This is a tricky review to write. Partly because I don’t tend to enjoy writing negative reviews (I wrote a whole post on the topic, including why I think they’re useful, here). Mostly though because Wuthering Heights is widely agreed to be a stone-cold classic and is a book that a great many people absolutely love. I wanted to love it too. Unfortunately, I didn’t even think it worth finishing.

As an aside, when I first saw that cover I thought it shameful that Wuthering Heights was being sold by reference to Twilight. Having now read a fair chunk of the book though, I can sort of see the link.

Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones.

As the above quote suggests, we’re in gothic novel territory here. Remote, brooding locations. Stormy metaphoric weather. Strange households with dark secrets best not spoken of. To be fair, these are a few of my favourite things so I’ve no issue with any of that. I’d even go so far as to say that the opening sets up expectations nicely, making it clear that what’s to come isn’t going to be a matter of strict realism but rather a work of mood and emotion.

Where the book soon runs into difficulty however is a flabbiness of structure. It opens with a framing device, the remarkably irritating initial narrator coming to his new landlord’s home and discovering a household afflicted by the remnants of past misery and bitterness. Edith Wharton, nearly 70 years later, used much the same device (quite possibly influenced by Brontë) in her Ethan Frome, but Wharton is a much better writer. Her narrator doesn’t take over the tale, she gets to the actual story much more swiftly and her prose is vastly more elegant.

Wuthering Heights then cuts back to the childhood of the central characters (one could argue who those are to a degree, but however you cut it they include Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw). Heathcliff is a foundling, adopted by Catherine’s father and raised with her, not quite one of the family but not a servant either. He cuts across barriers of class, money, race and propriety. In a sense he’s almost more plot device than character, an interloper from beyond the social world the novel otherwise portrays, and thus a living challenge to that world’s order.

He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose.

Catherine, though as wild as Heathcliff by nature as a child, grows up to assume the place expected for her by society. She becomes a lady, gently spoken, refined and beautiful. In her heart she loves Heathcliff, but when the time comes for marriage she chooses a gently born neighbour as Heathcliff has no fortune and thus could not maintain her position.

I won’t say what happens, since there may be those reading this who don’t actually know the story, but it’s all very passionate and dramatic. How could it not be, when we have conflicts of nature and society, of expectation and desire? The problem though is the characters and the contrived nature of the plot.

A degree of contrivance is inevitable in a gothic novel. Here though it’s simply heavy handed. At one critical passage Heathcliff overhears Catherine talking about how she feels about him. He manages to hear the bit about why she doesn’t want to marry him (he’s broke), but not the lengthy exposition of how much she loves him. He then charges off in a fury and naturally never thinks to ask for clarification. It’s a device still used in literature and film today, the part heard conversation leading to misunderstanding and breakup, but it’s a terrible device and the perfect example of how characters here act as puppets to the plot rather than from any organic sense of character.

Wuthering Heights is a novel of grand passions. The difficulty is that the characters are vehicles, not people. It’s easy to write that two characters love each other. I can do it now: Bill and Hannah love each other. It doesn’t make it mean anything though. Bill and Hannah are in love because I’ve said they are, but I’ve established nothing about them that makes that love meaningful.

Reading Ethan Frome, I could see why Ethan felt trapped, why his cousin Mattie was so important to him. The characters felt real, their emotions grew out of their natures and their situations in ways that were organic and true. Ethan Frome isn’t really any less contrived than Wuthering Heights, but it feels like a story that could be told in no other way and so has the quality of Greek tragedy.

In Wuthering Heights characters act as the plot demands. Of course that’s also true of Ethan Frome, and most every other plot-heavy novel ever written, but in Wuthering Heights you can see the puppeteer’s hands moving the strings. I had no sense that Heathcliff and Catherine’s situation arose out of anything other than their being written to be in that situation. I had no sense that they had lives beyond the novel (which of course no character in any novel does, but then novels are beautiful lies which in most cases at least seek to make us forget we’re being lied to while we read them).

Perhaps I was just the wrong age for this book. Were I first encountering it as an adolescent I can see that I might relate to characters motivated by sweeps of emotion which overcome their reason. I might find Heathcliff romantic (with a lower case r, he’s obviously Romantic with an upper case R), and Catherine’s dilemma interesting. I’m not adolescent though, and I couldn’t believe in them or their problems.

I’ll end on a minor positive note. The following passage reminded me irresistibly of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. The two books have nothing in common, and the Hardy while I think more successful is much less ambitious than Wuthering Heights, but the Hardy is easy to love and anything that reminds me of it is welcome.

our pleasure was increased by the arrival of the Gimmerton band, mustering fifteen strong: a trumpet, a trombone, clarionets, bassoons, French horns, and a bass viol, besides singers. They go the rounds of all the respectable houses, and receive contributions every Christmas, and we esteemed it a first-rate treat to hear them.

There it is then, Wuthering Heights. I genuinely wanted to like it, and having compared it here so much to Ethan Frome which uses very similar devices I’m slightly frustrated that all I seem to say in the end is that I didn’t like it because I didn’t think it was very good. Unfortunately, that’s where I come out, I just didn’t think it was very well written. If you read this and you disagree, think I’ve utterly missed the point, whatever, please feel free to tell me where I went wrong in the comments.

Beryl Bainbridge is one of those writers who seem to slip out of fashion, never quite given the recognition they deserve. She was nominated five times for the Booker, never winning (except for a rather bizarre consolation prize for which nobody else was nominated). Since her death she’s remained in print, but I see relatively little discussion of her online.

Today her books are firmly marketed as women’s fiction, a category largely made up by marketers which helps shift units but at the same time pigeonholes a wide range of female authors by implying their books are essentially entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, and there’s no dichotomy between being serious and being entertaining (several of the books I’ll soon be writing up are both). Still, if a book comes with pretty pastel covers, or faux-vintage photos of vaguely 1940s/50s-ish people against a black and white background, it’s sending a message about the contents. Much the same as if a book comes with big bold letters and a picture of a gun, helicopter or other piece of high-tech hardware.

Why do I care about all this? Well, partly because I’m a Guardian reader of course and it’s the sort of thing we care about, but mostly because while it does undoubtedly help sell books it also blocks certain books off from certain readers. So, if anyone reading this has been put off Beryl Bainbridge by the covers (the one below features two women nothing like those in the novel, and is utterly misleading), the blurbs, the impression given by all that of her work, here’s the important bit: she can write.

The Bottle Factory Outing opens with Brenda and Freda, two flatmates who decided too hastily to live together and have long since found out they have little in common. Brenda is a mouse of a woman, constantly cowed and put upon (“As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no, unless she didn’t mean it.”) . Freda is near her opposite, voluptuous and full of rather theatrical life.

They had gone once to a bureau on the High Street and said they were looking for temporary work in an office. They lied about their speed and things, but the woman behind the desk wasn’t encouraging. Secretly Freda thought it was because Brenda looked such a fright – she had toothache that morning and her jaw was swollen. Brenda thought it was because Freda wore her purple cloak and kept flipping ash on the carpet.

They share a North London bedsit and work together in a bottle factory, bottling Italian wine. Rossi, a manager, gropes Freda every day (“He had a funny way of pinching her all over, as if she was a mattress whose stuffing needed distributing more evenly.”), she doesn’t like it but she doesn’t like to say no either and she can’t get Brenda to pay enough attention to help her out. Brenda anyway is too preoccupied with the handsome Vittorio, who she is determined to have a grand romance with.

