"Winter" by Ali Smith

This is the second of the 'Four Seasons' tetralogy that Smith is writing about Britain after the Brexit referendum. It follows Autumn.

It was shortlisted for the 2018 fiction book of the year in the British Book Awards.

Smith has a unique way of writing. She doesn’t really narrate a single story. Instead she puts together little snippets of narrative in a sort of collage so that we can build up her characters and at the same time understand her themes. As she herself says in Part Three: “That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.”This makes her books not simply linear, as most standard narrative fiction is, but two or even three dimensional: there is the story, the characters, the understory. We might never find out what is going to happen next but we have had a glimpse into the lives of some very real people and we understand a little more about the world in which we live. This book is a perfect example of her craft.

Each fragment of the collage is very carefully crafted. She follows Orwell's dictum that 'good prose is like a windowpane'. For example, I know exactly what she means by this description in Part One: “He is here on a communal PC the keyboard of which makes the fingers on his hands feel as inept as some love making sessions he'd rather not recall.” And this from Part Three: “The whole room turns towards her in that unnatural way owls can move their heads right round without moving the rest of their bodies.”

She also has a prose style which feels very intimate in which she sort-of splurges in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way, which draws you in as a friend, and yet is so sophisticated. For example, this is a woman shortly after making love: “Later on her way home, as she walks down a street, there’ll be words again, she’ll be dazed with it, blasted by it, made roofless like a house after a gale with it and the walls all down, made open, maybe such a thing as too pen because this street she’ll be on, it’s a pretty run-down street but it will be vibrant to her, though below her there’ll be nothing but a pavement, but beautiful, the pavement, well get real, pavements aren’t beautiful, and the bus shelter a beauty, buildings, scruffy, beautiful, beautiful fast food place, shockingly beautiful coin-operated launderette full of strangers whose profiles in the late evening sun are, yes, though she knows they aren’t really, but they will be, right then, unbelievably beautiful.”

It might be thought that this means that the structure of the book, its 'plot', is less important to her but this book is structured after the three phases of the Christmas Carol: past (Christmas Eve), present (Christmas Day) and future (Boxing Day). Furthermore there are moments which loop back. For example, one of the first things that Sophie says to Lux is that her "face is full of little holes". At the time I thought this referred to the eye problems that Sophie might be having. But later on we are told that “It would be good to be full of holes ... Then all the things you can’t express would maybe just flow out.” This rather summarises Lux (which Lux says is short for Velux, after the window). Furthermore the vision of the head which Sophie sees at the start of the book is paired with Art's visions towards the end of a section of the coastline falling from the sky.

It starts in a very Dickensian way by adapting the start of a Christmas Carol: “God was dead, to begin with.” It then lists all the other things that are dead in a way which reminded me of the “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” start to the Tale of Two Cities or the “Fog everywhere” second paragraph of Bleak House.

Part One:
In Part One, Sophie, an old lady who was once a successful businesswoman, is hallucinating a head. This reminded me of Scrooge, hallucinating Marley’s Ghost. She goes to the Opticians and the bank and is rather annoyed by what she sees as the rudeness of modern life and, again like Scrooge, the banks closing early when she wants her money. Later, in Part Two, she will be described as miserly. There is also a reminder of Christmas Carol in the way Sophie will remember Christmases from her past. She grew up with a rebellious sister called Iris who later became a peace protestor at Greenham.

We also learn about Art, Sophie’s son, who has broken up with his girlfriend Charlotte and now has to find a woman to pretend to be Charlotte when he goes to his mum’s house for Christmas.

But when Art and the hired girl, Lux, get to his mum’s rambling old mansion (which used to be the squat that Iris lived in) Sophie is unwelcoming and there is no food in the house. In an obvious reference to the Nativity story, she tells Lux to sleep in the barn. Instead, Lux phones Iris to come and help, even though she is told that the two sisters haven’t spoken for thirty years.

Great lines from Part One:

• “The traffic jam congealing in all directions.”
• “Your default to selfishness is not ok at all.”
• “Solstice, she said. You said it. Darkest days ever. There's never been a time like this. Yes there has, he said. Solstices are cyclic and they happen every year.”
• “That's what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. ... He himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.”

