Anglocentric Nostalgia for the Past?

What, then, of the 2009 shortlist? At first glance, it breaths the spirit of the 1970s. Fiercely English, it is strongly inclined to the historical narrative. Every one of these books explores the past in some form.

Taking few risks, it offers JM Coetzee and AS Byatt the prospect of a return visit to the winner's podium. In a recession, it's a list that will transmit a warm glow of reassurance into the troubled breasts of nervous UK booksellers. God knows what they will make of it in Beijing or Kuala Lumpur.

Occasionally, as it has every right to do, the prize turns its back on posterity. This year, Booker is in denial, big time.

Robert McCrum weighs up this year's Booker shortlist in The Observer, and it's very nice of him to consider what we think here in KL, isn't it? (I think we just shrug and say "Fine, just guarantee us some quality reading." You all agree?)

Tim Adams in the same paper makes a very good case for the Booker shortlist this year being symptomatic of the general British desire to escape into the past.

Fiction editor at The Telegraph, Lorna Bradbury, is very happy with the selection:

There hasn’t been a Man Booker shortlist to match this one since 2005, when the shortlisted novelists Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith went on to split the judges so irrevocably that John Banville came out the ultimate winner. ... If the longlist contained the requisite number of outsiders and eccentrics, such as James Lever’s comic novel narrated by Cheeta the Chimp, the shortlist concentrates on quality and seriousness

In an interesting piece at The Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole, reckons that Irish authors William Trevor, Ed O’Loughlin and Colm Tóibín didn't make the cut this year because :

The advance word had hinted at a feeling that there have been quite enough Irish winners for the moment, thank you. .... (And also because) Irishness is losing its gloss.

So much can be read into a shortlist!

Fiction at the Crease

Q : How do you start a book?

Joseph O'Neil : As inadvertantly as possible. Then I continue as accidentally as possible.

I'm sure I wasn't Joseph O'Neil's ideal reader. I began Netherland some weeks ago. It wasn't the all-absorbing holiday read I was looking for and I put it down left the last 30 pages or so unread until today when I picked up it again today to take with me into that wonderful reading zone - the hairdressers.

The novel, which, you may remember, won a great deal of critical praise and was longlisted for last year's Booker Prize, as well as being nominated one of the ten best novels of 2008 by The New York Times and sweeping up the Pen/Faulkner Award. Obama was apparently also reading it.

The cover is decorated with words lifted from reviews - Wonderful (Jonathan Safran Foer), Stunning (New York Times), Breathtaking (Observer). I felt a measure of guilt most of the way through the novel that I felt some ambivalence towards it. Most of the way through I just felt I couldn't get a handle on it, there didn't seem enough that was cohesive to hold it together, and I longed for that simple, old-fashioned thing - a good story, to take over.

Netherland is a pretty unusual book : it's a novel about New York but focuses more on immigrant communities than the skyscrapers of Manhattan; it's a post-9/11 novel in which the incident is hardly mentioned (yet casts an enormous shadow); and its a novel about cricket set in a country where there sport is scarcely played at all.

Financial analyst Hans van der Broek finds himself alone in New York when his wife Rachel leaves him to go back to London, and finds refuge in cricket, played almost entirely by immigrants, mainly Asian and from the Caribbean. He becomes friendly with Chuck Ramkissoon, the "oddball umpiring oracle", a wheeler-dealer businessman with dubious connections who takes him under his wing. Later Chuck is found murdered - his wrists handcuffed and his body thrown into the Gowanus Canal.

But if if the reader expects the solving of and fallout from the murder to drive the story, this isn't the case at all. O'Neil actually says in the notes that accompany the novel that he actually abandoned a first draft because it was:

... undermined by a preoccupation with plot.

And then there is Hans marriage to Rachel. We're never quite sure why she decides to leave him and take their son, Jake, back to London, and why she can't get back together with him. We're not privy to her thoughts and we aren't given the opportunity to warm to her, while Hans who comes across as ineffectual and inert. He drifts and allows matters to take their course, rather than taking any kind of decisive action. It isn't surprising that he finds himself following in the wake of the charismatic Chuck.

Yet O'Neill catches Han's depression and sense of dislocation most convincingly, in the first person narration. He employs an almost stream-of-consciousness style where one memory flows back into another (very much in the style of John Banville in The Sea - I don't think that it is coincidence that O'Neill is also an Irish author), the novel moving between layers of time and recollection. I was also reminded very strongly - perhaps because of the introspection and aching melancholy - of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter : we get the sense of a real man doing his best to make sense of his circumstances.

It occurs to me too that this might be another example of what Atwood calls The Male Labyrinth Novel.

There are some beautifully observed scenes of New York, especially those which centered on his quirky neighbours in the Chelsea Hotel (where the author actually lives), and his visits to Brooklyn. I appreciate too what I learned about cricket (especially how pitch conditions and the weather affect play, and about how it is a game of perspectives - knowing when to switch from the wide view to the telescopic).

But I'm still not sure what to tell you about whether I enjoyed the novel or not. I still feel I'm pulling together the threads and making sense of it, but I suspect that this might be one I want read again.

