Dave's Book Blog: "Self-Help" by Edward Docx

A woman dies in post-Soviet, gangster-run St Petersburg and her unacknowledged son, a divinely talented pianist, needs to contact her heirs in London to persuade them to continue paying his fees to study at the Conservatoire.

This novel, entitled Pravda outside the UK, is a book of cities, almost always in dreadful weather. Arkady lives in St Petersburg, Isabella his half-sister lives in New York, Gabriel, her twin brother, is a journalist in London. Their father Nicholas lives in Paris. The London scenes are informed by the inevitable Dickens and the Russian scenes by Dostoevsky (the scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov stands on a bridge is mentioned twice). As for Paris, there seem to be echoes from Zola's The Masterpiece: just like the hero of that novel, Nicholas is a painter who despairs of ever producing truly good work (“The fact that he was a profoundly mediocre painter might not have bothered him at all except ... that every time he closed his eyes, he could see quite clearly what it was that he wanted to achieve. ... The artist's vision without the accompanying artistry: a curse of the gods if ever there was one.”; Ch 20) and lives on the Ile St-Louis.

The children, Isabella and Gabriel, are thrown into psychological crisis by the death of their mother. “When a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat, but rise from their sarcophagi instead.” (Ch 19)

The keeper of the secrets is their father, the man who controlled them throughout their childhood and emotionally and physically abused them when they were young. The man they hate. Nicholas is a towering figure, a truth teller who understands himself at the deepest level. “What interested him most of all in life was trying to understand the exact shape and weight of other people's inner selves, the architecture of their spirit.” (Ch 20) He is the villain of the piece but he is the most beautifully written character of the book, “a selfish cowardly bullying bastard and a charming intelligent thoughtful man at the same time.” (Ch 43)

But the other main characters - Isabella, Gabriel who has become outwardly a clone of his father, a faithless lover and a man capable of extraordinarily eloquent invective, Arkady and his protector, Henry the heroin addict - are all wonderfully written. The book is written with each chapter from the perspective of one or more of these characters, but always in the third person and the past tense.

For me, the most impressive feature of this book was the brilliance of the description. Time and again, Docx summarised a whole scene with a few words, often using language creatively or coining neologisms to do so, in phrases such as:

“The road into town was as Stalin-soaked in the monochrome of tyranny as the centre of the city was bright and colourful with the light of eighteenth-century autocracy.” (Ch 1)
“The cars were moving freely - the battered Czech wrecks and tattered Russian rust-crates, the sleek German saloons and the tinted American SUVs, overtaking, undertaking, switching lanes in a fat salsa of metal and gasoline.” (Ch 1)
“His heart was pestling itself mad against the mortar of the present.” (Ch 1)
“His slight scrappiness, his hassled hair, his loose shirt, his jeans, his battered boots, they somehow told against him; where before there had been a casual confidence dressing down, she now saw anguish dressing up. His manner no longer said, ‘I don't care to manage any better - take it or leave it,’ but instead, ‘This is the best I can manage.’” (Ch 16)
“The pavement had turned into a thickening medley of slush and mottled grey ice. Pedestrians squelching, sliding, sloshing along. Hard to believe that from the moment the snow left heaven until the moment it touched the Earth, it was virgin white.” (Ch 30)
“The roots of his teeth felt like a jagged line of glass splinters in his gums.” (Ch 30): Cold turkey.
“The Sunday sky as raw and pale as fear-sickened flesh waiting at the whipping post.” (Ch 40)
“Notre-Dame like some mighty queen termite, belly-stranded in the middle of the river by the sheer volume of her pregnancy.” (Ch 51)

Other selected quotes:

“The head distrusts the heart. The heart ignores the head. The balls want to carry on regardless. It's a total and utter mess. Chaos.” (Ch 5)
“Honesty ... is it not the most monstrous piece of excrement that mankind has ever come up with? Human nature, consciousness itself, is famously indefinable, mysterious, mobile, responsive - is gloriously less constant, this intrinsic than the imagining of rocks, trees, sheep. That's the whole point.” (Ch 5)
“Alessandro enjoyed flattery more than anything else in the world and could tease it out of quick-drying cement if he applied himself.” (Ch 5)
“In art we are in conversation with ourselves across the generations ... This is the lodestar of our humanity, the rest is chasing food and money.” (Ch 7)
“He went on, the narrow angle of dead ahead all that he permitted himself.” (Ch 11)
“The worst storm since the last one. skies of bitumen and creosote. there could no longer be any doubt about it: the planet was finally becoming angry - the wildest beast of them all goaded, poked, insulted once to offer.” (Ch 19) This was written in 2007 and now seems prophetic!
“One day they may just about persuade you to believe that business is the engine and money the fuel ... but whatever they say, you can be absolutely certain that neither is the journey and neither is the view.” (Ch 19)
“Our falsities are more eloquent than our truths.” (Ch 20)
“Yet another avaricious, harrowingly insecure, narcissistic little claw-wielder who had recently about-turned into a guru of well-being and life-balance. How did any of these people expect to be taken seriously?” (Ch 22)
“Even her own blood cells loathed her.” (Ch 22)
“Creativity is a massive and serious lifetime’s endeavour to further humankind's fundamental understanding of itself.” (Ch 22)
“Someone swore at a bottle of ketchup, which they could not bully into dispensing its chemical treasures.” (Ch 25)
“Power may not corrupt every time, but it always isolates.” (Ch 25)
“What they say - in fact what almost anybody says - is most often what they need to hear themselves say. Not what they really mean. We are all forever in the business of persuading ourselves.” (Ch 27)
“Another day, here on Earth. Another day of attrition, murder, beauty and birth. Another day of six billion soloists at full lung, all hoping for some miracle of harmony.” (Ch 37)
“All through the city, her brother's words stalked her. sinister clowns or blithe assassins she could not tell.” (Ch 43)
“Now that it came right down to it, life turned out to be mostly about not flinching. Keeping going.” (Ch 45)
“Strange that being human was never enough on its own. That the need went further. The need to belong. To belong to one tribe or the other ... which is where the trouble began. Why could we not be content with species-pride, the staggering good fortune of belonging to humanity itself?” (Ch 51)

Trivia:

“The fifty filthy shades of grey were all gone, unimaginable, and instead the sky was uniform and blue.” (Ch 52) Is this where E L James found the title for her novel Fifty Shades of Grey, published 4 years after Self-Help?

Early in the book, Arkady plays a brilliant jazz concert . He is described as feeling his way early on, so he can learn the piano and adjust his fingers to its inadequacies. Was this based on the legendary 1975 Koln Concert in which jazz pianist Keith Jarrett was forced to perform on a dodgy rehearsal grand and "was forced to adapt his playing for a shonky instrument" according to the Guardian?

This powerful novel was long-listed for the 2007 Booker and won the 2007 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Docx has also written: