Patient waits and fallow periods

Well, it's a good while (as ChatGpt has noted!) since I announced on my website that my next book, The Mountain and Other Stories, is to be published by the science fiction imprint at Goldsmiths Press, Gold SF. I still have no publishing date, but things are now moving: the contract is signed, I've completed the (impressively lengthy and detailed) form for the marketing department, and now the art department have sent me a choice of three covers drawn by an artist. I've chosen one (I love it - it echoes beautifully the story and themes of the speculative lead novella, 'The Mountain') but won't produce it yet, as we need to finalise the decision. Perhaps it's just as well that it's taken so long, as, due to various circumstances, my last book, Five Different Stories About One Thing, was an even longer time in coming to fruition, and at one point there seemed the possibility that I'd have two books coming out at once, which might have been somewhat difficult.

In the meantime, I've been working on a new novel, though family circumstances and other things, such as a trip this summer to Arras to speak at the conference for the European Network for Short Fiction Research, have somewhat sidetracked me, and I rather lost touch with it. In the end I decided to let it lie fallow for the rest of the summer, and ended up with a stunning revelation: that a novel I had written long ago and put aside as a failure was really the core of what was in effect this new version, and that I needed to begin again, combining the two. Which (as long as the result is successful) goes to prove that breaks and fallow periods can be essential as part of the writing process.

Above is a pic of the place where I had my revelation.

Reading group: So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

This autobiographical novel, the author’s last, published in 1980 when he was seventy-two, revisits the subject of his first, that of the death of his mother in the flu epidemic of 1918, and in addition addresses a deep and lasting regret concerning his behaviour towards a boyhood friend, a matter he had mentioned in an earlier interview with the Paris Review.  After a somewhat quiet publishing past, the book has recently received a renewal, hugely praised by reviewers and becoming a contemporary literary bestseller.

 The book (my suggestion for the group) is told in the restrained, straightforward though sometimes wry style that is often the mode of The New Yorker of which Maxwell was for many years an editor, and which in fact seemed to me somewhat conventional, if not old-fashioned, others in our group agreeing. However, its structure is anything but straightforward.

 

I began the discussion by saying that when I first read this novel, I found it oddly disjointed, and there were immediate murmurs of assent. I had first begun reading it on a train journey to France with two disruptive changes, not picking it up again until my similarly interrupted return journey almost a week later, getting about two-thirds of the way through. Another problem I mentioned later in the meeting was that I had kept getting mixed up between the characters and having to look back to be reminded, and others in the group said that they had too. Wondering, once I got home from my trip, if the problem was the circumstances under which I had been reading the book, I began it again, reading it right through in two sittings. This time I found it a more satisfying read and ultimately very moving, and liked it very much. However, everyone else at the group meeting, having read the book only once, received my praise with dubious silence, and Ann immediately said that she felt it was not one book but two separate stories. Doug quickly and strongly agreed with her, and was echoed by others, and I’m interested now to examine the book to see why we received this impression, why my subsequent re-read gave me a different experience, and why it has received such praise elsewhere.

 

The book opens with a chapter titled ‘A Pistol Shot’, in which the author reports, in a factual, objective register, the 1921 murder of a local farmer, Lloyd Wilson, presenting the facts as they emerged in the subsequent inquest. Shot as he sat milking his cows, he was found slumped across the nearby stall by one of the young sons with whom he lived alone along with a housekeeper. The chapter ends with a fact which the ‘the Lincoln Courier-Herald hesitated several days before printing’: that the murdered man’s ear had been razored off and taken away (the ear, as the author implies, being in Freudian terms an erogenous symbol). The protagonist-author is peripheral in this first chapter, mentioned in the opening as having at the time only heard of the gravel pit from where people heard the shot, since he was forbidden as a child to go there, and commenting, in a direct authorial address to the reader, about the non-likelihood of violence at that time in that area, the author’s home town of Lincoln, Illinois. 

 

The second chapter begins on a more personal note as the author states that he doubts that he would have remembered ‘for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I had never laid eyes on if (1) the murderer hadn’t been the father of someone I knew, and (2) I hadn’t later done something I was ashamed of afterward.’ Thus he purposefully establishes a connection between the murder and himself. However, this connection remains theoretical since formally, in terms of the structure of the novel, he then immediately breaks that connection – or at least breaks away from it - by writing: ‘Before I can go into all that, I have to take up another subject’, and does indeed appear to change the subject entirely.

 

The title of this second chapter, ‘The Period of Mourning’ had led me to expect the mourning to be connected with the murder, but what follows instead is a lengthy section focussing on the author’s childhood tragedy of losing his mother when he was ten years old. Deeply traumatised, he clings bodily to his grieving and pacing father, a distant father who can offer him no comfort; sadly he watches first a housekeeper and then a new stepmother take his mother’s place; and then there is the final disruption and loss of a family move from the house where all his memories of his mother lie. His father is building a new house, and in the evenings the boy author visits the half-built house alone, a house (symbolically) without a roof, and plays there, climbing on the beams and wandering through rooms without walls. After a while another boy, Cletus Smith, turns up, and they play together. They don’t talk; the thirteen-year-old protagonist-author doesn’t tell Cletus about what he calls his ‘shipwreck’, and Cletus tell the author nothing about himself. The author tells us that they always parted with that phrase, ‘So long, see you tomorrow’ and then, finally, after making that connection with the book’s title, imparts to us: ‘The only person who had any reason [to murder Lloyd Wilson] was Clarence Smith, Cletus’s father’.

