Slade House by David Mitchell

This book review was in the Sunday Independent a few weeks ago:

Slade House

By David Mitchell

(Sceptre, €17.99 stg h/b)

English born, Clonakilty (by way of Japan) resident David Mitchell’s new, shortish novel is an offshoot from his last one, 2014’s rather more epic tome, The Bone Clocks. It shares with its predecessor an overriding theme of Immortality and How To Achieve It, although while in the previous work this goal could be arrived at through fair means or foul, here we take a dramatic turn towards the dark side. The complex emotions of grief and hope, and how they feed off each other, also emerge as central concerns in this particular tale. All this, as well as being a contemporary variation on the venerable tradition of the scary Halloween haunted house story.

  Every nine years, over a timespan beginning in 1979 and culminating in 2015, on the last Saturday of October, a ‘guest’ finds their way, via an obscure door down a dark alley, to the titular abode. There they encounter, in various elaborate, occult-induced disguises, telepathic twins Norah and Jonah Grayer, who feed off the souls of these ‘engifted’ victims to further their own longevity.

  The first of the five sections, each told from the point of view of a different narrator, began life as a stand-alone short story published on Twitter in 2014. Entitled ‘The Right Sort’, it is recounted by 13-year-old Nathan Bishop, whose literal-mindedness signals that he has Asperger’s Syndrome (leading one to speculate that, in Mitchell’s view, Twitter’s 140 character per post format is a medium ideally suited to those with Asperger’s – and that observation is meant as no disrespect to those living with the condition, but rather as a jibe at those who live as though they might as well do so). Accompanied by his depressed, pianist mother, Rita, purportedly to a party where she meets Yehudi Menuhin, a grizzly fate awaits young Nathan.

  Next up is recently divorced policeman Gordon Edmunds, seduced by the equally recently widowed Chloe Chetwynd (a roleplaying Norah). In 1997 we are introduced to a university Paranormal Society field trip, which does not end well for insecure student Sally Timms. 2006 sees Sally’s elder journalist sister Freya lured by supposed witness Fred Pink (a roleplaying Jonah), who thoughtfully provides much of the twins’ colourful back story.

  Things reach a satisfyingly dramatic conclusion in 2015, with the appearance of this cycle’s intended target Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby, a psychiatrist who knows more about the twins and their scurrilous activities than she lets on. Aficionados of Mitchell will recognise her name from previous novels of his, as it is his habit to have characters reappear across his entire oeuvre, in what he has described as ‘a kind of uber novel.’

  Given the scale and ambition of some of Mitchell’s previous books, from 1999’s debut Ghostwritten, to the subsequently filmed Cloud Atlas, and the more recent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks itself, and not forgetting the more straightforward but equally compelling number9dream and Black Swan Green, Slade House may appear as a more minor addition to the endlessly unfolding Mitchell canon. But it shares his signature entertainingly inventive imagination. Postmodern narrative pyrotechnics married to traditional page-turning suspense: he’s got it cracked.

Low

Low: released on January 14^th 1977, 39 (!) years ago, two days shy of my 16th birthday. Nothing had prepared us for this, not 'Changes', not 'Ziggy Stardust', not 'Rebel Rebel', not even 'Station to Station'. (Of course, if we'd been hip enough to have discovered Can, Neu or Kraftwerk at that point, we might have had an inkling, but I wasn't.) Last track 'Subterraneans' was the lushest, scariest (at the same time) thing I'd ever heard. I thought the whole album extraordinary then, and I think it's extraordinary now. As the poster ads of the time read (sighted on first trip to London!, as well as in the NME): 'There's old wave, there's new wave, and there's David Bowie.' For once, the ad men got it bang on. Listen. Enjoy. Marvel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkyp6HCqrs4&list=PLW5_8eogYFDMWprSKGjryhPtPqmgPoPvX

David Bowie R.I.P.

So, I know I’ve posted a few things about Bowie since his death (specifically about the 39^th anniversary of the release of Low last week), but I’ve mainly been keeping my powder dry, ‘cos I knew all I’d be saying is how great he was (is), and how much I was (am) affected by his passing – which is exactly what everyone else is saying too.

But now I’ve actually thought of something original to say, or at any rate something individual to me. The thing is, I never really realised how influenced I was by him, until he died, and then I started thinking about how influenced I was by him. More than that, thinking about his music, and ultimately how much I loved it.

