Month: August 2012

Liz Jensen, The Uninvited (2012)

13th August 2012 / / 3 Comments

Liz Jensen’s The Rapture was one of my favourite reads a couple of years back; now she has returned with what could be seen very much as a companion piece. The Uninvited also sees a scientist investigating unusual human phenomena which turn out to herald apocalypse, and also shares a focus on the personal side of events.

Jensen’s protagonist this time around is Hesketh Lock, an anthropologist investigating corporate scandals. Hesketh’s latest assignment takes a bizarre turn when Sunny Chen, the whistle-blower from a Taiwanese timber company, throws himself into a pulping machine. That’s only the first of several similar incidents worldwide; at the same time, children begin to kill their families violently. Hesketh, a pattern-spotter by both profession and inclination, searches for a connection – even when his experiences lead him down a path that goes against all his rational instincts.

Again as with The Rapture, Jensen’s protagonist comes under pressure in the areas of life where he feels it most acutely. Hesketh’s ability to analyse and find patterns was where he felt most secure, and of course now that’s now being undermined by the apparently irrational crisis. However, he’s also feeling tested in the area of relationships: his Asperger’s Syndrome has made them difficult enough already, such that Hesketh has had to leave his partner Kaitlin. But at least he’s always felt that he knows how to communicate with his stepson Freddy – and this area of stability is now also being challenged.

Jensen handles the characterisation of Hesketh well. His personal quirks (such as a fascination with origami, and an instinctive knowledge of the Dulux colour chart) come across not as gimmicks but as anchor-points in his life (symbolically so when he folds origami models from the pages of a medical report that he’d rather not face). Hesketh is not characterised simply as someone who is great with data but inept with people – Jensen is subtler than that. The protagonist does have his difficulties with relating with people, but for the most part, he gets by. There are a couple of conversations where we realise (and Hesketh doesn’t) that he’s saying the wrong thing; but the effect is jarring – they stand out because they’re so infrequent.

The character who, for me, most brings home the emotional impact of The Uninvited’s catastrophe is not Hesketh, but his boss, Ashok Sharma. In some ways, Sharma is the opposite of Hesketh: he comes across as a smooth operator who knows what to say to everyone. But, when the plight affecting the world’s children knocks on Sharma’s door, he can’t stay that way, and becomes a deeper character. That two such different individuals as Hesketh and Sharma are so strongly affected is a way of showing just how far-reaching The Univited’s crisis is.

In its later sections, The Uninvited focuses more strongly on its disaster-novel aspect, and I don’t think it works quite so well – but I must acknowledge that this could just be because find the actual nature of what’s happening in Jensen’s novel is less interesting to me than exploring the characters’ reactions to it. The Uninvited seems to me to be less about human response to catastrophe than response to the threat of catastrophe, and the great emotional challenge that entails. The challenge for Hesketh Lock is to see how – or even if – he can deal with extreme emotional situations. What Jensen does so well in The Uninvited is to explore a global problem through the microcosm of one person’s life.

Elsewhere
Liz Jensen’s website
Arc Quarterly video interview with Jensen
Some other reviews of The Uninvited: Thirteen O’Clock; Curiosity Killed the Bookworm; Pamreader; Justine Jordan for The Guardian.

Sunday Story Society 2012 Schedule

12th August 2012 / / 0 Comments

I left a couple of slots open in the Sunday Story Society schedule; but now I’ve decided what’s going in them. So here is what we’ll be talking about for the  rest of the year:

19 Aug: “Atlantic City” by Kevin Barry

02 Sept: “The Merchant of Shadows” by Angela Carter

16 Sept: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig

30 Sept: “Drifting House” by Krys Lee

14 Oct: “Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring” by M. John Harrison

28 Oct: “The Disappearance of Miranda Željko” by Rebecca Makkai

11 Nov: “Reflux” by José Saramago

25 Nov: “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard

09 Dec: The winner of the BBC International Short Story Award (to be announced)

You can click on the titles above to read any of the stories. If the BBC Short Story Award is running to the same schedule as last year, it should be announced at the end of September, and the winning story made available on line shortly after. Assuming it is, we’ll discuss it in the December slot.