 

Now, it seems, the two stories – that of the author’s boyhood loneliness and grief and that of the murder – have finally dovetailed, but this is after a diversion of some 30 pages, and 

once again the focus immediately shifts, as if veering away once more from the connection. We are back now exclusively with the murder, and the narration adopts once again a more distanced narrative tone as the author writes of his latter-day researches of the incident through the archives of the local newspaper. We learn about the sheriff’s immediate investigations at the scene of the murder, and of unconfirmed witness reports, the author commenting that he ended up with many unanswered questions. However, we do learn that Cletus’s mother and father had divorced, that his father had given up his lease on his farm and, in an extremely depressed state of mind, moved in with his parents in town, and that Cletus also came to town with his mother to live with an aunt. We learn a fact that did not emerge at the divorce hearing, that some months before, the wife of LLoyd Wilson, the murdered man, had left him to live with relatives, taking their daughters but leaving their sons with Lloyd, and that he had been ruined by being forced to settle on her most of his money. Above all, we understand that although the two neighbouring farmers, Smith and Wilson, had once been inseparable friends, an affair between Lloyd Wilson and Smith’s wife (Cletus’s mother) had ended in the murder of Wilson by Smith. Finally, we learn that the body of Smith, Cletus’s father, had been found in the gravel pit with the incriminating murder weapon and the still-bloody razor. ‘Not wanting to live’, he had shot himself in the head. All of this information is delivered somewhat piecemeal, and in a non-linear order – and in that cool, objective mode - which is perhaps why I, and others in the group, found it hard to keep a handle on who was who and which married couple was which. Finally, right at the end of the chapter, we do at last come back to Cletus and the author’s boyhood connection with him. Cletus, it turns out, was asked to identify his father’s gun, and the author muses: ‘Between the time that Cletus and I climbed down from the scaffolding and went our separate ways and the moment he was confronted with the broken gun … he must have crossed over the line into maturity.’ 

 

At this point, though, Cletus disappeared from the author’s life, the author as a boy assuming that his mother kept him away from school and they then moved away: ‘It was as if his father had shot and killed him too.’ Formally echoing this – and thus once again structurally breaking the connection - Cletus now disappears once more from the narration of the novel as the author describes life after the move into the newly built house, once again portraying his boyhood loneliness and continuing grief for his mother. At length his father is offered a promotion that requires a move to Chicago and the boy’s adjustment to a new life in a much bigger town and school. Finally, again at the very end of the chapter, we come upon Cletus again. Walking along the corridor of his huge Chicago school, the author meets Cletus coming in the opposite direction, and is so overwhelmed that he fails to speak to him, a moment that has haunted and shamed him for the rest of his life. This chapter is titled ‘In the School Corridor’, but it has taken the whole chapter for the author to get to that moment, and the substance of the chapter has been focussed entirely elsewhere. At the beginning of the second chapter the author has written: ‘This memoir – if that’s the right name for it – is a roundabout, futile way of making amends.’ But it is as if he is psychologically incapable of addressing the matter directly, but must approach it always from a distance and indeed in a roundabout way. 

 

And sure enough, although we seem now to have reached the crux of the novel, the next chapter, titled ‘The Emotion of Ownership’ immediately swings away from it as the author describes his own boyhood outings in his father’s horse and carriage, and discusses his father’s ownership of a farm he rarely visits and the general matter of tenant farming in the area. It becomes only slowly clear that the chapter is after all spooling towards Lloyd Wilson and Clarence Smith who are indeed tenant farmers, farming land owned by others in town, and thus, at last again to Cletus.

 

 The author writes now: ‘If I knew where Cletus Smith is right at this minute, I would go and explain.’ But then goes on:

 

 …the one possibility of my making some connection with him seems to lie not in the present but in the past – in my trying to reconstruct the testimony he was never called upon to give. 

 

In other words, he will make up for his failure to make an act of sympathy with an act of empathy, and imagine what the whole episode of the marriage breakup and murder was like for Cletus.

 

Earlier, commenting on the unanswered questions in the newspaper reports he has asked: ‘For example, from whom did Cletus’s mother learn about the murder? And how soon…?’ And in fact what he now imagines is the story not just from Cletus’s viewpoint but from those of all involved.

 

This was the part of the novel that on my second reading I found extremely moving. It seemed to me indeed a magnificent act of empathy, a demonstration of acute insight into the workings of the human heart – and even that of the dog (which the author readily admits he has invented), as it experiences the breakup of the human lives around it. I was moved to drenching tears by the description of Cletus’s loss as he has to leave the farm (which I have to say echoes my own childhood experience):

 

Take away the cow barn… the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? … He may as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

 

It is as if once the author gives himself up to fiction, the book takes off onto an entirely different emotional level, the elements of the section gelling, and that it is perhaps this section that has garnered the book such praise. However, the book does fall overall into two distinct parts, the earlier strictly autobiographical part, and the later fictionalised part which concentrates solely on the story of the murder, a bifurcated structure that exacerbates the lack of connection between the two major strands of story we found within the earlier part. 

 

I have to say however that although on my first reading I did get some way into the second part, I wasn’t moved then in the same way, and continued to have to remind myself which character was which. On my second reading I was of course more familiar with the characters and wasn’t hampered in the same way and was thus more easily able to immerse myself in the story. In addition, I think I was able to read into it the connections the author had intended, but which the structure frustrated on my first reading. Margeret, though, said that she too had been moved almost to tears at times, and Ann, putting her hand on her heart, agreed about the dog, though she later commented that there was more stress on the dog, and more empathy shown towards it, than to the children involved. It is also true that although the experience of Cletus in the fictionalised section is (to me) extremely moving, more narrative space is given to the adults in their love triangle – another authorial/structural evasion, possibly.

 

However, Doug said roundly that he did not find the fictionalised section moving at all. Right at the start of it the author says:

 

If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. 

 

Doug was that reader. I had read the section as fiction, but Doug said that once the author had announced it as speculation, he simply could not commit himself to it or take it seriously. He did indeed find much of it unconvincing. He could not accept that two men with such a close friendship could become such sudden enemies. He didn’t feel that it would have been possible in that close community for people to conduct a secret adulterous affair. He found other aspects of the novel unconvincing, too: he didn’t buy that anyone could have had such a lifelong shame about a boyhood friend when their connection had obviously lasted for only a few days. None of these objections seemed realistic to me, or to Clare, a counsellor, and they seemed uncharacteristic of Doug, who is usually an empathic reader. Apart from which, the whole thing is based on a true story, and of course the author had confessed in a public interview that he suffered that lifelong shame. My first thought was that the author had made a mistaken choice in confessing the autobiographical nature of the book within the text and thus casting doubt on his speculations, rather than writing the whole book as fiction.  And while it might be obvious on a theoretical level that the author’s own tragedy would link him emotionally with the similarly grieving Cletus, it seems to me that the structure, by constantly separating the two stories and dropping focus away from Cletus, militates against the idea that the author’s life was haunted by the thought of him – ie the novel fails formally to embody that emotional hangup. I think too that the prose, with its measured tone and years-long distanced view, fails to allow the reader to share it in the way that a more immediate and interior style might.