Does it sound prosaic? Initially it is. It’s also though beautifully observed and painfully funny. Here’s an example of Brenda and Freda’s domestic arrangements:

Brenda had fashioned a bolster to put down the middle of the bed and a row of books to ensure that they lay less intimately at night. Freda complained that the books were uncomfortable – but then she had never been married.

Bainbridge crafts each sentence perfectly. She has an extraordinary talent for small and cutting observations. Both Brenda and Freda are brilliantly captured. I believed in them and to an extent sympathised, which given they’re comic characters and arguably stereotypes is no small achievement. Bainbridge also has a knack for language that illuminates the everyday, but from unexpected angles (such as at one point where she describes a “block of flats, moored in concrete like an ocean liner.”, an image I adored).

Freda has organised an outing for the bottle factory employees. A van is booked, picnic lunches packed and the absent factory owner has contributed two barrels of wine for the day. Everyone is looking forward to it, everyone except Brenda who’d rather not go but doesn’t want to put anyone out.

At this point in the novel I was expecting a light observational comedy. I’d already noticed a black vein to the humour, but it was nothing compared to what followed. Obviously I won’t spoil what happens for those who may read it, but it’s fair to say that by about the half-way/two-thirds mark I was wondering what Bainbridge was trying to achieve. The essentially realist opening turned increasingly surreal as the day of the outing unfolded; the plot became less likely, the tone more vicious.

Stick with it though and Bainbridge does have a plan. Looking back the cruelty, uncertainty and bleak irony were always there, right from the beginning. Here’s the novel’s opening:

The hearse stood outside the block of flats, waiting for the old lady. Freda was crying. There were some children and a dog running in and out of the line of bare black trees planted in the pavement.

‘I don’t know why you’re crying,’ said Brenda. ‘You didn’t know her.’

It’s a collision of romance and brutal reality, as is the whole novel. Freda is self-indulgently moved by the death of an old woman she didn’t know “‘I like funerals – all those flowers – a full life coming to a close …’”. Brenda notes that the dead woman’s life didn’t look that full, seeing as she only left behind a cat and had no mourners. Brenda’s life is rather miserable, and while perhaps Freda’s is too Freda certainly doesn’t see it that way. Brenda is escaping a past, Freda is looking forward to a future even if it is one that’s largely founded on self-delusion. Of the two, if I had to choose, I’d rather be Freda.

In case there’s any lingering doubt I thought this was superb. It’s funny, disturbing and exceptionally well written. It won’t be my last Bainbridge. Thanks are therefore due to Guy Savage of His Futile Preoccupations, who turned me on to Bainbridge in the first place. Were I to compare her to any other author it would be JG Farrell, who can also make the reader laugh while showing them terrible things (I reviewed his Troubles here,  if you like one its worth trying the other).

For some other reviews of The Bottle Factory, I’d recommend this rather excellent review by Savidge Reads, this from the bibliolathas blog (particularly good for quotes) and this review by Gaskella which seems to have inspired a lot of different people to read the book.

I do hope to begin posting normally again within the next week or so, which would be good because even though I’ve had almost no time recently for reading, I’ve had even less for blogging so the review backlog has grown.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share this rather wonderful quote. It’s from the foreword to the translation I’m currently reading of Hjalmar Soderberg’s Doctor Glas.

The English writer William Sansom has written: “When the book first came to me, I got again that marvellous rare feeling, after the first page or two, of being quite certain I was in the hands of a master, knowing that I could trust this book entirely – knowing that this intelligent and beautiful writer would make me both sit up startled by various excitements and at the same time lie back with wonderful relief to know I was securely protected against the second-rate . . . In most of its writing and much of the frankness of its thought, it might have been written tomorrow . . . That this is a work of art and a masterpiece is to my mind unassailable.”

It’s not a feeling I get from every book, far from it, but there are times when I know exactly what William Sansom meant and it really is the most wonderfully reassuring sensation. It’s why (despite the fact I have as a rule no intrinsic interest in the subjects he writes about) I still read Colm Toibin. It’s why I love James Salter. It’s what I felt within moments of starting Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit.

It reminded me too of Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (it’s in my archives). That’s a book firmly of its period, but in its ambition and verve it too might have been written tomorrow. I do like that test – it might have been written tomorrow. It’s curious how few books pass it (even those that were only written yesterday).

I grew up with musicals. As a child, staying with my maternal grandmother, I used to love watching them with her. Dazzling choreography, great songs, and all in glorious Technicolor. Singin’ in the Rain remains my favourite film.

I saw Gigi back then, the 1958 musical with Leslie Caron in the lead role, but I don’t think I understood much of what was going on. Quite recently I saw it again, and absolutely loved it. It’s a joy of a film, with some great songs (I Remember It Well being a particular standout) and set pieces. It also has a tremendous cast, including of course Maurice Chevalier (whose Thank Heaven for Little Girls remains the dodgiest song I’ve ever heard in a musical, even as a child it seemed a bit questionable to me, though at least the singer does wait for them to grow up).

Colette’s original novella, here translated by Roger Senhouse, is just as much a joy as the film was. Perhaps more so, because it can afford a cynicism that Hollywood largely had to expunge and because Colette’s observations are so utterly delicious.

Gigi is a pretty young Parisienne, still in essence a child. Her mother is a moderately unsuccessful actress who has passed responsibility for Gigi’s upbringing largely to her own mother, with whom they both live. Gigi’s grandmother has plans for the girl, and to that end is having her trained by her own sister, Aunt Alicia.

What is Gigi being trained in? Well, that’s what I missed as a child watching the film. Gigi’s aunt is a grand courtesan, her grandmother was a courtesan too, though not so grand. Gigi, the illegitimate daughter of an actress, has very few career paths open to her and the one she’s being prepared for whether she knows it or not is the life of a serial mistress.

What follows is a wonderful clash of youth and idealism on the one hand, and age and guile on the other. Gigi’s innocence and sheer spirit has captured the friendship of the most eligible young man in Paris, Gaston Lachaille, but now she’s starting to leave childhood the possibility arises that she could be something more to him than just a friend. Gigi doesn’t understand that yet, but her grandmother and great-aunt most certainly do. If only Gigi showed the slightest aptitude for their training…

Don’t ever wear artistic jewellery; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.” ‘What is an artistic jewel?’ ‘It all depends. A mermaid in gold, with eyes of chrysoprase. An Egyptian scarab. A large engraved amethyst. A not very heavy bracelet said to have been chased by a master-hand. A lyre or star, mounted as a brooch. A studded tortoise. In a word, all of them frightful. Never wear baroque pearls, not even as hat-pins. Beware above all things, of family jewels!’ ‘But Grandmamma has a beautiful cameo, set as a medallion.’ ‘There are no beautiful cameos,’ said Aunt Alicia with a toss of the head.

This is novella as macaroon, a perfectly crafted little delicacy, beautiful to look at and delightful to bite into (why yes, I do love macaroons, why do you ask?). Gigi’s lessons are full of acerbic little asides (“The telephone is of real use only to important businessmen, or to women who have something to hide.”) and pretty much every page had me laughing.

The three great stumbling-blocks in a girl’s education, she says, are homard à l’Américaine, a boiled egg, and asparagus. Shoddy table manners, she says, have broken up many a happy home.

Colette here manages to be both cynical and romantic, to have her gateau and to eat it. I could quote it endlessly, and can easily imagine rereading it. It’s just huge fun.