Any queries on the above, drop me a line; and don’t forget you can also follow the Society on Twitter and Facebook.]

See you back here this time next week to discuss Kevin Barry’s “Atlantic City”!

Book notes: William Wharton and P.Y. Betts

10th August 2012 / / 2 Comments

William Wharton, Birdy (1978)

Al and Birdy were both scarred by their experiences in the Second World War. For Al, the damage was largely physical – he now has a jaw made of glass – but for, Birdy, it was mental. Now in a psychiatric hospital, Birdy is living up to his name and acting like a bird. Al has been brought in to try to get through to his old friend; he recounts to Birdy stories of their younger years in Philadelphia. Alternating chapters chronicle Birdy’s developing fascination with birds as a child.

Birdy has recently been republished in the UK by The Friday Project (along with Shrapnel, a previously unpublished war memoir of William Wharton’s). As a first-time reader of Wharton, this is a powerful book, because of the way it depicts such a vivid character as Birdy becoming lost in his own mind. Al’s engaging reminiscences show how enterprising and resourceful he and Birdy were; in Birdy’s chapters, these qualities are applied to the keeping of birds. Wharton portrays Birdy’s slide from this to a too-close association with birds convincingly, which gives Al’s later attempts to reach Birdy all the more force.

Some other reviews of Birdy: The Bookbag; Read with Style; an appreciation of Willam Wharton at Eleventh Stack.

P.Y. Betts, People Who Say Goodbye (1989)

In the 1930s, Phyllis Betts wrote several short stories, contributions to Graham Greene’s magazine Night and Day, and one novel (French Polish)… then she wasn’t heard of again for another fifty years, until Christopher Hawtree tracked her down to a Welsh smallholding; she was eventually persuaded to write this memoir, which I’m reading in a lovely hardback edition from Slightly Foxed.

People Who Say Goodbye is a joy to read, principally because Betts is so engaging, both as a writer and character. She has a knack for identifying the telling details that bring the people from her childhood to life; such as Dr Biggs, who pronounced ‘bowels’ as two syllables, and who treated all ills with a swift examination by stethoscope, followed by a prescription of brown cough mixture and red tonic. The young Phyllis and her mother also had a robust, no-nonsense attitude to life (‘What happens to all those dead people who are put into graves?’ asks Phyllis. ‘They rot,’ her mother repies).

But that quotation points also to the undercurrent of darkness in the book. Living through the First World War – and especially with a hospital down the road – the reality of death was never far from Phyllis’s life. As Betts puts it, the people who say goodbye don’t come back. It’s the careful balance of moods that makes this memoir such a rewarding read.

Some other reviews of People Who Say Goodbye: Stuck in a Book; 20th Century Vox; I Prefer Reading.

This book fulfils the Biography category of the Mixing It Up Challenge 2012.

Book notes: collections by Jon Gower and Tim Maughan

8th August 2012 / / 1 Comment

Jon Gower, Too Cold for Snow (2012)

There are funny stories in Too Cold for Snow; dark stories; poignant ones, too – but all are built on a base of ordinary Welsh life, which Jon Gower then transforms in some way. In the title story, we meet Boz, a jingle-composer who answered a job ad and is now in Siberia, working on a documentary about a reindeer-herding people. Gower creates an effective contrast between Boz’ and the herders’ lifestyles, and shows how the gap between them starts to be bridged.

‘The Pit’ is the tale of a miner who became trapped in a collapsed pit, and had to take extreme measures to survive. A borderline-supernatural twist makes this piece a genuine chiller. ‘TV Land’ is a satirical treatment of celebrity culture, in which a burger van proprietor who uses rather… unusual ingredients is invited on a local chat show and his secrets exposed. Gower’s story is absurd, but only just, and has significant bite because of that.

‘White Out’ is a beautifully written piece in which an avalanche has covered north Wales; a sheep farmer explores the ruined landscape, encountering no one but a mysterious young girl. The closing revelation is especially moving, in one of the highlights of a varied and textured collection.

Tim Maughan, Paintwork (2011)

Paintwork is a collection of three stories set in a near future where the online space has become thoroughly integrated with individuals’ sensorial. Tim Maughan’s tales explore issues of control and authenticity in that world.

