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November
2004
The
Tortilla Curtain
by T Coraghessan Boyle
Sarah
had chosen this book which, beginning with a car accident in California,
brings into literal collision two diametrically opposed protagonists:
prosperous white American Delaney and illegal immigrant Candido,
whose destinies thereafter are intertwined.
She had read and loved it some years ago, as had Mark. This time
round she hadn't changed her mind (Mark was unlikely to, as he never
reads a book twice), and most of the rest of us concurred, Jeanne
and I indeed saying that we had been overwhelmed by the book, by
its muscular vivid prose propelling a pell-mell narrative and its
brilliant satire woven into a tragedy which had moved us in a way
that books rarely do nowadays.
Interestingly,
Don and Neil didn't agree with us. Neil had found the gradual descent
of Candido and his young wife America too unremittingly grim - and
that was before he got more than half-way through, at which point
he gave up. Don felt, similarly, that Candido's misfortunes were
too drearily repetitive and found himself skipping pages with the
feeling that he'd read the incidents already, and that the book
is thus structurally flawed.
I could hardly believe that he could skip pages of such emotive
and precise prose, which I would read simply for its own sake, and
I protested that what he saw as repetition I saw as development.
What the book deals with, brilliantly, in my opinion, is the notion
of consequence (most specifically, the consequences of liberal
blindness), and part of the book's brilliance is precisely that
the structure embodies this notion. Many if not most of the episodes
are related retrospectively (via the characters' restrospective
thoughts), even the opening car-crash scene being presented in this
way. This is a very difficult thing to do without loss of vividness
and narrative tension, but the dynamic prose and the plotting -
which makes us aware of the actions of other characters bearing
down on the thinker - make the scenes utterly vivid and explosive
with narrative tension and a doomed sense of consequence.
Don didn't buy this and insisted that Candido's story was artificially
doom-laden.
Although we thought that it was in fact a fairly realistic portrayal
of the plight of many immigrants, Jeanne and I objected that it
was a novel, for goodness' sake, and the novelist was making narrative
choices to make a point.
Don said, Exactly, that was his own precise point: the narrative
was manipulative
to the point of grand-guignol sensationalism.
In
particular he objected to the ending, in which the final, possibly
fatal confrontation between the protagonists is thwarted by a much
huger catastrophe, and thus the issues ultimately ducked. Doug thoroughly
agreed on this, and even I was briefly persuaded, but then Anne
pointed out that the catastrophe is the inevitable and final consequence
of the actions of both parties.
John and Doug and others of us did concede that there was a touch
of manipulativeness about the plot - John said that there seemed
an over-reliance on coincidence and his problem with the ending
was not so much that the catastrophe occurred but that it occurred
just then - but as Doug said, we found the book otherwise
so great that we could live with that.
Don said that he found the characters caricatured, in particular
the white Americans and especially Kyrie, Delaney's wife, who as
a dealer in real estate is the most materialistic - as a result
of which, he said (to our disbelief), he was not in any way moved
by the novel.
I tried without making much impression to say that this was an acceptable
feature of the satire (applied in particular to the white Americans),
and Sarah and I both tried without impact to give examples which,
far from being dreary, had made us laugh out loud: a coyote climbing
the high garden fence built specifically to keep it out, as if it
were a ladder erected specially to enable it, and snaffling Kyrie's
two dogs effetely named after the Sitwells; the line in a passage
explaining that Kyrie likes sex when she's upset: 'she'd been especially
passionate around the time her mother was hospitalized for her gallbladder
operation'; above all the hypocritical and deluded nature pieces
Delaney writes and publishes, full of self-inflation and inflated
prose, which Don considered only a minor part of the novel but which
I found central to the portrayal of Delaney's flawed liberalism.
Don said that he felt that other writers - Dos Passos, Steinbeck
- had dealt with the plight of immigrants more succesfully and economically,
but he agreed with Trevor when he pointed out that this book is
the first to link the theme with environmental issues, and that
this was one level on which the book was successful.
The above discussion had taken very little time, but the focus now
shifted away from the book itself, and for the rest of the evening
Don and
Trevor led a discussion about the issues instead. I found this frustrating,
but afterwards reflected that the book had thus had an impact after
all on even those who had professed to be little touched by it.
