimes not—so I didn’t realise it was a quote. “Flaming … swords” sounds Biblical: a cherub with a flaming sword was stationed at the gates to Eden. It sounds like he’s declaring his love albeit in a rather OTT way. But then why’s he shaking his fist at her? She’s sitting on a chair. Is he sitting on the chair opposite her? “[D]ays and days after with no tomorrow”—why’s “tomorrow” singular? Surely “tommorrows” would read better. Am I editing here or is this important? She’s tied to her chair. Okay so maybe he is crazy, a religious zealot, a terrorist. But then why’s he professing his undying love if they’re all going to die in some imminent holocaust? Perhaps they’re in a bunker and she’s safe from everything just not him. Is that why “all real life was gone”? If there’s a staircase maybe they’re in a basement. It sounds like a spiral staircase. No one has one of them leading to their basement. Not in a normal home. Then again she wondered about the property of the rope. What woman would care about something like that? Maybe she’s a scientist and this is a lab. Always a possibility with one of Tania’s stories as fond of science as she is. (She used to work as a science journalist.) But now what’s this about angles? Sounds like geometry: In any right-angled triangle, the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the opposite sides. He’s pacing. Is he expecting something? Or psyching himself up for something? Now he’s bending and stretching. An odd time for calisthenics. “[T]he angle a man shudders into with a woman, rope and chairs and all, is never equal to the angles of the opposite sides”—what on earth does that mean? Shudder: verb, (of a person) Tremble convulsively, typically as a result of fear or repugnance. How does one shudder into something? Wait a second. There’re no more words. That’s it. Bugger. Now what? Okay, let’s go back to the start.

Okay, I’m being a little facetious here but pretty much every story—this is one of the shortest ones—is like this. There are Is and hes and shes but mostly we’re never told who they are. We deduce from the context that they’re mothers and sons or wives and husbands or any of a dozen or so different male-female dynamics. There’s the odd sister too. Few have names. Or faces. What does the woman look like in ‘The Angle of his Bending’? Is she old, beautiful, full-figured, the proverbial catch? Does it matter? In her review of the book Michelle Bailat-Jones says these stories "aren’t incomplete excerpts; the reader doesn’t want or need any of these fictions to go on longer or somehow become another form entirely" and she has a point up to a point; Tania deliberately leaves things vague and allows/expects us to fill in the blanks, to finish off the story but isn’t that the author’s job? “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”—Samuel Johnson. Fair comment. But what’s the right ratio? 50:50? 90:10? Tania thinks it should be more like 10:90. In an interview with Rumjhum Biswas she had this to say:

I am a reader who wants to be made to work hard. I love great flash stories that leave 90% to the reader to work out, ones that aren’t necessarily rooted in reality as we know it. I think the very short form lends itself well to this. Great flash fiction is when the story fits the length—it’s not straining to be something longer but compressed to fit into a tiny box. Everything has its ideal length, I believe.

Reading other people’s reviews of this I can see there were others who couldn’t come up with their requisite ninety percent.

Even after many readings, I'm not convinced I've understood some of these pieces. – Shirley Golden

Some (like 'underground') I don't feel I fully understood, but even those still manage to be engaging and to paint a vivid picture of a strange world. – Annemaire Neary

[A]lthough each of Tania Hershman's stories has a point, not all are immediately apparent. She mentions her parents saying they enjoyed all the stories, even those they couldn't understand and I see where they're coming from. – Ani Johnson

‘The Angle of his Bending’ might have been one I struggled with but there were others I did not or at least not as much. The one that jumped out at me was one I’d already read online: ‘Under the Tree’. You can read it over at Electric Velocipede in full. She began the story in 2006 and it took her three years to write; a long time for only 800 words but that’s the thing about brevity, you can’t afford to be sloppy and it’s to her credit that she bided her time and got it right. She talks about the writing process in a post on her blog and here’s my comment:

This story reminded me of the novel Bed where a boy one day refuses to get out of bed and eats and eats until his health is at risk. My problem with the novel is that the author skipped over practical details (like going to the toilet—it’s astounding the number of literary characters who never poop) and as much as I wanted to rise above it a part of my mind kept wondering. I was the same with your story. Tried not to be but couldn’t help myself. That said there was a lot I did like about it and read it over several times. I can see that you’ve weighed every word. A haunting study of the nature of grief. At least that’s my reading of it. I do like the structure very much.

If I was allowed one adjective to describe the stories in this book I’d go with ‘unusual’; chuck in a noun and I’d pick ‘perspective’. So many of these stories could be told as straightforward third person narratives—she said this, he did this, they went there where this and that happened—but even with her third person narratives she manages to twist them ever so slightly. Take, for example, this story which appeared in Metazen back in 2010:

The Family

Although the family is not always available, the family is on hand when it comes to death. The family stands a respectful distance away, swaying slightly as the coffin is lowered, every now and then blowing a nose. Back at the house, the family are convivial, shaking hands, patting backs, handing food around. The family are good like that. In the pandemonium that is mothers and children, fathers and whisky, small dogs and the one that cries a lot under a table, the family takes charge, ushers and whisks, cajoles and sweeps away.

The family is especially on hand for those medium-sized boys with their exploding watches, exploding eggs, exploding matches, whom the family, in formation, scoops up before damage is done so that grieving can continue. And when it is over, the family clears away the necessary before making a quiet exit.

After that, the family may not be available, may be unseen and unheard from for months or perhaps even years. When people ask you a question about the family, answer them vaguely, for the family do not like to be proscribed, assigned to boxes, dates, labels. When they come, they come. And don’t forget your manners.

We all recognise this family. Most of us belong to families like this. What she’s saying here is so bleeding obvious but she’s done what any poet worth his or her salt would do, she’s taken the familiar and made us see it again, afresh. How? Quite simply, firstly, by the use—the unusual use—of an omniscient narrator and secondly, by treating the family as a single unit rather than a composite body made up of mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, grandparents and other relatives once or twice removed. I have a scene in one of my own short stories where the relatives appear after the death of the narrator’s father and I thought I’d done a good job of it till I read this.

When I reviewed Tania’s first collection I mentioned that there was a magic realist undercurrent at play in some of her stories and drew attention to her thoughts on the subject in an interview on Vanessa Gebbie’s blog where she talks at length about the subject. In part she says:

I like to read magical realist stories because they make me think more than a story in which every element is familiar. I am not particularly interested in a story about someone like me, who lives where I live, does what I do. I want to learn something from a story, and one way to draw me in as a reader is to invent something completely new! If you convince me, I will step into that world, I will accept it all, I will be right there with your characters. If you don't convince me, I stop reading.

Some of my favourite writers in this vein are Angela Carter, Aimee Bender, Italo Calvino, Haruki Murakami, Jose Saramago. These writers inspire and influence me by saying that anything is possible. Their work says to me: Don't be constrained by what you have seen, what you have experienced. Go beyond your world, use your imagination, see what might be, what could be.

This is not done simply for entertainment value: the best magical realist stories use the magical aspects to unveil something about our own world, our communities and societies, who we are as human beings.

In this new collection there are a far greater number of stories that one could classify as magic realist or fantastic. Examples are:

The short tree has its hand up, the short tree wants to ask, wants to ask a question. The two taller trees ignore the short tree. They whisper together, the one tree leaning in to the other, giggling a little, flirting, while the short tree, its hand upraised, is crying out now. (from ‘The Short Tree has its Hand Up’)

Life was small. It was tiny even, so tiny it was hard to see it sometimes. Life curled up to make itself even smaller, to fit into the kinds of holes that insects crawl into to get away from bigger insects. Life was sad. Life didn’t want to be an insect. Life was getting backache from the curling up. It wanted to straighten out, stand up tall, shout out to the world. But it had been so long, Life wasn’t sure how to. (from ‘Life Bursts Out’)

I can see through her. She is sitting opposite me and I see her ribs, the blood beating in her heart, the tea as it makes its way down towards her stomach. Yesterday we were sitting here as couples do, cut off from one another by skin, by outward defences. Today, she is as open to me as my own mind. (from ‘Transparent’)

Others are simply quirky:

Einstein sits in the corner, playing guitar. No-one tells him, Albert, go home. Because he’s Einstein. He looks up and grins. (from ‘Einstein Plays Guitar’)

We just love Art in containers, any sort of glass jars, or Tupperware, even. We adore that sense of containment, the feeling that the Art isn’t going to, well, leak out. Or that something else will get into the Art. Art contamination, it’s something we worry about a great deal. Some Art, it’s terribly sensitive, you know. It’s fragile, like a baby, or more like a soufflé. The smallest thing can deflate it, like tapping a balloon with a sharp pin. (from ‘Containing Art’)

And some are just plain poetic:

I stand under the street lamp, my flickering self lit up by doubt and lit up by the lamp and by the moon. I wait under that street lamp for you, all the while vibrations inside me filling me with questions. And you, where are you? Untethered, floating away, leaving me, a stranded star, to shimmer and blister on dark street corners alone. I wait for you to rush up to me, but where you should be rushing there is only silence and where your feet should be there is a cat, moon-widened eyes, afraid to cross my path, a witness to my inner ache. (from ‘My Flickering Self’)

When it sings he sings with it, him and the bird. It sings in its metal cage, with its metal wings and small metal beak, and its heart, which is part of his heart, a tiny lump that he removed from his and placed inside the bird’s metal ribcage. (from ‘Tiny Red Heart’)

Where the quirky or the fantastic ends and the poetic begins I couldn’t tell you.

One thing that bothered me a little about the collection as a body of work was that it felt a little jumbled. I had a horrendous time organising my own poetry book and the only way I could do it was to have an overall theme but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. In an interview with Nuala Ní Chonchúir she said:

I had over 150 that I'd written … and so—in contrast to my first collection, which contained basically everything I'd written up to that point—I got to pick my favourites, the ones I really love, the Top 56, you could say. That's a really nice and different feeling. I can never put my own stories in order—my fabulous publisher, Richard, at Tangent Books, did it for me. We didn't want any conscious thought of ordering by theme so he tried as much as possible to mix them up—but then you read them and things jump out at you. Like how many times trees appear. And certain images I clearly like to use, that I'd ever seen before!

This will likely bother others less than me but I didn’t feel that the book had an overall tone unlike, for example, the two collections by Andrew McCallum Crawford. Fifty-six stories is a lot, even fifty-six very short stories. There are a few I would have left out this time. Another reviewer took the view that with so many if there was one you didn’t like you should just jump onto the next one. And there’s nothing wrong with that attitude either.

In her review Ebba Brooks made this observation: “A minor quibble: I spotted four typos in the edition I read. At a cover price of £9.99 for a paperback, I’d expect better. In case there’s a chance of a second print run, Tangent Books editor please take note.” I read the ebook—I downloaded it from Amazon—and my gripe was with the punctuation (commas without spaces after them, for example) and the formatting which was a little sloppy too. Now there’s nothing stopping them uploading a clean copy there.

Larkin was once asked what he’d learned from his study of poetry. His response, slightly butchered by me, is sound advice for anyone interested in flash:

Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study [microfictions]! You read them, and think, That’s marvellous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.

Flash fiction has never been more popular and anything that stops novices writing awful haiku has got to be a good thing. Like haiku flash fiction looks easy and it’s really easy to write bad flash fiction; you don’t even have a syllable count to worry about. If you’re genuinely interested in learning how to express yourself in a few hundred (or even a few dozen) words then get yourself a copy of this book; it’s as good a textbook as you’re likely to find.

If you’d like to try before you buy there’s plenty of her work online:

From this collection

• ‘My Mother Was an Upright Piano’, ‘Trams and Pies’, ‘Containing Art’
• ‘Missy’, ‘Suitcases Balanced on Your Head’, ‘Underground’
• ‘The Watch My Father Wanted’
• ‘We Watched Him on our Screens’
• ‘It Could Almost be an Accident’
• ‘Vegetable, Mineral’
• ‘Tiny Unborn Fish’
• ’48 Dogs’

Others

• ‘A Sigh Rose Inside Him’
• ‘Colours Shift and Fade’
• 'All Activity is Silent'
• ‘Burrowing Blind’
• ‘Dog Daze’
• ‘Fish Filled Sea’
• ‘Go Away’
• ‘Sunspots’
• ‘Plaits’

***

Tania Hershman lives in Bristol, UK, with her partner and their cat. Her first collection, The White Road and Other Stories, was commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Her award-winning short stories and flash fiction have been widely published and broadcast. Tania is currently writer-in-residence in the Science Faculty at Bristol University, and is founder and editor of The Short Review, an online journal shining the spotlight on short story collections.

Her recent projects involve an interesting shift in direction. She’s submitted an entry to the Wellcome Trust Screenwriting prize (an idea for a biomedicine-inspired feature film), has completed a science-inspired radio play, is writing more actual poetry (with line breaks) and is also working on what she described as “a sort of novella thingy.” A third collection of short stories is also a distinct possibility.

Frog City Updike never would’ve been without Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, the book that showed me just how loose I could get with form. – Arthur Graham, Big Al’s Books and Pals

One of the words I use too often in reviews is ‘interesting’ but I never really make it clear whether a particular word piques my interest or holds it. It’s the same with ‘nice’, which I also overuse; nice can have negative connotations; the last thing your wife wants to hear when she walks in wearing a new outfit is, “You look nice, dear.” Even more confusing I would expect is when something gets referred to as ‘nice and interesting’. Frog City Updike—the place, not the book—sounds like a nice, interesting place. I’m not sure I’d want to live there but if I did I can see myself running across interesting things and saying, “Oh, that’s nice,” or vice versa.

Short story collections are a bugger to review. The problem usually is finding the common thread. Why does the author think that these particular stories, in this particular order, work? The ones I find I enjoy best are books like The Next Stop is Croy and other stories where the stories all revolve around a single family or Ugly to Start With where the stories are all set in a particular town and retain the same narrator. Arthur Graham’sFrog City Updike works because all the stories bar two are set within the borders of the fictional town of Frog City Updike. As for the two exceptions, one is set in Ireland and another in Frog City Updike Heaven. Some have first person points of views, others third; there’s even a couple of letters employing a second person narrative; the protagonists vary but they all are Frog City Updike-ites and that is what binds them together; their idiosyncratic take on life. The closest comparison I can think of is the quirky American TV series Portlandia. Anyway, this collection works.

Astute readers will have noticed in the last paragraph that I mentioned that Frog City Updike was a town. This is not a typo. I’ll let the author explain:

[W]eighing in with just 7,886 yearlong residents, it would be more accurate to call the place Frog Town Updike. But, as is the case with all such misnomers, the fact of the inaccuracy is not as important as the truth of it. Whenever the place was first referred to as Frog City Updike, or whoever first referred to it that way – these questions are purely academic. For those who call it home, Frog City Updike simply is what it is. Frog City Updike is just what the town has always been called, and since the name stuck as well as it did, no one really sees much point in trying to change it on a technicality now.

The Updike connection also requires some explanation:

[T]here has never been any family, business, or public office with the name Updike listed anywhere in the local phone book. One can imagine how hard this has made it to look up the local post office, or anything else for that matter!

Okay it’s not much of an explanation. But it is a fact. However bizarre. There are frogs, just not as many as one might expect to warrant the inclusion of their existence in the name of the place.

To be perfectly honest, there are only about two hundred or so in the entire area, and most if not all of them are concentrated around the small pond at the shady heart of Frog City Updike City Park. Quite rare is it to see a frog anywhere beyond this pond or its immediate environs – at least one that hasn’t been flattened by a car or carried off and pecked apart by a bird somewhere. But the frogs of Frog City Updike – confined as they are to their pond at the centre of Frog City Updike City Park – they don’t much complain about their lot in life.

So that’s Frog City Updike. Having read no Updike I can’t say that the writing style reminded me in any way of John Updike although Wikipedia tells me that he also wrote a great deal about American small towns and probably published far more short story collections than most winners of the Pulitzer Prize have. The author bio at the back of the book says that Arthur Graham works “in a slipstream, surrealist style that has been compared to that of William S. Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” but as I’ve managed to get through the last fifty-three years without reading either of them I can’t comment on any similarities to their work either. (Note to self: need to read more American writers.) Having only read the three quotes above, although not in the order in which I presented them, the author I thought about was Richard Brautigan (which shows that I have read at least one American writer) and one particular book came to mind: In Watermelon Sugar. In an old post on Arthur’s blog I was pleased to see that he’d also realised that this was the kind of book “Brautigan might’ve enjoyed if he hadn’t blown his brains out all those years ago.” Which is a very Brautigan-esque way of putting it, don’t you think?

Now having read the above, which, as I’ve said was all that I’d read when I reached that conclusion, you may or may not agree with that assessment, assuming, of course, that you’re familiar with Brautigan’s work, but as I pressed through the collection I only found more evidence to underline that initial determination. Brautigan’s naïve style of writing is not something one comes across very often. Indeed the last book that reminded me of him was called Naïve. Super by the Norwegian author Erlend Loe which I enjoyed immensely.

The majority of the stories in Frog City Updike could be described as flash fiction; many only last for a couple of pages and as the paragraphs are mostly short and the font is on the generous side (I was working from a PDF mind) there is certainly more white space than most short stories contain resulting in proportionately fewer words per page that one might expect. The net effect is that it is a nice book to read. This is not a thing I tend to say about most books of flash fiction where the stories jump all over the shop but since all the stores are set in Frog City Updike or involve Frog City Updike-ites you feel as if you’re getting to know the town a little at a time. It’s an interesting town. Needless to say it’s not a real town. The title came from Arthur’s wife:

My wife suggested Frog City Updike as a nonsensical title for the novella I was working on last year. Though completely inappropriate for that particular book, it was far too good a title to just throw away! Frog City Updike basically wrote itself around these three words, which is why it’s dedicated to Jayna, who provided that initial spark.

[…]

For Frog City Updike… whenever I felt like working I would imagine this nondescript town, theoretically in rural America somewhere – a place that served as a sort of microcosm for the larger world, along with all of the people, places, and things in it. From there, I would cast about for interesting characters and situations, transporting them to this rather amorphous locale and infusing them with my own observations and experiences. In so doing, I found it easy to incorporate a wide variety of unpublished material I’d been sitting on for a while, stuff that likely never would’ve seen the light of day if I hadn’t taken such an essentially open approach. – The Indie Spotlight

I can see the total sense in this because a number of the stories don’t work especially well on their own but gain strength from being incorporated in a group like this.

A number of the stories in Frog City Updike come from a group whose connection to Frog City Updike is tenuous to say the least. The first, entitled ‘Hitler’s Bad Day’ begins as follows:

Hello. My name is Arthur Graham. If you’re reading my book, Frog City Updike, then you can call me Frog City Updike Arthur Graham.

Incidentally, how are you liking my little book so far? I hope you are liking it well!

If you like this book, then you may like this other thing I wrote – a short story entitled “Hitler’s Bad Day.”

HITLER’S BAD DAY
By Arthur Graham

A short man paced aimlessly around the small underground room, stopping here and there to straighten a wall hanging or rearrange the items on a table. Each time he passed the ornamental mirror above the fireplace, which he did with some frequency, he paused for a moment to examine his moustache and frown at it. The barber had cut it too short, he thought.

Hitler was having a bad day.

The others are ‘TV and the Internet’, ‘Nice Description’, ‘And So It Came to Be’ and the longest story in the collection, ‘No One Drinks Tea Anymore’ which, if I’d read any books by Tom Robbins I might say reminded me of Tom Robbins in that the protagonist in the story is a teacup. (Note to self: add Tom Robbins to the list of American authors you need to get round to.) None of the other stories in the book involve sentient inanimate objects although to be fair to the teacup she does not remain immobile and indeed makes her big bid for freedom juiced up on nicotine of all things towards the end of the story. There is a talking frog and a chatty Loch Ness Monster in the story which is set in Ireland although he does explain what the Loch Ness Monster isn’t doing in his native Scotland. For me, though, the standout story was the one about the teacup. I suspect its length was the reason. It has time to develop the characters. An extract:

Teacup wasn’t dumb. She was fairly smart as far as inanimate objects went, but her knowledge of current fashion trends was sadly lacking. In any event, she was used to having her suggestions ignored.

What she did know about the world outside the diner was largely limited to what people around her let slip. Other objects were rarely much help at filling in the gaps because each had their own geographic blinders. For example, in the kitchen, Whisk had no idea what a chicken was. He could tell you every minute detail about an individual chicken egg, but for all he knew they grew on vines.

The problem was actually quite simple: Most of them simply lacked any general context in which to place their very specific knowledge. That’s what happens when you spend the majority of your time stuck in a sink, in a drawer, or in a cupboard. These days Teacup was spending more and more of her time in the cupboard.

No one drinks tea anymore, she would often lament.

There is some attempt at continuity and characters from one story do reappear in another, especially Frog City Updike Arthur Graham. Frog City Updike Sheila and Tony appear in ‘The Jean Jacket’, ‘On Your Side’, ‘It Was Just that Kind of Vacation’ (for me the weakest story in the book as it’s set in Ireland and having written a book set in Ireland and also not being Irish—Arthur hails from the north woods of Michigan; I hail from Glasgow city centre—I know just how hard it is to get those telltale details right), ‘A Scene From Frog City Updike Tony’s Deathbed’ and the last story, ‘Heaven’, in which everyone has a cameo and I nearly missed her because her name is spelled ‘Shelia’. (Considering Arthur pays his bills editing medical textbooks for a small publishing company in Salt Lake City, tsk, tsk.)

Some of the stories have a surreal edge to them. In ‘Making Relationships Work’ the unnamed narrator is sitting in Frog City Updike Public Library when he sees a “young hip couple” come in:

I could tell they were young due to their solid, slender physiques, smooth skin, and overall lively demeanour. They were hip obviously because they were dressed in the latest fashions of the time, which at that time consisted of an all-black winter ensemble accentuated by bright pastel accessories. As for how I could tell they were a couple, well, there were two of them present.

But the next time he notices them they’ve mysteriously aged and their relationship also seems to have, well, depreciated. And they smell:

I tried to pretend that I hadn’t been thinking intently about their personal lives, which was easy now that I noticed their combined effluvium of French fry grease, cigarette smoke, and mildewed undergarments.

No explanation is forthcoming but the narrator notices the book the woman is carrying: MAKING RELATIONSHIPS WORK and he proceeds to mull over in his mind what he might learn from this pair. He realises that the experience has taught him valuable lessons:

1) It takes more than the latest styles to make a person hip,
2) it takes more than hipness to make a person young, and
3) it takes more than two persons present to make a couple.

Others stories have a profound simplicity. In ‘Bruised Bananas and Broken Bones’ we learn what has happened to reduce Frog City Updike Dr. Robertson from being a successful and wealthy medical practitioner to having to spend his nights under a Frog City Updike bridge “with nothing but a sleeping bag, a rucksack, and a small wooden crate he’d turned upside down to use as a table.” But rather than being a tale of failure the story ends on a surprising positive note:

It had given the former Mrs. Robertson great pleasure to see her former husband left penniless, but what she didn’t know was how well an old hobo doctor could live in exchange for giving free medical advice and setting the occasional broken bone.

A new young doctor now taken over the practice but he still hadn’t taken down the sign that reads “Frog City Updike Dr. Robertson’s Family Clinic.”

Whenever the young doctor finally takes down his old sign, Dr. Robertson decides, he will reclaim it from the Frog City Updike municipal dump and set it up beneath his bridge.

None of the stories are especially heavy. Not even the one about Hitler. In fact the political correctness of writing stories about someone like Hitler is addressed in a later story:

I am not nor have I ever been a Nazi sympathizer, Hitler lover, or Holocaust denier/apologist. I’ll tell you a few other things that I’m not: 1) Simple-minded to the point where I am unable to conceptualize on multiple levels. After all, it is not hard to image Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tossing a paper cup out the window of a moving vehicle, or Mahatma Gandhi verbally abusing his wife, so why is it so hard to imagine Adolph Hitler doing anything other than incinerating Jews, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals and intellectuals? 2) Ignorant to the point where I equate the mere reference of a word/name with the wholehearted support of everything associated with it, and 3) Sensitive to the point where I allow my ignorance in these basic matters to upset me to such a degree that I feel compelled to write asinine letters to anyone who will read them and possibly respond.

We have a grandmother and granddaughter exchanging letters, there’s a woman who can’t sleep for her husband snoring, an overly-forthright drama coach, a boxer who becomes a legend because of his glass jaw, a group of gypsies who seem to pass around the same kid while they beg for money, there’s some debate about why bunnies don’t lay eggs (personally I’ve never understood what either eggs or rabbits have to do with Easter) and there’s even a story where you can decide what happens next; remember those?

All in all it adds up to a rather charming read. As Arthur puts it himself:

It won’t keep your children or grandchildren nearly as riveted as the average Disney film, but you could probably read it aloud to them without overly censoring the material. It retains a lot of the same quirks that made its predecessor such a mixed bag, but it’s executed with virtually no sex, violence, or dark, demented broodings to speak of. Very whimsical in both structure and tone. – Big Al’s Books and Pals

I have nothing to add.

You can read a lengthy extract from the book here.

***

The biography on his Facebook page reads as follows:

Graham currently resides in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife and her cat. He writes his books alone in the dark, usually nude, surrounded by empty bottles and loaded guns. Occasionally, he prefers to work nude while astride a rainbow.