 

All in all, the book got a thumbs-down from the group, though Clare said that after our discussion she wanted to read it again, and someone noted its power in prompting a long subsequent discussion about the impact of our parents on our lives.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here  

Reading group: Soldier, Sailor by Claire Kilroy

This book (Doug’s suggestion), an interior address by a young mother (the Soldier of the title) to her first baby (Sailor), portrays the physical and psychological battle of new motherhood for a young professional woman. Suddenly ripped by the advent of her baby from her social position she is swamped by the conflicting feelings of on the one hand loss of identity and entrapment, exhaustion and resentment, and on the other overwhelming love for and identity with her child. It is written in an urgent, sometimes desperate, often savagely witty and utterly stylish prose, and Clare, Doug and I found it entirely compelling. (I wished I had written it!)

 

It charts the sheer loneliness of an experience the narrator’s husband cannot share and the stress on the marriage; her mad bid in the very early days to escape through suicide, thwarted by the overriding bond with her baby; the relief (and temptation) of a chance encounter with an old male university friend, custodian of her former identity; and finally, as the child reaches toddlerhood and is no longer so utterly dependent, an adjustment to something more like normality, but also to a knowledge of being deeply changed, bonded to her child forever. 

 

Clare and I both found it captured exactly our own experience of new (and lasting) motherhood, but Doug who has obviously not had the experience, said he too found it entirely convincing, engrossing and moving. Less enthusiastic about the book were John and Ann. John said he had found it boringly repetitive, which seemed staggering to us. It is true that the author portrays with huge honesty the repetitive tedium of looking after a baby, but for us she does it so wittily and with such stylish panache that the reading of it is anything but tedious. She is especially wry about the constant superior and casual advice she receives from her husband who cannot possibly know of her subjective experience, or even of the practicalities, referring to him with savage irony at one point as ‘the Child Development Specialist’, and at another as ‘the Professor of Paediatrics’. When she worries that her toddler isn't eating, her husband tells her: 'You need to calm down. He won't eat because you're stressing him out.' She thinks:

 

It was so easy for him behind his desk. He hadn't lain on his side that morning extending bits of toast under the table while you were playing. You had chewed the first buttered soldier and inserted the second into the cabin of your fire engine.

 

As they prepare to leave to go out she asks her husband to pack the nappy bag:

 

‘With what?’

‘The stuff he needs.’

‘What does he need?’

‘His stuff,’ I had repeated… ‘The stuff. You know, all the stuff.’ But my husband didn’t know all the stuff. How would he? Stuff was for the little people. The soother, the spare soother, the nappies, the wipes, the barrier cream, change of clothes, Calpol, a snack, a spare snack for when the first snack was rejected. I’d tried to say the words but there were so many of them it’d be quicker to pack the bag myself.

 

As her experience goes on, the narrator becomes more and more aware, and angry, and ironic, about the continuing power imbalance between men and women exposed by the basic fact of childbirth. Out with the pram on a country lane she is confronted by a middle-aged man who refuses to move for her, and when she stands her ground, calls her stupid. She rages:

 

…although the dicks themselves blur, the nature of their dickdom is coming into sharper focus. That man saw fit to chastise me because he had never pushed a pram. He had made no contribution to the enormous effort required to raise a child and regarded me as an obstacle in his path, an obstruction to his business, which, unlike mine, was important. So he pranced around like a country squire reinforcing as best he could the ideologies of patriarchy, Empire … all along I had believed I was equal, when all along I was not, because all along I had been treading towards this great crevasse called motherhood, and now that I was looking up at the world through my brain fog, I could see that to have presumed Empire and patriarchy were dead was naïve at best. Not only were they alive and well: they had won. Trump and Putin were in office…

 

Ann said perhaps it was because she hadn’t had children herself, but she kept feeling a bit annoyed with the narrator, wondering why she didn’t get help, by which she meant practical help. The book doesn’t spell this out, but Clare and I pointed out that as a professional woman the protagonist was clearly very much alone with new motherhood, as we had both been, far from any family who could help out. Ann did then muse that it was of course traditionally different, when people lived in communities with all the women rallying round to help out new mothers. But it is perhaps the psychological and physical effects of childbirth and new motherhood that are the biggest burden and which can’t be shared, and are the biggest thing for those outside of the experience to appreciate: the phenomenon commonly called postnatal depression, which is a combination of hormonal flux, physical trauma and exhaustion, and the unprecedented shock of the overwhelming responsibility for another helpless human being with whom, for the first time ever, you utterly identify. When her husband suggests she take the baby to the Baby and Toddler Group, she muses: ‘It was difficult to explain the obstacles to my husband, because they weren’t obstacles he recognised. They weren’t obstacles I’d recognised before having you…’  At another point she comments that people think looking after a baby is simple: ‘I know because I once thought so myself.’

 

When her teething child wakes in the night and begins screaming, before she remembers the health insurance doctor line the narrator panics: 

 

I didn’t know what to do and turned one way then the other. Had the abscess burst? Would that poison the blood? Is that what this fever was? Sepsis? ‘I’m trying to sleep!’ your father yelled from the bedroom.

 

It was the powerlessness that was so frightening. The middle of the night and my child was in crisis. There was no one I could run it past to check it was okay, it was normal, there was nothing to worry about.

 

There was some lack of sympathy over this – after all, it was said, the child soon recovers – but both Clare and I had had the same experience and found it entirely emotionally truthful.

 

A really great book, in the opinion of some of us: emotionally truthful and moving, stylish, funny and exceptionally intelligent. 

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here  

Annabel Gaskell reviews Five Different Stories

A lovely review from Annabel Gaskell of Five Different Stories About One Thing. She talks about its relationship to Astral Travel (which she gave a smashing review when it came out), saying that although the stories work perfectly on their own, there is 'another dimension' if you've read the novel. And she 'love[s] the combination of writing with the art', and calls it a 'lovely little book'. 

Held by Anne Michaels

Clare suggested this book, remembering that she had liked Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces when we read it. The book has been hugely praised by critics and was shortlisted for the Booker, but I’m afraid that in the event our reaction was markedly different.

 

It begins with very short sections, some only one sentence long, which take the viewpoint of John, a soldier lying wounded in Cambrai, France, in 1917, and thinking he is dying. These sections consist of the aphoristic thoughts that move through his mind – 'We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?' (This is the very first two-sentence section, which poses the central question of the book); 'We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known' – and memories of his lover, Helena, and his mother.