Part Two:
In Part Two there are more memories from Art and from Sophie, which suggest that Iris helped to bring Art up when he was too young to remember, a fact that his mother furiously denies. And there is a wonderful Christmas lunch, which reminded me of the brilliantly horrible dinner party in Smith’s There But For The, in which we explore the play of Cymbeline in which “A play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning.” is a powerful metaphor for Britain after the Brexit vote, and compare ‘No room at the Inn’ with the refusal to accept economic migrants.

Great lines from Part Two:

• “It might be worth it, to re-experience what it's like to be sick, because from what she remembered there was a certain pleasure in it, anarchic force of clearance.”
• “One of those powerful liminal times in a life when death isn't just preferable to being alive, because you feel so lousy, also but that also let you negotiate with the powers that be about your own living or dying.”
• “There was always a furious intolerance at work no matter when or where in history, she thought, and it always went for the head or the face. She thought of the burnt-off scraped-off faces of the mediaeval painted saints on the wooden altar screens in hundreds of churches.”
• “It was meant as a warning. Take a look at what your saints are truly made of. It was the demonstration that everything symbolic will be revealed as a lie, everything you revere nothing but burnt matter, broken stone, as soon as it meets whatever shape time’s contemporary cudgel takes.”
• “None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere. ... What does here mean anyway, I'd like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?”
• “It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.”
• “Surreal was the word. Above real.”
• “And now for our entertainment when we want humiliation we've got reality TV instead ... And soon instead of reality TV we’ll have the President of the United States.”
• “I'm me all right ... I'm more me than I care to admit.”
• “In real life you seem detached, but not impossible.”
• “But what will the world do ... if we can't sort the problem of the millions and millions of people with no home to go to or whose homes aren't good enough, except by saying go away and building fences and walls? It isn't a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We've got to come up with a better answer.”

Part Three
In the third part, which starts with a scene in the future in which Art is reading A Christmas Carol with his son, reconciliations abound and there are parallels drawn between Joseph, father of Jesus, and the man Art thinks is his father.

Great lines from Part Three:

• “Whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface”
• “We’re all apocrypha.”
• “It's the ghost of a flower not yet open on its stem, the real thing long gone, but look, still there, the mark of the life of it reaching across the words on the page for all the world like a footpath that leads to the lit tip of a candle.”

Ali Smith is perhaps the most original and innovative writer in England at the moment. Her corpus is astounding. It includes: 

• How To Be Both which contains two linked stories either of which can be read first (indeed, they are printed in a different sequence in different editions with no clue as to which you have bought until you start reading)
• The Accidental
• Artful which interweaves a ghost story with lectures about the art of literature.

February 2019; 322 pages

Thanks to my sister Jane for yet another brilliant Christmas present.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Most Wanted" by Robert Crais

Devon Connor is worried about her son, Tyson. She has found a $40k Rolex under his bed. She hires Private Investigator Elvis Cole to find out where he got it. Tyson and his teenage friends are responsible for a strong of burglaries across LA. Trouble is, they have stolen something valuable beyond pearls and two killers are hunting them. Can Elvis save the situation?

A fast-paced thriller set in California.

Some nice lines:

• "Stemms sniffed the air loudly, like a dog catching a scent. "I'm smelling bullshit."
• "He was an excellent criminalist. He was also paranoid, needy, and burdened with less self-esteem than the average grapefruit."
• "I like having my ass kissed but you're giving me bum-burn."

February 2019; 375 pages

Also starring Elvis Cole: The Forgotten Man

My wonderful wife bought me a subscription to Books and Beer; each month I receive a crime book and some cans of beer. The other titles I have received so far are:

• A very murderous Christmas (a short story collection)
• The Devil's Dice by Roz Watkins: a whodunnit set in the English Peak District
• Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth:  a stunning tale of crime and revenge, of temptation and sin, of evil and redemption set in 1880s Queensland and as gritty as only the Australian Outback can get.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Outsider" by Colin Wilson

This thesis is remarkable in that it was written by a 24 year old who displays an astonishing range of reading (Herman Hesse, Sartre, Camus, GBS, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Gurdjieff; some of these he would have been forced to read in the original languages). The thesis is a fascinating blend of literary criticism, philosophy and psychology.

