Quis Corbyniet Ipsos Corbynes?

It has taken me months – more or less fully the close-to-a-year that he has been leader of the Labour Party – to find the courage to write about Jeremy Corbyn. Undoubtedly, courage is what is required – never in my lifetime has Labour politics in particular, but British politics in general, been so querulous and febrile. That our politics requires courage is not, I think, a bad thing – for decades it has been more often characterised if not by cowardice then a queasy caution. Even Thatcherism, lionised by some and despised by others for its hatchet-job temerity, strikes me as a form of capitulation – to American hegemony or global capital or simply compensatory managerialism. It is this technocratic approach which is most despised by those flocking to Corbyn’s banner. That it requires courage now to be political speaks of a moment in which we might actually be doing something.

But doing what? Part of the courage we now require is simply in predicting events – the kaleidoscope is over-shaken. What next depends, of course, upon whom you ask. For my part, I haven’t shifted on the subject of Corbyn from initial scepticism: for all the rapture which welcomed his original leadership campaign – the huge turn-outs, the excited spike in membership, the unassailable mandate – it never seemed to me that what Corbyn was saying was terribly interesting in anything other than its distinctiveness from the barren pronouncements of his opponents. “If the best the left can do is go back to the planned economy, we are screwed,” I texted a friend last July, who seemed surprised I wasn’t embracing Corbynism’s first flush with enthusiasm. Corbyn is a Bennite; for many this is his selling-point. For me it is the best expression there might be of the wider malaise of the left. Corbynism badly needs a Jeremy Corbyn figure to shake it up and put it on a righteous, radical path.

But Owen Smith has matched Corbyn policy-by-policy (except on keeping Trident and inviting ISIS to tea) – and why vote for an unimaginative retreat to a 1970s comfort blanket when you can vote for an unimaginative retreat to a 1970s comfort blanket that really means it? Where are the bright ideas from Corbyn’s leadership – even bright ideas, like those of Paul Mason, which seem doomed to remain in the middle chapters of lesser-read Charlie Stross novels? Why has he failed to do anything more with his ascent to the apex of his party than continue to advocate for his ascent to the apex of his party?

Because, Corbynistas will retort, he has been given no room to express an agenda, and no space to relax into the role. That is, the ‘Labour right’ has prevented anything but an immediate bunkerisation of the Corbyn project. I no longer know what is meant by the ‘Labour right’ – the old right of John Spellar or the “Blairism” of the King over the water, David Miliband? Or perhaps what was once the soft leftism of Angela Eagle, or the plain-speaking bullishness of Margaret Hodge. The ‘right’ has morphed into a bogeyman, a label with which to tar and defang Corbynism’s opponents. The breakdown of meaningful dialogue between heterodox political positions characterises our new hard-knock politics more than any other phenomenon: Brexiters and Remainers, one half seemingly hardly knowing a member of the other; Cameroons and Mayites, unable to serve in the same Cabinet even when the transition period between the two regimes is wafer thin; the one per cent and the ninety-nine; the Scots and the English.

But Corbyn’s heart is in the right place – Corbyn wants to stop all this. His is a kinder, gentler politics. He means well. With much of this it is hard to disagree, since his has been a career defined by stubborn advocacy for the under-dog; but my issue is that I have never been sufficiently tribal to believe that at least a fair number of Tories, too, also bleed if we prick them. What matters is not intention but plans of action; we all want that which we define as “best”. But what is that? And how will you achieve it? Robert Halfon wants to tackle poverty, just like Jeremy Corbyn. I know how he proposes to do so, and disagree; Jeremy shrouds his strategy in good intentions.

Perhaps all of this is due to the failure of communications ably identified by (for it is he) Owen Jones. But the dispassionate observer might instead conclude that the principal project of Corbynism is not to craft a platform for government but to build a means of achieving creative destruction within the Labour Party. From the forming of a social movement to the application of extra-parliamentary pressure on legislators, the Corbyn project is so inchoately anti-establishment that it can attract even anarchists like Alan Moore as fellow travellers. This is yet another sign of the abject collapse of the social democratic left. This moribundity can be observed across Europe and beyond; but its ubiquity offers no defence. The lack of a compelling narrative from Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper in 2015; the ham-fisted incompetence of the so-called coup against Corbyn; and Ed Balls’s abject appearances on Strictly Come fucking Dancing are all symptoms of this malaise. But no consequence of social democracy’s senescence is as eloquent as the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

Indeed, the malaise may well require the sort of revolution Corbynistas hanker for. If Owen Smith is the solution being sold, surely everyone must go to another store. The issue is, however, that the Corbynmania whipped up by the Socialist Campaign Group in order to win last year’s election serves to occlude any policy platform they might now wish to develop: in this excellent piece (the most balanced I have read), the LRB’s Tom Crewe writes that “the failure to separate Jeremy Corbyn from the project of a revived left … obscures (and by extension denies) the existence of legitimate concerns about his leadership.” That is, while you’re busy sharing all those stories from the Canary about how the attacks on Corbyn are all one big conspiracy, you are failing to take the log from your eye. Where are the propitious signs which do not rely on blind faith that Corbynism can, in Moore’s words, “struggle towards a future that we and all of the people who came before us could breathe in”?

