Spineless Reviews

Bleeding-hearts liberal

The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, by Arthur Japin

£7.99, Vintage (2001)

Race is a tricky subject to discuss. As Berkeley Breathed, cartoonist behind Bloom County, discussed in an interview with the Onion AV Club:

Don’t touch it. Run. Hide. Smile and say you love everybody equally, and don’t make any jokes as you back out of the room […]. There isn’t a shade of a chance for anything resembling a real discussion about race occurring publicly in this country for another… well, ever. Tirades, yes. Conversations that don’t become tirades after the first sentence spoken? No.

In European culture we have a much weaker “race issue” than exists in the States, arising from a feeling of self-righteousness over the fact that, if we didn’t actually jettison slavery before the US, then at least we were nicer about it The primary effect, and probably function, of Japin’s The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi is to explode both this myth and the idea that the noble savage can be somehow tamed and Europeanized like Kafka’s Affe.

Writing about racism—as with sexism, ageism, or any kind of discrimination against a persecuted minority that perceives itself as such—is generally best carried out by the disinterested. However, early European racism is clearly Japin’s bête noire (as it were) and The Two Hearts… suffers because of it. The arc of the book is strong, and individual scenes harden on reading into tough kernels of authorial intent thanks to their simplicity and directness. Mesoscopically, however, the narrative is unevenly paced and cluttered with explications of Dutch crypto-slavery in the 19th Century. The irony present in the scene-setting at the beginning, when the two princes Kwasi and Kwame are taken from their African homeland to be educated in Holland in return for “slave” trading, is confusingly and lengthily expounded; the corresponding revelations at the end of the book, where Kwasi finally uncovers the extent of bureaucratic embodiment of the “noblesse de peau” that has dogged him throughout his attempts at a civil service career, are clumsily handled, and lead to less of a reconciliation of complex and conflicting threads of his life than the extended, half-chapter shrug of an old man in his dotage.

It doesn’t help that this period of Dutch history is so obscure, and the book suffers further harm at the hands of the confusing cast of characters in the higher echelons of Dutch society. Three or four Willems (it isn’t clear) and at least two Sophies make descriptions of life at court obscure, and often the resultant confusion overlaps what would otherwise be a powerful scene.

But perhaps we shouldn’t blame Japin for the difficulties that his historical premise have unavoidably placed in his path, and be grateful that he hasn’t forced the reader to wade through appendices and family trees. A flawed book, then: but one that shares many of its flaws with any account of a previously neglected period of history; unlike its drier cousins, The Two Hearts… has a worthiness that manages to penetrate the necessary tangle of humdrum, unavoidable fact.

posted at: 16:31 | path: / j / japin_arthur | permanent link to this entry

One man’s account

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, by B. S. Johnson

£6.99, Picador (2001)

Everyone wants to get their own back, and Christie Malry is no exception. Payment is due, he feels: from his seminal encounter with an in-the-way Edwardian office block (debit one scratch on the brickwork), through his employers and co-workers (debit five tons of carbon-copy paper, delivered in apparent error) to the Houses of Parliament themselves (debit tbc.), Malry calculates in a common coinage the wrongs done to him, and acts accordingly to recover those debts. But his accounting is suffering overinflation, people are dying, and the clockwork train of Malry’s morality is careering out of control….

It’s rare to come across a novel which simultaneously conveys such tension and obsession with detail, while pouring forth exuberance and sheer joy in the craft of writing well. B. S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is such a book. The plot kapows from one ecstatic event to another, supported ably by Johnson’s literary caprices that Joyce and Borges would sell their aunts for. He stretches the form just far enough to generate plenty of heat, but not so far that it snaps under the strain. This is the bleeding edge of novel construction, and Malry skims along this blade like an angel dancing on a pinhead, living through his dangerous, violent, hilarious exploits like no thriller hero has ever done.

