Month: May 2010

Nina Allan, ‘Flying in the Face of God’ (2010)

I’ve heard great things about Nina Allan’s fiction, but (as far as I’m aware) this is the first of her stories that I’ve read — and all those great things I’ve heard were correct.

In the world of this story, a process has been developed called the ‘Kushnev drain’ which alters human physiology to allow those who undergo it to travel through space, though they are changed fundamentaly as a result. Anita Schleif is making a film about female ‘fliers’, and in particular her friend Rachel Alvin. That’s the background, but the tale is less concerned with space travel than about the difficulties of dealing with profound personal change.

Anita is very fond of Rachel, and secretly distressed at the prospect of losing her friend, even though Rachel is fulfilling her ambition; the film is at least as much an attempt by Anita to hold on to her friend as it is a product of genuine interest in the subject. Allan also sets up some neat parallels that give the story a satisfying cohesion: Rachel’s single-minded determination to become a flier is not so different from Anita’s desire to keep Rachel in her life however she can;  and the transformation through which Rachel is going is analogous to the mental decline of Anita’s grandmother — both involve the loss of a human self as conventionally understood; so Anita is effectively seeing the two most important people in her life disappear before her eyes, albeit in very different ways.

‘Flying in the Face of God’ is a superb piece of fiction, and you can be sure that I’ll be looking out for more of Nina Allan’s stories in the future.

This story appears in issue 227 of Interzone. Read all my blog posts about that issue here.

Kirsten Reed, The Ice Age (2009)

Kirsten Reed’s debut, The Ice Age, is a short novel (little over 200 pages), an extended snapshot (if there can be such a thing!) of a period in its protagonist’s life – at one and the same time both satisfyingly complete and intriguingly incomplete.

Reed’s narrator is a seventeen-year-old girl (we never find out her name) who had not long been a hitch-hiker when she met Gunther, the older man with whom she now travels around the US, heading nowhere in particular. What might seem to an outsider to be a man taking advantage of a naive young girl is not like that in reality – their relationship is a sort-of friendship, and, at the times it becomes more than that, she is the instigator.

But all is not as well as it seems. The book’s title refers to the idea that the Gulf Stream might slow, causing temperatures to drop abruptly; the girl has heard about this, and decides that she must stay near Gunther if that comes about – so there’s some desperation under the apparently confident exterior, as Gunther represents stability, to which the girl wants to cling. For his part, Gunther knows this can’t go on, and is trying to find some real stability for his companion, by taking her to stay with one of his friends – at least, that’s one way of interpreting it.

What’s particularly striking about The Ice Age is how completely our experience of the story is shaped by Reed’s presentation of the protagonist. We don’t learn about the girl’s past, or why she has taken to the road, which gives a sense that the novel occupies an eternal present. This is further emphasised by the cool, even tone of the girl’s narrative voice, which, to an extent, elides the passage of time (one’s aware, of course, that time is passing in the novel, but only dimly; what length of time that might be doesn’t really register) – giving the reader all the more of a jolt when events suddenly take a darker turn, because it happens so suddenly.

Reed also conveys the complexity of her protagonist very well. In some ways, the girl is highly perceptive and self-aware, recognising even the multiple aspects she presents to the world:

Gunther and I, an item…Gunther and I, just friends. Me, precocious slut, tempting Gunther to nail me. Me, repentant youngster trying like hell to learn some respect for my elder(s) again. (123)

Yet, in other ways, she knows very little – for example, Gunther’s thoughts and motivations remain in large part a closed book to her (and she doesn’t necessarily realise that this is so). It’s this mixture of traits, and the narrative voice, that make the girl so convincing as a character – and that’s a large part of what makes The Ice Age such a fine debut.

Link
Kirsten Reed’s page on Picador.com
Pen Pusher magazine interview with Reed

Links: 6th May

A selection of links on books featured here, and other stuff…

Rhian of It’s a Crime! on Rupture by Simon Lelic, This Bleeding City by Alex Preston, and The Rapture by Liz Jensen.

Views on Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey: Kim of Reading Matters, and Jean Hannah Edelstein.

Victoria Hoyle on Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed.

Views on Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi: Savidge Reads, Dovegreyreader, Stuck-in-a-Book,

Savidge Reads interviews Evie Wyld, who is also blogging at Booktrust, as their current online writer in residence.

The Book Whisperer on her top book club reads (we used to be in the same book club, so I remember the discussions on some of these).

Kamvision on New Model Army by Adam Roberts.

Jenn Ashworth on ‘When the Door Closed, it Was Dark’ by Alison Moore.