I worry. How devastating that UKIP’s Douglas Carswell often seems to express the world-historical underpinnings of our particular moment better than John McDonnell. How fractured a left that cannot occupy or express any truly radical position until it has destroyed itself.

Owen Smith is not the answer to all this, of course. But is Corbyn-as-Moses any more a solution? Who could salvage from Corbynism’s under-whelming performance the trailblazing transformation that was promised? Might Jeremy lead his people to the promised land but never enter it, leaving the storming of the land of milk and honey to McDonnell or Clive Lewis? In the face of a possible early election, an uncooperative parliamentary party, an unprecedented period of constitutional flux and an at-best nascent movement outside Parliament, this seems a slim possibility. It might be made more likely by a war of slow attrition inside the Labour Party – the only body in Britain today, by the way, even faintly capable of mounting a proper opposition to Conservatism. Should Corbyn win on Wednesday, there is little doubt that his allies will recommence with renewed energy exactly that project. But while they are helping themselves, who is helping the people in whose name they are recreating their party? How many years will it take to reach the promised land, and how many of us will fall down during the long trudge through the desert?

The Labour party is Corbynism’s cocoon, and it is struggling to make its way out. What it will look like if it ever does manage to emerge is uncertain – as is why anyone, as a consequence, might feel at all qualified to vote in the party’s current leadership contest with anything but trepidation.

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“It’s All Just Ink-Blots”: Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island”

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island was the only novel on the 2015 Booker shortlist that I had already read. When I try to recall it, recpature the experience of reading the thing in order to write a post hoc review of it, what I come back with primarily is blankness. This is no doubt inspired in part by the glooping blackness of the cover art, and also by the empty post-it notes which are evoked in its endpapers; but it’s also, I think, more or less the effect McCarthy was after: a literary lacuna, a mordant glance askance at our superficialised milieu.

Here’s what I noted down about it in my reading diary (this entry of which is preserved in our What We Like Section on this very blog):

This is not C: it is not freewheeling and compendious, or expansive and confusing. A satire of late capitalism, Satin Island is the story of an anthropologist working as a researcher for a variety of consumerist brands, and he is open from the first about his bull-shitting trade; as the novel proceeds, however, even those ideas and thoughts he believes to have substance are revealed to have little purchase on significance. Almost everyone in the novel, regardless of their employer, is at work on the same Big Data-ish project, though none understand it; almost everyone searches for meaning and then doesn’t find it; and the novel ends, Gatsby-like, with a character letting a boat flow ever onwards … not into an ineffably recursive future, but a dirty harbour. Did we need Satin Island to know that late capitalism is a morass of self-negating contradictions? I’m not sure.

I’m not sure I need to add much to that, to be honest. Satin Island is far greater than its slim girth might suggest – it feels like an important novel in McCarthy’s pantheon,unlike, say, David Mitchell’s recent placeholder between projects. But by the same token it in some ways feels like a novel McCarthy would of course write, rather than one which surprises or startles. His earlier novel, C, was also nominated for the Booker but, in its twisting of the bildungsroman form into new shapes, or its frankly eccentric diction, it felt like a novel busting out o jail. Satin Island, meanwhile, draws a faithful scale drawing of the prison.

In the course of the novel, the narrator speaks directly to us at length about his life, and yet we are left more or less mystified as to its contexts. We follow him through episodes or even over-arching quests – interviews whi his gnomic boss, the ideas man Peyman (based, apparently, on McCarthy’s real-life friend and sparring partner, the Serpentine’s emperor of the contemporary, Hans-Ulrich Obrist), or visits to a colleague with cancer, or his continuing attempts to write something he calls the Great Report (a task for which he is supposedly employed by the corporation, but which never comes close to being begun, much less completed). These remain in weird ways like marooned components of an unfinished collage, however – floating between each other like underwear on a sparsely-populated washing line, identifiable but absurd.

The Great Report, of course, is both signifier and metaphor for this novelistic approach: like the Koob-Sassen Project, the great Big Data mission on which everyone the narrator encounters is working, it is ineffable and yet all-encompassing, both total and invisible. It is utterly pointless and worthy only of abandonment, and yet life without it would lack purpose of any kind. “The truly terrifying thought,” the narrator muses at one point, “wasn’t that the Great Report might be unwritable, but – quite the opposite – that it had already been written” (p. 123). That is, that it is in some way not being done by the narrator but being done to him, the system grown out of control.