Johnson is—was, God keep him—a stunning writer. Christie Malry leaps off the page, while still being aware on one level of Johnson pulling the strings. Self-referential asides deftly sidestep the territory of the cynical, knowing wink and become respectful acknowledgements of the intelligence of the reader. The characters are all ripe, richly sympathetic and completely, completely believable. The story is genius and the narrative flawless magic. Read this book.

posted at: 22:03 | path: / j / johnson_b_s | permanent link to this entry

Extraordinarily normal

House Mother Normal, by B S Johnson

(OOP) Bloodaxe Books (1971)

What you’re about to read isn’t a normal book review. But then B S Johnson didn’t write normal books. Just keep in mind that House Mother Normal is challenging, exciting, but above all readable, and all will be well.

Imagine a book where the same story is told from different viewpoints. Think David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, where each viewpoint is topped and tailed by another. But the narratives in House Mother Normal all come one after the other, for a very good reason.

Now imagine that the same number of pages is used for each viewpoint, , that each line advances the chronology by the same amount. It’s like a film script, where each page is a few minutes and a gap in one’s thoughts looks like this: “        ”. Thus in House Mother Normal page 5 of Gloria Ridge’s story matches page 5 of Ron Lamson’s, and page 5 of the House Mother’s, line by line.

Finally, imagine that each story describes the same few hours in a nursing home, from the point of view of one of the old folks, all with wildly varying degrees of mental competence. After the gradual deterioration of narrative from lucid Sarah Lamson to almost silent Rosetta Stanton, the story is finally explained, and cast in a whole new light, by the House Mother’s own narration. In this way House Mother Normal makes barbed comments about our understanding of mental wellness and wholeness, and break the heart of every reader with its portrayal of silent, unacknowledged, misunderstood sickness.

1. House Mother Normal is a book with no equal, no peer, no accompanying movement and no obvious influences.
2. House Mother Normal is prose and play minced and ground and stirred up together.
3. House Mother Normal is a three-dimensional novel.
4. House Mother Normal is a witty, wise, sad, beautiful exploration of the human condition.
5. House Mother Normal is a biting satire on mental-health culture and Foucauldian power struggles.
6. House Mother Normal is smashing.

posted at: 18:06 | path: / j / johnson_b_s | permanent link to this entry

Let the dead describe their own dead

The Aspern Papers, by Henry James

Free, Gutenberg (1999)

Jeffrey Aspern was a world-class poet, and as such attracted a gaggle of biographers shortly after his death, all clamouring to tell the definitive story of the great man. The narrator of James’ The Aspern Papers is one such devotee—or hack, depending on your point of view. He travels to Venice to hoodwink two generations of ageing Aspern-satellites into yielding the papers that he is certain the elder has hidden. Inveigling himself in their household as a lodger, he worries away at the younger woman but ends up too deeply involved in the household, tempting the onset of the older woman’s ill health as she begins to suspect his motives. Worse still is the prospect he finds inconceivable: failure to procure Aspern’s papers.

James’ convoluted, ornate style is ideally suited to this sort of work, conjuring as it can tension and suspense out of the most apparently innocent of situations. His circumlocutions appear to orbit subjects which, when talked of directly, might be innocent enough; seen from the corner of the eye they take on an altogether sinister object, as is also clear from his other novella The Turn of the Screw. James’ writing is at once tangled and wandering, yet is still dense and tight: like certain mathematical maze forms, his verbal journey fills every single nook and corner of the space allotted. James is able to turn what might be a rather banal tale of the hunter-gathering of a dead author’s papers from two unsympathetic old women into a novel of tension that makes the reader’s nerves twang and jangle with the effort of reading.

Not only that, but James is able to cover so much ground with his method that almost every aspect of this novel is practically overdeveloped to the point of giantism. We get rich, intricate descriptions of the atmosphere and aspect of Venice almost as asides; the two women are compared and contrasted until each becomes as three-dimensional as the lone subject of almost any full-length novel; and we see in the narrator the conflict between James’ own horror of the vultures that might circle his still-warm body and his sense of his own literary duty. Indeed, there seem to be even more likenesses between author and narrator than are made explicit, as the protagonist, fresh from the male-oriented environment of hinted-at academic institutions, shies away from a marriage proposal as a means to his concealed ends: deified, unattainable Aspern is the only object of his desires. Ultimately, though, we find in The Aspern Papers a novella of complexity in all forms: thoughtful, careful and brilliant. Aspern himself could not have written better.

posted at: 20:01 | path: / j / james_henry | permanent link to this entry