An Oddly Specific Fairytale: Silk by Alessandro Baricco

16 May

This odd book, which I read on a whim, has the feel of a fairytale grounded in reality. The texture of magical realism hums just under the surface of this story of a village economy which runs on silkworm eggs brought back from the ends of the earth.

Herve Joncour is a French silkworm salesman in the mid-nineteenth century, who must travel to Japan in the course of his work. There, on the other end of an 8000km journey, he meets an alluring woman, the memory of whom pursues him back to his homeland on the other side of the world.

The stylistic elements – which, by the way, are beautiful – give the story a fairytale feel. This is particularly strong in the repeated (but subtly shifting) descriptions of Joncour’s journey to Japan. The sense of oral storytelling is heightened by the way the book is structured, both in its 65 short sections and the rhythmic nature of the prose.

What I like most about this book is its sense of connection to the remote. Even in this age of twenty-four hours to anywhere, I’ve always found it curious that I can remember people, conversations, the intimacies of rooms and the layout of relatives’ gardens on the other side of the world.

How much more so for Herve Joncour on the end of a three-month journey, thinking of people and places that to others around him may as well be a dream world! Given Silk was written well within the age of air travel, it’s a real feat for Baricco to imagine and so eloquently portray this ancient experience of travel.

Another thing I love about Silk is the history in it. Joncour’s wider context is established early, and deeply affects his personal life, starting with the silkworm plague that necessitates his journey to Japan. Civil strife in Japan separates him from his beloved woman forever. Most poignantly, Baricco tells us, the opening of the Suez Canal cuts the journey time to a mere twenty days.

Silk is almost a novella, and the small but significant shift at the end gives it the energy of a short story, as well as cementing the folk tale feel. I really love this book. Baricco crafts an exquisite story of desire and distance, tied off neatly but ambiguously with what could be an appeal to remember what’s closer to home.  

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Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears

13 May
Horse high jump

Mears uses horse sports as a jumping-off point for an exploration of illness and family. (Image: Public domain)

I did not enjoy reading this book.

I remember seeing an interview where Mears said that she hoped Foal’s Bread would make people cry. It goes further than that. The whole week I spent reading, I felt a sense of sinister melancholy. Toward the end, it bled out of the time I was reading and crept up on me at random, sometimes accompanied by a fragment of remembered prose.

Undoubtedly, some of this comes from the story itself. Set around the time of the Second World War, the novel opens with the meeting of Roley Nancarrow and Noah Childs, who live in the bush and have a passion for horseback high-jumping. Soon after their marriage, Roley develops a degenerative nervous disease which robs him of his skills, his dignity and his will to live, with terrible repercussions for his family.

But plot alone cannot account for the full pathos of the reading experience. Mears is singularly brilliant in capturing the Australian bush. There’s a certain sparseness of imagery, a reluctance to compare the place or experiences to anything else. Yet, as with the country, the prose stands on its own merit as a source of beauty.

The narrative shifts beautifully between third-person perspectives, with most of it focalised through Roley’s wife Noah and his daughter Lainey. Noah, who of the two could be said to be the main character, is wonderfully drawn and epitomises the subtlety and strengths of this book.

The one issue I had with this book is that, following the more delicate, starkly realistic tragedy of Roley’s illness, the details of Noah’s final demise seem a bit contrived. The sudden quasi-Shakespearean touch (I’m not going to give it away; you’ll know it when you see it) seemed a bit incongruous in a book that thrives on understatement.

The novel is not pure bleakness. It’s strengthened and nuanced exponentially by a vein of hope that runs counter to the sadness. The subtle ironies of the coda, far from diminishing the losses of the novel, seem a fitting memorial to the determined, tragic characters. The possibility of recovery – in the legacies of those gone and the lives of those who remain – seems vindicated, if only by the passage of time.

In Foal’s Bread, Mears spectacularly asserts her capacity to convey the environment of the Australian bush. Her incredible skill and great emotional power vividly portray the experiences of people and place, giving a panoramic sense of life in the 1940s, the Australian bush and, most starkly, the tragic Nancarrow family.

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The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

11 May

This review guaranteed 100% Harry Potter-mention free!

