by Wallace Stegner, 1943. 563 pages. Published by Penguin.
Up to page 83; reviewed 29 December
I brought this book with me to a Thanksgiving party when I first started reading it. My friend Cody Jane asked me what it was about. I read her the first line of the back-cover blurb: “Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair.” Ah, the sweet escape that fiction affords us all!
The novel starts out as Elsa, a young and intelligent woman, travels by train to a frontier town in North Dakota. It’s about the turn of the century. Elsa has left her home out of a sense of betrayal and disgust after her widower father married her best friend. The image that we get of the American frontier is free of lyrical hyperbole. Elsa feels out of place here. There’s nothing to read, there are few people her age to speak with, and she’s aware that there are some dark goings on at the periphery of her attention, illegal gambling and liquor consumption, a world so foreign to her sheltered sensibilities that she basically chooses to ignore it until Bo Mason, who runs the local saloon (which is disguised as a pool hall) begins to fall in love with her.
The section of the story that tells about Bo Mason’s early life is one of my favorite parts of the book so far, because it gives an idea of the sort of raw intelligence that the developing American West attracted but did not necessarily nurture. As a child, Bo is a prodigious reader, but that doesn’t endear him to his scowling schoolteacher, nor to his father, a burned out Civil War veteran living off a pension. After running away from home, Bo drifts through a variety of jobs, often coming into conflict with the pettiness of his foremen. I like Bo because he’s quick to protest injustice, but usually only when he’s the victim of it—much more believable than old Tom Joad with his too-sweeping vow to serve the underdog, no matter how, no matter where.
Once Bo’s character is established, we see him put to the test as he becomes Elsa’s suitor. Stegner’s account of their relationship is complex and sophisticated. Elsa appeals to Bo largely because she’s someone who sees through his rough exterior and recognizes all his greatness: his ability to learn quickly, his overriding competitive drive, and the ability he has to open up new frontiers for her in life. But Elsa’s family puts up a strong resistance, and confronted with the unfairness of their rejection, Bo’s mood grows dark and brooding, and he takes out his anger in a violent outburst against a vagrant who tries to cheat him. Elsa sees the outburst and it sours her on him. Eventually they do find their way back into each others arms, and on the day they finalize their plans for marriage a tremendous ice storm hits and it’s Bo that ventures out into the blinding snow in order to rescue Elsa’s uncle, Karl, partly out of concern for him, but also in order to protect Elsa from the rumors that are bound to spring up if the young, still unmarried couple spends a night alone together in a fire-lit cabin.
When we next catch up with Elsa, more than seven years have passed. She’s tending a farm household, doing all her chores with one good arm because the other’s been wounded. The wounded arm seems to be a symbol for the hardships of the early years of Elsa’s marriage—confounding, but not debilitating, and not enough to shake her youthful inclination to enjoying life.
Although in general Stegner doesn’t romanticize the frontier life, he wisely includes the romanticism innate in the experience of young people venturing into new realms of experience. Although we sense that Elsa’s been programmed by her stern Norwegian upbringing to be hard on herself and easily victimized, we also have the feeling that she’s just a little too smart to fall completely into the traps of her upbringing. Elsa has traveled West without any big dreams other than simply finding a little bit of contentment with her life; but the man she falls in love with is the personification of impetuous youthful ambition.
Back cover blurb notwithstanding, this has not yet proved to be a depressing book. We have certainly been warned that bad times are ahead for Elsa and Bo, but the concise and well-told romance story at the outset of the book makes us certain that they have something worth pursuing and fighting for.
23 February 2008, p 83 to end
I can pinpoint the moment that I fell in love with this book. It was in a scene in the third section of the book, where the increasingly violent Bo has abandoned Elsa and their two boys, Chet and Bruce, after a fit of abusive rage. Now Chet and Bruce are living in a large and shabby boarding house. The scene starts with Chet in his high bunk, inspecting the treacherous network of roof beams that span the gulf between the boys’ and girls’ sleeping areas. He ponders, wipes some dust from the top of the beam, and then climbs up onto the beam and begins to walk across. He pretends he’s piloting an airplane. He imagines that the fate of the world depends on his making a safe landing.
And when he reaches the girls’ bunks, he encounters a set of blue eyes that are sharp and alive as a rabbit’s. The eyes belong to Helen Murphy, a character so fascinating and well drawn out that I was convinced Stegner planned to use her as an important figure throughout the book. Not so. Helen teases Chet into a game of “I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours,” the kids get caught, and Chet’s mother is called to the carpet by the severe hag of a schoolmarm, Mrs. Mangin.
The scene where Chet crossed the roof beam made me fall in love with Stegner’s writing; the scene where Elsa confronts Mrs. Mangin made me impressed by the character of Elsa, because she holds her ground and refuses to accept the idea that a child should be made to feel ashamed for simply engaging in childish behavior. From this point onward, it’s clear that Elsa’s principal characteristic is her resolve. She refuses to give up her vision of what’s right and wrong: she believes her children deserve a home, that they be protected from abuse and that they be given every opportunity to thrive. At the same time, she believes her husband, Bo, is a man worthy of her love and devotion. And her transition from immaturity to adulthood comes when she realizes that these twin ideals can never be realized together, but chooses to commit herself to them anyway. She resigns herself to the flaws of the world she lives in, and through her resignation she becomes the strongest character in the book.
In the meantime, Bo refuses to resign himself to anything. He’s always dreaming about some breakthrough, a scheme that will not only make him rich but, most importantly, prove that the rest of humanity is made up of fools. For this reason, he’s always drawn to schemes that are ill advised and usually illicit. A lot of the action of the book stems from this fact. Bo’s bootlegging activities, the main source of his income, result in a plethora of car chases, crashes and police raids that make the book a surprising page-turner.
But the real fuel of the book is in the way the characters develop. Elsa becomes more and more silent and stoical, standing by her man in even his most maddeningly foolish schemes, but also lending her children a foundation of sanity they’ll remain grateful for their whole lives long. Chet develops into a charismatic high school hero, winning everyone’s approval but unable to hold himself together when faced with the slightest of failures. And Bruce develops a into a reader and deep thinker. In the last sections of the book his perspective draws on a variety of metaphoric comparisons and analyses ranging from Greek Tragedy to Sigmund Freud. This is especially interesting because Bruce represents the culmination of the Mason family’s aspirations, and also represents an encapsulation of the phenomenon of Wallace Stegner’s subject matter; this is a book written for an educated audience, but it touches only tangentially on the concerns of educated elites. The real root of the book is in the struggle of a family that was never offered privilege but always stayed focused on the promise of a sweet deal, a big break, an assortment of dreams whose value lay in the fact that they were all too good to be true.
While the book shifts from the perspective of one character to another, there’s always a sense that the characters own internal development is tightly lashed to the fortunes of the family as a whole. The only exception comes in the last days of Bo Mason, who seems only concerned with his own vain pursuits. An aging widower now, heavily in debt, abandoned by his fair-weather friends, estranged from his son and unable to let go of his old dreams. In fact, by this time Bo can’t even be seen as a dreamer; what he’s holding onto is the tarnished identity of a misbehaving youth, impertinent and cocksure even as a part of it knows that hope is lost. It’s fascinating to see the way Bo’s psyche begins to percolate with self-hatred. It would be easy to damn this character were his stubborn and juvenile ambitions not so hopelessly entangled with so many desires and comforts crucial to the human development of any family, and were his quest for success not so bejeweled with sweet glimpses of hard-won freedom.
The Anchorage International Film Festival 2007
Reviewed 12 December 2007
Last weekend I watched eight films at two venues in the Anchorage International Film Festival. Overall, it was a good experience. I toyed with the idea of reviewing all the films I saw, but instead decided just to focus on the three I liked best. The other films I saw (and enjoyed) were Unraveling the Wind, Nailed, Your Beautiful Cul-de-Sac Home, Body/Antibody, and Donovan Slacks.
REVIEW #1 – PORTRAIT OF A LEGEND: CLIFF HUDSON
This is a documentary about an Alaskan bush pilot who lived most of his life in Talkeetna and holds the records for the most airplane landings on Mt Denali, the highest peak in North America. In its opening moments, the film’s narrator describes Hudson as a quiet, unsung hero. So it seems fitting that through much of the film, Hudson himself seems upstaged by the incredible rural Alaska scenery and by the assembly of typically eccentric Alaska characters who’ve come together to discuss the details of this man’s life.
I must disclose that this movie was made by a friend of mine, Tom Stagg. And I also must say that I envy him the experience of making the movie, of traveling around the area around Talkeetna junction, of traveling the aerial mail route Hudson passed on to his son, and sitting in the living rooms and kitchens of Alaska old-timers, soliciting their stories and reflections.
There’s a strong undercurrent in the movie about the way Alaska’s quirks are sold to tourists. We come out with an impression that Hudson is a man who sold his services as a pilot, but never sold himself, and we get a glimpse of a certain Southcentral Alaska way of life that was once authentic and is now in the process of being turned into a product of great value to the tourist industry.
REVIEW #2 – FAT STUPID RABBIT
In today’s culture of Second Life and Reality TV, it’s useful to remember that Shakespeare himself posed the metaphor of life as a stage. As with all Shakespeare’s metaphors, this one maintains its potency in spite of massive and flagrant misuse, abuse and overuse. This Russian romantic comedy is proof.
The hero, Arcady, is an aging Russian actor stuck in a rut. He’s performed 300 times as a rabbit in an inane children’s play about woodland animals in which. Lately, he’s been drawing ridicule for breaking into Shakespearean soliloquies in the middle of performances.
To me, this film captured more of the true spirit of Shakespeare than many of the direct adaptations of Shakespearean work that have come out on the screen in my lifetime. Arcady is cast as a King Lear figure, and his character is built up with all the highlights and shadows of the original Lear. The symbolism is obvious but not overdone. The rabbit costume Arcady wears onstage is ridiculous, but as the plot goes on we have a stepwise chain of associations reminding us of the associations of the rabbit with Easter, childhood, springtime and renewal and the Christ story, but because of the initial silliness these parallels never outweigh the story itself. There are obvious parallels and allegories: the theater company is taken over by a merchant who wants use it as a vehicle to promote sausage sales; the lecherous producer tries to seduce the beautiful young girl Arcady is in love with. It’s a story about the way art is corrupted by money and cronyism, and the way that idealism in general is corrupted by cynical calculations. But the story is so full of magnificent specifics and authentic bits of comedy stolen from everyday life that it can’t possibly be reduced to mere symbolism.
REVIEW #3 – CTHULHU
Illustrators have long since discovered the graphic possibilities in Lovecraft’s stories of monsters and monstrous deities intent of preying on the world. There are lots of wonderful images of Cthulhu, the octopus headed giant asleep in his palace beneath the sea, or Azathoth and Shoggoths, Lloigers and the Old Ones. Someday soon there will be some large budget movie that attempts to capture the whole vision in lavish computer generated animation. Sadly, it’s only a matter of time.
I sensed that this movie was something better than that when I saw how the director used images of the ocean, casting it as a vast but none-to-comforting alternative to the complicated and frustrating world on the land. Most importantly there’s the conflict of Russ, a college professor whose open homosexuality has brought him into conflict with his family’s constricting religious beliefs.
This conflict itself is a worthy basis for a wholly “serious” film, and would benefit from all the clichés that would place it firmly in the Drama section of your local Video Bargainville. But inevitably there would be a lot that’s lost.
Along with being a good writer of scary fiction, HP Lovecraft was able to root out and exploit the sensation of feeling like a stranger in your own flesh in a way no other writer could, not even Edgar Allen Poe. The creative team of Dan Gildark and Grant Cogswell are absolutely right in approaching Lovecraft’s work from this angle, of using Lovecraft’s storytelling with all it’s grim suggestiveness and slow emergence of unearthly details to explore the way the judgments of modern conservatism can suffocate the sense of individuality in anyone who is different.
Images of the ocean are used brilliantly in this film. As the inevitable apocalypse draws near, two mysterious barges dominate the seascape. The plot is driven forward by a white-bearded old sailor who admits to going out on the sea for five days tripping on acid when he netted a creature that was “like a gigantic baby.” Russ’s early memories of his first romance, simultaneously sublime and profane, play out on the planks and struts of an old pier. And a scene of predatory seduction is carried out in front of an aquarium tank where two massive polar bears swim and gobble fish.
With all its quiet, slow moving scenes this movie is exactly the sort of guilty pleasure I love best in movies. Its quality is likely to go unrecognized for some time by people who need everything to fit into their perfect pigeonholes. Don’t believe such critics. If you’re looking for inspiration and new ways to make storytelling fresh, this is a great place to go.
Last weekend I watched eight films at two venues in the Anchorage International Film Festival. Overall, it was a good experience. I toyed with the idea of reviewing all the films I saw, but instead decided just to focus on the three I liked best. The other films I saw (and enjoyed) were Unraveling the Wind, Nailed, Your Beautiful Cul-de-Sac Home, Body/Antibody, and Donovan Slacks.
REVIEW #1 – PORTRAIT OF A LEGEND: CLIFF HUDSON
This is a documentary about an Alaskan bush pilot who lived most of his life in Talkeetna and holds the records for the most airplane landings on Mt Denali, the highest peak in North America. In its opening moments, the film’s narrator describes Hudson as a quiet, unsung hero. So it seems fitting that through much of the film, Hudson himself seems upstaged by the incredible rural Alaska scenery and by the assembly of typically eccentric Alaska characters who’ve come together to discuss the details of this man’s life.
I must disclose that this movie was made by a friend of mine, Tom Stagg. And I also must say that I envy him the experience of making the movie, of traveling around the area around Talkeetna junction, of traveling the aerial mail route Hudson passed on to his son, and sitting in the living rooms and kitchens of Alaska old-timers, soliciting their stories and reflections.
There’s a strong undercurrent in the movie about the way Alaska’s quirks are sold to tourists. We come out with an impression that Hudson is a man who sold his services as a pilot, but never sold himself, and we get a glimpse of a certain Southcentral Alaska way of life that was once authentic and is now in the process of being turned into a product of great value to the tourist industry.
REVIEW #2 – FAT STUPID RABBIT
In today’s culture of Second Life and Reality TV, it’s useful to remember that Shakespeare himself posed the metaphor of life as a stage. As with all Shakespeare’s metaphors, this one maintains its potency in spite of massive and flagrant misuse, abuse and overuse. This Russian romantic comedy is proof.
The hero, Arcady, is an aging Russian actor stuck in a rut. He’s performed 300 times as a rabbit in an inane children’s play about woodland animals in which. Lately, he’s been drawing ridicule for breaking into Shakespearean soliloquies in the middle of performances.
To me, this film captured more of the true spirit of Shakespeare than many of the direct adaptations of Shakespearean work that have come out on the screen in my lifetime. Arcady is cast as a King Lear figure, and his character is built up with all the highlights and shadows of the original Lear. The symbolism is obvious but not overdone. The rabbit costume Arcady wears onstage is ridiculous, but as the plot goes on we have a stepwise chain of associations reminding us of the associations of the rabbit with Easter, childhood, springtime and renewal and the Christ story, but because of the initial silliness these parallels never outweigh the story itself. There are obvious parallels and allegories: the theater company is taken over by a merchant who wants use it as a vehicle to promote sausage sales; the lecherous producer tries to seduce the beautiful young girl Arcady is in love with. It’s a story about the way art is corrupted by money and cronyism, and the way that idealism in general is corrupted by cynical calculations. But the story is so full of magnificent specifics and authentic bits of comedy stolen from everyday life that it can’t possibly be reduced to mere symbolism.
REVIEW #3 – CTHULHU
Illustrators have long since discovered the graphic possibilities in Lovecraft’s stories of monsters and monstrous deities intent of preying on the world. There are lots of wonderful images of Cthulhu, the octopus headed giant asleep in his palace beneath the sea, or Azathoth and Shoggoths, Lloigers and the Old Ones. Someday soon there will be some large budget movie that attempts to capture the whole vision in lavish computer generated animation. Sadly, it’s only a matter of time.
I sensed that this movie was something better than that when I saw how the director used images of the ocean, casting it as a vast but none-to-comforting alternative to the complicated and frustrating world on the land. Most importantly there’s the conflict of Russ, a college professor whose open homosexuality has brought him into conflict with his family’s constricting religious beliefs.
This conflict itself is a worthy basis for a wholly “serious” film, and would benefit from all the clichés that would place it firmly in the Drama section of your local Video Bargainville. But inevitably there would be a lot that’s lost.
Along with being a good writer of scary fiction, HP Lovecraft was able to root out and exploit the sensation of feeling like a stranger in your own flesh in a way no other writer could, not even Edgar Allen Poe. The creative team of Dan Gildark and Grant Cogswell are absolutely right in approaching Lovecraft’s work from this angle, of using Lovecraft’s storytelling with all it’s grim suggestiveness and slow emergence of unearthly details to explore the way the judgments of modern conservatism can suffocate the sense of individuality in anyone who is different.
Images of the ocean are used brilliantly in this film. As the inevitable apocalypse draws near, two mysterious barges dominate the seascape. The plot is driven forward by a white-bearded old sailor who admits to going out on the sea for five days tripping on acid when he netted a creature that was “like a gigantic baby.” Russ’s early memories of his first romance, simultaneously sublime and profane, play out on the planks and struts of an old pier. And a scene of predatory seduction is carried out in front of an aquarium tank where two massive polar bears swim and gobble fish.
With all its quiet, slow moving scenes this movie is exactly the sort of guilty pleasure I love best in movies. Its quality is likely to go unrecognized for some time by people who need everything to fit into their perfect pigeonholes. Don’t believe such critics. If you’re looking for inspiration and new ways to make storytelling fresh, this is a great place to go.
The Lotus Caves
by John Christopher. (1968) Published by Collier Books. 215 pages.
Reviewed 24 November 2007
A little ways into “Lotus Caves” the first big mistake comes up: the main character, a child named Marty, has a friend over and they listen to some music—on tape. In this science fiction story set in a colony on the moon in the year 2068, the presence of audiotape is an obvious, if forgivable, flaw. It’s also a flaw that betrays a lot about the man who made it.
The lunar colony of “Lotus Caves” is characterized by scarcity. All resources must be shepherded, messes and waste are forbidden. Christopher isn’t interested in extolling the state of tomorrow’s technology, but in underlining its disappointments; in the schools of the lunar colony (informally called “The Bubble”) the students are able to enter into holographic reconstructions of past eras—the Roman Empire, for instance—but the technology to simulate tastes and smells has been forbidden, for fear that it will make children distressed over all they miss out on by not being raised on the world.
I first got to know John Christopher in elementary school, where I read his “White Mountains” trilogy and was captivated by it. John Christopher is a children’s writer who is quite concerned about the state of childhood in the modern world. In “White Mountains” we have a world colonized by aliens who implant hardware into the brains of adults in order to make it impossible to rebel or even think disobedient thoughts. In “Lotus Caves” it’s all about a sort of squalor of the senses and the soul, a legislated dispiritedness and pessimism. I imagine that the soul stifling culture of the Bubble is based on the rationing of goods in England after the Second World War.