All of which makes it a bit of a shame that I didn’t like the other novella in the Vintage Classics edition I read at all. The Cat is actually an earlier work by Colette (1933, whereas Gigi is 1945). It’s the story of a young man who has a frankly unhealthy relationship with his pet cat and the rivalry that develops between that cat and his new bride.

I grew up with cats, and have loved them all my life. This should then be the novella for me. Unfortunately though I’ve never met a cat that behaved remotely like the cat Saha does in this story - too human to ever be convincingly cat. Then again, I’ve never met humans who behaved much like the humans do in this story either.

Alain, Saha’s owner, is an unwordly sort who is marrying more from duty than love. Here he coldly considers his new bride:

Alain listened to her, not bored, but not indulgent either. He had known her for several years and classified her as a typical modern girl. He knew the way she drove a car, a little too fast and a little too well; her eye alert and her scarlet mouth always ready to swear violently at a taxi-driver. He knew that she lied unblushingly, as children and adolescents do; that she was capable of deceiving her parents so as to get out after dinner and meet him at a night-club. There they danced together, but they drank only orange-juice because Alain disliked alcohol. Before their official engagement, she had yielded her discreetly-wiped lips to him both by daylight and in the dark. She had also yielded her impersonal breasts, always imprisoned in a lace brassière, and her very lovely legs in the flawless stockings she bought in secret; stockings ‘like Mistinguett’s, you know. Mind my stockings, Alain!’ Her stockings and her legs were the best things about her. ‘She’s pretty,’ Alain thought dispassionately, ‘because not one of her features is ugly, because she’s an out-and-out brunette. Those lustrous eyes perfectly match that sleek, glossy, frequently-washed hair that’s the colour of a new piano.’ He was also perfectly aware that she could be as violent and capricious as a mountain stream.

It’s a long quote, but an interesting one. This is his bride to be, but note the complete lack of passion. Here, by contrast, Alain considers his cat:

As soon as he turned out the light, the cat began to trample delicately on her friend’s chest. Each time she pressed down her feet, one single claw pierced the silk of the pyjamas, catching the skin just enough for Alain to feel an uneasy pleasure. ‘Seven more days, Saha,’ he sighed. In seven days and seven nights he would begin a new life in new surroundings with an amorous and untamed young woman. He stroked the cat’s fur, warm and cool at the same time and smelling of clipped box, thuya and lush grass. She was purring full-throatedly and, in the darkness, she gave him a cat’s kiss, laying her damp nose for a second under Alain’s nose between his nostrils and his lip. A swift, immaterial kiss which she rarely accorded him. ‘Ah! Saha. Our nights . . .’

Leaving aside the anthropomorphising there, we’re in distinctly creepy territory. That’s not a problem per se, though it wasn’t clear to me whether I was supposed to find Alain quite as profoundly distasteful as I did, the issue is that this is a character driven tale without a single character one cares about.

It’s about the lowest form of book criticism to say a book is bad because it has no likeable or sympathetic characters, and that’s close to where I’m getting here so I need to be a little careful. I read noir though, and it never bothers me there that frequently everyone in the story is utterly repellent.

The issue here is that Alain is so fixated on his cat he moves beyond the credible. He becomes almost an image of mental illness, but that’s not what this story is. His bride, efficient, modern, is put in the incredible situation of competing for her husband’s affections with his cat but since I didn’t believe in the husband or the cat the whole setup just became rather artificial.

As I grew distant from the story it jarred more and more. At one point, Saha becomes concerned that she’s upset Alain and so scoops “up a rusk from the table and held it between her paws like a squirrel.” Cats lack both the empathy and the grip to do anything like that. If I’d been enjoying the story I’d have read that passage generously, but I wasn’t and instead it became just another unconvincing detail.

For me then The Cat became a hugely contrived tale featuring a conflict that I didn’t believe in between characters who didn’t persuade me. It’s neat, and I don’t say that remotely as a compliment. Gigi is a vastly more accomplished tale. I’ll return to Gigi, but I doubt very much I’ll ever return to The Cat.

I should add, by way of postscript, that as I write this I’m actually surprisingly tired, my own cat having shown a distinct lack of empathy last night and having woken me repeatedly as she wanted to curl in and was annoyed I wasn’t responding. I love cats, but putting the feelings of others ahead of their own isn’t one of their core strengths as a species.

For me the yardstick for this sort of writing is Barbara Ehrenreich’s tremendous Nickeled and Dimed. If you’ve not read that book, it’s a sobering account of what living on minimum wage with minimal labour rights is actually like (in that case in the US, but the experiences Ehrenreich describes can certainly be extrapolated to the UK without much difficulty and I imagine to many other countries too).

Ehrenreich wrote from the outside in. She’s a respected writer and journalist who decided to write (among other things) about the lives of the working poor. Ivor Southwood by contrast writes from the inside out, he is one of the working poor. The subject matter is the same though, that hinterland (largely ignored by politicians) of people who slip back and forth between precarious employment and unemployment mostly just getting by, sometimes not getting by at all.

Here’s how it opens:

Business at the warehouse was going downhill rapidly. There had already been meetings on the floor and warnings about dire times ahead. I’d only been taken on from the agency and made “permanent” a couple of months earlier, and already I was expecting to be got rid of. I’d been applying for new jobs continuously anyway since I had started there. But for others who were more attached to the place, its social and historical solidity was dissolving before their eyes. We knew that sooner or later there would be a huge cull which would eliminate about a third of the workforce; but in the meantime people were being given notice in dribs and drabs, two or three every month, mostly people like me who had only recently been employed. Every day could be the day you got the tap on the shoulder.

Southwood takes his particular circumstances as a starting point to explore wider themes. Not just the precarious nature of much contemporary employment (when governments boast of how many new jobs have been created, they often forget to mention how many of them are temporary positions at minimum wage), but also the way in which the unemployed are expected to treat unemployment as if it were a job in itself, and the way in which whether in work or looking for it they’re expected to present an unfaltering image of bland positivity.

All of this of course takes place in the context of a wider culture in which the consumer is held out as king, and in which the values of consumerism seem to migrate into areas where they don’t naturally fit. As Southwood notes, “Even the Jobcentre calls its claimants “customers”.”

Part of Southwood’s thesis is the concept of emotional labour (he’s exploring the idea, he doesn’t claim authorship of it) and the “emotional labourer”. The point is that the employee increasingly is required not merely to turn up and perform their day’s work (with the concept of a day’s work of course becoming increasingly elastic, as home and workplace boundaries soften in the wake of new technologies), but also to present an appropriate emotional front while doing so.

In some professions this has always been true. A McDonalds’ server in the 1950s would have been expected to smile and welcome the customer just as much as one today. What’s new however is the way this self-commoditisation has spread into areas where traditionally one wouldn’t have expected it. Even in the most tedious of jobs employees are expected to show passion for the product, a commitment to the company mission, an emotional engagement in other words which may be wholly at odds with anything one could reasonably expect someone to actually feel.

This spreads beyond work into the search for work. The CV and interview (if you get one) become essentially performative; the prospective employee and employer both adopt a peculiar cod-management/cod-self help rhetoric which sits over the banality of the actual job being discussed. As Southwood says:

the most mundane experience becomes the occasion of a personal epiphany: “working in a busy café really taught me something about the importance of customer service.”

To put my own cards on the table, I think Southwood is right about this. It’s visible in exaggerated form in programmes such as The Apprentice (with the UK version being a bizarrely low-rent emulation of its vastly more moneyed US parent), but it’s true through much of the working world. It’s particularly true at the lower end of the job market (at the professional end your work likely is something you can emotionally engage with, and the connection between your activity and your company’s success is much more evident, so this kind of fake enthusiasm simply isn’t as required).