The Casual Vacancy masterfully portrays a fictional British village facing the challenges of the modern world. Following the death of a member of Pagford Parish Council, various residents use the vacancy to push their own agendas on the much-disputed issue of The Fields, a public housing estate nominally under the responsibility of the town. What follows is a beautiful examination of socioeconomic and generational divides with a some memorable and well-written characters.

The big drawcard for this novel is style. I’ve always wondered what makes J.K. Rowling’s writing so enjoyable, and now I’ve invented a word for it: it’s the carriage of the text. She seems to have an innate judgement and sense of pacing, on various levels, ending a sentence, paragraph or section of perspective just before the point at which attention starts to wane. This gives the reading experience an almost lulling effortlessness.

As always, Rowling is comfortable and playful in setting the scene (I love “the town petered out in a final wheeze of old cottages”). Unfortunately, this loving description, so abundant in the first pages, is lost as we move to the guts of the story. Which is sad, because a few stylistic flourishes would have prevented it from getting a bit bland at some points later on. Overall, however, The Casual Vacancy scores high on the readability scale and provides an enjoyable experience in this respect.

The most interesting, and problematic, aspect of this novel are its characters. The narration switches between, by my count, fifteen (third-person) points of view. It’s a remarkable achievement of omniscient narration that on the whole, they’re realistic and fairly distinct from a characterisation point of view, and the perspective switches are not jarring.

Standouts included the relationships between the three Walls, particularly the seemingly sociopathic Stuart “Fats” Wall, who is brought shockingly to his senses, and his struggling father and deputy headmaster Colin. The beautifully flawed Parminder Jawanda springs to mind – I love her complexity, the sometimes awkward tension between her roles as councillor and town GP, and the way that, despite her role as chief proponent of compassion toward The Fields, Rowling resists any temptation to make her perfect.

However, many of the characters serve essentially the same narrative function. Merging a few of the characters – or demoting some to non-point-of-view status – would have improved the clarity without sacrificing much.

The second problem is that all the action occurs between this a fixed cast of about twenty characters, including the fifteen whose thoughts we see. There are virtually no secondary characters: in Rowling’s Pagford, you’re either an all-important player, whose point-of-view is seen, or you’re merely mentioned and dragged in once or twice as necessary.

While in isolation the characters are very well-drawn, their unnaturally closed, interdependent circle of associations makes it seem as if Pagford is controlled by an oligarchy of unhappy couples and disaffected teenagers, with everyone else watching from the sidelines. Again, reducing the role of a few point-of-view people while developing a couple of the “tertiary” characters would have given it a much more realistic balance.

A couple of problems occur at the end of the novel. Firstly, the pacing which carries the story so magnificently through the first and second acts suddenly falters as it approaches its conclusion. I’ll admit to a bit of “looking ahead” around page 350. I really think this comes down to the length and character-heaviness of the novel – again, if you reduced the number of perspectives even to the ten most intriguing, readers would be doubly less likely to lose interest as it’d also finish a bit earlier.

Secondly, as the story wraps up, the political aspects introduced so delicately at the beginning are suddenly delineated along much simpler lines. While the novel is stunningly successful in showing the complexity of lives among socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, a number of acts of heavy-handedness give the ending preachy overtones. We gradually stop seeing the perspective of the conservative Howard, and his wife is reduced to a snobby, racist, homophobic, technophobic caricature who at the very conclusion regains some complexity only by becoming homicidal as well!

On a rather random note, The Casual Vacancy ranks high on my personal list of best fictional portrayals of technology. The Council website forms the basis for a number of hackings and revelations but Rowling integrates them into the context of small town gossip without becoming enslaved by grandiose rubbish about the “power of the internet”.

Overall, despite a number of weaknesses, The Casual Vacancy is largely successful. Rowling explores the anatomy of first-world disadvantage and the problem of assigning blame in complex situations. Other issues, including mental illness, teenage rebellion, domestic violence and marital dysfunction, are handled skilfully. While she doesn’t innovate with style, readability is also this book’s secret weapon, carrying readers through a sustained, thoughtful and accessible examination of the complexities of our modern world.