On the very first page of the novel, we’re told that “people need foundation myths,” and if anything Satin Island is interested in being anti-origin story, a recursive feedback loop without any of the consolations or comforts of repetition. “There were scores of wakes,” the narrator observes of that dirty harbour at the novel’s end, “crossing each other in irregular and tangled patterns” (p. 171).  At another juncture, he imagines himself in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a man puttering down an endless hall, artefacts just as priceless as the one he is currently carrying stretching off to infinity. In this way, the narrator – like us all – is trapped within a self-replicating system of such bewildering fecundity that to cultivate any part of it is to allow a dozen others to grow wild. The Koob-Sassen Project – unknowable, unfinishable – is winning.

The thing is, I knew that Tom McCarthy – and most everyone else – though that about post-modernity, and Satin Island doesn’t add a great deal to ‘what next’ (even if ‘what next’ is a scenario straight out of a Charlie Stross novel, which it may well be).  Perhaps ‘what next’ is another way of saying ‘so what’; perhaps requiring a next or a what is just my urge for a foundation myth whispering; either way, I think Satin Island gets its contrarian way with me. But what’s next?

“The Dead Never Stop Talking”: Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings”

Life beyond this blog – that insistent, inconvenient thing – has been so full of late that I have failed, this year, to read the Man Booker shortlist prior to the announcement of the prize’s winner. In fact, I’ve failed yet to read the whole shortlist full stop. But this won’t, you will expect, prevent me from pronouncing upon it.

In no small part my keenness still to pontificate is based on the day on which I began the shortlist – two before the glittering shindig where the winner is crowned – and the book I chose to start with – Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was, of course, the eventual winner. What this tells me is that there’s no reason to read the shortlist at all, if your game is picking the winner – just sit on the sidelines, vaguely pick up on the background mood music, and you’ll be about right.

This may or may not be fair on James, even if it more or less nails the Booker. I picked his novel as my belated opening Booker gambit because I lacked the pressure to read the lot and lacked the time to spend on so-so novels; I’d heard good things about A Brief History, appreciated the jacket art and copy, and thought I’d give it a go. This seems the way we should always pick books to read, right?

Still, back to the horserace (because that’s what matters, natch). When I started the James, I immediately wondered how any other book on the list might manage to compete: the story of a number of character orbiting around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 Kingston, the novel has such a range of voices, so well-conceived and -executed, and such a pace and sense of energy, that I found myself excited to wonder what the rest of a competitive shortlist might be like.

Of course, before I’d even finished the book it had been announced the winner and I inevitably wondered whether I should bother with the other five at all – at least in part because the middle third of James’s novel is a good deal baggier and less taut than its opening section. This was not, that is, the perfect winner … so, given it still could not stand up to the in-the-event slightly less impressive competition, was the rest of the shortlist up to much?

On deeper reflection, this is certainly unfair on James. That opening third – which introduces a range of characters, from youths on the lowest rung of the gangs which rule Kingston’s various subdivisions to American rock journalists, and conflicted daughters of good, light-skinned, middle-class Jamaican families – really is worth the price of admission alone. James sketches a bewilderingly complex culture and society in which each side seems to be playing all the others (the dimmest character in the book, and the most straight-forward, may not coincidentally be the CIA’s operative in Kingston, Barry DiFlorio); politics shade into organised crime, organised crime into Cold War espionage. Christopher Tayler in the LRB is good on how closely this all cleaves to the reality (in short: pretty).

But in many ways the question of James’s accuracy is the least interesting thing about his novel. Like James Ellroy, who is an impossible comparison to avoid here, James is sneaking his fictions between the cracks of official history; unlike his American counterpart, he eschews real-life names and settings (only Marley is referred to by the name he had in our own world, and even he is largely known throughout as ‘the singer’): the novel’s gangsters, its towns and its reporters, all have new sobriquets. If the background figures – presidents and prime ministers – remain the same, everything else changes. I wonder about this: is there some cowardice here, in dressing up a more or less real-life event in names to protect the decidedly not innocent? What fictive game is James playing?

In part, he’s playing a game of truth or consequences, and the unreal names allow him to posit his own poetic justices for the historical acts he fictionalises: the internal lives of all these men and women are conflicted and shot through with not a little philosophising; the fake names in this way operate as dramatic masks to place over the verifiable historical truth. This is where the novel starts to creak, though: the first third, which sticks closest, except in its interior speculations, to what we know about the history it recounts, bleeds into a rather awkward second section, which strains in every way to pivot the novel to its final furlong, in which chickens come home to roost for all of the characters, transplanted now to the USA and New York’s grim 1980s. James has a beginning and he has an end (his truth and his consequences); at times it feels like he lacks a middle. This is a problem, of course, because the middle is where a book lives.