Nigel P. Bird on ‘Black Country’ by Joel Lane.

Sharon of Dark Fiction Review on both of the above.

Alex Preston on fiction’s response to financial crisis.

A pair of Nightjars

Alison Moore, ‘When the Door Closed, it Was Dark’ (2010)
Joel Lane, ‘Black Country’ (2010)

A short story is, by its nature, generally more tightly focused than a novel – after all, it has fewer words in which to make its point. This can make some things easier for the shorter form to accomplish: for example, there’s less pressure for a short story to illuminate a wide area of the space it occupies; it can focus more intensely on doing a smaller number of things, and perhaps have a greater impact in doing so.

These thoughts came to my mind when reading the latest chapbooks from Nightjar Press, which are both short, intense bursts of story. ‘When the Door Closed, it Was Dark’ by Alison Moore tells of Tina, a British girl who has travelled to another country to work as an au pair, and finds it hard to adjust to her new surroundings. There’s a palpable sense of menace about this piece, which comes less from images and individual word choices (though it has its share of striking examples; I love this image from when Tina is trying to understand her host family’s rapid conversation: ‘her formal phrases were like wallflowers at a wild party’), than from details of the broader structure. Tina never learns the family members’ names – they’re just ‘Uncle’ or ‘Grandmother’, and so on – which itself makes them more unknowable to her; but, more than this, the whole piece feels like a closed system. We discover barely anything about Tina’s life before the moment of the story; and the accretion of repeated details – the monotonous food, the outside staircase – heightens the feeling that there’s no escape. Moore’s tale is excellent.

‘Black Country’ by Joel Lane is narrated by a police officer who travels back to what was Clayheath (his birthplace, now subsumed into the broader urban landscape of the West Midlands) to investigate a series of strange incidents – the local children are apparently turning violent all of a sudden. Our man is reluctant to return, as he thought he’d left his old life behind; but he seems discontent with even his current circumstances. ‘Black Country’ is a story built on shifting sands, as the actual investigation recedes into the background somewhat (though an answer to what’s going on is provided by the end), and the focus is more on the narrator’s emotional state. Lane’s main theme, I would say, is loss – loss of place, and loss of self. There’s a parallel, I think, between the protagonist’s difficulty in getting a handle on his life, and the social and geographical changes being depicted. I feel that those parallels don’t quite have all the breathing-space they need to establish themselves fully, but it’s a very good story and portrait nonetheless.

Links
Alison Moore’s website
Nightjar Press

Véronique Olmi, Beside the Sea (2001/10)

This is the launch title of Peirene Press, a new publisher specialising in English translations of short European works. And what a book to begin with. Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea, first published in France in 2001, and now available in Adriana Hunter’s superlative translation, is the story of a single mother taking her two sons to a seaside town. But all is not as happy as it sounds. Here is how Beside the Sea begins:

We took the bus, the last bus of the evening, so no one would see us. The boys had their tea before we left, I noticed they didn’t finish the jar of jam and I thought of that jam left there for nothing, it was a shame, but I’d taught them not to waste stuff and to think of the next day. (9)

Ordinary enough details, but with dark undertones — why leave so furtively? Why dwell on the unfinished jam? Even in this first paragraph, the seeds of the ending are sown, but the power of Beside the Sea lies in how the journey unfolds. Olmi gradually reveals just how fragile is her protagonist’s psyche: the narrator is a woman ill at ease with the world, reluctant to engage with other people, simultaneously protective of her children and at times uneasy around them.

Reading this character’s story is an intense, discomforting experience; her words spill out in a torrent of clauses, pushing inexorably on to the conclusion, which has no less impact for being anticipated (and may actually have more). Beside the Sea is a superb character study that marks out Peirene Press as a publisher to follow. Recommended.

Link
Peirene Press

Adam Roberts, New Model Army (2010)

I can safely say that New Model Army is like no other book I’ve ever read. I know this because I have no name for the feeling I was left with after I’d finished it. That’s a recommendation, by the way.

A few decades hence, a new kind of fighting force has emerged: organised on democratic principles (Athenian democracy, that is), New Model Armies (NMAs for short) have no command structure, and no specialisms; soldiers communicate with each other in the field via private wikis, and all decisions are put to the vote. A row over the royal succession has led the now-independent Scottish government to hire a New Model Army named Pantegral to fight the English, which the NMA has been doing very successfully. The novel’s narrator (though not, he is at pains to stress, its hero) is Tony Block, a member of Pantegral. Block tells of his exploits in the battles of south-east England, and it gradually becomes clear that he has been captured by the enemy, who have their own plans for him.

