The Blue Book By A. L. Kennedy

The Blue Book

By A. L. Kennedy

As regular readers of this page will be aware, I am an A. L. Kennedy fan, having already given overwhelmingly positive notices to her two preceding novels, 2004's Paradise and 2007's Day.

Writing as someone who has read all of this Scottish writer’s previous novels and short-story collections, and been an avid promoter of and enthusiastic proselytiser for them, sometimes to the point of heroine-worshipping partisanship, it gives no pleasure to opine that The Blue Book is, by a long way, the weakest fiction in an otherwise dazzling oeuvre.

The plot is simple, verging on trite: a middle-aged woman goes on a transatlantic cruise with her attentive boyfriend, meets a roguish ex-lover en voyage, and leaves her boyfriend for her ex. The woman is Elizabeth Caroline Barber, the boyfriend is plain old Derek, and the ex is Arthur Peter Lockwood. Elizabeth, formerly Beth, is temporarily fleeing the UK, in flight from her past, which mostly means the life she shared with the charismatic Arthur, when she partnered him in touring church halls as mediums, perfecting the arcane but also practical skills utilised by believable frauds in facilitating the bereft and bereaved to contact their deceased loved ones on “the other side”. When Elizabeth finally rejected what once seemed an intoxicating game as merely an unpardonable series of tawdry crimes, Arthur continued his search for the right way to do wrong, or to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. He now subsidises free closure for the traumatised and dispossessed (e.g. Agathe in Montreal, a survivor of Rwandan ethnic cleansing, while her husband and son were not) by preying on the super-rich (e.g. Peri Arpagian in New York, a widow still missing her passed-on, self-made mining industrialist and environmental polluting husband, Mels), and does very well for himself too, into the bargain. Elizabeth and Arthur still met occasionally, for weekends of sexual oblivion, but their desperate affection lacerated as much as it consoled. Thus, poor Derek, who is “perfectly adequate”, and may be planning to propose marriage, but spends most of the crossing in bed with seasickness, not helped by the fact that after Elizabeth encounters Arthur she starts substituting anodyne but ineffective medication for his seasick tablets.

So, why doesn’t it work? All the usual stylistic ticks and familiar techniques are present and correct: the italics to indicate interior monologue and/or sarcastically toned stream of consciousness; the bold type for emphasis within those excursions; the short, sometimes one-sentence, sometimes even one-word paragraphs; the rhetorical repetitions. These have proved invaluable resources before, but such devices have grown over-familiar through overuse, and should perhaps be pressed into action more sparingly. As it is, they are beginning both to look and sound like emotional incontinence, a literary running off at the mouth, or mind. Of course, it can be argued that this modus operandi provides an accurate representation in prose of Elizabeth’s thought processes and how she feels, an appropriate matching of style to content, but the close juxtapositioning of reams of lazy, loose writing with wonderfully arresting insights wrapped in poetic phrasing is highly frustrating. Kennedy fails to, ahem, strike a happy medium. There is also the fact that Elizabeth’s situation doesn’t seem to warrant such neurotic flights.

The downgrading of Derek from harmless stooge to petulant control freak is convenient but contrived, and ultimately self-serving. The sporadic direct addressing of the reader in the second person singular, as a performer would an audience, is far from innovative, featuring prominently as it did in Jay McInerney's 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City, and is a staple of postmodern fiction, for example Italo Calvino's 1979 masterpiece, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Besides which, the “you” addressed switches willy-nilly between being the reader and Elizabeth talking to herself. Then, the significance of the title is never adequately explained, but it is certainly no exhaustive meditation on an area of the psychic and colour spectrum as thorough as William Gass's beautiful essay, On Being Blue. Or maybe it’s because Hilary Mantel gave us a much more substantial and satisfying exploration of the hocus-pocus thing in 2005’s Beyond Black, perhaps because it paid more attention to social context than Kennedy chooses to do here. Finally, there is the “tragic revelation” at the end which is supposed to explain everything (and why do I feel the need to resort to that unpardonable mannerism of both writing style and speech pattern, the inverted commas or finger-flexing, when reviewing this book?), but which instead feels woefully tacked on and, as the youthful Martin Amis would have put it, “real dead babies”. In short, the whole book is a series of unlikely occurrences and outlandish situations which, as they say, “fail to convince”.

Granted, this pulling a rabbit out of a hat, narratively speaking, is meant to mimic a magic, or a confidence, trick. But there are few things more embarrassing to watch than a conjuror, or a conman, who doesn’t pull it off. I didn’t “believe” a word of it, and that is what makes this latest piece of sleight of hand, by the gifted illusionist A. L. Kennedy, her first serious misstep.

First published in The Sunday Independent.

Paradise By A.L. Kennedy

Paradise 

By A.L. Kennedy

Hannah Luckraft drinks too much. She’s been drinking too much since she was seventeen, and now she’s pushing forty, with nothing much to show for it: ‘Because I was born with the absolute certainty that I would die before leaving thirty. I arrived with ten toes and blue eyes and death firmly in mind. I passed the age when lives should be taken in hand, knowing that no such formalities would be required. For me, there would be no pension, no insurance, no prudent mortgage plan, no fretting over outrages in homes for the elderly, or the ultimate loss of my health and faculties. I was carefree. And completely wrong, of course.’ There is also no child, which in her ‘personal arithmetic’ means ‘Hannah Luckraft = Nothing’.