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December
2004
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer
We
had high expectations of this novel by Nobel-prizewinner Nadine
Gordimer. Similar in theme to our last, generally admired book,
The Tortilla Curtain by T Coraghessan Boyle, it concerns
the relationship between a young white woman and a male Arab illegal
immigrant to South Africa.
Unfortunately no one present at the meeting enjoyed it, and only
Don had any word of defence for it. Sarah had given up after 70
pages, which is pretty unusual for her, Doug said he wished he’d
done the same, I said I would have done so too if I hadn’t had to
introduce it, and Trevor, who has never before been known to dislike
a book, said he’d come to the conclusion that it was a load of old
rubbish.
I said that in fact I’d been quite taken with the beginning in which
Gordimer as narrator looks on detachedly at the scene which brings
the two characters together, and states openly that she as the author
is going to imagine where it will lead.
This seemed postmodern and interesting, but the narrative henceforth
remained detached to an uninteresting degree, and it seemed to me
that the novel failed in precisely the matter of fully imagining
the characters and situation.
There was general agreement that a fundamental problem was the prose
style: strangely uncertain and ungrounded, with modern slang and
elisions mixed with coyly formal diction and clunking verbosity,
often all within the same sentence, as well as seemingly irrational
switches of tense, sometimes mid-sentence. Above all, sentences
had lengthy subordinate clauses which you needed to skip in order
to get the gist of the whole but in which the more vivid details
were often embedded and thus lost.
All of us consequently found that sentences often required more
than one reading to be understood, and sometimes we’d give up on
a sentence before understanding it. Sometimes on these occasions
I had the suspicion of malapropisms and incorrect and misleading
use of dashes and semi-colons, but couldn’t be bothered to examine
the prose to check if this were really so.
Although most people said that eventually they got used to the sentence
constructions, everyone felt that the prose failed to provide a
grip on the characters and situation.
I said that I found the language particularly coy, indeed sentimental
in the last part of the novel and thus its subject particularly
unconvincing: the acceptance of white South-African Julie as Abdu’s
wife in his African home village. Anne, who has personal knowledge
of such situations, said that she had indeed found the depiction
very unrealistic.
Partway through the novel narrator Gordimer admits that there has
been yet no physical description of Julie, and makes the point that
there is never any definitive description of anyone: each person
is always perceived in any number of ways by others. This is a valid
enough and indeed interesting political point, but it cuts across
the essential concern of a novel: to imagine, if not to visualise.
Similarly, there are moments when Gordimer only speculates on a
character's thoughts and motives, at least once even making alternative
suggestions, which seemed merely frustrating and an abdication of
the novelist’s role. 'You're not there; I'm not there: to see' Gordimer
tells the reader of the couple's situation at one point, but seeing
- in terms of insight - is precisely what a reader has the right
to expect of a novel.
One indication of the novel’s failure of imagination was the apparently
lazy repetition of the original wording each time the moment of
the characters’ meeting was revisited, Abdu continually described
as ‘a grease-monkey’ emerging ‘from under the belly of a car’. Thus
the moment was never imagined anew, and however ironical the description
had started out, its apparently unthinking repetition began to seem
patronising and even racist, and to undermine Gordimer’s evident
political aims.
The net result of all of this was that, as Sarah said, the novel
seemed cold, and none of us could care about the characters or what
happened.
Only Don stood up for the book in any way. He said that before getting
fed up with it he had really liked the beginning (although Jeanne
- not present - had hated it), and he argued the case for some of
the strangely dissonant diction being satirical. The rest of us
acknowledged that this may well have been the intention, but didn’t
think it remotely worked.
There was then some attempt to discuss the characters’ motives and
the book’s theme – whether Abdu was a manipulator or had really
fallen in love with Julie; John suggesting that the book was more
about the difference between what women want and what men want than
about cultural differences - but Doug and I and others felt that
it was a waste of time discussing things which couldn’t be substantiated
since they just weren’t there in the prose. Don said that you could
substantiate some things: Julie’s feelings for Abdu, for instance,
could be deduced by the way she strokes him. I disagreed, saying
that since the prose fails to give any real sense of the emotional
tenor of the relationship, the precise implications of the gesture
can't be deduced.