Really random notes (not Harry Potter-free) AND MINOR SPOILERS:

  • Given the furore over the depiction of obesity in the Harry Potter books, I’m surprised that JKR once again chose to use Howard’s extreme fatness as almost a shorthand for his close-mindedness and the way he dominates the town’s politics. That being said, there is more nuance and contrast here, with the plump Tessa Wall portrayed as likeable, and her skinny son Stuart “Fats” (whose name is a comment on his skinniness) being borderline sociopathic at times. Miles, also overweight, is a bit of an antagonist to the overall pro-equality message, but has a redeeming moment at the end.
  • I did quite like this book.
  • I reposted this due to some technical issues which, thankfully, seem to have self-resolved.

The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars

28 Apr
A picture of the moon, almost full

Image: Public domain

The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars. Seems weird, but after a few times saying it, it starts to roll off the tongue. And this sets the trend for most of the play, where mythology-meets-onstage-rom-com works a lot better than you might expect.

After cheating on her boyfriend with fellow museum worker Michael (Matt Zeremes), thirtysomething abruptly-single Marion (Silvia Colloca) deals with her remorse by moving to a remote resort to work as an art teacher. There she meets Mark (also Matt Zeremes), a serious womaniser who’s perplexed by his inability to seduce the new arrival.

After the name and genre, the third thing that seems doomed to fail is the strange combination of self-narration and action that’s presented as a sort of re-enactment. Actually, this works incredibly well, as does the use of the cubes of timber that form the set. One little gripe I had is that at times the description veers a little into what kids these days call TMI… the audience has imaginations and sometimes it’s best to let us choose to use them. Or not.

Van Badham’s playwriting experience is clear, as it calls for various props to be repurposed in a satisfyingly clever manner. My favourite is the tablecloth/toga/bedspread, as well as the tender use of Marion’s jacket to represent her carried in Mark’s arms.

Though I’m not familiar with the mythological basis of some of the imagery, I really like how it’s weaved in. The scenes in the museum, which culminate in Marion (and Michael)’s act of infidelity, are especially thought-provoking explorations of self-control, responsibility, and blame(-shifting) in light of desire.

One place where this play falls down a bit is characterisation. Marion is beautifully written – and acted – from start to finish, with a particularly touching, contrite monologue following her cheating on her boyfriend. At some points it becomes a little melodramatic, or perhaps just overliteralised, complaining, for example, that her sheets aren’t scratchy nor are her pillows hard enough to sustain her penance. This, combined with Marion’s consistent use of the term “adultery”, to me seemed to turn her into a mocking caricature of a religious conservative, which I don’t think is what Badham intended for this otherwise nuanced, starkly remorseful character.

Michael and Mark, both superbly acted by Zeremes, are also questionable. In many ways, I prefer how Michael is written pre-cheating – his confusion over his feelings, and conviction that his wife has done nothing wrong, combine to make him an interesting character. This tension also creates a more engaging background to his abandonment of Marion, as he realises his actions have led to a choice of which woman to hurt.

Unfortunately, Mark seems to me a much less nuanced character. The end of the play suggests, somewhat retrospectively, that his compulsive philandering – “sex without intimacy, passion without love” – indicated a desire for something deeper all along. However, I didn’t feel that this was reflected earlier in the piece, resulting in a rather jerky transition to true love when up until that point he seemed solely concerned with getting Marion in bed.

The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars is a fairly good play, with solid acting and many likeable touches.

The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars has finished for now, but you can find some info about the play here on the City of Sydney website.

I have to add that I absolutely love the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre’s location, even with the current building works. Really nice to step out of the theatre onto that lovely lawn.

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Fanfiction: Not Such a Novel Development

22 Apr
A cropped picture of the title page of the Othello first folio, beginning with the title "The Tragedy of Othello"

The first copy of Othello… or is it? (Source: Public domain; copyright expired)

This was originally a speech I did in 2011.

This past week I’ve been reading a great story recommended to me by a friend. It has an engaging plot and a naive but faintly ironic style, somewhat like Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl’s. But I can’t describe this one as a page turner. I have to scroll down, and click between chapters, because it’s on fanfiction.net.

Fanfiction. Noun. The stuff people write when they can’t think up their own story, and have to steal someone else’s. Okay, I guess it’s a bit of harmless fun – it’s just not, you know, something you’d ever read in English.