What’s really interesting to me is the nature of the main characters in this book. Marty and his friend Steve seem to be remarkably thoughtful children. Even though the whole plot is driven by their disobedience (they take a lunar crawler out beyond the bounds of radio transmission) they don’t seem at all like “problem children.” There’s no roughhousing or mouthing off or restlessness. But the characters are not miniature adults. This is the sort of child that I was growing up . . . or rather, I had the distinct potential to be this sort of child. I engaged in long thoughtful spells and was quite curious about books, even though my learning difficulty made it difficult to read them. I think during the 1980s American culture was just starting to move away from encouraging these sorts of character traits in children, maybe because thoughtful children are less likely to push their parents to buy things; I don’t know. What I do know is that John Christopher’s vision of childhood is something important that we shouldn’t lose track of.
The storyline of “The Lotus Caves” shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to anyone who watched the old Star Trek series. While exploring the moon, the two children stumble across a cave inhabited by an advanced life form, a massive plant that fills the whole cave in the form of mushrooms, vines, trees that produce organ music, grassy meadows and luminescent moss. Because the organism doesn’t want the human colonists to find out about its existence, it insists on keeping the children locked up inside its domain. If offers to keep them entertained and feeds them fruit that levels their personality and quells their desire for escape. In order to succeed, the characters have to find a way to overcome their complacency and build their fighting spirit. In the end, their escape from the caves is pretty easy. The plant doesn’t put up much of a fight; indeed, it’s much easier for the boys to liberate themselves from the forbidden caves than it was for them to get away from their human settlement on the other side of the moon.
The friendship between Steve and Marty is the weakest part of the book. We're told that Steve is the domineering one, and that Marty has to “gain ascendancy” over him in order to pull off the escape from the caves. But Steve doesn’t seem to have much personality of his own, and there’s definitely a coda in their relationship missing from the end of the book.
But what’s good about this book is that it does such a great job at raising the frightening specter of a lifeless, overly controlled childhood, a childhood where all sense of joy and abandonment has been legislated away. There are lots of kids who are in no danger of this, but for some kids the biggest danger is to shy away into a life of obedient introversion. You can’t just deny that kind of personality; there are those of us that are contemplative by nature, who spend a lot of their lives in our heads. But there’s a crisis point where an introspective person has to decide whether or not to succumb fully to the undertow of isolation, or to spend a lifetime fighting the current and making efforts to get out and participate in life. This crisis is very real to those of us who face it; what’s rare about Christopher’s work is how well he brings it to life.
Reviewed 24 November 2007
A little ways into “Lotus Caves” the first big mistake comes up: the main character, a child named Marty, has a friend over and they listen to some music—on tape. In this science fiction story set in a colony on the moon in the year 2068, the presence of audiotape is an obvious, if forgivable, flaw. It’s also a flaw that betrays a lot about the man who made it.
The lunar colony of “Lotus Caves” is characterized by scarcity. All resources must be shepherded, messes and waste are forbidden. Christopher isn’t interested in extolling the state of tomorrow’s technology, but in underlining its disappointments; in the schools of the lunar colony (informally called “The Bubble”) the students are able to enter into holographic reconstructions of past eras—the Roman Empire, for instance—but the technology to simulate tastes and smells has been forbidden, for fear that it will make children distressed over all they miss out on by not being raised on the world.
I first got to know John Christopher in elementary school, where I read his “White Mountains” trilogy and was captivated by it. John Christopher is a children’s writer who is quite concerned about the state of childhood in the modern world. In “White Mountains” we have a world colonized by aliens who implant hardware into the brains of adults in order to make it impossible to rebel or even think disobedient thoughts. In “Lotus Caves” it’s all about a sort of squalor of the senses and the soul, a legislated dispiritedness and pessimism. I imagine that the soul stifling culture of the Bubble is based on the rationing of goods in England after the Second World War.
What’s really interesting to me is the nature of the main characters in this book. Marty and his friend Steve seem to be remarkably thoughtful children. Even though the whole plot is driven by their disobedience (they take a lunar crawler out beyond the bounds of radio transmission) they don’t seem at all like “problem children.” There’s no roughhousing or mouthing off or restlessness. But the characters are not miniature adults. This is the sort of child that I was growing up . . . or rather, I had the distinct potential to be this sort of child. I engaged in long thoughtful spells and was quite curious about books, even though my learning difficulty made it difficult to read them. I think during the 1980s American culture was just starting to move away from encouraging these sorts of character traits in children, maybe because thoughtful children are less likely to push their parents to buy things; I don’t know. What I do know is that John Christopher’s vision of childhood is something important that we shouldn’t lose track of.
The storyline of “The Lotus Caves” shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to anyone who watched the old Star Trek series. While exploring the moon, the two children stumble across a cave inhabited by an advanced life form, a massive plant that fills the whole cave in the form of mushrooms, vines, trees that produce organ music, grassy meadows and luminescent moss. Because the organism doesn’t want the human colonists to find out about its existence, it insists on keeping the children locked up inside its domain. If offers to keep them entertained and feeds them fruit that levels their personality and quells their desire for escape. In order to succeed, the characters have to find a way to overcome their complacency and build their fighting spirit. In the end, their escape from the caves is pretty easy. The plant doesn’t put up much of a fight; indeed, it’s much easier for the boys to liberate themselves from the forbidden caves than it was for them to get away from their human settlement on the other side of the moon.
The friendship between Steve and Marty is the weakest part of the book. We're told that Steve is the domineering one, and that Marty has to “gain ascendancy” over him in order to pull off the escape from the caves. But Steve doesn’t seem to have much personality of his own, and there’s definitely a coda in their relationship missing from the end of the book.
But what’s good about this book is that it does such a great job at raising the frightening specter of a lifeless, overly controlled childhood, a childhood where all sense of joy and abandonment has been legislated away. There are lots of kids who are in no danger of this, but for some kids the biggest danger is to shy away into a life of obedient introversion. You can’t just deny that kind of personality; there are those of us that are contemplative by nature, who spend a lot of their lives in our heads. But there’s a crisis point where an introspective person has to decide whether or not to succumb fully to the undertow of isolation, or to spend a lifetime fighting the current and making efforts to get out and participate in life. This crisis is very real to those of us who face it; what’s rare about Christopher’s work is how well he brings it to life.
Underworld
by Don DeLillo (1997) Published by Scribner. 827 pages.
Up to page 345; Reviewed 22 November 2007
There are times in life, events and environments, that make us listen better than we usually would. We listen well in crises because we have to, because that’s the primal reason for our being able to perceive the universe at all, so as to avoid calamity and find our way back to safety.
We listen well when our senses are enticed by ceremony, when our minds are cued by the excesses of pageantry to cue in because the event about to occur is something everyone cares about, something that people will ask us about later, something that we’re expected to look back to as a defining moment in our existence.
And we listen when we’re relaxed, when we let our guard down. When you meet someone you feel comfortable with, when there’s a break in the demands of the working day, when you’ve just sat down in a restaurant booth after a hectic bike ride in the snow, when all the survival mechanisms go on standby and nobody’s watching the clock to evaluate your productivity—in these moments we start listening because now we have an opportunity to be human, to open our senses like a Canadian border checkpoint and just let ideas and impressions roll on through.
At the start of “Underworld,” DeLillo demonstrates his ability to exploit the first two enhancements of listening. There’s a chase scene; we watch a group of Brooklyn boys jump a turnstile to get into a baseball game, watch them running from the guards, get all the messiness and thrill of petty crime; and then the focus moves to the baseball game itself, a match between the Giants and Dodgers in October 1951, a match which DeLillo frames as an epic event, history in the making, Homeric light dribbled over every little detail. And the effort doesn’t seem wasted or overblown because in hindsight all the casual details of an afternoon at the stadium in the early 1950s seem so different, pure, uncomplicated. As a reader I had no doubt that there was a real drama at the core of all DeLillo’s fine prose, and looking at it now I realize that the drama lies in the knowledge of how quickly things change in our world, how quickly our comforting customs and pastimes vanish, or transform themselves into shallow artificialities.
After showing he’s capable of crisis and pageant, DeLillo shifts into the mode he’s most comfortable with: a subdued, strolling casualness where profound truths are likely to crop up out of nowhere.
Years ago I read one of DeLillo’s early novels (maybe his first?): “Great Jones Street.” I was unimpressed by most of it. It was a hard-to-swallow story of a rock star obsessed with the sort of ideas that only a graduate student in literature or linguistics to devote much time to, and that no one’s likely to get especially worked up about. But what I admired about the book was its casual tone, totally unhurried. It’s the tone people use in their minds when they have the time to really stop and think things through, let the fabric of our thoughts uncrumple so we begin to notice the details we spend so much of our lives filtering out.
In “Underworld” DeLillo achieves a sort of Taoist mastery of this shuffling, hands-in-pockets literature. None of the characters seems to be drifting exactly, but neither are they the masters of their own destiny. None of them really has the infinite stretch of contemplative time enjoyed by the rock star in “Great Jones Street,” but we get to see them in those brief moments when the mind is free to stretch itself out; a nun prepares to cleanse her hands at the end of the day; a retired schoolteacher gives a haircut to a dying friend; an aging mother and her middle-aged son stay up late at night watching television together.
This isn’t a novel where nothing happens, but even in those moments where a “big event” occurs (an extramarital affair, let’s say; or watching a videotape of a serial killer’s latest murder) you get the feeling that the characters are in an abstracted state, their souls just a millimeter or two away from meshing with the big cogwheel of reality.
In the next section of this review I’ll talk more about the actual storyline and characters of this book, but I do want to point out how well DeLillo depicts his oldest characters such as Marvin Lundy, the widowed baseball memorabilist; Albert Bronzini, onetime schoolteacher and chess aficionado; and Sister Edgar, the nun who has visions of a Hieronymus Bosch world just beneath our own. DeLillo neither fawns over these characters, nor does he relegate them to the sidelines of the story.
2 December 2007; pp 345-460
I promised a plot synopsis in the last entry, but the plot is so sprawling that it would be a waste of effort. It’s not just that the plot is sprawling, it’s that there seems to be an underlying logic to the plot. The narrative jumps from character to character, and tends to work its way backward in time from the early 1990s toward the 1950s of the prologue. Every once in a while, we are reminded that the plot isn’t nearly as disjointed as we think. Apparently peripheral characters are actually linked closely to the more central characters, but the link happened long ago. But the more important links between characters are the thematic ones, the way each of their preoccupations and traits serve to shed light on the same issue, even when they physically inhabit remote spheres of existence.
One central theme of the book is waste. The character Nick Shay works as a waste analyst. He studies the way garbage is managed and stored by private individuals, city governments, large corporations, and by the military. As the novel’s narrative drifts gently backward in time, the theme of waste becomes more and more poignant. What became of old love affairs, of the things once considered to be precious? Why do some parts of the past become increasingly precious, while others are classified as simple junk?
Nick is preoccupied with his father, Jimmy, who disappeared when Nick was still a child. Nick is convinced that Jimmy, a small-time numbers runner and fence, was murdered by the Mafia. No one else takes this theory seriously. Nick himself recognizes it as a little bit crazy; he has no evidence to support his theory other than a series of numerological cabbalisms based on the number thirteen. Nick’s mother and brother, Matt, are both convinced that Jimmy merely walked out on his family because he was too weak and immature to handle being a father.
To label Jimmy the victim of a mob killing is to make him somehow precious. To label him a deadbeat father is to make him junk.
This is a template for other conspiracy theories that crop up in the novel. Nick’s friend and colleague Big Sims tries to convince him that there’s a dark connection between the waste industry and the Mafia. Matt Shay’s friend and colleague, Eric Deming, tries to haunt him with rumors of secret government experiments in the Southwest where soldiers and civilians were unknowingly exposed to radioactive fallout.
In his book “U and I,” author Nicholson Baker described that women have mastered the craft of the novel; when men produce significant works of fiction, they’re often odd, inward looking books focused on private obsessions. I could cite many of my own examples: Moby Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow, Beautiful Losers, The Magus, and Infinite Jest. In all of these books, the truth for some hidden connection dominates the plot, perhaps at the expense of a serious exploration of humanity. From Ishmael’s long maunderings on the whale’s sublime dimensions to Tyrone Slothrop’s fascination with the international cartels of the early 20th Century, there is always a mental quest that seems half lurid and silly, and half serious search for mystic revelation.
What makes all these books worthwhile is the way that they try to get underneath the surface, try to discover the motive behind the compulsive digging in the dirt.
In “Underworld,” the character Klara Sax seems to stand in contrast to many of the male characters. As an artist, she’s also fascinated with obscure connections, but whereas other characters share an unhealthy conviction that they’re uncovering a real conspiracy outside themselves, Klara Sax appears satisfied that what she’s discovering a network of associations and connections that says something about herself. Whereas others try to hide their revelations about the world, Klara seeks to share her vision with others out of conviction that many share her sense that there’s more to life than meets the eye, that there’s something in the past worth salvaging through continual re-exploration. Of all the characters, Klara seems the only one whose focus flows in the opposite direction to the narrative, moving toward the future.
11 February 2008; p 460 to end.
After finishing this book, I went out to a chamber music concert at Alaska Pacific University. I noticed a similarity that was difficult to ignore but also difficult to put my finger on. The experience of watching the cellist, violinist and pianist walk out onstage in single file, the applause of the audience, neither spontaneous nor routine, the formality of dress both onstage and offstage, the way that the performers went straight to work without giving any verbal introduction, plunged right into the sea of notes and musical phrases—there was a sense of formal polish that comes when things that are sublime enter into a realm normally occupied by the mundane. That’s the sense that DeLillo evoked throughout his book, the sense that he’s a writer who feels most confident dealing with those things in life that are most ordinary and casual, but that he’s well aware that in this book he’s tackling issues that are huge. He’s putting on his best suit to write this book, taking a moment of silence to compose himself, arrange his thoughts, and he hopes that we, the readers, will do the same.
I’ve always been a little irritated with the way authors treat characters that are supposed to be linguistic prodigies. It’s so easy to pick out a handful of twenty-cent words from a thesaurus and put them into the mouth of a ten-year-old protagonist and say, “Look, this child is brilliant beyond his years.” Much harder to recreate the actual sense of wonder that captivates those who are beguiled by words their whole life long.
I feel that DeLillo came close to capturing this sense of wonder when he depicted a pivotal scene in the life of protagonist Nick Shay. The scene takes place after Shay has done his stint in juvenile prison for killing a man. For the rest of his life, Nick will be jarred by the ambiguity of his crime; he’ll never quite be able to know whether the act was intentional or accidental. But what he is certain about is that he wants to turn his life around. He gives himself over completely to the rehabilitation efforts of the juvenile prison system, and proceeds with equal enthusiasm to a Jesuit school, where he encounters Father Paulus.
In a truly fascinating scene, Paulus brings Shay into his office. The old Jesuit seems to be in a mood of some despair. After some words are exchanged about the nature of knowledge and learning, Paulus invites Shay to look at his own shoe and to name the parts of the shoe. When Shay flounders, Paulus runs off the list of names as though they were the names of cities in the holy land. One of Paulus’s points is that until we are fluent in the names of the things around us, we will see the world as dull and foolish.
As someone who lived through the final years of the Cold War, I must admit that in some ways I am as daunted by the many facets of this historical period as poor Nick Shay was looking at the leathery surface of his own shoe. Coincidentally, as I was finishing up the book I happened to learn a few facts that taught me something about the sources DeLillo used. For instance, I had known who Bobby Fischer was, but I’d never realized that his career as an American chess prodigy matching wits with Russian chess prodigies was seen as a very deliberate Cold War battle. I learned about this only because of the news coverage that arose after Fischer’s recent death. It immediately became clear to me that the character of Nick Shay’s younger brother, Matt, was a sort of portrait of Fischer. Matt was a young chess prodigy whose abilities seemed to provoke conspiratorial murmurings from many adults, including the enigmatic Father Paulus. There’s a sense that the intelligence of both brothers Shay, as well as the native intelligence of American youth in general, has suddenly become a strategic asset because of the dangers posed by the hydrogen bomb.
At the end of the book we see Nick coming to terms with the brokenness of his marriage. The Cold War has ended, and he has flown to Central Asia with the man who cuckolded him. The ostensible reason for the journey is to see a new technique for disposing of radioactive waste: blowing it up in deep underground chambers with the aid of nuclear warheads. Shortly after reading this scene, I learned that this disposal strategy was actually proposed by a Russian entrepreneur who claimed to be in possession of his own nuclear warhead.
I suspect that in my hurry to read this book cover to cover, I missed many similar allusions, many subtle hints dropped by DeLillo to give the overall impression that all the events of the book are influenced by the actions of a conspiracy that is vast and so nearly invisible that even those involved in it aren’t sure it exists.
What’s wonderful is that you don’t need to get all the references in order to enjoy this book. The book is a pleasure in itself. When in the last pages we see Nick Shay mourning the wild, aimless days of his youth, we see quite clearly that he was asked to transform himself, asked by authorities like Paulus to become someone sophisticated and analytical when he might have followed a quite different destiny—had it not been for the overarching struggle of the age. The story is meaningful even outside the context of the Cold War. It’s a dynamic that’s been happening on a personal and a global level ever since humans started climbing down from trees.
Similarly the last section of the book, which focuses on an ostensible miracle that occurs in the darkest, most dangerous corner of the Bronx, is clearly a prayer for peace. DeLillo adds plenty of qualifiers, recognizes that there have been missed opportunities at every turn in the course of human history. But he also rightfully acknowledges that there is a great readiness for change among the people of today’s world, and that even if we’re destined to fall back into old patterns of struggle and war, witnessing the multitudinous for a better world can itself be a redeeming experience.
Up to page 345; Reviewed 22 November 2007
There are times in life, events and environments, that make us listen better than we usually would. We listen well in crises because we have to, because that’s the primal reason for our being able to perceive the universe at all, so as to avoid calamity and find our way back to safety.
We listen well when our senses are enticed by ceremony, when our minds are cued by the excesses of pageantry to cue in because the event about to occur is something everyone cares about, something that people will ask us about later, something that we’re expected to look back to as a defining moment in our existence.
And we listen when we’re relaxed, when we let our guard down. When you meet someone you feel comfortable with, when there’s a break in the demands of the working day, when you’ve just sat down in a restaurant booth after a hectic bike ride in the snow, when all the survival mechanisms go on standby and nobody’s watching the clock to evaluate your productivity—in these moments we start listening because now we have an opportunity to be human, to open our senses like a Canadian border checkpoint and just let ideas and impressions roll on through.
At the start of “Underworld,” DeLillo demonstrates his ability to exploit the first two enhancements of listening. There’s a chase scene; we watch a group of Brooklyn boys jump a turnstile to get into a baseball game, watch them running from the guards, get all the messiness and thrill of petty crime; and then the focus moves to the baseball game itself, a match between the Giants and Dodgers in October 1951, a match which DeLillo frames as an epic event, history in the making, Homeric light dribbled over every little detail. And the effort doesn’t seem wasted or overblown because in hindsight all the casual details of an afternoon at the stadium in the early 1950s seem so different, pure, uncomplicated. As a reader I had no doubt that there was a real drama at the core of all DeLillo’s fine prose, and looking at it now I realize that the drama lies in the knowledge of how quickly things change in our world, how quickly our comforting customs and pastimes vanish, or transform themselves into shallow artificialities.
After showing he’s capable of crisis and pageant, DeLillo shifts into the mode he’s most comfortable with: a subdued, strolling casualness where profound truths are likely to crop up out of nowhere.
