Max Sebald’s Writing Tips – Richard Skinner

Max Sebald’s Writing Tips – Richard Skinner.

‘the thirst for sensation’ The Dinner – Herman Koch

Translated by Sam Garrett

In Room 25 of The National Gallery is a painting by Pieter de Hooch, an artist who specialised in scenes of domesticity in the heart of the Dutch Golden Age.  The Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658) presents a solid everyday world of cleanliness, transparency, upright citizenry, and carefully marshalled beatific children; a world of order and harmony founded on firm moral ground. This is, as Andrew Graham-Dixon writes, ‘a place where stillness and security are charged with ethical value…De Hooch’s courtyard is the setting for a gentle conflict between the virtues of domesticity and the forces ranged against them.’ This is the prosperous Dutch’s self-conception reflected for their moralising satisfaction and patronage. This is, they think, a form of happiness: clean, Calvinist, and destined for Heaven. Graham-Dixon goes on, ‘The safe enclosure of the home becomes an image of the safe enclosure of the state…To look out is to see, not difference, but sameness;…an entire city of safe havens, an urban organism made up of such healthy, single cells as the one he has happened to paint. Art becomes a form of civic self-assurance.’ It also becomes rather bland.

Johannes Vermeer’s The Little Street was finished in the same year, in the same historical moment as The Courtyard of a House in Delft and resembles it in subject, but whereas De Hooch’s work encapsulates Holland’s vision of itself in both the 17^th and 21^st Centuries, Vermeer’s interrogates the façade and allows darkness and indeterminacy to remain in both home and the individual. Now we are on the outside looking in. At a time of unparalleled prosperity, Vermeer just might be wondering what lies beneath the mercantile frontage, beneath the blurred faces of his retiring subjects. Graham-Dixon calls this ‘the way in which the world withholds itself from the artist-as-observer, the way in which it retains its mystery.’ We might also see those sheer frontages as dykes holding back that darkness as the pumps and levees resist the North Sea and ensure Holland’s feet are kept dry.

All I want to talk about here are the things I heard and saw during our little get-together at the restaurant.

Herman Koch’s The Dinner can be understood as a challenge to the de Hoochian picture of Holland, happiness, and human nature; and as an attempt to move past Vermeer’s allusions to darkness into those shadows themselves. It goes without saying that Paul Lohman wants to talk about far more than what he heard and saw on one evening in an expensive Amsterdam restaurant. He is far from being a neutral narrator and he wants us to understand how he, his wife Claire, his sister-in-law Babette, and prominent politician of a brother Serge ended up sitting at this table, talking about the things their children have done and what they are to do about it. Whether Paul is reliable or not is not entirely clear; although I suspect that his honesty is one of the unsettling aspects of the novel. His voice, whilst becoming increasingly violent and disturbing, does satisfy that terrible phrase but laudable characteristic of being compulsively readable. In deceptively simple tones Koch has Paul narrate the evening and its unexpected developments.

‘The crayfish are dressed in a vinaigrette of tarragon and baby green onions,’ said the manager: he was at Serge’s plate now, pointing with his pinkie. ‘And these are chanterelles from the Vosges.’ 

The Dinner begins as an apparent consideration of a certain brand of conspicuous consumption and artifice. That the novel is anchored by the framework of the meal’s five courses – Aperitif, Appetizer, Main Course, Dessert, Digestif – seems to support this. Indeed, Paul rails against the absurd divorce between price and service in top restaurants, against the stage-management, wine-urging manipulation, and his brother’s political smile. We sympathise, even if Paul is more strident than we might be. ‘Serge never reserves a table three months in advance. Serge makes the reservation on the day itself, he says he things of it as a sport.’ This is far from the moralising pictures of Pieter de Hooch. It recalls, rather, the other side of the Golden Age: the conspicuous consumption of Frans Hals’ Banquet of the officers of the St George Militia Company (1616) and Willem Kalf’s Still Life with the drinking horn of the St Sebastian Archers’ Guild, lobster and glasses (c.1653) Serge Lohman wants to show off, to say ‘Look, I can have this whenever I want, because I can play the game’; or so his brother believes. Slowly the meal becomes an exercise in manoeuvring for advantage amongst the diners, from course choice to strategic toilet breaks. It quickly becomes clear that far more is at stake than simple brotherly conflict or cultural bankruptcy as parents jockey for position and each course ramps up the tension in simmering mix of violence, loyalty, moral indignation, and desire for stimulation.

