Tag Archives: Novel

J. G Ballard’s Crash

Posted on 25 Jul 2024 | 13 comments

J. G. Ballard, Crash (© 1973, Vintage Books 2005)

tl;dr: Yuk!

Having seen Crash on Tim Walters’ list of must-read science fiction / fantasy novels about 15 years ago, I got hold of a copy via Bookmooch, and it has been sitting on my To Be Read shelf ever since. I knew a David Cronenberg movie was based on it, and that it was about car accident survivors who share a sexual fetish for cars and car crashes.

Not an attractive proposition. But it’s a slim paperback, so I overrode my reluctance and packed it to read on the plane on my recent trip.

The Vintage Books edition has an Introduction written by J. G. Ballard in 1995, which includes this:

Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology.

If pornography is something that feels you leaving just a bit less than fully human, he succeeds. If it’s something that makes you feel sexy, not so much. I’m a long way from being a connoisseur of porn, but the book this reminded me of was the one in the podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno. It has the same obsession with genitalia and sex-related bodily fluids – which in this book means pretty much all bodily fluids – but it’s not funny, even unintentionally. The patriarchal world view is overwhelming, and the sex is somehow tangled up with, or smeared or squirted on, car dashboards, crumpled metal, and terribly scarred bodies. The book is not for the faint-hearted, and I include myself in that category. In case that makes it sound titillating, I should add that it’s not for the easily ignored either: it goes on and on with unerotic sex scenes that are described in clinical, mechanical language (I won’t inflict examples on you) but still manage to be anatomically/mechanically confusing..

It’s not that I was clutching my pearls. I read the whole thing in the hope that it would deliver on the ‘total metaphor for man’s life’ etc. There’s a whiff of a promise that it would shed light on our society’s widespread fascination with car crashes, or the frisson produced by famous road deaths (Jane Mansfield, Albert Camus and James Dean are mentioned). But no more than a whiff. The opening paragraph foreshadows a near escape by ‘the film actress Elizabeth Taylor’ (whose Cleopatra appeared in the year the book was published), but she pretty much remains an abstraction.

Suffice to say I’m not rushing out to see the movie.

I wrote this blog post on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, where the earth has been reshaped over the last century to accommodate the needs of motor vehicles. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, with gratitude for their care of the land over millennia, and hope that the rest of us can learn from them in time.

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Andrew O’Hagan on Caledonian Road with the book club

Posted on 23 Jul 2024 | 10 comments

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road (Faber 2024)

Before the meeting: Caledonian Road has a brilliant epigraph from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1881 essay about ageing, ‘Aes Triplex’:

After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner and thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.

This quote struck a powerful chord with me, as the ice is definitely growing thinner below my feet, and I’m seeing my contemporaries ‘going through’ with increasing frequency.

Disappointingly, however, the book isn’t about courage and resilience in the face of ageing. It’s both more ambitious and less engaging than that.

Caledonian Road is a portrait of modern Britain, where criminality and corruption are the order of the day, and complicity is universal. Ranging from a Russian oligarch to a bystander at a backstreet knifing, with a distinguished art critic, a number of parliamentarians and a huge cast of characters in between, no one in the book can claim complete innocence.

The book’s first sentence introduces the main character and hints broadly at what is to happen:

Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.

Campbell is a successful academic and art critic who dabbles in writing copy for fashion shows. He has written an essay that aims to puncture the complacency of the art world. He’s also dashed off a self-help book called Why Men Cry in Cars for which he plans to hire a handsome young actor to claim authorship and do signing tours. In the year covered Caledonian Road – in four parts named for the seasons, plus a fifth part titled ‘Realisation’ – his plans go (predictably) awry, and his own complacency is shattered. He falls under the spell of a young black student, Milo, who challenges his liberal world view and introduces him to the dubious pleasures of the dark web. Campbell’s comfortable life unravels and all around him and Milo as the outright and criminality of their friends, families and associates is laid bare.

The narrative takes us into many corners of UK society – a private gentlemen’s club, the tiny front parlour of a bereaved working class Scotswoman, a disastrous fashion shoot, a marijuana farm, a lorry full of illegal immigrants, the office of a tabloid newspaper. And weaponised social media is everywhere.

If it was a television series, I’m pretty sure I’d be addicted. As a novel, it’s not my cup of tea. There are many wonderful things in it, but the narrative just doesn’t sing, at least not to me. For instance, this is the opening of Chapter 10, which was a turning point, not in the plot, but in my non-enjoyment:

When he wasn’t in the country or at their mansion in Holland Park, the Duke was often at his old bachelor set at Albany, Piccadilly. His rooms were halfway down the rope-walk, opposite Admiral FitzRoy’s storm barometer, which that day indicated a fair wind. For some time there had been work going on above him, an ‘Oedipal struggle’, the porter said, between the young playboy Ralph Trench and his father, the decorator Hartley Trench, who had made his name, and his family ill, via a lifetime’s association with Sibyl Colefax and the Prince of Wales.

The Duke is one of the book’s main characters, but no one else in that paragraph is ever mentioned again. For an ignorant colonial commoner like me, none of the named places, things or people means anything. Google isn’t much help with Admiral Fitzroy and his storm barometer; I’m guessing the Trenches are inventions; for those in the know there’s probably a witty observation about fashion or the lifestyles of the rich and famous in the mention of Sybil Colefax and the prince. It feels as if Andrew O’Hagan worked hard at getting the details right here. And that’s so for the whole book – details for fashionistas, marijuana growers, people-smugglers and art dealers as much as for the aristocracy. And it feels like work for the reader too, with too little pleasure or enlightenment to show for it.

