Spineless Reviews

I change, but in death

Kalki, by Gore Vidal

£9.99, Abacus (1993)

James Kelly wants to bring about the end of the world. In the guise of Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, that’s precisely what he will do. But why? If Kelly really believes himself to be a god, that question is more complex than it appears; if he’s bluffing, and the government’s investigations into his all-too-human history of drug dealing and post-Vietnam activities have revealed the truth, then the question and its answer are more straightforward. Few people dare to think of the third possibility: that Kalki is really among us, and the end is as nigh as he, or maybe He, claims.

Enter Theodora Ottinger, flying ace and largely failed mother. The glow surrounding her memoir Beyond Motherhood has largely faded, and the alimony payments are due. Just in time, word reaches her that Kalki wants her to interview him, and will accept no other: until, of course, an interview with CBS scheduled for a week or two later. But what, apart from sex and the distribution of his origami peace flowers to all nations, does Kalki want with the stridently bisexual Ottinger? And what, apart from sex and a good story, attracts her to Kalki and others in his coterie? How might all these dysfunctional, possibly deified individuals depend upon each other? And what does it mean to the rest of the world—for the next month or so, at least?

Vidal understands his genre well: in this as in other novels, he combines noirish suspense with a soap-operatic absurdity that turns comedy tragic at the same time as turning tragedy comic. Ottinger’s journeys and her plane flights are at the same time a shambolic gamble on her own mortality and a purposeful, insightful investigation of the tendrils of Kalki’s international organizations. The book’s general atmosphere also remains timely, describing the 1980s American dystopia in a way that chimes far more eerily with the circumstances of our new century: a weakened, tottering American empire, set like shit on a rock in a decaying, dangerously unstable climate; bleached, poisoned, beset by other world powers it feels far too certain it can control; and ploughing on regardless into its own oblivion, with or without the help of the Destroyer of Foulness.

In keeping with the suspenseful style of the narration—from Ottinger’s point of view—the book is riveting and complex. Vidal has proved himself time and again as one of America’s foremost writers: a master of style, searingly intelligent and with an acidic, biting sense of satire (one daren’t call it humour) that could etch any politico to the bone. His status as an author, however, is more easily contested. Vidal finds it hard to distance himself from his subject, and his voice often creeps into those of his characters. When Ottinger creeps too far into political comment, or when her stream of consciousness freewheels through philosophy or psychology, one can hear the rumbling, crackling tones of the author turning her charming, rich voice into a brief succession of bum notes. But in Kalki more than in other novels Vidal is capable of largely forgetting himself, and his own prejudices, and reconciling himself with his varied and generally sympathetic characters. Just as well he and they are able to set aside their differences: after all, life is too short to fall out; brutally short.

posted at: 18:37 | path: / v / vidal_gore | permanent link to this entry

A’ we luve ‘s been dung ajee

Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, by Alberto Manguel

£5.99, Canongate (2005)

Robert Louis Stevenson spent the last few years of his life on a Samoan island. Like many literary exiles, during that period he was both prolific and wracked with doubts as to his abilities. But what if he had travelled all those thousands of miles, only to meet a sinister spiritual twin? When Mr Baker, a Scottish Puritan, appears on the beach one evening barking bible verse and eschewing the somewhat indolent lifestyle of the native islanders, Stevenson finds his presence curious if unremarkable to others. But then the violence begins. And the rape. And, ultimately, the killing. Stevenson is implicated—or was it Mr Baker? Does Baker even exist, or is Stevenson much sicker than he thinks? How to solve the mysteries, before the community turns against the author and embarks on a course of retribution that Stevenson might, or might not, deserve?

Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, in the style of the more successful fictionalizing homages to great authors, is a spicy, redolent novella, written with illuminating affection rather than oppressive devotion. It slots very neatly, in fact, into gaps in Stevenson’s oeuvre: those he didn’t have chance to fill, describing Samoa and the colourful background of his own situation; and those he could never fill, consisting of dramatizations of his final days and moments. However, Stevenson himself is very much a prop, far less psychologically developed than his weird doppelgänger or than any of Stevenson’s own fictional characters, and he neither bungles nor strides his way through the criminal investigations that provide a structure for the book, but rather drifts along as the plot demands. This novella gives clues to his influences, his surroundings and his ultimate death: it would be a fitting tribute to his writing—a veritable pastiche—if it had also told us more about the man himself.