I was remarkably calm. Calm and fatigued. There would be no violence. It was like a storm coming up: the café chairs are carried inside, the awnings are rolled up, but nothing happens. The storm passes over. And, at the same time, that’s too bad. After all, we would all rather see the roofs ripped from the houses, the trees uprooted and tossed through the air; documentaries about tornados, hurricanes and tsunamis have a soothing effect. Of course it’s terrible, we’ve all be taught to say that we think it’s terrible, but a world without disasters and violence—be it the violence of nature or that of muscle and blood—would be the truly unbearable thing.

The literary interrogation of the dark side of humanity goes at least as far back as Mary Shelley and Robert Louis-Stevenson, whilst its dramatic consideration is thousands of years old. More recently James Smythe’s The Machine, a speculative re-examination of the Frankenstein story – amongst many other things – ask what it is which keeps violence at bay, and what it takes for those barriers to be overtopped: ‘People are capable of anything, he says. It’s inside all of us.’ In many ways The Dinner is akin to Golding’s Lord of the Flies in that Koch uses children as well as adults in order to pose his questions, although it is, in a limited way, more effective because the novel remains rooted in the modern state rather than a desert island. The novel becomes concerned with the nature of moral responsibility and the lengths to which parents should go in order to protect their children from themselves and the codes of the society in which they live.

‘To the outside world they’re suddenly adults, because they did something that we, as adults, consider a crime. But I feel that they’ve responded to it more like children. That’s exactly what I was trying to tell Serge. That we don’t have the right to take away their childhood, simply because, according to our norms, as adults, it’s a crime you should have to pay for for the rest of your life.’

The repressed violence and cold manipulation that infects and bursts out of the characters in The Dinner is chilling. ‘To look out is to see, not difference, but sameness.’ Are the Lohmans an aberration or a microcosm? Is their darkly rationalised happiness won in a way which parallels the self-deception of a nation? De Hooch’s domestic harmony, his network of safe-havens hide something far darker. The Golden Age was built on the proceeds of the slave-trade. It is hard not to see a parallel here with the son Serge and Babette adopted from Burkina Faso. His treatment is troubling and the potentially political or honest intentions of his adoptive parents unresolved. What stands behind Vermeer’s shuttered windows and dark doorways? What is being kept at bay?

Without knowing glances—without winks—there was in fact no secret: that was my reasoning. It might be hard for us to put the events in the cubicle out of our minds, but in the course of time they would start to exist outside us—just they did for other people. But what we did have to forget was the secret. And the best thing was to start forgetting as soon as possible.

Koch shifts the ground beneath the reader as more and more is revealed throughout The Dinner, as the meal runs its course. It is very well done indeed. The sympathies of the reader veer wildly after an initial identification with Paul’s impatience with the paraphernalia of consumption; an identification which becomes increasingly uncomfortable in the face of Koch’s uncompromising writing. The Dinner is nothing if not gripping, even if elements stretch one’s credulity a little. The half-cocked idea that not all victims are innocents and not all criminals are guilty unsettles and shifts throughout as it is put to self-interested use. The tablet suffering a good-natured assault by a questing limb of ivy in de Hooch’s picture runs thus, ‘This is in Saint Jerome’s vale, if you wish to repair to patience and meekness. For we must first descend if we wish to be raised.’ The choices Paul and Claire make in order to protect their family might ultimately twist this moralising saying into a darker reflection of itself. Happiness is, after all, its own sensation.