His style is one that willingly loses itself in the false dichotomy between "genre" and "literary" fiction, with much of it cleaving towards satire and surrealism. His work has been called "clever", "tacky", and "even a bit obscene", and one reviewer was kind enough to label it "Burroughs-lite".

His novella Editorial was recently picked up by Bizarro Press, and his short story ‘Zeitgeist’ is set to appear in an upcoming anthology from the same imprint. One day, he hopes to sell enough books to supplement his drinking habit, but not so many that he's forced to claim the income on his taxes.

‘Zeitgeist’ appears in the anthology Tall Tales with Short Cocks and his latest book, Non/Fictions, a “healthy mix of fiction, nonfiction, nonfictional fiction, and fictional nonfiction” is just out.

This review originally appeared in Dactyl Review.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. – Friedrich Nietzsche

My novel, Milligan and Murphy, is 169 pages long. On page 131 I end the sixth chapter with the following three paragraphs:

This is where their story could have ended. Indeed in one way it did. They had ended up where they had started off and it hadn’t taken them too long to find a new life that so closely resembled their old one; it was almost indistinguishable from a distance. Not all stories are epics and very few epics are that interesting; even the ones involving lots of Russians. If everything were interesting then nothing would be interesting. Interesting things are not always significant things either. Think about that.

Would this be a happy ending, though?

Happy endings are nothing more than matters of timing. We are in the midst of beginnings and endings all the time. Every sentence has a beginning and an end and they’re supposed to make sense in between; that’s the rule: a grammatical unit that is syntactically independent; that has a subject that is expressed or, as in imperative sentences, understood, and a predicate that contains at least one finite verb. This book may end—there are no never-ending stories; we could just quit right here—it’s as good a place as any other—but the story goes on and who is to say that the ending we finally decide upon; the one that ends up at the end, is really happy or not so happy? It all depends on what follows. If we quit here you might draw the wrong conclusions about these two entirely. That’s the thing about being an omniscient narrator, I know where things should end and, if the characters start to veer off in the wrong direction or get too settled, well, I can always gee things up for them. Sometimes, however, all you have to do is wait a bit for the action to catch up…

You see, at this point in the story the brothers have gone full circle, i.e. they’ve basically gone nowhere. Since the novel was based on a book by Beckett whose characters famously never go anywhere in particular I could have stopped the book there and I even thought about it. It’s hard to know where to stop especially when you’re not reliant on a conventional plot. Plots lay out everything for you and we really don’t appreciate the storyline dawdling around on after the hero’s quest is over. A short coda is permissible but only a short one. And often writers use these opportunities as an excuse to lay the groundwork for the next book.

When I wrote Living with the Truth a sequel was the furthest thing from my mind. Just writing a single novel felt like such an achievement and to top everything off I killed off my protagonist at the end of novel which pretty much put the nail in that coffin. Or so I thought. Death ain’t what it used to be though, certainly not after George Dixon was resurrected in 1955 for Dixon of Dock Green (his character having been killed by a young Dirk Bogarde at the end of The Blue Lamp): Bobby Ewing stepped out of the shower in the May 1986 cliff-hanger episode of Dallas, Superman’s died and come back (actually several Supermen did), Spock was reborn, Buffy made a veritable habit of resurrection but she’s a rank amateur when compared to Kenny from South Park. Be it through revivification, reincarnation, mucking around with time, cloning or some form of magic, death these days may still be quick but seldom permanent. The thing I’ve come to realise with hindsight is that I really hadn’t done all I intended to with that first novel. As much as it rankles me to admit this—and it does because on the whole I’m not a huge fan of sequels—the two books do form a cohesive single unit; Living with the Truth feels like a better book once you’ve read Stranger than Fiction. And yet I left Stranger than Fiction on a cliff-hanger with absolutely no intention of ever writing a third book and, nearly twenty years on, I still feel no inkling to return to that universe; it’ll just have to limp on as a duology. (No, I didn’t make it up.)

I have a motto: Say what you have to say and get off the page. Despite the lengths of some of my blogs it’s something I take seriously when it comes to my creative writing. I’m not saying there haven’t been worthy sequels but I’m struggling to think of any. But when exactly have you said what you need to say? It’s a hard call. I mean you can always think of something more to say, that little bit more, that teensy tiny smidge of a bit just so you don’t have to hit that final full stop and be done.

Schopenhauer said that life is “too short for bad books” and “a few pages” should be quite enough, he claims, for “a provisional estimate of an author’s productions.” I think most of us put this into practice, even if we’ve never said as much out loud. In bookshops we open a book, perhaps in the middle even, scan a few lines—perhaps a whole paragraph—and judge the author based on one- or two-hundred words. But let’s say he or she has roped you in based on those words, you take the book home, settle down with your beverage of choice, commence reading, enjoy what you’re reading, get to, say, page 131, and think: This seems like a good place to stop and so that’s what you do, you stop there, shelve your book and never worry for a moment what might have happened next. No one does that, do they?

If it was a bad book I can fully understand stopping when you’ve had your fill. There aren’t a lot of books that I’ve never finished but there are a few. Three that jump to mind are: Gertrud by Hermann Hesse, Dangling Man by Saul Bellow and the second volume of Don Quixote; told you I’m not one for sequels. There will be more I am sure but not many mainly because I buy books with care. And there have, of course, been books that I’ve attempted to read but returned to years later and wondered what the problem was the first time. The best example of that is the book that was the inspiration for Living with the Truth, The Pigeon by Patrick Süskind which I failed to get through twice before finally, recently, reading it through to the end and thoroughly enjoying it too.

But what, as I said, if it was a good book. Why would anyone decide to stop reading a good book. I know it’s said you can get too much of a good thing but seriously, if you’re enjoying something surely you want to prolong that experience for as long as possible? That’s why we get so many sequels and threequels and quadrilogies and whatever made-up names marketers think will convince us to buy. (Seriously what’s wrong with ‘trilogy’ and ‘quartet’?) Here’s a wee anecdote from novelist Tim Parks:

One of the strangest responses I ever had to a novel of my own—my longest not surprisingly—came from a fellow author who wrote out of the blue to express his appreciation. Such letters of course are a massive pep to one’s vanity and I was just about to stick this very welcome feather in my cap, when I reached the last lines of the message: he hadn’t read the last fifty pages, he said, because he’d reached a point where the novel seemed satisfactorily over, for him.

Naturally I was disappointed, even a little angry. My leg had surely been pulled. Wasn’t this damning criticism, that I’d gone on fifty pages too long? Only later did I appreciate his candour. My book was fine, for him, even without the ending. It wasn’t too long, just that he was happy to stop where he did. – Tim Parks, ‘Why Finish Books?’The New York Review of Books, March 13, 2012

There are a number of unfinished works out there that we treat as if they are complete. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony is the one that obviously jumps to mind even though attempts have been made to polish it off. But is it incomplete and is it fair to compare a symphony to a novel? Wikipedia has a whole page full of unfinished novels which leads me to believe that there is definitely something to be gained by not reading to the very end but in these cases all we have is all we have and I imagine most people reading those books wished they knew just how the author would have ended it. I mean that adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Droodwe had over Christmas last year was fine, it made sense, but is that what Dickens would have done? We’ll never know. The only book I’ve started where I knew it was unfinished was The Dark Tower by C S Lewis and I can tell you I was disappointed by it leaving me hanging in mid air.

“You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.” So said Lewis. I have to disagree on both counts. A while ago I read my first—and I can pretty much guarantee it will be my only—1000-page novel, The Instructions by Adam Levin and, in my review, I wrote, “no book needs to be 1030 pages in length, I don’t care who wrote it or what it’s about.” I stand by that and I have to say that final chapter dragged. I could have easily stopped short and been completely satisfied. But if I had I wouldn’t have seen his full vision and I might not have been quite so disappointed because I wasn’t that crazy how he chose to end things; unbelievable as it sounds, the ending felt rushed.

Of course it all depends on the book. The only point in reading an Agatha Christie (I’m being facetious here) is to get to the drawing room scene at the end. But then again her books are plotted and once you know who did it and how they were found out you really don’t want any more. I read a thriller many years ago—I think it was a le Carré—and the climax arrives one page before the end of the book; I remember being quite impressed by that at the time. It’s the kind of thing one expects from a good horror film: the monster dies and the film ends a minute later. That’s what we came to see, we’ve seen it and so we can go and queue for fish and chips now.

I look at the books coming out at the moment and I think all of them are too long. I’m a self-confessed lover of the novella even though I’ve never actually written one. I’ve always thought I would but I always seem to have another 10,000 words in me. And I can live with that because four of my five books are all under 60,000 words. The fourth novel clocks in at 90,000 and I consider it a ruddy epic. I can’t believe I managed to write a book that long. In his article ‘Why modern books are all too long’Robert McCrum thinks he has the answer:

Literary elephantiasis starts across the Atlantic. North America has a lot to answer for. In the "pile 'em high" tradition, US bookshops love to display big fat books in the window. The cut-and-paste technology of word processors must bear some of the blame, but overwriting is part of the zeitgeist. Jonathan Franzen'sFreedom is highly enjoyable but who's finishing it? The novel is at least 100 pages too long.

He believes, as many others do, that The Great Gatsby is the greatest novel in English in the 20th century; it weighs in at under 60,000 words. He calls it “a miracle of compression” and goes on to point out that between them Waugh, Greene and Orwell all wrote books that average out between sixty- and seventy-thousand words apiece. Stephen King says he has to cut at least 10% on every novel he writes to sharpen it up.

"If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and engagingly said in one, then it's amateur work." — Robert Louis Stevenson

"Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress?" — Samuel Johnson

I have to disagree with him as far as Cervantes goes although maybe not. Once I’d finished the first volume I did dive into the second but why I gave up on it was because the second was just the same as the first; I wanted the same but different. That’s why James Cameron’s sequel to Alien is such a damn good film and why its sequel, Alien³, is a better film than people often give it credit for.

Part of the problem is that people set down arbitrary rules for how long a book, especially books of certain genres like science fiction, ought to be. Most publishers—for first time authors—want something between 80,000 to 120,000 words. I just don’t get that. A book is finished when you’ve said what you had to say. Why all the padding? Problem is the padding will likely be evenly spread throughout the book and so you can’t just skip the last fifty pages and be done with it. More’s the pity.

Okay, what am I going to say now? I’ve reached that point in the article where I think I’ve made my point and I’m not sure what else I have to say but I haven’t managed to tidy things up. I don’t have a nice pithy (or even pissy) punch line to leave you with and so I keep typing hoping that something might come, something clever to leave you with. I even let the whole article sit for a day before I started writing the sentence I’m typing just now. I read through from the beginning (as it my habit) hoping all the time that something would jump out at me that would enable me to maybe write another five-hundred words and, perhaps, think of a decent ending but it doesn’t look as if that’s happening and yet I just keep on typing and typing and typing…

Nope. Can’t think of anything. So I’m just going to stop. Wait! No! I’ve just thought of a great quote to leave you with:

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

Dr. Seuss

So that’s you left. And I’ve got the title for my blog.

I wanted to show you what was happening here. Because anybody who sees it and can carry on with his life as if nothing’s the matter belongs before a firing squad. – Chris Barnard, Bundu

Biafra was the first I remember. We told jokes about starving Biafrans in the playground. We should’ve known better. Then there was Ethiopia, then Ethiopia again, Somalia, the Sudan, Ethiopia once more, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Sudan again, Malawi, Niger, the Horn of Africa. And these were just the newsworthy ones. The sad fact is there’s hardly been a year since the 1970s when thousands of Africans haven’t been starving. I was often starving in the 1970s. I’d rush home from school and dive into the biscuit cupboard and tell my mum I was starving but, of course, I wasn’t starving; I probably wasn’t even especially hungry. All my life people have been appealing to us for aid and bit by bit compassion fatigue’s set in. Images of little black babies with bloated bellies don’t shock us like they used to or ought to but they’re still not attractive images so when I learned that Chris Barnard’s novel Bundu focused on an African famine I didn’t find myself exactly desperate to read it; what fresh could he possibly have to say?

Bundu is not a new novel. It was first published in 1999 in Afrikaans and has only now been translated into English; other reviewers have commented on the quality of the translation but I can only take their word for it. The book centres on an isolated clinic somewhere on the South Africa-Mozambique border whose settlement starts to become the destination for a number of refugees, the Chopi, not the thousands we see on the TV, just a couple of hundred, but the doctor and nurses are simply not equipped to deal with even that number; this was not what they signed up for; they’re not aid workers. As I started to read about them the first thing I found myself thinking of was Northern Exposure of all things. It’s a certain kind of individual who moves into an isolated setting like that; they usually have pasts they want to be as far away from as possible and that’s exactly the kind of people we have here; damaged individuals who now have to cope with people even more damaged than themselves. But let’s not be too quick to pity the Chopis:

That the Chopis had waited until halfway through the third summer of drought before crossing the border was proof of their extraordinary endurance.

We don’t learn a great deal about them which I thought was a pity. I would’ve liked to see them as more than just ‘the refugees’ but maybe that was done deliberately because these are people who are not only dislocated but disenfranchised and deculturalised; we don’t see them hauling their musical instruments with them—their music was proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005—all that has been abandoned.

Our narrator is Brand de la Rey, a wildlife researcher who applied for the position because it put him as far away from civilisation as possible; no one else wanted the job anyway. He’s not a complete misanthrope though and there are a few fellow eccentrics whose company he can tolerate like Julia Krige, the local nurse who he’s developed a soft spot for (and it is reciprocated) but neither is in a rush to do anything about it; neither has been lucky in love before so why should this be anything different? The blunt fact is that no one can afford to be completely alone in such an inhospitable place. None of the natives could be described as loquacious and even when they did talk often what they said was cryptic and no amount of pressing would get them to say more than they felt needed to be said; Strydom, the archaeologist, talked in half-sentences and avoided addressing people directly (“the addiction to first names probably figured to him as an excessive show of brotherliness”), Tito de Gaspri, who delivered de la Rey’s each month, never gave a straight answer to a question and Bruyns, one of the Red Cross doctors, “was not a man for detail. He supplied only the most essential of facts.” None of them are much into talking about their pasts.

You couldn’t really describe the structure to this book as a crucible but it does have that kind of feel to it. When Hitchcock was populating his lifeboat or O'Bannon deciding on the crew of the Nostromo I’m sure they spent a long time figuring out what the perfect mix of people would be. Getting the balance is important. We do get to learn the backstories of most of the characters—Julia was a nun before she turned to nursing, Mills was a musician before he became an alcoholic pilot, presumably Strydom has a first name once upon a time—but now they’re all pretty much alike and, like the baboons that circle de la Rey’s house, keep everyone at arm’s length.

There’s no antagonist in this book—unless you count bureaucrats, the military and Mother Nature—and everyone takes their turn playing the hero; either that or there are no heroes and it’s just a bunch of people doing the best they can in impossible circumstances. Surprisingly the refugees fade very much into the background despite the fact the book’s focus is How are we going to save as many of these as we can? A couple stand out, a woman with red beads and a child who insists on bringing Julia feathers but mostly they remain nameless, faceless and voiceless. We learn more about the baboons but I wonder if that’s not deliberate. The monkeys are also starving. There’s been no rain for a very long time and the vegetation is quickly disappearing. The humans can be kept alive by slaughtering the odd animal—an injured hippo early on in the book is a real find—but what can one do for a troop of baboons? Two scenes in the book are worth contrasting. The first involving the humans from the beginning of the book:

[Julia] was making her way towards a woman lying in a patch of shade just outside the shelter. There was a baby in the woman’s arms about three months old and reed-thin. The child was dead still and every now and again the woman tried with jerky movements to drive the flies from its face. I stood looking, stirring the pot, at Julia patiently trying to get some soup into the child’s mouth with a piece of reed.

[…]

The child vomited up the few scraps of soup in his throat—there, take it, it’s too late—and closed his eyes. The woman on the ground stretched out her arms to the child as if she wanted him back. But Julia put him down on the ground, because he was dead.

This second one comes near the end:

There was a strange sound among them which we couldn’t quite make out. It was a very soft tapping sound as if one of them was walking on a badly made wooden leg. We watched them more closely to see if we could trace the origin of the sound. After a while Vusi pointed out one of the larger females. She had something in her hand, a scrap of sack or cloth. As long as she could get by on three legs, we could hear her walk—but as soon as she had to use the other front paw and couldn’t move the cloth to another foot in time, something inside the cloth—something like a dry wild orange or calabash—struck the rock. […] For a second it lay there on the rock in front of me before she could grab it and take off with it. It was the dry head and scrap of hide and tail of what earlier in the summer would have been her offspring—only the nostrils and eye sockets recognizable in the little skull rattling in the desiccated scalp when she stepped on the wrong front paw.

Both are equally tragic and yet it was the latter that had the greater impact on me. I’ve thought about this for a couple of days now and I think the difference between the two mothers boils down to language; the human can be comforted with words, can bury her child and start the grieving process; we think of most Africans as primitives and yet she’s civilised enough to realise there are appropriate ways to deal with the death of a child. The baboon, however, does what the human might want to—not let go.

Thankfully the book is careful not to overpower us with too many images like this; it would be an unbearable read if it did. It focuses instead on the lives (and loves) of the foreigners. Essentially though there’s no difference between the humans and the baboons other than the fact the humans live in hope of being rescued; all the baboons can wait for is rain or death. A few pages after the last quote de la Rey returns to the clinic and makes this observation:

“This poor…” I couldn’t find a word for the little flock that above us in the three stuffy little wards was lying waiting for the night. They were no longer people; they weren’t just matter either; they were not dead and no longer really living. “These poor… wretches.” That was the only word I could find.

Okay, so we know what the problem is. What’s the solution? Phone calls are made daily. Long stories. Reasons. Excuses. Apologies. And every day, thanks to the efficiency of the bush telegraph, more arrive than are dying. Time is against them. The answer comes in the unlikely shape of Jock Mills who, we learn, has been rebuilding a Dakota DC-3 in the middle of the jungle pretty much for the hell of it; it had been abandoned by the army, gutted by the natives but the superstructure, engine and electrics were still mostly intact. And so the next film to jump into my head had to be The Flight of the Phoenix, the 1965 original, of course. It’s not quite that bad—the DC-3 from all accounts is now actually airworthy. At least that’s what de le Rey is told when he first broaches the subject with Mills; Mills’ airworthiness is another matter entirely but he’s certainly up for the job. The fact that the plane can only carry about sixty means three or four trips and that’s asking a lot of both plane and pilot.

First things first, let’s see if he can get the damn thing off the ground. That proves easier than probably either of the men expected it to be but as de la Rey sees the plane rise into the air he notices that one of the landing wheels doesn’t look right. This initial flight was supposed to last fifteen minutes but an hour passes, and then two. No sign of Mills and with no radio no way to find out what’s happened. Have their plans been scuppered? Well, it wouldn’t be much of a book if they had but no one is going to make life easy for this small group despite the worthiness of their cause. Mills had noticed the wheel too and realising that it would be foolhardy—if not downright suicidal—trying to land in the jungle, had headed immediately for the nearest runway he thought he had a chance of landing safely on. This turns out to be Manzini in Swaziland. Of course as soon as he touched down they arrested him. After some interrogating and wrangling his story is confirmed and one Jenny Grobler appears on the scene. As usual with this lot we don’t get to learn much about her or her relationship to Mills, not at first anyway (bits are filled in later), but despite, to quote de la Rey himself, being “not particularly pretty”, “dressing like a man and behaving like a man” and insisting on calling him “Mr Brand”—and even years later (which is when this book is written) looking back—he finds himself unable to explain why “she had such a paralysing grip on [him] almost instantaneously.” But, of course, this does toss the spanner into the works with regard to his feelings for Julia.

How though, at a time like that, can people worry about stuff like love and sex? Because when you don’t have a roof over your head, a blanket to wrap round your shoulders or a mouthful of food to keep you going you find comfort where you can. Some people are never more alive than when they’re dying, never more aware of being alive. It’s really no different from those convicts who find God five minutes after they’ve been locked up in prison only to forget about him the second they walk through the gates to freedom.

I’m not going to say how the book ends. Nothing goes to plan but that would’ve been too easy. Barnard has done some screenwriting in his day—his script for Paljas was the first South African film to be nominated for an Oscar—and he clearly knows that we need a moment or two of crisis in the middle to keep our interest (the ‘boy loses girl’ bit or in this case ‘boy loses plane’). The basic plot structure here is not especially exciting—Barnard’s doing nothing new here essentially—but I found once I got over that I started to appreciate the under and overtones. I can easily see this being adapted for the small (or big) screen where (probably) all that will be lost.

In her short review of the book, Karen Rutter says:

[T]here’s the odd tendency to “Over-Africa” the novel. You know, when writers start pulling “dark continent” clichés out the bag – fiery sunsets, starving children with flies in their eyes and superstitious natives.

I’m not sure I agree with her and it’s a sorry world where starving children have become a cliché. Okay there were a few words I would’ve liked to have had explained, bundu, for starters:

bundu [bʊndʊ]
n
(Sociology) South African and Zimbabweanslang
a.  a largely uninhabited wild region far from towns
b.  (as modifier) a bundu hat
[from a Bantu language]

but mostly you could get the idea from the context: stoep [veranda], kloof [ravine], kraal [cattle enclosure], veld [outback], donga [an eroded ravine; a dry watercourse], vlei [an area of low marshy ground, especially one that feeds a stream]. I can’t pretend not being familiar with these words wasn’t a little annoying but it’s not like there were hundreds of them. A number were clearly the names of common plants like the calabash mentioned in one of the earlier quotes which is a gourd… whatever a gourd is.

This book could’ve gone in several different directions. It avoids being preachy but it makes its points well enough. What I particularly liked was the ending. Circumstances have galvanised these disparate individuals, created a necessary bond but once the crisis is over—their involvement in it at any rate—they no longer have sufficient reason to cohere and drift apart far too easily. You would think what they’ve been through was a life-changing experience but perhaps these people’s lives had already been so changed by what had happened in their pasts that nothing was ever going to bring them back. It certainly made me pause for thought because, at least as far as Africa goes, nothing has changed there. A few people manage to get saved but who’s to say that where they ended up will not face its own famine in two or three years? All part of what de la Rey calls “the Great Process”, not a Divine Plan but an admission that “Nature had no use for chance”.

You can read a lengthy extract from Bunduhere.

***

Chris Barnard was born in Nelspruit in 1939. His full name is Christiaan Johan Barnard but I can see no connection with the famous South African heart surgeon, nor, if it comes to that, the infamous South African executioner. He matriculated in 1957 and completed a BA degree in 1960 at the University of Pretoria. He worked as a journalist for seventeen years and as a script writer and film producer between 1978 and 1994. Barnard has published thirty books, including novels, plays for stage and radio, short stories, film scripts and children’s books. In February 2012, he was recipient of the Department of Arts and Culture’s South African Literary Awards (SALA) for lifetime achievement.

The palest ink will outlast the memory of men – Chinese proverb quoted in The Garden of Evening Mists

Persian carpets have flaws in them; horimono—traditional Japanese tattoos—contains blanks:

‘A horoshi will always leave a section of the horimono empty, as a symbol that it is never finished, never perfect,’ said Aritomo, wiping his hands on a towel.

In that respect The Garden of Evening Mists, which was shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize, is not a perfect novel assuming one were to define a perfect novel as one where every question a reader (or even a character within said novel) might ask is answered to their satisfaction. There are definitely questions left unanswered at the end of this book, some by the characters themselves, some by the author. In some cases there’s an unwillingness to say more than needs be said; in others it’s an inability to adequately answer those questions. In an interview the author writes:

I’m interested in exploring realistic and flawed characters. I don’t set out to judge or to preach morality, but to convey what all of us have to confront daily — our own flaws, our own weaknesses and strengths. If my books feel ambiguous, it’s because life is ambiguous. Nothing is in black and white, and this is what makes writing so fascinating and challenging. I’ve always wondered what I would do, if faced with certain alternatives: would I have the courage and the strength to make the right decision? I’m still looking for the answer.

The book opens with a quote from ‘A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting’ by Richard Holmes:

There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.

The author even incorporates the two sisters into his novel:

A pair of marble statues stood on their own plinths in the centre of the lawn, facing one another. On my first glance they appeared to be identical, down to the folds of their robes spilling over the plinths.

‘Bought them ridiculously cheap from an old planter’s wife after the planter ran off with his fifteen-year-old lover,’ said Magnus. ‘The one on the right is Mnemosyne. You’ve heard of her?’

‘The goddess of Memory,’ I said. ‘Who’s the other woman?’

‘Her twin sister, of course. The goddess of Forgetting.’

I looked at him, wondering if he was pulling my leg. ‘I don’t recall there’s a goddess for that.’

‘Ah, doesn’t the fact of your not recalling prove her existence?’ He grinned. ‘Maybe she exists, but it’s just that we have forgotten.’

‘So, what’s her name?’

He shrugged, showing me his empty palms. ‘You see, we don’t even remember her name anymore.’

The narrator, the ‘I’ in the above quote, is Teoh Yun Ling:

I was born in 1923 in Penang, an island on the north-west coast of Malaya. Being Straits Chinese, my parents spoke mainly English, and they had asked a family friend who was a poet to choose a name for me. Teoh is my surname, my family name. As in life, the family must come first. That was what I had always been taught. I had never changed the order of my name, not even when I studied in England, and I had never taken on an English name just to make it easier for anyone.