We
felt we had been unanimous in damning the book, but next day Jeanne
rang me to say that after balking at the beginning – speech without
speech marks being her pet hate – and also needing to adjust to
the sentence constructions, she had very much enjoyed the book,
had found the characters well rounded and their psychological dilemmas
acutely delineated, and in spite of Anne’s view as reported to her
by Don, had found the dramatic tension of the situation in the Arab
village particularly well done.
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January
2005
Double Vision by Pat Barker
Jeanne
had suggested this book by an author whom, interestingly, she had
known before she became famous, and which she had already enjoyed.
She began her introduction by saying that although she had been
unable to work out why the book had been given its title - Double
Vision - she admired its concern with the way that political
violence overshadows personal lives, and found engrossing its cast
of damaged characters: sculptor Kate grieving the death in Afghanistan
of her war-photographer husband Ben and also herself suffering a
major accident at the start of the novel, war-traumatised reporter
Stephen Starkey who has come to her North-east village to work on
a book using Ben’s photographs, Stephen’s brother and sister-in-law
and their crumbling marriage and autistic son, vicar’s daughter
Justine whose mother abandoned her at an early age – many of them
touched by the sinister figure of Peter, a local handyman with a
mysterious past.
Jeanne found the air of menace in the book brilliantly managed and
thought the book exceptionally well written, quoting in illustration
from the passage preceding Kate’s accident at the beginning, with
its presaging hints of physicality: ‘pale trunks of beech trees,
muscled like athletes stripped off for a race.’ She thought that
the prose, while atmospheric, also had a beautiful ease which made
the whole book very easy to read.
She said that she’d had a moment of worrying that the book was going
to turn out as some kind of aga-saga romance, but had been relieved
that Barker had done something much more interesting. She felt that
ultimately the book was about redemption, each character being redeemed
in their own particular way.
Sarah,
absent, had rung to say that she too had enjoyed the book, and Trevor
and Doug now said that so had they, and that they had found it a
very easy read, but Trevor said that he thought it lightweight –
Mark, arriving later, would say the same - and although Doug too
had been engrossed by the characters, he’d been left confused as
to what or who it was all meant to be about.
I agreed: beforehand I had commented to Madeleine (returned to the
group after a long absence) that Double Vision was an apt
title as the book seemed to have no focus. While the blurb on the
paperback edition implies that the novel is purely about Stephen,
the novel begins very much with Kate, shifts to focus on Stephen
and then on again to focus on Justine.
Jeanne countered this objection by referring to a final passage
in the novel in which Stephen is spinning stones on water, creating
‘concentric rings that would meet and overlap … always spreading
out’, and said that this exactly describes the structure and theme
of the book.
Madeleine said while she too had found that the book carries you
along, her problem with it was that, unlike Jeanne, she found the
prose marred by a certain imprecision, and quoted in illustration
from a passage in which the disturbed Kate wakes according to habit
too early, in the dark: ‘If she went on like this night and day
would be reversed.’
Don said there was nothing wrong with this sentence, but I said
that I had found the novel peppered with such de-focussing and sometimes
clichéd overstatements (‘apple crumble indistinguishable from cement’).
While I conceded that there were passages of powerful atmospheric
description I had in fact found much of the prose unsuitably coy.
There is, for instance, an episode in which Kate notes the violence
of the Green-Man gargoyles on the church. They are clearly meant
in the book to be a symbol of the ominous violence overshadowing
the characters, but the author dissipates all sense of the sinister
with the somewhat effete language of her statement: ‘[Kate] had
been paying [the gargoyles] regular visits since.’ As a consequence
of this coyness, unlike Jeanne, Don and Doug, I had found the characters
unconvincing and the themes uninvolving.