And I think the reason I took this love and influence for granted is that in the popular consciousness, or in my consciousness at least, Bowie lacks the gravitas associated with other singer/songwriters of comparable status, e.g. Dylan, Cohen, Townshend, Lennon, Reed, Cale, Young, Mitchell, Simon, etc. Aside from the fact that he’s slightly younger than those other luminaries, it’s all that dressing up and prancing around and pretending to be someone else, isn’t it, that predisposes us towards taking him less seriously? He was much more of a ‘mere’ ‘pop’ star than the others were (Lennon at the beginning of his career excepted). I mean, unlike them, he’d already been a Mod, and been a hippie, and also unlike them, he was on Top Of The Pops at the height of glam rock, at the same time as Slade and Sweet and Mud and Gary Glitter, and behaving in the same outlandish fashion: how could we know he was going to be any different from those early peers, and have more longevity?

It was the overt theatricality that made him seem more of a media figure and less of an artist (of course, that distinction has blurred somewhat over the years since, and partly as a result of DB’s own collapsing of the difference).  Watching his riveting 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman on YouTube, I found it very interesting that he said the reason for all the different adopted personae was that he had never felt comfortable being on stage as himself. Furthermore, he said that by the start of the ’80s, he felt all the guises were getting in the way of his writing and performing, and so he decided to just ‘be himself’. (Of course, ‘David Bowie’ is another construct as well.) This, arguably, invites the corollary that his creativity only began to flounder when he stopped acting a part (on stage, not in films).

But the point I’m working towards trying to make is that Bowie must have realised, early in his career, be it consciously or unconsciously, that doing rock’n’roll in the traditional way would have been inauthentic for him, and so he embraced his own lack of authenticity. This is an idea and modus operandi that can be traced back at least as far as Wilde and Yeats: give a man mask and he’ll tell you the truth. We are all acting, some of us realise it and some of us don’t. But, and here’s the rub, over time the inauthentic becomes its own form of authenticity, because it’s authentic for him, and authentically him.

Maybe we also didn’t take him as seriously, and value him as much, as those others, because of his mischievousness, his playfulness, his sense of humour. Not that those others mentioned weren’t/aren’t possessed of same, but Bowie’s was always more in your face, less subtle, sometimes making you think he didn’t give a shit. How wrong we were.

Among all the post mortem commentary and obituaries, the adjective that keeps cropping up the most to describe and encapsulate him is his ‘fearlessness’. But I would add another: his generosity. Nowhere was this more apparent and exemplified than in his discoveries. Like Björk, when Bowie collaborated with someone it was almost always to bring someone from relative obscurity to wider public attention – unlike Madonna, for example, who only works with someone who is already hip or happening, thus latching on to the latest craze, the freshest talent, after the fact. Of course, it benefitted him too, but he knew where to look, and used his high media profile to further the careers of others. The list is endless: Mick Ronson, Eno, Fripp, Nile Rodgers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Donny McCaslin. It took a great deal of prescient perspicacity to know how good the first Velvet Underground album was in 1967, to realise that Lou Reed was, to quote from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon in 1972, ‘one of the best songwriters around’, and to produce Transformer; or to know there was something very special gong on with the Stooges’ first two albums, and to mix Raw Power, set up a management deal and recoding contract for Iggy and The Stooges, to say nothing of going on to co-write and co-produce Iggy’s The Idiot and Lust For Life, and even tour for a while in Iggy’s backing band as a keyboard player. All when Lou and Iggy were being ignored or dismissed or derided by the industry and the general public. Indeed, my favourite epitaph that I’ve read so far was that from Iggy Pop: ‘His friendship was the light of my life. I never met such a brilliant person. He was the best of what we can be.’

A gentleman. A scholar. A writer. A total performer. An incisive social commentator. But all done with the lightest of touches. He even made fear and isolation and alienation seem like they might be fun, or not as bad as you thought, or much worse than you thought – but with the hope of the possibility that you might survive them because, after all, he knew all about them, and he had.  Genius. Yes, because it takes a particular kind of genius to be serious but not take yourself too seriously, to be serious but not be taken too seriously. That’s when the fun begins. And it’s only just beginning. The hard work of taking him seriously, I mean. What fun it’s going to be. Watch that man.

Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights By Salman Rushdie

Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights

By Salman Rushdie

(Jonathan Cape, €28.50)

In the near future, a huge storm rips through New York, and thus ‘the strangenesses’ begin. Our hero, the elderly, widowed landscape gardener Raphael Hieronymus Menezes, more popularly known as Mr. Geronimo, finds there is a growing space between his feet and the earth. Jimmy Kapoor, a young wannabe graphic novelist, awakens in his bedroom to see a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub-Stan Lee creation, Natraj Hero. Abandoned at mayor Rosa Fast’s office, it emerges that a baby wrapped in an Indian flag can identify corruption with her mere presence, the guilty coming out in blemishes and boils. A seductive Latina gold digger with a fierce temper, Teresa Saca Cuartos, is soon called upon, issuing lightening bolts from her fingertips, to combat otherworldly forces beyond imagining. And there are more, many more.