Like Mnemosyne, Yun Ling also has a sister—in her case an elder sister, Yun Hong—who died while both girls were ‘Guests of the Emperor’ towards the end of the Second World War.

When we first encounter Yun Ling she is sixty-four years of age, has served as a judge in Malaya for many years and has, two months earlier (and without offering any explanation), announced her intention to retire two years earlier than expected. After leaving her court in Kuala Lumpur for the last time she drives to Yugiri, a house she owns but has not visited in many years, situated in the Cameron Highlands. It had been willed to her, along with its famous garden, by its previous owner, Nakamura Aritomo, a man who had once served as gardener to Emperor Hirohito of Japan and was also highly regarded as a woodblock artist. Yugiri means ‘Evening Mists’, hence the book’s title. The statues I just mentioned are not, however, his; he is a master of shakkei, the art of Borrowed Scenery, and one would imagine he might look on statues of Grecian titanesses as perhaps a little tacky. These belonged to his neighbour, Magnus Pretorius, who was at-one-time-at-least a friend of Yun Ling’s father. Magnus was an ex-patriate from the Transvaal who settled in Malaya and established the Majuba Tea Estate which has been taken over by his nephew, the now sixty-seven-year-old Frederick Pretorius. Some thirty-six years have passed since Frederick and Yun Ling first met in the October of 1951. A great deal of history binds these two but this is not their story.

The reason for Yun Ling’s early retirement is not kept from us. She confides in Frederick:

‘Something in my brain, something that shouldn’t be there.’ I pull my cardigan tighter over my body. I sense him waiting for me to explain. ‘I’ve been having problems with names.

[…]

‘The neurosurgeons ran their tests. They told me what I had suspected. I’m losing my ability to read and write, to understand language, any language. In a year – perhaps more, probably less – I won’t be able to express my thoughts. I’ll be spouting gibberish. And what people say, and the words I see – on the page, on street signs, everywhere – will be unintelligible to me.’ For a few seconds I am silent. ‘My mental competence will deteriorate. Dementia will shortly follow, unhinging my mind.’

Although I don’t think it was her intention when she first set out on this trip to write a memoir, she heeds Frederick’s advice and begins to tell her story, a story which hinges on the two years she lived there, initially as a guest of the Pretoriuses. She had travelled there originally to ask Aritomo to design a garden for her sister. When they’d been in the internment camp the two of them had often talked about building a garden once the war was over. Interestingly, despite the fact they were in a Japanese camp, it’s a Japanese garden her sister wants. On her first meeting with Aritomo Yun Ling tells him:

‘Yun Hong was fascinated by Japanese gardens even before we heard about you. Before you came to Malaya,’ I said.

‘How did she know about our gardens?’ he said. ‘I doubt there were any in Penang in those days, or in the whole of Malaya. Even today, mine is the only one.’

‘My father took all of us to Japan for a month. In 1938. Your government wanted to buy rubber from him. He was busy with his meetings, but the officials’ wives showed us around the city. We visited a few of the temples and the gardens. We even took the train to Kyoto.’ The memory of that holiday – the only time I had been overseas till then – made me smile. ‘I’ll never forget how excited Yun Hong was. I was fifteen, and she was three years older than me. But on that holiday... on that holiday she was like a little girl, and I felt I was the elder sister.’

That final comment is worthy of highlighting because when she asks Magnus which of the two twins was the older he said to her…

‘Mnemosyne, of course.’

‘Really? She looks younger, don’t you think?’

‘Memory must exist before there’s Forgetting.’ I smiled at him. ‘Or have you forgotten that?’

Aritomo, who had been in Malaya for eleven years at that time having resigned on a point of principle as gardener to the emperor (although later on some doubt is cast on whether he resigned, was sacked or had been assigned other duties), says he’s only interested in completing his own garden and refuses the job. Later on, having been unhappy for some time with the labourers he’s been working with, he reconsiders his position and makes her a counteroffer:

It took me a moment or two to grasp the nature of his proposal. ‘You’re asking me to be...apprenticed... to you?’ It was not what I had wanted from him at all. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I will teach you the skills to build your own garden,’ he said. ‘A simple, basic garden.’

‘A half-hearted Japanese garden isn’t good enough for Yun Hong.’

‘That is all I can give you,’ he said. ‘I do not have the time – or the desire – to create a garden for you. Or for anyone else. The last commission I undertook taught me never to accept another.’

‘Why would you want to do this? Why did you change your mind?’

‘I need someone to help me.’

She agrees to work for him until the monsoon rains come, a period of about six months. It proves to be an interesting, a life-changing six months and, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have realised that she stays on longer than that. The core of the book focuses on this then, the awkward (certainly at first) relationship between an ex-POW and the ex-gardener of the emperor who authorised her capture and, had circumstances not intervened, her death.

Aritomo is… I’m tempted to write ‘a shady character’ but that has certain unpleasant connotations… he is, however, a man who is not given to shining too bright a light on himself or his past; he is very much the archetypal Japanese scholar: terse, principled, controlled, refined, private. Despite the fact that he bows before a portrait of the emperor every time he enters his study he was not, however, a fervent supporter of what his emperor was doing and went out of his way to ensure the safety of as many of the locals as he could during the Japanese occupation. Magnus tells her:

[I]f it hadn’t been for him half my workers would have been rounded up and taken down to some mine or worked to death on the Railway.

That helps their relationship but only a little. So many of the things he does remind her of her imprisonment. She tells Frederick:

Aritomo had brought me to a stack of trees he had had felled a month earlier. They had been trimmed. ‘Get one of the men to saw these maruta into smaller pieces and take them away,’ he ordered. Instead of carrying out his instructions, I had turned around and hurried away. I heard him calling out to me, but I did not stop. I walked faster, heading deeper into the garden. I tripped, got up and continued walking, going up the slope until I came to the edge of a high drop, with only the mountains and the sky before me. I did not know how long I stood there. After a while I sensed Aritomo coming up to my side. ‘Maruta,’ I said, staring ahead. ‘That was how the officers in the camp referred to us: logs. We were just logs to them. To be cut up, incinerated.’ For a few moments the gardener was silent. Then I felt him take my arm. ‘You’re bleeding.’ He gripped my elbow and pressed his handkerchief against my wound.

Little by little a bond forms between the two, at first a bond of convenience and necessity but later on this deepens. Then one day Aritomo, who had been in the habit of taking an evening constitutional, says he would prefer his own company that particular evening and walks off into the jungle; he is never seen again. Was he murdered by “the communist-terrorists” (which the government referred to as ‘CTs’ or, more commonly, ‘bandits’) or did his disappearance have anything to do with the Golden Lily?

The operation was not under the control of the army … but was headed by Prince Chichibu Yasuhito, the Emperor’s brother. Chichibu was assisted by some of the other princes. ‘They had accountants, financial advisers, experts in art and antiques working under the direction of these princes.

[…]

‘They knew where to look, and they stole everything they could lay their hands on: jade and gold Buddha statues from ancient temples; cultural artefacts and antiques from museums; jewellery and gold hoarded by wealthy Chinese with their distrust of banks. Golden Lily emptied royal collections and national treasuries. It removed bullion and priceless artworks, carvings, pottery and paper currencies.’

Perhaps Aritomo is not the man Yun Ling and others thought him to be? And, of course, it takes no great leap of the imagination for her to realise that the camp she had been in, which had been involved in mining, was probably run by the Golden Lily.

So this is a mystery novel; it is also an historical novel, a political novel and a love story, albeit not one Mills & Boon would’ve jumped at the chance to publish. It is also a literary novel in that it is fundamentally an exploration of the nature and desirability of memory. At 448 pages it’s not a quick read although it’s certainly not a hard read; the biggest problem most people will have is their unfamiliarity with the history surrounding Malaysia. A lot of people—myself included—will probably have difficulty even locating the country on a world map.

The bulk of the novel takes place during the Malayan Emergency. After Malaya had been reconquered by Allied Forces—it had been occupied for three years by the Japanese—a growing need for independence began to show its face.

The Malayan Union, established in 1946 and consisting of all the British possessions in the Malay Peninsula with the exception of Singapore, was quickly dissolved and replaced by the Federation of Malaya, which restored the autonomy of the rulers of the Malay states under British protection. During this time, mostly Chinese rebels under the leadership of the Malayan Communist Party launched guerrilla operations designed to force the British out of Malaya. The Malayan Emergency lasted from 1948 to 1960, and involved a long anti-insurgency campaign by Commonwealth troops in Malaya. After this a plan was put in place to federate Malaya with the British crown colonies of Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore. – Wikipedia

Just because Yun Ling is Chinese, Aritomo is Japanese and the Pretoriuses are South Africans (from 1910–1994 Transvaal was a province of the Union and Republic of South Africa) doesn’t mean they’re safe by any means and there are a number of run-ins, one fatal.

Gardens obviously loom large in this book and are a strong metaphor. When Yun Ling arrives on the first day of her apprenticeship the following exchange takes place:

He pointed to my writing pad. ‘I do not want you to make notes,’ he said, ‘not even when you go home at the end of the day.’

‘But I won’t be able to remember everything.’

‘The garden will remember it for you.’

Later he tells her:

A garden is composed of a variety of clocks […] Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than we can ever perceive.

The terms ‘memory garden’ or ‘memorial garden’ are not used in the book but they don’t need to be. In an interview Tan Twan Eng says:

I wanted the reader to feel that he or she is walking through a garden, with each bend in the path revealing something new, something different, and yet connected to the overall design and themes of the garden. If the reader were to read the book again after he had finished it, his experience will mirror that of walking through the same garden again, but the scenery and the views, and his awareness of them, will differ from what he saw on his first walk through it.

There is much talk in the book about the time when the garden will be completed but, of course, it’s the nature of gardens that they’re never finished; they continue to grow and so the gardener’s work is never done; he has to continue to work to maintain their artificiality. And this is an important thing to remember about most gardens but especially the kind of Japanese gardens in the book: they are constructs with a specific goal in mind. Frederick doesn’t much care for Yugiri’s “artificial” look. He says:

‘Gardens like his are designed to manipulate your emotions. I find that dishonest.’

‘Is it?’ I fired back. ‘The same can be said of any work of art, any piece of literature or music.’ I had worked extremely hard in the garden, and to hear someone denigrating it angered me. ‘If you weren’t so stupid you’d see that your emotions are not being manipulated – they’re being awakened to something higher, something timeless. Every step you take inside Yugiri is meant to open your mind, to lead you to the heart of a contemplative state.’

Books, like she says, are also artificial constructs made up mostly of lies and half-truths and yet if we approach them with the right attitude they can also open us up “to something higher, something timeless.” I don’t want to make more of this book than it deserves—it’s an aspirational work certainly—but I found it a far more engrossing read than I expected it to be. The story is fine, told well enough even if it does meander a bit—and story is clearly important to the author—but I was more taken with the book’s “higher” purpose if you like. Perhaps this is because over the last five or six years I’ve also been preoccupied by the ephemeral nature of memory. The worst I could say about this book was that it was good research material but if that was all I was to say I’d be selling it short. Most other reviewers have been positive in their comments, the only really negative one that crops up from time to time remarks on how boring the narrator can be—in her review in The GuardianKapka Kassabova writes, “There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling”—and it’s a fair comment—she’s not the most exciting person who’s ever told her story—but I think much of this can be blamed on her upbringing, history and nationality; the same goes for Aritomo. I’m not saying Orientals can’t be passionate but it’s not the first thing that jumps to mind, is it?

I’m not sure many really expected The Garden of Evening Mists to win the Man Booker Prize but for any writer to get his first and second books both at least considered for the prize says something about the man if only the fact that hard work pays off:

The structure of the story has to have balance and harmony. And this I achieved only with endless rewriting. I was constantly changing the sequence of chapters and scenes until I was satisfied with the balance in the book.

I will be interested to see how his third book pans out.

Let me leave you with a short clip of the author reading from the first chapter:

***

Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang in 1972 but lived in various places in Malaysia as a child. He studied law at the University of London and later worked as lawyer in one of Kuala Lumpur’s most reputable law firms before becoming a full-time writer. He has a first-dan ranking in aikido and currently lives and works between Cape Town and Kuala Lumpur. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was published in 2007 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize that year.

This book is not The Book. The Book is in this book. And The Book in this book is both the goodie and the baddie. – Amazon book description

I’m going to split this review into two halves. The first dwells on the positives, the second on the negatives. The positives far outweigh the negatives and they’re not really negative; they’re niggles. Most people won’t notice, care about if they do notice, or accept that some of these things are negatives and just think I’m being a fusspot and that’s fine. I think this is a book worth reading, has something important to say—it’s not just a story—and I think a lot writers who are considering taking a similar tack will learn much from her. Mostly my gripes are with the book’s editing and not its writing.

The Story

Adult novels written from the perspective of young children are, understandably, rare. Most people will only be able to think of one, Room, but there are others I’ll mention later. Writing in a voice that’s not your own is tough enough but with a child you’re also trying to conjure up a mindset that most readers will have lost touch with… well, in my case we’re talking almost fifty years ago. I’ve no idea how I thought when I was five. You might as well have the book narrated by a talking rabbit. How does a rabbit think? Not in English for starters. And yet Richard Adams did it and we bought into it; we accepted that if a rabbit understood English then this might be how he might think; we happily suspended disbelief. Well, when you sit down to read Jessica Bell’sThe Book be prepared to do the same—this is not a criticism, merely an observation—because no grownup remembers being five. We remember being young but the threes, the fours, the fives and the sixes all blur into one despite the fact there’s quite a gulf between the cognitive skills of a three-year-old and a six-year-old. Bonnie, the five-year-old narrator of The Book, is a work of fiction; she is what Jessica has imagined/decided a five-year-old is like.

In that respect The Book is also a work of historical fiction. Okay we’re only going back thirty-odd years but trying to get inside the head of a five-year-old living in the 1980s is no different than trying to get inside a queen’s head living in the 1680s; it’s mostly guesswork. Accuracy is the goal but even the most dedicated of researchers is going to find there are things he or she has simply got to make up because there’s no such thing as a five-year-old, just as there’s no such a thing as a Glaswegian or a New Yorker; everyone’s an individual and Bonnie is very much her own person. In that respect Jessica’s done an outstanding job because Bonnie leaps off the page as a fully-formed character in her own right and not simply a voice box for Jessica. Doubtless she shares some similarities with the young Jessica Bell—the autobiographical elements to the book are openly acknowledged—but whereas I can see Jessica in her poems (this is especially true of her first collection) I never knew her as a little girl and can only imagine what she might’ve been like. I don’t feel any desperate need to do this though; I’m happy to accept Bonnie as a separate entity.

There’s not much of a story to The Book. This, again, is not a criticism, merely an observation. The focus of the book is Bonnie’s trying to understand adult relationships, specifically those between her mother (Penny), her father (John) who has moved out to care for his teenage daughter (Mary) following his ex-girlfriend’s breakdown and Penny’s new husband whom Bonnie refers to as “my Ted”. The only other significant adult in Bonnie’s life is Dr Wright, her psychotherapist, although why Bonnie’s seeing her is never made too clear. Lots of parents split up and their kids cope just fine.

Bonnie, we learn, was tiny when she was born, 2.55kg [5.6 lbs] and 4 weeks early and statistics do suggest that premature babies can have problems. The areas that have been shown to be most likely affected include:

• cognitive and academic ability (e.g. math or reading disability, intellectual ability)
• language (e.g. delays)
• fine and gross motor (e.g. poor coordination)
• vision, hearing (e.g. visual impairment)
• mental illness (e.g. attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder)

Her mother, however, pooh-poohs this:

Your doctor said you would have learning difficulties and react in strange ways to some things. But I think she’s being ridiculous. You are just human. Like all of us. Being premature has nothing to do with anything.

but I can’t see Jessica making such a point of mentioning it unless we’re to pay attention to the fact. Is Bonnie a normal five-year-old? The first question we have to consider is: Is there such a thing as a normal five-year-old? As Tim Love notes in his article Child narrators in adult fiction:

It can be difficult to convince the reader of the narrator's age. Authors often seem to have over- or under-estimated the child, but kids have an irritating habit of not acting their age—one moment they talk like an adult, next moment they sulk like a baby.

There are two instances I’d like to highlight. The first is at the beginning of the book:

My yucky undies drop to the floor and the torlet door becomes a disgusting brown mess. I could do a finger painting in it, though. Should I lick it? Maybe it tastes like chocolate fudge. I know that sometimes things don’t taste as badly like they smell.

Accidents do happen and Bonnie won’t be the last five-year-old to mess herself but in the article Children’s Extension of Disgust to Physical and Moral Events the authors states that “children begin to reject certain disgusting objects, such as faeces, as foods by about the age of 2 or 3” so I don’t accept that a typical five-year-old would consider playing with it or tasting it.

The second instance involves one of the interviews with Dr Wright that pepper the book. The doctor spells out her name in blocks and asks Bonnie what it says:

Bonnie: It says Doctor Wright.

Dr Wright: Wow! That’s fantastic, Bonnie. Who’s been teaching you about silent letters?

Bonnie: Daddy. Because Daddy is smart.

Dr Wright: And so are you, Bonnie. That’s brilliant. Bravo. [claps hands]

Bonnie: [smiles and takes some letters out of the box. She spells: Silent letters are stupid.]

It’s funny but unrealistic. Invented spelling (i.e., phoneme based sounding out, and representation of these sounds, without regard for the correct spelling) is the dominant strategy of most children during this year. Unless Bonnie is exceptionally smart in this regard. Most kids who’ve just started school can just about handle “See Dick run. See Dick play. See Dick run and play,” or whatever the modern equivalent of that is.

Intelligence is a big thing with Bonnie. She’s not ignorant of what the doctors have said about her possible learning difficulties and she regularly points out how smart or not smart people are:

As Mummy says, it’s not rocket science. I guess she’s smart with sumfings. She knows when bodies are smart and when bodies are just pretending to be smart. Daddy is smart. And I think Mummy knows that my Ted is just pretending to be smart. That’s why she always is doing doll’s eyes when he’s not looking and learning about money in his study room.

She also realises that intelligence and common sense are two different things even though she hasn’t the words to express that thought.

Sometimes I think grownups are stupid just pretending to be smart.

The novella is broken into three sections:

• Love is the Beginning
• Love is a Weapon
• Love is Tangible

The first section consists solely of entries from the eponymous Book. In the novella’s acknowledgments Jessica has this to say:

When I was a child, my mother, Erika Bach, and my father, Anthony Bell, wrote in an illustrated journal by Michael Green called A Hobbit’s Travels: being the hitherto unpublished Travel Sketches of Sam Gamgee. This journal is the inspiration for this book. Thank you for keeping it, and blessing me with such an amazing treasure. It will always have a special place on my bookshelf. I must also add that in Part One of this book, there are some excerpts that are used verbatim.

There’re no mention of hobbits in Bonnie’s parents’ book. What they’ve decided to do is compile a diary of sorts:

January 3rd, 1980
~Mummy

I forgot to mention that we are going to give you this book when you’re older, but every time I write in it you want to chew it. I hate saying no to you but you want everything. It’s not enough that you have most things. I also need to encourage John to write in it more. It was his idea. He started it. I wish he would follow through. At least with something that could one day be such a treasure for you

What we get to see throughout these entries is the gradual disintegration of Penny and John’s marriage. Bonnie was born on January 12th 1979. By 28th December 1981, without any explanation, someone called Ted has appeared on the scene and the three of them have headed off to Germany for an extended holiday lasting from May until November. John’s there with Mary on their return but it’s only as the book progresses that we, the readers, become familiar with the whole story and much of this comes from Bonnie and not the Book. I’m assuming that the entries we’re shown are all the entries and not simply selections—that’s never made clear—but my suspicion is that there’s more and we only get to see the relevant pages because Penny in particular seems to do a lot of writing in the Book. It’s clear that John and Penny are not bad parents—they’re certainly (as is the case with most parents) well-intentioned—but they can be a little preoccupied with themselves (and I need to lump Ted in here too). Who would take the time to explain everything to a five-year-old anyway? They tell her as much as they think she needs to know, answer the questions she thinks to ask and assume she understands. Some of it she does but not all. The thing she struggles with most is this damn Book that they all start fighting over.

Back in mediaeval times people believed in black magic. People and things could be possessed by demons. If something new came into their village and bad things started happening then the obvious conclusion was that the thing was evil and should be destroyed. This is the end of the 20th century and through fairy stories and films children are well aware of devils and demons. Bonnie begins to wonder about the Book. One night John asks for the Book but Penny refuses to hand it over:

“Can I have the book?”

“Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t finished with it. I was in the middle of an entry when you arrived.”

Bonnie reasons:

I don’t think she’s talking about the same entry as I know. But I don’t think doors can fit in that book. Unless they are magic doors. Maybe they are doors that gobble up bodies. Maybe there’s demons in it.

Metaphorically-speaking she’d spot on. The original purpose for the Book’s existence has slipped into the background and Penny especially (who does most of the writing for a long time) has turned the Book into something of a confessional. She’s even made John promise not to read her entries and says she’ll respect his privacy in this regard too. Needless to say Ted’s nose is put out of joint. He wants to make entries too—he’s very much a part of Bonnie’s life and clearly loves her—but Penny won’t have it. Cracks are starting to appear in their relationship and it looks like John’s starting to have second thoughts about leaving his wife. Stuck in the middle of all of this is Bonnie—like all kids she sees and hears (and, more importantly, understands) more than we think they do—Bonnie who is struggling with concepts she doesn’t understand and a language that doesn’t have enough words to express the things she’s thinking and feeling.

Things come to a head eventually and the book ends tragically and swiftly as is often the case where relationships are involved. This reader’s feet were kicked straight from underneath him. After this quick and messy climax we get the third section to the book which serves as a dénouement. John makes an entry in the Book which addresses and attempts to answer many of the questions that Bonnie’s been struggling with while the adults around her have been preoccupied with their own issues. The things that have been bothering her have been things like the perversity of the English language:

“Have you got in-some-knee-ah?” That’s me asking mummy, not her asking me. Sometimes she gets this thing called in-some-knee-ah and it means she can’t sleep poperly. She makes me bring her TicTacs for that too, but I think they’re another kind of TicTac because they look a bit bigger.

I think the body who invented English wasn’t very smart. I don’t understand how the poblem is in the knee. My Daddy said that when we go to sleep, that our brains are having a nap. So that means it has sumfing to do with the head. It should be called in-some-head-ah. I think the ah is like the ow.

Why do adults sometimes speak in “invisible words” or call little girls “ladies” when they’re obviously not ladies or ask questions that don’t need answers or use the same-sounding word to mean two different things or make simple things so difficult or talk about holding things (like love) that you can’t hold? When you think about language it’s nothing less than miraculous that any of us get to grips with it and yet we do and at an amazing speed. But not always fast enough.

As adults we assume a lot. I recall a story about a father telling off his son for being bad and realising some way into the diatribe—as his son’s eyes have glazed over—that his son hadn’t a clue what the word ‘bad’ actually meant. How had he managed not to explain that to him? But that’s what happens. And that’s why this is very much a book for adults because it’s all about the consequences of adult actions.

The Words

Before I talk about some of my reservations let’s have a good listen to how Bonnie talks:

I didn’t go to school today so I get to play a shop with Mary all day while Daddy is at work. I don’t rooly understand what he does. But he always is talking about numbers in shapes and the sky, and always is leaving the house wearing the same boring old thing.

Anyway, how the shop game works is that I pull all the medicine bottles out of the bathroom cupboard, and I spread them all pretty on the kitchen counter. Every two minutes, Mary comes in and tells me that she’s not feeling good. So I ask her to splain me how she feels so I can sell her the right bottle. It’s not good to make mistakes with sick bodies because if you do they might be getting sicker.

Most of the time, I don’t really understand the words she says, but I think they’re called SimTims. But that just makes me want TimTams, so I just give her a packet of aspirin to take the pain away and ask her to go to the milk bar to buy me some. She’s good like that. She doesn’t get those silly lines in her face every time I ask for sweets. She just goes and gets them. It’s really simple. I think she should tell my mummy how simple it is.

After a while of playing, Mary gets bored and speaks on the phone. She always twirls the cord around her finger and gets her whole body wrapped up in it. It’s silly. Sometimes I don’t think she’s really a grownup. Maybe she’s just playing dress-ups.

Daddy walks in with a big smile on his face, and Mary skips up to him like a little girl and gives him a kiss on the cheek.

“Did you go to see your mother today?” That’s Daddy speaking to Mary, not me. She nods and does doll’s eyes and hangs her head to the side making a stupid groaning sound. She sounds like my Ted in the mornings.

“I still don’t understand why I should go, Dad. She can’t remember me.”

“It’s just good to keep touching base.”

I don’t know what sports has to do with what they are saying but it sounds serious. It always sounds serious with grownups.

I haven’t been around children in a long time and I honestly don’t think I’ve spoken to a child as young as five in about fourteen years. And yet in my head I have a picture of what a five-year-old should act like. The differences between a four-year-old and a six-year-old are significant and if I’m being honest what I have in my head is a fuzzy picture of a kid; they’ve all blurred into a mush of childishness.