I had found there to be lazinesses and inaccuracies which betrayed
the novel as incompletely imagined and the author as not in complete
control of her material. I pointed for instance to the fact that,
while Barker makes elaborate, indeed insistent play on the ideas
of dark and light and dawn and dusk – presumably linked to the concept
of double vision – there are glaring continuity errors in the first,
prolonged description of dusk: dusk fails to fall at a time of day
in January when in fact it would have done so; then, after we have
been told that the day is finally ‘fading fast’, have subsequently
witnessed a family meal and been treated to an image of ‘a shoal
of stars’, we are told that Stephen can see a detailed view of the
garden through the window with a red sky in the distance, before
the window slowly fades to dark.
Everyone said that they had noticed this too, including Don, but
Don said this sort of thing didn’t matter. I said that it mattered
to me, since it made me question the writer’s authority over her
material, especially when the material involved the novel’s central
metaphor, but Don insisted hotly that it didn’t matter to him.
I also quoted (to John’s groaning protest) a list of instances of
formulaic or clichéd sentences which for me had made encounters
between the characters less than vivid or convincing: ‘She greeted
Fred and his son with pleasure’; ‘He was beginning to like her a
lot.’ ‘The adults stood around chatting.’
In particular, I said, I found the dialogue poor – unheightened
yet unrealistic with the characters undifferentiated, and often
used to provide information to the reader in an unrealistic and
stilted manner: ‘The Starkeys. You know them. The little boy.’ ‘Oh
yes. Adam, isn’t it?’
However, I destroyed my own argument by quoting the above in the
affected voice which it had suggested to me, and Don and Jeanne
cried that anyone could put on a voice to misrepresent anything,
and Don said pretty angrily that I was imposing my own prejudices
on the book. Madeleine said, but isn’t that what anyone does on
reading a book? Don began to respond to this, but I objected hotly
that he was interrupting me and he agreed even more angrily that
indeed he was, rightly, because I was imposing myself on
the novel.
John then asked Anne, who had so far said nothing, her opinion of
the novel, and she said that she too had found it sloppy, and Trevor
added that he was unsatisfied by the sense of things unresolved,
in particular the character of Peter and the way we never find out
the real truth about him. There was then some general discussion
about this character, and Anne pointed out that he operates as a
catalyst for the other characters and is the novel’s bogeyman.
Don then brought the discussion back to the matter of the prose
and after quoting, as an illustration of Barker’s narrative economy,
the passage describing Kate’s accident - ‘The road dipped and rose,
and then, no more than 400 yards from her home, where a stream overflowing
in the recent heavy rain had run across the road forming a slick
of black ice, the car left the road’ - said that in order to judge
a book we ought to be doing just that, looking at the text.
John took great exception to what he saw as Don’s implication that
our method of studying a book was inferior, and there was a heated
altercation as Don defended himself from this accusation. I wanted
to say that we had been looking at the text anyway, but things
were already too heated to interject.
Then
things calmed down and attention returned to the character of Peter.
What some saw as a weakness in the representation of this character,
Don and Jeanne saw as a strength: Don said that Barker handles brilliantly
the sinister tension surrounding Peter, and that our inability to
see him or indeed any of the characters in any clear moral light
was a function of the personal moral ambiguity inevitable in a world
of political violence, potently conveyed in the moral issue of Ben’s
war photography and encapsulated in the title Double Vision.
However Madeleine then said that rather than asking the question,
What can we know about the characters? we should perhaps be asking
the question, How much does the author know about the characters?
and that Barker didn’t give us quite enough about the characters
to allow us to feel that she has a grip on them herself.
None of us beside Don and Jean felt that the Sarajevo and Hague
trial sequences were convincing, but found them grafted on, and
Madeleine said to general agreement that she thus didn’t find that
the novel successfully conveyed any convincing or resonant links
between the rural middle-class world of the characters and the background
world violence.
Mark, who had very much enjoyed other novels by Pat Barker, said
it read to him like an airport novel, and that it gave the impression
of having been written in a rush. Trevor said that to him it read
as though Barker had been unable to give it her full attention,
as if, for instance, she’d been suffering a family crisis while
writing it, and I said it read to me like a first draft.
Jeanne
concluded by saying that she found it strangely heartening, but
also as a writer quite frightening, that people could have such
extremely differing reactions to the same book.
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February
2005
How Many Miles to Babylon? by Jennifer Johnston
This
time our group came up against an effect of the depressing phenomenon
in British publishing and book marketing about which Mark is always
railing: the concentration on the New.