  What do they all have in common? They are the descendants of the 12th century union between a good jennia called Dunia, aka the Lightening Princess, and rationalist philosopher Ibn Rushd, better known in Western history as Averroes, who as translator into Latin of the works of Aristotle preserved in Arabic at the library of Alexandria, was responsible for bringing Aristotelian thought back into European culture. (There’s a personal touch here, as Rushdie’s father changed the family’s name to honour Ibn Rushd.) As though treated with early medieval IVF, they produce an astonishing amount of children, all unaware of their semi-supernatural parentage, and inherited fantastical powers.

  It transpires that the strangenesses merely foreshadow a full-blown invasion of the human world by malevolent spirits from another dimension. Four evil jinn, Zabardast, Zumurrud, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, have broken through the wormholes separating this world from Peristan, or Fairyland, and are hell-bent on unleashing an Age of Unreason, causing havoc in the 21st century. If Dunia can round up her distant progeny in time and awaken them to the power of their jinni nature, humanity might have a chance against these forces of darkness. “The seals between the Two Worlds are broken and the dark jinn ride,” she tells Geronimo. “Your world is in danger and because my children are everywhere I am protecting it. I’m bringing them together, and together we will fight back.” And so the novel, Rushdie’s 12^th, like a pyrotechnic C.G.I. literary video game, moves inexorably towards a showdown between the twin abstractions, Good and Evil.

  A further twist in the timescale is provided by the fact that the story is related from far into the future, from which narrative perspective it can be seen that the theme has been one of Rushdie’s perennial favourites: the conflict between faith-based superstition, spawned through fear (i.e. belief in a personal, monotheistic God) [= BAD], and enlightenment Reason [= GOOD]. The front-piece, after all, is Goya’s ‘The sleep of reason brings forth monsters’. But, as the becalmed Epilogue warns us: ‘We read of you in ancient books, O dreams, but the dream factories are closed. This is the price we pay for peace, prosperity, understanding, wisdom, goodness and truth: that the wildness in us, which sleep unleashed, has been tamed, and the darkness in us, which drove the theatre of the night, is soothed…. Mostly we are glad. Our lives are good. But sometimes we wish for the dreams to return. Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long for nightmares.’ In dreams begin responsibilities, indeed.

  So, does it all add up? Two predominant critical views of Rushdie prevail: the ‘yea’s’ hail him as the ‘Ocean of Notions’, an endlessly inventive, imaginative genius; the ‘nay’s’ dub him the ‘Shah of Blah’, not so much as in ho-hum, but as someone who doesn’t know when to shut up – a Wizard of Oz, Vaudevillian travelling show, snake-oil salesman, unaware of his own charlatanism. While there are undoubtedly many pleasurable passages of fine writing to savour here, this new offering often seems like the work of a man with too much time on his hands. Which prompts the question: how much of our leisure time should we readers give to it? The novels which made Rushdie’s name, Midnight’s Children and Shame, married significant socio-historical events (Indian independence, the foundation of Pakistan) to the magic realism he imported from his South American and Eastern European predecessors. This work, like a Bollywoodised Mahabharata, teeming with endless incarnations and avatars, reads like an amusing jeu d’esprit, written because writing is what writers do.

  Without realistic roots or reference points to spring from, which feel more than just gratuitous nods towards profundity, fictional magic can quickly morph into self-indulgent whimsy. Scheherazade’s playful stories in the Arabian Nights, to which this book’s title obviously nods, ultimately had the urgency of ‘stories told against death’. Rushdie’s latter-day version is too much of an ornament to what is now a nice, untroubled life, to be taken too seriously.

First published in The Sunday Independent 18/10/2015

Submission by Michel Houellebecq

Submission

By Michel Houellebecq

(Heinemann, £18.99 stg)

Published in French on January 7th this year, the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, and now appearing in English translation, you couldn’t say controversialist Michel Houellebecq latest novel, his seventh, is not prescient. He has form when it comes to Muslim immigration in France, and jihadism, of course. He was taken to court in 2002 for incitement to racial hatred, after calling Islam ‘the stupidest religion’, and his 1999 novel Platform culminates in the conflagration of a fundamentalist terrorist atrocity on a beach resort in Thailand.