Wilson's thesis is that there are characters who are Outsiders. As well as the literary characters he cites among others Lawrence of Arabia, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Nietzsche, William Blake, and George Fox (the founder of the Quakers). Some of these Outsiders are highly intellectual, some highly emotional, some highly physical; most are rather unbalanced. They are set apart from the Insiders who form the common herd of humanity (there seems to be a feeling that they are thus superior to the common man). But Wilson can square this circle by using the example of Einstein and Newton. Newtonian physics is fine for low relative speeds; so common philosophies are fine for most everyday situations and everyday folk. But you need Einsteinian relativity when relative speeds approach the speed of light. In the same way the philosophies of everyday fail in the extremes to which Outsiders push them.

The Outsider is outside because he has recognised the futility of life; “The Outsider ... is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn’t know it is sick.” This makes them feel that the world is somehow unreal and they long to be immersed in the world's vividness. 

The Outsider “does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent.But his honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about.” This leads to “terror on the edge of nothingness.”

Thus, the Outsider's initial experience is that of rejecting the world leading to withdrawal from it; if this withdrawal leads to a mystical revelation they may then return to the world as a prophet: “The history of prophets of all time follow a pattern: born in a civilization, the reject its standards of material well-being and retreat into the desert. When they return, it is to preach world rejection: intensity of spirit versus physical security. The Outsider’s miseries are the prophet’s teething pains.” This is quite religious: The Outsider feels himself to have a purpose. This is an intense religious feeling. But the Outsider has rejected conventional religion. His problem is therefore to develop his religious mysticism outside conventional religion. As William Blake said: “I must create my own System or be enslaved by another man's.”

This is a compelling thesis and it seems backed with a great deal of evidence although sometimes Wilson's comments on others seems opinionated: “Crime and Punishment is his [Dostoevsky’s] only complete artistic success; the other novels are as unshapely as pillow-cases stuffed with lumps of concrete.”

I found the book initially very appealing and very easy to read. I was humbled by the breadth and depth of Wilson's knowledge. Some of the later ideas, when he talks for example of Nietzsche and later of Gurdjieff, I found more difficult to understand. I think this is because (perhaps as an Outsider myself) I find it difficult to believe when a philosopher no matter how respected makes ex cathedra pronouncements. I want to shout: where is the evidence? like a little boy asking where are the emperor's clothes. So when Wilson spoke of the visionaries such as these two (and later William Blake and George Fox) I found it a little less compelling. Nevertheless, this thesis is a tour de force.