If you want a taste of Netherland, you can read the first chapter here.

Now then, what are you reading?

Barry for Costa

Irish novelist Sebastian Barry takes this year's Costa Prize for The Secret Scripture ... despite most of the judges feeling that the book was deeply flawed and almost none of them liking the ending!

What redeemed it? According to Matthew Parris, chair of the final judges:

Sebastian Barry has created one of the great narrative voices in contemporary fiction in The Secret Scripture. It is a book of great brilliance, powerfully and beautifully written.

The novel tells the story of Roseanne McNulty, a very old woman living in a mental institution and secretly writing her memoirs in an attempt to reclaim her past. Her narrative is interwoven with that of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene, whose:

...own sense of self becomes entangled with the fate of this mysterious old lady.

The novel was earlier shortlisted for the Booker prize.

Postscript :

All literature is flawed, everything creative is by its nature flawed ...

says Lisa Jewell, one of the Costa judges, in The Telegraph, explaining that Barry's book :

... was, quite simply, magic.

In the same paper, Robert Colville asks why the judges are so grudging in their praise, but seems to rather welcome their honesty!

Postscript 2 :

As James Delingpole so rightly points out in The Telegraph:

And their shining example of the novel that isn't flawed is what exactly? All novels are flawed, that's the whole point. Dickens goes on a bit as – my, and how! – does George Eliot; War and Peace ends with 100 pages of rambling, esoteric spiritual drivel; Proust badly needs pruning; Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer aren't great prose stylists. ... As a novelist it's the first – and most depressing – thing you learn about your trade: that between the sweeping ambition of your conception and the reality of your execution there will always be a terrifyingly large gulf. All novels, even the greatest ones, are failures. It's just that most readers are too polite to notice.

Enright and the Workings of Memory

Just a-musing for my own amusement ...

One aspect of Anne Enright's Booker winning novel that I found fascinating was the way the author takes apart memory.

As I mentioned in the review I wrote for the Star:

Most novels play out the past in flashbacks which make memory appear to be an instantly accessible video with every detail rendered distinctly. This is of course not at all how our minds work, and Enright shows how an apparently solid memory of an event has to be modified in the light of objective evidence. “I don’t know if I have the correct picture in my mind,” she says, and talks of “shifting stories and waking dreams” which she must sift through to find the truth.

How do we actually remember things that have happened to us in the past? In fact we don't, the brain quite simply creates an illusion.

Here's an extract from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness. Try this on for size. :

If you've ever tried to store a full season of your favourite television show on your computer's hard drive, then you already know that faithful representation of things in the world require gobs of space. And yet, our brains take millions of snapshots, record millions of sounds, add smells, tastes, textures, a third spatial dimension, a temporal sequence, a continuous running commentary - and they do this all day, every day, year after year, storing these representations of the world in a memory bank that never seems to overflow and yet allows us to recall at a moment's notice that awful day in the sixth grade when we teased Phil Meyers about his braces and he promised to beat us up after school. How do we cram the vast universe of our experience into the relatively small storage compartment between our ears? ... We cheat ... the elaborate tapestry of our experience is not stored in memory, at least not in its entirety. Rather, it is compressed for storage by first being reduced to a few critical threads, such as a summary phrase ("Dinner was disappointing") or a small set of key features (tough steak, corked wine, snotty waiter). Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating - not actually retrieving - the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory. This fabrication happens so quickly and effortlessly that we have the illusion (as a good magician's audience always does) that the entire thing was in our heads the entire time.

The other writer I said similar things about was John Banville - the way memories in The Sea cascade one from another.

Both Enright and Banville are Irish writers, so is there something in the drinking water that makes them so concerned with the depicting memory in a more realistic way?

Of course, they might be part of a legacy inherited from James Joyce, the grandaddy of stream-of-consciousness writing and they must be influencing each other.

Truth is, I'm getting less and less happy to read novels in which characters remember everything in full technicolour detail without the slightest hesitation.

But then there's the danger of slowing the narrative down so I suppose that as a payoff we accept the artifice.

So how do the writers among you deal with memory?

Enright's Complex Mix of Emotions

Sarah Lyall profiles Booker winner Anne Enright in the New York Times and makes the point that a win opens you to all kinds of scrutiny.

Enright was strongly criticised for an essay she wrote for the diary section of The London Review of Books about the parents of missing child Madeleine McCann. (I don't know if Malaysian readers have been following the case - we did after all have the Nurin Jazlin case to chill our hearts ...).

In a piece that was unflinchingly honest (her hallmark after all!) about the complex and sometimes contradictory emotions that flooded through her, watching the news broadcasts about Madeleine day after day. Enright:

... tried to work through a cacophony of complicated emotions toward the girl’s parents, including reluctant voyeurism, distaste and pity.

The British press blew the piece, and her confession in it that she had disliked the McCanns earlier than most people, out of all proportion. As Enright explains in the piece, it was an impulse she felt ashamed of afterwards, the anger growing out of the fact that they had left their child alone.

(And if we honestly examine our feelings in the Nurin case, well, aren't they equally complex?)