Andrew O’Hagan spoke with Richard Fidler about Caledonian Road at the Melbourne Writers Festival (here’s a link). He talked an excellent book.

After the meeting: We discussed the book along with Daniel Mason’s North Woods. We found a lot more to talk about in this one.

Someone brought along a book on Joan Eardley, one of whose paintings hangs in Campbell Flynn’s house. We found a painting that most fitted the description in the book, and were reminded of a feature of Flynn’s character that I’ve omitted in the earlier parts of this post: his childhood was in a poor part of Scotland, and he occasionally reflected on the disparity between his present comfort and past deprivation.

I read out the passage about Admiral FitzRoy’s storm barometer. Possibly in response to that, someone said they had read somewhere that London is a character in the book. Maybe so, was my thought, if you already know London.

Someone recognised a syndrome (my word) in Campbell’s relationship with Milo: an ageing academic who feels his grip on the zeitgeist loosening sees the prospect for continuing relevance in latching on to a student and, under the appearance of supporting the student, in effect plagiarises their work. In Campbell’s case, he employs Milo as his research assistant for a significant public lecture and, though like much else in the book this is never quite explicit, Milo in effect writes the lecture for him. When one or two scholars from outside Campbell’s comfortable British liberal arts environment dismiss the lecture as derivative, the narrator leaves it to the reader to judge whether this is just academic snark or whether something substantial is being said. We know that Milo is waging a kind of guerrilla class warfare as a hacker; is he also doing it by messing with Campbell academically?

We argued abut Campbell’s financial worries. Though his psychiatrist wife and he live pretty luxuriously, he considers himself to be in trouble – but won’t tell her about. Some of us believed he really was in trouble. Others thought it was all in his mind. Typically, the narrative voice leaves it up to the reader to figure it out.

I think we generally agreed that there is too much happening in the book. Things just happen, mostly offstage, and the action moves on. Things are generally treated superficially, so that there only a couple of moments, involving minor characters, where real emotion is being captured. In particular, the treatment of the younger characters – Campbell’s DJ son, the profligate son of the Russian oligarch, the Black gang members – is unconvincing.

This is the Book Club where we used to just swap books, with no more than 30 consecutive seconds of discussion allowed on any book. We’ve now met five times and are getting the hang of the Club’s new incarnation. Astonishingly, Trump and Biden hardly got a mention until quite late in the evening, when one who may or may not have inside knowledge predicted that Biden would withdraw from the race on Monday our time. She was right.

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Daniel Mason’s North Woods and the book club

Posted on 21 Jul 2024 | 2 comments

Daniel Mason, North Woods (John Murray 2023)

Before the meeting: If my experience is anything to go by, your heart may sink as you read the first pages of North Woods. It looks as if it’s going to be one of those historical novels written in a strained imitation of late 17th century semi-literate English. But be of good cheer – the passionate young couple who have fled into the forest from a Puritan settlement in Western Massachusetts don’t last long: the book is about the place they flee to. Each chapter moves to a new set of characters, descended from or otherwise related to the previous set, and we move through the decades and centuries up to the indefinite future of the final chapter.

It’s almost, but not quite, a collection of short stories in different modes, set in different time periods. There are ghost stories, stories of unrequited love, a tragic gay story, family sagas, a psychological horror story. There’s a persistent attention to what happens to the woods in question as an area is cleared for an apple orchard, which is turn is partly destroyed then overgrown, as various blights and diseases wipe out some of the splendid native species. Between the chapters there are sections that are presented as found documents: a story written in the margins of a family Bible, a True Crime article from the 1950s, a speech written for a local amateur historical society meeting. There are ballads written by one set of characters (which I found mostly unreadable), and photographs of the woods in its many stages.

Yes, it’s a terrifically inventive work, with US history of the last three hundred years as its backdrop.

But, well, meh!

I’m mostly left cold. It mostly feels like a writerly exercise with no deeper necessity. That would be fine if it was fun, but it’s not fun. What may be meant as magic realism just feels contrived and arbitrary. Lyrical descriptions of natural processes are laboured – more than anything, they made me want to reread Richard Powers’ Overstory (link to my blog post). Because nothing outweighed it, what might have been a niggle at the back of my mind became a constant unease: First Nations people are only glancingly present and mostly consigned to the unknowable past; tribal names are mentioned a number of times with due respect, and a wise Elder makes an appearance in an early chapter, but that’s it. I don’t know that a similar book could be written in Australia, possibly because colonisation is so much more recent here. For this Australian reader, this virtual absence meant the book felt hollow at its heart.

After the meeting: We discussed this book along with Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road. That book took up most of the discussion time, though it’s probably true that the excellent Indian meal and catch-up conversation took up more than both combined.

I think there was a consensus that the book worked as a collection of short stories. The over-all concept was impressive but didn’t quite come off, and the ghost stories worked least well of all. Someone else mentioned the Richard Powers novel as a comparison that didn’t reflect well on this book. The stories / chapters that received most honourable mentions were a long interstitial piece, the Johnny-Appleseed-like memoir of the man who planted the orchard, and Chapter Three, in which his daughters Alice and Mary are inseparable, until they’re not, with a creepy Gothic twist at the end.

I wrote this blog post on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, which has seen many changes in the last 236 years, but has never ceased being cared for by these First Nations people. I am very happy to acknowledge their elders past and present.

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Percival Everett, James and the book group

Posted on 20 Jun 2024 | 14 comments

Percival Everett, James (Pan Macmillan Australia 2024)

Before the meeting: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those books that, even if you haven’t actually read it, you probably feel as if you have. Though it’s set in the south of the USA during the time of slavery, it was published in 1884, two decades after slavery was abolished. It’s an adventure story. A prefatory note warns the reader not to look for a motive, a moral or a plot. But the warning is obviously ironic. Huck, a white boy, teams up with Jim, a man escaping from slavery, on a raft trip down the Mississippi and, though the book is much praised for other elements such as its portrayal of the great Mississippi River and its breakthrough use of US vernacular English, it’s Huck’s moral growth, his coming to recognise Jim’s humanness and the evils of slavery that account for the book’s status as a Great American Novel.

But …

As African-American voices – voices of people whose lives are still deeply affected by the legacy of slavery – have made themselves heard, the book has met with controversy. I first met the negative case in Julius Lester’s Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky, in which one essay begins, ‘I am grateful that among the indignities inflicted on me in childhood I escaped Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’ Inspired by Lisa Hill in the comments section on my post about that book (yes, there are places where it’s safe to read the comments!), I searched for the article to refresh my memory and found a version at this link. Lester is scathing, describing the book’s world as the ‘all-too-familiar one of white fantasy in which blacks have all the humanity of Cabbage Patch dolls’. There’s a lot more if you’re interested.

Percival Everett’s James tackles Huck Finn in a different way, less scathing but even more radical in its project of restoring humanity to the character Jim. It’s a novel in its own right, which I imagine you could read without reference to Twain’s. But you’d miss a lot of the pleasure and insight it has to offer.

James tells the story from Jim’s point of view, including a number of episodes where Jim and Huck are separated. It keeps much of the adventure and the humour of the original, but it opens out to the visceral horrors of slavery. In particular Twain’s final section in which Huck and Tom Sawyer hatch a plot to free Jim is replaced by darker, and also more joyful and just as improbable actions in which Jim takes things into his own hands.

But just as important as the changes in the story are the changes in tone. Beginning with the book’s title, dignity is restored to Jim. He is still called by the diminutive in most of the narrative, but we know that’s not all of him. In a key device, whenever enslaved characters talk to each other out of earshot of whites, they speak a form of standard English, returning to ‘slave talk’ – Sho nuff, Massah, etc – if they think they’ll be overheard. It’s not realistic: there’s no way enslaved people in the American South in the mid 19th century spoke standard 21st century English, but it’s an inspired bit of comedy that works to undo the othering of the enslaved.

As it happens, page 77* is a nice example of how James writes back to Huckleberry Finn.

In Mark Twain’s narrative, Huck and Jim have been separated by a near disaster. When Huck regains the relative safety of the raft he finds Jim in an exhausted sleep, and decides to play a trick on him. He tells Jim nothing untoward has happened, that it has all been a dream. Jim believes him, and sets about interpreting the dream – only to have Huck point to some damage on the raft that proves the incident really happened. Huck, who is the narrator, asks teasingly what these things stand for:

He looked at me steady without ever smiling, and says:
‘What do dey stan’ for? I’se gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’, en I didn’ k’yer no’ mo’ what become er me en de raf’. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun’, de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo’ foot, I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin’ ’bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.’
Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back.
It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither.

It’s a milestone in Huck’s journey to realising that Jim is fully human, and is often quoted as one of the most moving passages in the book.

Here’s the equivalent in James, beginning with Jim playing along with Huck’s childish trick:

‘Lawdy, Lawd, Lawd,’ I said. ‘Sho was a scary dream.’
Huck started laughing. He pointed at me and laughed harder.
‘You mean you was pullin’ on my leg?’ I said. He was enjoying himself and that was all right with me. It always made life easier when white folks could laugh at a poor slave now and again.
‘I had you goin’,’ Huck said.
I acted like he’d hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.
‘I’m sorry, Jim. I just thought it was funny,’ he said.
‘Yeah, it be funny, Huck, sho nuff funny.’ I pushed out my lower lip a bit, an expression I displayed only for white people.
‘I din’t mean to hurt you none.’
It could have been my turn to experience a bit of guilt, having toyed with the boy’s feelings, and he being too young to actually understand the problem with his behaviour, but I chose not to. When you are a slave, you claim choice where you can.

So much is happening here. Jim is no longer a gullible fool. He’s an adult, adept at playing the role assigned to him by slavery while holding firm to his own reality. Huck’s great moral turning point is just another example of the psychology of members of the oppressor group who want to see themselves as virtuous: ‘White people love feeling guilty.’ But as an adult he is acutely aware that Huck is a child. When he chooses not to ‘experience a bit of guilt’ he’s departing from his usual protective attitude. Despite what he says, he clearly does feel guilty – and needs to justify his behaviour. Like a true adult, though, he doesn’t argue that he was just giving as good as he’d got, tit for tat, ‘He started it’. He acknowledges that he was acting within their other opprsssor–oppressed relationship. ‘When you are a slave, you claim choice where you can.’ It’s a complex moment, that foreshadows the way we come to see Jim and Huck not so much as slave and slaver as adult and child.

Jim, soon to call himself James, gets to dispense some rough justice in the course of the book, but his relationship with Huck develops in benign and interesting ways, with a twist that is signalled early, guessable, and very satisfying.

After the meeting: We had a fabulous meal, over which discussion ranged from the recent State of Origin match to the question of whether as a man of a certain age one should step off the footpath when an oncoming group of young people acts as if you’re invisible.

