Interzone 226: Rachel Swirsky, ‘Again and Again and Again’

Oh, but I loved this. A two-page chronicle of children rebelling against their once-rebellious parents, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the future, where technology makes the possibilities for shocking the previous generation ever more extreme, until…

Well, if I’m any more specific, I’ll spoil all the fun for you. And that’s what this story is – great fun, and (one suspects) only too true.

Link
Rachel Swirsky’s website

Philippe Claudel, Brodeck’s Report (2007/9): Not the TV Book Group

Introduction

In the wake of The TV Book Club, four book bloggers (Lynne Hatwell of Dovegreyreader Scribbles, Simon Savidge of Savidge Reads, Kirsty of Other Stories, and Kimbofo of Reading Matters) have launched their own online reading group, which they’re calling ‘Not the TV Book Group’. The group will run fortnightly on Sundays for sixteen weeks, with discussions being hosted on each blog in turn. The schedule is:

7 Feb – Philippe Claudel, Brodeck’s Report

21 Feb – Ali Shaw, The Girl with the Glass Feet

7 Mar – Susan Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia

21 Mar – Jennifer Johnston, The Illusionist

11 Apr – Mary Swan, The Boys in the Trees

25 Apr – Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

9 May – Jon Canter, A Short Gentleman

23 May – Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling

I thought it would be interesting to join in, which I’ll try to do for all eight books (though, of course, we’ll see how well I manage!). For now, though, let’s turn to the first selection, Brodeck’s Report by the French writer Philippe Claudel (very well translated by John Cullen). I’m hoping to make this review more reactive than usual, so I’ll be looking out for commentary elsewhere online and maybe updating this post as the day goes on (and, of course, commenting on the actual discussion when it goes live). First of all, here’swhat I thought:

My view

One night, in a remote village somewhere in post-war Europe (Claudel is deliberately vague about place and time in the novel), there is a murder. The victim is known only as ‘the Anderer‘ (‘the Other’), a colourful stranger who arrived in the village from who-knows-where, and immediately drew fascination (gradually turning to suspicion) with his unusual dress and manner.

The Anderer has been killed by men of the village, who ask Brodeck — a villager who didn’t witness those events, but has attended university and so (the logic goes) can write — to produce a report on what happened, so there can be an authoritative statement. Alongside his report, Brodeck writes a second account, which forms the text of Claudel’s novel; this longer account covers not only matters concerning the Anderer, but also key events of Brodeck’s life — including his time in a concentration camp.

Brodeck’s Report comes garlanded with many glowing quotes from newspaper reviews; I’m not quite as thoroughly enthusiastic about the novel as they appear to be, but I still think it’s a very good book. Claudel’s central theme, I think, is that, given the right circumstances, anyone could be party to monstrous acts; there are strong parallels between the villagers’ treatment of the Anderer, and Brodeck’s treatment by the camp guards — and even Brodeck himself is not entirely innocent. This is a powerful demonstration of how even apparently ordinary, decent individuals could come to do the worst.

One of the most striking things about Brodeck’s Report is Claudel’s construction of the novel. Instead of taking a linear approach, he moves backwards and forwards between times and events — sometimes even within the same passage — yet never loses his control over the narrative. As the threads swirl around and move inexorably towards their conclusions, the story itself becomes a kind of net, mirroring the way that the characters become snared by events, prejudice, and social pressures. Claudel’s prose (and, of course, Cullen’s translation) succeeds at more detailed levels, too; there are some very well written, highly affecting scenes (often concerning some of the plot’s most harrowing events).

I doubt I’d have read Brodeck’s Report if not for this book group (actually, never mind that, I wouldn’t even have heard of it) — but I’m glad I did, and I look forward to seeing what others have made of it.

Updates

11.10 – The discussion is now underway at Dovegreyreader Scribbles.

Interzone 226: Jay Lake, ‘Human Error’

Again, I find myself thinking: nearly there, but not quite. ‘Human Error’ is about three miners on a distant asteroid who chance upon an artefact which is apparently the product of non-human intelligences. Reporting such a  find will make the ‘rockheads’ fabulously wealthy — if they can only settle their differences first. The relationships are the core of Lake’s tale, and I appreciate what he’s aiming to portray (as summed up by the ironic pun in the story’s title); but I don’t tink he manages fully to capture the claustrophobic intensity of the situation.

Link
Jay Lake’s website

A blog post, a question, and zombies

Zombie mash-ups seem quite popular of late, but which of these do you think sounds the most horrifying? And do you have any suggestions of your own?

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Zombies

Bridget Zombie’s Diary

The Catcher in the Rye and Zombies

I, Robot and Zombies

A Kestrel for a Knave and Zombies

Oliver Twist and Zombies

The Wind in the Willows and Zombies

Dan Rhodes, Little Hands Clapping (2010)

My introduction to Dan Rhodes was his previous novel, 2007’s Gold, which I enjoyed very much; enough that I needed no persuading to seek out a copy of his latest work.  Little Hands Clapping is very different in subject matter, but unmistakably the work of the same author; and, as I read, I began to see deeper similarities. Perhaps more than usual, I find my thoughts about the present book coloured by those I had of the earlier; in that light, I’m a little less satisfied with Little Hands Clapping than with Gold, though the new novel is a very enjoyable read in its own right.