Kids Say the Funniest Things used to be a TV programme in the late nineties and I had a look at a few of these on YouTube and then just followed my nose to try to get a feel for what a five-year-old sounds and acts like and they were all more articulate than I expected. I had an image of Morwenna Banks in my head doing her little girl (which I’m sure owes a lot to Lily Tomlin’s‘Edith Ann’) and, of course, there are clips available of both of these.

As I mentioned at the start Jessica’s not the first author to have a very young child as a first-person narrator. The book most people will think of in this regard is Emma Donoghue’sRoom which I hadn’t read although there are others—In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes and What I Did by Christopher Wakling both have six-year-old narrators—but the book I was most familiar with was The Way the Family Got Away by Michael Kimball who has two very young children as the narrators; no ages are mentioned by I would guess five and three and the action mostly takes place in the back of a car. I read excerpts from each of these books and was surprised by the differences in voice. Kimball, in my opinion, has the most realistic narrators even if it’s not the most exciting (or easy) read.

I looked up to see what the cognitive norms were five-year-olds. According to what I found online (opinions differ) by the time a child reaches school age he or she will have a spoken vocabulary of anything between 1500 and 2200 words although they’ll be able to understand about ten times that number, they’ll be able to count and write numbers up to ten (maybe twenty), will be able to spell simple words like ‘cat’, ‘dog’ and ‘hat’, will generally speak in short sentences five to eight words long and will know their own address and phone number. It was the sentence bit that got me because all the kids in the videos—all the ones where they weren’t being difficult and being monosyllabic brats or just shrugging—were constructing far longer sentences although to be fair many were just strings of short sentences joined together with ‘ands’. Here’s a good example, five-year-old Jackie talking about The Dark Knight although what her parents were doing letting her watch The Dark Knight I’ve no idea:

I mentioned New York and Glasgow earlier because I’ve written stories where my narrators have strong accents and know just how hard it can be to find the balance between accuracy and intelligibility. There are no dictionaries we can refer to that give us consistent spellings and so we end up having to create our own eye dialect which is the literary technique of using a nonstandard spelling to imply the pronunciation of a given word that is actually standard, such as wimmin for women. The technique when it comes to replicating how children speak is exactly the same. For example, because children have difficulty with the phoneme ‘th’ they’ll say somefing instead of something; this is called th-fronting.

Children generally learn the less marked phonemes of their native language before the more marked ones. In the case of English-speaking children, /θ/ and /ð/ are often among the last phonemes to be learned, frequently not being mastered before the age of five. Prior to this age, many children substitute the sounds [f] and [v] respectively. For small children, fought and thought are therefore homophones. As British and American children begin school at five, this means that many are learning to read and write before they have sorted out these sounds, and the infantile pronunciation is frequently reflected in their spelling errors: ve fing for the thing. – Wikipedia (bold mine)

Here’s a sentence from The Book I had some problems with:

I reach in and I pick up three little chocolate eggs and I hold them above my head and I scream “Eureka!” because I learnted in school that some man in histories said this when he found sumfing rooly important and that in some other language, I forget which one, that the word means “I found it.”

If Bonnie is going to say sumfing she’s also going to say free instead of three and why doesn’t she use the homonym sum instead of some earlier in the sentence? In several places she breaks up words like I-scream and in-some-knee-ah. I’m not convinced she’d spell eureka correctly. (You-reek-ah maybe?) Jessica says:

[A]ll these 'spellings' were actually things I discussed in great detail [with my editor] and purposely decided to vary. And the reason I didn't have the adults correcting Bonnie, was because I wanted to show how self-consumed they were.

Fair enough but I can’t imagine any teacher would be talking about Archimedes to a bunch of five-year-olds. It’s not impossible, just unlikely. There’s an aside in this sentence and I doubt any five-year-old would use them even in a sentence fifty-six words long. The only text I could find online that highlights the use of asides refers to children between nine and eleven. Even accounting for four ands this sentence is too long and convoluted. The word learnted sounds cute but in all the videos I watched none of the children used expressions like this. A younger kid might. It’s acceptable for a five-year-old to mispronounce a word—when Bonnie says rooly she’s thinking really—but screwing up tenses (or using an adverb in place of a noun as she does when she talks about the badly) is unrealistic unless Bonnie is behind for her age. If that’s the case when Dr Wright spells out her name on blocks could that exchange have taken place?

Another minor irritation while reading was inconsistent spellings. I can assure you that when writing in a dialect (although what we have here is more of an idiolect) these happen all the time and it takes constant rereading to pick them all up. For example, once Bonnie uses maded, a second time maked and a third time made but there were half a dozen others that I suspected were missed in the editing. I asked Jessica about this:

[T]here were cases where I purposely left inconsistencies in spelling too. I actually have a video of myself when I was five and I changed the way I said words all the time. So to me, in my experience, this is only natural, as Bonnie is still learning.

Does any of this matter? I suppose it depends who you are. I’m a writer and I’m afraid I can’t turn that off when I’m reading. From the responses I’ve seen online I can see that no one else was even slightly fazed by the language here which brings me to an important question: Does a child narrator’s voice have to be authentic? This question was asked of four authors on Claire King’s blog and this was Chris Wakling’s response:

A child-narrator’s voice must be convincing, but that’s not quite the same thing as authentic. All fictional voices are constructs in the end. Has a real whaler ever thought quite like Ishmael in Moby-Dick? Are teenagers ever as unwittingly funny as Adrian Mole? Who knows whether a serial killer ever noticed what Patrick Bateman tells us in American Psycho?

These voices are sustained and consistent inventions. They feel ‘real’ while we’re reading them, but they’re not the result of real whalers, teenagers or psychopaths dictating their stories. (They’d be duller and less coherent if they were.) A child-narrator has to stand up to the same benchmark of authenticity.

In that respect Bonnie does have an authentic voice and, editorial choices aside, it is a consistent voice. Is it real? Maybe not as ‘real’ as I would’ve liked but it’s realistic. If this was ever dramatized I’m sure we’d see quite a few changes in the dialogue but this is a book and the rules aren’t normally so strict here. I think the text here stands on a par with Emma Donoghue’s Room. That said, after reading a few pages of that book I also have valid criticisms of her child Jack’s linguistic and cognitive abilities: what five-year-old understands the concept of negative numbers or can count into the hundreds? But, as I’ve said, all kids are unique and there is no such a thing as an average, common or garden five-year-old. In some respects Bonnie’s too smart for five whereas in others quite immature. The important thing is she feels real and that’s quite an achievement.

Overall

Last November Jessica posted this entry on Facebook:

Author Jessica Bell
November 24, 2012
I completed the first draft of a novella in 3 days at 19,200 words. Now I think I'll go die in the shower.

Once again this is an observation and not intended as a criticism because the gripes I’ve mentioned are things that should’ve been caught in the editing process. These days I don’t write this quickly but I have done in the past and it’s a joyous thing to have words pour out of you like this. I don’t know how much rewriting was involved but the book is nicely structured and probably the perfect length for the material; much more would’ve felt like padding. For me two months is ridiculously fast but not all writers are me:

I wrote it in November, let it sit for three weeks, wrote a second draft, sent it to beta readers, wrote a third draft, sent it to an editor, and THEN put it out. In my mind, that is not rushed.

Not everything is answered but not everything needs to be answered; also there were points that I picked up on the second read and, yes, even when you know how things pan out this is worth a second run through because despite not having much of a plot it does have a plot and you will want to know what’s going to happen and will probably read it too quickly. The answers that do come arrive piecemeal and so we have the pleasure of a picture coming gradually into focus. The book skimps on lengthy descriptions—off the top of my head I couldn’t even tell you what Bonnie looks like but it doesn’t matter—and that’s definitely a plus of having a very young narrator. Surprisingly Bonnie stays on-topic more than I think would happen in the real world but if you’re going to have a kid narrate a whole book, albeit a short book, you have to be practical. In the videos most of the kids had adults there to keep them on track by offering prompts and to a certain extent that happens here too.

Bottom line then: this is an excellent book and well worth a read. Judging by the other reviews I’ve read I’m not the only one to think so either; my wife certainly enjoyed it. Also, if you do decide to go with the paperback rather than the ebook, can I just say that this is a lovely book? It feels nice in the hand, the paper’s good quality and—and the older I get the more this is an issue—the font is a decent size a well-spaced. As more and more people are being swayed towards ebooks—not that that’s a bad thing by any means—if you are going to bring out a paperback, you really want it to tick all the boxes and this does.

I’ll leave you with the book trailer:

Alzheimer’s is the cleverest thief, because she not only steals from you, but she steals the very thing you need to remember what’s been stolen ― Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

‘Journey into Alzheimer’s’ by Ruth Blackford

To the best of my knowledge I don’t have Alzheimer’s although, if what I’ve read is anything to go by, none of us can say nay with any degree of certainty because it takes a while for any symptoms to manifest and even then the only way to know for sure is to cut your head open and look to see if there are any tangles and plaques in there. I do have difficulty remembering stuff. I’m in my fifties and most people my age will have started to notice that their brains aren’t quite as sharp as they once were. If I was to look on the bleak side I might be tempted to think I was suffering from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) but since there’s no way to test for it conclusively, either, I’m not desperate to label what I have. But I do forget things quickly. If ‘forget’ is the right word and I’m not sure it is. There’s a negative connotation to forgetting. I don’t so much forget as let go of stuff once I’m done with it. I couldn’t tell you my daughter’s address or my wife’s mobile number. I know where to find both of them so I don’t need to remember them but it still puzzles me that I can’t remember them.

My ‘bad’ memory is nothing new. I’ve always had a ‘bad’ memory. For certain things. I was talking to my wife about this a wee while back—and I can remember talking to my wife so I clearly don’t forget everything. I was telling her about a boy I went to school with, Neil McC. We were in Primary One together and we left secondary school on the same day so I knew him for eleven years. We were friends, good friends for a while, but this is all I can remember about him apart from his looks: he was born on May 15th (the same date as my kid brother which is the only reason that stuck); he was into Genesis (while Gabriel was still in the band—I can picture him showing me The Lamb Lies Down on Broadwayin his bedroom) and Wishbone Ash; he lived on the ninth floor of the first block of flats you reached walking into town; he was with me when we found the fossilised ‘brain’ in the mud on the way to school (it was actually a sponge); he emigrated to Australia and his mother—who was a thin, tall, very polite woman—moved after that to a flat above the corner shop. And that’s it. Eleven years and that’s it. I couldn’t tell you if he was in the football team or the rugby team. I don’t know what subjects he took. I’ve no idea if he ever had a girlfriend at school although I don’t think so; very few of us had proper girlfriends at school.

Clearly I knew much more about him over the years but I’ve not felt attached to those things and I’ve let them go.

The subject of memory loss fascinates me though. There are things I wish I could remember more about and feel a real sense of loss over. I feel I’ve been negligent, not taken care of my memories. And that’s the thing when we’re kids, we can’t imagine getting old, losing our hair, our teeth, our figures, our memories; we’re cocky, we eat what we like, drink what we like, stay up as late as we like and never imagine there’ll be any consequences and then we hit fifty and find we have to watch our salt and sugar and fat and wheat and caffeine and milk—seriously, why did eating get so complicated? Use it or you’ll lose it, so they say. I neglected my memories and they faded away. Now I need memory aids to crack open the doors. If this flat burned to the ground and I was just me how much would be lost forever I wonder?

So I’ve been reading a lot about Alzheimer’s recently. I’m calling it research. I’ve been trying to write about memories for a while now—unsuccessfully I should add—and I was hoping one or more of these books might give me an in or an angle or something. So this isn’t a proper review, just a few observations. I chose five books originally and then ordered a sixth. There’s a lot of stuff out there directly (quite rightly) at carers: it’s a soul-destroying job having to look after a loved one with dementia and they need all the pointers and support they can get. I was more interested in what sufferers had to say.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

This was a New York Times bestseller. I tend to shy away from bestsellers but I was pleased enough with the purchase. This is a novel and a very well-researched one at that. It focuses wisely on the early and middle stages and all credit to the author because the world she presents is realistic and believable. There’s not a great deal of plot and certainly no subplots. We simply follow this woman as she not-nearly-as-slowly-as-she-would-have-liked slips away. It can’t help but be tragic but the author doesn’t milk it although it does feel a little contrived at times: you know when the woman, Alice, describes the process of eating ice cream at the start of the book there’ll be a scene towards the end where she makes a mess of it; you know when she has a sister who died called Anne and a daughter called Anna they’re going to get mixed up in her head. The most heart-breaking thing is when Alice’s Blackberry, which she’s carried around with her as an extension to her memory, gets damaged; you can’t see the damage to her brain but you can see the damage to her phone. We know right from the start what the future holds for Alice. It doesn’t matter that she’s a plucky individual who’s not going to lie down to this easily because she’s got no choice; this was never going to be a fair fight.

If you know nothing about Alzheimer’s and want a quick overview then this is as good a place as any to start which is why I did; it was an easy read and far more enjoyable than a textbook with a title like Introduction to Alzheimer’s Disease. Shame it was written in the third person.

 

The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic by David Shenk

This is an extremely well-constructed and well-written book. It treads the line between history book and memoir carefully but with something of the novelist’s panache. It should probably get labelled ‘Popular Science’ as it’s really not a textbook in the proper sense. There are several strands to this book which could have been presented as chapters in their own right but the constant interweaving of these stories—the history of Alzheimer’s from its initial discovery to now, the course of the disease, the life of Emerson, a conference in 1999—is beautifully done. It’s also a surprisingly frank book. It’s honest about the disease, yes, as you would expect, but it is also honest about those looking for a cure and the politics involved, who gets the grants and why and in that respect it shows up the major flaws in scientific research at the end of the twentieth century (the book came out in 2001) but there’s no reason to assume that things have changed much in the interim. Of course the book isn’t as up-to-date as it could be and there have been new discoveries since it was written but it is still well worth reading for its humanity. More than anything else I’ve read this author manages to put Alzheimer’s in perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in the tragedy of it and not look properly at it. The book also discusses some frankly philosophical issues like the nature of memory and the fact that virtually all our memories are actually memories of memories: the things that get remembered are the things that get remembered. Loads of interesting anecdotes along the way. The one that jumped out at me was the debate that raged in the artistic community about the worthiness of the paintings de Kooning made after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Somehow his art—which was getting a little stale at this point—was granted a second wind, the last thing one would’ve expected. If the book is a little weak it’s on personal accounts—these tend to be relegated to quotes in-between chapters—but this is a minor gripe; there’re other books out there to fill that gap and I’ll come to them. Another valid ‘criticism’ I suppose is that the book is very American in its perspective. The writer drew on what was familiar to him. There are no doubt plenty of examples out there on the other continents that he could’ve used but it didn’t bother me.

 

Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimer's by Andrea Gillies

This book upset me. The first two books didn’t upset me but this one did. The first two were good but I read them dispassionately. Keeper, on the other hand, got to me and it’s all credit to the author’s brutal honesty, not only about her mother-in-law’s condition and… I’m going to use the word ‘antics’ but it’s really far too jolly a word for what Nancy gets up to. Reading about how the disease affects people in a textbook is one thing but hearing someone describe the painfully slow decline of a loved one is something else. Have you ever watched a time-lapse film showing a piece of fruit decay? Well, that’s what this book was like. Months and months of a mind seizing up reduced to a couple of hundred pages. The tendency when faced with the ravages of extreme age is to look away. The author acknowledges this and tries to understand it; we all do it so it must be natural but to what end? And yet we’re not so squeamish when it comes to car crashes. Funny things us humans and by ‘funny’ I mean perverse. Normally we reign in that perversity but when we lose control it all spills out. Alzheimer’s is a very personal disease—no two cases will follow the same pattern—but it’s possible to outline the basic course of the disease and the author does slip in a fair amount about the nature and history of the disease and the progress that’s being made in treating it all of which is covered better elsewhere but that’s not what this book is all about. This book takes statistics and symptoms and charts and tables, gives them a name, a face, a past, a family and a personality, lights the blue touch paper and steps well back. If you’re only going to read one book on the subject then this wouldn’t be a bad choice. It was also nice that they were based in the UK and could talk about the problems they had with local councils and the NHS which despite being a national treasure is far from perfect.

 

Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's by Thomas DeBaggio

Thomas DeBaggio was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 1997; he was 57. He died in 2011. He wrote two books talking about his condition, Losing my Mind, published in 2002 and When it gets Dark published a year later. This was the first book about Alzheimer’s written by an actual sufferer; the novel I read was written from the perspective of a sufferer but the author didn’t have the disease and so it was a more polished and structured book than this, although not a bad book and clearly, as I’ve already said, well-researched. This book is the real deal and a much harder read. It’s not a hard read in the sense of it being an upsetting book; it focuses on his experiences whilst in the early stages of the disease and it’s only in the last few pages where, for example, he calls for his mother at night after having a nightmare that you see what the future’s going to be like and there’re other books that describe that vividly, albeit from a carer’s point of view. No, this is a book describing a man coming to terms with losing himself. What makes it a hard read is that he’s chosen to write the book in a style that emulates how his mind is working/not working. There is a rough chronology to the work but his jumps about from here to there and so it takes a while before you start to build up a picture of this man and his life. He’s not lived the most exciting of lives but his time as a journalist during the sixties and seventies was interesting. He inserts quotes from journals to explain the factual elements but strangely enough chose a lot of things that didn’t rehash what I’d read elsewhere and I was grateful for that. Some of the entries are just one or two lines long, things like “There is death working away in my body. I live there in the company of fears,” “What am I doing here?” and, for me the most powerful quote in the whole book, “Alzheimer’s has taught me that sometimes it is wise to look in the same place many times for the things you desire.” Pages and pages of these could quickly become maudlin but there are just enough of them and their brevity and poignancy jump out at you.

The author has made a real effort to be open and honest. That you’re left at the end of the book wondering about many of the things he’s mentioned is probably the nearest he was ever going to get to communicating how he must feel; the arbitrariness of the disease’s course definitely comes across.

 

Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch by John Bayley

Having seen the film adaptation, albeit a while ago, I was surprised to find I enjoyed this book as much as I did. Bayley has a nice conversational style and this is very much a memoir and not a biography although, of course, the book is full of biographical details. It is also a far from objective assessment of his wife and her achievements; he’s happy to leave others to do that. No, this is a record of a flawed man’s love for a flawed woman. His love, though, was not flawed and it was certainly not blinkered (from the very start he was well aware of her limitations) but it was total; he was devoted to her from the beginning. So if you’re looking to learn more about Iris Murdoch’s body of work or wanting to learn more about Alzheimer’s this really isn’t the book for you and it never pretends to be, in fact, as regards her dementia, in a single sentence he skips a whole eighteen months of the disease which I thought was a lost opportunity. Although the book is called Iris it could just as easily—more so in fact—have been called John because he really is the central figure here; this is his story even more than it’s his wife’s and so I suppose that might be another reason for it to disappoint, but all of it comes down to the expectation of the reader as opposed to the intention of the author. I’ve no doubt that he achieved what he set out to do and was pleased with the results. Oh, and I know my edition was promoting the film but did we really need a photo of Judi Dench on the cover; a subtitle ‘Now a major motion picture starring Judi Dench’ would’ve been quite sufficient.

 

When It Gets Dark: An Enlightened Reflection on Life with Alzheimer's by Thomas DeBaggio

Having got a lot out of his first book I decided to order this one. I read the two books in the order in which they were written and because of this I find myself biased in favour of the first book but mainly because I read it first. The books cover the same ground. Both are in fact autobiographies but not of anyone especially famous—unless you’re into herbs, then DeBaggio’s name is well known—but of an ordinary, decent bloke who just happened to get some bad news from his doctor one day.

DeBaggio’s life is actually quite interesting—he grew up in interesting times—and as such listening to him talk about his life and his deaf cat isn’t unpleasant, although having no interest in gardening whatsoever, the long passages talking about the joy of dirt didn’t do much for me. Where his first book is “better” than this one is in its structure. In When it Gets Dark he utilises a chronological structure and so he doesn’t really get into the affect Alzheimer’s has on his life until about a hundred and fifty pages in, which is fine unless you’ve read the first book and keep remembering bits and bobs. The first book doesn’t follow a chronological structure and so it takes one longer to get to know the guy behind the words but it also presents—this was his intention—a more realistic impression of what a life with Alzheimer’s is like, at least in the early stages. It’s a harder read but a better one.

In both books he inserts his day-to-day thoughts into the flow of the text, little aphoristic statements, observations, poetical notes. What comes clear quite quickly is that the language with which he has to communicate his losses is rather clichéd: fading, crumbling, slipping. This is not his fault. Go to any funeral and you’ll see the same happen. People don’t know what to say and so they fall back on well-worn expressions: I’m sorry for your loss, He was a good man, He’s in a better place now.

That said DeBaggio does his damndest to present a brutally honest picture of his mental state despite the fact his text has had all the typos fixed and that does mask the effort that must’ve gone into this work; an appendix with an uncorrected page would’ve been appropriate. Although written later than the first book this second one doesn’t reveal a great deal more; he hasn’t moved on that far. I would recommend buying Losing my Mind rather than this one and certainly not both.

 

There’s not one single book in the list that covers everything. If you are looking to learn more about Alzheimer’s I’d recommend these three:

• The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic
• Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's
• Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimer's

I bought all three for pennies on Amazon.co.uk. I’m not sure how useful they’re going to be in my writing but we’ll have to see what sticks and what my subconscious can make use of. While I was waiting on the second DeBaggio book coming I also read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Talesby Oliver Sacks. The book underlined just how little we still know about the human brain and how it works. What’s clear is that it doesn’t lie down without putting up a fight.

I’ve very little experience of dementia. My mother was a wee bit doty towards the end and it might’ve been the early signs of dementia but she died of pneumonia before we had to worry about that. Carrie’s mother in the States is in the middle stages but I’ve not seen her since she got bad and so most of what I hear is second-hand. The only thing I’ve written on the subject is this short poem from 1983. I was taken to visit an old woman who’d just been admitted into a nursing home and whose short-term was shot. It was a terribly upsetting visit and despite the fact it’s been thirty years since I was there the experience has stayed with me. The old woman kept searching for her keys in her purse so she could go home. We’d explain to her that the nurses had them and why she’d been admitted and she’d calm down and then a few seconds later the memory of what we’d just said would slip away—you could literally see the awareness vanish from her face—and she’d begin her pointless task again. We were there for maybe an hour in which the same five minutes was replayed over and over again. Heart-breaking.

THE VISIT

Sympathy and Apathy
sat side by side in
the old folks' home,
neither knowing what
they were doing there.
Not really.

(For Elizabeth Gray (91))

4 September 1983

[T]he word “spirituality” [is] not a noun, it’s not a something. It’s not even a nothing. Or a preposition, a relational plank bridging a this and a that. It’s more like a verb, an action, a doing. It’s something done. Yet what’s done is the act of asking a question. [...] “[S]pirituality” is an interrogative. It’s a placeholder for a series of productive but unanswerable questions, just as the term “art” is. Where is art? Not where you think... In a similar way, “spirituality” initiates an inquiry: What is the religious? When is the religious? Where is the religious? – Thomas Tweed, ‘John Cage’, freq.uenci.es, 22nd November 2011

Look up into the heavens. Who created all the stars? He brings them out like an army, one after another, calling each by its name. Because of his great power and incomparable strength, not a single one is missing. – Isa 40:26

If you are a regular reader of my blog the name Stephen Nelson might ring a bell. We had a conversation back in 2011 about concrete and visual poetry, two subjects I knew very little about at the time and still know little about; I’ve dropped the ‘very’ so it wasn’t a complete waste of his time. Stephen’s just published a collection of poems and he asked if I’d like a review copy. I accepted against my better judgement because I felt ill-equipped to judge the merits of a book of concrete and/or visual poems but I was willing to give it my best shot. A couple of weeks later the book arrived from his publisher, Knives Forks and Spoons Press, and I found myself facing a block of stream-of-consciousness writing some forty pages long that filled half the book. The rest was made up primarily of concrete poems and prose poems, another form I’m not well-versed in. What the hell had I let myself in for? At the time there was only one review online on the One Night Stanzas site in which Claire Askew writes:

It’s only January, but I’ll be shocked if I find a more original, enjoyable collection to top it this year. I’m calling my Top Poetry Read of 2013, folks!

“Okay,” says I, “if she thinks it’s so damn good let’s put our reservations to the side and see what’s what.” The collection’s broken into two parts, ‘The Moon from my Windowless Heart’ and ‘Crescent’ and I’m going to spend most of my time on just one poem.

The Moon from my Windowless Heart

The first part consists of only two poems, ‘Song’ which you can read on Claire’s site here and ‘Look Up!’, a three and a half thousand word tirade. Both are written in Scots which I’ve no problems with personally being Scottish although if you’ve met me you’ll have noticed I don’t even have a slight Scottish accent. Non-Scots will struggle which is a shame because there’s plenty to struggle with here without writing in a (what will be for most people) foreign dialect. But I support his decision. Would Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ be half as effective as it is if it had been presented in Standard English? I doubt it. Scots talk with an accent—my daughter does and my siblings (I’m just weird). As Stephen’s poem is set in Scotland and has a Scottish narrator, it’s appropriate if for that reason only, but Scots is also one of the voices of the downtrodden masses, the plebs, the common people. His narrator’s concerns are universal; a bloke from the east end of London or the Bronx could easily relate to what’s being saying here.