The Dinner is published in paperback by Atlantic.

John Updike’s Rules for Reviewing Books

I don’t normally reblog, but this is a great summary of the kind of reviewing I am for.

Biblioklept

From Picked-up Pieces (1975):

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later…

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Cassandra – Christa Wolf (Translated by Jan Van Heurck)

Anger be now your song, immortal one,

The Illiad I.1 (Trans. Robert Fitzgerald)

‘The last thing in my life will be a picture, not a word. Words die before pictures.’

Allegorical novels can be among the very finest and the very worst. Moralizing is a constant temptation and when twinned with a lack of sympathy for one’s fictionalised opposition this results in a Pretty Bad Book. To this extent poor allegorical fiction resembles both hagiography and humpbacked vilification in its intention to beatify, sanitise, caricature, or damn its subject rather than represent or explore human nature and its manifestations in distinct but related historical, geographical, and political contexts. To that extent, to call a Good Book allegorical is at most to identify one aspect of its author’s intentions, because a common humanity must serve as the grounding of almost any novel worthy of the name. The greatest works resonate beyond their particular moment because they do just this; and likewise the greatest allegorical novels use a particular moment to reflect upon another. Sometimes it is the similarity veiled by an apparent difference which is so striking; sometimes it is that so similar a set of people could be so different. These are obviously versions of the same thing. Thus, the greatest allegorical novels find a way to say something truly interesting about both their apparent subject and their (more or less) hidden subject. One or the other won’t do.

All this, the Troy of my childhood, no longer exists except inside my head. I will rebuild it there while I still have time, I will not forget a single stone, a single incidence of light, a single laugh, a single cry. It shall be kept faithfully inside me, however short the time may be. Now I have learned to see what is not, how hard the lesson was.

Christa Woolf’s Cassandra takes as its apparent subject the recollections of the eponymous prophetess and daughter of the Trojan king Priam as she waits to be executed by Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra ouside the gates of Mycenae. However, Wolf’s story is definitely not a straightforward recapitulation of Homer, Virgil, or the Epic Cycle. This is most clear when Cassandra speaks of ‘Achilles the brute’. No heroes here: just violence and deceit. In Wolf’s war the most beautiful of Priam’s daughters finds herself in the midst of an economic struggle between Troy and the Greek states falsely dressed as a question of honour and idealism. The priestess watches in horror as her father’s court is slowly infiltrated and increasingly controlled by the bland but insidious Eumelos who wishes only to protect the state against those who would betray it. The enemy seems less those beyond the walls and more the new party of Trojans who subvert Troy in the name its perpetuation. Thus power deceives not only its objects but itself and in doing so hastens its own destruction. Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance: So far, so Cold War.

How many realities were there in Troy besides mine, which I had thought the only one? Who fixed the boundary between the visible and invisible?

This is a question we might ask of Cassandra itself. Where does allegory begin and end? Where is the apparent story and where the hidden? Where the visible and where the invisible? It’s also a question Wolf is asking of the other Trojan War narratives. Why is that tale of gods and armoured men the story? We can also turn the question back: why is Cassandra’s narrative the one we should trust? After all, she doesn’t seem to trust herself.

   Will I split myself in two until the end before the axe splits me, for the sake of consciousness? In order not to writhe with fear, not to bellow like an animal – and who should know better than I how animals bellow when they are sacrificed! Will I, until the end, until that axe – will I still, when my head, my neck, is already – will I—?

Why do I simply refuse to allow myself this relapse into creatureliness? What is holding me back? Who is there left to see me? Do I, the unbeliever, still see myself as the focus of a god’s gazes, as I did when a child, a girl, a priestess? With that never pass?

