Another Literary Abduction

Another novel, another missing child!

In Peter Carey's new novel His Illegal Self, the child, a seven year old called Che (named for revolutionary Che Guevara) is not only a willing party to the abduction, he's actually been waiting for it.

They will come for you, man. they'll break you out of here

his neighbour predicts, referring to the boy's parents, famous student radicals on the run from the FBI.

When Dial arrives one day at the apartment Che shares with his WASP grandmother in New Yorks Upper East Side, he recognises her immediately, and soon the pair are on the run from the law and with financial and, with tactical help from the activists, eventually skip the country and find themselves on the run in Australia. Is the young woman with honey-colored skin, tangled hair in 15 shades, hindu necklaces and little silver bells around her ankles his real mother though?

Now I must confess that I found myself frequently scratching my head in the first part of this book, struggling to find out exactly what was happening. I felt as if I were watching a film through frosted class - I couldn't quite get the picture into focus and I felt distanced. Most of the pieces do fall into place later in the novel, but still there is still a need to suspend a fair old bit of disbelief, and I am still not convinced about Dial's motives for taking Che in the first place.

For me the book really began to pull together once the pair move into a hut in the inhospitable Queensland wilds, and find themselves part of an equally inhospitable hippy community (based on a commune Carey had once been part of) guaranteed to knock any residual nostalgia for the good old '60's and 70's firmly on the head.

(I must add a note here while I remember that I am thinking of founding a society for the prevention of cruelty to fictional animals, because the incident with the cat was totally uncalled for, I thought.)

The great strength of the book is in Carey's ability to create characters we can fully believe in and want to root for. His portrait of the watchful, needy Che is pitch perfect. We sympathise deeply with Dial, torn between regret for opportunities lost (she was due to start a new career as a college when she found herself drawn into her friend's mess) and her fierce love for Che whom she took care of for a time when he was a baby. The narrative is told at times from her perspective, at times from his, and I very much like the way that sometimes the same event (most notably the actual abduction) is viewed through both sets of eyes to show the differences in the child's and the adult's perception.

There's also Trevor, their neighbour in the commune is just the kind of wily rascal that Carey excels at creating, who gradually assumes the role of a father figure to Che and lover to Dial.

It's a sort of modern adage that there are two kinds of families, those we are born into, and those we struggle to create. In his novels, Carey frequently draws characters who are in some sense orphaned as these three are. The love that grows gradually between them is earthy and real. So real in fact that I wanted to spin the last few chapters of the book out for as long as possible, though when I got there, the life-affirming ending had me cheering.

So in the end, yes, I was a satisfied reader, although I didn't feel as strongly for the book as I have done for most of Carey's other novels, notably True History of the Kelly Gang and Theft.

Will the novel get Bookered? I bet.

If you want to know more about the book, here are some leads you might follow :

You can read the first chapter of the novel on the New York Times website and there's a very interesting review of the book by Liesl Schilinger which concentrates on its political context.

Ruth Scurr also reviews the book in the Times, describing Carey (very aptly, I think) as :

... a feral writer.

You can also read Carey's Q and A about the book on the Random House website.

Here's an interview from ABC :

Abduction Fiction

Some of my most recent reads seem to have the theme of abducted children running through them, which seems pretty topical. (Another is Peter Carey's His Illegal Self which I also plan to share my thoughts on anon.)

Our book club chose Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as our month's shared read, and I was very happy to re-encounter this old friend of my own adolescence. But I definitely appreciated it far more several (!) decades on.

I particularly love what Preeta calls "voicy" novels, in which we hear the voice of the main character, especially when he or she is not telling us the truth, and sometimes not even aware of their own self-deception.

Humbert Humbert, we learn right from the first page, is a murderer and the paedophile abductor of twelve-year old Dolores Haze alias :

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

The novel is his confession, written later in prison, and it is a meticulous study of obsession. And right from the start it puts the reader in a very uncomfortable position: while we know that what Humbert is doing is morally repugnant, while we are horrified by the chilling tyranny he exerts over his stepdaughter, we are disarmed by his honesty, seduced by the sensuality of the writing, and drawn into collusion with him in this most perverse of love stories. It's a very strange and unsettling sensation.