In the late seventies I used to correspond with a poet from Bristol if memory serves right. He was a HUGE Ginsberg fan and very kindly sent me a copy of Howl and Other Poems which I hated and barely got by the second page. We disagreed on just about everything to do with poetry and the letters dried up after a few weeks. I mention this because my first thought about the second poem in Stephen’s collection was that it’s a Scottish ‘Howl’; they’re actually just about the same length if you include the footnote to ‘Howl’. Claire also noted the obvious similarities with poetry by the Beats and so I asked Stephen who told me:

Ginsberg and ‘Howl’ were influences, but also d.a. levy's long poems. I was reading both poets as inspiration and the Beat feel is intentional. I love both these poets.

This meant I’d need to get over myself and look at ‘Howl’ again. Much to my surprise I found out it’s not an especially complex poem once you boil it down.

In the first line of the first section, the speaker tells us that he has been a witness to the destruction of "the best minds" of his generation. The rest of the section is a detailed description of these people – specifically, who they were and what they did. He doesn't tell us what destroyed them quite yet, though we get plenty of hints. Most lines begin with the word "who" followed by a verb. These are people "who did this, who did that," etc. We quickly learn that these "best minds" were not doctors, lawyers, and scientists. They were not people whom most middle-class folks in the 1950s would have identified with the best America had to offer. And that's exactly Ginsberg's point. According to the speaker, they are drug users, drop outs, world travellers, bums, musicians, political dissidents, and, yes, poets.

If the key word of the first section was "who," the second section asks "What?" As in, what destroyed the best minds of his generation? Ginsberg provides the answer immediately: Moloch. In the Hebrew Bible, Moloch was an idolatrous god to whom children were sacrificed by placing them in fire. In other words, not a friendly god. […] For Ginsberg, Moloch is associated with war, government, capitalism, and mainstream culture, all of which might be summed up by one of the poem's most important concepts: the "machine" or "machinery." Moloch is an inhuman monster that kills youth and love.

The third section is addressed to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's close friend from the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. The speaker refers to this psychiatric hospital by the shorter and more evocative fictional name of "Rockland." He reaffirms his solidarity with Solomon over and over again by repeating the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland." The central question of this section is "Where?" The speaker uses this question to explore Solomon's existence within the walls of the institute. The poem ends with the image from the speaker's dreams, in which Solomon is walking from New York to the speaker's "cottage" (in Berkeley, California), where they will reunite. – shmoop.com

What complicates matters is the fact that Ginsberg hadn’t written his poem with a mass audience in mind and a great many of the things he references will go over a casual reader’s head and even more so now almost sixty years have passed and it’s no longer contemporary. It’s a poem that needs to be studied before it can be fully appreciated. Ferlinghetti initially rejected the poem when it was offered to him but changed his mind after its first reading. Surely if it was such an important piece he would’ve seen it there and then. All firsts are significant because they’re firsts but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily great art. The Star Trek episode ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’ which contains the (arguably) first interracial kiss on TV is nothing to write home about but it won’t be forgotten because of that kiss and I think of ‘Howl’ in much the same respect. Yes, it challenged freedom of speech and good on it for that but, that aside, it’s an esoteric work aimed at a tiny audience. Had it not gained notoriety because of the trial I wonder if it would be as well-regarded as it’s become? Who knows?

Stephen’s poem ‘Look Up!’ won’t cause a ruckus. Little shocks people these days. In 1955 homosexuality was something people hid—just think of the film stars who went to great lengths to keep their true nature secret—but now gays are a part of the mainstream. Not that that’s the focus of Stephen’s poem; his poem is about drugs but then again who bats their eye these days when they hear about kids taking drugs? It’s almost regarded as a rite of passage and, again, in that regard I’m also a bit weird because (prescription drugs aside and my experiences with them were quite enough, thank you very much) I’ve never used any recreational drug bar alcohol and I pretty much gave up drinking that in my twenties.

Anyway I sat down and read his poem. Then I read it again. After a third read I e-mailed Stephen and asked for a softcopy which he sent me and I spent two full days annotating the poem. That done I decided to try a write a summary of it which I did and passed to Stephen to see how well I’d done. I’ll let you know his response later but for the moment I’m going to stick with my reading since it’s as valid as anyone else’s. That’s the problem when you write a poem that’s open to interpretation; you really can’t whinge when someone comes along and imposes their own structure on the piece. I’ve a tendency to read things literally. I wanted to know who was talking, where they were talking, what they were doing when talking and over what timeframe events took place. This is what I came up with:

The poem features a first-person narrator, a male, an adult, Scottish and, judging from the accent (the poem’s written in dialect) living in the central belt near Glasgow. Over the course of the poem we learn little about the man: his parents are still alive and he becomes (or has already become) a disappointment to them due to his lifestyle choices; he has children but it doesn't sound as if he’s a wife. He has at least one friend who’s a girl and who he sleeps with but I don't think she's his girlfriend in the traditional sense. He's not homeless, can drive, has access to a car and certainly has enough money to be able to afford to buy breakfast at a drive-thru. He never mentions a job but since he's more than empathetic with the socially deprived about him—perhaps, although he's not living rough, he's still technically homeless—it's likely he's currently unemployed. He has problems with drink and drugs and it’s probably fair to say that at the start of the poem he’s spiritually empty.

I was brought up in a religious household and studied the Bible for many years. Okay, the Bible’s not a poem despite the fact it does contain some poetry and a lot of people struggle with how to read it. Some take it literally—if it says God created the heaven and the earth in six days then it must be six literal days—but science has pretty much disproved that so when the Bible talk about days it must mean a longer time period. Think of the expression, “in my day”—what day was that that? I’ve lived for almost 20,000 days—which particular one was my day? Some things in the Bible are literal—King David was a flesh and blood man—and some things are not, e.g. the cast of Jesus’s parables. How do you decide? Common sense really. And the same goes for poetry. When Stephen’s narrator says:

Ah made masel a fry up –
bacon, eggs, mushrooms –
ah ate dinner, tranced-out autonaut,
ah smoked & watched Eastenders,

I take that literally. When he talks about leaving his body and floating above the earth, well I’m going to go with symbolic, metaphorical or hallucinatory. The picture of the man above was collated from the handful of facts that are peppered throughout the poem. They may not be important to some people but they made a real difference to me.

Part I

The poem opens with the man looking out at a tall government building. Stephen lives in Hamilton so I imagined this to be the South Lanarkshire Council Headquarters on Almada Street—it fits the description—but it isn’t important.

He's in spiritual crisis although it's secular things that have his attention at the moment, a government that can't be trusted and the consequences of their (and presumably previous governments') poor decisions:

Av been perched at this windae fur
a while noo starin oot at yon monolith
ae local government wi us aw teeterin
oan the edge ae the abyss aboot
tae plunge heid first thru chaos and calamity,
the next bunch ae jerk-offs
showerin us wi silver tongued deceits,

[ae = of]

Ginsberg claimed Part II of ‘Howl’ was inspired by a peyote-induced vision of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco which appeared to him as a monstrous face. Stephen’s narrator doesn’t see a face (at least not here) but he does see the moon which is a significant and recurring image throughout this book:

(Ah saw the full moon once
reflected in its dark glass,
like a picture taken in outer space
beamed back and shimmerin
on a screen grainy vision ae beyond)

What’s he doing looking at this building? He’s…

contemplatin the nature ae spiritual
LUMINOSITY against a background
ae social deprivation drug induced mayhem
& blood bleached alcoholism –
FUCK!
Here & now! I mean here & fuckin now!

If you’re not familiar with how Scots talk then you should know that when you’re reading this poem treat the block capitals the same way as would do in an e-mail or a comment; these words need to be emphasised; seriously just imagine Billy Connolly reading this and you’ll not go far wrong. The expression “blood bleached” puzzled me initially until I confirmed what I suspected that alcohol starves red blood cells of oxygen[1]. I also found the use of the world ‘LUMINOSITY’ an unusual choice—we tend to think of spiritual enlightenment—but since astronomers use the term luminosity to measures the total amount of energy emitted by a star or other astronomical object it’s obviously a more poetic choice given that so much emphasis is placed on stellar phenomena in the poem. The full moon on a clear night measure between 0.27 and 1 lux.

He's fascinated by the counterculture movement of the 1960s:

Granted av always hid these swirlin sun eyes gazin
back oan the 60s a dream machine vision
ae evolutionary leap up, leap up!

[hid = had]

and clearly views those who followed Dr Timothy Leary in a sympathetic light—he’s been reading up on the subject—although it looks like he has more in common with the followers than the leaders; in the second half of the poem he draws parallels with the rave culture of the 1980s.

He's evidently assimilated a great deal of information about eastern mysticism because he uses many expressions above and beyond those that have slipped into popular culture. For example, I thought Stephen was simply being poetic when he used the term ‘dream machine’ but was surprised to discover that such a thing actually existed and was in fact a stroboscopic flicker device. When he talks about the Millbrook happenings he shows he's familiar with the protocol for these gatherings.

girls in green saris loungin on the lawn
like yellow haired dakinis waitin tae greet
every star seekin psychonaut filtered thru
the heavy iron gates

He also understands why the fifties were a time ripe for social change; following the end of the World War II people were living in fear and looking for answers:

atom bomb mushroom cloud or
magic Acidmind expansion,
take yer pick!

Despite his obvious preoccupation with the sixties our narrator’s not blind to the fact that there were casualties of this cultural revolution along the way and “picks”—which I took to be a play on ‘guitar pick’—a number of famous musicians—the likes of Peter Green, Syd Barrett, Skip Spence and Roky Erickson—all of whose careers suffered because of abuse of LSD; all the four above are believed to have suffered from schizophrenia and here we have another commonality with Ginsberg’s poem because although it was dedicated to a schizophrenic, Carl Solomon, Ginsberg later claimed that at the core of ‘Howl’ were his unresolved emotions about his schizophrenic mother. Also when the narrator uses the repeated phrase “Ah'll take ma pick” this reminded me of the same technique used by Ginsberg where he uses a similar phrase of solidarity, “I'm with you in Rockland.”

Despite an awareness of the damage drugs can do apparently Stephen’s narrator isn’t put off. From this point on he talks about his experiences under the influence of alcohol and at least two kinds of hallucinogens, psilocybin and ecstasy. He begins with an experience he's had whilst in bed—and probably not a one-off from the past because he uses the present tense—when under the influence of rum and so-called magic mushrooms. Predictably he draws on his readings to explain what he's experienced and so many of the metaphors and images reference eastern religions plus there are a number of references to stellar bodies—the sun, stars, comets—throughout the whole piece but the moon especially features. Whilst high he hears—or imagines he hears—a woman's voice saying his name:

Well, can ye imagine?
Who the fuck is that? God? God's maw?
It occurs tae me that the voice lulls back
tae an awesome silence deep well of
loneliest love. It's a female voice –
mother
sister
familiar yet unrecognised
compassion.

Is he having some kind of spiritual awakening? He describes this a little later as “the night of storms”:

No' always so fur alang wi the voice comes
the night of storms, fierce howlin winds
rammin lamposts, trees, coilin then unleashed
on civil man, tucked up in bed as ah was,
no-pity gales fae the darkest caverns of the earth.

[fae = from]

This, of course, reminded me of the experience of Elijah recorded in 1 Kings 19:11-13:

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Our narrator now frames two important questions. He wonders…

                                      whither
drugs ir able tae precipitate such deep spiritual
experience ae a sort once conjured
by yer prophets & yer shamans

[…]

             & whither such experience is relevant or admissible
in an age gon saft oan science (suck oan science!)
material reductionism

The sixties were a time ripe for change. As Stephen notes so often "enlightenment goes hand in hand / wi social reformation"; if there was ever a time change is needed, as he put it right at the start of the poem, it’s:

Here & now! I mean here & fuckin now!

He moves on from such lofty topics to more immediate concerns, i.e. his love life:

Such things that happen!
Such things as fallin in love.
A huge gaitherin ae desire in the belly
fur a beautiful girl sweet henna hair
fallin ower delicate shooders & staunin
next tae her wis a charge a bolt
a sudden dance drawn deeper & deeper
intae her laugh her eyes – ye know the score!

It looks like he's fallen for a married woman—he says “she hid [i.e. had] a man”—but hasn't had the nerve to pursue things as aggressively as he might have. He remembers finding himself at another girl's house where they end up in bed:

So that wan night, drunk at a friends,
up aw night in torments ae hell,
ah danced wi her shade
& lay wi her ghost
& screamed a scream
ower streets & rooftops,
smotherin it, suppressin it,
a silent scream,
an inner roar,

Here he experiences what he describes as a kundalini awakening[2]. One of the physical effects can be extreme sexual desire (although it can apparently go the other way too). In practical terms, one of the most commonly reported Kundalini experiences is the feeling of an electric current running along the spine and Stephen describes something very similar. You can read a good description here.

In the morning he orders burgers from a drive-thu. The girl's voice over the intercom reminds him of the voice he’d heard during his trip. When he'd awoken that morning he'd seen a face before him but not the girl he'd been with—we don’t even know whose bed he woke up in—so perhaps the face belonged to the married woman although even if it was she probably symbolises something greater.

He goes about his day as usual—no mention of a job—but all he's really waiting for is the night when he'll be free to take a further trip.

          moved through the day
a pale, distracted ghost (bread fae the
bread shop, remember?), waitin
fur the phantom night,

Once home, has a fry-up for tea (typical Scottish cuisine), watches Eastenders and thinks about his recent experiences whilst under the influence. Presumably he takes some drugs—he mentions having a smoke but he doesn’t say what of—puts on some music and describes this second trip where the voice has now become a “PRESENCE”:

a lover, a touch ae the maddest love,
ma mind playin oot sich tender
mallow beauty . . .
("Feel so close to you!")
Yet meltin intae somethin,
an invisible love,
a sweeter union!

[sich = such]

I tracked down two dozen songs with the words ‘feel so close to you’ in them. That’s when I gave up and asked Stephen, not that it’s especially important—the sentiment is the same in them all— what the song was. He told me:

[T]he lyric is the first line, or perhaps a mishearing of the first line of the song ‘I Wanna Know What Love Is’ by Foreigner, that old power ballad.

Because I read the thing literally—and because he specifically talks about “spring loaded bounce pop”—that one wasn’t on my list.

The love he talked about earlier becomes more abstract and he imagines he's left his body. He flies over some of the places that were focal points to the drug culture lifestyle of the past—places like, the Libre artistic community, Taylor Camp and swinging London—and the present—sites like Tipi valley and Glastonbury. Again he starts to think about the rise of drug cults around the world

Part II

Although this part opens with another—albeit much shorter—recollection of what I’m taking to be a third trip (this time including an out-of-body experience and a nod to past life regression) the main emphasis in this part of the poem is on refocusing his life:

Nae cults fur me, awash & awake
tae primal life force myelination,
fierce upsurge ae full charge neuron
BLITZ!

Perhaps he's starting to see signs in himself of an "emergin mental illness".

He looks at the rave culture of the nineties.

MDMA,
new drug fur a
new youth –
squeezed oot by greed &
vain materialism!

He can see definite parallels between the rise of various New Age cults in the sixties—specifically Acid cults—and the spiritual aspects of rave culture.[3] There are obviously highs…

The pu ae this,
the pulse ae this,
catching the tail ae the
comet & fleein wae it!
Weekend dance orgies
fuelled by sonic banks
stacked high against
autumnal skies;

and lows…

Tae end up . . .
hingin fae the ceilin by
yer nerves, swingin fae the
fittins by yer
nerves, wrecked, a wreck,
lyin in yer bed aw week,
gouchin, fleein, then
quickly deflated, flat,
flattened wi fear,
chitterin wi fear
fur the nerves yiv fried & the
organs yiv pulped,
no able tae walk or talk,
except when ye talk–
yer maw mad wi worry,
yer da's pride ripped right
oot 'im . . .

[pu = pull, gouchin = hanging out, chitterin = shivering]

This section ends with him burned out after overdoing it. He’s bedridden for a week and when he does get up he’s happy simply to lie in a bath all day long. His parents are beside themselves.

What he then describes I took to be withdrawal symptoms:

Ah lie in bed, takin this, sufferin this,
sick auric fusion, total wrench ae
free will consciousness –
seized upon,
possessed,

He compares it to being "perched oan a sick, black mountain" and being possessed by "a scarlet queen". In the midst of all this the quiet voice returns but the message is clearer this time: "I am the Lord's”. His family nurse him back to health and he starts to think more clearly about where drugs fit into modern society—Dr Leary's legacy is clearly still alive and kicking—but more importantly his own life:

The tease ae drink, the lure ae
drugs, a silent pool, a quick escape,
slow temptation . . .

He then describes a planned spiritual pilgrimage across Scotland highlighting many of the places of significance to Christians, places like Iona (St Columba) and Dunfermline (Saint Margaret of Scotland):

Ah'll visit Dumfries, Whithorn, Stranraer!
Girvan, Arran, Cumbrae!
Ah'll sleep by the roadside,
Ah'll beg for ma bread,[4]
Ah’ll follow the LAMB.
Oan ma road wi
ma voice!
Ma vast calm!
Ma loss in Thee!
Ma hair,
Ma lips,
Ma eyes.
Ma cleansin!

It looks like he’s found religion but not a new religion, in fact a very old one which is perhaps why the poem ends with a chant to Jehovah, the god of the Old Testament who, of course, Ginsberg namechecks in ‘Howl’ too. I very much doubt he’s suggesting that he’s answered the door to a couple of Witnesses and been converted:

Ma road,
Ma light,
Ma voice.
A vast calm!
A silversong dream devotion:
JEHOVAH
JAH
JEHOVAH
JAH
JAH
AH
JAH
JEHOVAH!

This is what Stephen had to say when he read my interpretation of his poem:

Perhaps the attempt to pin down the narrator is a little too literal. Many of the details are oblique autobiographical references or simply generalisations about contemporaries who were involved in the drug scene. The references to various trips are general and oblique and shouldn't be taken as literal trips. Also a lot of what the narrator experiences, like the voices and guided thoughts, aren't part of a drug trip but more like spiritual breakdown associated with kundalini. These aren't linear in the poem, but flit in and out like thoughts or images in the mind. It's about the movement of mind as random and chaotic rather than anything directly linear or narrative.

As for the end, yes, it's Christian, but also interfaith, both. There's an openness and non-duality, but from a Christian bedrock. The path of salvation is Christian (for the narrator) but not exclusive in general.

Fair enough. The problem with any work that’s ‘open to interpretation’ is that no one can say your interpretation’s wrong, not even the author. Perhaps he wasn’t clear enough. Perhaps it would help if I understood stuff like kundalini. The poem as a whole has a great deal of energy and I could imagine, as with ‘Howl’, a public reading of it could be most entertaining. My main problem with it—and the same goes for ‘Howl’—is that it contains too many esoteric and cryptic references. To understand both of these works you have to study them. In my opinion Ginsberg’s is weak in that it contains too many autobiographical and now dated elements (Gregory Stephenson for one disagrees with me here); Stephen’s is weak—again, in my opinion (and I’m sure there will be others who’ll disagree with me)—in that it contains too many obscure terms like kundalini, the Age of Aquarius, Helios, dakini, psychonaut, light-being, Tantrika, om, trans-dimensionality, new frequencies, karma, astral projection, bluestone healer, ghat, ashram, guru, shaman, trance dance, levitation, bardo, lifeforce, vision quest, bodhisattva, Krishna…Do you have to understand all of these terms to get the gist? No, and that will be enough for most. They’ll just let the psychobabble for want of a better expression wash over their heads in exactly the same way Star Trek fans buy the technobabble without batting an eye; it’s all window dressing. Did the hippies back in the sixties understand all these terms? Unlikely. The vast majority were in it for the drugs and the sex or am I being just a wee bit too cynical?

Crescent

Clearly I’ve not left myself much space to do this part of the book justice, so I’m not going to try to. It’s made up of three different styles of poetry. The first are the kind of concrete poems regular readers of Stephen’s blog will be already familiar with and either you like this kind of thing or you don’t. The first one in the book is:

mo( )on

To be honest I find it very hard to get excited over pieces like this. I think I get it but I don’t get a lot out of it although I suspect that me being a bit “left-brained” as Stephen described me. (Actually every test I’ve taken has put my squarely in the middle.) Most of the others are longer, several over a page long. Many touch on themes covered in ‘Look Up!’ like this one:

i
is
iss
liss
bliss
blissis
blissisbliss
blissisblissisbliss
blissisblissisblissisbliss
blissisblissisbliss
blissisbliss
blissis
bliss
liss
iss
is
i
is
iss
liss
bliss
blissis
blissisbliss
blissisblissisbliss
blissisblissisblissisbliss
blissisblissisbliss
blissisbliss
blissis
bliss
liss
iss
is
i

The second lot are prose poems. All consist of short blocks of text maybe six or seven lines long, sometimes in two or three… Is it paragraphs or stanzas with prose poems?... constructed mostly from sentence fragments. The one I liked the most was this one:

Choose The Moment

Soft chambers and bellows for a flame. A voice in the corner of the room. Laughing. I expand to include you. We miss the man who plays the organ – he failed to arrive this morning. Variations in colour, tone and atmosphere as we move between each room. One man dominates the ceremony. I give him place because I love him. We expand to include you.

There may be an unavoidable dilemma. Trickery in the garden. The shadow of your days unaccounted for. Let me present my son, he has just returned from South East Asia. The subtlety of my gesture confounds you.

The rooms are full of trophies and mementoes. Windowless. A barrage of history. Children drag me off – they want to sing for me. Immutable connections. I am new here. What melds us.

The third type of poem are just, well, poems and there are two of these, ‘So High, So Hung Up’ and ‘Whit a Man Wants’. As with ‘Look Up!’ these are written in dialect and, to my mind, really belong in the first section which is something Stephen says he did consider:

You're perhaps right about the two Scots poems belonging in the first half. I wrestled with this a little but decided they should be towards the end of the book as echoes of Part 1.

The first one I’d read before in an interview for Salt; Lunar Poems for New Religions was shortlisted for the Crashaw Prize and they did a piece on him.

Looking at the book as a whole Stephen says:

[I]f you take the theme of spiritual emergence in ‘The Moon from my Windowless Heart’, ‘Crescent’ teases this out in terms of the lunar cycle, giving not quite variations but extensions of the experience in visual and sonic and concrete form. If ‘The Moon from my Windowless Heart’ is a disjointed narrative of breakdown and new birth, ‘Crescent’ is the follow up, the resulting integration and building of a spiritual life. Claire Askew was spot on about the timing of these poems being essential as stages of the moon, but also stages of spiritual growth and emergence.

Overall

Overall I’m not quite sure what to make of this collection. Eclectic is as good a word as any. Personally I would’ve preferred him to stick to the one style throughout—the dialect poems are quite enough on their own to make into a decent chapbook—but that’s me. These were the poems I enjoyed the most and, yes, I did actually enjoy ‘Look Up!’ in my way although probably not in the way Stephen would’ve liked me to enjoy it. He said to me:

I'm of the opinion that you don't have to understand a poem to be moved by it, indeed the way it moves you is more important than understanding. I find easily understood poems a bit boring sometimes. Unusual or complex language and structure are just more enjoyable. I particularly like the flow of spontaneous writing, where meaning is perhaps subordinate to energy. I did feel the structure of LOOK UP! was quite straight forward however – Part 1 LSD in the 60s, Part 2 Ecstasy in the 90s, weave a personal spiritual experience and reflections around that with a suggestion of the disjointedness of breakdown and recovery.

With some avant-garde poetries, it's the spirit that's important, and ‘Howl’ had a HUGE spirit, which affected the spirit of the age and still affects how we see things today. It's shamanic poetry. Drugs, shamanism, spirituality work the same way. No one really understands what's going on but they alter things and thereby change how we see the world and how we live our lives. ‘Howl’ did this and I wanted my long poem to reflect that dynamic a little.

And that’s where I come unstuck because I’ve no interest in drugs or shamanism and freely admit to not having a spiritual bone in my body. That said one of the reasons we read is so we don’t have to experience things personally, we can read about the experiences of others. In that respect ‘Look Up!’ was interesting and I don’t feel like I’ve wasted the last week wallowing in his world.

***

Stephen Nelson was born in Motherwell, Scotland in 1970, to the King of Belgium and his wife, a member of the Swedish Royal Family. He was educated in a monastery in Bhutan where he quickly learned the simultaneous arts of telepathy and levitation. He gave it all up for poetry, however, and now lives in a tower block somewhere in South Lanarkshire, having denounced his royal heritage and all its attendant privileges. His interests include the sun, rain, snow, grass, beaches, islands, mountains. At present he doesn’t own a bicycle, although that may change in the near future as he is intent on losing a bit of weight. He enjoys being an Anglican.

(Not sure you should take all the above seriously, folks. Someone’s tongue was definitely in their cheek when they wrote it.)

Let me leave you with a wee video of Stephen reading 'Look Up!' (part one)

REFERENCES

[1] See Harold S. Ballard, M.D, ‘The Hematological Complications of Alcoholism’, Alcohol, Health & Research World, pp. 42-52

[2] The website The Biology of Kundalini is quite helpful here.