Wolf’s writing is searching, clawing at the truth, or some truth. Inseparable from its subject and subject-matter, the tumbling consciousness is feverish in its expression as thought and language move toward and away from resolution until the very end. This is a consciousness divided against itself within a state divided against itself. Indeed, division is everywhere: in the dual nature of Apollo, in the gods’ gaze, the torment and the desolation; and in the prophesying of Germany’s future, the future of many times and places, the fall of the USSR, its wall breached. Yet Cassandra is nothing if not resistant to quite so totalising a summation of its aims. Cassandra sweeps back and forth between love and hatred, male and female, madness and sanity, belief and apostasy, the city and the natural, life and death.

Who lives will see. It occurs to me secretly that I am tracking the story of my fear. Or more precisely, the story of its unbridling: more precisely still, of its setting free.

One of the most powerful and interesting aspects of Cassandra is Wolf’s discussion of a beauty which does not exist and which is yet the pretext for war and repression. Once you go far enough, you have to keep going. Time and again the structures of Terror have become their own end. The end is no longer in sight and may have never been possible. We should be careful when mixing biography and criticism – although Wimsatt and Beardsley’s warning against ‘author psychology’ in their ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ is far too strong a prohibition – but it is interesting that Christa Wolf opposed the reunification of Germany despite her implied criticism of the East’s surveillance culture in Cassandra. (She herself was a Stasi informant at one point long before the novel’s composition). This suggests that it is the idea of utopia – socialist or otherwise – and its attendant terrors which Wolf critiques. Beyond a certain point everyone knows it never existed in the first place; and yet they cannot stop themselves. Honour demands that the image remains. In the paradise

we had invented, we were defending everything that we know longer had. And the more it faded, the more real we had to say it was. Thus out of words, gestures, ceremonies, and silence there arose a second Troy, a ghostly city, were we were supposed to feel at home and live at ease.

This is all only a first-pass reading. Cassandra deserves several readings for the quality of language and thought alone. I think an awful lot passed me by, especially at the beginning as I settled into Cassandra’s habits of speech. Without any dissembling I can say that I have failed to do justice to the aspects of the novel which deal with female experience, with the feminine, the binaries Wolf creates between Greek and Trojan, with Cassandra’s life itself. That’s one set of concerns to pay more attention to when rereading. I’ve been told by several people that Wolf’s later novel Medea is even better than Cassandra, so that’s definitely going on the list. Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian is one of my favourite books and, although the two are very different, Cassandra has reminded me how much I want to reread that. I’ve also had Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles on the shelf for a few months after a very generous Christmas present from a sister-in-law of the entire Orange Prize 2012 shortlist. Miller is quoted on the back of my copy of Cassandra and hers is yet another approach to Achilles and the nature of passion and conflict I want to read.

The last thing in my life will be a picture, not a word. Words die before pictures.

I began by making several fairly reductive comments about allegory and the past and present moment. I suggested that Good Books overflow their setting, their moment, and touch on something human. It is very difficult to talk about Cassandra without wanting to go off in several different directions at once. Now that suggests there is something in the novel which we have to grasp after, something which reaches back and forward in time, and which is expressed in language which runs ahead and returns saying something we did not expect. ‘The last thing in my life will be a picture not a word.’ There is something beyond language for Cassandra: a picture, or pure experience, something will momentarily outlast the word she might use to describe it. This is part of what Wolf’s language is grasping at, and part of the reason why she cannot reach it. Perhaps. There is an awful lot I did not understand in Cassandra. I think that’s extremely promising.

Once again limb-loosing love shakes me,

bitter-sweet, untamable, a dusky animal

Sappho

Cassandra is published by Daunt Books

My thanks to Daunt Books for this review copy.

‘manipulate the pieces’ The Machine – James Smythe

‘They said, We can take a person and make them whole again.’