Years ago I read one of DeLillo’s early novels (maybe his first?): “Great Jones Street.” I was unimpressed by most of it. It was a hard-to-swallow story of a rock star obsessed with the sort of ideas that only a graduate student in literature or linguistics to devote much time to, and that no one’s likely to get especially worked up about. But what I admired about the book was its casual tone, totally unhurried. It’s the tone people use in their minds when they have the time to really stop and think things through, let the fabric of our thoughts uncrumple so we begin to notice the details we spend so much of our lives filtering out.
In “Underworld” DeLillo achieves a sort of Taoist mastery of this shuffling, hands-in-pockets literature. None of the characters seems to be drifting exactly, but neither are they the masters of their own destiny. None of them really has the infinite stretch of contemplative time enjoyed by the rock star in “Great Jones Street,” but we get to see them in those brief moments when the mind is free to stretch itself out; a nun prepares to cleanse her hands at the end of the day; a retired schoolteacher gives a haircut to a dying friend; an aging mother and her middle-aged son stay up late at night watching television together.
This isn’t a novel where nothing happens, but even in those moments where a “big event” occurs (an extramarital affair, let’s say; or watching a videotape of a serial killer’s latest murder) you get the feeling that the characters are in an abstracted state, their souls just a millimeter or two away from meshing with the big cogwheel of reality.
In the next section of this review I’ll talk more about the actual storyline and characters of this book, but I do want to point out how well DeLillo depicts his oldest characters such as Marvin Lundy, the widowed baseball memorabilist; Albert Bronzini, onetime schoolteacher and chess aficionado; and Sister Edgar, the nun who has visions of a Hieronymus Bosch world just beneath our own. DeLillo neither fawns over these characters, nor does he relegate them to the sidelines of the story.
2 December 2007; pp 345-460
I promised a plot synopsis in the last entry, but the plot is so sprawling that it would be a waste of effort. It’s not just that the plot is sprawling, it’s that there seems to be an underlying logic to the plot. The narrative jumps from character to character, and tends to work its way backward in time from the early 1990s toward the 1950s of the prologue. Every once in a while, we are reminded that the plot isn’t nearly as disjointed as we think. Apparently peripheral characters are actually linked closely to the more central characters, but the link happened long ago. But the more important links between characters are the thematic ones, the way each of their preoccupations and traits serve to shed light on the same issue, even when they physically inhabit remote spheres of existence.
One central theme of the book is waste. The character Nick Shay works as a waste analyst. He studies the way garbage is managed and stored by private individuals, city governments, large corporations, and by the military. As the novel’s narrative drifts gently backward in time, the theme of waste becomes more and more poignant. What became of old love affairs, of the things once considered to be precious? Why do some parts of the past become increasingly precious, while others are classified as simple junk?
Nick is preoccupied with his father, Jimmy, who disappeared when Nick was still a child. Nick is convinced that Jimmy, a small-time numbers runner and fence, was murdered by the Mafia. No one else takes this theory seriously. Nick himself recognizes it as a little bit crazy; he has no evidence to support his theory other than a series of numerological cabbalisms based on the number thirteen. Nick’s mother and brother, Matt, are both convinced that Jimmy merely walked out on his family because he was too weak and immature to handle being a father.
To label Jimmy the victim of a mob killing is to make him somehow precious. To label him a deadbeat father is to make him junk.
This is a template for other conspiracy theories that crop up in the novel. Nick’s friend and colleague Big Sims tries to convince him that there’s a dark connection between the waste industry and the Mafia. Matt Shay’s friend and colleague, Eric Deming, tries to haunt him with rumors of secret government experiments in the Southwest where soldiers and civilians were unknowingly exposed to radioactive fallout.
In his book “U and I,” author Nicholson Baker described that women have mastered the craft of the novel; when men produce significant works of fiction, they’re often odd, inward looking books focused on private obsessions. I could cite many of my own examples: Moby Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow, Beautiful Losers, The Magus, and Infinite Jest. In all of these books, the truth for some hidden connection dominates the plot, perhaps at the expense of a serious exploration of humanity. From Ishmael’s long maunderings on the whale’s sublime dimensions to Tyrone Slothrop’s fascination with the international cartels of the early 20th Century, there is always a mental quest that seems half lurid and silly, and half serious search for mystic revelation.
What makes all these books worthwhile is the way that they try to get underneath the surface, try to discover the motive behind the compulsive digging in the dirt.
In “Underworld,” the character Klara Sax seems to stand in contrast to many of the male characters. As an artist, she’s also fascinated with obscure connections, but whereas other characters share an unhealthy conviction that they’re uncovering a real conspiracy outside themselves, Klara Sax appears satisfied that what she’s discovering a network of associations and connections that says something about herself. Whereas others try to hide their revelations about the world, Klara seeks to share her vision with others out of conviction that many share her sense that there’s more to life than meets the eye, that there’s something in the past worth salvaging through continual re-exploration. Of all the characters, Klara seems the only one whose focus flows in the opposite direction to the narrative, moving toward the future.
11 February 2008; p 460 to end.
After finishing this book, I went out to a chamber music concert at Alaska Pacific University. I noticed a similarity that was difficult to ignore but also difficult to put my finger on. The experience of watching the cellist, violinist and pianist walk out onstage in single file, the applause of the audience, neither spontaneous nor routine, the formality of dress both onstage and offstage, the way that the performers went straight to work without giving any verbal introduction, plunged right into the sea of notes and musical phrases—there was a sense of formal polish that comes when things that are sublime enter into a realm normally occupied by the mundane. That’s the sense that DeLillo evoked throughout his book, the sense that he’s a writer who feels most confident dealing with those things in life that are most ordinary and casual, but that he’s well aware that in this book he’s tackling issues that are huge. He’s putting on his best suit to write this book, taking a moment of silence to compose himself, arrange his thoughts, and he hopes that we, the readers, will do the same.
I’ve always been a little irritated with the way authors treat characters that are supposed to be linguistic prodigies. It’s so easy to pick out a handful of twenty-cent words from a thesaurus and put them into the mouth of a ten-year-old protagonist and say, “Look, this child is brilliant beyond his years.” Much harder to recreate the actual sense of wonder that captivates those who are beguiled by words their whole life long.
I feel that DeLillo came close to capturing this sense of wonder when he depicted a pivotal scene in the life of protagonist Nick Shay. The scene takes place after Shay has done his stint in juvenile prison for killing a man. For the rest of his life, Nick will be jarred by the ambiguity of his crime; he’ll never quite be able to know whether the act was intentional or accidental. But what he is certain about is that he wants to turn his life around. He gives himself over completely to the rehabilitation efforts of the juvenile prison system, and proceeds with equal enthusiasm to a Jesuit school, where he encounters Father Paulus.
In a truly fascinating scene, Paulus brings Shay into his office. The old Jesuit seems to be in a mood of some despair. After some words are exchanged about the nature of knowledge and learning, Paulus invites Shay to look at his own shoe and to name the parts of the shoe. When Shay flounders, Paulus runs off the list of names as though they were the names of cities in the holy land. One of Paulus’s points is that until we are fluent in the names of the things around us, we will see the world as dull and foolish.
As someone who lived through the final years of the Cold War, I must admit that in some ways I am as daunted by the many facets of this historical period as poor Nick Shay was looking at the leathery surface of his own shoe. Coincidentally, as I was finishing up the book I happened to learn a few facts that taught me something about the sources DeLillo used. For instance, I had known who Bobby Fischer was, but I’d never realized that his career as an American chess prodigy matching wits with Russian chess prodigies was seen as a very deliberate Cold War battle. I learned about this only because of the news coverage that arose after Fischer’s recent death. It immediately became clear to me that the character of Nick Shay’s younger brother, Matt, was a sort of portrait of Fischer. Matt was a young chess prodigy whose abilities seemed to provoke conspiratorial murmurings from many adults, including the enigmatic Father Paulus. There’s a sense that the intelligence of both brothers Shay, as well as the native intelligence of American youth in general, has suddenly become a strategic asset because of the dangers posed by the hydrogen bomb.
At the end of the book we see Nick coming to terms with the brokenness of his marriage. The Cold War has ended, and he has flown to Central Asia with the man who cuckolded him. The ostensible reason for the journey is to see a new technique for disposing of radioactive waste: blowing it up in deep underground chambers with the aid of nuclear warheads. Shortly after reading this scene, I learned that this disposal strategy was actually proposed by a Russian entrepreneur who claimed to be in possession of his own nuclear warhead.
I suspect that in my hurry to read this book cover to cover, I missed many similar allusions, many subtle hints dropped by DeLillo to give the overall impression that all the events of the book are influenced by the actions of a conspiracy that is vast and so nearly invisible that even those involved in it aren’t sure it exists.
What’s wonderful is that you don’t need to get all the references in order to enjoy this book. The book is a pleasure in itself. When in the last pages we see Nick Shay mourning the wild, aimless days of his youth, we see quite clearly that he was asked to transform himself, asked by authorities like Paulus to become someone sophisticated and analytical when he might have followed a quite different destiny—had it not been for the overarching struggle of the age. The story is meaningful even outside the context of the Cold War. It’s a dynamic that’s been happening on a personal and a global level ever since humans started climbing down from trees.
Similarly the last section of the book, which focuses on an ostensible miracle that occurs in the darkest, most dangerous corner of the Bronx, is clearly a prayer for peace. DeLillo adds plenty of qualifiers, recognizes that there have been missed opportunities at every turn in the course of human history. But he also rightfully acknowledges that there is a great readiness for change among the people of today’s world, and that even if we’re destined to fall back into old patterns of struggle and war, witnessing the multitudinous for a better world can itself be a redeeming experience.
Cambridge
by Caryl Phillips. (1991) Published by Vintage International. 184 pages.
Reviewed 11 November 2007
This is a novel about two topics that interest me a lot: colonialism and slavery. The first, and longest, portion of the book deals with Emily, an intelligent young woman in the19th century whose father owns a sugar plantation in the West Indies. After a short prologue in the third person, the rest of this section is made up of entries in Emily’s diary. She’s en route to her father’s plantation. She describes everything in language that, at first, seems a little too flowery, always searching for the most roundabout ways to describe her experiences. It’s a little off-putting; to the reader it was as if the author is straining to create an authentic 19th century sound, getting a good handle on the intricacies of the language, but missing the simple bluntness that writers of that time were capable of.
But as we get to know Emily better, the pretentious and overwrought tone makes more sense. She’s a young person of great intelligence and greater ambition. After her trip to the Caribbean, she has little to look forward to besides an unappetizing arranged marriage; the only thing that might add an element of variety and freedom to her life would be a career as a lecturer, traveling about England and sharing her experiences, observations and vision on the future of British colonialism. It all hangs on her intelligence, her verbal agility, and her ability to ferret out the truth.
This makes for excellent reading. The author bestows Emily with such a richness of vocabulary and wit that it’s possible to see in her prose all the complex mechanisms of 19th Century hypocrisy. One senses that, had she been born in another era, Emily could easily concoct a first class exposé about the inhumanity of slavery and the essential wrongness of the exploitative sugar trade. But she’s endowed not only with a journalist’s innate appetite for the truth, but also with an aristocrat’s instincts of self-preservation. She knows that her life of luxury is supported by the exertions of slaves who daily perform labors in the cane fields that would kill an ox or horse. She knows that her future career as a lecturer will only bear fruit if she stays well within the boundaries of what the English public is willing to hear. So she succumbs eagerly to all the fundamental lies of the planters’ culture. She allows her formidable wit to be eclipsed by an even more powerful cowardice.
That we’re able to witness all this so clearly is a tribute to Phillips’ masterful talents as a writer and a scholar. Voluminous research went into creating Emily’s account of her voyage, and Phillips strikes the perfect alchemical balance, transforming historical details into a young woman’s living perception of a world alive with promise and intrigue.
Standing on its own, the first part of “Cambridge” is the best thing I’ve read since starting this blog. It isn’t just the historical flair that makes it so much of a pleasure to read. Also there’s the way Phillips builds the plot of sexual tension. Emily gradually comes to realize that, as the daughter of an absentee plantation owner, she has the status of royalty without the limitations. She takes a sadistic pleasure in frustrating the ambitions of her less satisfactory suitors, none of whom have the wit to win her favor. Only the plantation overseer, Arnold Brown, is able to seduce her by gradually adopting a more gentle persona toward her, while still continuing to be cruel and wicked to his slaves, particularly to the enigmatic Cambridge, a strong and obdurate man whose self confidence and mastery of scripture makes the white slave drivers distinctly uncomfortable.
The second portion of the book belongs to Cambridge. It’s an autobiography of his life from the time he was captured in West Africa to the days shortly before his death. It’s a much more sweeping narrative than Emily’s diary, and yet it feels much less real, much less gripping. I got the feeling reading this portion of the book that Phillip’s was actually a little bored by the whole prospect of the firsthand experiences of a man enslaved. Whereas the Emily portion of the book was overflowing with descriptions of the various luxuries of colonialist life and the peculiarities of the plantation setting, Cambridge’s account seems very much a lifeless, dutiful exercise in connecting point A to point B through an extremely circuitous route. Whereas Emily’s transatlantic voyage as a privileged passenger is described in great detail, Cambridge barely goes into depths about his experiences being transported in the belly of a slaver. There are a few horrifying details, but they somehow seem obligatory.
In his first experience of being enslaved, Cambridge is taken to England, where a rather ineffectual “owner” allows him to get an education and marry a white servant girl. On the “owner’s” death, Cambridge becomes a free man, traveling around England and lecturing for various abolitionist groups. Cambridge embraces the Christian religion as a doctrine of universal freedom and human rights, but we never really get to see the evolution of his thought process. This creed of universal human dignity is what his abolitionist tutor believed, and this is simply the belief that Cambridge adopted. When Cambridge is eventually taken into captivity again (during a voyage to Africa, to make a series of abolitionist lectures there) the effect is unnaturally comic. He seems to take this new and tragic twist of fate as just a big misunderstanding, an inconvenience. “Isn’t this just my luck?!” When he arrives at the sugar plantation in the West Indies, he holds himself aloof from his fellow slave laborers. Only the schizophrenic Christiania earns his attention, and as she seems incapable of lucid speech, she never seems to have her own mind, her own voice.
In order for the novel to work, we need a sense that as sophisticated an intellect as Emily is, Cambridge is ten times as sophisticated. I think this is the story that Phillips wanted to tell, and I think it failed because of the limitations of the tradition of historical fiction he abides by. Whereas there’s an abundance of firsthand source material by colonialists, the voices of those who labored for them as slaves was largely kept silent because slaves were forbidden much formal education. This in itself constitutes one of the great tragedies of history. In order to recover the voices of those who were forbidden to record their own histories, a writer must take a powerful step into the realm of imagination, speculation. This means being willing to make huge mistakes, even to resort to lies.
I think this is foreign to the current trends in historical fiction, which becomes ever more methodical, ever more scholarly, ever more dependent on the carefully woven safety net of official, documented truth and ever more reluctant to go out on a limb in the way that only fiction can.
Reviewed 11 November 2007
This is a novel about two topics that interest me a lot: colonialism and slavery. The first, and longest, portion of the book deals with Emily, an intelligent young woman in the19th century whose father owns a sugar plantation in the West Indies. After a short prologue in the third person, the rest of this section is made up of entries in Emily’s diary. She’s en route to her father’s plantation. She describes everything in language that, at first, seems a little too flowery, always searching for the most roundabout ways to describe her experiences. It’s a little off-putting; to the reader it was as if the author is straining to create an authentic 19th century sound, getting a good handle on the intricacies of the language, but missing the simple bluntness that writers of that time were capable of.
But as we get to know Emily better, the pretentious and overwrought tone makes more sense. She’s a young person of great intelligence and greater ambition. After her trip to the Caribbean, she has little to look forward to besides an unappetizing arranged marriage; the only thing that might add an element of variety and freedom to her life would be a career as a lecturer, traveling about England and sharing her experiences, observations and vision on the future of British colonialism. It all hangs on her intelligence, her verbal agility, and her ability to ferret out the truth.
This makes for excellent reading. The author bestows Emily with such a richness of vocabulary and wit that it’s possible to see in her prose all the complex mechanisms of 19th Century hypocrisy. One senses that, had she been born in another era, Emily could easily concoct a first class exposé about the inhumanity of slavery and the essential wrongness of the exploitative sugar trade. But she’s endowed not only with a journalist’s innate appetite for the truth, but also with an aristocrat’s instincts of self-preservation. She knows that her life of luxury is supported by the exertions of slaves who daily perform labors in the cane fields that would kill an ox or horse. She knows that her future career as a lecturer will only bear fruit if she stays well within the boundaries of what the English public is willing to hear. So she succumbs eagerly to all the fundamental lies of the planters’ culture. She allows her formidable wit to be eclipsed by an even more powerful cowardice.
That we’re able to witness all this so clearly is a tribute to Phillips’ masterful talents as a writer and a scholar. Voluminous research went into creating Emily’s account of her voyage, and Phillips strikes the perfect alchemical balance, transforming historical details into a young woman’s living perception of a world alive with promise and intrigue.
Standing on its own, the first part of “Cambridge” is the best thing I’ve read since starting this blog. It isn’t just the historical flair that makes it so much of a pleasure to read. Also there’s the way Phillips builds the plot of sexual tension. Emily gradually comes to realize that, as the daughter of an absentee plantation owner, she has the status of royalty without the limitations. She takes a sadistic pleasure in frustrating the ambitions of her less satisfactory suitors, none of whom have the wit to win her favor. Only the plantation overseer, Arnold Brown, is able to seduce her by gradually adopting a more gentle persona toward her, while still continuing to be cruel and wicked to his slaves, particularly to the enigmatic Cambridge, a strong and obdurate man whose self confidence and mastery of scripture makes the white slave drivers distinctly uncomfortable.
The second portion of the book belongs to Cambridge. It’s an autobiography of his life from the time he was captured in West Africa to the days shortly before his death. It’s a much more sweeping narrative than Emily’s diary, and yet it feels much less real, much less gripping. I got the feeling reading this portion of the book that Phillip’s was actually a little bored by the whole prospect of the firsthand experiences of a man enslaved. Whereas the Emily portion of the book was overflowing with descriptions of the various luxuries of colonialist life and the peculiarities of the plantation setting, Cambridge’s account seems very much a lifeless, dutiful exercise in connecting point A to point B through an extremely circuitous route. Whereas Emily’s transatlantic voyage as a privileged passenger is described in great detail, Cambridge barely goes into depths about his experiences being transported in the belly of a slaver. There are a few horrifying details, but they somehow seem obligatory.
In his first experience of being enslaved, Cambridge is taken to England, where a rather ineffectual “owner” allows him to get an education and marry a white servant girl. On the “owner’s” death, Cambridge becomes a free man, traveling around England and lecturing for various abolitionist groups. Cambridge embraces the Christian religion as a doctrine of universal freedom and human rights, but we never really get to see the evolution of his thought process. This creed of universal human dignity is what his abolitionist tutor believed, and this is simply the belief that Cambridge adopted. When Cambridge is eventually taken into captivity again (during a voyage to Africa, to make a series of abolitionist lectures there) the effect is unnaturally comic. He seems to take this new and tragic twist of fate as just a big misunderstanding, an inconvenience. “Isn’t this just my luck?!” When he arrives at the sugar plantation in the West Indies, he holds himself aloof from his fellow slave laborers. Only the schizophrenic Christiania earns his attention, and as she seems incapable of lucid speech, she never seems to have her own mind, her own voice.