This isn’t just an issue for the employed. The job-seeker who doesn’t come across as sufficiently positive, who seems demoralised or depressed, risks seeing benefits cut due to a perception that they aren’t doing enough to cure their misfortune.

“Jobseeker”: a more demeaning label is difficult to imagine. It recalls a childish game of hide and seek, and the unemployed are indeed often treated like errant children who need to be kept in line by playground supervisors who make sure they go back into class promptly when the bell rings. There is also the spiritual connotation of “seek and ye shall find”: if you do not find a job this is not a reflection of any real social situation, it is simply a failure of faith on your part; you just do not really believe.

Southwood goes on to show how this system acts to displace analysis of the extent to which an individual’s joblessness may result (at least in part) from factors outside their control:

The only labour now exchanged at the Jobcentre is the performative sort: empty gestures, feigned enthusiasm, containment of hostility, suppression of resentment. The “customer” and “advisor” are required between them to conjure an interaction which is entirely fake, a form of surface acting stretched over the underlying reality of compulsion and surveillance. Posters and leaflets in the Jobcentre depict smiling figures in work-like scenarios, proffering handshakes or clutching official-looking folders. The discourse of customer service adopted by the staff presents an illusion of empowerment, as if the claimant were choosing to buy a product, and deflects any real criticisms of the system onto pseudo-issues of standards or quality.

The language of empowerment then is deeply political. If unemployment is treated as a personal issue, a question of commitment, skills and attitude, then that frames a debate in which the question of whether there are actually enough jobs to go round (and whether they pay enough to live on) isn’t asked. The focus moves from asking whether the economy is working, to asking why the individual isn’t. 

This all makes the book sound rather a grim read, and it likely would be except that Southwood has a fairly lively sense of humour about it all. I loved asides such as this:

If the Jobcentre does indeed hail the benefit claimant as a customer, it is that type of shop where, having been monitored suspiciously by staff for signs of shoplifting, one feels obscurely intimidated and leaves the premises convinced that the theft alarm will go off, even if one’s pockets are empty.

Where Southwood explored his personal situation and used it to illustrate wider societal trends I thought the book worked well. Where he turned to the more academic side of his argument, however, I have to admit to flagging a little. Paragraphs such as:

The argument for a move from macro- to micro-politics represented an effort to divert the flow of the new liquefied culture, to claim the new politics of identity for those whose everyday lives had been routinely crushed by patriarchal-colonial capital.

are quite hard going if you’re not yourself an academic. Southwood explains all his points well, I was never lost even though in many cases he was drawing on a sociological tradition I’m not familiar with (not that there are any sociological traditions that I am familiar with), but phrases like “patriarchal-colonial capital” just don’t make my heart beat faster.

Equally, while I agree with Southwood that there’s something demeaning and ultimately dishonest about the faux-consumerification (great, I’m doing the jargon thing now) of what is frequently low-skilled and uninteresting work, that doesn’t mean the individual is entirely powerless. If there are no jobs you’re not going to find one however positive you may be, but equally while much of how our life plays out is beyond our control it isn’t all beyond our control. Southwood says:

But then I listen to the politicians and the lifestyle gurus and I think that perhaps my situation is self-inflicted. If only I hadn’t attempted to improve myself by going back into higher education – if I had learnt some practical skill to make myself easily employable, rather than fill my head with useless knowledge, or if I had spent the time between lectures doing part-time jobs rather than studying or, even worse, writing – I wouldn’t now be underemployed and trapped by debt.

The hard answer to that is, well, yes. If he had learnt a practical skill instead of going into higher education with no long term goal then he likely would have better employment prospects and less debt. It’s profoundly unfair of course that some people by virtue of birth need never worry about employability and can just follow their dreams and whims, while others must abandon deeply held passions in order to make a living. Profoundly unfair, but true for almost all history.

For a few decades after the second world war there was an expectation that society could and should be fair. If you look to nineteenth century or earlier fiction there’s no such concept, servants are servants and masters are masters. In the twentieth century, for a while, subsidised university education and full employment created a different world in which the servants could at least dream of becoming the masters (even if, if you look at the numbers, actual social mobility didn’t change much).

That dream is now closing and we’re returning to the world of the nineteenth century novel. The existence of a precariat, a class of people a single paycheck away from penury, is nothing new. Dickens would have recognised it in a heartbeat, he’d just have called it something else. Perhaps Southwood’s misfortune in part is to have the dreams of a man of the 20th century, but to be living in the 21st.

Still, Non-Stop Inertia is an argument, it’s not the entire debate. Southwood puts forward his perspective, but never claims that there aren’t others. He’s stronger on the personal side than the academic, but that’s the more interesting side anyway, and his analysis is much stronger than his few proposed potential solutions (as he himself admits), but that’s ok because the truth is that just because someone identifies a problem doesn’t mean they have to be the one to come up with an answer to it (or even that one exists). In the end when he writes about:

This constant precariousness and restless mobility, compounded by a dependence upon relentlessly updating market-driven technology and the scrolling CGI of digital media, together suggest a sort of cultural stagflation, a population revving up without getting anywhere. The result is a kind of frenetic inactivity: we are caught in a cycle of non-stop inertia.

I think he writes about something which is real and which may of us would recognise. That makes this a worthwhile book, and one I’m glad to have read.

For the curious, there’s an interesting interview with Southwood here and an excellent review of the book here.

Firstly, welcome and please feel free to leave comments (though you don’t have to of course).

Secondly, as you’ve probably already worked out this is a reading blog. How it works is that I write up each book I read. Mostly it’s literary fiction (including modernist and experimental works), but also some crime, SF and whatever else may take my fancy.

Thirdly, if you scroll down on the right hand side you’ll find a link titled A random post. If you click on that link you’ll be taken to a random blog entry from my archive. Give it a try, it’s a fun feature (well, fun for me anyway – if there’s anything literary bloggers love it’s people digging up old reviews). If you do wander into the older posts, again comments are totally welcome.

Finally, each year I do an end of year round-up post in which I talk about the best books I read that year. You can find those posts, for each of 2009 to 2012, in the Annual Reviews section on the right. You’ll also find there my two Personal Canon posts, where I talk about the writers who were most important to me as a teenager and the ones who’re most important now.

That’s it really. Thanks for dropping by, and please check out some of the links in the blogroll to the right. I put links there for the blogs I chiefly follow myself and they’re all blogs that I regard highly (a few are dormant, but I hope they’ll return so I keep them there).

The Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Literature is one of the very few literary prizes I pay any attention to. In part that’s because I don’t read enough science fiction to otherwise be on top of what’s coming out, but it’s also because it’s a well curated prize that really does tend to catch much of what’s most exciting in the field.

Lauren Beukes’ second novel, Zoo City, won the prize back in 2011. That caused some controversy, with many arguing that it wasn’t science fiction at all but rather a fantasy novel which shouldn’t even have been shortlisted (hardcore genre fans can get very bullish about defending genre boundaries). For me the better view is that the boundaries aren’t the point. The point is that the Clarke Award did its job, by finding a bloody good book and shouting to the world about it.

Zoo City is the Johannesburg ghetto where the “animalled” live. The animalled are people who carry the guilt of another human being’s death in an unusually literal way, manifested in the form of animals which they must keep near them at all times. Zinzi December, the protagonist, used to be a Johannesburg lifestyle journalist until she fell into addiction and got her brother killed. Now she has a sloth which goes with her wherever she goes – a living reminder of her sense of responsibility for her brother’s death.