Hannah, whose nomenclature manages to combine both the idea of grace and religious longing in its ‘Christian’ first part with the trusting to blind fate (rather than faith) of someone all at sea in treacherous waters in its Family second half, will drink anything she can get her hands on, including the ever reliable old standby from schooldays, cough mixtures, although she’s not too keen on lager. Her favourite is: ‘Bushmill’s, County Antrim, 700 millilitres, 40 per cent. I mean, what else do you need to know? Not that, as an additional courtesy, you don’t turn it in your hands and love the rounded corners and the dapper weight and the elegant cut of the label: the black with the white and the gold, all shaped around each other to mark out an arch: a long, slim doorway to somewhere else. And God bless the rectangular bottle, for it will not roll and harm itself.’ She regularly has blackouts, waking up without a clue where she is, only to recollect later that – to take a random example – she spent a portion of the previous evening giving a vigorous blowjob to the unattractive total stranger she now finds herself chatting to across a hotel breakfast table. 

Fans of the quick-fix quackery dignified under the term ‘psychiatry’, or the more long drawn-out charlatanism which passes itself off as ‘therapy’, will search in vain for THE REASON Hannah behaves in this punishingly self-destructive way. Her childhood has been comfortable and stable, in fact a lot less traumatic than average. She is blessed with loving, supportive and – most important of all, given her inclinations – forgiving parents. Then there’s her doctor brother, Simon, whose social and material success may be a standing reproach to Hannah (who is, ridiculously, ‘something in cardboard’, that is until she gets the sack and starts working in a bar) and who, while he may have a smug shrew for a wife and a baby on the way, still cares enough to get her into a treatment clinic in Canada, and foot the bill for it. Plus there’s Robert, her recently acquired dentist boyfriend, whom she fell for because of his ‘drinker’s smile’. Yes, he’s as big a dipsomaniac as she is, if not worse, but that doesn’t stop her being crazy about him.

Doubtless any therapist worth his inflated 50-minute-hourly fee would dub this relationship ‘co-dependent’, but our Hannah isn’t about to be taken in by any of their value-laden, socially-controlling, self-serving guff, and much satire is knocked out of her time in recovery: ‘This morning, we’re sitting in a circle again – this means we’re doing something to make us better, the kind of something that we get instead of treatment. Apparently it’s a known fact that no one has ever recuperated from any unfortunate state without being slapped down into a grisly ring of pink Naugahyde armchairs and made to discuss their personal lives with a dozen emotional vampires listening.’ Shrinks aren’t any better, in Hannah’s view, their evil bunk giving them a license to behave much worse than priests and nuns ever did: ‘Tomorrow morning, I’m supposed to go off and have my skull cracked by some consultant, let him fumble around when there’s nothing left for anyone to find. I’ve been professionally groped here for over a week: whatever thrill there was in it has gone. I’ll tell him my dream and he’ll grill me about masturbation or fetishes and then try to make me feel abnormal. This doesn’t suit people like me… We need something gentle.’  

So, why does she drink? If the standard answer is ‘To forget’, and the further routine inquiry ‘To forget what?’ is always inevitably met by the comic reply, ‘I’ve forgotten’, none of this is applicable to Hannah. For she remembers, in painful, self-lacerating detail. Indeed, it would be easy to conclude that her default setting is remorse, if it were not for the cutting, paradoxical humour with which it is leavened. Why does she drink? ‘I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would – but there isn’t. So I drink.’ Maybe it would be better to ask a geneticist why she is the way she is; or, failing that, a philosopher. For the metaphysical ironies and moral ambiguities in Kennedy’s work are beyond most of her contemporaries, and are expressed, as they could only be, in a prose style that is virtuoso in its linguistic brilliance. If this review contains excessive quotation, it is simply because this is very definitely a case where it is better to let the writing do the talking. Kennedy thrives on paradox: Paradise is, obviously, an inferno, but it is nonetheless a paradise for all that.

Allegedly a teetotaller, Kennedy has here performed a miracle of imaginative empathy. One would have to go back over seventy years, to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, to find a woman writing so well about the interiority of the drinking life. As it is, this is a lyric work which bears comparison with Malcolm Lowry’s rather more epic booze hound’s bible, Under The Volcano. It ends with a supremely well-rendered surreal train journey, which turns into a sort of pilgrimage, full of happy serendipities.

There are always only a handful of gifted and important writers in the world at any particular time, writers who really matter. Already an accomplished practitioner of the short story, with three previous highly ambitious novels behind her, Paradise provides further evidence, if any more were needed, that A.L. Kennedy is among that select company. It also, incidentally, bears ongoing witness to the thoroughgoing, media-driven farce that is the Mann Booker Prize, for which this wonderful novel did not even make the long list, much less take its rightful place among the shortlisted six.

First published in The Sunday Independent