Synopsising Rhodes is awkward, because it doesn’t give a full picture: for one thing, if you take a bald summary of the plot, it seems that nothing much happens – but that’s not how the book reads; for another, Rhodes’s style is integral to the experience of reading him. I’m trying to think how to describe his style – words like ‘fairytale’ and ‘whimsical’ are going through my mind, but none of them seems quite right. The sense is more one of being told a story – of viewing a slightly heightened version of reality.

One of Rhodes’s common techniques is to mask something harsh and real behind that facade of tale-telling, such that you might have to stop and check back that, yes, you did understand that correctly. Take, the beginning, for example, where the author introduces his main setting, a German museum devoted to the subject of suicide. The museum’s caretaker is a grey old man who’d probably feel right at home in a Roald Dahl story; we first see at the end of the opening chapter that he’s not as straightforward as we might have assumed, when he happily munches on a spider which has crawled into his mouth. (The museum gains its own tinge of unreality from the way Rhodes unveils room after room, like a magician producing handkerchiefs from an apparently empty fist.) Whilst lying in bed in his quarters above the museum, the old man hears a noise from below; he thinks nothing of it, and, perhaps, neither do we – but we soon discover that the noise was someone hanging himself (this happens regularly, despite the museum’s having been founded with the aim of deterring people from suicide).

Other harrowing facts are revealed in a similarly deadpan way, not least that the doctor whom the caretaker surreptitiously calls out to deal with all the suicides has his own use for the dead bodies – he eats them. This will become public knowledge by novel’s end, as we learn early on.

Running in parallel are several other storylines, notably that of Mauro and Madalena, the most beautiful boy and girl in their village, who seem destined to be together always – and they are, until they leave and discover that, whilst Mauro is just as handsome in the wider world, Madalena is merely pretty. fate turns against them… With Rhodes’s style, it can be hard to get at the ‘real’ emotions; but this strand of Little Hands Clapping is affecting nonetheless, with some telling observations of love and how it can evolve.

So far, so good; why the unfavourable comparison with Gold, then? Because, as far as I can see, Little Hands Clapping doesn’t have the same subtextual richness. The individual elements of the novel are fine, but I don’t think they tie together in the way that Gold’s did, and that’s why I’m less satisfied. But I’m not dissatisfied, no way; not when Rhodes builds and maintains a momentum that drives his story on to a conclusion that seems inevitable (but is it?), yet remains compulsive reading. And the ending – like the ending of Gold – is a lovely piece of writing.

And so, with regret, I leave the imagination of Dan Rhodes behind once more. There’s no other imagination in literature quite like it – and I look forward to when the time will be right to go back there, to read another of his books.

Link
Dan Rhodes’s website

Ruth Padel, Where the Serpent Lives (2010): BookRabbit review

Where the Serpent Lives is the first novel by the poet Ruth Padel. I didn’t know much about Padel prior to reading the book, but the author biography mentioned that she’d been acclaimed for her nature writing – and, straight away, it was easy to see why. I found the first scene, which describes an encounter with a king cobra in the jungles of India, to be wonderfully intense, making poetry out of the precise language of science. Sadly, the novel never quite reached that level of intensity again.

Padel’s chief protagonist is Rosamund Fairfax, the daughter of Tobias Kellar, an eminent herpetologist, who might have followed her father into the biological sciences, but instead abandoned her university studies and embarked on a relationship with music mogul Tyler. Now, in 2005, Rosamund is forty-two years of age and living in London, unhappily married to a philandering Tyler, saddened and frustrated at the uncommunicative teenager her son Russel has become, and wanting nothing to do with her father (who’s still based in India, where Rosamund grew up). Where the Serpent Lives chronicles a year of drastic change in Rosamund’s life.

The key problem I have with Padel’s novel is not being able to engage with the central relationships. Partly, this is an issue of characterisation – Russel’s character seems to me not to rise above that of a stock ‘sullen teenager’; and, whilst there’s plenty of evidence that Tyler is a bad husband, one sees much less of the caring side that makes Rosamund stay with him – making her dilemma that bit harder to empathise with.

It’s also partly an issue of prose. There are moments where I find Padel’s writing sharply observant (such as when one of Tyler’s lovers reflects on her past in war-torn Kosovo and contrasts it with Tyler’s flippancy, concluding that he ‘did not live in a world where people died’ [168]); but much of it doesn’t command the same attention. Padel’s prose is at its most effective in the passages dealing with the book’s most extreme events – but the heart of Where the Serpent Lives concerns the everyday, where the prose is weaker; and, since the novel’s strengths lie on its fringes, the result is, naturally, uneven.

Where the Serpent Lives is a frustrating read that genuinely has its moments, some of them very good; but it’s hard not to wish for more than just moments.