 

Clare said she liked the novel when she began it, since the preoccupations and the fragmented structure were suitable for the mentality of an apparently dying man, but the whole novel turned out to be structured and pitched in this sonorous way, and she quickly tired of it. There was unanimous agreement in the group. In this style, the novel moves non-chronologically between the years of the twentieth century and between European countries, picking up on moments in the lives of the war-surviving John and his wife Helena, of Anna, the daughter Helena conceives before John commits suicide, of Anna’s daughter Mara, who, like Anna before her, is a doctor working in war zones, and of those with whom they connect, sometimes only briefly, including also in its sweep others unconnected with them: Eastern European dissidents on the run and a period in the life of Marie Curie.

 

The problem was, we found, that in spite of this theoretical sweep, it was hard to distinguish between the characters: every character thought and talked the same, asking each other and themselves over and over the same question about life and death posed at the beginning. In fact, every character talks and thinks as the author writes. People complained that it was hard sometimes to tell whether thoughts were meant to be those of a character, or were simply those of the author, and it seemed to me that there was no real distinction, they were indeed conflated. This is perhaps a legacy of Anne Michaels' prior and parallel practice in poetry, with its mode of direct authorial address. There is also much that seems arcane and abstruse, perhaps more admissible in poetry which requires a more contemplative mode of reading than does a novel. There is constant reference to scientific theories that potentially pose the possibility of unknown dimensions, not all of it the kind of science that is commonly known. On the second page of the novel, the wounded John (or perhaps the author?) contemplates:

Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.

 None of us knew what Lagrangian meant, and those of us who Googled it encountered an explanation that was not easy for the non-scientifically or -mathematically trained, and gave up trying to relate it to John’s situation. There are also, as some of us had found in Fugitive Pieces, statements that sounded profound, but that, once examined, made no sense:

Even when he had no tears left, he would have tears for Anna.

 We also found the characters and their relationships unrealistically, indeed sentimentally idealised: every character loves their parent unconditionally and every parent their child; each sexual partnership is perfect and instantly established by love at first sight and a tacit knowledge of permanent togetherness, with an almost fetishistic stress on the beauty or sentimental value of women’s handbags and scarves, and bonds frequently sparked or sealed within the romantic ambience of snow. Every character – apart, as Clare pointed out, from the artist Helena poses for in later life – is good: well-intentioned and loyal and capable of huge love (and intent on grasping the truth about the continuance of life and love after death)..

 

Nearly every critic praising the book has mentioned its ‘beautiful prose’ – a suspiciously vague term in itself – but we found the prose simply pretentious. We also found the whole thing static, repetition being its essence, with its movement forward and back in time without any obvious further insight to the same central question, and with the lack of differentiation between the characters - even the names are passed down the generations, increasing the effect

 

Critics have pointed out that the book proposes love as the crucial antidote to the horrors of war with which it begins, and which Anna and her daughter Mara experience as doctors. But as I said to the group, in reality things are not so clear-cut and binary. Relationships and people are far more complex than the idealised versions presented here, and it is indeed the same human flaws that complicate personal relationships (and which novels classically examine) that also lead in the wider context to war. Apart from which, the horrors of war are not truly tackled in his book: they are not directly depicted. Although John does eventually commit suicide (prompted by a realisation that he has not in fact captured proof of the afterlife in his professional photos), at the beginning we are party not to his physical pain or the horrors he experienced prior to the moment, but to his somewhat removed thoughts and memories. Some of the horrors Mara and her war-photographer lover Alan have seen are recalled, but only from the comfort of the home to which they have retreated, and as the thing from which their love does indeed cushion them. We are meant to believe that they have been war-traumatised, but there is little evidence apart from a certain disillusion about life on Alan’s part, greatly eased by their love. And, as I said to the group, their memories of the moment of their meeting seriously romanticise the explosion in which they are involved at the time:

In the ruins, the smoke chafed the back of her throat, but it was dry and quiet and she slept like a stone. When she woke, she saw him sleeping next to her. Later Alan would tell the story of how he had found her. But she would never forget the feeling that she had found him, simply by opening her eyes.

Our members Ann and John both noted similarities in the solipsism of this book with that we found in Virginia Woolf's The Waves. The group as a whole pondered the fact that this book has received such lavish praise, and Ann said she felt it was a similar instance of the emperor's new clothes. I noted that some of the reviewers had caught the soulfulness of tone and impenetrability of meaning, the Sunday Times declaring that 'Michaels inhabits episodic moments with a quantum quality', which made everyone laugh. Margeret said roundly in conclusion that if she'd wanted to ponder at length whether life goes on after death, she'd have gone to church.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here  

Reading Group: When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola

Ann suggested this book alongside Lord of the Rings (we take turns to make suggestions, and always suggest two for the rest to choose from), since the blurb implies a similar kind of scenario: a group of people, in this case a family, ‘grow[ing] up wild’ on the land, in this case on the ‘hulking Pyrenees’. In fact, it turned out to be a very different kind of book altogether.

 

It does indeed begin, as the blurb tells us, with the death by lightning of a young farmer, Domenec, and we do get to learn of the fates of his family as the years go by, and it is true that the book ends with a moving reconciliation for one of the family members. But the story of the family is not foregrounded throughout the book, and the point is to illustrate that it is only one thread in an interconnected biosphere. Domenec’s death is related dispassionately, not by any conventional narrator, but by the collective voice of the clouds that bring the lightning that kill him. They note the ghosts of women once killed as witches approaching the body and then picking up the chanterelle mushrooms for which he had been foraging, and moving on. The next chapter is related by one of those ghosts, telling of how they were tortured. Each chapter is devoted to a new and different narrator, human or non-human: we hear Domenec’s widow, a roe deer, the mountains themselves telling the tale of their geological upheaval, a ghost of the Spanish Civil War, and the chanterelles with their (symbolically) interconnected mycelium – ‘the cap of one is the cap of us all … the spores of one are the spores of us all … the story of one is the story of us all’. 

 

This might all sound difficult, fragmented, and possibly pretentious, but in fact the book avoids entirely the archness to which it might have succumbed, while reading like a fluid dream. We were all captivated by the lyrical yet earthy prose, the authentic feel of every viewpoint and the author’s astounding empathy. The chapter taking the viewpoint of a dog made us laugh out loud - we agreed it was one of best and funniest things we’d ever read. It seemed to us that the translation from the Catalan, by Mara Faye Lethem, was excellent. Ann and Doug were very taken by the fairytale and folklore references threaded throughout, which add to the dream-like quality and underpin the sense of history and time. The book constitutes a moving plea for respect for the earth and its ecosystem, and we were indeed both delighted and moved.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Bookmunch reviews Five Different Stories About One Thing, and a launch date.