In order for the novel to work, we need a sense that as sophisticated an intellect as Emily is, Cambridge is ten times as sophisticated. I think this is the story that Phillips wanted to tell, and I think it failed because of the limitations of the tradition of historical fiction he abides by. Whereas there’s an abundance of firsthand source material by colonialists, the voices of those who labored for them as slaves was largely kept silent because slaves were forbidden much formal education. This in itself constitutes one of the great tragedies of history. In order to recover the voices of those who were forbidden to record their own histories, a writer must take a powerful step into the realm of imagination, speculation. This means being willing to make huge mistakes, even to resort to lies.
I think this is foreign to the current trends in historical fiction, which becomes ever more methodical, ever more scholarly, ever more dependent on the carefully woven safety net of official, documented truth and ever more reluctant to go out on a limb in the way that only fiction can.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
by Brian Selznick. 2007. Published by Scholastic Press. 534 pages.
Reviewed 20 October 2007
In my lifetime, an interesting cultural switcheroo has taken place. What happens backstage is much more interesting to us now than what happens onstage; practically every DVD comes with a compilation of interviews and outtakes detailing the process of how the film was made. Political campaign coverage focuses on fundraising and campaign logistics. It’s no longer necessary for us to suspend our disbelief; it’s not so important now that we succumb to illusions as that we are curious about how the illusion is accomplished. There’s the danger here that all this will result in a gradual death of the faculty of imagination. The wonder of tales and legends will be deflated and replaced merely with a bland, utilitarian interest in plain facts. But there’s also the hope that as viewers and readers get more interested in the processes of creativity, a new sort of legend will begin springing up, one which brings creators and audiences closer together.
“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is a perfect example. The author’s love of silent movies is captured in the sumptuous pencil, charcoal and chalk drawings as well as in the way that the illustration and text are interspersed. At the core of this novel is a good deal of sound research into the history of the first years of cinema, the movies of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, the Lumire Brothers and Georges Méliés. And around this core is built a narrative that incorporates all the pathos and simplicity of these old classics. The story is about an orphan boy, Hugo Cabret, who steals the inner workings from windup toys in order to rebuild an old clockwork automaton. Along the way, Hugo meets the orphaned girl Isabelle; her stepfather forbids her visiting movie houses, but still she’s fallen in love with the medium, and sneaks Hugo in to see a matinee showing. In this sequence, the narration gives way to the image of a set of heavy, tasseled curtains pulling aside to reveal an empty screen. Then we see the light of the projector come on and finally, the image of Hugo’s face, lips parted, eyes widening, the contours of his cheekbones and forehead highlighted by the reflected glow of the screen.
In this scene and in the whole book, you can almost feel the flicker of an old movie projector as it churns out the story, reel after reel after reel.
Reviewed 20 October 2007
In my lifetime, an interesting cultural switcheroo has taken place. What happens backstage is much more interesting to us now than what happens onstage; practically every DVD comes with a compilation of interviews and outtakes detailing the process of how the film was made. Political campaign coverage focuses on fundraising and campaign logistics. It’s no longer necessary for us to suspend our disbelief; it’s not so important now that we succumb to illusions as that we are curious about how the illusion is accomplished. There’s the danger here that all this will result in a gradual death of the faculty of imagination. The wonder of tales and legends will be deflated and replaced merely with a bland, utilitarian interest in plain facts. But there’s also the hope that as viewers and readers get more interested in the processes of creativity, a new sort of legend will begin springing up, one which brings creators and audiences closer together.
“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is a perfect example. The author’s love of silent movies is captured in the sumptuous pencil, charcoal and chalk drawings as well as in the way that the illustration and text are interspersed. At the core of this novel is a good deal of sound research into the history of the first years of cinema, the movies of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, the Lumire Brothers and Georges Méliés. And around this core is built a narrative that incorporates all the pathos and simplicity of these old classics. The story is about an orphan boy, Hugo Cabret, who steals the inner workings from windup toys in order to rebuild an old clockwork automaton. Along the way, Hugo meets the orphaned girl Isabelle; her stepfather forbids her visiting movie houses, but still she’s fallen in love with the medium, and sneaks Hugo in to see a matinee showing. In this sequence, the narration gives way to the image of a set of heavy, tasseled curtains pulling aside to reveal an empty screen. Then we see the light of the projector come on and finally, the image of Hugo’s face, lips parted, eyes widening, the contours of his cheekbones and forehead highlighted by the reflected glow of the screen.
In this scene and in the whole book, you can almost feel the flicker of an old movie projector as it churns out the story, reel after reel after reel.
Der Verlorene—Text und Kommentar
by Hans Ulrich-Treichel, Commentary by Jürgen Krätzer, (1998, commentary 2005), published by Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek. 175 pages.
6 October 2007; pp. 1-129
In German, “Der Verlorene” basically means, “the lost person,” but there’s some subtlety in the title that’s hard to describe in English. “Verloren,” related to the English word “forlorn,” is simply an adjective: lost. In German, it’s possible to take an adjective like this and turn it into a noun. Usually this is done when the noun itself is clear. If you’re talking about two men, one short and one tall, you can say “Der Große,” and it’s clear you’re referring to “Der große Mann,” or “the tall man.” But In the title of Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s novel, it’s almost as if the noun itself is what’s missing. Something or someone is lost, so very lost that it can’t even be given an true identity. All we know about it is that it’s really and truly gone.
The literal answer to the question of who or what has been lost: a child, Arnold, the infant child of a German couple at the end of World War II. In a moment of panic, when Arnold’s mother thought she was going to be accosted and killed by Russian soldiers, she gave the infant Arnold to a passing woman. As it turned out, she was neither accosted nor killed; she and her husband made it safely to the West of Germany and managed to start a new life, but they never recovered their son, and never recovered from the pain of losing him so suddenly and so pointlessly.
The story is narrated by Arnold’s younger brother, born after the war, who’s lived out the early years of his life in Arnold’s shadow, never quite understanding what happened to Arnold, but always burdened with a sense of shame that pervaded his household. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that not only is Arnold lost, but also the younger brother has lost something. He’s never experienced a moment of kindness from his father. He’s never experienced a loving embrace from his mother. Most of all, without understanding what really happened to Arnold, he’s never been able to understand who his parents are and who he is.
Treichel has mastered the sort of humor that characterizes a lot of my favorite German fiction, where the joke is rooted in the way a child’s mind tries to come to terms with all the metaphors, euphemisms and half-truths that characterize adult speech. As the plot rolls on and the parents try everything they can to try and find their lost child, the narrator grapples with a sense of jealousy that defies logic but nevertheless makes a lot of sense: he’s jealous of how easy Arnold has things, how he has two parents who are willing to sacrifice so much to find him, and yet never has to suffer the father’s coldness, the mother’s tragic mood swings, the anxiety of having one’s life invaded and eclipsed by an older brother who’s been elevated to a sort of mythic perfection by the fact of his perpetual absence.
The best parts of the story are the characterization of the father, who seems in some ways to be the most lost of all the figures in the book; the story of the kindly policeman Herr Rudolf, who stands as a perfect counterpart to the cold, remote father figure; and the strange monologue of the hearse driver who enters the story midway through and plays the same role as the gravediggers in “Hamlet,” reminding us that death is unrelenting and ever-present, unglamorous, not glorious, redemptive, nor particularly tragic—and that in our struggle to deny it, we ultimately turn ourselves into the basest of comedians.
6 October 2007; pp. 1-129
In German, “Der Verlorene” basically means, “the lost person,” but there’s some subtlety in the title that’s hard to describe in English. “Verloren,” related to the English word “forlorn,” is simply an adjective: lost. In German, it’s possible to take an adjective like this and turn it into a noun. Usually this is done when the noun itself is clear. If you’re talking about two men, one short and one tall, you can say “Der Große,” and it’s clear you’re referring to “Der große Mann,” or “the tall man.” But In the title of Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s novel, it’s almost as if the noun itself is what’s missing. Something or someone is lost, so very lost that it can’t even be given an true identity. All we know about it is that it’s really and truly gone.
The literal answer to the question of who or what has been lost: a child, Arnold, the infant child of a German couple at the end of World War II. In a moment of panic, when Arnold’s mother thought she was going to be accosted and killed by Russian soldiers, she gave the infant Arnold to a passing woman. As it turned out, she was neither accosted nor killed; she and her husband made it safely to the West of Germany and managed to start a new life, but they never recovered their son, and never recovered from the pain of losing him so suddenly and so pointlessly.
The story is narrated by Arnold’s younger brother, born after the war, who’s lived out the early years of his life in Arnold’s shadow, never quite understanding what happened to Arnold, but always burdened with a sense of shame that pervaded his household. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that not only is Arnold lost, but also the younger brother has lost something. He’s never experienced a moment of kindness from his father. He’s never experienced a loving embrace from his mother. Most of all, without understanding what really happened to Arnold, he’s never been able to understand who his parents are and who he is.
Treichel has mastered the sort of humor that characterizes a lot of my favorite German fiction, where the joke is rooted in the way a child’s mind tries to come to terms with all the metaphors, euphemisms and half-truths that characterize adult speech. As the plot rolls on and the parents try everything they can to try and find their lost child, the narrator grapples with a sense of jealousy that defies logic but nevertheless makes a lot of sense: he’s jealous of how easy Arnold has things, how he has two parents who are willing to sacrifice so much to find him, and yet never has to suffer the father’s coldness, the mother’s tragic mood swings, the anxiety of having one’s life invaded and eclipsed by an older brother who’s been elevated to a sort of mythic perfection by the fact of his perpetual absence.
The best parts of the story are the characterization of the father, who seems in some ways to be the most lost of all the figures in the book; the story of the kindly policeman Herr Rudolf, who stands as a perfect counterpart to the cold, remote father figure; and the strange monologue of the hearse driver who enters the story midway through and plays the same role as the gravediggers in “Hamlet,” reminding us that death is unrelenting and ever-present, unglamorous, not glorious, redemptive, nor particularly tragic—and that in our struggle to deny it, we ultimately turn ourselves into the basest of comedians.
Inland Empire
Directed by David Lynch, starring Laura Dern
Reviewed 30 September 2007
Wow. I’m not going to try and sum this movie up or even to get very in depth about the history of my passion for David Lynch movies. Suffice it to say that I feel with this movie Mr Lynch has fulfilled a promise he’s been making for years and years with his more recent films. The confusion of “Mulholland Drive” and “Lost Highway” are mixed with the tenderness of “The Straight Story.”
Laura Dern is so amazing to watch. The more the movie progresses, the more I was amazed at what I saw coming from her. It’s as though she pours forth a whole career in this movie, acting out every conceivable character she might be called upon to play. What’s wonderful is that she has such total conviction that this wacky-ass David Lynch mindfuck has something genuine at its heart. And, in return, Lynch seems to have realized that however much eccentric vision he’s capable of concocting in his mind, it can only be realized if he allows an actor with Dern’s genius to have her own vision, to stand at the heart of the movie and drive it forward with all the heart and soul anyone could possibly ask for.
Reviewed 30 September 2007
Wow. I’m not going to try and sum this movie up or even to get very in depth about the history of my passion for David Lynch movies. Suffice it to say that I feel with this movie Mr Lynch has fulfilled a promise he’s been making for years and years with his more recent films. The confusion of “Mulholland Drive” and “Lost Highway” are mixed with the tenderness of “The Straight Story.”
Laura Dern is so amazing to watch. The more the movie progresses, the more I was amazed at what I saw coming from her. It’s as though she pours forth a whole career in this movie, acting out every conceivable character she might be called upon to play. What’s wonderful is that she has such total conviction that this wacky-ass David Lynch mindfuck has something genuine at its heart. And, in return, Lynch seems to have realized that however much eccentric vision he’s capable of concocting in his mind, it can only be realized if he allows an actor with Dern’s genius to have her own vision, to stand at the heart of the movie and drive it forward with all the heart and soul anyone could possibly ask for.
At The Still Point
by Mary Benson. 1969. Published by Virago Modern Classics 1988. 250 pages.
Reviewed 30 September 2007
This is a book about South Africa, about Apartheid and oppression, about justice, about civil rights checked and frustrated. We follow the travails of Anne Dawson, a writer who’s been unlucky in love. After breaking up with her flame in New York, she returns to her home country of South Africa. Here, she finds herself torn between her family’s racist friends and a group of dissident, anti-apartheid intellectuals who are closer to her heart, but who frighten her because of the risks they take in defying an increasingly oppressive South African government.
What works about this book is the political and journalistic angle. I got an education about the history of government restrictions, about the pass laws (requiring Africans to carry their papers on them whenever they went out in public), about the way the white government urged former members of the African National Congress to testify against one another in return for lighter prison sentences.
The story of Anne Dawson, of her inner life and of her romance with the activist attorney Matthew Marais, is less engaging and less genuine. Narrating in the first person, Dawson goes to great lengths to create a jumpy, disoriented stream of consciousness, full of vivid sense impressions and memories that leap at you from out of nowhere. But the more we get to know her, the more it seems that Anne is actually a very linear, prosaic person; the edgy narrative style seems an affectation and a distraction. It gets even worse whenever Anne gets going about her romance with Marais. The writing in these sections gets so overwrought you almost want to take a pen and just cross it out and get back to the main part of the book.
In the course of the story, Anne discovers her true path in life as she chronicles the injustices carried out every day in the South African courthouses against civilians such as schoolteacher Beatrice Qaba and ANC leader Daniel Makhana. The quality of prose in these courtroom scenes is so much superior to the mushy narration of the romantic scenes that it seems that Benson must also have been in a process of discovering what did and didn’t work for her as she wrote this book. I suspect that there were a lot of forces at work both internally and externally that told her politics was a poor choice of subject matter; perhaps too dangerous, perhaps too obvious, probably not “artistic” enough. It’s clear that as a writer and a reader, Mary Benson had steeped herself in poetry and psychological fiction, and probably envisioned herself going in this direction.
Reviewed 30 September 2007
This is a book about South Africa, about Apartheid and oppression, about justice, about civil rights checked and frustrated. We follow the travails of Anne Dawson, a writer who’s been unlucky in love. After breaking up with her flame in New York, she returns to her home country of South Africa. Here, she finds herself torn between her family’s racist friends and a group of dissident, anti-apartheid intellectuals who are closer to her heart, but who frighten her because of the risks they take in defying an increasingly oppressive South African government.
What works about this book is the political and journalistic angle. I got an education about the history of government restrictions, about the pass laws (requiring Africans to carry their papers on them whenever they went out in public), about the way the white government urged former members of the African National Congress to testify against one another in return for lighter prison sentences.
The story of Anne Dawson, of her inner life and of her romance with the activist attorney Matthew Marais, is less engaging and less genuine. Narrating in the first person, Dawson goes to great lengths to create a jumpy, disoriented stream of consciousness, full of vivid sense impressions and memories that leap at you from out of nowhere. But the more we get to know her, the more it seems that Anne is actually a very linear, prosaic person; the edgy narrative style seems an affectation and a distraction. It gets even worse whenever Anne gets going about her romance with Marais. The writing in these sections gets so overwrought you almost want to take a pen and just cross it out and get back to the main part of the book.
In the course of the story, Anne discovers her true path in life as she chronicles the injustices carried out every day in the South African courthouses against civilians such as schoolteacher Beatrice Qaba and ANC leader Daniel Makhana. The quality of prose in these courtroom scenes is so much superior to the mushy narration of the romantic scenes that it seems that Benson must also have been in a process of discovering what did and didn’t work for her as she wrote this book. I suspect that there were a lot of forces at work both internally and externally that told her politics was a poor choice of subject matter; perhaps too dangerous, perhaps too obvious, probably not “artistic” enough. It’s clear that as a writer and a reader, Mary Benson had steeped herself in poetry and psychological fiction, and probably envisioned herself going in this direction.
Paprika
1 September 2007
Just as I was clocking off work today, one of my coworkers came up to me and told me I had to see this movie, no questions asked. I’m so glad she told me. This was just a wonderful picture.
The story is about a research team busy developing a product that can allow dreams to be transferred onto computers. It’s supposedly going to be very useful in psychotherapy. But when a disgruntled member of the research team steals the device, the whole crew has to kick into action to prevent the world of dreams from breaking through and overwhelming reality.
We’re never completely sure, though, if the research team itself is especially “real.” As the movie goes on layer after layer gets pulled away. People keep “waking up” from one reality into another even more fantastical than the last. But even as every bit of reality comes into question, the characters themselves become more and more real to us, especially the brooding, beautiful At-Chan, who’s created an alternative identity in her dream life: the sprightly and flirtatious Paprika.
In the century or so since Freud released his book on dreams, it seems we’ve amassed this huge visual vocabulary of dream images that we collectively know tell us something about ourselves: lately a slew of science-fiction movies have come out which attempt to harvest the vast field of burgeoning archetypes in a single swoop of the cinematic scythe. “The Matrix,” “The Cell,” and “Existenz” all come to mind, but none of them are quite as honest or as beautiful as “Paprika.”
Just as I was clocking off work today, one of my coworkers came up to me and told me I had to see this movie, no questions asked. I’m so glad she told me. This was just a wonderful picture.
The story is about a research team busy developing a product that can allow dreams to be transferred onto computers. It’s supposedly going to be very useful in psychotherapy. But when a disgruntled member of the research team steals the device, the whole crew has to kick into action to prevent the world of dreams from breaking through and overwhelming reality.
We’re never completely sure, though, if the research team itself is especially “real.” As the movie goes on layer after layer gets pulled away. People keep “waking up” from one reality into another even more fantastical than the last. But even as every bit of reality comes into question, the characters themselves become more and more real to us, especially the brooding, beautiful At-Chan, who’s created an alternative identity in her dream life: the sprightly and flirtatious Paprika.
In the century or so since Freud released his book on dreams, it seems we’ve amassed this huge visual vocabulary of dream images that we collectively know tell us something about ourselves: lately a slew of science-fiction movies have come out which attempt to harvest the vast field of burgeoning archetypes in a single swoop of the cinematic scythe. “The Matrix,” “The Cell,” and “Existenz” all come to mind, but none of them are quite as honest or as beautiful as “Paprika.”
After Dark
by Haruki Murakami, 2004, translated to English by Jay Rubin, 2007; published by Knopf. 191 pages.
1 September 2007
Interesting: This was a page-turner in which nothing seemed to happen.
The story is about a bookish girl named Mari who’s spending the night wandering around a seedy part of Tokyo. In the meantime, her sister, a teenage fashion model named Eri, is lying asleep in her room when something strange begins to happen. Her unplugged tv flickers on. A man with a mask (called The Man with No Face) watches her from the screen, and then she vanishes from the bed and appears to have been sucked into the television.
In the meantime, Mari gets called on to help a Chinese prostitute who’s been beaten by one of her customers. A photograph of the abuser is sent to the Chinese gangsters, who swear they’ll get their revenge.
To me, these are all cliché scenes from the sort of Japanese movies I love watching. Revenge, weird science fiction abductions, and especially the blurring of the border between reality and fantasy. So all through the novel I was eager for the moment when that big explosion or chase or revenge killing would happen.
And in the meantime, I was killing time with Mari, listening in on her conversations with the various people she met in the night, with Kaoru, the massive female wrestler; with Korogi, who’s running away from people who want to kill her; and especially with Takahashi, a messy-haired jazz musician who seems to be falling in love with Mari, but isn’t quite sure and can’t quite convince her to let down her guard.
It was only after the book was over, and I was puzzling over whether I’d missed something or not, that I began to wonder about that Man with No Face, about the way he never did anything but watch. I wondered if he wasn’t maybe supposed to represent God, or whatever mythical being we hope or fear might be there beyond death, beyond the other side of the screen.