Jennifer Johnston is an Irish and Booker-prize-winning author who
has been publishing short and in my opinion stunning novels since
the early seventies. John, a great admirer also, chose for this
meeting her 1974 novel How Many Miles to Babylon? which is
narrated by Alex, the son of landed Irish gentry, and concerns his
forbidden friendship with local lad Jerry, from boyhood through
to the first-world-war trenches in France.
Scandalously, although this book is in print, the group had great
difficulty obtaining copies. Madeleine said that she had rung every
bookshop in central and south Manchester and not one had had it
in stock. All but one said that (perhaps because of Penguin’s recent
warehousing problems) it would take two to three weeks to obtain.
Only the tiny but famously efficient independent Chorlton Bookshop
said that they could get it quickly, and did so. Mark and Sarah
both failed altogether to get hold of copies, as a consequence of
which Sarah, busy anyway with her job and baby, didn’t attend the
meeting, and Mark had to sit through it without having read the
book.
Of the rest of us present, all but Anne – John, Madeleine, Doug
and me – admired this book immensely and were greatly moved by it.
We thought it exceptionally well written and vivid. Madeleine commented
that one function of the vividness was the author’s use of colour
– the rich golds of the drawing room in Alex’s family home, the
silvers of the Irish landscape, the pink of the dawn sky the morning
that Alex is due to leave for the war, the encroaching greyness
and brownness as the trench scenes take over – all achingly mirroring
the state of mind of narrator Alex, caught between longing and the
emotional repression resulting from his lonely and emotionally cold
upbringing.
All of us found Alex’s relationship with his cold mother heart-wrenching,
and we noted the subtle ways in which Johnston achieves this effect,
such as this understated but vivid depiction of the mother’s passive
manipulation: She walked slowly, leaning on me slightly, to keep
my pace the same as hers.
Introducing the novel, John asked us what we thought it was
about. This novel is very non-explicit and works very much on an
emotive rather than intellectual level, prompting an emotional rather
than analytical response from the reader. Therefore few of us had
yet analysed the novel in this way - I for one felt unusually reluctant
to do so - and, faced with John's question, we weren't quite sure
of the answer. John now suggested that the novel was about the class
system and its deleterious effects, both in Ireland and in the British
army. Madeleine suggested cruelty as its theme – the cruelty of
Alex’s mother and her social class, the cruelty of war.
Anne, who had said at the start that she had mixed feelings about
the book, now gave her reason: unlike the rest of us she had found
the section set in the trenches unconvincing. In particular, the
whole thing had fallen apart for her at the point when Alex’s commanding
officer tells him to ‘mix’, which she felt was unrealistic and anachronistic,
too modern in concept and diction. She said now that she felt the
war episode wasn’t even necessary, that the themes of cruelty and
schism as played out in the relationship between Alex and Jerry
might have been better served if, instead of enlisting in the British
Army, they had remained in Ireland and Jerry in the Republican volunteer
force.
This seemed plausible, and we all nodded, but I felt somehow that
we hadn’t yet got to grips with the novel’s true meaning and intent.
Madeleine then asked us what we thought of a woman writing a book
concerned with two men, in which the only woman was a cold one,
and wondered, having not read any other books by Johnston, if Johnston
perhaps had some difficulty writing from a woman’s point of view?
This reminded me of a connected point made by Zadie Smith (author
of White Teeth) on a recent Radio Book Club programme: she
said that she found it much easier to write from a man’s point of
view, as women so often suffer from the burden of false consciousness
which is very tricky to replicate in writing – a statement I found
riveting, since this last, an anatomisation of female false consciousness,
is one of the things I’m attempting in the novel I’m currently writing.
Mark asked in amazement and some derision how on earth it could
be easier for a woman to write from a man’s point of view, and questioned
whether a woman could write convincingly from a man’s point of view
at all.
I said, Well, how do the men here who’ve read this book think Jennifer
Johnston has done? and both John and Doug, the most unreservedly
admiring of the book, said that they had been utterly convinced.