posted at: 18:35 | path: / m / manguel_alberto | permanent link to this entry

A misanthropic sort of occupation

Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad

£1.99, Wordsworth (1996)

The province of Sulaco, convulsed by the revolution which has engulfed the Latin-American state of Costaguana, desperately needs honourable men. Captain Mitchell would gladly inform anyone who might ask him that Giovanni Battista Fidanza, the Capataz de los Cargadores, the great Nostromo, was the most trustworthy fellow along the entire coast. But Nostromo’s honour is a constructed thing, a fame built purposefully by the Capataz with the premise that one might as well be famous for being honourable than for being duplicitous. When he is asked to save the silver of San Tomé mine from the armies, so that Sulaco might gain independence, the brave deed fits so well into the story of his life that he cannot refuse. But as he finds himself alone in the Golfo Placido, and finally the last person alive to know that the silver has not been lost, his resolve, and the faith he has in his capitalist-idealist masters, begins to quaver.

The rest of Sulaco can only ever guess at the genuine beliefs and passions of such an actor as Nostromo, a man who has become the devil-may-care cavalier of his own myths. But as silver and expectations weighs heavy on the backs of Nostromo and Martin Decoud (the architect of future independence), we begin to see beneath the façade. A complex Gian’ Battista had once determined to create the simple, boisterous Capataz, and when his faith in his place in the schemes of his so-called countrymen is shaken then the original, less dependable Fidanza emerges, confused and thinking furiously. Conrad takes an archetype and forces him to shrug off the armour of his cynicism, leaving a more vulnerable, sympathetic character behind. Almost all of the characters in Nostromo provide an enjoyable read, but it is to the tragedy of the Capataz that the reader’s heart goes out.

Nostromo is a huge story in a reasonable-sized book. It encompasses capitalism, revolutionary politics, vast tracts of geography, the complexity of a tempted, imperfect man, and the birth of a new nation. It reads almost like a serial, certainly like an epic. Conrad has used a number of techniques to spread his work far beyond the vision of his book, reaching out into misty indistinction both at the beginning of the story and at the start of the denouement. Here the story looks far into first the past and then the future, so that it draws all of history and predestiny into its scope. And as one approaches the fovea centralis, the narrow, frightening pit of the silver’s concealment and of Nostromo’s darkening soul, the story slows, repeats and concentrates. The scenes in the Golfo Placido, when Decoud can see nothing but Nostromo’s near-black corneas, become indelible phosphorescences, long after the book has ended.

The sheer substance of Nostromo can make it hard to digest at times, and the book is certainly no easy page-turner. Yet its density is also instructive, and scarcely as heavy as the load that the poor Capataz must carry on his back: of hopes, responsibility and guilt. The story of a man in torment is no easy read, but it becomes an inevitable one, drawing the reader back to the sometimes difficult work over and over again.

posted at: 21:17 | path: / c / conrad_joseph | permanent link to this entry

What a terrible mess we’ve gotten in

Laughing Gas, by P. G. Wodehouse

£9.99, Everyman (2001)

Earl Reginald “Reggie” Havershot, dispatched to America against his will in order to save his dypsomaniac cousin from the clutches of both liquor and the woman to which he wishes to become engaged, finds himself in the same dentist’s waiting room as child star Joey Cooley. Both are to have a tooth out, and both find themselves under general anaesthetic in adjoining surgeries. But Reggie wakes up horrified to find that he and young Cooley have somehow swapped bodies during the otherwise routine clinical process of tooth extraction. Cooley, he soon finds out, is bolting around the place in the bulky body of the aristocrat bopping the noses of people he hates, and the police are gradually forming a pattern, while the Earl is prisoner to Joey’s curls, his miserable schedule of pranks and public appearances, and the curtailment of his adult activities by the formidable Miss Brinkmeyer and the surprisingly sinister aspect of his fiancée, April June. As the scales fall from his eyes he soon realises: he needs to get out, get his body, and get back to England.