What exactly happened to Eri when she was trapped inside that tv set? Although we never find out, it’s interesting that practically every character in the story has some recollection about being trapped in a small, enclosed space. Sometimes it’s in a dream, or it’s the way they felt during a difficult period of their life; in Mari’s case, it was a real-life experience of being trapped in an elevator.
With all its eeriness and simplicity, this story leaves a very clear image: life is just one room, and eventually we all have to leave the room. Whether there’s another room out past it, nobody can say. But the truth is, we’re all a little scared of that exit we have to make. If we want, we can make our time in the room quite miserable for everyone involved. Or, if we’re willing to share our fears, we might instead offer one another a little comfort.
1 September 2007
Interesting: This was a page-turner in which nothing seemed to happen.
The story is about a bookish girl named Mari who’s spending the night wandering around a seedy part of Tokyo. In the meantime, her sister, a teenage fashion model named Eri, is lying asleep in her room when something strange begins to happen. Her unplugged tv flickers on. A man with a mask (called The Man with No Face) watches her from the screen, and then she vanishes from the bed and appears to have been sucked into the television.
In the meantime, Mari gets called on to help a Chinese prostitute who’s been beaten by one of her customers. A photograph of the abuser is sent to the Chinese gangsters, who swear they’ll get their revenge.
To me, these are all cliché scenes from the sort of Japanese movies I love watching. Revenge, weird science fiction abductions, and especially the blurring of the border between reality and fantasy. So all through the novel I was eager for the moment when that big explosion or chase or revenge killing would happen.
And in the meantime, I was killing time with Mari, listening in on her conversations with the various people she met in the night, with Kaoru, the massive female wrestler; with Korogi, who’s running away from people who want to kill her; and especially with Takahashi, a messy-haired jazz musician who seems to be falling in love with Mari, but isn’t quite sure and can’t quite convince her to let down her guard.
It was only after the book was over, and I was puzzling over whether I’d missed something or not, that I began to wonder about that Man with No Face, about the way he never did anything but watch. I wondered if he wasn’t maybe supposed to represent God, or whatever mythical being we hope or fear might be there beyond death, beyond the other side of the screen.
What exactly happened to Eri when she was trapped inside that tv set? Although we never find out, it’s interesting that practically every character in the story has some recollection about being trapped in a small, enclosed space. Sometimes it’s in a dream, or it’s the way they felt during a difficult period of their life; in Mari’s case, it was a real-life experience of being trapped in an elevator.
With all its eeriness and simplicity, this story leaves a very clear image: life is just one room, and eventually we all have to leave the room. Whether there’s another room out past it, nobody can say. But the truth is, we’re all a little scared of that exit we have to make. If we want, we can make our time in the room quite miserable for everyone involved. Or, if we’re willing to share our fears, we might instead offer one another a little comfort.
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens, 1854, published by Penguin Classics with introduction by Kate Flint in 1995. 319 pages.
1 September 2007
For a story that starts out on the precise wrong footing, I thought this worked really well.
What I mean is this: The first scene in “Hard Times” is of a headmaster, Old Tom Gradgrind—stodgy and domineering—drilling a class of mostly working class children. His strategy, we are told, is to emphasize pure reliance on facts and to suffocate all traces of imagination, fancy, passion and wonder from these children’s minds.
Furthermore, we find out that as a father, old Gradgrind has made his own two children, Young Tom and Louisa, the prototypical examples of his no nonsense ideas.
The problem is that Dickens has so much fun drawing a buffoonish caricature of Old Tom Gradgrind and his thinking. Then for the rest of the book, we’re asked to witness the story of Louisa’s journey into womanhood, her failed marriage to a wicked and lecherous old man, and her brother Tom’s devolution into a gambler, petty thief, and first-class lout. The story fleshes itself out with remarkable detail, but every time things really get rough, Dickens points us back to Old Gradgrind, and reminds us that his philosophy is the root cause of all this suffering, and it just can’t be believed.
Kate Flint’s notes make it abundantly clear that Dickens meant Gradgrind to stand for the Utilitarian school of thought, especially for the key assertion that all people act only in self-interest. But though both Tom and Louisa bemoan the way their youth has been stolen from them, we never really see what’s so awful about the way they were brought up. We’re merely told that at one point in her girlhood, Louisa said, “I wonder . . .” and her parents told her she must never wonder.
Old Tom Gradgrind is nothing but a paper tiger, and you’d really expect more from the man who brought us Ebenezer Scrooge.
Or even Mr. Bounderby, the aforementioned lecherous old blowhard who sucks Louisa into a loveless marriage. With all his hypocrisy and lack of compassion, Bounderby is a first-rate villain. More importantly, he has a first-rate foil: Mrs Sparsit, a nosy old widow who’s willing to slog through muddy, slug infested gardens in order to get Louisa out of the picture and become the new Mrs Bounderby.
The scenes with Mrs Sparsit are downright hilarious. Indeed, there are so many excellent things in this book that it really is worth reading for all its flaws. From the slimy womanizer James Harthouse—a bored aristocrat who plays carelessly with the emotions of both the Gradgrind children—to the surprisingly realistic account of the way the entire city of Coketown rallies to rescue a worker who’s fallen down an abandoned mineshaft, this book inadvertently proves a very Utilitarian lesson: that a story doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it can be enjoyed.
1 September 2007
For a story that starts out on the precise wrong footing, I thought this worked really well.
What I mean is this: The first scene in “Hard Times” is of a headmaster, Old Tom Gradgrind—stodgy and domineering—drilling a class of mostly working class children. His strategy, we are told, is to emphasize pure reliance on facts and to suffocate all traces of imagination, fancy, passion and wonder from these children’s minds.
Furthermore, we find out that as a father, old Gradgrind has made his own two children, Young Tom and Louisa, the prototypical examples of his no nonsense ideas.
The problem is that Dickens has so much fun drawing a buffoonish caricature of Old Tom Gradgrind and his thinking. Then for the rest of the book, we’re asked to witness the story of Louisa’s journey into womanhood, her failed marriage to a wicked and lecherous old man, and her brother Tom’s devolution into a gambler, petty thief, and first-class lout. The story fleshes itself out with remarkable detail, but every time things really get rough, Dickens points us back to Old Gradgrind, and reminds us that his philosophy is the root cause of all this suffering, and it just can’t be believed.
Kate Flint’s notes make it abundantly clear that Dickens meant Gradgrind to stand for the Utilitarian school of thought, especially for the key assertion that all people act only in self-interest. But though both Tom and Louisa bemoan the way their youth has been stolen from them, we never really see what’s so awful about the way they were brought up. We’re merely told that at one point in her girlhood, Louisa said, “I wonder . . .” and her parents told her she must never wonder.
Old Tom Gradgrind is nothing but a paper tiger, and you’d really expect more from the man who brought us Ebenezer Scrooge.
Or even Mr. Bounderby, the aforementioned lecherous old blowhard who sucks Louisa into a loveless marriage. With all his hypocrisy and lack of compassion, Bounderby is a first-rate villain. More importantly, he has a first-rate foil: Mrs Sparsit, a nosy old widow who’s willing to slog through muddy, slug infested gardens in order to get Louisa out of the picture and become the new Mrs Bounderby.
The scenes with Mrs Sparsit are downright hilarious. Indeed, there are so many excellent things in this book that it really is worth reading for all its flaws. From the slimy womanizer James Harthouse—a bored aristocrat who plays carelessly with the emotions of both the Gradgrind children—to the surprisingly realistic account of the way the entire city of Coketown rallies to rescue a worker who’s fallen down an abandoned mineshaft, this book inadvertently proves a very Utilitarian lesson: that a story doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it can be enjoyed.
Girls + Boys
by Lynda Barry, 1981, Reprinted in 1993 by Harper Perennial. 94 pages.
1 September 2007
I read this whole book of comic strips while taking a walk through the quiet neighborhood where I live. My favorite part was the story of the Donut Boy of Seattle, Wash, who struggles with life until a psychiatrist tells him to stop whining and get a job like everyone else.
Lynda Barry’s drawings are ugly depictions of ugly people. Her stories are often short, usually just enough to establish that the main characters have some serious problems. They seem to come right from that fine borderline where ideas first become reality: Is this idea worth putting to paper, or should I just crumple it and throw it away? All these scrawled pictures seem to make the case for salvaging every idea, bringing it just far enough into the light, then moving on and ferrying the next one over. With all her stories of miserable single women and bullied children, Barry seems to have been acutely tuned into the emerging spirit of the 1980s, which I certainly remember as a decade when America decided the underdogs had received all the chances they deserved. Lynda Barry doesn’t spare her characters moments of huge embarrassment and suffering, but she also doesn’t follow the Regan era prescription that if you just ignore all the “losers” they’ll just go away. I’m glad that Barry decided to scrawl out this little collection of odd thoughts and nightmare stories, and I’m curious to see what she drew next.
1 September 2007
I read this whole book of comic strips while taking a walk through the quiet neighborhood where I live. My favorite part was the story of the Donut Boy of Seattle, Wash, who struggles with life until a psychiatrist tells him to stop whining and get a job like everyone else.
Lynda Barry’s drawings are ugly depictions of ugly people. Her stories are often short, usually just enough to establish that the main characters have some serious problems. They seem to come right from that fine borderline where ideas first become reality: Is this idea worth putting to paper, or should I just crumple it and throw it away? All these scrawled pictures seem to make the case for salvaging every idea, bringing it just far enough into the light, then moving on and ferrying the next one over. With all her stories of miserable single women and bullied children, Barry seems to have been acutely tuned into the emerging spirit of the 1980s, which I certainly remember as a decade when America decided the underdogs had received all the chances they deserved. Lynda Barry doesn’t spare her characters moments of huge embarrassment and suffering, but she also doesn’t follow the Regan era prescription that if you just ignore all the “losers” they’ll just go away. I’m glad that Barry decided to scrawl out this little collection of odd thoughts and nightmare stories, and I’m curious to see what she drew next.
Essay on Man and Other Poems
by Alexander Pope. (1996) Published by Dover Thrift Editions. 99 pages.
4 August 2007: Page 1-79.
A poem and an essay are not the same thing, are they? Just like a novel is not a newspaper article, and a screenplay is not a rock song. Today the categories are clear. Poems can serve all sorts of roles. They can be tributes or snapshots of emotions, they can be bold attempts to sabotage language by evoking bizarre images in meaningless cacophonies, or they can be straightforward, impressionistic portraits of beautiful landscapes. It can be a form of improvisation, of jazz, of competition even. What they cannot be is essays. They’re not a suitable medium for serious arguments. We turn to poetry to escape, to find something less bureaucratic and less academic than prose.
I think from Pope’s point of view, and probably from the point of view of many of his contemporaries, poetry represented the end of a stage, the last stage of a process of metamorphosis like that of grain of sand to pearl or caterpillar to butterfly. Once a truth had been argued out in dry prose, once philosophers had argued away the last absurdities and refined their arguments, the final step was to take the results and state them in verse whose rhyme and meter reflect the inner truth. While Pope allows in his “Essay on Criticism” for the fact that there’s certainly room for frivolous poetry, for poetry independent of serious philosophical intent. But he doesn’t seem to think that there’s room for serious thought that refuses to wear the beautiful vestments of poetry.
Pope himself lets his hair down in his farcical “The Rape of the Lock,” in which a petty spat amongst a bunch of foppish dandies is chronicled with all the vigor and pathos of a Homeric epic. Indeed, it contains some of the most impressive and witty poetry in the whole book, as in the section where a game of cards is described as a battle between heroic and villainous kings, queens and knaves.
I have a real soft spot for humor like this. There’s just something so satisfying in thinking that the revered elders found laughter something worth aspiring to. When I see Pope put so much of his significant, serious, craftsman’s talent fully behind the task of a silly joke, I—a frivolous and shallow person—feel somehow deeply honored.
And so it’s out of common courtesy that I lend an ear to his more serious works, such as the “Essay on Man.” At first it’s a little hard for me to accept the unabashedly circular logic with which Pope sets down his arguments about the Great Order of the Universe. It’s as absurd to doubt God as it is to have the foot rebel against the head, we are told. Man has to pursue his goals one step at a time, whereas God created the universe in a single action. Therefore, God is greater than man. And because God is greater than man, and God created the universe, it’s sheer folly for man to see any fault in the universe. If we think we see fault, it’s only because we can’t see the “big picture.”
This isn’t the way I see things. It’s not the way I think about my life, not right now. But I remember at times that I was very depressed about my life, I relied upon exactly such thoughts as these to help lift me out of despair. Furthermore, once I got past the initial arguments, I found Pope had a lot of interesting things to say about happiness and justice, about the futility of striving for power and the need to seek personal happiness through charity and kindness.
It’s just this sort of all-pleasing, totally reasonable Enlightenment Era Englishness that sent thinkers like Nietzsche around the bend. He railed against it, calling it weak, cloying, effete. But there’s a sense of viability, vigor and downright truth in Pope’s straightforward verse that puts Nietzsche’s thundering and dundering to shame. Yes, Pope was a little too formal, a little too stiff, but at the heart of his arguments is an affirmation of the value of happiness, which is the same as an affirmation of the value of life. This affirmation was echoed and enhanced later on by the more free-spirited Walt Whitman in his “Song of Myself.” In fact, it pleases me to think that just as Pope improved upon prosaic philosophy by organizing it into verse, so too did Whitman improve on Pope’s era by freeing verse of its Byzantine rules and conventions, by making the sentiments less reasonable and more fierce.
1 September 2007; p. 79 to end
There’s not much more to say about this book other than that the last two poems included are a little disappointing after what came before, filled with personal references, inside jokes and cultural minutiae that haven’t aged well.
I would like to say a word, though, about Dover Thrift Editions and how much fun they are to pick up and read. They’re printed on pulpy paper that reminds me of the pages of the drawing tablets I used to have as a child. They’re all available for $2 or less, and usually they have some very low budget but lovely image on the cover, a swatch of Victorian wallpaper or a section of intricate lacework. There’s something wonderfully monastic about reading these books, as though you’re opting out of the whole free market system, out of the whole of modern society, pared down to pure literature. Probably if there is a nuclear war, Dover Thrift editions of Kate Chopin and Anton Chekhov will be the only pieces of literature to survive, and they will serve as the basis of a new civilization. Of course, in a world where Disney keeps lobbying for extensions of copyrights, at some point there will come a day when it’s harder and harder for a company like Dover to find the sort of classic, public domain material that serves as its lifeblood. Ah, well, it’s a pity.
4 August 2007: Page 1-79.
A poem and an essay are not the same thing, are they? Just like a novel is not a newspaper article, and a screenplay is not a rock song. Today the categories are clear. Poems can serve all sorts of roles. They can be tributes or snapshots of emotions, they can be bold attempts to sabotage language by evoking bizarre images in meaningless cacophonies, or they can be straightforward, impressionistic portraits of beautiful landscapes. It can be a form of improvisation, of jazz, of competition even. What they cannot be is essays. They’re not a suitable medium for serious arguments. We turn to poetry to escape, to find something less bureaucratic and less academic than prose.
I think from Pope’s point of view, and probably from the point of view of many of his contemporaries, poetry represented the end of a stage, the last stage of a process of metamorphosis like that of grain of sand to pearl or caterpillar to butterfly. Once a truth had been argued out in dry prose, once philosophers had argued away the last absurdities and refined their arguments, the final step was to take the results and state them in verse whose rhyme and meter reflect the inner truth. While Pope allows in his “Essay on Criticism” for the fact that there’s certainly room for frivolous poetry, for poetry independent of serious philosophical intent. But he doesn’t seem to think that there’s room for serious thought that refuses to wear the beautiful vestments of poetry.
Pope himself lets his hair down in his farcical “The Rape of the Lock,” in which a petty spat amongst a bunch of foppish dandies is chronicled with all the vigor and pathos of a Homeric epic. Indeed, it contains some of the most impressive and witty poetry in the whole book, as in the section where a game of cards is described as a battle between heroic and villainous kings, queens and knaves.
I have a real soft spot for humor like this. There’s just something so satisfying in thinking that the revered elders found laughter something worth aspiring to. When I see Pope put so much of his significant, serious, craftsman’s talent fully behind the task of a silly joke, I—a frivolous and shallow person—feel somehow deeply honored.
And so it’s out of common courtesy that I lend an ear to his more serious works, such as the “Essay on Man.” At first it’s a little hard for me to accept the unabashedly circular logic with which Pope sets down his arguments about the Great Order of the Universe. It’s as absurd to doubt God as it is to have the foot rebel against the head, we are told. Man has to pursue his goals one step at a time, whereas God created the universe in a single action. Therefore, God is greater than man. And because God is greater than man, and God created the universe, it’s sheer folly for man to see any fault in the universe. If we think we see fault, it’s only because we can’t see the “big picture.”
This isn’t the way I see things. It’s not the way I think about my life, not right now. But I remember at times that I was very depressed about my life, I relied upon exactly such thoughts as these to help lift me out of despair. Furthermore, once I got past the initial arguments, I found Pope had a lot of interesting things to say about happiness and justice, about the futility of striving for power and the need to seek personal happiness through charity and kindness.
It’s just this sort of all-pleasing, totally reasonable Enlightenment Era Englishness that sent thinkers like Nietzsche around the bend. He railed against it, calling it weak, cloying, effete. But there’s a sense of viability, vigor and downright truth in Pope’s straightforward verse that puts Nietzsche’s thundering and dundering to shame. Yes, Pope was a little too formal, a little too stiff, but at the heart of his arguments is an affirmation of the value of happiness, which is the same as an affirmation of the value of life. This affirmation was echoed and enhanced later on by the more free-spirited Walt Whitman in his “Song of Myself.” In fact, it pleases me to think that just as Pope improved upon prosaic philosophy by organizing it into verse, so too did Whitman improve on Pope’s era by freeing verse of its Byzantine rules and conventions, by making the sentiments less reasonable and more fierce.
1 September 2007; p. 79 to end
There’s not much more to say about this book other than that the last two poems included are a little disappointing after what came before, filled with personal references, inside jokes and cultural minutiae that haven’t aged well.
I would like to say a word, though, about Dover Thrift Editions and how much fun they are to pick up and read. They’re printed on pulpy paper that reminds me of the pages of the drawing tablets I used to have as a child. They’re all available for $2 or less, and usually they have some very low budget but lovely image on the cover, a swatch of Victorian wallpaper or a section of intricate lacework. There’s something wonderfully monastic about reading these books, as though you’re opting out of the whole free market system, out of the whole of modern society, pared down to pure literature. Probably if there is a nuclear war, Dover Thrift editions of Kate Chopin and Anton Chekhov will be the only pieces of literature to survive, and they will serve as the basis of a new civilization. Of course, in a world where Disney keeps lobbying for extensions of copyrights, at some point there will come a day when it’s harder and harder for a company like Dover to find the sort of classic, public domain material that serves as its lifeblood. Ah, well, it’s a pity.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
by JK Rowling. (2007) Published by Scholastic. 759 pages.
28 July 2007
I went out and picked up my reserved copy of this book the day it was released, and I finished it on the evening of the day after. It was an odd feeling, knowing that except for a few people on the other side of the literary curtain, I was among the first to find out all the little secrets of this last chapter in Harry Potter’s adventures.