It was only after I got home that it occurred to me (perhaps because
it’s a theme in my own current novel) that what this book is about
is the eternal Irish theme of belonging or not-belonging, and that
in this case the war episodes are absolutely necessary. Jerry and
his people can’t truly belong in their own country, seized long
ago by the settlers, Alex’s family among them; there's no belonging
for Alex in his emotionally cold family; social and religious divisions
in Ireland mean that Alex and Jerry can’t belong together as friends.
Enlisting seems a way of belonging at last, to each other, to a
joint cause. But their escape to the fabled Babylon of the title,
so easily by candlelight, is doomed. It only brings them back again
to the same divisions pursued more viciously and with tragic consequences
in a mud-slicked field of division and death.
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March
2005
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
This
unusual, prize-winning and much-praised novel focuses on the normal
life over one summer’s day of a residential street in a northern
town, making clear from the start, however, that by the end of the
day a momentous event will have shattered it, affecting for ever
at least some of the residents.
Mark
had chosen the novel because, he said, he had found it utterly engrossing
- he had been unable to put it down - and had been immensely impressed
by it. He admitted that he had found the numerous characters living
in the street confusing and had had constantly to look back to check
which character lived at which address, but said that he’d actually
enjoyed being thus made to keep on his toes.
He was especially taken by the book’s unusual structure: omniscient
present-tense chapters providing both an overview of the life of
the street and delving intimately into the lives of some of the
inhabitants, alternated with the first-person retrospective narration
of one of them, a nameless young woman who is still emotionally
affected by the catastrophe and living through its repercussions.
This structure does indeed convey stunningly the way that the past
lives in the present, as well as the book’s concern with the way
that people fail to connect yet profoundly touch each other’s lives.
Mark thought the book brilliantly written, in moving and exceptionally
insightful prose, and he had found the revelation of the catastrophe
stunning.
Sarah agreed with Mark wholeheartedly. She had particularly loved
the opening section, a sustained riff on the life of the city at
night (the night which precedes the day in question). She had loved
its evocation of the sounds of the night city, and in particular
of the miracle of silence ... a hesitation as one day is left
behind and a new one begins.
Doug
too had loved this opening, but said to Mark’s great surprise that
after this he got bogged down with all the characters and began
to find the prose overblown and became really irritated with the
book, and in the end hated it.
John went further: he said he had hated in particular the beginning
so admired by Mark and Sarah, and hadn’t been able to bring himself
to read much of the rest of the novel. He found it affected and
highly derivative of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (a play
which also takes an omniscient view of a small society of disparate
individuals), aping Thomas’s opening section down the actual wording:
(Thomas: Listen. It is night moving in the streets … Listen.
It is night in the chill… McGregor: So listen./ Listen, and
there is more to hear.
I find it hard to believe that McGregor isn’t deliberately
referencing Thomas, consciously providing a counterpoint to the
silence of Thomas’s night-time rural town with the noise of his
contemporary night-time city. However, as a teacher of Creative
Writing I have read far too many Under Milk Wood pastiches
not to have, like John, found this opening passage tedious, and
did find it to have a ‘Creative Writing’ quality of description
for description’s sake.
Sarah made clear that she for one was quite happy with description
for description’s sake, but everyone did agree that the section
was somewhat distinct from the rest of the novel in style and content
and focus, and did read rather like a piece written separately from
out of which the novel was later developed. People also expressed
mild irritation with the idiosyncratic layout of the first-person
sections - overhanging rather than indented paragraphs - seeming
to find it somewhat affected. This was one point on which John later
defended the novel, seeing the technique, as I do, as a useful typographical
signal for change of viewpoint.
My
experience of the book was quite opposite to Doug’s. Having had
problems with the beginning, I later became on the whole almost
as moved and involved as Sarah and Mark. However, I did agree with
Doug about the ending. We both felt that the coming disaster had
been built up to such an extent that we were expecting something
more monumental than actually occurs, so that when it happened it
seemed almost lame and disappointing.
Anne said, But isn’t that the point (pace the book’s title): that
events which may not be deemed remarkable in the wider political
scheme of things are in fact remarkable on the human scale in their
power to affect people’s lives.