[3] See Nicholas Saunders, ‘The spiritual aspect of rave culture’, The Guardian, 22nd July 1995

[4] Couldn’t help but think of Psalm 37:25 here, “I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.” Presumably he’s yet to attain righteousness. Again, I’m probably being too literal.

Self-referential poetry is the surest sign you've run out of ideas. – Robyn Smith, 13 Words that Should Never Appear in Poetry

The expressions ‘confessional poetry’ and ‘self-referential poetry’ tend to get a bit mixed up and it’s easy to see why. Who is the ‘self’ that’s being referenced? Is it the poem or the poet? For the purpose of this article ‘self-referential’ means poetry written about poetry.

There are those who look down on poetry about poetry—no matter what you do there’ll always be someone ready to dismiss it—and yet poets have been writing about their craft since at least 1848 when Keats penned ‘On the Sonnet’ and probably much earlier. I’ve never understood why some are so opposed to this topic because if there’s one thing poets have the hardest time doing it’s defining poetry; we write about love all the time (which we don’t understand) so why not poetry (which we also don’t understand)? I’ve heard some wonderful attempts at defining poetry (and some very poetic ones at that) but the more you hear the further you actually get from actually grasping what poetry is and, for me at least, the more fascinating it gets. Me, I don’t know how poetry works. I’ve been doing it long enough that I’ve got a feel for it but I don’t understand why when I try to write I end up with something artificial and yet there are other times, whilst watching TV for example, when a poem, often almost fully-formed, will pop into my head. I’m just grateful they do and know to jump when the ideas come lest I lose them but I really don’t understand the process. I couldn’t explain it very well any more than I could explain what being in love is although I’m pretty sure I’ve known when I was and when it was just infatuation. So, is it any surprise that I’d find myself writing about poetry? I think it’s the most natural thing under the sun and judging by the number of poets who’ve written artes poeticae (from Horace and Aristotle on) I’m far from being alone.

There are three main questions:

• What is a poem?
• How do you write a poem?
• What do you do with a poem?

That third one’s a good one too. As far as I’m concerned all my poems are perfect. Whatever’s missing on the page is in my head so, of course, they’re perfect. They only stop being perfect after a few years and I’ve forgotten all the stuff in my head that stopped me seeing how imperfect they really were. The hardest thing for any writer is getting rid of all that stuff in their head and looking at their work objectively. In fact it’s not hard; it’s virtually impossible.

The Northern Irish critic Edna Longley says that every poem worth its salt is in part about poetry. Sounds cool but what does she mean? If I said that every piece of music is about music would that make any more sense? Probably not. For me you can’t ignore the medium. I can’t see the lines on the page or the stave but I know they’re there. I know that poetry and music are artificial constructs; people made them; they devised a set of rules and played by them. Maths and physics dictate the rules for music—they’re much easier to quantify—but poetry’s a slippery bugger. The rules aren’t so easy to express but there’s obviously a process of encoding and decoding going on. I’ve written dozens of poems about poetry like this one:

Subcutaneousness

This is the skin
of a poem.

Its heart still sits
inside of me.

This holds true for
every poem.

No poem is a
complete poem.

All poems are
superficial.

Poems are flat.
Poetry’s not.

I suggest a
number ten blade.

Thursday, 14 June 2012

This is a good example of the self-referential poem. It’s metaphorical, symbolical, metafictive, requires the involvement of the reader. This was certainly not me running out of ideas. This is me trying to explain poetry. Poems have height and width—they sit on the page; they’re two-dimensional; they need you to look under the skin, to cut into them but even when you do you’ll still not find the heart of the poem. I’ve spoken before about iceberg poems—most of the poem stays with the poet and only a fraction ends up on the page. Beauty is only skin deep and maybe the same applies to meaning. Superficial meaning jumps off the page and it’s easy to read a poem, especially a short poem, and go: Is that it?

Which brings me—eventually—to the poetry of Glenn Ingersoll or, specifically, the poem poems of Glenn Ingersoll. In an old blog post he defines the poem poem as follows:

[A]t some point the poet will refer to the poem as though it were a creature, or physical object, the poem itself will take on metaphorical qualities.

He’s just published a small—literally—book of fifty poem poems entitled Fact and he sent me a copy to have a look at. The blurb says:

The poems are philosophical, humorous, and often conscious of themselves. The book is small enough to slip into a pocket, handy for those moments stolen for contemplation or distraction.

I told my friend Vito Pasquale that I was working on this article and he dutifully went away and looked up Glenn online. I wasn’t surprised to find that he enjoyed what he came across because Vito’s another of us—I feel like we’re a clique but I bet there are thousands of us—who enjoys writing and reading poems about poetry. The poem from Glenn’s collection that jumped out at him was this one:

The poem is absolutely
quiet. You might've heard
little scratches as it
moved away from the
pen. But it got here,
the place it made for,
when the pen let it go.

about which he said:

The poem that starts. . . '[The] poem is absolutely quiet' has a nice, nice, nice image in it of the words receding from the pen. Never pictured that before myself and now that I have, I wish I had. I'm not sure he planted that vision in my head as perfectly as he might have though. I might have left out that whole first sentence. 

I actually like the opening sentence because the poem is quiet now. All poetry reaches this state of quietude but to get to it some noise has to be made, be it the clattering of plastic keys or the scratching of a pen or pencil on paper. Of course, as is the case with many poems of this ilk, Glenn anthropomorphises the poem; it becomes a thing apart from its creator capable of scrabbling across a page; it has its own intent. Any writer will acknowledge this duality. Novelists talk about characters taking control of the story and they mean it; we all accept the fact we’re only ever partly in control of the writing process. When I get an idea for a poem something inside me tells me to get it onto a page, be it literal or electronic… or, perhaps, ‘let it’ is a better expression, let it onto the page because that’s where it wants to be, what Robert Duncan called, in his poem ‘Poetry, a Natural Thing’, an “inner persistence / toward the source”. This is why I struggle with poetry as a vocal thing because my first urge is to write the poem, not recite it.

One of the problems with poetry of this ilk is that it doesn’t usually amount to much on its own; the same can be said for concrete poems and pwoermds, haiku and Ginsberg’s American sentences. Here’s one of the book’s shorter poems:

Instruction

Read this poem again.

On this surface this appears trivial, a throwaway line and yet there’s intent here. The first thing I noted is that because the poem is called ‘Instruction’ I did read the poem again. Okay it must have taken me all of a second to do so but that’s not the point. Poetry needs to be read again. A lot of prose doesn’t—good prose does—and many people read poems as if they were chopped-up prose even though they know they’re poems. They don’t read them like poems because they don’t know how to read poems, so they read them the only way they know how and move on. There are about 1700 words in this collection which most people could read in five minutes and then what? Will they read the poems again? Or will they just sniff and go: “Not much there to write home about” or, as Glenn puts it in this poem:

Yours is the first
gaze to touch upon
the alien landscape
of the poem. But, as
though your landing
craft were out of whack,
you swoop over without
raising the ancient
dust, leaving no suggestion
of your passage.

On its own ‘Instruction’ is not a great poem, I grant you, but as a part of this collection it has its place because as you read through this wee book the effect it has on you is cumulative. The same goes for “Yours is the first gaze” although, being longer and having an actual narrative, it does stand better on its own. I think this is an excellent metaphor, a poem as an alien landscape. I know when I first encountered the unique typography employed by E E Cummings this is exactly how I felt: How on earth do I read this? And I probably did skip over it and go searching for something more traditional and familiar. For others though any poem is an alien thing. It’s like Glenn says in the very next poem in the book:

This poem is easy to understand
when read in the language in which
it was written
by one for whom reading
is a familiar and comfortable occupation.
The poem makes no other claims.

In what ‘language’ is a poem written? English is the obvious answer and there’s not a word in it that any average reader won’t be able to understand so why, when you arrange them thusly, do they feel like a foreign language or an alien tongue? The tiny poem ‘Instruction’ is the perfect example here. A five-year-old could read that poem and follow its instruction and yet there will be grown men who read it and go: “I don’t get it.” And they will mean that.

Haiku is a popular form of poetry. This puzzles me a little because I don’t find good haiku especially easy to understand. Sure, it’s easy to read, but they demand attention, more attention that I expect the average reader gives them. A number of the poems in this collection are written in that same spirit like this one:

This poem makes no effort
to stir the emotions, hopes
rather, that they will settle,
as, at the bottom of the cup,
there is the fine powder
from the teabag, the
tea cooling.

How do you read a haiku? Not an easy question to answer briefly but here’s a start:

The central point about haiku is that they present in brief compass the record of an illuminating moment or perception, a satori, and do so in a way that encourages readers to share deeply as many aspects of that experience as they can open themselves to. Good haiku need to be read slowly and repeatedly, and despite their brevity will not be easily exhausted. Reading them is in itself something of an art. – Gary Eaton, 'A Note on Haiku', The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 38, Number 4, p. 328

This isn’t a haiku but I think a similar approach is the right one. There is danger reading tiny poems like this that you treat them purely as intellectual exercises, puzzles to be worked out and, yes, that is one way to read them but that’s only a superficial reading. You really need that No 10 blade. (The No.10 blade, by the way, with a curved cutting edge is one of the more traditional blade shapes and is used generally for making small incisions in skin and muscle.)

I thought I’d ask Glenn a few questions about this book and about poem poems in general.

JIM: When I first got this book in the post my first thought was, God, it’s so small! I’ll never be able to read it—I did, in fact, have to use a magnifying glass—whereas my wife’s initial reaction was, “It’s precious!” Mind you she would’ve needed to use a magnifying glass too. Why produce a book so small?

GLENN: I asked Andrew Topel, who runs Avantacular Press, if he could share some thoughts on the design of Fact. Andrew wrote back:

When I read the poems, they seemed to me that they needed an intimate environment to be set down in, so the small format was decided right off the bat. At the same time, I was toying with an idea of publishing a book that fit in a miniature suitcase, as I shared with you at one point, so this also had me thinking small.

I had some input into the design, but I wanted Andrew to make the project his own. Andrew is a visual artist. Two of his own poems are included in the newly published The Last Vispo Anthology from Fantagraphics Books.

JIM: Why’s the collection called Fact?

GLENN: Very few of the poems are titled. The poems being so brief I thought titles would burden them. What they were saying was what they were about. On the other hand when I thought about gathering them into a book I knew a title was needed. I title my notebooks and had used “Fact” as the title for the notebook in which the series got started. (The previous two notebooks are titled “Art” and “e”; with “Fact” the three notebooks’ titles read Art-e-Fact.) That’s the truth of it. But once I’d settled on Fact it seemed to fit. The poems did not to think of themselves as fiction.

I will add that I used to be a huge fan of the rock band New Order and their music was released by Factory Records, which at least once appeared on an album cover abbreviated “fact.” (Note the period; I used a period in the title of the book, too, until at some point it fell away.)

JIM: I have to say I'd never thought about these as examples of nonfiction poetry. I guess it depends on how you define 'fiction'. I think it's an interesting point and perhaps a good way to approach this kind of poetry. They're probably closer to philosophical texts—we are after all examining the nature of poetry—than entertainments.

For all that poetry about poetry—or poem poems as you call them—are generally looked down on. In his poem 'Decision for Self-Love' for example the poet Landis Everson wrote

Sometimes you write poetry about poetry.
You can’t help yourself.
Your fingers stray down there where there is
still feeling.

suggesting that poems about poetry are nothing but a masturbatory dead end and yet I suspect few poets will have been able to resist the urge to write one or two. How do you feel about this? Is it okay to do it as long as you don’t talk about it?

GLENN: It’s okay to do whatever. Subject matter taboos are silly. In the lines you quote Landis Everson is writing about his feelings. Feelings of shame and lack of self-worth, perhaps? He is looking for the place “where there is still feeling,” which sounds rather alienated. “Learning to love yourself,” if we’re to take Whitney Houston at her word, “is the greatest love of all.”

Poem poems are poems that speak for themselves. They may have their own feelings of doubt and shame, but it is of their own bodies they are dubious or ashamed, not someone else’s. The poem is a metaphor, just as a word is a metaphor for meaning, a sentence a metaphor for thought. The poem poem stands in for the reader. The poem is being spoken and heard by the reader in her own voice.

JIM: Poetry, certainly from the twentieth century onwards, has become an amorphous term and few I would imagine—certainly not after someone came out with, "It's a poem because I say it is"—are now comfortable trying to define poetry. Do you think this is one of the reasons you're drawn to poem poems, you're trying to either define or at least identify what poetry's becoming?

GLENN: I define Poetry as “Art made using language as the material.” This is, of course, laughably broad. Are you laughing?

JIM: Actually, no, it’s a good starting, point although I think it’s a bit too broad. What you’ve been saying so far does remind me of this poem of mine:

Body of Work

This is a naked poem
          so try not to stare.

There are no meanings
          for the words to hide behind.

Just let your eye brush

          over them and don't ogle;
          I know that it's hard.

You can't touch them and
          they're not allowed to touch you.

Think of it as art

Friday, 2nd October 2009

For me poem poems are about stripping away everything bar the process: I am reading a poem; what am I doing? Of course novelists use language as their raw material as do songwriters and even t-shirt designers and a distinctive feature of modern art is the fact that many artists incorporate language into their art, as in the case of Tracey Emin’sneon art, but putting that aside for the moment…

GLENN: Recently I wrote a sort of gigantic poem poem in prose called Autobiography of a Book. The book’s life is what takes place in the language of which it is made. It is alive so long as it is being read and if it lives on beyond that it is in memory.

JIM: Now that reminds me of the Bishop Berkeley's famous maxim: "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived) which was the inspiration for Beckett’s film Film and what I take from that is that a poem—indeed any literary work—only truly exists in the mind of its reader.

GLENN: While struggling over a poem that didn’t work once, I got the feeling I wasn’t trying to make something, I was trying to free something that was trapped. Sometimes I see the page as a covering that has to be scraped away in order to release the poem inside it.

JIM: No, I get that, which is why I've never sat down to write a sonnet or a sestina. I see them as artificial constructs. My poems have structure but that structure evolves as a part of the writing process. I don't force the words into a (what would be for them) unnatural shape.

In the editorial to his short-lived webzine Poetry about Poetry, Tim Love lists five possible reasons why some editors, readers and even poets are wary of poetry about poetry. Your thoughts?

GLENN: I understand that many readers wish words were invisible, that their meanings would instantaneously and without ambiguity translate to their minds the important stuff—the story, the scene, the conflict. That sounds like a philosophy of prose. Poetry wants you to notice the way it’s being said as well as what it’s saying. Poem poems show you that language, like the rest of us, is in a struggle for meaning. Per Mr Love, that struggle is universal.

Very interesting stuff. Personally I liked this collection. I didn’t like its physical size but I suspect most people with a decent pair of eyes will have no problems with it. As a body of work it’s thought-provoking and deals with many aspects of the nature of poetry. I talked at the start of this article about how poems appear mysteriously and here’s this wry observation from Glenn:

This poem was
genetically encoded
in my DNA and
is being revealed through
the inevitable progression
of a system of chemical
reactions. Having written
it I can see I couldn't
help it and am content
to disclaim any
responsibility. It grew
out of me like a thumbnail,
and now I am cutting
it off.

This makes so much sense to me as a fellow poet. I’ve always resisted the urge to think of my poems as my babies—which doesn’t mean I’ve not on occasion given them their own voice—but I can relate to them as a by-product of the poetic process. I write to work things out and once they’ve been worked out I’ve no further need of the poem that was produced in the process. I suppose there’ll be people who collect their nail clippings in a jar. I collect my poems in a big red folder. Same difference.

Fact costs a mere $5, postage included, if you live in the States. It won’t be for everyone but if you enjoyed any of the above then you should think about it. I liked it. To help you make your mind you can read some of the poems from Fact online:

• Go to Alba for four poems.
• Go to Shampoo for seven poems.
• Go to Avantacula Press for four poems.

***

Glenn Ingersoll lives in Berkeley, California having moved there in 1991 to finish his undergraduate studies at the University of California. His work has been published in Exquisite Corpse, The Quarterly, Phoebe, and Columbia Poetry Review, among other places. In 1993, he won the Charles B. Wood Memorial Award from Carolina Quarterly. His chapbook City Walks (Broken Boulder Press) was published in the spring of 1999 and can be downloaded from them as a pdf here. It’s a little different from Fact.

North Carolina State motto: Esse quam videri (To be, rather than to seem) (1893)

I don’t think I’d like to live in North Carolina. And certainly not in the 4.3 square miles that comprises Boiling Springs, North Carolina. The official website says the town is known as ‘The Crossroads of Opportunity’. Why does that scare me just a little? Of course everyone’s lives are filled with crossroads: will-I-or-won’t-I?s can become thank-Gods or if-onlys so easily; what things seemed to be can sharply come into focus; welcome to the real world, son. Some say—well, The Guardiansaid—that “[t]he real spirit of the US is found not in the mega-cities but in the soda fountains and dime stores of its small towns.” Maybe that’s what scares me because more and more the notion of small-town America has a tinge of menace to it. I guess The Last Picture Show, The Stepford Wivesand Blue Velvet started me thinking that way and I’ve never been able to shake it. Small towns and the mentality that accompanies them aren’t unique to America. I grew up in Scotland where there are many and the expression, “The best thing about [insert town name here] is the train station,” is a well-known, well-worn phrase.

To illustrate how things are changing in the States then:

Oelwein, Iowa, spawned a meth lab and crime that became the subject of the best-selling book, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.

"Rural America remains the cradle of our national creation myth," wrote Methland author Nick Reding. "But it has become something else, too—something more sinister and difficult to define."

It's not that small-town America is worse than cities or suburbs. But it's clearly not the singular birthplace of principle and virtue portrayed by mythmakers and politicians. – Stephen Thomas, ‘Small-town America—the myth and the reality’, McClatchydc.com, 21 August 2011

In his latest collection of short stories Appalachian author Ron Rash—who grew up in Boiling Springs (population still only 5506 in 2011)—shows us that all is not what it seems in rural America and drugs are only one of the issues the inhabitants have to deal with. But before we look at that, let’s address the appellation ‘Appalachian’ first:

Chekhov has talked about this, that any designation besides writer (Russian writer, whatever) was a diminishment. – Noah Charney, ‘Ron Rash: How I Write’, The Daily Beast, 27 February 2013

[T]hough there is no doubt I’m very proud to be Appalachian, I am sometimes worried that when we put adjectives in front of “writer” there’s a sense that he or she is only that. If my work only appeals to people in the region, then I’ve failed as a writer because I think what we want to do is what Eudora Welty said: “One place understood helps us understand all other places better.” So by writing about a particular place, I also hope I’m writing about all other places as well. – Marann Mincey, ‘An interview with Ron Rash’, The Pedestal Magazine, Issue 49

As a Scottish writer I get where he’s coming from; the population of my town is about the same as Boiling Springs even if the name’s not quite as cool. Geography aside, like me, Rash also writes in dialect from time to time and that immediately puts his work one step further off for his readers. It’s a handicap no matter what way you look at it. Setting all his stories in the same area—an area as foreign to me as I imagine Scotland is to him—doesn’t help his universal appeal which is why his stories have to work that bit harder to appeal to a wider audience. But not too hard. As my fellow Scot Robert Burns noted just over two hundred years ago, “A Man's a Man for a' that.” The setting of Rash’s stories may be alien to me but he deals with things that I do understand: loneliness, not belonging, feeling trapped, believing that the grass is always greener. This is perfectly exemplified in the opening story to the collection, ‘The Trusty’, concerning Sinkler, a prisoner from a chain gang who gets sent to the local farms looking for water for the men (on his own and unshackled, hence the title). During one such visit he encounters a young woman, the wife of the farmer, and it’s obvious that the two are kindred spirits, equally desperate but similarly incapable of escaping alone; pooling their resources might give them a fighting chance:

        “I don’t think I could stand it,” Lucy said. “Being locked up so long and knowing I still had nigh on four years.”
        He checked her lips for the slightest upward curve of a smile, but it wasn’t there.
         “Yeah,” Sinkler said, taking a step closer. “You don’t seem the sort to stand being locked up. I’d think a young gal pretty as you would want to see more of the world.”
         “How come you ain’t done it?” she asked again, and brushed some loose wisps of hair behind her ear.
         “Maybe the same reason as you,” Sinkler said. “It’s not like you can get whisked away from here. I haven’t seen more than a couple of cars and trucks on this road, and those driving them know there’s prisoners about. They wouldn’t be fool enough to pick up a stranger. Haven’t seen a lot of train tracks either.”
         “Anybody ever try?” Lucy asked.
         “Yeah, two weeks ago. Fellow ran that morning and the bloodhounds had him grabbing sky by dark. All he got for his trouble was a bunch of tick bites and briar scratches. That and another year added to his sentence.”

They do make their big bid for freedom but, just as they’re about the find their way into Asheville, Fate steps in only, in what I was to discover was typical of Rash, we don’t actually get to see what goes wrong. It’s suggested but he leaves the specifics up to us. And this is something that happens quite often—or doesn’t happen to be more precise—the critical or key scene takes place off the page or the story stops (seemingly) a couple of paragraphs short.

In ‘Where the Map Ends’, for example, we have two runaway slaves whose map has only taken them so far. Freedom is tantalisingly close. Only one obstacle remains but it’s not what they expected. Again, as in ‘Trusty’, the climax is left entirely to the readers’ imaginations.

The need to escape isn’t always as obvious as in these two stories but it does crop up in others. Take the couple in ‘Cherokee’ who visit the local casino in need of a lucky break. They’re imprisoned by poverty:

With a green rabbit’s foot clipped on his belt loop, a silver four-leaf clover dangling from his neck, Danny has brought all the good luck he could find. As they drive past a billboard advertising Harrah’s Casino, his free hand caresses the green fur, maybe hoping luck really can rub off on you. Lisa remembers a story about a magic lamp that, once rubbed, grants three wishes. Danny would settle for just one—make the one hundred and fifty-seven dollars in her handbag turn into a thousand.
         “By what time Monday morning?”
         “Ten,” Danny answers.
         “Does the bank come and get it or do we take it to them?”
        Danny shifts his eyes from the road and looks at her.
         “We could win,” he says. “People do all the time. That woman from Franklin won twenty thousand on a quarter slot machine.”

The ‘it’ Lisa is talking about is their truck which they’re struggling to keep up the payments on. Of course the story can really end only two ways, they get the money or they don’t. Of course if they do get the money can they hang onto it and use it for its intended purpose? Considering the fact that the bulk of this story consists of them playing what we call here in Scotland a puggy (i.e. a slot machine) Rash manages to keep the tension going quite effectively but it’s the end of the story that’s the most effective and it’s not until the penultimate sentence we learn the outcome. Well played.

Not all the stories in the book are set in the present. It’s hard to place exactly when ‘Trusty’ is set but it has a Depression feel to it, ‘Where the Map Ends’ clearly takes place before slavery’s been abolished and ‘The Magic Bus’ is definitely in the sixties—the Vietnam War is still on the go—but it’s core is much the same: two hippies break down near a farm, the daughter lends them a pail to get water for their radiator and they present her with the chance to ‘escape’ to the big city, San Francisco:

         “Time to unplug the jukebox,” Thomas said. “Time to get back on the road.”
         “I thought you were staying until morning,” Sabra said.
         “This bus has no set schedule,” Thomas said. “When it comes by, you either get on board or you’re left behind.”
        Wendy put the elastic and beads in the backpack and tightened the straps. She stood up, a bit unsteadily, and walked over to the barn mouth.
        “So,” Thomas said, staring at Sabra, “ready to get on the bus?”

Drugs, of course, make their appearance in this story—young Sabra gets her first whiff of marijuana—and in ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ where two young lads break into a World War II vet’s home to steal a jar of gold fillings to buy drugs, but the closest to the story in Methland is ‘Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven’ which opens:

The Shackleford house was haunted. In the skittering of leaves across its rotting porch, locals heard the whispered misery of ghosts. Footsteps creaked on stair boards and sobs filtered through walls. An Atlanta developer had planned to raze the house and turn the thirty acres into a retirement village. Then the economy flatlined. The house continued to fold in on itself and the meandering dirt drive became rough as a logging trail.

In this ‘haunted house’ (now a meth kitchen) Jody gets to meet the ‘ghost’ of his old girlfriend, Lauren:

What’s left of her is at the Shackleford place, Trey, Lauren’s brother, had finally told Jody.

Jody remembers the place well enough:

Each time they’d driven here their senior year, Lauren had leaned into Jody’s shoulder, her hand on his thigh. Those moments had been as good as the actual lovemaking—hours alone yet awaiting them.

Now life’s moved on. Jody has been ostracised by his classmates for being a swot. He’s escaped to college but Lauren is also ‘escaping’ from her dull life in her own way. As she tells Jody:

         “Oh, you know me,” Lauren said. “I’ve never been much for delayed gratification. I find what feels good and dive right in.”
         “This feels good,” Jody said, “living out here with those two?”
         “It allows me what I need to feel good.”
         “What will you do when you can’t get what you need?” Jody asked. “What happens then?”
         “The Lord provides,” Lauren said softly. “Isn’t that what we learned in church? Has being around all those atheist professors caused you to lose your faith, Jody, like Reverend Wilkinson’s wife warned us about in Sunday school?”
        Lauren moved closer, leaned her head lightly against his chest though her arms stayed at her sides. He smelled the meth-soured clothes, the unwashed skin and hair.
         “Does being here bring back good memories?” Lauren asked.