  Submission’s central character is a recognisable Houellebecq type. François, 44, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, is reclusive, friendless, existing on a diet of frozen dinners in his two room apartment, and trying to avoid mithering by postgraduate students he doesn’t consider up to snuff. He usually initiates an annual affair with a female student, which ends in the summer when he receives a message beginning ‘I’ve met someone.’ The current incumbent is 22-year-old Myriam, beautiful, sexy and Jewish, who clearly cares for him, but he can’t respond. He was the author, in his 20s, of a brilliant dissertation on decadent 19th century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of the infamous Au Rebours. 

  Set slightly in the future, Submission partakes of a trait of most of the best science fiction, that of a ‘What if…?’ projection on the present. It is also in the tradition of the dystopian narrative, á la Orwell’s 1984, although the timeline here is rather more truncated and immediate, for this is a dystopia we mostly already inhabit.

  It is 2022, and the apolitical François is settling in to watch the Presidential election results on TV, entertainment he considers second only to the soccer World Cup. After the preliminary voting, two candidates emerge: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, and the head of France’s new Islamic party, Mohammed Ben Abbes. The Socialists coalesce with the Muslim Brotherhood to defeat Le Pen, and Ben Abbes becomes president. Because the Brotherhood cares more about education than the economy, as the chief instiller of appropriate moral values in the next generation, all they ask is that state secondary schools and universities adopt an Islamic curriculum. François is duly informed that he cannot return to his university work unless he converts to Islam, and is retired on a generous pension.

  These events precipitate a crisis of (non) faith, which sees François taking off for the Benedictine abbey in southern France where Huysmans spent his last years after abandoning his dissolute life in Paris and converting to mystical Catholicism in middle age, and thence to the medieval Christian pilgrimage site Rocamadour. Myriam leaves for Israel with her parents, but François concludes “There is no Israel for me.”

  This is no coup d’etat, so little seems to change at first, but over the following months François starts to notice small things, beginning with how women dress. He sees fewer skirts and dresses, more baggy pants and shirts that hide the body’s contours. Non-Muslim women have adopted the style to escape the sexual marketplace that Houellebecq has delineated so well elsewhere. Youth crime declines, as does unemployment when women, grateful for the social engineering of new family subsidies, begin to leave the workforce to care for their children.

  François thinks he sees a new social model developing before his eyes, which he imagines has the polygamous family at its center. Men have different wives for sex, childbearing, and affection; the wives pass through all these stages as they age, but never have to worry about being abandoned. They are always surrounded by their children, who have lots of siblings and feel loved by their parents, who never divorce. François is impressed, but while his admiration may initially stem from a colonial fantasy of the erotic harem, it flourishes as acknowledgement of a secure social order, based on the family.

  The big question here is, how much does Houellebecq himself endorse this view? Curiously, he may not simply be pulling our leg here. When François accedes to the gentle proslytising of suave university president, Robert Rediger, and returns to his now exorbitantly paid teaching post, it seems not solely out of self-interest, if at all. Similarly, when he also edits a complete works of Huysmans, where he concludes that his hero was not really a decadent after all, he genuinely seems to believe this. But if François rolls over, dose that mean Michel H has?

  When asked about ‘the stupidest religion’ remark last January, Houellebecq declared that he had now changed his mind, through reading the Qu’ran. “Perhaps I hadn’t read it with enough care,” he said. “Now I think that a reasonably honest interpretation of the Qu’ran does not end up with jihadism. It would require a very dishonest interpretation to arrive at jihadism.” He also added that Submission is “not Islamophobic. Even an inattentive reading would not see it as that.”

  So, while some in France have complained that the novel fans right-wing fears of the Muslim population, that is to miss Houellebecq’s deeply subversive point: Islamists and anti-immigration demagogues really ought to be on the same side, because they share a suspicion of pluralist liberalism and a desire to return to ‘traditional’ or pre-feminist values, where a woman submits to her husband, just as ‘Islam’ means that a Muslim submits to God. Rediger even permits himself a sly allusion to Pauline Réage’s BDSM classic The Story of O in this regard.

  Which is all fine and well, unless you’re the kind of man who’d like to be with a woman who has a brain, or are the kind of woman for whom domesticity does not provide total fulfilment. 

  The other aspect of this timely novel to be remarked upon is how much Houellebecq has improved as a writer qua writing since his early scattergun sprawls. When he started off, he had a lot to say, but was not always all that careful about how he said it. However, aphoristic sentences such as ‘For man, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure’, and ‘Living together would have spelled the end of all sexual desire between us, and we were still too young to survive that as a couple’ partake of a Wildean exactitude. How much of this greater attention to language is the result of working with more skilled editors and translators we may never know, but it is one more reason to read this novel, from a writer who has never been afraid to grapple with the big questions.