The story ‘Paintwork’ itself concerns 3Cube, a guerrilla artist whose speciality is replacing QR codes on billboards with his own, to give people artistic vistas rather than commercial messages. But the artist finds that his latest work is being vandalised, faster than should be possible. Subsequent events 3Cube to question whether he’s behind the times, with his romanticism and insistence on old-fashioned methods (such as hand-cut stencils) – and to question how much he’s in charge of his own work.

Similar considerations emerge in ‘Havana Augmented’, whose young protagonists have created an augmented-reality version of a popular fighting game. Business, government, and a major gaming clan all take an interest, and a game on the streets of Havana becomes a fight for something deeper. Perhaps this story isn’t as complex as ‘Paintwork’ in its examination of issues, but it is engaging nonetheless.

The structural similarities of Paintwork’s stories can make individual aspects of them less satisfactory – the beginning of ‘Paparazzi’ (a piece in which a journalist is sent into an MMORPG to investigate a prominent gamer) is a little heavy on exposition in comparison to the other two, though the sting-in-the-tale ending may be the best in the book. But the overall impression left by Maughan’s collection impresses most – the strong sense of tackling issues of a kind that might face us just around the corner.

Sunday Story Society: “Bombay’s Republic”

5th August 2012 / / 6 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or like us on Facebook.

It’s time to start our second discussion; this time, we’re focusing on “Bombay’s Republic” by Rotimi Babatunde, which you can read here. As winner of the Caine Prize, there’s been a substantial amount of commentary on this story, not least because Aaron Bady of The New Inquiry organised a mass blogging of the shortlist earlier in the year. As with last time, I won’t pretend to have covered everything here.

Aishwarya Subramanian saw “Bombay’s Republic” as ‘a story about stories and how they are told, and the relationship between stories and the world’.  Stories and storytelling were recurring themes in the commentary:  Ndinda described Babatunde’s tale as ‘a story that simply ridicules stories of war.’ Peter Day noted that ‘Bombay begins the story as a reader like us, practically anonymous, nameless, pulled from the “droves” of unknown men…[and] becomes the writer, that perverse egomaniacal hermit.’

The Oncoming Hope felt that Bombay’s period as a ‘writer’ came to a bad end: ‘Unfortunately for Bombay, he had the opportunity to create his own story, but went home instead and trapped himself in delusions’. In contrast, Matthew Cheney considered that Bombay ‘liberates himself through stories, and the stories become true, and he becomes a story.’

Aaron Bady’s own response examined how truth in the story is malleable, and can be exploited: ‘the entire course of [Bombay’s] experience in Burma is marked by the repeated discovery not of what the world really is like, but of the extent to which people will believe totally crazy things. For City of Lions, “Bombay’s Republic” parodies ‘the idea that storytelling is a kind of heroic calling. And the destabilizing shifts in style are part of that, because they play against the individualistic notion of author-as-brand.’

Soulfool reflected on the story’s theme of possibility:

Possibilities peddle themselves with sour faces and sharp swords of obloquy. They demand that something must be done with them. And yet what is it that one is to do with possibility? What is one to do with the obscenity of knowledge? Bombay is obnoxious to the possibilities of possibility.

Richard M. Oduor explored the representational aspects of the story:

Bombay’s Republic is a metonym for white-black relations during the World War, mapped on the dichotomy of good and evil, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. It should be celebrated by Africans as a great lamp post lighting the path for continued de-authorization of colonialist literature. Dotted with unending tints of dark humour, Bombay’s Republic forces us to see ourselves as we need to see us, not otherwise.

Olumide Abimbola also touched on this:

Even though he does not repeat the Burma returnee cliché Bombay is still recognisable. He is a Big Man who spins wealth out of political power, and whose political sovereignty and legitimacy is fully acknowledged only by himself. In that sense, one can read Bombay’s inhabitation of a jailhouse as a metaphor for the alienation that high political office sometimes imposes on office holders, especially those whose legitimacy is questionable.