Unless, of course, you go back four hundred years. You read a short story, and this story doesn’t just make you think, “Well, knocked that off my reading list. What’s next?” This story inspires you. You wish there was more, and if you can’t read more of it…

You will write more of it. (Copyright hasn’t really been invented yet.) You add a few characters and a lot of scenes, and use your characteristic writing style. You’re Shakespeare, and you’ve just completed Othello – epic tragedy, an incredibly insightful look into human nature and perhaps, the best fanfiction of all time.

What? Is that any more unfair than stating, correctly, that Pride and Prejudice is a novel, and that Twilight happens to share this particular literary form?

I think this prejudice against fan fiction has a lot to do with the fact that it’s almost always read on the Internet. And whether it’s blogs, fanfiction or original fiction, writing that’s posted online is seen as second-rate.

And that is completely ridiculous. Whether something is first seen on the Internet or in print has about as much relevance to its quality as the font that it’s in. There is one reason that so much of what’s posted online is rubbish. And, despite popular belief, it has nothing to do with

a) LOL technology, like, rotting teenagers’, like, brains, like ROFLCOPTER dude!!

b) the inherent inferiority of typing as compared to writing by hand or even

c) the UNSTOPPABLE DECLINE OF LITERATURE!!!!

It’s simple. When you hand over your nineteen dollars fifty for a paperback, you’re not just paying the author – you’re paying editors and publishers for going through the hundreds of rubbishy manuscripts they receive every day and picking out this one well-written, interesting story. On the Internet, that’s your job.

Anyone can post a story on fanfiction.net. Anyone frequently does. How someone can read an entire book and then write a fanfiction on it, without learning how to spell the title is something I will never figure out.

But you’ll also find amazing fanfiction, as good as the original. Or maybe it’s an incredible novel, but it’s not going to sell, so no publishing company will touch it… and posting online is the only way anyone will ever read it. I say this without doubt: some of the writers out there are better than many published authors.

So why don’t they seek publication, that stamp of approval from the “real” literary world? Perhaps one day they will. Or maybe, everything they want out of writing is satisfied in the community online. A community which isn’t, really, that different from the Inklings (CS Lewis’s writing club) or Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group.

It’s a world where writers cut their teeth writing fanfiction as all kids act out their favourite superhero stories. They grow in confidence and learn to create their own, realistic characters and settings. It’s like one big, voluntary, peer-marked English class.

“MeganDaWriter”, from Canada, and Sydneysider “Rose93” discuss characterisation in poetry, while “Nibbles” reviews the first chapter of “Blossom”’s first novel, posted with the disclaimer: “Sorry, this isn’t very good”. But it is.

Literary society needs to get over prejudices and look at the value of this online world. Every new development in literature has been met with suspicion, including that most “novel” of literary forms: the novel. Yes, once the novel was the terrible new thing that was going to destroy literature.

I’m not saying we should stop reading the classics. The question is, where will we find the new classics? In the cutthroat, commercialised publishing industry? Or online, where writing is free of commercial interests and bestseller lists?

Unless “literary” society starts to take notice of what’s happening in writing online, we risk missing an entire generation of writers and stories. Sure, you won’t have great literature served up to you on a platter (or a reading list). The only question here is: how much rubbish are you willing to sift through to find that one diamond?

If you’re curious, the fanfic I reference in the intro here is Inverarity’s Hogwarts Houses Divided, an epic next-generation Harry Potter fic. I know there are loads of fanfic sites out there, but since it was a speech, I kept it simple and only mentioned fanfiction.net.

What’s the best fanfiction/online work you’ve read?

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The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu

19 Apr

As a first-year uni student straight out of high school, I find it interesting that in some countries, you have to go through a couple of years’ National Service between sitting in a classroom and sitting in a lecture theatre. Boianjiu, an astonishingly young Israeli author, went through this process herself only a few years ago, forming the basis of this book.

That being said I’d shy away from defining the novel’s subject as “war” or “female soldiers” or even “National Service”. Somewhat similarly to what I was just describing with A Farewell to Arms, the story takes a different turn quite early on. It’s much more constructive simply to say that it’s about the lives of young Israeli women as they move from high school to the adult career world, via the army.