Selected quotes

• “Some are perfectly satisfied with what they have; they eat, drink, impregnate their wives, and take life as it comes. Others can never forget that they are being cheated; that life tempts them to struggle by offering them the essence of sex, of beauty, of success;and that she always seems to pay in counterfeit money.”
• “All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational.”
• “Many great artists have none of the characteristics of the Outsider. Shakespeare, Dante, Keats were all apparently normal and socially well-adjusted.”
• “Must thought negate life?”
• “Is there no causality, no possible meaning? ... There is only being useless and knowing it and being useless and not knowing it.”
• “The atmosphere of the Existentialist Outsider is unpleasant to breathe. There is something nauseating, anti-life, about it: these men without motive who stay in their rooms because there seems no reason for doing anything else. It is essentially an adult world, this world-without-values. The child’s world is altogether cleaner; the air tastes of expectation.”
• “The rationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not a sterile, boring state of mind; it was a period of intense and healthy optimism.”
• “The romantic Outsider is a ‘dreamer of other worlds’ ... ‘the idle singer of an empty day’.”
• “The Bildungsroman sets out to describe the evolution of the ‘hero’s soul’; it is fictional biography”
• “The descent into the dark world is not necessarily evil; it may be the necessary expression of boldness and intelligence.”
• “The Outsider is the mainstay of the bourgeois. Without him the bourgeois could not exist. ... Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight.”
• Quoting GBShaw in Buoyant Billions “I don’t want to be happy; I want to be alive and active.”
• “The Outsider’s first business is self-knowledge.”
• “The violence and cruelty of the desert, and its contempt for the flesh, weigh equally in opposite balance-pans.”
• “His most characteristic trait is his inability to stop thinking. Thought imprisons him; it is an unending misery ... Lawrence was “a monk in his body’s cell.” There are times he could avoid thought, while riding camels or later while riding fast motorbikes.
• “This particular contradiction is inherent in mysticism - the saint who sees all existence as holy, and the saint who is completely withdrawn from existence.”
• “Man is not a unity; he is many. But for anything to be worth doing, he must become a unity.
• “His last words ... are the words of a man who feels that defeat is inevitable, that life is a baited trap; who kills himself to escape the necessity of taking the bait again.”
• Alcohol stimulates the “mystical faculties ... that flood-tide of inner warmth and vital energy that human beings regard as the most desirable state to live in. The sober hour carries continuous demands on the energy; sense-impressions, thoughts, uncertainties, suck away the vital powers minute by minute.”
• William James in Varieties of Religious Experience suggests a “misery line”: “The sanguine and healthy minded habitually live on the sunny side of their misery line; the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension ... Does it not appear as if one who lived habitually on one side of the pain threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?”
• “When Van Gogh's ‘misery will never end’ is combined with Evan Strowde’s ‘nothing is worth doing’, the result is a kind of spiritual syphilis that can hardly stop short of death or insanity. Conrad's story Heart of Darkness deals with a man who has brought himself to this point.”
• “The neo-Platonist ... is just as likely to be knocked down by a bus at Marble Arch as the deepest-dyed pessimist.”
• “What about what the millions of men and women in our modern cities; are they really all the Outsider claims they are: futile, unreal, unutterably lost without knowing it?”
• “Real evil ... attacks the mind, not the body.”
• “An Eastern fable of a man who cling a shrub on the side of a pit to escape an enraged beast at the top and a dragon at the bottom. Two mice gnaw at the roots of his shrub. Yet while hanging, waiting for death, he notices some drops of honey on the leaves of the shrub, and reaches out and licks them.” (In Tolstoy’s Memoirs of a Madmen)
• Insiders: “have aims .... some of them very distant aims: a new car in three years, a house at Surbiton in five; but an aim is not an ideal. They are not play-actors. They change their shirts every day, but never their conception of themselves ... These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison - caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison to ... but he knows it.” Insiders think “they are the prison.”
• “He thinks too much. Thinking has thinned his blood and made him incapable of spontaneous enjoyment. He envies simpler, stupider people because they are undivided.”
• From The Brothers Karamazov: 
• “It’s not God I don’t accept, Alyosha - only that I most respectfully return him the entrance ticket.”
• “The Outsider’s problems are insoluble, and we, the elect, know this”
• “If I am a delusion of your mind, you are also a delusion of mine.”
• “The Outsider sees with such penetration through the usual self-deluding the way in which all men and women blind themselves with their emotions. The consequence is usually a Swiftian contempt for men and women.”
• “What is the business of intellect? It is to synthesize unendingly.”
• The Outsider sees most men as failures but this enables him to realise “ If I can say: that man was a failure, then I must have an idea of what success means.”
• “Man is not merely intellect and emotions: he is body too. This is easiest off all to forget.”
• “Wells was a political witch-doctor, full of quack remedies for the age; Dickens a sentimentalist who helped to poison our language, and Shaw ... became a complacent, self-satisfied old man.”
• Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” 
• Kierkegaard: “The Gods were bored, so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created ... Then the population of the world increased, and the people were born en masse. To divert themselves, they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens.”
• “The universe is full of life is nothing but life, life engaged in an unending attempt to reinforce its grip on matter.”
• “Kali is depicted as a fierce, black-visaged woman, holding a sword and a dripping human head in two of her four hands ... She stands on the prostrate body of her husband Shiva, for Shiva only symbolizes conscious life; she is the life-force.”
• “The world has no meaning for us because we do all things mechanically. One day we are inspired by some poem or piece of music or picture, and the whole world is suddenly ten times as real, as meaningful, for us.” 