I was probably the most familiar with Huckleberry Finn, and no one else was all that interested in the relationship between the two books. My impression is that reading with that relationship in mind meant that I enjoyed it more – I didn’t just forgive what others saw as the faults of the book but saw them as features. For example, a number of chaps commented that there was a series of incidents and events rather than a character-driven plot. That’s definitely an issue for James as a stand-alone novel, but I just accepted it as integral to the basic project of writing back to Huck Finn. Similarly, the number of coincidences that allow Jim and Huck to get back together after their separations is irksome, or possibly laughable, unless you take them in your stride as echoing nineteenth century conventions. Most interestingly, the ‘twist’ (sorry, I won’t be spoileristically specific) feels implausible. Sure, but it’s profoundly satisfying as a symbolic statement.

But it wasn’t a disagreement. We reminded each other of ‘good bits’: the time Jim spends with a minstrel group, as a Black man pretending to be a white man pretending to be a Black man; a horrific scene when a man who is being savagely flogged mouths the word ‘Run!’ to someone he sees to be at risk Mostly, we enjoyed the book as a good yarn – down the river then a u-turn back up, as someone said.

I wrote this blog post on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, not far from where what we now call the Cooks River has been cared for by Elders for millennia. As I finished it, the shortest day of the year was nearly here, and the ground was sodden from abundant rain.

* My blogging practice is to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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William Gibson’s Peripheral

Posted on 20 May 2024 | Leave a comment

William Gibson, The Peripheral (Berkly 2014)

I picked up The Peripheral in a street library soon after I finished reading and blogging about its sequel, Agency, nearly four years ago. Since then, it has been my TBR shelf as a treat for a rainy day. Its time has now come.

There’s a peculiar challenge in writing about it. Possibly the main thing I enjoyed about it is that a lot of the time the reader has no idea what’s actually happening. You’re not even sure what some words mean, or what the characters are not saying. Explanations do come, eventually, but there’s a delicious disorientation as AI devices and other technical marvels multiply, we only half-see crucial incidents, cultural events are described from the point of view of someone who knows a lot more about the background than the reader does. The action takes place in two unspecified future time periods that interpenetrate in often unclear ways. However serious the issues may be – and there’s a plausible version of how the global emergency will develop – there’s a pervasive sense of play. If I summarise the plot, or even the set-up, I’ll be depriving you of that experience.

My first idea was to write about first two short chapters – all the chapters are short – but then I thought, oh what the heck, I’ll skip straight to page 77* to give you a taste, and let the spoilers fall where they will.

Lev had told the polt that he needed to speak with the polt’s sister, but the polt had wanted to hear a figure, a specific sum of money. Lev had offered ten million, a bit more than the fee for the supposed murder contract. The polt had said that that was too much for his cousin to receive by something called Hefty Pal.
Lev had explained that they could arrange for the cousin to win that amount in their state’s next lottery. The payment would be entirely legitimate.

Gibson has a gift for coining terms. ‘Cyberspace’ is his invention. Of The Peripheral‘s many coinages, three appear in this short passage: ‘polt’, ‘Hefty Pal’ and ‘stub’. They each have the virtue of suggesting their origins if not their precise meanings. A polt, derived from poltergeist, is a person who is bodily in one place and/or time, but is somehow seeing and acting in another time. (A peripheral is a human-looking artefact, that can be the host to a polt.) Hefty is a mega corporation of which Hefty Pal, as in PayPal, is a subsidiary. A ‘stub’, known more formally as a ‘continuum’, is a key invention of the book, something that readers and half the characters come to understand only gradually. All I’ll say here is that it is something that results from people going back to an earlier time and changing that time’s future.

There are three characters in this scene: Lev, the son of a fabulously wealthy Russian gangster capitalist, whose hobby involves mucking about with the past (stubs/continua are his playthings); Ash, a tech wiz who makes it happen for him (among other distinguishing features, she has tattoos of animals that move around on her skin, often glimpsed running for cover when someone tries to look at them); and Wilf Netterton, put-upon publicist, from whose point of view the story is told in alternate chapters. Page 77 is at the end of a Wilf chapter.

Three more characters are referred to. ‘The polt’ is Burton, a battered veteran in Netterton’s past / our future (though that way of describing things isn’t quite accurate). ‘The polt’s sister’ is Flynne, a gamer in a small US town who is the focus of the non-Wilf chapters. Burton and – on one fateful occasion – Flynne have been employed as polts by Lev under the impression they were testing a computer game. The main narrative is set in motion by Flynne’s witnessing what may be a murder. ‘The cousin’ is Leon, one of their tribe of loyal family members.

At that, Netherton had been unable to resist looking at Ash again.
‘You don’t think that that lottery business casts the whole thing as a Faustian bargain?’ Netherton had asked, when the call was done.
‘Faustian?’ Lev looked blank.
‘As if you have powers one would associate with Lucifer,’ said Ash.
‘Oh. Well, yes, I see what you mean. But it’s something a friend stumbled across, in his stub. I have detailed instructions for it. I’d been meaning to bring it up with you.’

Tiny moments like this give the book its rich texture. There’s the complicity between WIlf and Ash, two underlings who have cultural memories, unlike their rich and powerful employer. (Similarly in the earlier paragraph, it’s fun that Hefty Pal is something in the reader’s future and Flynne’s present that has been forgotten in Wilf’s time.) Like the implied reference to poltergeists, the mention of Faust reminds us that even though the narrative is presented as a tale of high tech, AI and nanotechnology, it often has the feel of demonic possession and fairytale magic. (If you’ve read Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy – Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) – you’ll remember the prominence there of the legba of Voodoo.)

And that had been that, really, except that now he was sitting there, waiting for the polt’s sister to call

That’s the first hint of the almost-romance that is to almost-blossom between these characters who can only spend time together by means of weird time travel mediated by a peripheral in one direction and an odd little children’s toy in the other.

Now I’m tempted to reread Agency. I remember that it was also gleefully inventive and similarly had two interrelating times. I’m pretty sure that some of the distant future characters are in both books, but my memory is dim. William Gibson is anything but dim.

I wrote this blog post on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, not far from where what we now call the Cooks River has been cared for by Elders for many millennia. The weather has just turned cold, but spider webs are still proliferating.

* My blogging practice is to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 77. For The Peripheral, I’ve included a little from page 76 as well.

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The Book Club and Paul Murray’s Bee Sting

Posted on 29 Apr 2024 | 8 comments

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton 2023)

Before the meeting: Grandparenting during school holidays has left me with very little time to write about The Bee Sting before the Book Club meets, so this may be sketchy.

I loved it. It’s a beautifully written Irish novel, a family saga in which each chapter focuses on a family member in rotation, with a couple of other characters taking a chapter each. A teenage girl, Cass, can’t wait to leave her tiny village behind and go to University in Dublin with her unreliable best friend. Her younger brother, PJ, is in a world of trouble at school. Their father, Dickie, is in much worse trouble as his Volkwagen dealership, inherited from his tough-man father, is falling on hard times, and – as we discover – that’s the least of his worries. Their mother, Imelda, formerly a stunning beauty, is bitterly discontented. There’s adultery, blackmail, teenage alcoholism, survivalist adventures in the woods, small-town scandal-mongering, a malign version of the Terence Stamp character in Pasolini’s Teorema, and a final chapter that feels like a version of the opening of Act Two of Sondheim’s Into the Woods …

A friend of mine who worked as an assistant director on TV says he usually has to read a novel twice: the first time he is in professional mode, taking note of the locations; only on the second reading can he attend to characters and plot. I’m pretty sure he would love his first read of The Bee Sting. The locations are brilliantly realised: a shed in the woods that is in turn a place for young people to hang out, a site of sexual danger, a survivalist project, a place for a secret stash, and the focus of the book’s final movement; the prestigious but grungy ‘Rooms’ at Trinity College; the elegant, dilapidated family home; the contrasting house where Imelda grew up; some new project homes that have been left unfinished when the Celtic Tiger failed.

What kept me in thrall, though, was the way characters’ back stories unfold like petals on a surprising flower, involving among other things the tragic death of Dickie’s elder brother (a local sports hero who had been engaged to Imelda and who was, we believe, the apple of his father’s eye), a car accident that injured Dickie in his days at Trinity College, and the titular bee sting that meant Imelda’s face remained hidden under her veil at her wedding.

The story of the bee sting turns out to be just that: a story. And the same goes for almost every story from the family’s past.

Rather than saying any more about the book in general, I want to focus on one moment. It involves a minor character named Willie. As a young man at Trinity he embodies the brilliantly witty, ironic, flamboyant element of university life that intimidates and entrances young Dickie fresh from small-town life. When Dickie leaves university after his brother’s death, Willie disappears from the book, only to turn up much later to give a talk that Cass attends almost by accident. The talk goes for roughly five pages, and is a brilliant example of a scene that does many things at once: it brings us up to date with WIllie’s life, showing him to us in a new light; it gives his perspective on a key incident that until now we have only seen from Dickie’s point of view; it moves Cass along decisively on her trajectory; it brings to the fore the book’s preoccupation with climate change and – possibly – allows the author to put an argument that’s dear to his heart. At least, it spoke to me as if from his heart:

Here’s a little from toward the end the speech:

Togetherness is crucial, if we’re to tackle something as total as climate change. Banging your own little drum, demanding everyone look at your mask, be it a consumer status symbol or one of sexuality or race or religious belief or whatever else, that will do no good. Division will do no good. You may gain some attention for your particular subgroup, there may even be minor accommodations made. But you are moving the deckchairs on a sinking ship, diversity deckchairs. Global apocalypse is not interested in your identity politics or who you pray to or what side of the border you live on. Cis, trans, black, white, scientist, artist, basketball player, priest – every stripe of person, every colour and creed, we are all going to be hit by this hammer. And that is another fact that unites us. We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end.

I just love that. The fact that a few pages later a young character characterises the speech as loathsome fascist rhetoric only deepens my awe for Paul Murray’s story-telling.

After the Meeting: The Bee Sting shared our agenda with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (link is to my blog post). We generally liked this book much more than the other, though more than one thought it was a good yarn but not much more than that. The Emerging Artist and I definitely liked the book more than everyone else.

One person singled out Willie’s speech, though for a very different reason from me. She saw it as symptomatic of the way the book is contrived, its world kept deliberately narrow. Why bring that character back in? she asked. I don’t see that as a problem – it’s not even up there with Dickensian coincidences – Ireland has a small population, and the same people will keep on turning up.

We tended to agree that there were longueurs and improbabilities when Dickie, PJ and another man go on their survivalist project.

Spoilerphobia stops me from airing one genuinely puzzling thing that occurred to me during the discussion. But two, and only two, of the characters have names that seem to mock aspects of their story – not so much them, as perhaps one of the Club members thought, as the act of creating their story.

When someone said that the book would make an interesting TV series, there was general assent.

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Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and the Book Club

Posted on 28 Apr 2024 | 9 comments

Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos (translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta 2023)

Before the meeting: The Emerging Artist read this book before I did. She hated it, couldn’t finish it, and threatened to divorce me if I ended up liking it. Though I wouldn’t say I absolutely loved the first 166 pages, by page 167 (of 292) I was pretty sure our relationship was safe.