Wodehouse spends much of the brazenly hackneyed Laughing Gas perversely turning his own techniques inside out: a rescue attempt aided by the apparently friendly butler ends in a failure that Jeeves could never conscience; the lead character ends up (apologies for spoiling what plot there is) engaged, albeit not to the quite obvious disaster he sets out to court. Moreover, he happily shatters some of the golden rules of farces. To keep up the pace, they ought to resort to high-speed, physical dynamics. Characters hare around, fall over, drop into the shrubbery, are chased by thundering, brachiating Spodes. However, Wodehouse has prevented himself from resorting to such literal speed increases, as the Earl is frequently trapped against his adult will by Cooley’s guardians. The result is a very stationary novel, compared to Jeeves & Wooster, or even to the Blandings series.

In places this static method works: the tension of the Earl bouncing off the walls, as Cooley in the Earl’s body bounces his fist off his erstwhile oppressors with gleeful, childish and increasingly illegal abandon, coils and uncoils like a spring, keeping the story moving even when the Earl does not. But frequently it feels as though Wodehouse’s usually powerful stroke of farce is treading water. The great strength of Wodehousian fiction lies in the author’s ability to tell a cracking story, with sparkling characters, in which nothing actually very much happens; that the lack of plot is almost the point, or that the plot has a lack of a point. But plot is not the same as activity, any more than steel girders or a network of lead counterweights are like popping, fizzing champagne. The moral behind the relative flatness of Laughing Gas is: if you’re not accomplishing anything, it’s best to look busy.

posted at: 21:02 | path: / w / wodehouse_pelham_grenville | permanent link to this entry

In the midst of death, we are in life

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami (transl. Jay Rubin)

£7.99, Vintage (2003)

Three friends, Toru, Naoko and Kizuki, have all reached seventeen years of age; Kizuki will never grow older. He commits suicide, inexplicably, after a companionable evening playing pool with Toru. Naoko, Kizuki’s girlfriend, appears normal but harbours an inconsolable inertia, dragging her towards death and Kizuki. Toru and Naoko find themselves drawn together as survivors of the tragedy, but after consummating their relationship they head off to different universities in 1960s Japan.

Naoko soon finds herself in a summer-of-love sanatorium, a half-way house between reality and mental institutions, that eventually proves to be an insufficient substitute for either of those environments. Meanwhile, Toru finds himself on the voyage of largely undisturbed studenthood: coasting past the rocky cliffs of unsuccessful student revolutions; idling on the tantalising, sunkissed beaches of his friend Nagasawa’s hedonistic sex-filled lifestyle; always returning to the safe, regimented harbours of his vaguely sinister dormitory life; and eventually pursuing the treasures of fellow traveller Midori. She, a confusing, confused, lively fellow student, quickens troubled waters much as Naoko seems to calm them down. Toru finds himself pulled between the two conflicting goals of Midori and Naoko, two possible waystations in his young life: but which can really lead him to his final destination, his true self?

In capturing the spirit of the decade, Norwegian Wood finds an authentic voice which nonetheless acts to distance itself from the modern-day reader. While its original release in 1987 might have swept up thirty- to fifty-somethings who could have related almost immediately to its weird atmosphere of free love, spirituality and politics, its English translation in 2003 seems a little too far away to leave so much of its assumptions unexplained. The sheer amount of sex that Toru indulges in, with friends and the friends of his girlfriends, frequently reaches Carry-On proportions. Naoko’s sanatorium is frankly ridiculous in its lack of rules, its self-declared equalization of doctor and patient, the openness of house it operates. It’s the sort of social experiment that, were it to actually have existed, would be famous or infamous, depending on its ultimate fate.

But while these details do occasionally jar—sometimes quite strongly—the central story is nonetheless strong and supple. When Toru is quiet and contemplative, and his contemplations are not specifically detailed in his narration or in somewhat formalized correspondence, then his unspoken inner self commands profound sympathy from the reader. Toru’s suppressed pain, his consternation, and his lack of awareness of the loss and lack of direction he is suffering from, waft intoxicatingly off the pages like the smell of patchouli; or, more appropriately, myrrh.