It's hard to imagine too that the book was written 50 years ago, because it seems so contemporary ... and thanks to the internet perhaps we are more aware of paedophilia now than we were back then.

I felt terribly sorry for Lolita, for although she is no innocent (having gleefully lost her virginity at a summer camp, and knowingly strung our narrator along), HH finally faces towards the end of the book the extent to which he has damaged his step-daughter. Having escaped HH's clutches, she eventually marries a war-veteran and, little more than a child herself, dies in childbirth. Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of all is where HH recalls Lolita talking to a friend about death, and realising that the nature of their relationship utterly precluded being able to reach her on a deeper level.

Lolita is also an early example of the genre referred to as a road novel, and I loved the way the essence of the whole journey criss-crossing small-town America moving is so skilfully distilled into a series of vignettes.

Is Lolita porn? Well, it was certainly seen that way when Nabokov first approached American publishers, five of whom rejected it, fearing that they'd be prosecuted on obscenity charges. The language of the book though is never sexually explicit, and all the more potent and sensual for that.

This is the climax (pun of course intended) of one of the most shocking scenes :

She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …

What dazzling, what shameless writing!

Stephen Metcalf in Slate magazine (asking the question Is Lolita Still Shocking?) says :

Lolita is a disgusting book. Furthermore, the day will never come when it is not a disgusting book.

and certainly it changes the reader's inner landscape. Not so long ago Woolworth's stores across the UK were forced by furious parents to withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita which had been designed for six-year-old girls.

(And Muntaj in our book club - a more respectable pillar of society you could not hope to find - said that the book had severely messed with her head and even when in the supermarket found herself weighing up which young girls HH might consider "nymphets"!)

If you haven't read Lolita yet (hey, where were you hiding?) but are considering picking it up, I'd recommend the Penguin Classics annotated version which seemed to be very helpful when I glanced at a friend's copy (especially as HH throws in a lot of words and phrases in French).

I really enjoyed the radio programmes about the book on NPR, and you can listen to the lovely Jeremy Irons reading the opening of the novel.

Lo. Lee. Ta.

Plumbing Depths of Tastelessness

The hunt for missing child Sharlinie Mohd Nashar has turned into a real dog and pony show with members of the public phoning in false leads, a dubious clairvoyant mathematician (who has clearly been watching Numb3rs!) turning up to steal the limelight ... and now an unscrupulous local publisher cashing in on the act.

Darshini Kandasamy in today's Malay Mail (which I can't link to online since no-one has updated the website for weeks) picked up the story from a reader who said that she was:

... shocked and disgusted ...

when she saw the book Di Mana Sharlinie? (Where is Sharlini?) in a bookshop in Bangsar because :

... her parents are in pain, worrying about their daughter, yet this book publisher is cashing in on their sorrow ...

The 40 page book in Bahasa Malaysia is a compilation of news items about the five year old's disappearance and includes:

... findings of a psychic as to why Sharlinie was taken ...

as well as the particularly insensitive faux film poster of Sharlinie with another missing girl Nurin Jazlin Jazimin, which is featured in the newspaper.

The publisher Penerbitan Karang Media cannot be contacted and there is no authors name, although the book was "arranged" (whatever that means) by "Bob Sri Menanti" and "Ron Sikana", who likewise have left no trace. The book clearly had no ISBN.

(Hmm, the cheques from the sales must be going ... somewhere!)

I have to say that this publication plumbs new depths of tastelessness and one wonders just why any bookshop decided to sell it in the first place! If people don't buy it and booksellers don't stock it, someone is going to lose all their money. (What a shame.)

Actually isn't it sad how a case like this brings out the ugliest side of human nature ... and we aren't just talking about the abductor.

Update (21/2/08) :

The story makes front page news today (and is online) and Sharlinie's father is interviewed about the book. He wasn't approached for permission and is deeply upset by the suggestion that his daughter will meet the same fate as Nurin. He is considering legal action. But does he really need this on top of everything else he is having to put up with?

*(Now which would that be? Can't be Silverfish. I wouldn't think MPH. Might be one of the mamak newsgents in Lucky Garden. Actually we want to know - why the coyness?)

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.