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.
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.
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