The novel ironically really comes alive as Toru sits at the bedside of Midori’s dying father: Toru’s own unashamed capacity for action leads him to eat and chat in front of the taciturn, fasting old man. The invalid is in turn encouraged to eat, and begins to talk in the urgent, cryptic monosyllables that are all his recent brain surgery will permit. From here Toru’s life with Midori gathers a speed that contrasts with Naoko’s (which is gradually slowing to a crawl) and Kizuki’s (long since stalled in his fume-filled car). Indeed, Toru is surrounded on all sides by suicides, fatalities and mysterious, permanent disappearances, yet he himself is always flung forward under these pressures like soap squeezed in the hands, cutting across in defiance of the narrative currents that threaten to pull him back to those dangerous seventeen years of age, where Kizuki continues to wait for all this novel’s players, arms extended in a terrible, bleak welcome.

posted at: 22:57 | path: / m / murakami_haruki | permanent link to this entry

Good luck, but no charm

The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart

£7.99, HarperCollins (1999)

Luke Rhinehart is not content. His job as a psychiatrist is driving him crazy, at odds with his newly discovered Zen Buddhism. His marriage is a neurotic, classically 1970s mess, in which he uses tenets of his half-cocked religion to manoeuver his wife, passive-aggressively, into a state of dialectic impotence. He loves and yet does not love his children; he relates to the aspects of his patients he is most honour-bound to treat; and, like any privileged white middle-class male, he wants out of the terribly mundanity of his life. And so he discovers the die, and eventually dice, which at first inject a little playful randomness into his routine. But as the variety proves addictive Rhinehart finds himself using the dice to make more and more of his decisions, as he forces sex, violence and erratic eccentricities on others, and homelessness, poverty and loneliness on himself. As the dice become the pivot around which his entire life revolves, he meets an old patient, as borderline as himself, and has a sudden flash of inspiration: now he can share with the rest of the world the guiding principles of the Dice Man, one person at a time.

In Rhinehart the character, Rhinehart the author (George Cockcroft, pseudonymously) has written the most bizarre literary creation ever to exist outside Gallowglass or Tom Ripley. Rhinehart is meant to be simultaneously both the everyman and his own subversion, by starting off as a confused, directionless therapy-mensch and ultimately transforming himself into a destiny-filled, fate-directed übermensch, as the dice take hold of his life and strip him of the socio-cultural norms that have held him prisoner for so long. In reality, and partly in the language of his profession, Rhinehart is more akin to the casual neurotic who achieves transference from dull but safe (and creatively and morally fecund) society to arbitrary, irrelevant (and thus terrifyingly dangerous) amoral edicts. These then tear apart his sense of self and belonging, while bolstering his conviction that those very methods provide the quickest, wildest, most exciting route to enlightenment. Rhinehart is gathering speed on a downward slope towards his own oblivion, swaddled in the convictions that every step along it is a step towards salvation.

What’s most surprising about The Dice Man is the banality with which its violence, arrogance and sheer wilful stupidity are presented. Rape and murder are treated as interesting experiments that Rhinehart the narrator conducts, rather than real, repugnant actions with real, reprehensible consequences, that cause real physical and mental damage to others. He hates women, other people, the simple everyday, and basic human relationships; he cannot deal with responsibility or any kind of repetition. Seeing himself as an iconoclast, he’s really an irritable, attention-deficient fool; seeing himself as some sort of model Zen pupil drifting on the ebb and flow of the world’s tide, he’s really an agent of profound and dangerous activity.

Ultimately, the Dice Man’s greatest hubris is that he has attempted to disguise all these quite wilful, intentional acts as consequences of a random, almost godlike agency that exists outside himself. But even the most fervent horoscope-follower or rune-caster has more simple empathy than the narrator, whose basic, psychopathic inability to comprehend the notion of other people’s existences leaves him free to follow whatever silly ideas can enter his head, however ultimately idiotic or empty. His childish attempts to wish away his own humanity shock in the same way as a child’s crimes shock, and should be treated accordingly. Compared to the psychological investigations of Kundera or Cockcroft’s fellow travellers Pirsig and Kesey, this is the giggling, random swearing of the primary school.

posted at: 14:26 | path: / r / rhinehart_luke | permanent link to this entry

The kitsching of the prevalent

The Pedant in the Kitchen, by Julian Barnes

£7.99, Atlantic (2004)

Cookery columns are cool. Just ask Alex Kapranos of art-indie band Franz Ferdinand, who wrote a number of articles for the Guardian about what he ate while touring. Fellow reluctant Guardian foodie (and much more besides) Julian Barnes wrote a series of similar pieces, with the theme of how the reluctant, easily confused newcomer deals with existing books on cookery, the specifics of ingredients and utensils, and the general hilarity which a fool and a pan can invoke. The resulting collection, novella-length, is gently and rather casually written, like the writings of James Fenton (another Guardianista) who Barnes cites. There are quasi-subversive references to the Big Mac and the Martha Stewart, and the now obligatory debunking of the myth of Mrs Beeton. Generally, though, Barnes’ confusion and wide-eyed amateurish fear is almost entirely sympathetic, and really quite funny. The book has a warm humour and an unthreatening charm that makes you wonder just how far Barnes has moved from the axis of Amis and Swift he once happily and edgily sat upon.