Perhaps the hardest idea to accept is that love can betray itself by its own depth of feeling. If love is given the means to try to recapture what it has lost it will most likely take the opportunity. After all, ‘Nobody dreams of a vacant shell for a husband.’ Therein lies the heart of The Machine. There are memories we don’t want anymore, memories we never wanted, memories which have changed us and not for the better. In a flat in an estate on the Isle of White in a warmed and partially flooded Britain Beth takes delivery of ‘the Machine’ and plans to reclaim the husband she lost, first to post-traumatic stress disorder, and then to the Machine itself which was supposed to bring him back by deleting the memories which had so changed him. Vic is not just comatose or suffering from dementia. He is gone. Only a body remains. In a grotesque inversion of therapy Vic spoke his life into the Machine and it removed every memory that might connect to his time as a soldier, from childhood to injury in Iran to mood swings and violence. Only this talking cure doesn’t resolve it purges. Beth’s great hope is that it can also ‘REPLENISH’, that it can put back what it took out.

Nobody knows why the brain doesn’t work like it should after the Machine’s had its way with it. This would be much easier for all involved if it was just a wipe. One doctor who worked on the project wondered if the brain hadn’t had its ability to record memories wiped. As in, it had forgotten how to remember.

From the moment the Machine’s ‘pitch-black casing’ enters Beth’s spare bedroom its power deforms its surroundings: ‘the room is suddenly darker,’ and once assembled ‘it’s like a solid lump of black metal from the front, no seams, like something carved from the world itself. It looks, she thinks, almost natural. Like rock.’ Fans whirr, vibrations fill the flat and enter Beth’s dreams along with the headaches that start soon after the Machine is delivered. The extent to which this Machine can be trusted to return Vic to Beth is a key question. Its double-nature threats Beth’s atonement. ‘She thinks about it in her flat, like some growth. Mould. Cancer. Waiting in the room, and somehow alluring, persuasive, even.’ The only certainties are the seemingly scorched and permanent bruises the ‘Crown’, a headpiece, makes on the head of its subjects. There is violence in the very process.

The Machine is occupied by three key themes: the promise, the treachery, and the inescapability of memory. Memory promises to tell us who we are, who we care about, where we have come from; and yet memories can be false, fleeting, reconstructed in hindsight, painful, and destructive; whilst, of course, being inescapable. The Machine promises and threatens: it promises to remove that memory which causes so much pain, to return you to yourself; and yet that memory is who you are, and so to remove it and the structures of which it is part is to undermine the self one sets out to save. Underlying all of this is the inescapability of memory. All experience relies on memory, be it short-term working memory – why did I come in here? What information am I manipulating in this particular task?  – or longer term encoding: speech, movement, life events, those we love. Hence Ulysses’ strange formulation ‘I am a part of all that I have met’. This line is testament not only to Ulysses’ effect on the places and people he has met, but, crucially, also to the fact that his memories, his experiences of those places are themselves filtered. Self and memory are indistinguishable. At one point Smythe quotes Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude ‘Memory is the space in which a thing happens for the second time.’ Elsewhere in the same work Auster echoes Tennyson’s thought, ‘Memory as a room, as a body, as a skull, as a skull that encloses the room in which a body sits.’

Thus the lack of speech marks in The Machine – noted by some on Twitter with immediate if transitory alarm – makes perfect sense in the context of a novel about the loss of memory. Memory differentiates one moment from the next and allows us to create and recreate our personal narratives. The lack of formal differentiation between voices is one aspect of the loss of the structure that memory provides. Furthermore, whilst being careful not to say too much, this lack of formal differentiation between each voice is thrown into sharp relief by The Machine’s ending.  Auster again, ‘It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own.’

Beneath its concern with memory The Machine is fundamentally a novel about trust: trust in one’s own intentions, in one’s memories, in one’s present experience, in those around us, in technology, in society, in the climate itself. Erosion both geological and psychological looms large. Smythe’s Britain is a fearful one. The population cannot trust the sea not to rise up and sweep them all away as it has in the novel’s recent past. Beth is afraid of those on her estate, especially the groups of youths – and one boy in particular – who shout and scream abuse on the streets and beaches of the island. The potential for tragedy is clear. It’s grim, violent, and full of tension. A world in which the government felt the need to make diazepam (Valium) available over the counter.