In a prologue, the book’s narrator, Katharine, learns that a former lover has died. She is unable to attend his funeral as she has promised, but soon after the funeral two boxes of material are delivered to her door by a weeping woman. Here’s how she describes the project that becomes this book:

Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of. Was it a fortunate moment, then, when she, just nineteen, first met Hans? One day in early November, she sits down on the floor and prepares herself to sift – sheet by sheet, folder by folder – through the contents of the first box, then the second.

What follows, based on the contents of those boxes plus a suitcase of Katharina’s own memorabilia, is the story of her relationship with Hans, a married man who is ten years older than her father, 51 to her 19. Two things inclined my expectations against the Emerging Artist’s distaste. First, the set-up linked nicely to other recent reading – mainly Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man (link is to my blog post), a memoir of a relationship between the author and a much younger man. Second, it’s set in East Germany in the 1980s in the prelude and aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, so I thought (correctly) that the book would capture something of the flavour of that time and place.

The book starts with a cute meet in a downpour in Berlin in 1985. There’s a period of mutual bliss, which blossoms all too quickly into a physically and psychologically abusive nightmare, to which Katharina is inexplicably committed, so that by page 167 without any explanation she has evidently consented to being tied up and beaten with a belt, and later with a riding crop. Until that point, the historical context was enough to keep me afloat as a reader. The hideous mind games move up a notch as Hans convinces Katharina that she is cold, selfish and deceitful and sends her a series of cassettes detailing how terribly she has made him suffer. Instead of pulling the plug, she listens to the tapes, takes careful notes (hence the narrator’s ability to recall them even though he destroys each hour-long diatribe by taping the next one over it), and writes a self- abasing reply, thereby provoking another cassette.

The hideous gaslighting continues for many pages. Several times the reader breathes a sigh of relief as it seems the relationship is finished, and then it’s on again with occasional moments of joy and endless rounds of blame and accusation on his part and wretched self-abasement on hers. Maybe its an allegory about East Germany, as Neel Mukherjee says on the back cover, but I can’t see it.

I’m glad I persisted, because a) the worm does finally turn, if ever so slowly and slightly, and more importantly b) there are several wonderful pages about how the reunification of Germany was experienced by the Easties. Maybe for German readers the relationship between the central relationship and the historical moments would be clearer, but I couldn’t see it as more than a gruelling account of a vulnerable young woman being exploited by a self-obsessed and cruel much older man, with the broad sweep of history barely impinging on their lives until massive change happens all around them.

Page 204: I usually blog about page 77. It would have been interesting to linger on that page in Kairos, where Katharina first visits the West, foreshadowing the final movement. But this time I want to give you a bit of page 204, which is the moment when I first began to hope for something other than abuse and submission, and catch a glimmer of the book’s intention to capture what it was like to have lived through first the Nazi and then East German Communist regimes. It’s the closest Hans comes to introspection:

The abolition of a pitiless world through pitilessness. But when does the phase after begin? When is the moment to stop the killing? … To be arrested or to carry out arrests and believe in the cause, to be beaten or to beat and believe in the cause, to be betrayed or to betray and believe in the cause. What cause would ever again be great enough to unite victims and murderers in one heartbeat? That it would make victims out of murderers and murderers out of victims, until no one could tell any more which he was? Arrest and be arrested, beat and be beaten, betray and be betrayed, till hope, selflessness, sorrow, shame, guilt, and fear all make one indissoluble whole … And if beauty can only be bought with ugliness, and free existence with fear? Probably, Hans thinks, turning aside, and hearing Katharina mutter something incomprehensible in her sleep, that’s probably what it took to produce the deeper experience that you can see here in every woman, every man, every child even.

After the meeting: After a pleasant meal of mussels and pasta, we dutifully turned to a discussion of the books (Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting was also on our agenda, blog post to follow). Only two of the five of us had finished the book. There was some discussion about whether Book Clunb members had an obligation to read the books. I think the position that ended up being accepted was that yes, they do, except if a book offends their value system intolerably. Kairos was such a case for at least one of last night’s non-completers.

Generally we agreed that it was an awful read. I tried to argue that the final section, in which the Wall comes down, made the whole book worth reading, but I didn’t even convince myself. I also argued that the eerie lack of internality in the characters was not a bug but a feature: the narrator is reconstructing a painful episode from her youth, which she no longer understands or perhaps can’t bear to imagine herself back into. So she meticulously recreates a narrative from the documents, including details of places, times, food eaten, drinks drunk, transport caught, the content of cassette tapes and letters, and leaves it to the reader to imagine the emotional content beyond the broad outlines of ‘love’. I pretty much convinced myself that this was an accurate reading, but no one else bought it.

We didn’t talk about the translation at all. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the book would almost certainly speak more forcefully to German readers, not so much because of the language as because of their connection to the history.

In short, not a recommended read.

I wrote this post on Gadigal-Wangal land, not far from the Cooks River, in a place that was once wetland teeming with birdlife. I finished it after a long walk through Gadigal land to the waters of Sydney Harbour/Warrane on a beautiful autumn day. I want to acknowledge the people who have looked after this place for tens of thousands of years, their Elders past present and emerging.