Here's another very nice review of Five Different Stories About One Thing, this time from Bookmunch. It's very complimentary about the Confingo series of collaborative mini-collections to which the book belongs, and says that FDSAOT 'maintains the high standards'. 'You can play an interesting game,' says the reviewer, working out what the 'one thing' is that links the stories (each written in a different genre): 'Violence, Family? Betrayal? Secrets? Legacy?' Well, as they indicate, it's all of these things, but for me the most important are the first and last - the legacy of violence, the way violence can have an impact down the generations, and whether or not, in subsequent generations, it can be eradicated or overcome. 

And we now have a launch date. We'll be celebrating the publication at the lovely Saul Hay Gallery in Castlefield (see picture below) on 27th May at 7.30. I'll read from the book, and writer and short fiction professor Ailsa Cox will quiz me about it. It's a free event - with a glass of wine! - but you are asked to book HERE.

Obviously the book will be available to buy at the event, but you can also get it HERE. 

New Publication: Five Different Stories About One Thing.

It's a long time since I've posted on here anything but the reports of our reading group discussions, but the publication today of my new mini collection prompts me to do so. I'm really thrilled with this little book - it's so beautifully produced by Confingo, with such wonderful care and attention. It's the seventh in a series of collaborations between writers and artists, and I'm truly delighted with the stunning full-colour artwork by Laura Scott which echoes so thoughtfully the themes and ideas of the stories.

The stories can be read as self-contained yet are linked by their characters and a past trauma shared by all of them. Each story is cast in a different genre which illustrates the particularity of the effect on each character and on his or her outlook, and the way that, while the experience connects them it also isolates them from each other. So there's a ghost story, a love story (of sorts), crime, science fiction, and a postmodern story. Read as a whole, however, their connections and implications grow. (At least, I hope they do!)

This mixed-genre idea was in fact an idea I had a long time ago, and at one point thought of using for my novel Astral Travel, but abandoned it, as the story of Astral Travel was complicated enough in itself! So what I've done here is take a similar set of characters, but apply the idea to a less complex situation.

And publication day has come with a lovely review from Jackie Law who concludes 'The stories within are just asking to be reread. This is a book I will keep'. Thank you, Jackie!

Five Different Stories About One Thing is available from Confingo Publishing. 

Reading Group: Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou

Warning: Plot spoil

Margeret's latest suggestion was this widely acclaimed and International Booker long-listed book set in the People's Republic of Congo in the aftermath of the Marxist-Leninist Revolution of the late 1960s. In 1970 our first-person narrator is a boy in a harsh orphanage, taking succour from the pastoral approach of the visiting priest, Papa Moupelo. It is Papa Moupelo who has given him his name, a long name in  Moupelo's own language, Lingala, which means 'Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors' - inevitably shortened to Moses - which imbues Moses with a fundamental if primitive sense of mission and justice. His sense of injustice will lead him to avenge his bullied best friend, Bonaventure, with chilli pepper, which earns him the nickname 'Little Pepper' (the title of the original French edition). One day Papa Moupela fails to appear: the new, anti-religion regime has taken over the orphanage, and there is a suggestion that he may have been disappeared. The harshness increases. Eventually Moses escapes with two others for the metropolis of Pointe-Noire (leaving Bonaventure behind), where their only choice is to join a street gang of petty thieves. Eventually Moses finds a kind of peace with a house of prostitutes, and the madam finds him a job in the docks and a hut in which to live. But then, during a purge of 'Zairian whores', Moses turns up one day to find the brothel house razed to rubble and the prostitutes 'disappeared'. Distraught, Moses descends into madness, vainly consulting various doctors, eventually dressing himself as a latter-day Robin Hood and setting out with a knife to avenge his 'little adopted family'.

On the whole we found the book an interesting and mainly enjoyable read. It is written with a kind of naif yet skewering wit we all enjoyed - Moses refers to his 'kilometrically extended name' - and Ann commented on the skill of the translator, Helen Stevenson, in capturing it. However, we all found the book 'front-heavy', as I think Clare put it. It is divided into two Parts of equal length. Part 1 deals with the time in the orphanage, covering in some detail the few years of Moses' early adolescence and the fascist idiocies of the regime. The pace is consequently measured, and in fact Doug said he found the section repetitive. It ends with Moses's escape. Part 2 opens when Moses has already been in the street gang for three years, and goes on to cover the years right into his middle age, its narrative sweep thus pacier and more eventful.  There seems no real narratorial significance in the initial leap, and the absence of any portrayal of Moses's arrival in the city and his adjustment to life there seemed to all of us a lack after the detailed treatment in Part 1. In fact, as Doug pointed out, Moses's escape at the end of Part 1 seems rushed and inadequately explained, as if the writer was just impatient to get on with the street scenes, and it is perhaps telling that most reviews give the impression that the more eventful Part 2 constitutes the main bulk of the book.

Doug said that although Moses's mix of childish, sometimes clumsy, yet insightful vocabulary is amusing, there are sentiments and a political understanding expressed in Part 1 that wouldn't in fact have been available to a young boy, and which smacked of the author's own voice and perspective. Others agreed. I thought this could be excused to some extent by the fact that, as we discover at the end, the whole thing is a memoir written by Moses in a penitentiary for the criminally insane, and the problem perhaps was that there was no indication of this at the start to make us read the book in that context.

At the end of the book, Moses is back where he started: the penitentiary is built on the sight of the orphanage, and Bonaventure is still there (using a different name, rather than that of the father who abandoned him), still obsessed with the planes flying over and expecting one some day to take him away. That, as someone pointed out, should make for a very sad book - and on one level it does - but there is a feel of survival in the lively prose of this fictional memoir, and of course the very act of writing it constitutes for Moses a triumph.  

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

This book which has sold millions of copies worldwide was suggested by John as, I think, something of a provocation, since our group is deeply suspicious of hype, and several people in our group had consequently avoided reading it. Once it was suggested, however, everyone decided that we should give it objective attention and read it.

It is the first-person narration of Frances, who relates how, one summer when she and her female fellow student and ex-partner Bobbi are performing their poetry together in Dublin, they meet an older couple, the reasonably well-known and glamorous photographer Melissa and her actor husband Nick. Frances embarks on an affair with Nick, and the novel charts the push-me-pull-you course of their relationship, and the effects of it on their relationships with the other two.