Stephen Derwent Partington felt that “Bombay’s Republic” tailed off in its final third:

And so, a story with great start, and which performs an important recuperation (for the western reader) of a Burmese campaign that s/he might not be fully aware of. If this section could somehow have been maintained without the awkward later shift into hard-and-fast, uncompromising allegory, this would have been, for me, a brilliant story rather than a very good one.

(But see also his comment on Bady’s post.)

I’ll also highlight positive views from Adjoa Ofoe; Saratu; Bookshy; Jayaprakash; Klara du Plessis; Mel u; Alan Bowden; Jeffrey Z.; Nana Freuda-Agyeman; and (positive with reservations) Ikhide.

And now, the floor is yours.

Various Authors giveaway winners

3rd August 2012 / / 0 Comments

Thanks to everyone who entered to win a copy of Various Authors. I’ve pulled the names out of the hat (as it were), and the winners are:

  • Brionna
  • Ben Osborn
  • naomifrisby
  • Annoné Butler
  • Lois Bennett
  • HabibiBoo

I hope you all enjoy the anthology. If you weren’t lucky enough to win one yourself, though, you can buy Various Authors from The Fiction Desk, or take out a year’s subscription (highly recommended). And thanks once again to The Fiction Desk for kindly allowing me to give the books away.

Sunday Story Society Reminder: “Bombay’s Republic”

2nd August 2012 / / 0 Comments

Thanks to everyone who took part in our first discussion – and now it’s time for the second. This time we’ll be talking about ab”Bombay’s Republic” by Rotimi Babatunde, the story which won this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing (I’d like to thank Aishwarya for bringing it to my attention. You can read the story here on the Caine Prize website, where it’s available as a PDF.

Rotimi Babatunde is a Nigerian writer whose stories, poetry, and plays have been published and staged around the world; as Caine Prize winner, he has also been awarded a month as writer-in-residence at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “Bombay’s Republic” was first published in Mirabilia Review. You can read more stories from this year’s Caine Prize in the anthology African Violet.

We’ll start the discussion of “Bombay’s Republic” here on the blog this Sunday, 5th August.

Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (1970)

1st August 2012 / / 5 Comments

When first we meet Lise, she’s out shopping for a brightly coloured new dress; but she takes exception to the sales assistant highlighting that the dress is made of stain-resistant fabric (‘Do you think I spill things on my clothes? […] Do I look as if I don’t eat properly?’ [p. 8]). She eventually buys a dress (equally colourful, but not stain-resistant) in another shop, teaming it with a coat that clashes. Immediately we’re wondering what sort of person this is, who would buy such a conspicuous outfit and seemingly wouldn’t mind if it got dirty.

A few clues – and more mysteries – emerge presently. Lise is secretive: the furniture in her apartment is hidden away behind wall panels, to be taken out when necessary. She’s dedicated: she has booked a holiday from work, but is remarkably reluctant to take time off to pack, even though her manager encourages her to. Perhaps most of all, though, she is doomed: Spark reveals early on that Lise will be murdered on her holiday; we read the rest of The Driver’s Seat trying to anticipate how that will happen, and who will do the deed.

There’s no shortage of characters who might turn out to be Lise’s murderer. Take Bill, the macrobiotic diet enthusiast who sits next to her on the plane, and invites her to catch up later at their destination. Take Carlo, the garage owner who offers to take Lise back to her hotel after she’s caught up in a student demonstration, but would actually rather take her somewhere else. But the thing is that Lise seems actively to be courting some men; goes on about them being (or not being) her ‘type’; and changes her story at will. She doesn’t seem the passive kind.

So, as its title suggests, a key issue in The Driver’s Seat is control. How does a woman apparently so in command of her destiny lose that command so dramatically? In answering that question, Spark’s short novel reveals the product of a dark psyche, but refuses to explain it – which makes The Driver’s Seat one of the most unsettling pieces of fiction I have read in quite some time. An uncertainty over place (neither Lise’s home city nor her holiday destination are identified) and dialogue which often sees characters talking at right angles, only enhance that feeling.

Simon from Stuck in a Book and Harriet Devine hosted a Muriel Spark Reading Week in April; I was unable to take part in that, which is one reason I wanted to read something by Spark now. I wish I had been able to participate, because The Driver’s Seat made such an impression on me that I want to explore and discuss Spark’s work further.

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