First published in the Sunday Independent, 13/09/2015

Miss Emily by Nuala O'Connor

This review was in The Sunday Independent on August 24th, 2015:

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/elegant-tale-of-a-maid-and-the-making-of-a-poet-31468723.html

Miss Emily

By Nuala O’Connor (Nuala Ní Conchúir)
(Sandstone Press, £8.99 stg, P/B)

The third novel from Galway-based writer Nuala O’Connor (who previously favoured her name rendered in Irish), concerns 17-year-old Ada Concannon, transposed from Tigorra on the banks of the Liffey in Co. Dublin in 1866, to relatives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she finds employment as a maid-of-all-work with the Dickinson family. Our point of entry to this household is Emily, then in her 34th year and effectively retired from society, and better known to posterity than in her lifetime as the mould-breaking poet, who forms a bond with Ada, mostly over cake baking in the kitchen. Between them they narrate the story in alternating, first-person chapters. Apart from stern Father and remote Mother, Emily has an older brother Austin, already left the house and married to her best friend Susan, and a younger sister, Vinnie.

  In many ways, the title seems a misnomer, as Ada is certainly the more vividly and vivaciously depicted character, and the novel is essentially her story. Besides which, Miss Emily doesn’t give enough credit to the servant for the dually shouldered narrative duties. There are, however, some excellent meditations in the Emily sections on the creative process, and the sacrifice and satisfactions of the solitude Emily chooses in order to be productive. ‘And why do I write? I ask myself daily for the answer differs at every dawn, at every midnight. I write, I feel, to grasp at truth. The truth is so often cloaked in misleading speech. Sometimes I let words fall carelessly from my lips when I am with people but, alone, I make them settle carefully onto paper. There they must be accurate and they must work as a choir works to sing a tune well…Oh chimerical, perplexing, beautiful words! I love to use the pretty ones like blades and the ugly ones to console. I use dark ones to illuminate and bright ones to mourn. And, when I feel as if a tomahawk has scalped me, I know it is poetry then and I leave it be.’ 

  Like Yeats after her, Emily too feels forced to choose between perfection of the life or of the work: ‘But how can I explain that each time I get to the threshold, my need for seclusion stops me? The quarantine of my room – its peace and the words I conjure there – call me back from the doorway. Ada could not truly appreciate that the pull on me of words, and the retreat needed to write them, is stronger than the pull of people. Yes, words summon me to the sacramental, unsullied place where my roaming is not halted or harnessed by others. My mind and heart are only free in solitude and there I must dwell.’ Today, she’d just be diagnosed as agoraphobic.  

  Ada too, even if she is occasionally articulate beyond her years and can sound educated above her station, is no slouch when it comes to words, and it is a fine pleasure to see neglected locutions like ‘figairy’, ‘wall-falling’ and ‘laxadaisy’ in print again. Her gift of the gab extends to equally overlooked phraseology, for example ‘as pleased as a dog with two pockets.’

  The plot unfolds at a leisurely pace, and we are well into the book before the vicissitudes Ada must overcome (with Emily’s help and support) kick in, and so it would be spoilerish to reveal their specific nature here. Suffice to say that Ada makes a match with fellow Irish emigrant, Daniel Byrne, but the path of true love doesn’t run smooth, due mostly to the actions of the villain of the piece, the scoundrel Patrick Crohan.

  There are other facets of this well-made historical novel worth exploring. Aside from gender issues, and the relatively powerless position of women in 19th century society, tensions surrounding race and class raise their heads as well. There is a virulent strain of anti-Irish sentiment abroad in the air around Amherst (where there is no Catholic church), among the buttoned-down burghers, mostly voiced through the mouth of the stonily pompous Austin and, to a lesser extent, his wife Susan – although the latter’s prejudices may derive from nothing more than jealousy at Emily’s growing closeness to Ada. An evolving consequence of such attitudes is Emily’s increasing alienation from her immediate family, and their ‘closed, righteous, faces.’ A strong tendency to blame the victim is evident when Ada suffers her setbacks, which are no fault of her own, and are only resolved by the Dickinsons out of a desire to save face and maintain respectability, rather than any notion of humanitarian compassion.    

  Although it may take its own sweet time in getting going, Miss Emily gains considerable pace towards its finale, and is a satisfying and enjoyable read from one of Ireland’s more unsung talents, who deserves to make the step to a much wider readership.