February 2019;281 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Snap" by Belinda Bauer

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018

Jack is eleven when his mum's car breaks down and she walks down the hard shoulder to find a phone for help. She never returns. Three years on and he is looking after his sisters by burglary. Then he burgles one house and finds evidence of what happened to his mother.

One of the best crime novels I have read for a long time. There are so many wonderful characters:

• Jack the teenage professional burglar, a real Artful Dodger
• Joy his sister, obsessed with newspapers that might have some item about their dead mother, filling up their house with piles of newsprint
• Reynolds the celibate copper who tries to do everything by the book but makes mistakes left right and centre
• Adam, pregnant Catherine's loving and sometimes not so loving husband.
• Smooth Louis, the burglar turned fence, obsessed with removing every trace of his body hair and bringing up his baby son properly.
• Veronica, the old lady with cats

Added to this are the wonderful observations of everyday life and some laugh out loud humour.

Selected quotes:

• "It was so hot in the car that the seats smelled as though they were melting. Jack was in shorts, and every time he moved his legs they sounded like sellotape." First lines
• "The breathless air twitched in the wake of each car, then flopped down dead in the dust again."
• "There was a long, hot blink of arid time."
• "Jack Bright's eyes were narrow as a smoker's and pale grey, as if all the colour had been cried out of them."
• "Marvel didn't know what was worse: too much sky above or too much green beneath. He'd been born and bred in the city, and was suspicious of both."
• "It was tiny in the way that only modern houses could be - with space for all mod cons but no room for character."
• "The Lego-trained architect had tried to inject some personality into the neighbourhood by aligning each carbon-copy house at a different angle on its handkerchief plot, but that only made the place look untidy, rather than interesting."
• "Louis clipped an extendable dog-lead to a belt-loop on his tiny jeans, which made babysitting not unlike flying a chubby kite - reeling him in for orange squash, or yanking him off a collision course with drowning or dog poo."
• "Catherine's risotto was a triumph ... but Jan went on and on about it as if she'd spit-roasted a unicorn."
• "You don't want to be chumming a river."
• "Hands that shook as if he'd uncovered King Tut's tomb on a Tiverton housing estate."
• "She was going to cry. Jack remembered when she used to do that all the time and get her own way. None of them cried now. It never got them anywhere."
• "By the end of the show the northerners were sent packing like pregnant housemaids."
• "He'd had many hours that were not his finest. He was a murder detective. The interests of the corpse came first."
• "A cup of Pepsi sitting in a puddle of its own sweat."
• "He hated cats. Couldn't bear the hoity-toity little fuckers. But he was a whore for information."
• "She'd been eating the same thing for supper since 1992."

This must read novel redefines what a crime novel should be. I need to read more from this author!

February 2019
Many thanks to my sister Jane for this inspired Christmas present.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Daybreak" by Pat McGrath

Beatnik culture in 1970's London: squatting and hitch hiking and taking drugs and pretending to write poetry. A sort of cross between On the Road and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Hippy culture meets gritty realism.

It opens with Rick returning home with his end of school exam results clutched in his hand to find that his mother has been on an alcoholic spree. He looks after his little sister, getting her first to a neighbour's and then to his gran's in Southend; then he abandons any further responsibility to leave home and shack up in a squat with Marie. From then on we follow his occasional forays taking drugs or hitchhiking into Wales to see his writing teacher and to Southend for Christmas with his family; he is occasionally reminded he has familial responsibilities but there is little serious conflict here. The book meanders, rather like Rick's life, with the only real question being whether Marie will stay with him.

Great lines:

• "A teenage mind tangled up in barbed wire knots."
• "I breathed in the sweet clouds of cancer."
• "I ... was oblivious of all the reality around me, unaware of the weight of life on grown-ups' minds."
• "I was alive like a ripple on a river - something deep was happening."
• "How long would we have to die in this queue?"
• "We lay body to body, warm skin to skin, warm soft lips to lips, soft tongue to tongue, teeth biting, legs tangled, arms locked around flesh, moving, crying out as we lost control together."
• "In London you were really content to know that the theatres were there, but really it was very rare that you'd actually go to one."
• "We were now self-contained in a magic box with a pink light, beds, carpet, compartments, curtains."
• "I was a young man thinking I've got a whole life ahead of me, what a drag."
• "It must be a hell of a life being a tree in this weather."