It’s a stunning first novel: readable, carried by Boianjiu’s enthralling style, yet without a distinct traditional plot in terms of a central complication. Unfortunately, toward the end Boianjiu seems to feel obligated to create some, leading to some highly improbable scenarios. Issues here ranged from simple believability – could someone really torture a man undetected for several days in a crowded apartment block? – to outrageous character actions that lacked credibility. (My longer explanation/analysis of this is in the footnotes.)

Overall, however, the characterisation is beautifully done, and the dialogue is rendered very realistically. Outside of a single instance between Avishag and her father, all the main characters are entirely credible, as Boianjiu convinces us that these are real lives. Their harsher, more disturbing actions also create a sense of realism, though at times the text “crosses the line twice” and becomes unbelievable, particularly in the extent to which others accept outrageous behaviour.

What really makes this novel is Boianjiu’s style. At a utilitarian level, it’s readable and engaging. Moreover, skilful, purposed use of repetition creates a texture of completeness and literary ability, in the same way that nuances in flavour convince us of culinary skill.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid provides a look at a world where young-adult rites of passage include boot camp and weapons training. Boianjiu’s style and sensitivity in depicting the lives of three Israeli women create an engaging story well worth a look. With her style and skills in characterisation, I’m interested to see what she’ll write next.

Footnote: I find this a bit hard to explain, but here’s a shot. Let’s take for example the scenario in which Lea finds a man whom she believes killed an Israeli soldier, and proceeds to carry him undetected to her apartment, where she tortures him over the course of several days before apparently releasing him, and nobody ever seems to find out.

Unless I am missing something absolutely profound, this is just far too out-there to be believable in fiction. Now, it may be that this has happened in real life, in which case, firstly, I apologise to Boianjiu. But even so, I once heard Anna Funder say she couldn’t write her non-fiction expose Stasiland as a novel, precisely because some of the stuff the East German secret police actually did was so extreme/weird that nobody would believe it if it were presented as fiction. So if anything like this did happen in real life, this needs to be made clear within the text, or whole sections don’t make much sense to international readers.

Have you read The People of Forever Are Not Afraid? What did you think of it? Any suggestions for future reviews?

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A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

15 Apr
Picture shows the author of A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, wearing a military uniform.

Ernest Hemingway in WWI; like his character Lt Henry, he was an ambulance driver.

I read this after reading Hemingway’s ‘A Clean Well Lighted Place’ for class. Like that short story, A Farewell to Arms is a beautiful piece of writing, simultaneously simple and spare, yet incredibly efficient in conveying meaning.

I must say, I appreciated the “war” bits far more than the slower-paced section at the end, perhaps simply because it’s such an experience to read war written in this way. Whether or not it’s truth is for those who’ve been there to determine, but to me, Hemingway’s style gives an incredible sense of authenticity to the horror and death of WWI in particular. I’m not surprised to hear he was a journalist.

One of the reasons I didn’t like the “romance” (if you could call it that; though it’s far more complex) bits so much is perhaps because of the dialogue. Speech blends into the efficient style of the prose rather than reflecting what I see as how people really talk; this could be a cultural, time or language difference.

Nonetheless, the content of what is said rings true, most strikingly in its unpredictability, especially the sometimes-desperate attachment between Catherine and Lt. Henry. While we’re on this topic, the way Lt. Henry thinks of women is exactly the way I’ve always imagined men must think of women – sort of wonder-meets-bemusement.
The story’s arc is infuriating at times –I wanted to know what happened to all those characters from the beginning! In its irritating-ness, of course, Hemingway is faithful to the nature of war and indeed life, where people part ways without conveniently summarising the rest of their lives to satiate each others’ curiosity.

It feels rather ghoulish to say I enjoyed reading this book, so I’ll be specific and say I love reading Hemingway’s style. He puts overwriting to shame, wielding the simplest of words to convey enormous meaning. I’ll leave you with my favourite quote, ironically a dialogue one, from the pregnant Catherine:

“For three years I looked forward very childishly to the war ending at Christmas. But now I look forward till when our son will be a lieutenant-commander.”

Sorry for the break everyone! I’ve been a bit busy and sick. Currently reading Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid so look out for a review of that soon!

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