Spineless Reviews

Love-sick

Gallowglass, by Barbara Vine

£6.99, Penguin (1990)

Joe is Sandor’s. When Joe leapt towards the tracks that lay before an oncoming tube train, Sandor pulled him back as much with his personality as with his hands. With a past that manages to fit Italian kidnappings and a typical suburban childhood side by narrative side, Sandor is a mystery to Joe, who informs the reader of the plans that Sandor grudgingly reveals to him; but none of that matters to Joe. Joe wants, needs to be Sandor’s servant. He loves Sandor, and Sandor, he knows, loves him too. Who else could he love?

A tale told by an idiot, full of Sandor’s fury, signifying nothing: morally, at any rate. Vine (alias Ruth Rendell), like Patricia Highsmith, knows how to make the reader empathize for what at first glance always seem like barely human creatures. And although Joe’s resolute ignorance of Sandor’s true motives (and his sometimes everyday meanness) cloys after a while, it should probably be read more as the blindness of the most definitely love-sick. One ought to think: despite his violent upbringing, Joe is not so much backward as wrapped in the blurring fog of his depression; nonetheless, by the middle of the book (a testament to the author) Sandor’s character is clear as day to the reader, and it ought to be clear to Joe. Can Joe be simultaneously this unaware plot-cipher and still provoke an emotional response from us?

But this is a niggle, noticed more in retrospect than in the reading. Gallowglass is a well-written, clever, exciting page-turner. It provides a frighteningly detailed description of twisted love arising from twisted circumstances but being no shallower an emotion for all that. At times it almost feels as though this was what the thriller form was built for, revealing these perfect imperfections. Barbara: I’m yours.

posted at: 21:40 | path: / v / vine_barbara | permanent link to this entry

The gods are on the side of the stranger

The Aeneid, by Virgil

£8.99, Penguin (1986)

The story of Aeneas’ flight from Troy, and his eventual sowing of the seeds of the Roman empire: everyone knows it and nobody’s read it all. Generations of grammar- and public-schoolboys have studied chunks of Virgil’s epic at school, with varying amounts of context to aid digestion. While it’s certainly beyond the scope of this review to discuss the Aeneid’s place in the classical literary pantheon—who would dare, realistically?—it’s nonetheless worth asking the separate questions: how has the Aeneid aged? is it worth reading, if not casually then at any rate on the sofa, train or beach? Hundreds of thousands of copies of this book, in various translations (here Jackson Knight’s), inhabit the Classics shelves. Should some be rescued from the indignity of the pulping bin?

The answer is generally affirmative, with some reservations. The characterizations and relationships, with some histrionic exceptions, are warm, rich and complex. With a little background knowledge—for example that Virgil, like Shakespeare, wrote his work to placate to the hegemony of the time, each establishing an empire’s semi-divine right to exist and indeed prosper—there is political and moral depth here that earns for the Aeneid the right to be considered a current classic as well as a literary milestone. The moral balance and interconnectedness, which we would now call karma, and the weird, Delphic fatalism that pervades Aeneas’ quest to fulfil Jupiter’s will, is intriguing and often wildly unpredictable in both cause and effect.

Most of the battle scenes can be omitted, excepting most obviously the death of Camilla. But the most fascinating part of the book is Aeneas himself: his reactions during the sacking of Troy, and his legendary, doomed relationship with Dido. For a modern audience Aeneas is at his most intriguing, and frightening, during his moments of greatest piety and certainty in Jupiter’s will. His eyes flash; his hair floats; he’s a Byronesque hero and a flawed, eccentric human at the same time. Aeneas as a conduit of the power of the gods is chilling indeed. In its protagonist, if nowhere else, the Aeneid has undergone a miracle of aging, changing from mythical epic into character study, acquiring new flavours over time that Virgil possibly never intended. This epic shows that some old classics never die; they just follow their own, opaque destinies.

posted at: 21:44 | path: / v / virgil | permanent link to this entry

Life with the Duluth bits left in

Duluth, by Gore Vidal

OOP, Penguin (1976)

When people die in Duluth, they reappear in “Duluth”, the popular TV show that has divided the townsfolk. But, while the reincarnated occasionally attempt to make contact with their onetime relatives, reality itself seems subject to the whims of a parade of pulp novelists: aliens land in the city; a statuesque blonde policewoman sexes her way through the barrios; and the high society of Duluth, led by magnate Bellamy Craig, drug-dealer Big John and shadowy figure The Dude, attempt to subvert and control the rioting masses. And when the spaceship seems to move wherever the sheriff puts the drawing pin on his map, or when famous novelist Rosemary Klein Kantor uses her database of everyone else’s fiction to change the social and geographical landscapes of the town, it’s clear that not all of the problems can be laid squarely at the door of Mayor Herridge.

This is a novel about the power of fiction as much as it’s a social satire. It boasts special effects and complicated visual sequences alongside such typical necessities as plot and characterization. As such, it suffers occasionally under the weight of the explosives and machinery required to keep the fires and bullets stoked, and the alien spacecraft moving around by pomo-magic. Vidal’s typically acerbic malice is here so flamboyant and over the top that it occasionally reveals the puppetry that guides his protagonists in their roles. Shallowness of character is not something that one expects from a Vidal novel and, while a brief managing of expectations permits you to settle down and simply watch the show, in the interim it’s easy to feel lost among a carnival of exciting, but ultimately pointless, distractions: “is this all there is?”

Rather aptly, then, Duluth is one of a breed of novels (all kissing-cousins of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions) that express a kind of mid-life crisis both in the lives of the individual authors and also in the way that the novel can be written. Personal and technical fears go into the writing of such books, and it’s understandable that excesses of style and technique are to be found in what are, in some ways, attempts to fend off insecurity. That Calvino was a fan of Duluth reveals a lot about its content: it’s a novelist’s novel, pointing the way for all sorts of techniques, but ultimately, like Captain Eddie standing for mayor but messing with his maps and plans, too busy with prestidigitation to win the popular vote.

posted at: 20:59 | path: / v / vidal_gore | permanent link to this entry

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