Of course it does but the Raleigh of his past is not the Raleigh that’s on offer now. Lauren’s brother cuts to the quick quite succinctly when he says:

“Stay in Raleigh … This place is like a spider’s web. You stay long enough you’ll get stuck in it for good. You’ll end up like her [meaning his sister]. Or me.”

The thing about freedom is that it only lasts as long as you stay out of that cage. The last thing Jody needed to do was come home. Freedom can mean the freedom to choose ones preferred prison.

On the cover to the book there’s a quote from The Times: “Rash can create a character in a single sentence: this is the great American short story at its best.” I’ve heard others described that way (Alice Munro, for example) but I didn’t see any really great examples in this book. Not of a single sentence anyway. But give the man a hundred words:

        Denton felt better as soon as he left the truck. Being that close to his brothers-in-law made him feel like a fungus was starting to grow on him. They both had a mouldy sort of smell, like mushrooms. Which was no surprise, since Baroque and Marlboro moved about as much as mushrooms. They never left the house, and got up from the couch only to eat or go to the bathroom. Hell, mushrooms probably did more than that. They actually grew. They were finding nutrients, some kind of work was going on down there in the soil.

(from ‘A Sort of Miracle’)

        The beldame’s face possessed the colour and creases of a walnut hull. A black shawl draped over her shoulders, obscuring a body shrunken to a child’s stature. The old woman appeared more engulfed than seated, head and body pressed into the soft padding, shoe tips not touching the floor. And yet, the effect was not so much of a small woman as of a large chair, which, like the velvet lining, gave an appearance of regal authority.
        “Granny,” Molly said. “We have guests.”

(from ‘A Servant of History’)

Rash is not only a writer of short stories although this is his fifth collection. He has also written five novels, a children’s book and four collections of poetry. In an interview with Jack Shuler, for the South Carolina Review, Rash said "when I write one, I can't do the other," explaining that the two forms seem to come to him on different wavelengths. I get that but I can also sense a poet’s sensibilities in these words. My prose is nothing like my poetry but I couldn’t write the prose I do if I hadn’t written the poetry I have and I suspect much the same is true with Rash. As he says, “I’m a narrative poet, which makes the transition to fiction easier.” You can read a decent selection of his poems here but I’d like to highlight this one which could so easily have been presented as a short story:

Brown Lung

Sometimes I'd spend the whole night coughing up
what I'd been breathing in all day at work.
I'd sleep in a chair or take a good stiff drink,
anything to get a few hours rest.

The doctor called it asthma and suggested
I find a different line of work as if
a man who had no land or education
could find himself another way to live.

For that advice I paid a half-day's wage.
Who said advice is cheap? It got so bad
each time I got a break at work I'd find
the closest window, try to catch a breath.

My foreman was a decent man who knew
I would not last much longer on that job.
He got me transferred out of the card room,
let me load the boxcars in the yard.

But even though I slept more I'd still wake
gasping for air at least one time a night,
and when I dreamed I dreamed of bumper crops
of Carolina cotton in my chest.

Most of the stories in this collection could be distilled down to something like this. This is not to say that they feel padded—far from it—but if you were to summarise them you could probably whittle them down to a couple of hundred words like this. His characters aren’t especially laconic nor does he exactly scrimp on descriptions but when you boil them down there isn’t a great deal of substance to these pieces; he says what he has to say and gets off the page, a credo I approve of. There isn’t one that isn’t well-written and well-rewritten by a man who’s honed his craft over many years. He says:

I just love short stories, and I love to write them. I think short stories are the hardest form to write—harder than poetry and harder than novels. There’s concision such as there is in poetry, a sense that every word and every sentence has to be in place for a short story to work. Yet at the same time the reader has to feel the satisfaction of a novel, the sense of an arc, a conclusion, a whole experience being rendered. – ‘Ron Rash biography’, Poetry Foundation

Those are lofty aims and as much as I enjoyed this collection I’m not sure any one of the stories was a satisfying as a novel. That he would be compared to the likes of John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy and include Faulkner among his influences came as no surprise to me though. It’s the kind of company a writer wants to be associated with.

Probably my favourite story was ‘Something Rich and Strange’ in which he bravely includes an almost-three-hundred-word long sentence in which he describes a girl drowning. Very effective. This is probably the most poetic of the fourteen stories and contains no actual dialogue but concentrates on the rescue attempt and the effect this has on the diver who is sent down to try to free the body. A moving and haunting tale and oddly enough there is also an undercurrent of escapism here because the girl’s body is trapped underwater for a long time because of heavy rains.

Even the last story in the book, ‘Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out’, is about the need to escape. In this story an old veterinarian and a long-time friend struggle to help a calf ‘escape’ from its mother’s womb:

         “Lord help us if our kids knew what we were up to tonight,” Darnell said as he rubbed a shoulder. “They’d likely fix you and me up with those electronic ankle bracelets, keep us under house arrest.”
         “Which would show they’ve got more sense than we have,” Carson replied.

This is an enjoyable collection and certainly not a hard read—I finished it in two sittings. The only story people might struggle with a little could be ‘A Servant of History’ in which an Englishman, an employee of the English Folk Dance and Ballad Society winds up in Sylva looking to do for Appalachia what Bartók did for Europe and Fanshawe did for Africa and Oceania. He ends up trapped in the home of Luther Wilson and his grandmother of the McDonald clan. Strangely enough this is probably the story that most people won’t get. You’d have to be Scottish and understand the animosity that existed between the clans and between the Scots and the English to really appreciate it:

The Clan system occasioned so many petty sovereignties, so many petty jealousies and conflicting interests, that the existence of a state of peace and security was hardly to be expected; and when to this was added the fiery disposition, the characteristic pride, proneness to fight, and desire to be distinguished for valour which animated the Highlanders, the reason of so many lamentable struggles becomes plain enough. A slight, an angry word, a sneering answer, was sufficient to plunge whole clans in bloodshed-was enough, indeed, to cause a feud which might continue for generations, until almost a whole people had been decimated. – Highlanders of Scotland, GlobalSecurity.org

This is also the funniest story in the book—the book is not heavy on humour and what there is is subtle—but, again, I think the humour might bypass some.

I really can’t say a bad thing about any of the stories in this book but I do find myself struggling for superlatives. I feel guilty even writing this—who am I to criticise?—but none of these stories really excited me. I didn’t feel the need to yammer on about what I’d just read as soon as I’d finished a story. Carrie always knows when a book’s excited me because by the time she comes to proofread my article she feels like she’s heard it all before. This doesn’t mean they didn’t move me because they did, albeit not to tears. Perhaps they were a little on the stolid side for my tastes. If you’re even remotely interested in how to construct a decent short story, though, you should read this guy.

You can read an extract from the book here.

***

Ron Rash's family has lived in the southern Appalachian Mountains since the mid-1700's, and it is this region that is the primary focus of his writing. Rash grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and graduated from Gardner-Webb College and Clemson University.

Rash’s poetry and fiction have appeared in dozens of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Longman Anthology of Southern Literature, Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and Poetry. He has been honoured with many awards, including an NEA Poetry Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, an O. Henry Award, and the James Still Award by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Two of his recent books, Serena and Chemistry, were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His last book of stories, Burning Bright, won the 2010 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, the most lucrative award in the world for short fiction.

Rash currently holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel – Thomas Hardy

Like me Stephen Nelson is a Scottish poet although when you look at our bodies of work we’re really very unalike in most ways—Stephen specialises in visual and concrete poetry (which we talked about in our first conversation) whereas I, much as I hate putting labels on what I do, veer towards the anti-poetic—but where we do find common ground is in our attitude towards writing in dialect, specifically (although, in my case, not entirely) in Scots.

Generally-speaking writing in dialect is frowned upon. It’s one of those many rules people try and foist upon us writers like the “cardinal rule of writing fiction”: show, don't tell. I can see why agents and readers turn up their noses; the former find it hard to sell and the latter find it hard to read and we wouldn’t want to make anyone’s life hard, would we? And yet there are writers who doggedly persist both in prose and poetry and I thought I’d see where Stephen’s experiences dovetailed with my own.

I’m just about to bring out a collection of short stories including four in dialect and I’ve just posted a review of Stephen’s poetry collection Lunar Poems for New Religions which includes four poems in Scots including the long poem ‘Look Up!’ and that seemed as good a place to start as any. A twelve-line poem is one thing; forty pages is something else.

***

JIM: So, Stephen, why did you choose to write ‘Look Up!’ in Scots?

STEPHEN: The experiences and reflections in LOOK UP! were so personal and close to me, I wanted a language that expressed my voice, those experiences, how I sound, how my family sounds to one another, which really is a mix of dialect and English. There’s an ability to move in and out of various tongues according to circumstance. We’re not bound by English or by regional dialect.  So the poem moves in and out of English and regional sounds, with a smattering of proper Scots.

Also, the text is littered with spiritual speak and hippie philosophy, so I wanted a regional dialect to balance that, perhaps bring all the mystical stuff closer to home, closer to domestic, suburban Scotland. The experiences are pretty off the wall, so an ordinary Scots voice allowed me to ground them and perhaps add a touch of humour—you know, here’s this ordinary Joe (or Jock) having all these weird, mental, mystical, often drug induced psychic encounters and unitive experiences. It’s funny.

JIM: I got the idea that you were going for an everyman here but it’s always a little worrying when accents, especially working class accents, are used because they sound funny. That’s what the BBC used to do. You’d have the newscasters with their Received Pronunciation but if you have a deliveryman he’d be a Cockney or a northerner and it really wasn’t until the fifties with the rise in popularity of kitchen sink dramas that the workingman was given something meaningful to say.

STEPHEN: Well yes, it's worrying if someone is taking the piss out of the accent or demeaning an individual for having that accent. But here the humour lies in the contrast between everyday speech and the language of mystical experience. You can't deny there's a gap there and the bridging of the gap is amusing enough for me, without being in the least bit mocking.

JIM: Understood. For my part I’ve always associated accents with honesty. Everyone around me spoke with an accent—be it my parents’ Lancashire twang (which they held onto despite living the majority of their lives in Scotland) or the various Scots accents around me—these were real people, people I could relate to. I’m fond of quoting William McIlvanney here when he said, “Scots is English in its underwear. It's difficult to be pretentious in a language like that.” That’s the thing about working class accents: these belonged to people like me who never pretended to be anything other than what they were and if they did they’d soon get put in their place.

Talking about the voice of the people obviously makes me think of Robert Burns who was definitely a man of the people. Burns was a big thing at my school—I even won a prize for my project on him during Primary Six—but his Scots felt like a foreign language to me and I think that’s why I’ve struggled with the likes of Hugh MacDiarmid and his synthetic Scots. Thoughts?

STEPHEN: Burns is foreign to me, too—well, not foreign, more distant in time. My great grandparents on my mother’s side spoke something closer to Burns’s language, and elements of that have filtered through the generations and been diluted, till now, with my niece and nephew, it seems almost lost. My mother is still a link to old Scots however.

When I started reading poetry again in my late twenties, I went to MacDiarmid, and enjoyed his first book [Annals of the Five Senses], which is very lyrical, although I definitely needed the glossary. I think his project failed in terms of language and literature, but it kick-started a nationalism which might bear fruit if we get independence. Something about his synthetic Scots makes me cringe a little now, although I admire his political aspirations and how he created the language in an attempt to re-establish a true Scottish identity.

JIM: I have to throw my hands up and say I’ve read very little MacDiarmid apart from his most famous poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’. He was never taught at school. Apart from Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson (at Primary School) I never read a single Scottish poet until I was working and could afford to buy my own stuff, although I’m pleased to see that things are changing now that pupils sitting Higher English from 2014/15 will have to answer compulsory questions on works by a variety of Scottish authors. Now I think about it I can only remember two novelists we covered, Robert Louis Stevenson again (Kidnapped) in Primary Four and John Buchan (The Watcher by the Threshold) in Second Year at the Academy.

So, if not Burns then, who were the Scottish writers that most influenced you? (I’m thinking here of those who chose to write to some degree in Scots.)

STEPHEN: Well, now we’re getting to writers who reflect a genuine contemporary central belt Scottishness, particularly Glaswegian writers like James Kelman and Tom Leonard. It’s not Scots in any traditional sense, but it’s part of the sound I hear around me. I read Leonard before I started LOOK UP! with a view to allowing something of his sound into the poem, but ultimately I had to reject it because it was too closed, too political, too reflective of a social milieu which wasn’t appropriate to the poem’s concerns with cosmic themes and its links to San Francisco and Manchester drug cultures in the 60s and early 90s. It’s the Glasgow writers I love and admire, though. I can’t say Burns or any traditional Scots writers have influenced me at all, although I have to mention Ian Hamilton Finlay, not in this context for his concrete poetry, but for his early short stories, which are really lovely and gentle, and his first verse collections, The Dancers Inherit the Party and Glasgow Beasts An A Burd, which was written in dialect [in 1961, so he really was a pioneer] and is really lovely. Beyond dialect writers, my main influences are friends and contemporaries like Peter Manson and nick-e melville.

Allotment Fox

see me
wan time
ah wis a fox
an wis ah sleekit! ah
gaed slinkin
                    heh
an snappin
                    yeh
the blokes
aa sayed ah wis a GREAT fox
aw nae kiddin
ah wis pretty good
had a whole damn wood
in them days
hen

Ian Hamilton Finlay

JIM: Kelman I only came to in the past ten years. William McIlvanney was probably the first writer who used contemporary Scots whose work made me sit up and go, “Oh aye.” Laidlaw was the first of his books that I read. I reread it back in 2009 and realised it’s a far better book than I realised at the time; it was 1977 and I was only eighteen and couldn’t read books fast enough.

Tom Leonard was a big influence on me though. In his poem ‘100 Differences Between Poetry and Prose’ he writes ‘John Menzies doesn’t stock poetry’ and yet the amusing thing is that that’s exactly where I bought my copy of Intimate Voices which, of course, included his famous Glasgow Poems.

Tom Leonard - The Good Thief - from Six Glasgow Poems

That would’ve been about 1984 and it made a big impression on me. In an interview he wrote:

People make the mistake of saying that art should be in the language of communication, but the language of communication is not the language of Art. The language of art is a language in itself, that’s what I believe. So if someone writes in the language of art, it might be in a language that only two thousand people speak, but it’s still universal. The language of art is universal, but it doesn’t have to be a universal language of information: it is universal because it’s about the universal person.

What do you think about this?

STEPHEN: Yes all language can be the language of art, including invented language and pure sound. Glossolalia is art if you find it so, but no one understands it. It can still move you, uplift you, and means something spiritually and psychologically. If you invent the language and no one else speaks it, but you turn it into a poem, something will happen, if the hearer is receptive. Have you heard Jaap Blonk recite Kurt Schwitters? Or Bob Cobbing? Such depth and resonance in a voice, in a sound! And it’s language! Communication. Scots is full of pure sound. Listen to a drunk man in a Glasgow pub on a Saturday night! You won’t have a clue what he’s saying but the sounds from his voice are full of expression. Glaswegian drunks are sound poets!

Blonk performs Ursonate with real-time typography (see essay)

JIM: Ah, now, sound poetry. That’s another form of poetry I struggle with because I’ve never really taken to poetry as performance although I do still to this day remember one of my classmates—a boy called Neil with a particularly gruff accent—standing in front of the class and giving a most impressive (if somewhat aggressive) recitation of ‘Scots Wha Hae’; I’ve never heard it read better. I know Schwitters mostly for his art but I’ve read some of his sound poetry (I suppose that defeats the purpose); Cobbing is just a name to me; Blonk I’d never heard of. But I do see where you’re coming from here. I don’t suppose it’s any different to listening to someone sing in a foreign language. I’ve always been fond of Schoenberg’sPierrot Lunaire which employs the sprechstimme technique which is an expressionist vocal technique between singing and speaking. I don’t really care what the words mean.

Talking about Schoenberg I was interested in what Peter Manson had to say about his own serial poetry.

My accent of spoken English (I come from Glasgow) has twelve vowel and diphthong phonemes, and the poems are written in groups of twelve words, with each of these twelve phonemes being represented exactly once in the main stressed syllable of a word in each group. – A note on serial poetry

[T]he actual structure of the poem only exists when its spoken by somebody who has an accent similar to mine ... [pause] ... So I think there are interesting political consequences of that. The poem in the mouth of an RP [Received Pronunciation] speaker, let's say, the words are the same, but the structure of the poem disappears completely ... 'cause you have a different phonemic structure. – Peter Manson His Lament

There’re two poems online, ‘Serial Drunken Boat Fragment’ and ‘Campaign for Really Authentic Poetry’ and what I found interesting about these is that he chose not to use an eye dialect when writing. But he is acutely conscious of the sound of the words nevertheless.

Up until this point we’ve focused on Scots but, of course, the world is full of different accents and dialects. Do you not think it strange though that so few people write in dialect bar the Scots? I mean, when was the last work you read in a Yorkshire dialect?

STEPHEN: That could be a political thing, the need to voice an identity normally submerged in another culture. I don’t read too much dialect poetry, but I used to listen to Linton Kwesi Johnson—again that need to free a voice historically suppressed by colonialism.

JIM: I’ve always shied away from any kind of political stance although there are those who would argue—and not unreasonably so—that’s it’s impossible to be Scottish and not be political. I don’t know about you but my hackles rise when someone on TV talks about the UK and calls it England. I’ve no problems with Larkin being called a British poet but Edwin Morgan is a Scottish poet. A few years ago I decided to do an article on dialect and went searching for fellow poets and writers to quiz and was very disappointed to find very few of them. I ended up using the Trinidadian poet, Miguel Browne to make my point although I’ve since discovered the Black Country poet, Liz Berry:

'Birmingham Roller' by Liz Berry (text here)

I’ve also found this site which has a few English dialect poems: A Celebration of English Dialect in England and if you want to hear my parents’ accent try this site: A Collection of Lancashire Dialect Poems, Photographs, Phrases & Sayings from around the Wigan area by Jeff Unsworth and to this day I’m still prone to definite article reduction when I speak (as in the classic ‘Goin’ t’Mill).

That said there are loads of examples of Scottish writers who’ve dabbled with dialect writing.

It might seem to others that those Scots who do write in dialect have a chip on their shoulder and are just making life difficult for their readers. What if the shoe was on the other foot? Here’s a wee passage from my short story ‘Monsters’ which is written in a New York dialect. How easy do you find it to read?

Whad’s a monsta anyway? Prick up yer ears, heah comes da English lesson: da woid comes from da Latin monstrum—meanin’ pawtent, which’s like a warnin’ prophecy kinduva ting—you tink I don’t read books?—which’s exactly whad Andrew believed his monstas ta be, notes from one parta his brain to anudda. Da human psyche’s a connivin’ sonuvabitch, sly, resilient and adaptable. Don’t toin yer back on it. When one meansa communication’s denied, anudda steps up ta da plate. Andrew’d lost da ability ta ‘heah’ dese warnin’s but da verces wouldn’t go away: dey was gonna have der say in whadeva way dey could. If da highway was closed dey’d scoot awf down some back roads. Now, is dat monstrous or ingenious?

STEPHEN: I don’t find that too difficult. It’s about tuning the ear rather than relying on the eye or normal patterns of language imprinted on the brain. How many people actually talk the way English is normally written? Poetry can make the page sing the song or sound the cry of the poet, not reflect some standardised version of English. Dialect writing is just one way to do that. Some dialects we can really hear, others we can’t. I think a lot of people can hear Scots. It doesn’t take too much effort to tune in. If the meaning of certain words are unknown, look them up. It’s no different than being presented with English words we don’t know. Besides, the sound of words is expression enough sometimes. Meaning doesn’t have to be always “got”. Sometimes it’s more about resonance or frequency. Or the feel of a certain tone.

There are claims too that certain writing in Scots is twee, like the Tartan shops along the Royal Mile, but this is down to the authority of the writer. No one could accuse Kelman of being twee, but I’ve read a lot of contemporary writing which is just too cosy or cloying or even cringe-worthy. So Scots to me isn’t twee per se, it depends on the power of the writing and how the language is employed. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.

JIM: Absolutely. I’m not daft—I realise that we’re a very small country, albeit one with a bit of an attitude, but why should a redneck sitting in his rocking chair on his porch staring out over the Mississippi not think of me as a some kilted, ginger-headed bloke living off haggis and whisky? It’s inevitable that we view each other in some stereotypical fashion; I bet most kids in America base their entire knowledge of Scotsmen on Groundskeeper Willie (who actually hails from Orkney so he’s not exactly your typical Scot, is he?)

Personally I’d be appalled if Scott’s dropped that bloke in the kilt from the front of their boxes (even though I can’t stand porridge). It’s a part of our heritage and something to be proud of but Scott’s has been on the go since 1880. We embrace change on the whole but not entirely; there’re certain—let’s call them emblems—that people of all cultures like to hang onto. That said, I hate the mascot they’re using for the 2014 Commonwealth Games: Clyde the thistle man. Truly awful. But change is inevitable. Even in my short life I’ve seen a marked shift in the way people speak. The accent is still there but the dialect is fading. Glaswegian is being replaced by Scottish English. I’m just wondering how long it will be before a poem like ‘Look Up!’ will become as hard to read as, say, ‘When Malindy Sings’ by the African-American poet Paul Dunbar:

G'way an' quit dat noise, Miss Lucy—
    Put dat music book away;
What's de use to keep on tryin'?
    Ef you practise twell you're gray,
You cain't sta't no notes a-flyin'
    Lak de ones dat rants and rings
F'om de kitchen to de big woods
    When Malindy sings.

STEPHEN: If we do, and I don’t think we ever will because language is too fluid, always moving and evolving, the greatest loss would be the voice of community or family. Community has to be open to outside influence in order to grow, which is why the sound of a community changes, but that sound is distinct from family to family, even within a small radius. To say that Burns is proper Scots, or Leonard is the sound of modern Glasgow isn’t the whole story. It’s a choir, an orchestra of polished tones and clanging symbols. But the sound of a family or community comes from a heart and the poet must be allowed to make the sound which expresses the collective heart or mind of a particular group of people in order to connect to that universal humanity we share.

Listening to the sounds of the voices around us can be a healing thing. In one section of LOOK UP!, the narrator finds healing in the arms of his family and church community, and it's their songs and stories which comfort him and the consolations of community voice which nurse him back to life. Dialect can be an expression of that closeness and affection and it would be a terrible thing if we lost that to a homogenised voice that didn't adequately convey a tenderness for who we are and where we've come from.

JIM: I get that. I’ve only been out of the UK twice—once to the States and once to Ireland—and both times when I stepped off the plane and heard the familiar Scottish accents around me I felt I was home; there was something heartening about those sounds; as you say, not so much the words as the sounds. I don’t have a Scottish accent—don’t ask me why but I adopted the accent of my parents—and I had a miserable childhood being the ‘English bastard’ at school (no one would believe I’d been born in Glasgow and I can’t say I blame them) but I still find being around Scots speakers comforting, reassuring. I write in Glaswegian on occasion because that’s the voice I hear in my head. My story ‘Zeitgeist’ was inspired by a colleague from Kilmarnock—which is in the heart of Burns Country—when on a bus he turned to me and said, “Ma wife says Ah'm too serious.” That was the voice I heard in my head so why not put that on the page? To do anything else would’ve been dishonest.

***

Hope you enjoyed that wee exchange. Let me leave you with my poem ‘Bloody Foreigners’ (the “translation” is part of the poem) and Stephen’s poem ‘So High So Hung Up’.

Bloody Foreigners


Ah went intae this Paki's
n asked the auld dear servin
fur ginga n dya know whit
she tried t palm off oan me?

Ginger fur cookin. She wis
frae England. Ah said are yoo
mental? Gie us a canna
Irn Bru ya stupid twat.

I nearly got ma arse felt
by her man but ah wis oot
o thur like a bat oota
hell wioot payin n aw.

Am ah a jammy bugger ur whit?


Friday, 8th February 2008




Translation

I went into this corner shop which happened to be owned by a gentleman of Pakistani extraction and asked the elderly lady serving behind the counter for a can of a carbonated soft drink. Unaware that the local euphemism for this is 'ginger' the lady mistakenly offered me a packet of the spice which I declined and asked after the state of her mental health. Realising the woman was from south of the border I was more specific in my request and used a brand name, Irn Bru so there would be no further confusion. Unfortunately I let slip a disparaging remark and one of her male relatives came to her assistance and tried to physically assault me however I managed to make my escape but, in the flurry, I omitted to pay for my can.




So High, So Hung Up

1.

Gouchin oan E in the
shittiest nightclub
imaginable cheap beer n
slapper sex in silver sequined mini-
dress dress up dress doon
blissful slabs ae flesh
quiverin roon God’s grandeur.
Music’s a beist n a
beat wi a burd screamin
the grace ae romance n
the pride ae her sex wi us
a random dance ae molecules.
O’er ma heid I feel
the love ae the place
n I want tae scream fir love
the love ae aw that’s floatin
in the sea above n the sky
below … love fur the
jellied cunt in the corner
the puir cow wi the squinty eyeball
the hard bastard wi the blade in his jaiket.
Noo, twenty years on,
I pity every beetle
I crush and flush doon the pan
wi every other ounce ae shit n piss
wrapped in a shroud ae
soft quilted velvet
— ah the bliss ae the world.