There’s something wrong with me, to have done what I have done.

In style The Machine is much closer to Smythe’s most recent novel The Explorer than to his second, The Testimony. There are noticeable continuities of theme and phrasing. He certainly isn’t becoming any more cheerful. The prose is direct and unadorned, relentless and personal, especially in the passages where Beth has to take care of Vic’s soiled and uncooperative body or where abuse and intimidation surround her. In my review of The Explorer I wrote that

what I like most about Smythe’s writing is its intimacy and deceptive ease. Complex narrative and emotional ideas are conveyed in a manner apparently free of all artifice as layers of repression are peeled back. This is harder than it looks. Smythe achieves a seemingly unmediated flow of thought and sensation as tender and raw as anything I have read this year. Neither diffident nor ostentatious, the writing is controlled to within an inch of its life…

This is all still the case, but I think that Smythe’s writing in The Machine is more controlled, refusing to rush through the heat, the pain of Vic’s treatments, Beth’s gradually dissolving life, the violence, fear, and the seemingly inevitable and very moving conclusion. This world is in many ways more plausible than the ship-bound space of The Explorer and yet the island setting restricts the characters and the reader in a recognisable way. (See Christopher Priest’s recent review for some thoughts about plausibility in The Explorer). Beth’s trips to London feel similar to Cormac’s space walks: an escape into vastness from which she has to return. If The Testimony explored human responses and interactions by placing a large number of characters in a disorientating and uncanny situation, Smythe’s later novels explore the human in a more concentrated way by restricting their characters either physically (in a spaceship) or psychologically: Beth’s love for her husband, her desperation for him to return, and her belief that this is possible.

The oppressive tropical heat creates a pressure-cooker atmosphere which immediately evokes the kind of sweaty tension of David Vann, Graham Greene, and Cormac McCarthy; not to mention the coldly uncomfortable writing of the young Ian McEwan, with a nod toward Ballard’s The Drowned World in both subject matter and psychology. Smythe has not reached those heights yet, but that is the direction in which his voice is heading. The heat also has the effect of simultaneously evoking both a hazy past and a threatened future, hot oppressive summers and a warmed dystopia. The collapse of that simple timeline parallels and intensifies the collapse of identity that the Machine’s manipulations can cause. As the fans whirr in the background, this heat also suggests an overclocked world, a world which has been made to do and be too much. A world in which coldness means death.

That’s what happens. That flash-rush of coldness envelops.

Smythe is improving with each book he writes, the voice becoming simultaneously more distilled and yet more complex. His preoccupation with time and memory and the interest in relationships that continue after loss continues. The weight of his prose is increasing. I felt The Machine had depths that were missing from The Explorer, more psychological plausibility throughout; because the subject of this novel is not the Machine. It is Beth and the way in which her love for her husband betrays them both, but not irredeemably. Not quite.

I love you, she hears him say, but then it’s gone, swallowed by the noise of the Machine and the noise of his thrashing as a new session is firmly underway, and she doesn’t know if that was the voice of him now, or from the recordings made long ago when she destroyed him.

The Machine is published today (11th April 2013) by Blue Door.

My thanks to Blue Door for this review copy.

 

 

Vivant Denon – No Tomorrow

A few months ago I was invited to be guest on The Mookse and the Gripes podcast which discusses selected titles from the catalogue of NYRB Classics and, indeed, to choose the book we might discuss. I chose Vivant Denon’s very short novella No Tomorrow. Yesterday we recorded podcast which has now been posted. I do apologise for the extended waffling at certain points, but Trevor and Brian were most understanding. I really enjoyed taking part, so many thanks to The Mookse and the Gripes for inviting me to participate.