The animalled are stigmatised. In China, the novel mentions at one point in passing, they’re executed on the assumption that whatever they did to end up with an animal must necessarily be a crime worthy of execution. They’re outcasts, and since few people want to employ a presumed killer who is accompanied everywhere by some bizarre creature (examples in the book include a sparrow, a bear, a mongoose, a vulture and much more) they can’t get regular employment.

Other than the presence of the animalled the world of Zoo City is our world. People started being animalled in the 1980s, the first being an Afghan warlord who manifested a penguin which he promptly issued with a custom-made bullet-proof vest. The phenomenon then quickly spread worldwide (the timeline is similar to the spread of Aids in real life). Some seek explanations in religion, others by reference to dodgy sounding quantum physics, but nobody really knows and from the point of view of the animalled it doesn’t really matter.

Being apart from your animal causes profound psychic stress. If your animal dies, you do too (and in a particularly eerie fashion). The only upside, and it’s not much of one, is that each animalled person gains a small magical power.

Zinzi December’s magical gift is the ability to find lost possessions. That’s a talent you can charge people for, that and her writing ability which makes her particularly good at crafting email scams to lure in unsuspecting first world retirees. The emails apparently come from:

…an old lady with a flooded mansion, desperate to sell her priceless antiques cheap-cheap. A Chechnyan refugee fleeing the latest Russian pogroms with her family’s diamonds in tow. A Somali pirate who has found Jesus and wants to trade in his rocket launcher and ransom millions for absolution” and to make some money while they do so.

What each of them has in common is the need to get a large amount of money out of South Africa, the promise of rich rewards for the kindly stranger who helps with that, and some unfortunate up-front administrative fees that can’t be paid from in-country…

We’re in noir territory then, with Zinzi a down at heels and distinctly morally ambiguous PI. Soon a pair of hired thugs (with poodle and vulture in tow) are pressuring Zinzi to take on a job for a reclusive music producer who’s lost one half of his latest boy-girl pop sensation. Zinzi doesn’t do missing people, but when the money’s right how hard can it be to find one lost teenager? Besides, there are some people it’s very hard to say no to.

The cover for my copy of Zoo City comes with a William Gibson quote, which makes sense because Beukes has a lot in common with Gibson. Neither has any real interest in the how of their world, whether the animalled or Gibson’s Cyberspace could actually happen. What each focuses on instead is the experience, the personal and social impact of change.

Beukes’ first novel, Moxyland (which I reviewed here), was outright cyberpunk in the classic Gibsonian mould. Here she’s writing what could be termed urban fantasy, but with the same outlook. Modern Africa is a mix of the high tech and traditional beliefs (the same could be said of modern Singapore, modern Britain). The animals and the magical gifts they bring allow her to explore the world of muti, African folk beliefs which continue in a world of email scams and disposable mobile phones.

Nyangas and sangomas and faith healers with varying degrees of skill or talent, broadcasting their services on posters stuck up on telephone poles and walls. Some of them are charlatans and shysters, advertising cures for anything from money woes to love-sickness and Aids with muti made from crushed lizard balls and aspirin. Guess which ingredient does all the hard work?

To South Africans the animals are another form of muti, as are the abilities they give their humans. December’s view of the world is a modern South African view, influenced in part by animist tradition surviving into a Christian and increasingly secular age. In truth she doesn’t particularly understand how magic works, but then she probably doesn’t understand how her car works either (since car control systems went largely electronic, few people do).

Object muti is easy, particularly when it’s based on a simple binary. Locked or unlocked. Lost or found. Objects want to have a purpose. They’re happy to be told what to do. People less so. [...] Most magic is more abstract. Capricious. It has a tendency to backfire. And the big stuff they promise, the Aids cures, bigger penises or death spells, are all placebo and nocebo, blessings and curses conjured up in your head. Not unlike glossy magazines, which also promise a better sex life, a better job, a better you. Trust me, I used to write those articles. And just look at me now.

The worldbuilding here is done to an extent by stealth - characters don’t spend time explaining their everyday world to each other (a common fault in much other SF). The result is that you pick up the details as you go along, and Beukes is good enough at her craft to ensure this doesn’t become confusing.

Beukes’ world convinces on its terms then, but that isn’t of itself enough to make a good novel. For me, where Beukes’ fiction really shines is her evocation of contemporary urban South Africa. She’s tremendous at capturing noise, smells, the clash of colours and the sheer energy and chaos of it.

Everything takes on a muted quality fifteen floors up. The traffic is reduced to a flow and stutter, the car horns like the calls of mechanical ducks. The skyline is in crisp focus, the city graded in rusts and coppers by the sinking sun that has streaked the wispy clouds the colour of blood. It’s the dust in the air that makes the Highveld sunsets so spectacular, the fine yellow mineral deposits kicked up from the mine dumps, the carbon-dioxide choke of the traffic. Who says bad things can’t be beautiful?

Though this next quote reminded me more of when I used to live in Earl’s Court, showing perhaps that in some ways major cities are the same the world over.

I catch a taxi into Auckland Park with the late-night cleaners, the nurses and the restaurant dish-washers: the invisible tribe of behind-the-scenes. I get off after Media Park and walk up to 7th Street with its scramble of restaurants, bars and Internet cafés. Outside the Mozambican deli-cum-Internet café, a hawker tries to sell me a star lantern made of wire and paper and, when I decline, offers me marijuana instead.

Beukes also often shows a nice turn of phrase. I liked an email-scam mark having his good sense overwhelmed by the smell of money which “bellows like a vuvuzela, drowning out the whisper of doubt.” Similarly I enjoyed a teenaged boy “pouting like he ordered strippers for his birthday and got clowns instead”, and in terms of imagery when a fatally wounded man “screams like a slaughterhouse pig in a Peta video” it’s vivid and unpleasantly easy to imagine.

What makes Zoo City such an enjoyable read then isn’t the concept itself, clever (and capable of so many allegorical readings) as it is. It’s the writing, the noirish characters, and perhaps most of all that remarkable sense of place. I’ve not read most of the novels Zoo City was up against in 2011, so I can’t say whether it deserved to beat them or not. I’m not at all surprised though that it got shortlisted, because if science fiction (or fantasy if you prefer) was producing many books like this back in 2011 it must have been an exceptionally good year.

Zoo City has been widely reviewed. There’s an excellent (and spoiler free) example at David H’s blog, here (I only just realised David’s blog wasn’t on my blogroll, so I’ve promptly corrected that) and he links in turn to fine reviews from John Clute and Niall Harrison each of which is definitely worth reading. I was happier with the ending than David was as for me the book always had that crime heritage overlapping with the SF and I was therefore expecting a fairly plot-driven ending.

Postscript: Some issues with the Kindle edition

Finally, a note of caution for those who don’t have this and might be thinking of picking it up. Beukes uses different fonts in places, to indicate emails or internet chats, and all that inevitably gets lost in the kindle version. Much worse though the kindle version, in the UK at least, has some truly appalling formatting errors which were so frequent and so bad that they started to genuinely spoil the book for me.

Since I knew the author was on twitter I dropped her a line there asking if there was some way to get the ebook version fixed (the paperback doesn’t have these problems). She put me in touch with her publishers, who asked me to email through the details of the problems I’d found (since they apparently weren’t in all e-editions in all countries).

The publishers offered to send me a cleaned up version, but before they could Lauren Beukes herself very kindly emailed me a word version of the book which was entirely error free (and which was apparently a later version of the book, fixing a plot problem I’d already read past without noticing that her French translator had picked up).