Some have complained that Harry’s long trek from campsite to campsite with his friends Ron and Hermione got a little boring. I think it is true that JK Rowling had to stretch the plot a little to make it fill out the usual framework of a full academic year. But each time our three fugitive magicians come out of hiding, there’s so much action that I felt I needed the long stretches of tedium to be able to catch my breath, and also to take a step back and appreciate just how far this series has come since its beginning.
I remember in 2000 I picked up the first Potter book. I read through it quickly and felt a little embarrassed to be reading what seemed to me a faddish kids’ book. As Harry took his first shopping trip for a wand and magical tomes, as he visited a deep underground bank run by goblins, as he took the train to Hogwarts and entered the great hall with an enchanted sky for its ceiling, I started to get sucked in by the concept. I thought that in terms of creating a fantastic world, Rowling had written herself an enormous blank check. But I expected the characters to be little more than action figures moving through this fantastic world.
There’s a point in this final book where Harry Potter breaks out into a fit of rage at a father on the verge of abandoning his wife and child. “Parents,” he says, “Shouldn’t leave their kids—unless they’ve got to.” It’s one of the best parts of the book, the whole series, maybe Harry Potter’s truest moment of heroism. One reason the Harry Potter series has worked so well is because of Rowling’s miraculous restraint with her own imagination. Though her world is awash with wonders, none of them could ever fully distract from the sadness at the heart of the story: the orphaning of an infant child. In his first few books of the series, Harry is able to enjoy his childhood, making friends and playing sports and spending a realistically minimal amount of time soul searching. But as his adolescence progresses, old phantoms and longings from his past come to haunt him.
JK Rowling avoided letting her series descend into hollow fantasy, but she also avoided making the novels too precious. True, sometimes Harry’s fireside chats with Dumbledore seemed a little bit like therapy sessions. But though each book contained it’s neat little life lesson served up at the end, it never dominated the plot, never consumed it. Rather, it was always the feelings and emotions that tripped him up as he was looking to concoct a potion or tame a hippogriff. We as readers never had to deal with “Harry Potter and the Journey of Self Discovery” or “Harry Potter and the Battle with Substance Abuse.”
Using the miracle of teleportation, Rowling takes us on a wonderful final tour of her magical world in this last book, whipping up some first class adventure scenes at Gringots Bank, the Ministry of Magic, the home of the wicked Malfoys, and of course Hogwarts Castle. Deftly as ever, Rowling paints the encroaching regime of Harry’s enemy Voldemort with traces of racism, fascism, and the love of torture: her most deliberate touch is the wizard Grindelwald, defeated by Dumbledore in 1945, infamous for building the Nurmengard prison, above whose gates stood the slogan “For the Greater Good.” But we also get a realistic look at the dynamics of blacklisting and hate campaigns as we see the Ministry of Magic come under the sway of the dark new regime.
There’s not much else for me to say here that you won’t find elsewhere. I’ll just tell you that this is an excellent conclusion to a wonderful series. A hundred years from now, people will look back at this time period and find many things confusing and confounding, but they will certainly understand the success of JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter.”
28 July 2007
I went out and picked up my reserved copy of this book the day it was released, and I finished it on the evening of the day after. It was an odd feeling, knowing that except for a few people on the other side of the literary curtain, I was among the first to find out all the little secrets of this last chapter in Harry Potter’s adventures.
Some have complained that Harry’s long trek from campsite to campsite with his friends Ron and Hermione got a little boring. I think it is true that JK Rowling had to stretch the plot a little to make it fill out the usual framework of a full academic year. But each time our three fugitive magicians come out of hiding, there’s so much action that I felt I needed the long stretches of tedium to be able to catch my breath, and also to take a step back and appreciate just how far this series has come since its beginning.
I remember in 2000 I picked up the first Potter book. I read through it quickly and felt a little embarrassed to be reading what seemed to me a faddish kids’ book. As Harry took his first shopping trip for a wand and magical tomes, as he visited a deep underground bank run by goblins, as he took the train to Hogwarts and entered the great hall with an enchanted sky for its ceiling, I started to get sucked in by the concept. I thought that in terms of creating a fantastic world, Rowling had written herself an enormous blank check. But I expected the characters to be little more than action figures moving through this fantastic world.
There’s a point in this final book where Harry Potter breaks out into a fit of rage at a father on the verge of abandoning his wife and child. “Parents,” he says, “Shouldn’t leave their kids—unless they’ve got to.” It’s one of the best parts of the book, the whole series, maybe Harry Potter’s truest moment of heroism. One reason the Harry Potter series has worked so well is because of Rowling’s miraculous restraint with her own imagination. Though her world is awash with wonders, none of them could ever fully distract from the sadness at the heart of the story: the orphaning of an infant child. In his first few books of the series, Harry is able to enjoy his childhood, making friends and playing sports and spending a realistically minimal amount of time soul searching. But as his adolescence progresses, old phantoms and longings from his past come to haunt him.
JK Rowling avoided letting her series descend into hollow fantasy, but she also avoided making the novels too precious. True, sometimes Harry’s fireside chats with Dumbledore seemed a little bit like therapy sessions. But though each book contained it’s neat little life lesson served up at the end, it never dominated the plot, never consumed it. Rather, it was always the feelings and emotions that tripped him up as he was looking to concoct a potion or tame a hippogriff. We as readers never had to deal with “Harry Potter and the Journey of Self Discovery” or “Harry Potter and the Battle with Substance Abuse.”
Using the miracle of teleportation, Rowling takes us on a wonderful final tour of her magical world in this last book, whipping up some first class adventure scenes at Gringots Bank, the Ministry of Magic, the home of the wicked Malfoys, and of course Hogwarts Castle. Deftly as ever, Rowling paints the encroaching regime of Harry’s enemy Voldemort with traces of racism, fascism, and the love of torture: her most deliberate touch is the wizard Grindelwald, defeated by Dumbledore in 1945, infamous for building the Nurmengard prison, above whose gates stood the slogan “For the Greater Good.” But we also get a realistic look at the dynamics of blacklisting and hate campaigns as we see the Ministry of Magic come under the sway of the dark new regime.
There’s not much else for me to say here that you won’t find elsewhere. I’ll just tell you that this is an excellent conclusion to a wonderful series. A hundred years from now, people will look back at this time period and find many things confusing and confounding, but they will certainly understand the success of JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter.”
Walking the Black Cat
by Charles Simic (1996) Published by Harcourt, Brace & Company. 83 pages.
Reviewed 28 July 2007
What’s great about Charles Simic is you never know when to take him seriously. This is the second book of poetry I’ve read by him; the first was “The World Does Not End,” an earlier book that won a Pulitzer Prize. “Walking the Black Cat” is both funnier and creepier than its predecessor.
If you’ve never read Charles Simic before, the key thing is to prepare for a lot of disjointed images. A lot of people have no patience for this, and who can blame them? Why force yourself through a book of poetry when the job of making sense of everything has been outsourced to you the reader? Why not just shut the book and go look for somebody who’s willing to tell you a story and make sense of what’s going on?
Of course, if you read, say, poetry by Shakespeare or Milton, you’ll encounter plenty of references, terms and phrasings that make it incomprehensible to the modern reader, but most probably you’ll also be presented with an infrastructure of footnotes, glossaries and critical essays that will help you find your way through. Underneath all the obscurity there is usually an orderly, understandable system of poetic symbolism.
One of Simic’s talents is to simulate that sense of confusion, to give us a sense that his poems have been salvaged from some different age, a different world, that with just the right key, it would all make sense. But there never will be a decoding ring for Simic’s puzzles. While Shakespeare’s references to Greek myth and the Chronicles of English history can all be unearthed and dusted off, there will never be anyone to tell us what, exactly, Charles Simic means when he says that Happiness “sat over a dish of vanilla custard without ever touching it!” Even when identifiable figures appear, as they often do, their actions are difficult to interpret. Why is the ghost of Hamlet’s father wandering around a Vegas motel? What does it mean when Adam says the “secret of the musical matchbox” has been stolen from him?
There are frequent references in this book to ghosts, and to hotels, cafés and casinos visited by the dead. There is a sense that these poems are all stories told by a man who has seen the most important figures in his life pass on to another world. He is left alone to tell stories he can’t completely understand. He has precious little real information at his disposal, but a wealth of inklings and dark intuitions.
There are other elements, too. Strange bits of comedy, as when a man demands that his pet canary sing in exchange for the privilege of being able to witness the act of lovemaking. And a few poems that strike a surprisingly candid tone, such as “Slaughterhouse Flies” or “Little Unwritten Book,” which tells the story of a beloved cat who disappeared years ago. The owner still goes out each morning and calls for the cat and leaves a saucer of milk on the porch, to no avail.
Some of the poems are a little weak, such as “The Something.” At his worst, Simic seems like he’s just fiddling around with words, creating little formulaic oddities. But these poems are few; mostly, this book is filled with stylish, enjoyable, spooky morsels of verse.
Reviewed 28 July 2007
What’s great about Charles Simic is you never know when to take him seriously. This is the second book of poetry I’ve read by him; the first was “The World Does Not End,” an earlier book that won a Pulitzer Prize. “Walking the Black Cat” is both funnier and creepier than its predecessor.
If you’ve never read Charles Simic before, the key thing is to prepare for a lot of disjointed images. A lot of people have no patience for this, and who can blame them? Why force yourself through a book of poetry when the job of making sense of everything has been outsourced to you the reader? Why not just shut the book and go look for somebody who’s willing to tell you a story and make sense of what’s going on?
Of course, if you read, say, poetry by Shakespeare or Milton, you’ll encounter plenty of references, terms and phrasings that make it incomprehensible to the modern reader, but most probably you’ll also be presented with an infrastructure of footnotes, glossaries and critical essays that will help you find your way through. Underneath all the obscurity there is usually an orderly, understandable system of poetic symbolism.
One of Simic’s talents is to simulate that sense of confusion, to give us a sense that his poems have been salvaged from some different age, a different world, that with just the right key, it would all make sense. But there never will be a decoding ring for Simic’s puzzles. While Shakespeare’s references to Greek myth and the Chronicles of English history can all be unearthed and dusted off, there will never be anyone to tell us what, exactly, Charles Simic means when he says that Happiness “sat over a dish of vanilla custard without ever touching it!” Even when identifiable figures appear, as they often do, their actions are difficult to interpret. Why is the ghost of Hamlet’s father wandering around a Vegas motel? What does it mean when Adam says the “secret of the musical matchbox” has been stolen from him?
There are frequent references in this book to ghosts, and to hotels, cafés and casinos visited by the dead. There is a sense that these poems are all stories told by a man who has seen the most important figures in his life pass on to another world. He is left alone to tell stories he can’t completely understand. He has precious little real information at his disposal, but a wealth of inklings and dark intuitions.
There are other elements, too. Strange bits of comedy, as when a man demands that his pet canary sing in exchange for the privilege of being able to witness the act of lovemaking. And a few poems that strike a surprisingly candid tone, such as “Slaughterhouse Flies” or “Little Unwritten Book,” which tells the story of a beloved cat who disappeared years ago. The owner still goes out each morning and calls for the cat and leaves a saucer of milk on the porch, to no avail.
Some of the poems are a little weak, such as “The Something.” At his worst, Simic seems like he’s just fiddling around with words, creating little formulaic oddities. But these poems are few; mostly, this book is filled with stylish, enjoyable, spooky morsels of verse.
Katzenkopfpflaster
by Sarah Kirsch. (1979) Published by dtv. 119 pages.
8 July 2007
This is a collection of poems from four books published by Sarah Kirsch between the years 1969 and 1979. As a reader, I got to witness how early on in her career Kirsch focused on complex narratives with syncopated construction (rhythms independent of sentence structure, and both independent of the breaks in lines of text and strophes), and how ten years later she began to produce tiny, lyrical images, often focused on the beauty of the landscape. I never felt like Sarah Kirsch was a poet enraptured by the beauty of the landscape, but rather one who escaped into it in order to flee an ever less tolerable world.
My favorite poems were from the 1974 book „Zaubersprüche.“ It felt to me like at this point Kirsch grew tired of the burdens of self-consciousness and personal symbolism. In the poem „Georgian, Photographen,“ she starts to let the pictures speak for themselves. She never abandons symbolism, but after this turning point I always felt as though she’d let go of her poems, let them be more spontaneous and open to interpretation and—more importantly—misinterpretation.
It was a hard book for me to read, because of the language, because of the fact that I’m a poor interpreter of poetry, and because of the fact that—aside from the last set of poems, which express Kirsch’s gradual personal rebellion against the East German government she once supported—I often have no context. It’s often hard for me to tell whether Kirsch is writing about her own life or the lives of characters she’s created. It’s often difficult for me to understand the significance of place names and of places described. Because my mind is focused on grasping the vocabulary, I often lose my sense for the sound of the words, and don’t catch the music or dissonance the author intends.
But misunderstanding is not the same as failure. A lot of meaning is lost in the gap between my German and my English, and a lot is lost from the fact that I’m a man a Kirsch is a woman. From where I’m standing, the reception is poor, but what I’m able to salvage from behind the static is still mine. As Kirsch says of kite flying, „Uns gehört der Rest des Fadens, und dass wir dich kannten.“
Yesterday I went to the wedding reception of two friends of mine, both of who are writers, and both of who are women. After the buffet had been served up, the two brides read poems by themselves and others. Because I knew those involved, because I’ve witnessed their relationship over the years, the significance of the words was instantly clear to me, and the meaning was intensified by the fact that these words were being spoken on this day, that they were chosen to honor a union that had finally reached its knotting point.
It’s impossible to recreate those circumstances for someone else. You had to be there. The poems themselves can be written on paper and carried from place to place over the Internet, but the context can never be fully carried along.
On the other hand, the context is never fully lost. This is one of the special abilities of poetry. When we encounter these little broke-lined passages standing alone on roomy pages, when we struggle through them and recognize this symbol and are confused by that one, we always have to repeat the thoughts and questions of William Paley’s analogy of a man discovering a watch on the ground: “This has a purpose. This has a creator. Who created this and why?”
It’s easy for me to understand what Kirsch is talking about in political poems, such as „Änglisches Lied,“ where a feudal subject describes an attitude of absolute subservience to her master. But in reading the earlier poems of Kirsch, I’m able to get a glimpse of the path she took to get their; I’m able to watch as she teaches herself to speak, as she looks around the world and harvests different sorts of empathy, and makes the crucial decision of what, if anything, is worth saying.
8 July 2007
This is a collection of poems from four books published by Sarah Kirsch between the years 1969 and 1979. As a reader, I got to witness how early on in her career Kirsch focused on complex narratives with syncopated construction (rhythms independent of sentence structure, and both independent of the breaks in lines of text and strophes), and how ten years later she began to produce tiny, lyrical images, often focused on the beauty of the landscape. I never felt like Sarah Kirsch was a poet enraptured by the beauty of the landscape, but rather one who escaped into it in order to flee an ever less tolerable world.
My favorite poems were from the 1974 book „Zaubersprüche.“ It felt to me like at this point Kirsch grew tired of the burdens of self-consciousness and personal symbolism. In the poem „Georgian, Photographen,“ she starts to let the pictures speak for themselves. She never abandons symbolism, but after this turning point I always felt as though she’d let go of her poems, let them be more spontaneous and open to interpretation and—more importantly—misinterpretation.
It was a hard book for me to read, because of the language, because of the fact that I’m a poor interpreter of poetry, and because of the fact that—aside from the last set of poems, which express Kirsch’s gradual personal rebellion against the East German government she once supported—I often have no context. It’s often hard for me to tell whether Kirsch is writing about her own life or the lives of characters she’s created. It’s often difficult for me to understand the significance of place names and of places described. Because my mind is focused on grasping the vocabulary, I often lose my sense for the sound of the words, and don’t catch the music or dissonance the author intends.
But misunderstanding is not the same as failure. A lot of meaning is lost in the gap between my German and my English, and a lot is lost from the fact that I’m a man a Kirsch is a woman. From where I’m standing, the reception is poor, but what I’m able to salvage from behind the static is still mine. As Kirsch says of kite flying, „Uns gehört der Rest des Fadens, und dass wir dich kannten.“
Yesterday I went to the wedding reception of two friends of mine, both of who are writers, and both of who are women. After the buffet had been served up, the two brides read poems by themselves and others. Because I knew those involved, because I’ve witnessed their relationship over the years, the significance of the words was instantly clear to me, and the meaning was intensified by the fact that these words were being spoken on this day, that they were chosen to honor a union that had finally reached its knotting point.
It’s impossible to recreate those circumstances for someone else. You had to be there. The poems themselves can be written on paper and carried from place to place over the Internet, but the context can never be fully carried along.
On the other hand, the context is never fully lost. This is one of the special abilities of poetry. When we encounter these little broke-lined passages standing alone on roomy pages, when we struggle through them and recognize this symbol and are confused by that one, we always have to repeat the thoughts and questions of William Paley’s analogy of a man discovering a watch on the ground: “This has a purpose. This has a creator. Who created this and why?”
It’s easy for me to understand what Kirsch is talking about in political poems, such as „Änglisches Lied,“ where a feudal subject describes an attitude of absolute subservience to her master. But in reading the earlier poems of Kirsch, I’m able to get a glimpse of the path she took to get their; I’m able to watch as she teaches herself to speak, as she looks around the world and harvests different sorts of empathy, and makes the crucial decision of what, if anything, is worth saying.
The Comedians
by Graham Greene. (1965) Published by Penguin Books. 287 pages.
Reviewed 5 July 2007
As a writer, I’ve always been a little shy of the subjects of adultery, affairs and jealousy the way that you might be shy of opening that great big present someone gave you for your birthday, the one in the enormous box with the massive bow. Mystery writers can rely on sexual jealousy as a surefire motive guaranteed to contain more spice than simple monetary greed. Serious writers seem obliged to dwell on the complications of extramarital affairs the way that traditional haiku poets were obliged to dwell on the blossoms of cherry trees. Affairs, custody battles, divorce, feelings of loneliness, these are all cliché subjects, but they’re clichés that many of us have to visit because these are the subjects that get under the skin of the safest, most stable, most “mature” people, the apparent pillars of our society. If you want, you can write about mob lords, private detectives, wizards, soldiers, whalers, firefighters, people who throw themselves into conflict and adventure. Heroism and villainy are legitimate subjects for serious literature. But in order to gain maturity you also have to recognize the forces in life that make mature adults act like selfish children; you have to recognize the fact that even when people seek to avoid conflict, even when they try to settle down, conflict comes and finds them right where they live.
Graham Greene is thinking about these issues and many more when he brings together Brown and Jones, two men who have spent much of their lives as itinerant con artists. After a particularly successful scam involving forged paintings, Brown retreats to Haiti and decides to settle down into the role of the owner of a hotel he inherited from a mother he barely knew. He manages to turn the Hotel Trianon into a favorite spot for poets, artists and thinkers, and also starts up a romance with the wife of an ambassador from an unnamed South American state. Brown scoffs at the way the ambassador is obsessed with his own sense of ownership, the way he treats his wife as a possession and always emphasizes the word “my” in the phrase, “my wife.”
But Brown finds that he too is susceptible to jealousy and pettiness when he encounters Jones, a laid-back smooth-talker who boasts of his spurious military achievements in Burma during WWII. As a fellow con-artist, Brown can’t look down at Jones for playing fast and loose with the truth, but he feels threatened by the fact that Jones is capable of something that’s always eluded Brown: the ability to make people laugh.