This review first appeared on BookRabbit.com

Interzone 226: Mercurio D. Rivera, ‘In the Harsh Glow of Its Incandescent Beauty’

The solar system has been made inhabitable to huamns, thanks to the technology of the alien Wergens — and all they asked for in return was our time and cooperation, because the Wergens are simply infatuated with us. Covert experiments with Wergen DNA by Maxwell and Rossi produced a drug — a love potion in all but name — which was stolen by Rossi, who used it on Max’s wife, Miranda, before fleeing with her to a colony on Triton. And Now Max has travelled there to find his love and bring her home.

One of the interesting things about blogging Interzone in this way has been that it’s made me reflect on what makes a story good, or better than good. Take Mercurio Rivera’s piece, for example. I like it — which is not hard, as it’s a very likeable story — but have ended up with reserations about it nonetheless.

There are many things about the story which are good — it combines thrills, appropriately exotic aliens and scenery, and philosophical questions. But, still, I needed it to do more. If the descriptive prose had been that bit more evocative, or the action sequences that bit more thrilling; if the aliens and their technology had been that bit more remarkable, or the examination of love that bit more developed… Even one of those would have taken the story up a notch. As it is, Rivera’s tale is good enough — but, somehow, ‘good enough’ still doesn’t feel quite enough.

Link
Mercurio Rivera’s website

The month in reading: January 2010

January 2010 didn’t bring any absolute knockout books my way, but there were some fine reads nevertheless. My favourite book of the month was Robert Jackson Bennett’s Depression-era fantasy Mr Shivers, which has substantially more subtextual depth than many a quest fantasy I’ve seen over the years.

Silver- and bronze-medal positions for the month go to two very different books. Simon Lelic’s Rupture is a fine debut novel, centred on a school shooting perpetrated by an apparently placid teacher; and Up the Creek Without a Mullet (reviewed in February, but read in January) is an entertaining account of Simon Varwell’s travels in search of places with ‘mullet’ in their name.

Bubbling under, but well worth checking out, are Nadifa Mohamed’s wartime East African odyssey, Black Mamba Boy; and Galileo’s Dream, a historical biography spliced with science fiction (or perhaps vice versa) by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Not a bad start to the year by any means; but, still, I’m hoping for even greater riches in the months ahead.

Simon Varwell, Up the Creek Without a Mullet (2010)

It was while travelling around eastern Europe with a friend that Simon Varwell developed a certain fascination with that [insert adjective of your choice here] hairstyle, the mullet. Back home in Inverness a year or so later, in 2002, Varwell discovered that there was a village in Albania named Mullet — and was taken with the notion of trying to visit everywhere in the world with the world mullet in its name. Up the Creek Without a Mullet chronicles the author’s travels up to 2005 (in Albania, Ireland, and mostly Australia), searching for mullets – places and haircuts alike.

There’s a danger, I think, that this sort of travel writing can come to seem gimmicky, if the quirky reason behind the journey is given more weight than the journey itself. I’m pleased to say that doesn’t happen here, to the extent that I often felt as though the mullet-hunt was somewhat in the background; not forgotten about (on the contrary, it’s often on Varwell’s mind, to the point that he even wonders at times whether his ‘mission’ is all worth it), but it’s the cement that holds Varwell’s travels together — and, like cement, it’s not necessarily what you see first. Indeed, with Varwell’s often finding the ‘mullet’ places to be disappointingly ordinary, it’s his travels between that provide the greatest amount of interest.

Varwell himself proves a likeable companion for the journey through his book: he has a dry wit (at one point, he describes Sydney’s rail system as ‘reliable, good value, and regular, all novelties for a Scottish traveller’ [114]), writes engagingly about the places he visits, and makes Up the Creek Without a Mullet a very personal account. The idea behind Varwell’s journeys may be daft, but he’s well aware of that; and his genuine enthusiasm shines through, making this book a very satisfying read.

However, in case you were wondering: I’m keeping my hair short.

Further links
Simon Varwell’s website
Sandstone Press
Sydney Morning Herald article on Varwell’s travels (2005)

TV Book Club: Sacred Hearts

Well, this was a major step up from the first two programmes. There are still some elements that don’t work — the back-and-forth presentation is awkward; describing how an author’s career was boosted by the Book Club in years past is unnecessary; and the non-fiction items (this week, one on the origins of pub names) might well be interesting in another context, but they don’t fit the format of this programme.

Elsewhere. however, things were far better. This week’s guest was the actor Emilia Fox, who didn’t have a book of her own to talk about, so instead the interview with her was about her favourite books. This was a much better idea, and Fox came across as a keen reader, as guests on The TV Book Club ought to be.

The choice this week was Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant, a novel about two nuns in a 16th-century Ferraran convent. Unlike previous weeks, the discussion was vigorous and enthustic — exactly what the programme needed. Nathaniel Parker remained the best contributor of the regular panellists, really engaging with the period here; but all were better than they were previously (though Gok Wan was absent this week), and Emilia Fox also made some of the strongest contributions. And, most importantly, they made the book sound interesting.

There’s a way to go yet, but, on this evidence, The TV Book Club is on the right path at last.