Reactions to the book in the group were interesting. All but one of us who had read it found it a fairly quick, indeed compulsive read, with a smooth prose that pushes things along at pace. Margaret liked the book unequivocally, but she was the only one to do so.  Clare said she did enjoy it as she read it (others, including me, agreed) but when she got to the end she questioned whether it had amounted to very much in terms of substance and theme. Others had substantial criticisms, and Ann said she really hated the book and wouldn't have finished it had it not been for our impending discussion.

What Ann said she hated was the characters - she really disliked every one of them - and much of the discussion centred on the character of the protagonist and narrator Frances. It was generally agreed that Frances was a very damaged character - self-consciousness and vulnerability seem to be what characterise her, and she self harms, pinching herself and even cutting a hole in her leg as a way of dealing emotionally with situations. However, people pointed out that this is simply laid out for the reader and never really addressed on any deep psychological level: there is no real indication of why she should be like this, apart perhaps from the fact that her father is alcoholic, with one possible hint that she and her mother had needed sometimes to avoid her father. Introducing the book, John had said that he found it interesting for Frances's masochism. At one point, when they are in bed together, Frances asks Nick to hit her, although he refuses. Clare pointed out that that's a known pattern, that abuse in childhood can lead to masochism, but none of us felt that the book made any conscious or satisfactory connection between these things.

I said that I thought a curious thing about Frances's character was that although she seemed so vulnerable much of the time, there was in fact a certain arrogance about her, although everyone else in the group was surprised at this idea. It is Frances, after all, who first makes a move on Nick, kissing him at a party with his wife nearby, and there is surely an arrogance about the fact that when she sends off her first short story after being introduced to an editor, she doesn't even bother reading through the draft before doing so (and of course it's immediately accepted.) As a result, a lot of her self-consciousness - the constant care about what impression she is making on people, what she should wear etc - seemed to me to tip over into self-obsession. When she and Bobbi are first invited to Melissa's house, as they travel with her in the taxi, Frances's thoughts are for herself rather than their new acquaintance: 

I felt excited, ready for the challenge of visiting a stranger's home, already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming.

There's a lot of obsession with how beautiful and interesting Melissa keeps making Frances look in her photographs, however surprised Frances purports to be by this, constant stress on what she (or Nick) is wearing at each pivotal moment, and when Melissa's sponsor-publisher visits while the four are staying in her French house, her only interest for Frances, and, more importantly, for the novel, is how much attention she pays Frances (none, until she finds she is a writer). I have read quotes from reviews that call  this novel funny, and I assume those reviewers were taking the characters' self-obsession as ironically intended, but our group had read it all as deadly serious. As the novel develops, Frances suffers severe and debilitating period pain which turns out to be caused by endometriosis, which can in no way be seen as ironically intended, but which seems to me to be the novel over-egging, indeed over-dramatising her vulnerability, since it is not integrated in any deep way with theme or even in fact plot. 

Doug said, to the agreement of others, that in fact you never get to know the characters, they are cyphers. The novel is titled Conversations With Friends, but Doug said 'What conversations?' The title may be ironically intended since there is a lot not said between the characters and consequent unknowing, but it is problematic that there is little in the way of character-revealing dialogue between the characters. So little, too, is actually described, so that there is not much sense of atmosphere, and Doug and others said that as a result they just couldn't engage. Ann said she hated the way the novel simply named areas of Dublin without giving any indication of what they were like, which meant that if you didn't know them, which she didn't, you couldn't envisage them or know their atmosphere.

People said that they didn't know what the novel was supposed to be about. I said that my main problem with it is that I think a political point is intended which is not in fact fulfilled. Bobbi and Frances espouse leftwing politics, and I feel it's meant to be politically significant that Frances is relatively poor while the other characters are not: it's a fundamental part of her vulnerability. But the plot, such as it is, does nothing to promote the politics, indeed it undermines them, as it is focussed without critique on the retrograde scenario of a woman masochistically in thrall to a man. (It is true that Nick, it will turn out, has deep emotional problems of his own, but again these are not addressed.) Another problem for me, and others, was that the novel is lacking a narrative arc. Throughout, the relationship between Frances and Nick waxes and wanes and waxes once again, and there is never a sense of denouement or revelation. Everyone agreed that they thought they had got to the end of the novel at a point when the relationship finally seems over (and when we could perhaps draw a conclusion about the meaning of it all), only for the final scene to upend this, and for the last words of the novel to be Frances's phone request to a clearly compliant Nick: 'Come and get me'.

Margeret protested against our negativity, saying that the book was beautifully written. Mark, our ex-member back on a visit, pointed out that being beautifully written on the sentence level is not enough for a novel, that there are many other elements, such as structure, theme etc, that need to be successful, and Doug added, and yes, it needs to convince. Margaret laughed and said that she was convinced and she was engaged by the characters.

However, Ann asked why on earth the novel has been so very popular and successful, and others suggested that perhaps it appealed to a younger demographic than ourselves. I did wonder afterwards if it is the very self-obsession of the characters that had endeared them to a generation of TikTokers obsessed with lifestyle and image.

Finally, John noted the book's debt to Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (which we discussed here), another novel about two young girls, an introspective narrator and her more outgoing friend, in which the narrator becomes involved with a married man - and which Ann said roundly was the far superior book.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut.

I suggested this novel which takes the form of the confession of Howard W Campbell Jr, who is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison after the Second World War. His war crime has been to have made broadcasts in Germany for the Nazi regime, whipping up vicious hatred towards Jews. In fact, however, Campbell was an American agent, and his broadcasts contained coded messages for the Americans. His problem now is that this was so secret that there is no one to come forward and vouch for him and save him. The US government 'neither confirms or denies I was an agent of theirs.' Resigned to his fate, he writes his memoir-confession. Here he describes how, as an entirely apolitical playwright of German-American origin living in Germany, whose plays are enthusiastically patronised by the Nazis, he is approached on a park bench and recruited by an agent, Frank Wirtanen (whom the American government now denies ever served in any of their branches). Witanen suggests that he uses his Nazi connections to gain a position of influence in the regime. What follows is a tale of double-dealings, in which Nazis can turn out to be undercover Jews, a wife can turn out to have been replaced by an imposter who can then turn out to be a Russian agent, and a post-war leader of a right-wing cult with rabid hatred for Jews, Catholics and Black people can blindly recruit members from those very groups, all prefaced by a section in which Campbell describes his Israeli prison guards, some of whom turn out to be ex-Nazis.