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Richard Osman’s Last Devil to Die and the Bullet that Missed

Posted on 6 Apr 2024 | 3 comments

Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die
and The Bullet That Missed
(both audiobooks from Audible, performed by Fiona Shaw)

These are numbers 3 and 4 of the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries, in which a group of friends an English retirement village meet of a Thursday, between the Chess Club and the Yoga Class, to solve murders. It’s like a blend of Miss Marple and the Five Finder-outers, both of which I loved with a passion, one when I was about nine years old and the other three or four years later. Even though these stories involve nastier crimes than Agatha Christie’s ancient sleuth or Enid Blyton’s ingenious children, listening to them on long car rides transported me back to those earlier pleasures.

We listened to them out of order. The Last Devil‘s first murder victim (there are several in each book) is alive and well in The Bullet, and though we understand why the club members want to solve his murder – he was a friend of one of them – it was only on reading the earlier book that we understood the nature of the friendship, and realised that what seems an improbable plot twist is actually completely in character. On the other hand, it was fun to see where Book 3 includes hints and foreshadowings of Book 4’s revelations.

Richard Osman appears regularly on UK panel shows. Pointless, the game show he developed and co-presented, was a pleasure to watch, and – to judge by the irritating quality of its Australian version – its success owed a lot to his self-deprecatory erudition. Those qualities shine through in these stories. We don’t really care about the vast quantities of lost heroin in Book 4 or the massive financial fraud in Book 3 except as MacGuffins. What matters is the way this group of people who couldn’t be more different from one another are thrown together by the accident of old age and become strong friends. There’s a former trade union official, an almost retired psychiatrist, a former spy who was high up in MI6, and Joyce who is endlessly interested in what’s cheap at the supermarket, what’s happening in her regular TV shows, the comings and goings of the village.

There are romances among the septuagenarians and especially in Book 4 some finely judged moments of pathos. Just as the reader thinks the present adventures are enough to sustain the interest, there are poignant excursions into the characters’ back stories – and one realises that the basic reality of being old is that one has a past.

Fiona Shaw’s reading – performance really – of both books is wonderful, and at the end of Book 4 she and Richard Osman have a conversation that sheds light both on his intentions in writing the books and her approach to reading more than 10 hours of text incorporating the voices of something like a dozen characters.

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What happened to Nina, Dervla McTiernan

Posted on 29 Mar 2024 | 19 comments

Dervla McTiernan, What Happened to Nina? (Harper Collins 2024; audiobook by Audible, performed by Kristen Sieh, Stacy Glemboski, Lisa Flanagan, Robert Petkoff, George Newbern, Jenna Lamia and Preston Butler III)

I used to read to the Emerging Artist on long car journeys. Then my voice started failing, and for a couple of years we’ve been trying podcasts and audiobooks, with mixed results.

What Happened to Nina worked like a charm. For a start, each of seven characters narrates at least one chapter, and each character has their own reader, so there is plenty of vocal variation. More significantly, the book reads like a television show: locations are established efficiently, introspection is minimal, dialogue and action are pacy, motivations straightforward. Perfect for listening to when part of your mind is on the passing scene. (I know there are people who do their serious reading this way. I’m not disciplined enough for that.)

I’ve read and enjoyed two of Dervla McTiernan’s previous books, The Rúin (link is to my blog post) and The Good Turn. They’re both police procedurals set in Ireland, and apart from the mystery to be solved in each of them, what I enjoyed was the sense of place, and the Irish ness.

In What Happened to Nina? there is no mystery. Twenty-year-old Nina narrates the first section, and then goes missing. The reader can guess the what, who, why, where, and pretty much how right from the start, and becomes quite sure within a couple of chapters. The novel is interested in how the disappearance is dealt with by the other characters, especially her parents and the parents of her boyfriend, who is also the chief suspect. As they gradually discover the truth, there are two harsh surprises, but no real twists. And though the logistics are carefully plotted, the Vermont environment doesn’t come alive, and the dialogue, while recognisably American, has a generic feel to it. (That’s no criticism of the readers/performers, who are universally excellent.)

So yeah, this is OK. It feels to me that it’s written with a possible US TV adaptation in mind. If that happens, it could be a successful series. I might watch it.

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Hisham Matar, My Friends, the book club, page 77

Posted on 18 Mar 2024 | 6 comments

Hisham Matar, My Friends (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: Hisham Matar was a guest at the 2017 Sydney Writers’ Festival. On a panel titled ‘Resist!’ which was mainly concerned with the recent election of Donald Trump as President of the USA, he enriched the conversation by referring back to his own childhood in Qaddafi’s Libya, where he wondered who was more sculpted by the regime, those who actively served its interests or those who dedicated themselves to resisting it. He argued powerfully for the importance of complexity, of remaining true to one’s own authentic self. (My blog post here.)

In My Friends, when the narrator, Khaled, is a teenager in Benghazi, he and his family hear a short story read over the BBC. It’s a kind Kafkaesque version of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in which the word ‘no’ has tremendous power. Nobody spells it out, but we understand that it’s a heavily coded advocacy for non-compliance with the Qaddafi regime. (By the end of the book, we understand it could equally refer to refusal to take up arms.) The young narrator, partly inspired by the story, leaves Libya to study at Edinburgh University.

In 1984, he and his friend Mustafa evade the surveillance of their fellow Libyan students and travel to London to join a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy. When the crowd is fired on from inside the embassy (this really happened), they are seriously injured. Unknown to them, the writer of the short story – Hosam – is also at the demonstration, but walks away uninjured. All three of them are now exiles.

The novel traces the way the lives of these three men intertwine, how their friendships grow, how each of them deals with the pain of separation from family and country, and how each responds to the changing political news from home. The Arab Spring of 2010 brings things to a head: the question is now whether to return to join the revolt against Qaddafi, or to continue with the lives they have built away from home, however insubstantial.