2.

Trippin oan Acid in a high rise
wi a couple ae guys and a lassie
in it fir a laugh but me wi ridiculous
pretensions ae highest yoga tantra
n astral elevation possibly a vision
ae God …
Leavin that aside, the ither day I
bought a book on LSD research and
contacted a transpersonal psychotherapist.
Nae acid flashbacks, nae drug enduced
schizoid behaviour (as yet) but a
history ae Kundalini
awakenin n several warm spots
in ma body tender n sweet as
marshmallow n jist so incredibly
poignant aw ae it.
I see yon acid trip n think
ae the lassie how she gave me
an incredible hard-on wi wild
Babylonian fantasies whirlin in
ma brain n Shiva lingam worship
wrappin itsel roon the high rise
so wired oan the drug
so constrained by perinatal
neurosis
fuck it mother
fuck it father.
In the book, subjects experienced
hours ae oceanic sex
reported visions ae
Babylonian orgies
acquired a taste for the forbidden
the exotic
the perverse.
And tae think I wis brought up in the
Plymouth Brithren!

A sibling may be the keeper of one's identity, the only person with the keys to one's unfettered, more fundamental self. - Marian Sandmaier

I have mixed feelings about this book. When people say stuff like that I usually assume that what they mean is, “I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it as much as I might have.” That’s not really the case here. What I mean is that the book made me feel a lot of different things at the same time. It’s like one of those blended fruit drinks—5 Alive jumps to mind—that have too many flavours and confuse people like me with unrefined palettes who expect orange-coloured things to taste orangey. This is as much as I knew about this book before I sat down to read it:

Lorenzo Cuni is a fourteen-year-old loner. His wealthy parents think he is away on a school skiing trip, but, in fact, he has stowed away in a forgotten cellar. He plans to live in perfect isolation for a week, keeping the adult world at bay.

The blurb actually contains ten more words, albeit in their own paragraph, but I stopped reading after the above so when what that second paragraph promised did happen I was genuinely surprised. I didn’t pay too much attention to the cover either which might’ve also given me a clue. All I saw was a silhouette of a boy with something vaguely similar to an hourglass hollowed out which I took to be symbolic of the ‘true’ Lorenzo.

There’s a fourteen-year-old boy inside me right now. Okay, maybe not exactly fourteen-year-old but someone teetering between puberty and adolescence. I wouldn’t say he represents the ‘real’ me but he’s certainly an important part of me. Not sure who was on the inside when I was actually fourteen but by then, like Lorenzo, I’d realised that appearances invariably are deceptive so the following made total sense to me:

One morning I was at home with a fake headache and I saw a documentary on television about insects that mimic other insects.
        Somewhere, in the tropics, lives a fly that imitates wasps. He has four wings, just like the other flies, but he keeps them one on top of the other, so that they look like two. He has a black and yellow striped belly, antennae and bulbous eyes and even a fake stinger. He can’t hurt you, he’s a nice insect, but dressed up as a wasp, the birds, the lizards, even human beings fear him. He can mosey into a wasp nest, one of the most dangerous and well-protected places in the world, and go unrecognised.
        I had been going about it the wrong way.
        Here’s what I had to do.
        Imitate the dangerous ones.
        I wore the same things the others wore. Adidas trainers, jeans with holes in them, a black hoodie. I messed up the parting in my hair and let it grow long. I even wanted to get my ear pierced but my mother forbade me. To make up for it, for Christmas, my parents gave me a scooter. The most popular one.

[…]

        The fly had managed to trick them all, integrating perfectly with the waspian society. They thought I was one of them. That I was all right.

It doesn’t make him the most popular kid in school but it does take the pressure off both at school and at home because his parents worry about him not fitting in and greet any news that things might be improving for their son with whatever support they think he needs, be it a hug, a smile or a top-of-the line scooter; they’re rich, they can afford it.

Lorenzo’s not a stupid boy though. He realises that it’s all an act and the only time he can relax and be himself is when he’s on his own. The prospect of what he sees as a life of constant pretence looming in front of him fills him with dread. Acting like a ‘wasp’ doesn’t make you a wasp. He still hasn’t been assimilated into any of the cliques he pines to be a part of like the one comprising Alessia Roncato, Oscar Tommasi, Riccardo Dobosz and the Sumerian:

They were the Fantastic Four and I was the Silver Surfer.

Spider-Man would’ve been a better example (he tried to join the FF in The Amazing Spider-Man #1) but he’s young, what does he know? The thing about this particular circle at school is that Lorenzo’s realised that they’re just like him—flies pretending to be wasps—but he has no idea how to communicate to them that he’s a… what shall we call him?... kindred spirit. He discovers that they’re going on a skiing trip and on a whim when he gets home he announces to his mother that Alessia Roncato has invited him to go skiing with her and her friends in Cortina. This news reduced his mother to tears of joy and suddenly he finds himself unable to tell her the truth so he devises a cunning plan; he will spend the week in the basement. It’s not a perfect plan—hey, he’s only fourteen and doesn’t think everything through (how, for example, will he cope with his mother’s insistence on talking to Alessia’s mother?)—but it’s a plan. One thing at a time, okay?

Of course for there to be any story here something has to go wrong. And that’s what those ten words I forgot to read would’ve let me in on if only I hadn’t already made my mind up about the book:

Then a visit from his estranged half-sister, Olivia, changes everything.

Enter the antagonist only she’s not really an antagonist; she’s more of a foil, a thorn in his side. Olivia, we learn at the start of the book, is nine years older than him and he’s barely seen her throughout his life. Their father goes to visit his daughter but she’s kept (or chooses to keep herself) at a distance from his new family. So, when she phones Lorenzo once he’s settled in the basement, he’s naturally suspicious:

         ‘Well. Sorry if I’m interrupting you. I got your number from Aunt Roberta. Listen, I wanted to ask you something. Do you know if your mother and Dad are at home?’
        It’s a trap!
        I had to be careful. Maybe Mum had suspected something and was using Olivia to work out where I really was. But Olivia and Mum, as far as I knew, didn’t talk to each other. ‘I don’t know . . . I’m away for ski week.’
         ‘Oh . . .’ Her voice was disappointed. ‘Well, you must be having fun.’

He really need not be concerned. She only wants to know when his parents will be out so she can come over and rummage for a box of her stuff but she doesn’t share this with Lorenzo this over the phone. The first he learns about it is when she turns up at the basement door; it’s accessed from outside. That she does is convenient because she can pose as Alessia’s mum but skipping over that bit of lazy plotting the real meat of the story begins when, after doing Lorenzo this huge favour, she informs him that she’ll also be staying the week.

This could have gone a number of different ways. Especially since they’re nothing alike. Lorenzo’s awkward, a little immature, introverted, private and actually a bit of a mummy’s boy. Apart from a few times when he was too young to remember the two have only been in each other’s company once since, two years earlier and this was what he took away from that encounter:

I had expected Olivia to be ugly and with an unpleasant face like Cinderella’s stepsisters. Instead she was incredibly beautiful, one of those girls that as soon as you look at them your face burns red and everybody knows you think she is beautiful, and if she talks to you, you don’t know what to do with your hands, you don’t even know how to sit down. She had lots of curly blonde hair that fell all the way down her back and grey eyes, and she was sprinkled with freckles, just like me. She was tall and had big, wide breasts. She could have been the queen of a medieval kingdom.

[…]

From what I could understand Olivia was crazy. She pretended to be a photographer but she just got into trouble. She’d failed her high-school exams and run away from home a couple of times, and then in Paris she’d had an affair with Faustini, my father’s accountant.

Naïve and inexperienced Lorenzo might be but he’s not stupid and very quickly he realises something else about his half-sister: she has a drug problem. And no drugs. And this was going to be a problem. Mitch Albom wrote, “Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.” Well these two are both family and strangers and Lorenzo’s got a lot of growing up to do. The Olivia he saw two years earlier is not the same woman he has to deal with now:

        Olivia was sitting on the edge of the settee, all sweaty, jiggling her legs anxiously and staring at the floor. She had taken her cardigan off. She was wearing a saggy, dark blue vest and you could see her boobs hanging down. She was so thin, all bones, with long narrow feet, a thin neck like a greyhound and wide shoulders, and her arms . . .
        What did she have in the middle of her arms?
        Purple spots studded with little red dots.

They don’t talk much. That doesn’t mean stuff isn’t said. Questions are asked, answered offered and that’s usually it. Neither is much of a conversationalist. If one doesn’t feel like explaining no one’s going to press them for information. She starts to go through withdrawal symptoms and her half-brother simply has to cope. Which he does and they do eventually have a moment and then it’s over. Flash forward ten years and Lorenzo’s in a café in Cividale del Friuli—the rest of the action takes place in Rome—and he’s about to see his sister for the first time since that eventful week.

Families are strange. I remember as a young boy of about ten a man knocking on our backdoor and asking to see my mum. Turns out he was my Uncle Harry—one of many uncles and aunts, I should say, but the first I’d ever met up until that point—but as far as I was concerned he was a complete and utter stranger. What was I supposed to feel for him? So I really got this book.

It has the feel of a YA novel but it’s not really. In the UK the book’s being published by Canongate. When they released The Radleys last year they also brought out a version under the Walker imprint aimed at a younger audience but I don’t see them doing that here. In the States the book came out under Grove/Atlantic’s Black Cat imprint which I thought might be aimed at young adults but not so apparently. The imprint’s been around for a while but only recently revived and the novels they’re publishing, according to Judy Hottenson, Grove vice-president of marketing and publicity, are going to be "in the Grove tradition of edgy, unusual fiction. They wouldn't sell as well in hardcover, but they're perfect in paperback for a younger, hipper audience. We think the market is calling out for something like this." Canongate’s already got a reputation for being a bit young and hip so the book’s a good-enough fit there but there’s nothing in the book that a real fourteen-year-old would be perturbed by. And there could’ve been. Probably should’ve been. In that respect Ammaniti pulls his punches as if he were writing for a younger audience. Just compare Renton going cold turkey in Trainspotting:

Relinquishing junk. Stage one, preparation. For this you will need one room which you will not leave. Soothing music. Tomato soup, ten tins of. Mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold. Ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of. Magnesia, milk of, one bottle. Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins. Mineral water, Lucozade, pornography. One mattress. One bucket for urine, one for feces and one for vomitus. One television and one bottle of Valium, which I've already procured from my mother, who is, in her own domestic and socially acceptable way also a drug addict. And now I'm ready. All I need is one final hit to soothe the pain while the Valium takes effect.

In this respect Lorenzo gets off easy. And so does Olivia. And us readers.

The book’s been generally well-received and rightly so. It’s a thought-provoking book with an engaging protagonist. The biggest gripe people have is its length. The book’s about 25,000 words long and Olivia doesn’t turn up until halfway through that so their story only takes about 13,000 words and that’s really not enough time to do their relationship justice. Still, this is no reason not to read the book and if, like me, you’re a fan of the novella this is definitely one to add to your collection.

***

Niccolò Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He made his debut in 1994 with the novel Branchie. He is the author of three novels, as well as a collection of short stories. The three books which have been released in the English language and have been translated by Jonathan Hunt are I'm Not Scared (Io non ho paura), Steal You Away (Ti prendo e ti porto via) and The Crossroads (Come Dio comanda). At thirty-four, he was the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Viareggio-Repaci prize for I'm Not Scaredwhich has been translated into twenty languages. All his books, including Me and You (directed by none other than Bernardo Bertolucci), have been adapted for the cinema.

I’ll leave you with the trailer for the film, worth watching if only to hear Bowie perform Space Oddity in Italian.

Inspiration is a happy convergence of random factors, which if you are lucky, you notice and then can use. And it helps if you have a husband who sends you interesting links! – Ruth Ozeki

This is a book about time and being, about cats—both real and figurative—and crows—both literal and mythological— about Japan and Canada and America too a little; it’s about life and death; about war and peace; about Buddhism, philosophy and quantum mechanics; about superheroes and living ghosts; about coming of age and dying with dignity; it’s about the interchangeable roles of readers and writers; about disasters both natural and manmade; it’s about family and duty, grief, honour and shame. It’s about 400 pages long but since it’s really two novels masquerading as one it’s no longer than it needs to be considering how much is packed into it; it has six appendixes and 165 footnotes and it kept me occupied and interested for a good week and despite the fact things got pretty complicated towards the end and she didn’t tie things up the way I would’ve liked (or would’ve done) I came away from the book with a sense of completeness even if every question wasn’t answered and wasn’t likely ever to be answered except in some parallel universe where all questions get answered. I mean, seriously, how did the French diary get from the pilot’s lunchbox to his remains box?

Naoko Yasutani is almost fifteen when she begins writing her story. She’s Japanese, born to Japanese parents, but has lived most of her life up in Sunnyvale, California:

[E]verything was great and we were just cruising along, except for the fact that we were living in a total dreamland called the Dot-Com Bubble, and when it burst, Dad’s company went bankrupt, and he got sacked, and we lost our visas and had to come back to Japan, which totally sucked because not only did Dad not have a job, but he’d also taken a big percentage of his big fat salary in stock options so suddenly we didn’t have any savings either, and Tokyo’s not cheap. It was a complete bust. Dad was sulking around like a jilted lover, and Mom was grim and tight and righteous, but at least they identified as Japanese and still spoke the language fluently. I, on the other hand, was totally fucked, because I identified as American, and even though we always spoke Japanese at home, my conversational skills were limited to basic, daily-life stuff like where’s my allowance, and pass the jam, and Oh please please please don’t make me leave Sunnyvale.

Nao (pronounced ‘now’) tells her story in the present tense but the present tense is a bit of a bugger. You feel as if I’m talking to you in real time just now, don’t you? The fact is that I’m writing this in a flat in Scotland on March 31st. We’re in completely separate time zones and probably in different countries. So when Ruth finds Nao’s book in a Hello Kitty lunchbox on a Canadian beach several years later it’s hard for her not read Nao’s story as if the girl is talking to her in real time especially as Nao has a habit of addressing her reader directly:

Here’s a thought: If I were a Christian, you would be my God.

Don’t you see? Because the way I talk to you is the way I think some Christian people talk to God. I don’t mean praying exactly, because when you pray you usually want something, or at least that’s what Kayla said. She used to pray for stuff and then tell her parents exactly what she’d prayed for, and usually she got what she wanted. They were probably trying to make her believe in God, but I happen to know it wasn’t working.

Anyway, I don’t really think you’re God or expect you to grant me wishes or anything. I just appreciate it that I can talk to you and you’re willing to listen. But I better hurry up or I’ll never catch up to where I’m supposed to be.

She’s nothing if not chatty as you might expect any fifteen-year-old Japanese girl to be and, yes, she witters on about a lot of the things you’d expect a fifteen-year-old to go on about (although, oddly enough, not so much about boys) but she’s got more pressing concerns: the first is her suicidal dad and the second is the fact she’s being bullied at school. The Japanese attitudes towards and approaches to suicide (a major social problem in Japan – see Japan: ending the culture of the 'honourable' suicide) and what I’ve called bullying (the Japanese word for what happens to Nao is ijime—see Ijime: A Social Illness of Japan) are fascinating. Quite, quite different to what happens in the west. By the time she sits down to write her story—in a French maid fetish café in Akiba Electricity Town of all places (see Maid Cafés – The Expanding Industry in Japan)—the second issue has pretty much resolved itself but only because she stops going to school; her father is still a concern since he can’t find a job (not that he’s tried very hard) and spends all his time at home moping around, reading manga comics or making origami insects from pages of his old philosophy books.

Salvation comes in odd packages sometimes. In Nao’s case hers comes in the diminutive shape of her great-grandmother, Jiko, a one-hundred-and-four-year-old (so she says) Zen Buddhist nun. After spending her summer holiday with Jiko in her temple in Miyagi, a prefecture located in the Tohoku region in the northeastern part of Japan, Nao begins to see life in a completely different way. The prefectural home to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is located just south of Miyagi, by the way, so you see where this might be going. And that’s what Ruth wonders. Was Nao there at the time of the tsunami? Is that how her lunchbox with its precious cargo started its travels? The problem is, the dates don’t quite add up.

Ruth takes her time reading Nao’s diary. She resists the urge to rush through it and tries to read it in real time as best she can.

Of course, the entries were undated, so there was no way of really knowing how slow or fast that might have been, but there were clues: the changing hues of ink, as well as shifts in the density or angle of the handwriting, which seemed to indicate breaks in time or mood. If she studied these, she might be able to break up the diary into hypothetical intervals, and even assign numbers to them, and then pace her reading accordingly. If she sensed the girl was on a roll, she could allow herself to read further and more quickly, but if it felt like the pace of the writing was slowing down, then she would slow her reading down, too, or stop altogether. This way she wouldn’t end up with an overly compressed or accelerated sense of the girl’s life and its unfolding, nor would she run the risk of wasting too much time. She would be able to balance her reading of the diary with all the work she still needed to do on her own memoir.

The diary isn’t the only thing the lunchbox contains. There’s also a watch, some letters in Japanese and a diary-of-sorts in French. In the breaks from reading she ropes in some of her neighbours to help with the translations; she lives on a remote island in the middle of Desolation Sound, British Columbia where everyone knows everyone’s business. Benoit, who worked at the local dump, takes on the challenge of the French diary; Kimi, the wife of a restaurateur in the nearest town of any size to where Ruth and her husband live, says she’ll translate the letters. Everyone’s keen to know what’s going on and try as she might she simply can’t keep her discovery a secret. Her own writing is not going well, though. She’s been trying to work on a memoir but can’t make any progress especially now she has this distraction.

She trawls through the Internet for information but there is precious little. Nothing on Nao at all—surprising although a possible explanation is provided near the end of the book—and then an unexpected discovery:

The website belonged to a professor of psychology at Stanford University, a Dr. Rongstad Leistiko. Dr. Leistiko was doing research on first-person narratives of suicide and self-killing. He had posted an excerpt from a letter, written to him by one of his informants, a man by the name of “Harry.”

Nao’s father was named Haruki Yasutani. He’d been a Japanese computer engineer who once lived in Sunnyvale, California, and worked in Silicon Valley during the dot-com days. Could this be the same man? Suddenly she realises that there might be a way of getting in touch with Nao and she writes an urgent e-mail to the professor. Why urgent? Because Nao has been talking about killing herself and Ruth is so caught up in the present tense of Nao’s narrative that the slippage of time in the real world has quite bypassed her and it’s not until her husband points this out that she’s brought crashing down to reality with a thud. Perhaps both Nao and her father are long dead, if not by their own hands then as a result of the tsunami. Or maybe not. A bit like Schrödinger’s cat. If she reads on she’ll find out one way or the other. And you’d think a woman with a cat called Schrödinger would know that; that said the cat’s been referred to as ‘the Pest’ for so long (or ‘Pesto’ if they’re feeling affectionate) that she’s probably forgotten that. Then again how come there’s a Japanese Jungle Crow sitting outside her house? What’s he after?

The book is a work of metafiction. Saying that is enough to put people off reading your book—I know that from personal experience—but writers will love this book. In an interview in The Guardian Ruth Ozeki was asked:

Nao's diary is described as a "message in a bottle". Is the fictional author Ruth's discovery of the diary a metaphor for how a story is born?

That's exactly right. As a writer you wait around for inspiration; this book is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being; it's about the character creating a novelist. – Anita Sethi, ‘Ruth Ozeki: “This book is about the character creating a novelist”’, The Guardian, 7 March 2013

There are a lot of biographical elements in the book: like Ruth, Ruth Ozeki lives on an island in British Columbia; like Nao, she’s a Japanese-American writer who did experience a cultural shock when she went to Japan herself; like Jiko, she’s a Zen Buddhist priest and from the way she describes him in interview her husband (the artist Oliver Kellhammer) sounds not unlike Ruth’s Oliver. And they also have a cat. All of this kind of stuff is familiar ground if you’re a writer yourself. What probably you’ll find harder to relate to is the fact she’d already submitted her book to her editor after having rewritten it “four of five times,” she says, “with different readers in mind” since 2006 (although its origins date back to 1999)—this being her third novel—and then, after the Tōhoku tsunami hit in 2011, she withdrew it and rewrote it again:

“I just threw away half the book. … It felt like such a relief.” – Felicia R. Lee, ‘What the Tide Brought In’, The New York Times, 12 March 2013

I’ve only heard of John Irving doing that kind of thing but I suppose there must be others. Takes a certain kind of writer to be able to do that, I can tell you. I’ve no idea what the book was like before but her final solution was inspired, a literary novel that’s not only readable and relevant but is also a page-turner. (Small point: in this interview she says she says she was was about to submit it to her editor.)

It’s not without its issues though. In the book, for example, she talks about gyres. The word was new to me:

“There are eleven great planetary gyres,” he said. “Two of them flow directly toward us from Japan and diverge just off the BC coastline. The smaller one, the Aleut Gyre, goes north toward the Aleutian Islands. The larger one goes south. It’s sometimes called the Turtle Gyre, because the sea turtles ride it when they migrate from Japan to Baja.”

[…]

“Each gyre orbits at its own speed,” he continued. “And the length of an orbit is called a tone. Isn’t that beautiful? Like the music of the spheres. The longest orbital period is thirteen years, which establishes the fundamental tone. The Turtle Gyre has a half tone of six and a half years. The Aleut Gyre, a quarter tone of three. The flotsam that rides the gyres is called drift. Drift that stays in the orbit of the gyre is considered to be part of the gyre memory. The rate of escape from the gyre determines the half-life of drift . . .”

He picked up the Hello Kitty lunchbox and turned it over in his hands. “All that stuff from people’s homes in Japan that the tsunami swept out to sea? They’ve been tracking it and predicting it will wash up on our coastline. I think it’s just happening sooner than anyone expected.”

Well this book, at times, feels a bit like that. There is just so much stuff thrown into the mix. Just look at my opening paragraph and that doesn’t cover it. I forgot to mention the hentai and the Proust and World War II and the kamikaze pilots and the suicide clubs and the fact that there’s a sudden lurch into magic realism territory near the end of the novel that might confuse a few readers. It’s a lot to take in at once but it’s not so bad when you’re on the shore and every day the tide washes in new and interesting stuff for you to pick through. And that’s how the book works. The tides come in (Nao’s sections) and they go out (in Ruth’s). Bit by bit you know what to hang onto and what to let you. All the stuff about the gyres and the Great Eastern and Great Western Garbage Patches is interesting but once you’ve had your question answered—How might the Hello Kitty lunchbox (and possibly the crow) have found their way from Japan to Canada?—you can move on. Nao is prone to digress too. She says, for example, that she’s going to tell us the story of her great-grandmother:

This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko. She was a nun and a novelist and New Woman of the Taisho era. She was also an anarchist and a feminist who had plenty of lovers, both males and females, but she was never kinky or nasty. And even though I may end up mentioning some of her love affairs, everything I write will be historically true and empowering to women, and not a lot of foolish geisha crap. So if kinky nasty things are your pleasure, please close this book and give it to your wife or co-worker and save yourself a lot of time and trouble.

Well, we do get to learn about Jiko but Nao takes her own sweet time getting round to it so one can feel a bit frustrated, as if you’ve been led on, but she’s like any other fifteen-year-old girl, full of good intentions. Besides, although she dilly-dallies along the way, it’s not as if she’s not talking about interesting stuff. As it happens we actually don’t learn that much about Jiko’s past—the paragraph above covers it nicely—besides, her present is quite enough to get on with; the book really did not need another hundred pages.

All the footnotes are a bit of a bind too but there weren’t many I felt able to skip over. I read this in ebook format and it definitely slowed me down waiting on the damn tablet deciding whether or not it was going to jump to the right page or interpret my stab at the screen as an instruction to turn the page back. These, and the detours Nao feels she needs to take to explain things to us (and Ruth and Oliver, too, to a lesser degree) do slow down the action but all the exposition is necessary. And helpful. About the only part I got lost in was the section on Schrödinger's cat which I’ve read about several times before and I just really don’t have the head for stuff like that.

Bottom line then: the reviews in the tabloids have all been on the positive side— “Bewitching, intelligent and heartbreaking” (Junot Díaz), “deeply moving and thought-provoking” (Madeline Miller), “[i]ngenious and touching” (Philip Pullman), “remarkable and ambitious” ( Jane Hamilton), “[f]unny, heartbreaking, moving and profound” (Doug Johnstone)… and they just go on and on and I’m not going to disagree with any of them. It was all these things. It wasn’t perfect but Zen Buddhists are not big on perfection: It's about connection, not perfection, and I was touched.

***

Ruth Ozeki is an award-winning novelist and filmmaker. She is the author of My Year of Meats (1998) which won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes and Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versaille and All Over Creation (2002) for which she was awarded a 2004 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, as well as the Willa Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction.

She was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, by an American father and a Japanese mother. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College and travelled extensively in Asia. She received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara University.

Ozeki, a frequent speaker on college and university campuses, currently divides her time between New York City and British Columbia, where she lives with her husband, artist, Oliver Kellhammer. She serves on the advisory editorial board of the Asian American Literary Review and on the Creative Advisory Council of Hedgebrook. She practices Zen Buddhism with Zoketsu Norman Fischer, and is the editor of the Everyday Zen website. She was ordained as a Sōtō Zen priest in June, 2010.