All of this is told in Vonnegut's own wry, wise voice, rendering the deadly tragedy via black comedy. Introducing the book, I said that I consider it brilliant. I love Vonnegut's voice and the book's concern with moral ambiguity and its message that fascism does not die, which makes it very relevant to today. Everyone agreed. Ann said she thought that the fact that the book is blackly comic - thus engaging the reader - made the book particularly powerful and its message all the more chilling, and again we all agreed.

There was quite a lot of discussion of Campbell's attitudes. I said I thought that the book was a condemnation of apoliticism and political unawareness, and a warning of their dangers. It is Campbell's apoliticism which allows him to be recruited in the way he is (and for which he was probably recruited):  he says he did it simply because he thought of himself as a 'ham', an actor. But there are terrible consequences: in bleakly comic and tragic scenes, Campbell discovers that people took up the racist suggestions in his broadcasts. Someone in the group noted the connection with Bolano's By Night in Chile, which we read recently, in which the protagonist  blinds himself to the political atrocities around him.

While much of the novel operates as dark comedy, there are moments of deadly serious authorial passion, such as this vivid depiction of the totalitarian mind:

...a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random... The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined... The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases ... The wilful filing off of gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information ...

 That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference towards slave women and love for a blue vase -

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -

A stunning book, we all agreed, and went on to discuss our own political situation, which only goes to prove its contemporary relevance.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

Doug suggested this lively and linguistically inventive novel set in late nineteenth-century Montana and featuring two reprobate but disarming protagonists who run off together, pursued by a hired gang: Irish poet Tom Rourke, doper and drunk with existential yearnings, and Polly Gillespie, hard-bitten ex-prostitute and newly arrived wife of a mining company captain. Told in Barry's signature insightful prose - lyrical yet earthy and often comic - it traces their progress through the Montana forests and the dead of winter on their stolen horse and with their ill-gotten money, and charts their love for each other.

Clare and others said that they found the opening a little difficult. The author brilliantly employs the technique of free indirect discourse, slipping fluidly between a narrative voice and perspective and those of a character, with often a mix of the two within a sentence. At the start the prose adopts the baroque poeticism of Tom as, not yet having met Polly, he wanders the 'stations of the cross' - ie the bars along the main street of the mining town of Butte - wondering depressively if he will end up 'old and mad and forgotten on the mountain': 'He was appalled at the charismatic light '; 'He walked as charity. He walked under Libra.' However, the moment Polly appears with her new husband in the photography studio where Tom works as an assistant, things take an earthier, more ironic turn. Clare picked out as an example this sentence describing Polly, chiefly from Tom's point of view, but with a sly authorial injection: 'Eyes of wren's egg blue and one inclined to say hello to the other but not unattractively'. Soon after, we are inside the cynical, demotic verbal world of Polly as we learn how, herself purporting to be something she wasn't, she has unwittingly married a self-flagellating religious fanatic. Ironically, indeed hilariously, it is a situation in which Tom has had a huge hand, since, as a literate man, he provides a service for other, illiterate immigrants, writing for them disingenuously romantic and courteous offers of marriage, with misrepresentative promises of a comfortable life. From this point on, we all agreed, the novel is a compelling read, and most of us read it in two sittings.

To begin with, we didn't really have a lot to say about it apart from the fact that we had liked it so much, how brilliant we thought the narrative voice, and how, in spite of Tom's criminality and Polly's hardness, Barry makes us understand and care for them, and want them to escape and succeed in the end. I said I wasn't too sure that the novel was about very much more than love - that existential connection which the pair have, and which for Tom is the only thing worth living for, and for which he would be happy to die. Doug said he did think that was exactly what it was about, and no one demurred.

Ann, however, had said very little up to this moment, and now she said that she was obviously going to be the dissenting voice about the book: she hadn't been taken by it at all. Very surprised, we asked her why. She said that perhaps it was because she read so many Westerns when she was a teenager, but she felt it was cliched - the whole scenario of outlaws with hearts of gold on the run and coming across various quirky others on their travels.

We thought about this. Clearly, the distinctive prose sets the novel apart from others, but it occurred to me also that Barry was consciously using a well-known template (in which, as Ann herself pointed out, there's always a hero, and always a happy ending) and subverting it. The real interest of this book, unlike that of the traditional Western, is psychological, concentrating on Tom's existential longings and fears and Polly's more realistic though no less moving grasp on the world, and the telepathic emotional connection between them. Clare added that, in contrast with the heroic mode of traditional Westerns, the novel exposes the hardship for immigrants in such late-nineteenth-century mining towns - the cultural barrenness, the sense of scraping a living, the drugs, and above all the violence. Someone noted that there is no sense in the novel of the presence of Native Americans, but we felt that that was probably historically correct - they would have been long driven from such places.

All in all, a novel the group generally very much enjoyed.  

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano

Clare suggested this novella narrated by Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who has also been a literary critic and poet. It is a deathbed confession, or more accurately an attempt at self-justification, as he recounts a compromised life in which he blinded himself to political atrocities going on around him by burying himself in literature - most notably Ancient Greek literature - and finally allowing himself to be seconded in service to the fascist Pinochet regime. Like Bolano's novella Distant Star, which we also read, it is deeply concerned with the role and place of literature in society and politics. While Distant Star depicts the way that art and literature can be used by fascist regimes and can itself be fascist, By Night in Chile is concerned with how literature - even leftwing literature - can be used by individuals as a smokescreen to hide from the reality of politics.

As a young newly ordained priest and aspiring literary critic, Sebastian is taken under the wing of the famous Chilean critic with the pseudonym Farewell and introduced to the leftwing poet and socialist politician, Pablo Neruda. Farewell, however, is conservative in nature and his literary interests apolitical, a landowner who is devastated when the socialist leader Allende is elected, and pleased at the return of his land after Pinochet seizes power. The young Sebastian, also conservative in nature and unsuited to the priesthood into which he has somehow drifted, flounders amid these conflicting influences, in awe of Neruda's greatness yet repulsed by the working people he encounters on Farewell's estate. Self-centred and inward-looking, he is no less lacking in insight or intellectual independence as his reputation as a literary critic grows, and, as the tale of his complicity with the fascist regime develops, his deathbed musings become more and more disingenuously self-justifying. 'A week later we would be back there again,' he says of the literary soirees held by the wife of a man who will turn out to have been a murderous agent of the secret police, adding quickly: 'By we I mean the group. I didn't go every week. I put in an appearance ... once month. Or even less often.'