What’s great about this book is the fact that the narrative is so prosaiac and matter of fact that I kept getting caught off guard by Graham’s great talent. Over the course of the book, Graham takes the carefree sense of humor that Brown so dreads and uses it as an anchoring for a series of literary fancy knots, reflections about the dark comedy of the increasingly corrupt Haitian Government under President “Papa Doc” Duvalier; about the tragically absurd comedy of guerilla forces who think they have a chance to overthrow a despotic government able to rely on CIA support; about the comedy of the American utopians who come to Haiti in hopes of building a vegetarian center that will bring peace to the country by removing acidity from the Haitian diet; and most of all, about the farcical and pitiful comedy of misunderstanding that arises when Brown fails to heed the wisdom of his own mistress’s words: “Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn’t worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination . . . then we fail.”
Reviewed 5 July 2007
As a writer, I’ve always been a little shy of the subjects of adultery, affairs and jealousy the way that you might be shy of opening that great big present someone gave you for your birthday, the one in the enormous box with the massive bow. Mystery writers can rely on sexual jealousy as a surefire motive guaranteed to contain more spice than simple monetary greed. Serious writers seem obliged to dwell on the complications of extramarital affairs the way that traditional haiku poets were obliged to dwell on the blossoms of cherry trees. Affairs, custody battles, divorce, feelings of loneliness, these are all cliché subjects, but they’re clichés that many of us have to visit because these are the subjects that get under the skin of the safest, most stable, most “mature” people, the apparent pillars of our society. If you want, you can write about mob lords, private detectives, wizards, soldiers, whalers, firefighters, people who throw themselves into conflict and adventure. Heroism and villainy are legitimate subjects for serious literature. But in order to gain maturity you also have to recognize the forces in life that make mature adults act like selfish children; you have to recognize the fact that even when people seek to avoid conflict, even when they try to settle down, conflict comes and finds them right where they live.
Graham Greene is thinking about these issues and many more when he brings together Brown and Jones, two men who have spent much of their lives as itinerant con artists. After a particularly successful scam involving forged paintings, Brown retreats to Haiti and decides to settle down into the role of the owner of a hotel he inherited from a mother he barely knew. He manages to turn the Hotel Trianon into a favorite spot for poets, artists and thinkers, and also starts up a romance with the wife of an ambassador from an unnamed South American state. Brown scoffs at the way the ambassador is obsessed with his own sense of ownership, the way he treats his wife as a possession and always emphasizes the word “my” in the phrase, “my wife.”
But Brown finds that he too is susceptible to jealousy and pettiness when he encounters Jones, a laid-back smooth-talker who boasts of his spurious military achievements in Burma during WWII. As a fellow con-artist, Brown can’t look down at Jones for playing fast and loose with the truth, but he feels threatened by the fact that Jones is capable of something that’s always eluded Brown: the ability to make people laugh.
What’s great about this book is the fact that the narrative is so prosaiac and matter of fact that I kept getting caught off guard by Graham’s great talent. Over the course of the book, Graham takes the carefree sense of humor that Brown so dreads and uses it as an anchoring for a series of literary fancy knots, reflections about the dark comedy of the increasingly corrupt Haitian Government under President “Papa Doc” Duvalier; about the tragically absurd comedy of guerilla forces who think they have a chance to overthrow a despotic government able to rely on CIA support; about the comedy of the American utopians who come to Haiti in hopes of building a vegetarian center that will bring peace to the country by removing acidity from the Haitian diet; and most of all, about the farcical and pitiful comedy of misunderstanding that arises when Brown fails to heed the wisdom of his own mistress’s words: “Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn’t worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination . . . then we fail.”
Suicide Club (自殺サークル）
(2002) Directed by Sion Sono. Distributed by TLA Releasing.
23 June 2007
I fell quickly in love with this grim flick that takes the clichés of Japanese horror cinema and turns them into something touching and surreal. The plot deals with a rash of unexplained suicides in Japan. The suicides have a cultish aspect: for instance, a group of uniformed schoolgirls line up on a train platform, join hands, and chant “one two three,” then throw themselves together in the path of an oncoming train. Furthermore, some of the suicides have identical wounds, rectangles of flesh sliced away.
An investigator following up on the suicides takes a soulful look around himself on a subway train and sees a pervasive melancholy in his fellow travelers. Soon after, he begins receiving ominous phonecalls from a child who seems to know something about the alleged suicide club. These phonecalls are genuinely creepy because of the coldness in the child’s voice and the disconcerting, unexplained cough that happens after every puzzling statement the child makes. The phonecalls seem to imply that suicide is preferable to life because only in suicide can one affirm one’s connection to oneself. Later, we are treated to a look at a strange conspiracy of children who seem to be at the root of the suicides. In an unforgettable scene, the children enter a long hallway infused with pink light. Chirping baby chicks dart around the floor of the hallway, and a man in a black mask prepares a carpenter’s tool to slice rectangles of flesh from the backs of the children’s victims.
There is a sequel to this movie which explains some of its mysteries, but the piece stands alone as sad, beautiful enigma.
23 June 2007
I fell quickly in love with this grim flick that takes the clichés of Japanese horror cinema and turns them into something touching and surreal. The plot deals with a rash of unexplained suicides in Japan. The suicides have a cultish aspect: for instance, a group of uniformed schoolgirls line up on a train platform, join hands, and chant “one two three,” then throw themselves together in the path of an oncoming train. Furthermore, some of the suicides have identical wounds, rectangles of flesh sliced away.
An investigator following up on the suicides takes a soulful look around himself on a subway train and sees a pervasive melancholy in his fellow travelers. Soon after, he begins receiving ominous phonecalls from a child who seems to know something about the alleged suicide club. These phonecalls are genuinely creepy because of the coldness in the child’s voice and the disconcerting, unexplained cough that happens after every puzzling statement the child makes. The phonecalls seem to imply that suicide is preferable to life because only in suicide can one affirm one’s connection to oneself. Later, we are treated to a look at a strange conspiracy of children who seem to be at the root of the suicides. In an unforgettable scene, the children enter a long hallway infused with pink light. Chirping baby chicks dart around the floor of the hallway, and a man in a black mask prepares a carpenter’s tool to slice rectangles of flesh from the backs of the children’s victims.
There is a sequel to this movie which explains some of its mysteries, but the piece stands alone as sad, beautiful enigma.
The Ice Storm
by Rick Moody, 1994, published by Little Brown and Company, 279 pages.
23 June 2007
This is a harsh diatribe on the state of the American family. The ice storm of the title refers partly to the storm that descends on the US east coast during the winter of 1973, but also to the lack of real, simple, warm love that seems to have descended upon prosperous American families. Moody focuses on two families in the Connecticut town of New Canaan: the Hoods and the Williamses. At the beginning of the story, father Benjamin Hood is having an affair with his neighbor Janie Williams. By the end of the book, their counterparts, Elena Hood and Jim Williams, have also jumped in bed together. But the real story is not the affairs but the environment that nurtures them: an alcohol riddled culture where parents gather together to play seemingly casual adulterous trade-off games (the men throw car keys in a salad bowls and the women fish them out, choosing their mates for the evening), while the children are left home to occupy themselves with television, talking toys, and of course the budding beginnings of their own sexual desire.
Rick Moody’s greatest talent is in giving voice to the children in his story. There is Wendy, who at fourteen is impatient to shed all vestiges of sexual innocence. There’s always a sense that she’s wandering off into deep and dangerous waters, but also a feeling that her nymphomania is driven by something natural and with the potential for fostering goodness. Down in the Williamses’ basement she bargains for sexual favors with schoolmate Mike Williams, demanding boxes of Bazooka Bubblegum in return for going all the way. Later, she helps Mike’s younger brother, Sandy, hang his talking GI Joe doll, and suddenly finds herself unable to resist him. She breaks down his inhibitions with a bottle of vodka, and in the morning imagines that in this prepubescent boy she’s found the love of her life.
We also get to look in the head of Wendy’s older brother, Paul, who’s on his way home for the long Thanksgiving weekend. Paul, too, is obsessed with losing his virginity, but a few years of age has made him more reflective. He draws parallels in his mind between his own crumbling family and the domestic problems of Reed and Sue Richards in the comic book series “Fantastic Four,” which makes for some of the best passages of the book.
If poetic depths can be found in the way these children interact with supposedly childish things, we also have to admit the shallowness of the adult culture in the book, where the platitudes of economist Milton Friedman and est-founder Werner Erhard seem foster a state of perpetual insecurity, a sense that life is about pursuing the best possible deal possible, and that you’re a fool if you settle for what you’ve got.
While this book covers the same territory as John Updike’s “Couples,” it’s a far better book because it is so focused, and because it is able to chronicle not only the selfishness of adults but also the consequences faced by their children.
23 June 2007
This is a harsh diatribe on the state of the American family. The ice storm of the title refers partly to the storm that descends on the US east coast during the winter of 1973, but also to the lack of real, simple, warm love that seems to have descended upon prosperous American families. Moody focuses on two families in the Connecticut town of New Canaan: the Hoods and the Williamses. At the beginning of the story, father Benjamin Hood is having an affair with his neighbor Janie Williams. By the end of the book, their counterparts, Elena Hood and Jim Williams, have also jumped in bed together. But the real story is not the affairs but the environment that nurtures them: an alcohol riddled culture where parents gather together to play seemingly casual adulterous trade-off games (the men throw car keys in a salad bowls and the women fish them out, choosing their mates for the evening), while the children are left home to occupy themselves with television, talking toys, and of course the budding beginnings of their own sexual desire.
Rick Moody’s greatest talent is in giving voice to the children in his story. There is Wendy, who at fourteen is impatient to shed all vestiges of sexual innocence. There’s always a sense that she’s wandering off into deep and dangerous waters, but also a feeling that her nymphomania is driven by something natural and with the potential for fostering goodness. Down in the Williamses’ basement she bargains for sexual favors with schoolmate Mike Williams, demanding boxes of Bazooka Bubblegum in return for going all the way. Later, she helps Mike’s younger brother, Sandy, hang his talking GI Joe doll, and suddenly finds herself unable to resist him. She breaks down his inhibitions with a bottle of vodka, and in the morning imagines that in this prepubescent boy she’s found the love of her life.
We also get to look in the head of Wendy’s older brother, Paul, who’s on his way home for the long Thanksgiving weekend. Paul, too, is obsessed with losing his virginity, but a few years of age has made him more reflective. He draws parallels in his mind between his own crumbling family and the domestic problems of Reed and Sue Richards in the comic book series “Fantastic Four,” which makes for some of the best passages of the book.
If poetic depths can be found in the way these children interact with supposedly childish things, we also have to admit the shallowness of the adult culture in the book, where the platitudes of economist Milton Friedman and est-founder Werner Erhard seem foster a state of perpetual insecurity, a sense that life is about pursuing the best possible deal possible, and that you’re a fool if you settle for what you’ve got.
While this book covers the same territory as John Updike’s “Couples,” it’s a far better book because it is so focused, and because it is able to chronicle not only the selfishness of adults but also the consequences faced by their children.
The Magus
by John Fowles (1965). Published by Little Brown & Company.
26 May 2007. Up to page 227 of 607.
A good author can manipulate the reader’s general interest into a sort of hunger. One way of doing this is to create suspense. You see this a lot in the Harry Potter books. Halfway into the book, you’ve got about seventeen different storylines going at once and are smacking your arm like a junkie waiting for the next little hit of information on any subject whatsoever. Here, the author is playing on the natural instinct of the human mind to constantly orient itself. By being stingy and tantalizing with information, JK Rowling hooks us firmly and well.
John Fowles traps his readers in a different sort of way. The first section of his book, “The Magus,” follows the life of a jaded and selfish young man named Nicholas Urfe. The story is quite believable. We see how Mr. Urfe falls in love with a feisty young Australian girl named Alison, only to leave her in order to run away to a solitary Greek island named Phraxos, where he plans to teach English and nurture his own poetic talent. Shortly after he gets to the island, he comes to the sobering realization that he has no poetic talent worth nurturing. Furthermore, the people of the island bore him to death; the children he teaches are more interested in their job prospects than in literature; the other teachers are all stick-in-the-muds. He contemplates suicide but can’t bring himself to do the deed.
The whole story is told in the first person, and the language is so rich and spirited that, while we can’t bring ourselves to really like Nicholas Urfe, we do think he might be a tad harsh when he labels himself untalented. Indeed, he seems to be a man of wonderfully acute and active intelligence. The danger is that all this intelligence is now trapped on an island with nothing to apply itself to. We’ve come right into a cul-de-sac of the soul, and we’re only a tenth of the way through the book. We can’t help but imagine that the rest of the book will be an excruciatingly detailed meditation on loneliness and boredom and routine, with a prose whose eloquence and beauty grow in inverse proportion to the suspense quotient.
So by the time the character of Maurice Conchis makes his entrance, we’re SO ready for a little bit of magic.
Maurice Conchis is an old man who lives an apparently solitary life in a mansion almost hidden from view. He is surrounded by books and beautiful paintings, periodically immersing himself in elaborate harpsichord music and in the undersea life of the nearby reefs and islets.
It certainly seems that Conchis is the Magus described in the book’s title, but what sort of magic does he have at his command? At first, it seems that the magic referred to is only the magic of enlightenment, of friendship, the magic of hope and engagement in life. But that’s only part of what’s going on, because Conchis also starts dropping hints that he’s a more literal type of magician; that he’s discovered a secret method for gaining contact with the spirit world.
Soon we’re caught up in a game of many-layered ambiguity. As Conchis spins out the story of his early life at a leisurely pace, the characters he describes begin appearing in real life. But Nicholas Urfe refuses to believe they’re actually ghosts, and he soon puts his intellect to the task of figuring out how exactly Conchis has organized this extensive charade. At the same time, he finds himself falling in love with one of Conchis’s “ghosts,” the delightfully coquettish Lily, who corresponds to Conchis’s first love, a woman whose erotic coercion prompted him to enlist in the army as a foot soldier in the first world war.
So is Conchis a teacher? A charlatan? A dandy? A philosopher? What is the purpose behind the elaborate masque that he constructs around poor Nicholas Urfe?
I can’t tell yet, but it seems as though Conchis’s masque is very much meant to be a collection of all the kinds of magic that fiction and literature can offer to rescue us from boredom and despair. Fowles seems to be gleefully mixing up a potion that includes just as much of the profane as it does the profound: mystery and romance, mythological symbolism and historical intrigue as well as serious meditations on death, free will, and the inevitability of evil all come together around Conchis, and the real magic behind it all is the way that the reader’s mind comes alive when faced with the many emotional and intellectual challenges presented by this truly fascinating book.
2 June 2007; pp. 227-351
It’s important when reading this book to keep remembering that as the reader, you have an advantage over the narrator. You, after all, are reading a work of fiction. Anything goes. And if the fiction you’re reading is a book called “The Magus”, you at least have to entertain the fact that some real magic is going on.
You have to remind yourself of this fact to keep from getting annoyed by the way that poor Nicholas Urfe keeps dragging his feet, concocting less and less plausible theories to explain the strange things that are going on around him. How is it that he sees the beautiful Lily—supposedly a ghost conjured up from Mr. Conchis’s past—down by the beach and moments later standing up on the balcony of Conchis’s mansion, looking wistfully to sea? Nicholas U of course rules out the supernatural and becomes convinced that “Lily” has a twin sister. He suggests the matter to Conchis, who at first scoffs at it, but soon the twin sister reveals herself, and Nicholas Urfe feels smugly confirmed that he worked out the secret.
To me, though, it seems more likely—because it’s more interesting—that Nicholas hasn’t discovered the existence of twins, he’s created their existence. At one point, Conchis tried to convince Nick that Lily is actually a schizophrenic, compelled to always put on new masks and pretenses. And at one point, Lilly refers to herself as Astarte, a Semitic Goddess of mystery who corresponds to the High Priestess of the Tarot deck. The reference to Astarte appears playful, and almost passes unnoticed amidst the many other mythic and cultural references dropped around this book, unless you recall that John Fowles has dedicated the book “To Astarte.”
So for my money, Lilly (who later claims that her real name is Julie Holmes, sister to June Holmes) is most probably the goddess Astarte herself, a sort of mad goddess who needs the enraptured imagination of a clever young man like Nicholas Urfe in order to guide the constant changes of her own identity.
All of which would be a fascinating intellectual game that we as readers could play alongside poor Nick Urfe, if it weren’t for the fact that Urfe seems to have chosen the wrong game to play. He’s determined to have sex with Lilly–Julie. He thinks about her constantly. The more he thinks about her and how to get her away from Conchis, the more Conchis fades into the background, and also the promise of a gift of wisdom and enlightenment that Conchis seemed once to extend. Earlier in the book, Conchis seemed to have something to say, something about morality and mortality. He had survived the horrors of the trenches in the First World War; he had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second. In one creepy incident, he uses a loaded die and a cyanide tablet to bring Urfe face-to-face with the fear of death.
There’s a sense that if Nicholas weren’t so dead set on sexual conquest, he might listen more to Conchis, and Conchis would then have more to say. But instead, he keeps pursuing Julie through all her various identities. And as he does so, he keeps encountering more and more frightening characters, including a man dressed as Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, and a troop of men dressed as Nazi soldiers (Nick, of course, is convinced that they’re actors in Conchis’s hire).
The book seems both a fantastical retelling of the story of “Faust” and more especially “The Tempest.” But the references to the World Wars suggest that the turmoil of the twentieth century make it impossible to escape fully into fantasy. Heaven may still be something phantasmagoric, but Hell has already been brought into being in this world in the recent past, and new generations discover this at their peril.
This is a fun book to review, although it’s so unusual that it’s hard not to want to just summarize the whole thing.
The emotional spine of the book is the relationship between Nick and his old flame Alison, who tries to draw him back into her life during a weekend trip to Mount Parnassus. Nick seems to view her as nothing more than a distraction and an annoyance until at one point something she does reminds him of a poem he once read, at which point he decides he has to have her as well as Lilly.
The argument that ensues is the most real thing in the book. Alison accuses Nick of being too cowardly to be capable of love, and Nick proves her right by only being able to respond with lame attempts at wit and romance, constantly calling her ‘darling,’ and calling himself a worthless bastard. Which is only an excuse because it’s obvious that this is a man who is actually quite in love with himself.
Before the argument with Alison, the game between Conchis and Nick seems like a wonderful second chance at life and fulfillment. But once we see that Nick has the chance to be with this woman who loves him, and blindly wounds her by chosing a woman who seems only to be a fantasy, or who rather seems to be fantasy itself, we can’t help but felt hat the game has become hollow. And at this point, Nick shifts from being someone we have difficulty liking to someone we sort of hate.
16 June 2007; p. 235-end
In order to discuss this book, I have to mention another book I read a long time ago: “Illuminautus!” by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert J. Shea. Today, the book is known mainly as a cult classic. It breaks all the rules, it fails majestically, it reads like bad 70s porn, it’s full of adolescent attempts at far-out chaotic montages of images that are almost unreadable. The sex is raunchy, the violence is graphic, and the whole this seems to have been plotted in a drugged-out haze.
But at the time I read it, I was only twelve years old, and it was the book that got me truly interested in reading. Although it’s not the sort of book I would like to reread now, it does hold a special place in my heart, and it’s important for me to think about it and understand what made it so meaningful at the time.