There are a number of ways to listen:

• The Mookse and the Gripes’ Website
• Libsyn
• iTunes

If you enjoy this podcast then please consider leaving a rating and review on the Mookse and Gripes iTunes page.

The Crane Wife – Patrick Ness

What actually woke him was the unearthly sound itself – a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt – but he, being who he was, assumed it was his bladder.

This is an opening sentence of which I am most fond. It moves from a shifting poetic register that invokes the infinite to the comic, bodily, and human. If I were to produce a one sentence review of The Crane Wife then this would probably do the job. That I’m going to say a bit more means either that I am being rather self-indulgent or that one sentence rarely does justice to the shifting thing that is a novel. Possibly, a bit of both.

Lives are assemblages of crude elements which signify beyond their constituents; as are stories and just about anything else which matters. In Patrick Ness’ new novel the cripplingly kind George – the subject of the above quotation – rescues an injured crane in the dead cold of a winter night (after having answered the call of his bladder, of course). The next day he meets the mysterious and calming Kumiko when she enters his printing shop. Together they produce art that dazzles: George’s crude cutouts from second-hand books and Kumiko’s remarkable compositions of feathers. They shouldn’t work, but they do. You can probably see where this is heading. You are probably both right and wrong.

A misanthropic, misunderstood, miserable daughter with a Gallic ex-husband and a son she adores; her unpleasant friends, one of whom ends every sentence with that damned upward inflection I recognise from every second undergraduate I meet; and a supporting cast of George’s ex-wife, her new husband, a Turkish shop assistant, and several art dealers: all contrive to mix together anger and loneliness and a simultaneous love and despair for George’s kindness. Each is sketched convincingly – for the most part – without pretension or artifice. Ness has the knack of making one care about his characters by making them very recognisably human, each sharing a fault we suspect ourselves of possessing. (Except maybe the kindness – I really don’t think I’m guilty of that one).

 She is born a breath of cloud

The novel is interspersed with a legend Kumiko tells in 32 tiles of feather and paper. I really liked this legend, told in a more mythic register. A story of passion, destruction, hatred, love, forgiveness, the creation and destruction of the world. It invades dreams, it punctures the novel and resists reduction. Implicit in The Crane Wife is an insistence that differences are constructive and stories polysemous. Ness’ stories exist simultaneously vibrating slightly alongside one another, not jostling for position so much as offering as many meanings as one can handle, and steadfastly refusing to be reduced to any one narrative or signification. At each moment of life a different story might be the one we need, as long as the others are not rejected outright.

It is quite possible that the relentless good-heartedness of The Crane Wife might be wearing to some. When each character has their epiphany, they are really rather similar. Beneath it all they might actually be good people after all. The sentiment is hard to question, but I should have liked some more difference with which to construct my reading of the novel. Although there is a rather enjoyable Twitter joke at one point, so, much like last week’s Dr Who, I can’t complain too much.

Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding the truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths – overlapping, stewed together – as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story’s life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.

 The Crane Wife is published  on 4^th April 2013 by Canongate.

My thanks to Canongate for this review copy.

Iain Banks & BanksRead

I am officially very poorly.

Following the very sad news of Iain’s cancer (you can read the full statement here) I thought it would be a nice idea to get together to read and discuss the many novels and stories he has produced. As it turns out Annabel Gaskell already had her own Banks Fest planned and so we decided to merge the two. Annabel plans to read, review, and discuss Iain’s mainstream work on her blog and I’m aiming to move between the both the more literary and science fiction streams: Iain and Iain. M. I’ll be starting with The Wasp Factory, Iain’s first novel and for many still his best.

I’ll set up a permanent page here and think Annabel will be doing the same, but we also have a BanksRead discussion forum where you can discuss any and all aspects of Iain Banks’ work, be it his influence on your reading and writing, your favourite novels, how the two streams of his work relate.

Please try and share the forum as widely as possible. The more people who get involved the better it will be.

BanksRead Discussion Forum