Doug said, but he didn’t believe that this event would have affected
the young woman narrator to the extent it is meant to, particularly
when she’s at present involved in her own crisis of having become
accidentally pregnant, and I felt inclined to agree.
Mark and Sarah strongly protested: Mark said he felt that anyone
would have been affected as the young woman is. I realised then
that yes, in theory, the event could symbolise for the young woman
her own vulnerability and the emotional damage caused by her childhood,
as well as the vulnerability of her unborn child, and that the event
would therefore be of emotional import to her, but the novel didn’t
make me feel this at any gut level.
Mark said, but didn’t we think the actual disaster was brilliantly
conveyed, especially the extended description of the mechanism by
which it occurs? John said that he found this last psychopathic
and self-indulgent and I said it was a narrative mistake, as by
this time the reader, knowing the disaster is unfolding, should
be far too keen to know the outcome in human terms to be reading
slowly enough to take in the detailed technical description.
I
was in fact more moved by some of the more peripheral emotional
situations, in particular the relationship and history of the old
couple living in the street, and everyone, even Doug, agreed that
this was very touchingly done.
Sarah said she was most moved by the portrayal of the young woman’s
reaction to seeing the first scan of her unborn baby: having not
long ago had a baby herself, she had found it very accurate, and
said that she was amazed that it could have been written by a man.
I agreed, and said that I had found it so insightful that I wouldn’t
be at all surprised to find out that Jon McGregor was really a woman.
Anne commented that this was interesting in the light of our discussion
last time, and Mark now furthered that discussion by asking me if
I thought it was easier for a woman to write from a man’s point
of view than vice versa. I said I thought (like Zadie Smith; see
our last discussion) that maybe it was, since there are indeed some
remarkable areas of female experience which have been very much
untold or unsaid, and that I myself might have found it difficult
to write about childbirth (as I have) without experiencing it -
which is what makes Jon McGregor’s achievement of insight (if he
really is a man) all the more remarkable.
Though then Doug put in that he had found the whole scan scene unbelievable,
because he just didn’t find it convincing that the character Michael
would have accompanied the young woman there.
Michael
is a twin, and there are two other sets of twins in the novel. This
had struck me as affected and, on the plot level somewhat laboured
and unconvincing. I now wondered about its thematic significance,
and even as I did so it came to me that of course twins embody the
novel’s theme of connectedness/unconnectedness, and it seems a measure
of my fundamental lack of engagement with the novel that it had
taken me so long to realise something so obvious.
Anne said she had a fundamental problem in that, in spite of the
descriptions of the houses in the street being central and endlessly
unfolding, she had had difficulty picturing them. Mark suggested
that there is a burden of imagination on the reader to realise an
author’s descriptions, but Anne pointed out that the descriptions
are actually contradictory: back yards and the fact that people
sit out on steps seemingly very close to the road imply a far humbler
street than the one drawn and mused about by the architecture student,
with trees and houses which he judges must once have been inhabited
by gentry.
Nevertheless,
Mark and Sarah found the book very clever, though John said that
that was the trouble, it was clever-clever. Doug agreed with John,
though he said that one thing he did find impressively striking
was the way that most of the characters were not given names but
distinguished according to their physical characteristics, most
notably their hair. I said that that was precisely one of the things
which had given the book a ‘Creative Writing’ feel for me. Distinguishing
characters according to their physical characteristics rather than
their names is a famous Creative Writing exercise, and I didn’t
think that the novel took the technique far enough away from this
dimension. While the objectification inherent in the technique might
seem to serve the novel’s purpose of showing how unknowable the
characters are to each other, it is psychologically incompatible
with the omniscient narrator’s intimate depiction of the characters’
inner lives, and is thus in danger of seeming an affectation.
Mark said, Well, it may seem ‘Creative Writing’ and therefore familiar
to you, but it’s not often you see this kind of writing published,
and to us it’s refreshing and exciting - which was indeed a most
interesting point, yet another comment on the limitations of a marketing
philosophy whereby publishers believe that readers must be provided
with what they think they want and therefore already know.
Even Mark, however, said that the very final twist of the book,
after the disaster, was disappointing, and most of us agreed with
Anne’s final conclusion that this was very much a curate’s egg of
a book.
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