I really can’t praise enough Lauren Beukes’ and her publishers’ response to the problem I had. Given though the formatting issues with the ebook, and the fact that even once fixed you’ll still lose the font choices Beukes makes, this is one you should definitely read in physical copy if at all possible.

LIKE MOST PEOPLE I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.

That’s the opening paragraph to Oranges, and it’s one of the best opening paragraphs I’ve read in a long while. I knew as soon as I read it that I’d like this book; that I was in safe hands.

For some reason I’ve long had the impression that I wouldn’t like Winterson’s work. She’s one of those writers who has a long shadow beyond their fiction, with a public persona that can seem arrogant and offputting (Hensher and McCarthy also spring to mind on that front). I was wrong though, because I absolutely loved this book and I’ve already bought her second novel. Winterson can write, and what’s more she has that unusual knack of writing serious fiction which is also extremely funny.

Oranges is about a girl named Jeanette Winterson, growing up in Northern England as part of a small evangelical Christian church in which her mother is one of the most important local figures. That’s also the early story of Jeanette Winterson, the writer. Does that make it autobiography? No, it just means that like many writers Winterson drew on her own life. It’s a story, and in that sense whether it happened like this or not (or not at all) doesn’t affect its truth. As Winterson observes: “People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe. This is very curious.”

Jeanette’s mother divides the world into friends and enemies, and there aren’t many on the friends list. Chief of the enemies of course is the devil, but it also includes the next door neighbours, the godless generally, most of the world in fact. Her life revolves around her church, which gives her a permanent cause to fight for and an endless supply of foes to fight against.

The Missionary Report was a great trial to me because our mid-day meal depended upon it. If it went well, no deaths and lots of converts, my mother cooked a joint. If the Godless had proved not only stubborn, but murderous, my mother spent the rest of the morning listening to the Jim Reeves Devotional Selection, and we had to have boiled eggs and toast soldiers. Her husband was an easy-going man, but I knew it depressed him. He would have cooked it himself but for my mother’s complete conviction that she was the only person in our house who would tell a saucepan from a piano. She was wrong, as far as we were concerned, but right as far as she was concerned, and really, that’s what mattered.

Jeanette of course is among the friends, a virgin birth (well, adopted, which is almost the same thing). As a child she grows up steeped in bible stories, myth and history commingled and inseparable. She views the world through the lens of religion:

Our house was almost at the top of a long, stretchy street. A flagged street with a cobbly road. When you climb to the top of the hill and look down you can see everything, just like Jesus on the pinnacle except it’s not very tempting.

It all works very well indeed, until the local council notices that Jeanette isn’t at school and requires her mother to make her attend (no home schooling in those days, thankfully). It’s the first exposure Jeanette has to worldviews beyond her mother’s.

‘And why, and this is perhaps more serious, do you terrorize, yes, terrorize, the other children?’ ‘I don’t,’ I protested. ‘Then can you tell me why I had Mrs Spencer and Mrs Sparrow here this morning telling me how their children have nightmares?’ ‘I have nightmares too.’ ‘That’s not the point. You have been talking about Hell to young minds.’ It was true. I couldn’t deny it. I had told all the others about the horrors of the demon and the fate of the damned. I had illustrated it by almost strangling Susan Hunt, but that was an accident, and I gave her all my cough sweets afterwards. ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought it was interesting.’ Mrs Vole and Miss shook their heads. ‘You’d better go,’ said Mrs Vole. ‘I shall be writing to your mother.’

Still, despite all these contradictions in her life (and whose life doesn’t have contradictions, however old they may be?) young Jeanette manages to balance her world at home with the wider world. To her church she’s a shining example, a young missionary with great promise. That’s what she wants, to grow up and one day take the Good Word out to the benighted peoples of the Earth. Unfortunately, not all contradictions can be reconciled. Jeanette falls in love, which might be manageable except that the person she falls in love with is another girl.

Oranges is sometimes described as a lesbian novel. Winterson doesn’t agree with that description, and she’s right not to. The key relationship here is not between Jeanette and the women she sleeps with as she grows into adulthood, it’s between Jeanette and her mother. This isn’t a coming out novel, it’s a novel about the gulf between parent and child as we come to realise that our parents may not, after all, be right about everything and definitely may not be right about us. (Well, that’s one of the things it’s about – no truly good novel is about just one thing.)

The problem Jeanette the character faces here isn’t an unusual one. She wants to be the child her mother wants, but who she is isn’t compatible with that. Here it’s because she loves the wrong people, but it could be too a child that realises they can’t face working in the family business; they want to marry outside their community or faith; they don’t want to be a doctor or concert pianist or whatever; there are so many ways parents can expect more from their children than just their happiness.

In part I actually found this quite a painful novel to read. It brought back a great many memories of my own childhood and adolescence; of trying to be someone I wasn’t and could never be. I was shy back then, terrible at sport and with no interest in it unlike my father’s side of the family who were (are) confident and naturally athletic. I was bookish, as were two of my grandparents but nobody else and the things that interested me were often so far from the interests of my family that we could barely talk to each other. I was transitional, born to a working class family but wanting more. None of this is unusual. As Winterson says: “Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.”

Winterson of course, the real Winterson, left home and went to Oxford and from there became a writer. Winterson in the fiction leaves town too, escaping but at times returning, as most of us do. Few of us, however much we may wish to escape from home, truly leave it behind forever. Few of us truly wish to, because however much we may fight with our parents, our family, we love them and they us and that remains true even as we may deplore each others lives.

There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what’s left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

I talked above about the key relationship here being between Jeanette and her mother, and it’s that tension between expectation and love that it captures so well. To Jeanette’s mother Jeanette is unnatural, one of the Godless, damned for passions against God. Jeanette however comes to accept her nature, to be happy with who and what she is. Logically that must be a divide that cannot be bridged. How do you reconcile two such different perspectives?

Well, you don’t I suppose. Still, only in the saddest cases do parents and children remain permanently estranged. We make allowances, permit exceptions to our most vital beliefs, because the alternative would be to deny love. My maternal grandmother was a devout Catholic, in her later years she took to referring to the family as heathens for our lack of faith, but she wouldn’t have dreamt of rejecting us over so small a thing as god or the fate of our immortal souls.

I should add that Oranges is not as straightforward a novel as the (marvellous) tv adaptation of it would suggest. While most of the novel is told fairly straight, it dips from time to time into fable, stories which reflect the wider story but which introduce an element of myth into the mundane. It works, because it fits. Winterson, the real Winterson, is telling a story and there are more ways of telling a story than just saying what happened.

Oranges is a superbly written novel. I was never a lesbian growing up among Pentacostalists in the North of England but I found it resonant and unsettling for all that – it isn’t remotely limited to its own particularities. Winterson is adept at arresting turns of phrase, women with “shoulders bared and white like hard-boiled eggs”, “ripe plums of indignation”, but she’s not one of those writers who place one beautifully crafted sentence after another ending with a result that while beautiful is somehow sterile and cold. All that and she’s funny too. Frankly, I wish I’d started reading her sooner.

The Attic by Danilo Kiš, and translated by John K. Cox

The journey of the young writer, from aspiring novelist to published author, is one of the most widely told stories out there. It’s the only story every novelist has in common. The details may vary, as may the difficulty of the path followed, but by definition every one of them has done it.