Cut down below all the psychedelic and the stew of conspiracy theories, get passed all the injudicious slang and you’ll find the story of Hagbard Celine, a renegade sea captain and philosopher who’s created his own alternative world inside a golden submarine, the “Leif Erickson.” Many of the book’s subplots are about people who are somehow abducted or tricked by Celine, and are subsequently put through a barrage of weird psychological situations, often involving sex, drugs and the threat of death.
What makes the book remarkable is the fact that Celine turns out to be a teacher at heart. His mind-games are tailor-made for his subjects. He sets out to identify a person’s own fears and taboos, and break them open; he teaches cops to hate authority; he teaches rapists to empathize with their victims; he teaches believers to be skeptics and skeptics to be believers.
The most interesting student of Celine’s is George Dorn, a headstrong intellectual hippie radical who begins to learn from Celine to stop living in his head and start living in his senses, who begins to learn bravery and confidence.
Corny as it sounds, this theme of learning and personal growth raises the novel up a notch from just being a piece of shock anarchic trash. Throughout his career, the late Robert Anton Wilson was always moved by the idea most people live their lives imprisoned in a rigid set of ideas. In dozens of books and articles he tried to incorporate Celine-like games to create satori-like revelations, to wake people up to . . . something vague and hard to define, yet exciting. The revelation, perhaps, that we are free.
What’s particularly interesting to me is the idea of a character like Hagbard Celine. By the time we’re adults, we all recognize to some degree that there are pivotal moments in life, galvanic moments when you realize who you are or you drastically change the course you’re going to take in life. For many people, these are moments of trauma; many report having such experiences in war; becoming a parent can trigger such moments; sometimes, just a conversation with someone very significant can be enough to trigger a massive change in perspective.
There’s usually an element of chance in the way these moments enter our lives . . . but what if someone created a system to engineer such moments, to accelerate the progress of humankind by creating carefully controlled psychological moments of crisis and enlightenment? Hagbard Celine is just that; he’s a sort of super genius whose purpose in life is to raise consciousness, an authority figure whose goal is to teach people to question authority, an entrepreneur who invests millions of dollars into getting people to cross personal thresholds, an old man who seeks not to censor the impulses of youth, but to enhance them.
The character of Hagbard Celine always seemed to be the most original, unprecedented part of “Illuminautus!” so I’m both proud and disappointed to have discovered at last his direct predecessor in John Fowles’s Maurice Conchis.
As in “Illuminautus!” the story of the Magus is ultimately one of teaching. Nicholas Urfe finds himself caught up in a sort of game of secrets and lies with this strange, possibly crazy old man on the island of Phraxos. As in “Illuminautus!” there is a recognition of the fact that a young man’s mind is much more receptive and malleable when he’s in a state of sexual excitement; Maurice orchestrates a bevy of beautiful women who play on Nicholas’s vanity, social pretensions, and predatory urges. Alternate explanations keep be offered for what is “really” going on. Conchis presents himself at various points as a psychic conjurer of ghosts; the well-meaning ward of a beautiful madwoman; an avant garde theatrical director creating a drama without an audience; and as a psychologist engaged in a bizarre and unethical experiment with Nicholas Urfe as the subject.
Each of these identities is somewhat accurate. Also, as readers, we should be alert to the fact that Conchis prefers his name to be pronounced with a soft “ch,” so that it resembles the word “conscious.” He represents the evolutionary process by which a young man like Nicholas rises from narrow selfishness to a more nuanced awareness of sharing a world with other people, a world where freedom and love are not simply abstract concepts and where there are no pat answers to ethical dilemmas.
Conchis’s own ethical dilemma took place during the German occupation of the island during WWII, when a sadistic German soldier presented him with the choice of personally executing three freedom fighters or standing by and watching as the Germans execute eighty civilians—including woman and children—in their stead.
It’s easy to see that John Fowles was a more artful and meaningful writer than Wilson and Shea ever were. “The Magus” is a masterful work, partly because it is a more focused work. He is able to tie together ideas about love, politics, free will and the existence of God without sacrificing believability because he shows the way that all these issues can tie into a single person’s life.
In contrast, “Illuminautus!” is a sprawling, disorganized work that makes a failed attempt to chronicle dozens of characters being subjected by Celine in parallel journeys of self-discovery. Although this weakens the novel, we shouldn’t see “Illuminautus!” as a failed rip-off of John Fowles’s work. Fowles is concerned mainly with the individual; in his novel, set in and informed by the moral climate of a world that had just recently witnessed the Holocaust and Hiroshima, learning is a lonely and painful experience reserved for the few.
“Illuminautus!” on the other hand is a novel grounded firmly in the 1960s when it seemed for a time as though whole western cultures were prepared to undergo a revolutionary change into something more open and exciting. If you ever saw Robert Anton Wilson speak before an audience, you realize that he was a very social man interested in broadcasting his ideas to the many than enclosing them in gilded envelopes and passing them on to a chosen few. The grand awakening promised in the 1960s by people such as Robert Anton Wilson’s mentor Timothy Leary never occurred, probably never had a chance of occurring, but the impetus to believe in it is a beautiful things.
It doesn’t matter you find more truth in isolationist books like “The Magus” or “Steppenwolf,” or communalist books such as “Illuminautus!” “Gravity’s Rainbow,” or (I’d argue) “Harry Potter.” What matters is seeing what makes these books special: in all these books magic itself serves as a symbol for something sealed away from us, something capable of nurturing us and bringing us toward ripening maturity. Because of this they speak to those of us who grow up feeling trapped in life, hemmed in by a culture riddled with prejudice, mendacity and self-centeredness. At their worst, books of this class tempt us to regress into childish fantasizing; but at their best, they encourage us to bring forward a child’s spirit of openness and exploration to matters which are very much adult.
26 May 2007. Up to page 227 of 607.
A good author can manipulate the reader’s general interest into a sort of hunger. One way of doing this is to create suspense. You see this a lot in the Harry Potter books. Halfway into the book, you’ve got about seventeen different storylines going at once and are smacking your arm like a junkie waiting for the next little hit of information on any subject whatsoever. Here, the author is playing on the natural instinct of the human mind to constantly orient itself. By being stingy and tantalizing with information, JK Rowling hooks us firmly and well.
John Fowles traps his readers in a different sort of way. The first section of his book, “The Magus,” follows the life of a jaded and selfish young man named Nicholas Urfe. The story is quite believable. We see how Mr. Urfe falls in love with a feisty young Australian girl named Alison, only to leave her in order to run away to a solitary Greek island named Phraxos, where he plans to teach English and nurture his own poetic talent. Shortly after he gets to the island, he comes to the sobering realization that he has no poetic talent worth nurturing. Furthermore, the people of the island bore him to death; the children he teaches are more interested in their job prospects than in literature; the other teachers are all stick-in-the-muds. He contemplates suicide but can’t bring himself to do the deed.
The whole story is told in the first person, and the language is so rich and spirited that, while we can’t bring ourselves to really like Nicholas Urfe, we do think he might be a tad harsh when he labels himself untalented. Indeed, he seems to be a man of wonderfully acute and active intelligence. The danger is that all this intelligence is now trapped on an island with nothing to apply itself to. We’ve come right into a cul-de-sac of the soul, and we’re only a tenth of the way through the book. We can’t help but imagine that the rest of the book will be an excruciatingly detailed meditation on loneliness and boredom and routine, with a prose whose eloquence and beauty grow in inverse proportion to the suspense quotient.
So by the time the character of Maurice Conchis makes his entrance, we’re SO ready for a little bit of magic.
Maurice Conchis is an old man who lives an apparently solitary life in a mansion almost hidden from view. He is surrounded by books and beautiful paintings, periodically immersing himself in elaborate harpsichord music and in the undersea life of the nearby reefs and islets.
It certainly seems that Conchis is the Magus described in the book’s title, but what sort of magic does he have at his command? At first, it seems that the magic referred to is only the magic of enlightenment, of friendship, the magic of hope and engagement in life. But that’s only part of what’s going on, because Conchis also starts dropping hints that he’s a more literal type of magician; that he’s discovered a secret method for gaining contact with the spirit world.
Soon we’re caught up in a game of many-layered ambiguity. As Conchis spins out the story of his early life at a leisurely pace, the characters he describes begin appearing in real life. But Nicholas Urfe refuses to believe they’re actually ghosts, and he soon puts his intellect to the task of figuring out how exactly Conchis has organized this extensive charade. At the same time, he finds himself falling in love with one of Conchis’s “ghosts,” the delightfully coquettish Lily, who corresponds to Conchis’s first love, a woman whose erotic coercion prompted him to enlist in the army as a foot soldier in the first world war.
So is Conchis a teacher? A charlatan? A dandy? A philosopher? What is the purpose behind the elaborate masque that he constructs around poor Nicholas Urfe?
I can’t tell yet, but it seems as though Conchis’s masque is very much meant to be a collection of all the kinds of magic that fiction and literature can offer to rescue us from boredom and despair. Fowles seems to be gleefully mixing up a potion that includes just as much of the profane as it does the profound: mystery and romance, mythological symbolism and historical intrigue as well as serious meditations on death, free will, and the inevitability of evil all come together around Conchis, and the real magic behind it all is the way that the reader’s mind comes alive when faced with the many emotional and intellectual challenges presented by this truly fascinating book.
2 June 2007; pp. 227-351
It’s important when reading this book to keep remembering that as the reader, you have an advantage over the narrator. You, after all, are reading a work of fiction. Anything goes. And if the fiction you’re reading is a book called “The Magus”, you at least have to entertain the fact that some real magic is going on.
You have to remind yourself of this fact to keep from getting annoyed by the way that poor Nicholas Urfe keeps dragging his feet, concocting less and less plausible theories to explain the strange things that are going on around him. How is it that he sees the beautiful Lily—supposedly a ghost conjured up from Mr. Conchis’s past—down by the beach and moments later standing up on the balcony of Conchis’s mansion, looking wistfully to sea? Nicholas U of course rules out the supernatural and becomes convinced that “Lily” has a twin sister. He suggests the matter to Conchis, who at first scoffs at it, but soon the twin sister reveals herself, and Nicholas Urfe feels smugly confirmed that he worked out the secret.
To me, though, it seems more likely—because it’s more interesting—that Nicholas hasn’t discovered the existence of twins, he’s created their existence. At one point, Conchis tried to convince Nick that Lily is actually a schizophrenic, compelled to always put on new masks and pretenses. And at one point, Lilly refers to herself as Astarte, a Semitic Goddess of mystery who corresponds to the High Priestess of the Tarot deck. The reference to Astarte appears playful, and almost passes unnoticed amidst the many other mythic and cultural references dropped around this book, unless you recall that John Fowles has dedicated the book “To Astarte.”
So for my money, Lilly (who later claims that her real name is Julie Holmes, sister to June Holmes) is most probably the goddess Astarte herself, a sort of mad goddess who needs the enraptured imagination of a clever young man like Nicholas Urfe in order to guide the constant changes of her own identity.
All of which would be a fascinating intellectual game that we as readers could play alongside poor Nick Urfe, if it weren’t for the fact that Urfe seems to have chosen the wrong game to play. He’s determined to have sex with Lilly–Julie. He thinks about her constantly. The more he thinks about her and how to get her away from Conchis, the more Conchis fades into the background, and also the promise of a gift of wisdom and enlightenment that Conchis seemed once to extend. Earlier in the book, Conchis seemed to have something to say, something about morality and mortality. He had survived the horrors of the trenches in the First World War; he had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second. In one creepy incident, he uses a loaded die and a cyanide tablet to bring Urfe face-to-face with the fear of death.
There’s a sense that if Nicholas weren’t so dead set on sexual conquest, he might listen more to Conchis, and Conchis would then have more to say. But instead, he keeps pursuing Julie through all her various identities. And as he does so, he keeps encountering more and more frightening characters, including a man dressed as Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, and a troop of men dressed as Nazi soldiers (Nick, of course, is convinced that they’re actors in Conchis’s hire).
The book seems both a fantastical retelling of the story of “Faust” and more especially “The Tempest.” But the references to the World Wars suggest that the turmoil of the twentieth century make it impossible to escape fully into fantasy. Heaven may still be something phantasmagoric, but Hell has already been brought into being in this world in the recent past, and new generations discover this at their peril.
This is a fun book to review, although it’s so unusual that it’s hard not to want to just summarize the whole thing.
The emotional spine of the book is the relationship between Nick and his old flame Alison, who tries to draw him back into her life during a weekend trip to Mount Parnassus. Nick seems to view her as nothing more than a distraction and an annoyance until at one point something she does reminds him of a poem he once read, at which point he decides he has to have her as well as Lilly.
The argument that ensues is the most real thing in the book. Alison accuses Nick of being too cowardly to be capable of love, and Nick proves her right by only being able to respond with lame attempts at wit and romance, constantly calling her ‘darling,’ and calling himself a worthless bastard. Which is only an excuse because it’s obvious that this is a man who is actually quite in love with himself.
Before the argument with Alison, the game between Conchis and Nick seems like a wonderful second chance at life and fulfillment. But once we see that Nick has the chance to be with this woman who loves him, and blindly wounds her by chosing a woman who seems only to be a fantasy, or who rather seems to be fantasy itself, we can’t help but felt hat the game has become hollow. And at this point, Nick shifts from being someone we have difficulty liking to someone we sort of hate.
16 June 2007; p. 235-end
In order to discuss this book, I have to mention another book I read a long time ago: “Illuminautus!” by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert J. Shea. Today, the book is known mainly as a cult classic. It breaks all the rules, it fails majestically, it reads like bad 70s porn, it’s full of adolescent attempts at far-out chaotic montages of images that are almost unreadable. The sex is raunchy, the violence is graphic, and the whole this seems to have been plotted in a drugged-out haze.
But at the time I read it, I was only twelve years old, and it was the book that got me truly interested in reading. Although it’s not the sort of book I would like to reread now, it does hold a special place in my heart, and it’s important for me to think about it and understand what made it so meaningful at the time.
Cut down below all the psychedelic and the stew of conspiracy theories, get passed all the injudicious slang and you’ll find the story of Hagbard Celine, a renegade sea captain and philosopher who’s created his own alternative world inside a golden submarine, the “Leif Erickson.” Many of the book’s subplots are about people who are somehow abducted or tricked by Celine, and are subsequently put through a barrage of weird psychological situations, often involving sex, drugs and the threat of death.
What makes the book remarkable is the fact that Celine turns out to be a teacher at heart. His mind-games are tailor-made for his subjects. He sets out to identify a person’s own fears and taboos, and break them open; he teaches cops to hate authority; he teaches rapists to empathize with their victims; he teaches believers to be skeptics and skeptics to be believers.
The most interesting student of Celine’s is George Dorn, a headstrong intellectual hippie radical who begins to learn from Celine to stop living in his head and start living in his senses, who begins to learn bravery and confidence.
Corny as it sounds, this theme of learning and personal growth raises the novel up a notch from just being a piece of shock anarchic trash. Throughout his career, the late Robert Anton Wilson was always moved by the idea most people live their lives imprisoned in a rigid set of ideas. In dozens of books and articles he tried to incorporate Celine-like games to create satori-like revelations, to wake people up to . . . something vague and hard to define, yet exciting. The revelation, perhaps, that we are free.
What’s particularly interesting to me is the idea of a character like Hagbard Celine. By the time we’re adults, we all recognize to some degree that there are pivotal moments in life, galvanic moments when you realize who you are or you drastically change the course you’re going to take in life. For many people, these are moments of trauma; many report having such experiences in war; becoming a parent can trigger such moments; sometimes, just a conversation with someone very significant can be enough to trigger a massive change in perspective.
There’s usually an element of chance in the way these moments enter our lives . . . but what if someone created a system to engineer such moments, to accelerate the progress of humankind by creating carefully controlled psychological moments of crisis and enlightenment? Hagbard Celine is just that; he’s a sort of super genius whose purpose in life is to raise consciousness, an authority figure whose goal is to teach people to question authority, an entrepreneur who invests millions of dollars into getting people to cross personal thresholds, an old man who seeks not to censor the impulses of youth, but to enhance them.
The character of Hagbard Celine always seemed to be the most original, unprecedented part of “Illuminautus!” so I’m both proud and disappointed to have discovered at last his direct predecessor in John Fowles’s Maurice Conchis.
As in “Illuminautus!” the story of the Magus is ultimately one of teaching. Nicholas Urfe finds himself caught up in a sort of game of secrets and lies with this strange, possibly crazy old man on the island of Phraxos. As in “Illuminautus!” there is a recognition of the fact that a young man’s mind is much more receptive and malleable when he’s in a state of sexual excitement; Maurice orchestrates a bevy of beautiful women who play on Nicholas’s vanity, social pretensions, and predatory urges. Alternate explanations keep be offered for what is “really” going on. Conchis presents himself at various points as a psychic conjurer of ghosts; the well-meaning ward of a beautiful madwoman; an avant garde theatrical director creating a drama without an audience; and as a psychologist engaged in a bizarre and unethical experiment with Nicholas Urfe as the subject.
Each of these identities is somewhat accurate. Also, as readers, we should be alert to the fact that Conchis prefers his name to be pronounced with a soft “ch,” so that it resembles the word “conscious.” He represents the evolutionary process by which a young man like Nicholas rises from narrow selfishness to a more nuanced awareness of sharing a world with other people, a world where freedom and love are not simply abstract concepts and where there are no pat answers to ethical dilemmas.
Conchis’s own ethical dilemma took place during the German occupation of the island during WWII, when a sadistic German soldier presented him with the choice of personally executing three freedom fighters or standing by and watching as the Germans execute eighty civilians—including woman and children—in their stead.
It’s easy to see that John Fowles was a more artful and meaningful writer than Wilson and Shea ever were. “The Magus” is a masterful work, partly because it is a more focused work. He is able to tie together ideas about love, politics, free will and the existence of God without sacrificing believability because he shows the way that all these issues can tie into a single person’s life.
In contrast, “Illuminautus!” is a sprawling, disorganized work that makes a failed attempt to chronicle dozens of characters being subjected by Celine in parallel journeys of self-discovery. Although this weakens the novel, we shouldn’t see “Illuminautus!” as a failed rip-off of John Fowles’s work. Fowles is concerned mainly with the individual; in his novel, set in and informed by the moral climate of a world that had just recently witnessed the Holocaust and Hiroshima, learning is a lonely and painful experience reserved for the few.
“Illuminautus!” on the other hand is a novel grounded firmly in the 1960s when it seemed for a time as though whole western cultures were prepared to undergo a revolutionary change into something more open and exciting. If you ever saw Robert Anton Wilson speak before an audience, you realize that he was a very social man interested in broadcasting his ideas to the many than enclosing them in gilded envelopes and passing them on to a chosen few. The grand awakening promised in the 1960s by people such as Robert Anton Wilson’s mentor Timothy Leary never occurred, probably never had a chance of occurring, but the impetus to believe in it is a beautiful things.
It doesn’t matter you find more truth in isolationist books like “The Magus” or “Steppenwolf,” or communalist books such as “Illuminautus!” “Gravity’s Rainbow,” or (I’d argue) “Harry Potter.” What matters is seeing what makes these books special: in all these books magic itself serves as a symbol for something sealed away from us, something capable of nurturing us and bringing us toward ripening maturity. Because of this they speak to those of us who grow up feeling trapped in life, hemmed in by a culture riddled with prejudice, mendacity and self-centeredness. At their worst, books of this class tempt us to regress into childish fantasizing; but at their best, they encourage us to bring forward a child’s spirit of openness and exploration to matters which are very much adult.
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