Having read that description, you may now have a conception of New Model Army in your mind which is nothing like the actual text. This is a novel in which the story is mediated through the voice in which it is told, and Block is as inclined to talk about his philosophy of democracy, love and war, as he is to describe his involvement in Pantegral’s military campaigns. As a result, we see both Tony’s ideas about war, and the effect those ideas have had on him.

Block is convinced of the NMAs’ superiority (both martial and moral) over conventional ‘feudal’ armies, and, indeed, Pantegral is winning the war in south-east England. But the New Model Army is also fallible – the majority vote isn’t guaranteed to be the ‘correct’ one, and such mistakes have consequences, as Roberts shows. There is no definitive ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ side, here, which makes the novel all the stronger.

At a deeper level, we see how being in the NMA has affected Tony psychologically. His narrative voice veers from being highly learned to making daft pop-culture references (the silliest is perhaps a burning building being described as ‘a field of spiky yellow flame: a hologram of Bart’s haircut on a Brobdingnagian scale’ [71]). This technique is presumably meant to represent the mish-mash of experiences and ideas engendered by the structure of the NMA; but another effect it has to undercut the harsh reality of what’s being described. Tony says that, in the heat of the moment, he can’t afford to think about the damage being caused by all the fighting; his pop-culture frames of reference may be another means by which he de-sensitises himself.

The effect of this on the reader can be quite suffocating, as the emotion coming from the narrative voice is inadequate for the horrors it relates. It’s made all the more suffocating by how little we learn of Block’s life before he became a soldier – there’s little true sense of a life beyond this moment, and hence of a way out of Block’s mindset. His resolve not to think too hard about certain things ebbs and flows tantalisingly throughout the novel – and then New Model Army turns in a direction that requires a different sort of imagining; the implications of the ending are chilling, but also somehow uplifting.

New Model Army is different, in the best sense of that word – it does something I haven’t come across elsewhere, and does it very well. It’s another fascinating read from the singular imagination of Adam Roberts.

Links
Adam Roberts’s website
Roberts’s review blog, Punkadiddle
Interview with Roberts at Kamvision

Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2009)

The Solitude of Prime Numbers tells the story of two young people who have been scarred (both physically and mentally, in their different ways) by events in their childhoods: Alice Della Rocca, who survived a terrible skiing accident; and Mattia Balossino, whose twin sister Michela (who had learning difficulties) was never seen again after he abandoned her on the way to a party.

Alice and Mattia meet at school, and grow… well, ‘close’ isn’t really the right word, because both find relationships awkward. Mattia, a maths prodigy, reflects that the two of them may be like twin primes, existing in such close proximity, yet never able to close the gap that separates them. And, when the adult Mattia is offered a position at a university in northern Europe, the gap between him and Alice looks set to widen irrevocably further.

Paolo Giordano’s first novel (translated into English by Shaun Whiteside, who has done a superb job) carries a certain weight of expectation, having won the prestigious Premio Strega in Italy. However, whilst I found it a good read, it never quite took off in the way I’d hoped. The characterisation of the two protagonists is key, and I think Giordano does particularly well with Mattia, whose cold personality and difficulty relating to other people are strongly evoked. This passage, for example, relates to a conversation he has with Alice when they are at school:

He wanted to tell her that her liked studying because you can do it on your own, because all the things you study are already dead, cold and chewed-over. He wanted to tell her that the pages of the schoolbooks were all the same temperature, that they leave you time to choose, that they never hurt you and that you can’t hurt them either. But he said nothing. (102)

Giordano weaves in some aspects of the protagonists’ characters particularly subtly, which makes their impact all the greater. But Mattia seems more fully-formed than Alice to me, in that I can trace the development of his character over the course of the novel more clearly. And I just think overall that, though it’s a very eloquent book at times, The Solitude of Prime Numbers doesn’t say as much (or in as much depth) as it would like to. Giordano is definitely a name to watch for the future, I would say, but his debut is promising rather than excellent.

Link
Video interview with Giordano

The month in reading: April 2010

April was the month of the Clarke Award, and completing the shortlist led me to read my favourite book of the month — Far North, Marcel Theroux‘s tale of survival in the aftermath of environmental change. I also read two great coming-of=age novels in April: Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey, set in 1960s Australia; and The Spider Truces by Tom Connolly, set in 1980s Kent. And, in terms of short stories, Sarah Singleton‘s tale ‘Death by Water’ from Black Static 15 was my pick of the month.

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