Of her writing Enright says:

The kids go to school; I sit down and write ... The kids go to bed; I sit down and write. ... I find that the whole sense of anxiety and largeness, the sense that you’re writing everything, the allness of it, disappears completely ... You have just three or four hours a day, and you’re going to write a book, and it just shrinks the work into its proper proportion.

Enright's Gathering Pips Pip

Anne Enright's novel won this year's Booker. I confess I'm feeling miserable.

(I sympathise with Sam Jordison's sentiments on the Guardian blog this morning:

Oh shit!)

This is not to say that the book isn't in many senses a worthy winner. It's well-written, honest and brave, and I very much like the way it draws on the way memory works. (I have a lot more to say about it, but you'll have to wait for Sunday's review!)

Sadly, I don't think that this is a novel that most readers in Malaysia will enjoy or find easy to relate to (with the exception of folks like Eric and Leon!) unlike other titles on the shortlist (especially Mr. Pip and Animal's People which I predict will do very well here).

Perhaps they will buy The Gathering because winning the Booker is an endorsement of quality and then find it depressing, dark and difficult and perhaps be further alienated by this thing called "literature".

(Please do feel free to prove me wrong, however.)

Jordison reckons that the choice is :

... the safe option. It's a vote for familiar themes that are close to home (especially if you're in the middle-aged middle classes like most Booker judges inevitably will be), and for skilful, but never really daring writing. ...The Gathering is nothing like as unsettling as Darkmans, as passionate as Animal's People as or even as endearing as Mister Pip. And isn't as funny as any of them either.

In the Independent, Chair of the judges, Howard Davison says of the judging process:

We found it a very powerful, uncomfortable and even at times, angry book. It's an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language. We think she's an impressive novelist. We expect to hear a lot more from her. ... The book is very tightly structured. It's seen through the dyspeptic vision of the central character. She's a woman at a difficult moment in her life.

I'm interested to hear that when the judges drew up the long list of 13 books, they:

.. probably did not expect that to be the winner, but it came through very strongly on re-readings.

because I found that I like the book much better too on second-reading when I could appreciate how it had been put together and where it was going. But should we need to read a book a second time to really get the best from it?

Incidentally, it's interesting to note that all the publicity for the books hasn't translated into great sales in Britain:

On Chesil Beach is far outselling the other books on the shortlist combined ... Sales figures of the other books, by contrast, exemplify the tough climate for literary fiction in the marketplace - and Enright's book has so far shifted just 3,253 copies. The latest figures from Nielsen BookScan show that the McEwan has sold a total of 120,362; Nicola Barker's Darkmans, 11,097; Mister Pip, 5,170; Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist 4,425, and Indra Sinha's Animal's People 2,589.

(Top pic from the Guardian. Bottom pic from the Telegraph shows the shortlisted authors at the Guildhall last night. Left to right - Nichole Barker, Mohsin Hamid , Indra Sinha, Anne Enright and Ian McEwan.)

An Appropriated Language

Laughed at this quote from Banville in an Independent interview last month:

Peculiarly for Irish writers, English isn't really our language. We might have spoken it for 200 years, but we don't necessarily always feel at home in it. The problem for us Irish novelists is that we publish in London and are reviewed in England by English reviewers who often regard Irish novels as a failed attempt to be English. I read something the other day that referred to the 'Celtic fringe' of writers. I thought: Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Beckett - if this is the Celtic fringe, where would I find the full head of hair?

Some Further Thoughts on Banville's The Sea

Just to add a little coda.

Yes, again I feel that it it hard to do justice to such a complex novel with such a niggardly word limit. I wanted to write more about the characters, especially about Max the narrator whom I did not warm to at all. (Presumably we are meant to feel like this about him, Banville is much too skilled a writer to think otherwise, but then it begs the question - why?) I also must confess that although I felt that he wrote beautifully about his wife's illness (i was close to tears at times, particularly at the achingly sad scene in the kitchen after her diagnosis, and the description of her bleak photographs of the suffering of other patients in the hospital), the other thread of plot - the events of that fatefully childhood summer, never quite ring true.

Are most Malaysian readers going to enjoy this novel? I don't think so. I think many folks looking for a pacier, more accessible read will judge it to be slow and depressing. (I found it beautifully written and thought-provoking. But then I'm odd!)

But if you are a fiction writer or aspire to be one, then you should take a look under the bonnet and see how the engine works, and then see what you can take for yourself.

Most fiction writers are pretty clunky when it comes to handling time past and drawing on a character's memories: cue the heavy-handed flashback - a couple of pages about what happened five years ago with every little detail and line of dialogue realled intact and then back to the present in time for tea.

Our thought processes are much much messier than that! Just watch where your mind goes for any length of time and you have to agree. (Try to meditate and empty your mind and just see those little monkeys of thoughts scampering about!)

Many writers (most notably Joyce in Ulysses) adopted a 'stream-of-consciouness' style, which can place considerable demands on the reader. Banville's prose flows effortlessly from past to deeper past to present and back to pasts again without hiatus, excavating layers of memory and holding them up to the light. It's beautifully done, and I think so far no writer has done it better, although I hunger now to read that other great book about memory Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. (Was this an influence on Banville's prose?)