It’s a story I tend to I find particularly uninteresting, because often it’s literature talking to itself instead of to the world. What could be more insular than novels about writing novels? Steampunk fiction actually, but I risk totally digressing in my second paragraph so let’s pretend I didn’t mention that.

The Attic is a Serbian novella written back in 1962. It’s a first novel about writing a first novel. It’s even called The Attic (the original could just as easily be translated as The Garrett or The Loft), as if to underline the airless subject matter. It has though that one quality which trumps all others, it’s well written.

Orpheus, the narrator, is a young writer living in a mould and cockroach infested garret apartment with a friend he calls Billy Wiseass. These aren’t, of course, their real names.

Orpheus falls in love with a girl he names Eurydice, although it’s fairer to say he falls in love with an idea of a Eurydice that he clothes a girl in.

Back at the time I think I first met her, I was feverishly demanding answers from life, and so I was completely caught up in myself – that is, caught up in the vital issues of existence.

Here are some of the questions to which I was seeking answers:

- the immortality of the soul

- the immortality of sex

- immaculate conception

- motherhood

- fatherhood

- the fatherland

- cosmopolitanism

- the issue of the organic exchange of matter and

- the issue of nourishment

- metempsychosis

- life on other planets and

- out in space

- the age of the earth

- the difference between culture and civilization

- the race issue

- apoliticism or engagement

- kindness or heedlessness

- superman or everyman

- idealism or materialism

- Don Quixote or Sancho Panza

- Hamlet or Don Juan

- pessimism or optimism

- death or suicide

and so on and so forth.

These problems and a dozen more like them stood before me like an army of moody and taciturn sphinxes. And so, right when I had reached issue number nine—the issue of nourishment—after having solved the first eight problems in one fashion or another, the last addition to the list turned up: the question of love . . .

Orpheus tells Eurydice of his adventures in the South Seas, though they’re plainly a flight of fancy and it’s doubtful he’s ever left Belgrade. Soon after is an entire chapter which mimics a passage from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (I only know that because of the incredibly helpful foreword, thanks John K Cox). His friend Billy gets a girl pregnant and needs help with cash for an abortion, and Orpheus is keen to help because as he notes with concern a baby would mean “voilà, a new character!“

What’s going on here? It quickly becomes apparent that The Attic isn’t just a novel about writing a first novel – it’s a novel about writing this particular first novel. It’s a literary ourobouros that becomes a kind of metafiction in which the characters are aware that they are characters and the novel is aware of its own artificiality. This isn’t a book which imagines a world, but which then pretends that the created world has some form of objective existence (the standard approach for the vast majority of fiction). Rather this is a book which expressly addresses the act of its own creation (though of course, the novel titled The Attic which is being written inside the novel I read titled The Attic may not be quite the same The Attic, in fact can’t be).

Soon I was giving [English] lessons to the sluts of the port. Never before had I had pupils who were more diligent and compliant. And they paid me regularly. In kind, to be sure. How else? Then I stopped giving lessons to those girls who lived by the Bridge of Sighs, as we referred to them. Every day their madam had brought me coffee with a great deal of sugar and milk, just because once I’d said I liked it.

[They discuss his smoking, which the madam thinks excessive. She refers to "some great disappointment in your past..."]

“No, no” I said. “But I prefer a bitter cigarette to sweet coffee with sugar. It’s simply…”

Then she said suddenly: “Listen, it’s not nice of you to make your café latte sound even sweeter than it is, just so I’ll end up coming across as all the more insipid. You reporters are all the same. It goes without saying that I’m mentioning this in your interest.

If all this sounds arch and pretentious then for a fair part of the book that’s because that’s exactly what it is. The early passages are breathlessly adolescent (check out that list, above). The style is deeply self-indulgent, but then the technique becomes surer, the conceit less overwhelming. What becomes apparent is that The Attic is not merely a novel about writing a novel, but a novel that reflects in its very style and structure the process of becoming a novelist.

It opens up excitable and even amateurish. It veers off into unbounded flights of fantasy. It then faithfully follows the path set down by an earlier great writer. Only after all that does it start to find its own voice, to convince in its own right.

What is all that if not the young author’s path? Learning their craft; learning how to structure so that the text doesn’t just fly off in all directions. In the foreword to Fugue for a Darkening Island, Christopher Priest talked of how he was over-influenced by his then literary heroes, and that’s what’s happening here when the text apes Mann’s text.

At about the half way point I was close to abandoning this book. Actually though, what it’s doing is genuinely clever. You aren’t just told how a novelist learns his trade, you feel it as the novel itself makes mistakes but improves as it progresses. The novel begins to embrace something beyond its own artifice, its own influences, just as within the fiction Orpheus as a writer develops his own craft.

The Attic then isn’t insular at all, even if it often seems so as Kiš plays with words and images like a child let loose in a toy store after closing time. Rather, it is about emerging from that attic of self-referentiality and breaking through to the world beyond the writer, writing about the external and not just the internal.

“So anyway – how are you amusing yourself these days?” asked Osip.

“I am writing The Attic,” I said.

We were walking toward the fortress along the edge of the Danube because Osip had resigned himself to the fact that Marija wasn’t going to show up for their date.

“That’s bound to be some kind of neo-realism,” he said. “Dirty, slobbery children, and laundry strung up in the narrow gaps between the buildings of some suburb, and dockside dives, shit-faced railroad switchmen and, hookers…”

“There’s some of that in it,” I responded. “After all, the title itself suggests as much. But it remains a horribly self-centred book…”

I don’t want to oversell it. It’s clever and it’s fun and most importantly of all it’s well written but it isn’t a weighty tome of sombre European insight. It’s not Thomas Mann (not that he’s particularly sombre now I think about it). Then again, why should it be? It’s a first novel after all.

Some other reviews I found interesting can be found here (and that article includes a useful career overview for Kiš) and here. There are also some more quotes here.

I have white skin. Light brown hair. Blue eyes. I am tall. I usually dress conservatively: sports jackets, corduroy trousers, knitted ties. I wear spectacles for reading, though they are more an affectation than a necessity. I smoke cigarettes occasionally. Sometimes I drink alcohol. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church; I do not have any objections to other people doing so. When I married my wife, I was in love with her. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I have no political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

My skin is smudged with dirt. My hair is dry, salt-encrusted and itchy. I have blue eyes. I am tall. I am wearing now what I was wearing six months ago, and I smell awful. I have lost my spectacles, and learned to live without them. I do not smoke at all most of the time, though when cigarettes are available I smoke them continually. I am able to get drunk about once a month. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church. When I last saw my wife, I was cursing her, though I have learned to regret it. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I do not think I have political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

Among the first books I reviewed when I started this blog was Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions. After writing the review, I looked online to see what others had thought of it and discovered that I’d liked it more than most. The reason seemed to be because the London Kunzru was writing about was the London of my childhood; I recognised his book as true.

The problem with that of course is that if a novel needs a reader who was there (though I was only a small child in the 1970s) then it will struggle both for longevity and a wider readership. My Revolutions did find a wider audience than just me, but not as appreciative a one as he found for some of his other books.

I grew up in Notting Hill, more specifically North Kensington (near the north end of Ladbroke Grove for anyone reading this who knows London). It wasn’t then as fashionable as it is now; in fact North Kensington (despite what the word Kensington suggests) was one of London’s more deprived areas. It was also an area with large Black British and Afro-Caribbean communities and there were often tensions between them and the older white communities (Sam Selvon’s excellent The Lonely Londoners and his Moses Ascending both explore the area’s immigrant experience, my reviews of both are here).