On page 77, Khaled is walking the streets of London, remembering when he and Mustafa first came there for the demonstration which would radically alter the course of their lives. His memories leap forward to the period years later when he and Hosam were walking those same streets, with Hosam enthusing about literary history attached to those places. Both the anecdotes on this page touch on major themes of the book.

At the start of the page Hosam has just relayed gossip that when Karl Marx is said to have been ‘sweating it out’ in the British Library, he was actually visiting his mistress in Soho:

‘I like imagining him shuttling back and forth between the two lives. And, anyway, doesn’t his prose hint at this? I don’t mean that it’s duplicitous necessarily, but that it endlessly sidesteps one thing so as to reach for another … ?’

Regarding characters, this is Hosam, six years older than Khaled, showing off his sophistication. Thematically, his description of Marx’s prose could equally be describing Khaled’s approach to life: it never quite commits himself to a clear position. Even in these early pages when he describes his participation in the demonstration, he oscillates between saying he waas led there by Mustafa and taking responsibility for his own decision.

It strikes me that I could draw up a list of all the writers and works mentioned in the early pages of this book and have a reading schedule for a year. There’s not just Marx, and further on this page Conrad, and much of the western canon (including Montaigne, my current early-morning read), but a whole world of Arabic writing including, for example, the Sudanese poet Nizar Qabbani, the Lebanese novelist Salim el Lozi, and Khaled’s father’s favourite poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri. Conrad, who wrote in English away from his native Poland, crops up a lot.

As we were walking down Beak Street, he said, ‘Have I shown you this yet?’ and shot down a narrow alleyway barely wide enough for a man to lie down. It had the unsuitable name of Kingly Street.
‘It’s here,’ he said and crossed to the other side. ‘No, here, yes, this is it, where one night, very late in the hour, Joseph Conrad, believing himself to be pursued by a Russian spy, took out his pocketknife and hid, waiting. As soon as his pursuer appeared, Conrad sneaked up behind him and slit his throat.’
The story was so farfetched that it did not deserve any attention, but what I remember most was the strange excitement that came over Hosam then.
‘It was probably why,’ he went on to say, ‘soon after this, Conrad, despite all the friends he had in London and his burning literary ambition, moved to the country, where he could look out of his window and be able to see from afar if an enemy were approaching.’

I’ve got no idea if this anecdote is Hisham Matar’s invention – a web search found nothing – but Hosam’s excitement in telling it signals a parallel with his own trajectory. By the time he tells it, he has abandoned his writing career, and like all three of the friends, he is intensely aware that he has enemies in Qaddafi’s regime.

Hosam never explains in so many words why he no longer writes, and is unmoved by his friends’ urgings. It’s through moments like this remembered anecdote that we are able to glean what is going on: Conrad’s withdrawal after killing the suspected agent is parallel to Hosam’s fear of detection and shame at his own silence after the 1984 demo.

The book’s opening words point to a feature of the narrative that this passage exemplifies:

It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone’s chest, least of all one’s own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best

I don’t think we ever know what is going on in Khaled’s heart. For instance, when Qaddafi is being overthrown, he sits up all night listening to news and reading text messages from back home, but at work the next day he mumbles that he doesn’t pay much attention to the news. He is more forthcoming with the reader, but a stubborn silence remains.

There’s a lot more to say, but I’m out of time. There’s one wonderful scene I must mention. When after many years his family come to London to visit him, Khaled finally tells his father the real reason that he hasn’t come home, his participation in the 1984 demonstration and the wound he sustained. What happens next between father and son is profound. Here’s how it starts, as Khaled indicates the location of the scar:

‘Here,’ I said and pointed to my chest.
His manic fingers were all over me, trying to unbutton my shirt and pull it off at the same time. I gave him my back and did it myself. He took hold of my vest, and the child I once had been surrendered his arms. What happened next broke a crack through me.
My father, the tallest man I know, bowed and began to trace his fingers along my scar, reading it, turning around me as he followed its line, tears streaming down his face.
‘My boy, my boy,’ he whispered to himself.

(page 242)

Now I really am out of time.

After the meeting: The five of us discussed this book along with Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren (blog post here). This one generated much more interesting conversation. Among other things, two of us had been to Libya when Qaddafi was still in power – for them, the descriptions of life in Benghazi stirred rich memories.

Most if not all of us had read at least one other book by Hisham Matar, The Return (my blog post here), Others had read either In the Country of Men (which I read with my other Book Group, blog post here) or A Month in Siena.

The one who had read A Month in Siena had been irritated by it because ‘nothing happened’. She had a similar complaint abut My Friends. Having enjoyed it up to the point of the demonstration, she was frustrated that instead of telling a story about Libyan politics, the narrative stalled and Khaled in particular settled for a boring uneventful life for most of the book. For others of us, that was the point – it’s a story of exile, and Khaled is stuck, caught between the yearning for home and the impossibility of going there. Yet another challenged the assertion that Khaled was stuck: he had a job teaching English literature, which was the great love of his life – what’s wrong with that? And as the narrator of this book, he is the one who gets to see the whole picture.

Speaking vaguely so as to avoid spoilers, there was some disagreement on how successfully the narrative placed its characters at key events in Libyan history. I thought it was audacious; others thought it was a weakness, a clumsy welding act.

We didn’t come to blows. Even the least enthusiastic among us enjoyed the book, and I think it’s true to say that we all learned a lot about, or were at least reminded of, recent Libyan history.

Also, we had a pleasant meal and heard epic tales of bathroom renovation.

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