February 2019

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Autumn" by Ali Smith

Elisabeth Demand sits by the bedside of dying Daniel Gluck, her centenarian neighbour, reading to him and reflecting on her friendship with him. It is the months after the Brexit referendum, someone is putting electrified fences up to enclose common land, and Elisabeth is battling her way to the front of the queue in the downsized Post Office to renew her passport only to be confronted with questions about her identity. Her own identity has been stolen. This is a collage of episodes. Elisabeth did her dissertation on Britain's only female Pop Artist, the now-forgotten Pauline Boty, who painted a lost portrait of Christine Keeler and had an uncredited part in Alfie. An advertisement for a supermarket uses music written by her friend Daniel, music which is now trending on social media; Gluck also wrote lyrics for a song a Barbra (Streisand?) sung in concert but never recorded. Elisabeth's mum appears on an episode of a TV show in which amateurs comb junk shops looking for treasures. It is as if our lives are made from disposable ephemera and who we are is made of glimpses.

Another fascinating and thought-provoking work from one of Britain's most original contemporary writers. The novelist as collage painter?

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017.

Other works by this brilliant and repeatedly original author that I have read and reviewed in this blog include:

• The Accidental: a holidaying family is gatecrashed by a young woman
• There but for the: a set of stories linked by a man who, at a dinner party, locks himself into one of the upstairs rooms of his host and refuses to come out
• How to Be Both which has two halves which can be read in either order (and some copies of the book are printed one way and some the other): one half has a teenage girl trying to cope with the death of her mother; the other half is the exuberant reflections of a renaissance artist who was a woman pretending to be a man.
• Artful which is both a ghost story and a meditation on art
• Winter, another collage type work which weaves the story of a Christmas Carol with Cymbeline and the Nativity and reflects on Britain following the Brexit referendum.

Selected quotes:

• "Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?"
• "Don't just sit there like an unstrung puppet."
• "Crying came out of her like weather."
• "Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility."
• "The symphony of the sold and the discarded. The symphony of all the lives that had these things in them once. The symphony of worth and worthlessness."
• "I like nakedness. I mean who doesn't to be honest? I'm a person. I'm an intelligent nakedness."

January 2019

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver

A bigoted American Baptist hellfire preacher takes his wife and four daughters to a mission station in the Congo. He starts by insulting the villagers because, at the feast thrown to welcome him, he objects to the bare breasts of the women. He compounds his mistakes by failing to understand that his great project of river baptism seems to the Congolese an attempt to lure their children down to the crocodile infested river, by his failure to understand that he can't transplant American agriculture to African soil, and is symbolised by his battle against a poisonwood tree; he tries to wrench it from the soil and it responds by living up to its name.

The story is told principally through the testimonies of the four girls:

• Rachel, the eldest, is a beautiful blonde fifteen year old who dreams of boys and repeatedly uses delightful malapropisms: "All I need is to go back home with some dread disease. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed is bad enough, but to be Thyroid Mary on top of it?". 
• Leah, the eldest brunette twin, is a highly intelligent girl who becomes firm friends with the orphaned schoolteacher who secretly organises for Congo's independence. 
• Adah her twin was brain-damaged at birth; she hardly ever speaks and is a convinced but silent atheist; she likes to write words backwards and loves palindromes. 
• Ruth-May is the baby of the family and understands things from the perspective of a young child.

The father is a man who believes passionately that God rewards virtue. He has a crippled daughter, Adah, who never speaks. When he only had a wife and three daughters he used to complain about the noise: "One Too Many Sopranos in Church". This makes Adah think  "Our Father probably interpreted Broca's aphasia  as God's Christmas bonus to one of His worthier employees." He himself has a tragic story: he was the only survivor of a US army unit that got trapped by the Japanese in the Filipino jungles. Survivor guilt means he cannot quit the Congo jungle, even though every other white person is fleeing and the civil war approaches. In the afterstory, some of his daughters are also trapped in Africa.