Sometimes there were riots, and as a child one particular street (All Saints Road, the band All Saints named themselves after it though god knows why) was known as “the front line” because it was seen as a border between black and white neighbourhoods and a no-go zone for police and whites. The no-go bit was a myth incidentally, I walked through it on several occasions without the slightest problem (other than an assumption I was looking to buy drugs).

All of which brings me to Christopher Priest’s 1972 novel Fugue for a Darkening Island. Priest is a writer of what is sometimes called slipstream fiction, a term he invented as far as I know. He provided the foreword for Anna Kavan’s Ice and is a writer who straddles the line between literary and science fiction without recognising the boundaries of either. He can be challenging, and while Fugue is far from his best novel in some ways it’s perhaps the most challenging of all of them.

Racists sometimes talk of immigrants “swamping” Britain; of them “overrunning” the country. Fugue is a novel in which their worst fears are realised, That’s what challenges here: it’s not the fact that the narrative is a mosaic which cuts forward and back among the protagonist’s experiences and memories so that only by the end is the entire story clear; it’s the fact that Priest has written a book which explores racism in a profoundly visceral way.

War has broken out in Africa. Some of the powers involved have got hold of nuclear weapons. They use them, rendering large parts of Africa uninhabitable. The result is a human tidal wave of refugees; millions of them. Many come to the UK; more than the UK can absorb. The result is social breakdown, civil war, the descent of the UK into the sort of hellhole the Africans are fleeing from.

The obvious parallel is with War of the Worlds, in which Britain finds itself on the receiving end of the colonialism that it dishes out elsewhere, thanks to the Martians. Here there are no Martians, but the essence is the same. Priest asks the same question as did Wells, how do we like it when the atrocities happen in the Home Counties, rather than Rwanda or the Congo?

Fugue is written from the perspective of Alan Whitman, but not chronologically. Some sections are from his life before the UK’s collapse, with Alan indulging in meaningless affairs while ignoring both the increasing sham of his marriage and a dangerous drift to the hard right in UK politics. Some are from the period in which society began to break down, with Alan looking for somewhere he and his family can safely wait out the approaching storm. Some are from after that storm has hit, with Alan one refugee among many looking now for his wife and daughter who have been kidnapped by an Afrim militia group.

The Afrim are what the African refugees are called in the novel. It’s never explained why, which lends it a certain verisimilitude as the characters after all would know why. As the novel takes Alan’s perspective though the Afrim are largely faceless; a mass of indistinguishable black aggressors who literally steal his women. It’s a troubling portrayal and it plays directly into racist stereotypes (“Once the Afrims have a street to themselves, they spread through the rest of the district in a few nights”, and later “‘Then you should know that the Afrim command has set up several brothels of white women for its troops.’”). I don’t think this is a racist novel, but it’s definitely capable of a (incorrect) racist interpretation.

Priest describes in the detailed and fascinating foreword how he was in part inspired by the cosy catastrophes of writers such as John Wyndham and John Christopher. He wrote against a backdrop of political violence in Northern Ireland, barricaded streets and paramilitaries driving families from their homes.

We realized we would probably be forced to abandon our house in Southgate the day the barricade was erected at the end of our road. Although terrified by the prospect we did nothing, because for several days we thought we might be able to adjust to the new mode of life.

In Northern Ireland sectarianism led to social cleansing, not that we use that term when it happens in the developed West. Catholics and Protestants often found themselves living in different areas, and entering one group’s territory if you belonged to the other could be dangerous even if you weren’t yourself political. For Catholics and Protestants read Hutus and Tutsis, Serbians and Bosnians, a myriad sectarian squabbles.

The following day we were at home when we heard the noise of the Martins being evicted. They lived almost opposite us. We had not had much to do with them and since the Afrim landings had seen even less of them. Vincent Martin was a highly qualified research technician and worked at an aircraft components factory in Hatfield. His wife stayed at home, looking after their three children. They were West Indians.

Soon Alan is on the road with his wife and daughter, heading to his wife’s parents in Bristol and avoiding “the barricaded Afrim enclaves at Notting Hill and North Kensington”. We know they don’t make it, and Alan becomes a refugee pushing his few belongings across England in a wheelbarrow. The violence spirals out, not just white against black but nationalists against those who sympathise with the plight of the African refugees. Alan finds himself in a warzone, policed by UN troops who do little to help. When he meets combatants it doesn’t really matter much which side they’re on because none of them give a damn about the civilians caught in the middle. At best the various militaries hand out propaganda, then move you along.

He offered me an immediate commission into the Secessionist forces, but I turned it down, explaining that I had to consider Sally. Before we left he handed me a sheet of paper which explained in simple language the long-term aims of the Secessionist cause. These were a restoration of law and order; an immediate amnesty for all Nationalist participants; a return to the parliamentary monarchy that had existed before the civil war; the restitution of the judiciary; an emergency housing programme for displaced civilians; and full British citizenship for all contemporary African immigrants. It reflected exactly what I hoped would happen, but all our recent experiences had underlined the impossibility of a peaceful solution to the present chaotic fighting.

Alan incidentally spends a fair chunk of the novel criticising his wife’s passivity and refusal to recognise what’s going on and so help herself. As the novel progresses though it becomes evident that Alan’s not really that different, that what he hates in her is in part the mirror of his own failings. Fugue is as much an exploration of Alan’s psychology and how he reacts under extreme pressure as it is a bringing home of conflicts we’re used to seeing on the TV, and it’s that dimension which ultimately makes this a better book than many of those which inspired it – Alan is simply more real, more flawed and human, than most protagonists are in this sort of book.

Fugue isn’t without its problems. In the foreword Priest talks about how he thinks that when he wrote it he was too influenced by the coolly distant style of the 1970s new wave movement and by writers such as Brautigan and Vonnegut. Part of the reason he rewrote the book was to change stylistic and language choices which worked in the 1970s but which with the passing of time carried overt political interpretations which hadn’t been intended, but part too was that with hindsight he felt that his influences had resulted in a book the language of which didn’t really suit the subject matter. I’ve not read the original, pre-revision, version, but even here there is at times a conflict between the intentionally flat prose and the horror it describes.

I’ll definitely be reading more Priest, and I’m glad I read this because while it is exceptionally bleak in both tone and outlook, it does humanise the nameless refugees who from time to time populate our news. There used to be a saying in English, there but for the grace of God go I. It’s gone out of fashion, but it expresses an important truth. Given different circumstances, a run of bad luck, political developments beyond our control, those people we perhaps send a little money or a food or old clothes donation to could be us.

In my last review, of Berlin Alexanderplatz, I talked at the end about how that novel continued to have a contemporary resonance. Fugue, despite the unlikely subject matter, does too in its way. I’ll leave you with two final quotes:

The country was in deep recession. We had a government that prided itself on fiscal expertise, but they made one bad decision after another. John Tregarth and his government had first come to power because of their economic policies but the balance of payments was in the red for month after month, public borrowing was at an all-time high, prices continued to rise steeply and an increasing number of people were made unemployed.

and

Meanwhile, democracy was taking its turn, and a General Election was held in Britain. It was a time of economic recession, with many people jobless. Inflation was high, loans were difficult to obtain, many companies were going out of business. A new right-wing party, initially a splinter group from the Conservatives, campaigned successfully on the basis of economic reform and isolationism as a cure for our employment problems.

The cover above is the one I have. I couldn’t resist sharing this one though, which utterly misrepresents the novel on pretty much every front:

Anyone who bought the book on the basis of that cover would have been sadly disappointed.