An illuminating if unexpected companion piece to The Pedant would probably be one of Jeremy Clarkson’s recent bound diatribes. Both authors have a unique tone and a recalcitrant fanbase who are more than happy to read anything written in the genre. Both authors write as prisoners of powerful, ubiquitous systems, the political views of which are anathema to the writers themselves: Clarkson sees wet liberals everywhere in society, restricting the freedoms of honest white male car-owning well-off folk; Barnes’ kitchen library is full of passive-aggressive authoritarian Tories, keen to maintain a Victorian culinary status quo and refusing to provide him with information precise enough to liberate him from the bondage of novicehood. Both then proceed to rail against these systems: Clarkson in his witless, anti-intellectual “common-sense” bombast, Barnes in an overanalytical, weedy, self-undermining whine.

And both, ultimately, are unwilling to resort to any action that might bring about the revolutions for which they seem to be longing. Both are happy to complain, berate, hold up for mockery and generally work themselves into emotional froths, so long as it gains them the audiences they crave. Their personal bêtes noires are also their vaches de cash, and to actually slay them would be financial and—if you like—artistic folly. Instead, they happily perpetuate the systems with which they have vitriolic, dysfunctional but ultimately lucrative relationships. Still, that’s life. Or, more pedantically, that’s entertainment.

posted at: 14:16 | path: / b / ba-be / barnes_julian | permanent link to this entry

Matters maketh man

A Sort of Life, by Graham Greene

£6.99, Vintage (1993)

As an author, Graham Greene shows a definite tough love towards his characters. The starkness of many of their novelized lives is belied by some divinity shaping their ends, or at least affording them a degree of salvation or condemnation. In this way Greeneland is similar in structure to the rigid, pitiless universe of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Once we accept that Greene’s early conversion to Roman Catholicism has informed these moral sensibilities—in ways that your average born-again would scarcely conscience—it follows that we will ask: what else in his life found its way into his work?

Greene’s autobiography ought to provide the ideal environment in which to interrogate him. There’s refreshingly little evidence that A Sort of Life constitutes a land-grab by Greene, an attempt to stake out territory that biographers might otherwise camp on to reveal the nastier features thereof. The tone is gentle and neutral: he claims in the preface to have written the book in good faith, both to his readers and to his younger self, and this faith shines from the book far more than the religious sort. While one can always argue for subconscious layers of misdirection, there is a warts-and-all honesty evident in these ramblings about his early life.

Dull yet interesting, is probably the neatest summary of his first twenty-odd years presented here. His cloistered, upper-middle-class upbringing is claustrophobic and privileged; he is surrounded by the extended Greene family and attends the school his father owned and headmastered. Unintentionally funny childhood games and a marked precocity on the part of young Graham strengthen the usual stereotypes of his class; there’s also implied, passive but unceasing encouragement from his parents, effortlessly brought to bear on their child. Greene’s formative years are clearly micromanaged to an extent, the size of which he barely acknowledges.

Therein lies the major flaw in A Sort of Life. While Greene is scrupulously honest about his mundane conversion, his fears of destitution following early, devastating failure, and his own gradual gendering—when he remembers, almost as an afterthought, to mention it—he is simply rattling the details off with the minimum of analysis or reflection. One is simultaneously encouraged by the glut of information and irritated by the lack of preparation and consideration of it.

If this were fiction, Greene would have written it as a grey, ambiguous story with hints of deep principles at work. As it is, this factual splurge is better thought of as rough notes, that a professional biographer would be able to take up as a promising starting point, not a finished book. His time in juvenile therapy, the brief mentioning of sexual frissons, his isolation and nervousness, the discovery of faith through his wish to marry… all of these stories have depth, and beg questions as much as they provide answers, but here the questions are not even considered. There exists the possibility of a discussion of Graham Greene’s sort of life that illuminates both the man and his work, but Greene himself was never the man to write it.

posted at: 21:01 | path: / g / greene_graham | permanent link to this entry