The plot proceeds from the difficulties of living in back-woods Africa through to the hostility of the villagers. Then Congo becomes independent and the new Prime Minister is swiftly ousted in a CIA-backed coup. There follows a civil war in which it becomes positively dangerous to be white.

The word epic is overused but this is an epic. The experiences of a single family act as a metaphor to the effect of colonialisation on Africa.

There are many metaphors within the text:

• Methuselah, the old African Grey parrot left behind by the previous, Roman Catholic missionary, who 'went native'. When Our Father, unable to cope with a parrot who uses bad language, releases the bird from its cage, he flies off but is still reliant on the family for food. "Now he has a world. What can he possibly do with it? He has no muscle tone in his wings. They are atrophied, probably beyond hope of recovery." He is a metaphor for Africa, enslaved and then set loose, with its wings atrophied, unable to fly, forever dependent on others for its survival.
• Adah, the crippled twin (and twins themselves are a source of provocation in a land where twins are exposed at birth), who is unable or unwilling to speak, who loves to say things and see things backwards. She is 'cured' of her crippledness when she is made to learn to walk all over again, from crawling. A metaphor for how to uncripple Africa?
• Rachel with her repeated malapropisms, is a metaphor for how the family repeatedly says or does the wrong thing. And so many of the African words are wrong. Our Father finishes his sermons by exulting that 'Tata Jesus is bangala', a word which, depending on the intonation, can mean several things including 'poisonwood'; the Minister tells his flock that Jesus is a tree that hurts.
• Our Father himself, the hellfire preacher, is a metaphor for the clumsy understanding of his country: "The United States has now become the husband of Zaire's economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitative and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature." 

Selected quotes:
Book One: Genesis

• "First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees." These are the second and third lines; the final Book is entitled The Eyes in the Trees.
• "The very first bite slowly grew to a powerful burn on my tongue."
• "I believe in God with all my might, but have been thinking lately that most of the details seem pretty much beneath His dignity." Leah on menstruation.
• Rachel on the assorted rags which the Africans wear: "The attitude towards clothing seems to be: if you have it, why not wear it?"
• "That razor strop burns so bad, after you go to bed your legs still feel stripedy like a zebra horse."
• "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes ... It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes." Our Father's attitude to his girl's education.
• "If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites."

Book Two: The Revelation

• "He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense, as a potter with clay to be molded."
• "Last week he spoke for an hour on the nonviolent road to independence. The crowd loved it so much they rioted and killed twelve people."
• "Anatole, the schoolteacher, is twenty-four years of age, with all his fingers still on, both hands and both feet, and that is the local idea of a top-throb dreamboat."
• "Anatole gave her compliments left and right, which tells you right there he was either a polite young man or mentally cracked."
• "Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness."
• "If your brother is going to steal your hen, save your honor and give it to him first."
• "He just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Only with a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it."
• "Waiting for a child to die is not an occasion for writing a poem here ... it isn't a long enough wait."

Book Three: The Judges

• "In hard times everyone's eyes get better or at least good enough."
• "The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you the best."
• "The wolf was not actually at the door but perhaps merely salivating at the edge of your yard."
• "Watching my father, I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room."
• "Children should never have to die ... But if they never did, children would not be so precious ... Also if everyone lived to be old, then old age would not be such a treasure."

Book Five: Exodus

• "Sometimes you just have to save your neck and work out the details later."
• "Preventatives for old age are rampant here."
• "Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?"
• "When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up."
• "That's the principal trick of Congolese cooking: rubbing two leaves together to give colour and taste to another day's translucent, nutritionally blank ball of manioc."
• "Rice and soy meal help when we can get them, to balance our amino acids and keep our muscle tissue from digesting itself in the process known picturesquely as kwashiorkor."
• "After that happy-ever-after wedding, they never tell you the rest of the story. Even if you get to marry the prince,you still wake up in the morning with your mouth tasting like drain cleaner and your hair all flat on one side."
• "the rearview mirror is always twenty-twenty."
• "A marital record distinguished for quantity if not quality."
• "The cranky indoor plumbing constantly grumbled at us like God to Noah, threatening the deluge."