Throughout the confession he has referred to a 'wizened youth', a figure who has dogged him from a certain distance through his life, challenging and judging him, and is now here beside him, and who is clearly his conscience or the shrivelled moral potential of his own youth.

Clare said she was very glad to have suggested and read this book. She commented on the fact that it reads almost as if it's written in one sentence - a stream-of consciousness outpouring lacking in paragraphs or pauses to mark shifts between events, with nested stories and disquisitions. Both Doug and John said they found tedious these apparent diversions, with which the first half of the book is heavily weighted, and which in fact are intended either to illustrate the impotence of art and literature or to show how Sebastian is sidetracking himself from important, contemporary issues. Margaret said she was finding the same, until she went back and read again from the beginning, after which she admired the book greatly. She noted, to my agreement, that these 'diversions', while deadly serious in intent, are at times wryly funny - such as Sebastian's tour of the churches of Europe where the bishops have taken up the elite and brutal sport of falconry (symbolic of fascism), to stop the pigeons - symbolic of the Holy Spirit, and perhaps of the congregations  - from despoiling the church buildings, or this passage indicating Sebastian's retreat from the world after Allende is elected:

When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics... I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba... and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episode of the soap opera The Right to Be Born was broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochus of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stechoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreaon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favourites)...

I said that I had started reading the book in short bouts on train journeys, which didn't really work for a book that is basically one desperate exhalation. Initially therefore I too had had much the same reaction as John and Doug. But then I too started again and read it all in one session, and found that the book worked and, indeed in the end gripped me. Most of us felt that we would have got more out of the book had we been more familiar with the political background, and both Margeret and Doug felt excluded by not knowing the Chilean writers Sebastian refers to. I said that I felt it wasn't actually necessary to know about the poets, many of them obscure, the point being that, like the above list of Ancient Greeks, the lists of Chilean poets are part of Sebastian's smokescreen against other, pressing political issues, and indeed his own moral culpability.

Margeret noted that there is a very old-fashioned feel to the world of the book, and it was sometimes hard to remember that it takes place in the mid-late twentieth century. I agreed, saying that I was sometimes brought up short by a contemporary reference, such as that to the soap opera above, and see this as an indication of Sebastian's atavistic retreat from the world.

Ann said that we ought to pay tribute to the translator, Chris Andrews, and we all agreed. I commented that the translation brilliantly captures the way the prose will sometimes suddenly drop, in a way that feels authentic, from the somewhat formal, sometimes high-faluting style of Sebastian's self-justifications to the deflating demotic of dialogue, and everyone agreed.

Finally, someone asked, so what was the message of the book? If it was a plea for left-wing literature, as I suggested, there was nothing in the book to indicate any possibility for its power in society. After all, as happened in life, the leftwing poet Neruda dies, and while (in life) it is suspected that he was poisoned by the regime, both Farewell and Sebastian choose to believe the official line hat he dies of the cancer for which he was being treated. And finally, the 'wizened youth', who has always challenged Sebastian, is defeated:

The wizened youth has been quiet for a long time now. He has given up railing against me and writers generally. Is there a solution? That is how literature is made, that is how the great works of Western literature are made. You better get used to it, I tell him. The wizened youth, or what is left of him, moves his lips, pouting an inaudible no. The power of my thought has stopped him. Or maybe it was history. An individual is no match for history. The wizened youth has always been alone, and I have always been on history's side.

A depressing message, we all agreed.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here   

Reading group: The Trees by Percival Everett

This is going to be a short post, as I don't want to plot spoil. 

Ann had recently read this genre-defying book and had been unable to put it down, and very much wanted to discuss it with us all. Taking its title from the Lewis Allan/Billy Holiday song, 'Strange Fruit', it is based on a startling idea. In the small racist town of Money, Mississippi, brutal and mystifying murders are taking place. Beside each mutilated (White) victim is found what seems to be the corpse of a young Black man, Emmett Till, lynched sixty-five years earlier by the white racists of the town. Each time, the Black corpse somehow disappears into thin air from the grip of the local law enforcement, only to appear again at the next murder. Two Black detectives are sent from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to uncover the mystery, and what ensues is a pell-mell tale of knockabout verbal comedy and aching tragedy, as the seams of prejudice and brutal racism still existing to this day are revealed. 

Like Ann, we all found it a breathless, gripping read. Part subverted detective story, part comedy, part supernatural thriller, it had us all in thrall as we read it. I said Everett's ability to deal with such searingly painful material with such a light touch was breathtaking, and everyone agreed. In a politically dynamic move, Everett, a Black writer, begins the novel with the racist family who will turn out to be at the heart of the history involved, and with a light, comic touch conveys not only their brutality but their humanity - in particular that of the women - which contributes to the poignancy of the underlying tragedy of racism. In short, snappy sections, the novel bats between the different parties involved as the murders go on: the family, the local law enforcement, the cynical bantering detectives from the MBI (who constitute a kind of send-up of the familiar tropes of the detective novel), and others who get involved - the local Klu Klux Klan, a local Black woman who is seen as a witch, her mixed-race waitressing granddaughter and the young White professor the granddaughter calls in to help, and the higher investigation officers who are eventually put on the case. Everett has a superb ear for dialogue, and all the characters are vivid and relatably human - apart perhaps from Mama Z, the so-called witch, who remains inscrutable to both the characters and the readers, and will be central to the outcome.

It is not really possible to report our detailed discussion, as it centred on points that would reveal the plot. Suffice to say that Doug was perhaps the most picky about the book. He said he found the depiction of the White racists a bit stereotyped, and when I said how great, and funny, I had found the meeting of the local Klu Klux Klan in which they try to pick up their lapsed game in the light of the murders, only to fall apart in incompetence and stupidity, he commented that he had found its stress on incompetent bureaucracy a bit cliched. I don't think any of the rest of us at all felt the same. I have to say that I was disappointed in the ending (John has since said he was, too), but won't say why as I don't want to spoil. It is true that once we got into a deep discussion we felt there were things about the plot that didn't make sense - or at least, that we didn't get - but in the end it didn't really matter, as this was a book intended to crash through the genres and blow traditional expectations into the air, and was so very engaging.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here