Book Six: Song of the Three Children

• "I have a little sign in every room telling guests that are expected to complain at the office between the hours of nine and eleven A.M. daily."
• "Sometimes life doesn't give you all that many chances at being good."

Book seven: The Eyes in the Trees

• "A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotting tree stumps, sucking life out of death."
• "Being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger."

This is the sequel to Heart of Darkness. Although, at the end, it becomes a little preachy and the Leah-Rachel dichotomy becomes a catechism with obvious answers, this book probably taught me more about the tragedy of Africa than any other. Rachel, of all people (and without being aware of it) says "things fall apart" and thus the book plays homage to the classic of African literature, Things Fall Apart. But this is a classic in the literature of apology for colonialisation.

January 2019.

This book was a runner-up for the 1999 Pulitzer prize for fiction and short-listed for the 1999 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 1999 Pen Faulkner Award.

Kingsolver also wrote The Lacuna, about another shameful episode in America's recent past and Demon Copperhead about a lad growing up in trailer trash West Virginia, in the middle of the opioid addiction epidemic. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Love Over Scotland" by Alexander McCall Smith

The third in the Scotland Street series of novels that includes:

• 44 Scotland Street
• Espresso Tales
• Love Over Scotland
• The World According to Bertie
• The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

One of the difficulties when you are publishing a series of novels such as this, with a large cast of recurring characters, must be how you ensure that the books are different. This book opens with Pat fancying a boy called Wolf ... but another in the series also opens with Pat fancying a boy. Bertie plays the saxophone and battles with his mother; the family car has gone missing again. Matthew years for Pat, again. Angus takes Cyril for a walk, again. For the first third of this book I had an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu; I believed I had already read the book. Perhaps this is a strength in that it attests to the strength of the familiar characters as in a TV soap opera. Perhaps this is also why authors are forced to resort to ever more extreme plot lines.

Alexander McCall Smith gently muses over the lives of his characters inhabiting the most genteel part of Edinburgh.

The strength of the books for me lies in the astute observations that he makes. Many of these things have been said many times before ... but they are worth saying:

• “Artists were allowed to look, he thought - no artist could really be considered a voyeur. Looking was what an artist was trained to do, and if an artist did not look, then he would not see.” (C 4)
• “He knew that his life was an adjunct life, lived in the shadow of his master.” (C 7)
• “Smells were like a palimpsest: odour laid upon odour, smells that could be peeled off to reveal the whiff below.” (C 7)
• “The unmerited dislike of others made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike.” (C 14)
• “The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us.” (C 17)
• “People fell in love with those who belonged to others. It happened all the time in fiction, and presumably in real life, too.” (C 24)
• “How many lonely women the length and breadth of Britain found Radio Four a very satisfactory substitute for a man? And Radio Four could so easily be turned off, just like that, whereas men ...” (C 29)
• “His eyes were fixed on the floor, hoping to locate the geological flaw which would swallow him up and save him from his current embarrassment. But of course there was none; at no time is the earth more firm than when we wish that it were not.” (C 39)
• “Such circumstances as these, she thought, remind us of just what we are: salt and water, for the most part.” (C 47)
• "This knowledge that Angus was not with him, made the world as dark and cold as if the sun had dropped out of the sky." (C 51)
• "He wanted to hit Larch, but he understood that principle which everybody, but particularly politicians and statesmen, understand very well: you only ever hit weaker people." (C 54)
• "The light thrown out by the Tilley lamp was soft and forgiving, a light that did not fight with the darkness but nudged it aside gently, just for a few feet, and then allowed it back." (C 56)
• "Although we are most secure - in one sense - in our own homes, we are also at our most vulnerable, for the social persona, the one we carry out with us into the world, cannot be worn at ho,e all the time." (C 80)
• "Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most of us never bother to cultivate." (C 112)

January 2019