I don’t often do this sort of thing in a review, but let’s compared and contrast at length:

We see and wait. Two men bring guns to the ghetto. One man show me how to use it. But ghetto people used to kill each other long before that. With anything we could find: stick, machete, knife, ice pick, soda bottle. Kill for food. Kill for money. Sometimes a man get kill because he look at another man in a way he didn’t like. And killing don’t need no reason This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness. (p. 9)

Is lie you tell me. Two Friends night club never deh ’bout in 1977? It didn’t open ’till ’79? Then is which club me run into Rawhide, Turntable? No star, me can’t imagine it being Turntable, boy, even the Prime Minister used to go there so. People from the good side of life mingling with middle-class people to feel like them connect to some culture, you know how it go. (p. 471)

Shit just blew up in Iran. Well, it blew up back in January, but fallout’s just reaching us now. Shit is blowing up all over the world. Chaos and disorder, disorder and chaos, I say them over and over like they have anything to do with each other, Sodom and Gomorrah, Gomorrah and Sodom. […] Jesus Christ, I think I’ve caught some Nixon fever. (p. 314)

The last of those three passages is from the troubled middle, and I think you can tell: it is more focused on exposition, on bridging gaps; it is admittedly written in the voice of one of James’s American characters, Barry DiFlorio, but even its rhythm and diction seem less natural and conversational than the first two. Where in the opening passage the accidental gang-member Bam-Bam offers a pungent-but-nuanced vision of life in the ghetto, and in the second an incarcerated former crim pokes the sort of metafictional holes with which James delights in peppering the whole novel, in the workaday central section the novel works hard. Were other parts of the novel not so very bloody good, you wouldn’t notice; as it is, the struggling second movement (“Doctor Love just fly to Miami saying he has a president to get elected” [p. 399]) tends to emphasise that A Brief History of Seven Killings hasn’t quite the iron-clad solidity of an Ellroy (not necessarily a bad thing given how thoroughly that author can be distracting by unity, but a thing all the same): it has a great setting, and some potent denouements (“I’m on the stool and I’m a fucking man, I want to say I’m a fucking man and you can’t treat people like this … but … my brief gets wet and yellow” [p. 656]); but it doesn’t always seem quite sure how to shape its material.

In one of the novel’s most compelling characters, however, there is a line of sight. Nina Burgess begins as the well-behaved daughter of a middle-class Jamaican family, resentful of her “rasta” sister and secretly pining after her one-night stand with the singer. Events conspire to force her into name changes and wide travels, but as she swaps locales and identities she comes, in her many-faced degradations, to stand for a range of roles and individuals in a way few of the other characters, locked in their self-definitions, can. At one point, she realises she “could kill anybody, even a child” (p. 284), and in many ways she in this moment resolves the theme of the novel: that murder is not uncommon or unusual, but endemic and central to the systems that govern – secretly and less so – our societies. The white man with a family at home who abandons her when his secondment to the Caribbean is over, the abusive father who casts her out of the respectable family home, the unthinking New York upper classes who pay her a pittance to care for their families: all of these are four, five, six or seven degrees of separation down the chain contributing to the quality of life of a Bam-Bam (buried alive), a Josey Wales (burned to death) or a Tony Pavarotti (stabbed in the neck by a panicked journalist). And the novel forces its readers not just to understand but to feel that.

That still leaves me wondering about the pseudonyms and about the structure; but the clarity of this novel is in its tone and voices, its pretty astounding ventriloquism. If having read it I might be able to see how there was room for any debate at all around the Booker judges’ table, I remain impressed that they chose it as the winner: tough and uncompromising, it may be imperfect – but it’s never less than vital, relevant and passionate.

“Blindly Following The Lead of Others”: Kamila Shamsie’s “A God In Every Stone”

Where all three of the Baileys Prize shortlistees I’ve so far read have opted for depth in one way or another, Kamila Shamsie opts in A God in Every Stone for breadth: this story opens at the dawn of the First World War and continues across Turkey, France, England and colonial India, only ending in 1930 (and with an epistolary epilogue written from 1947). All this leads to some reliance on the readers’ received knowledge of a given period – British women of the Great War got jobs they hadn’t before been permitted when all the men went away, Edwardian men felt excited by the glimpse of a female ankle, the British Empire was a bit racist – which at times feel like gestures at detail rather than the real stuff of these characters’ lives. “‘MORE ARMENIAN HORRORS,'” reads one character in 1915 at one of the novel’s particularly heavy moments of eye-rolling irony. “Surely the propaganda department was overplaying its hand?” [p. 116]

In the summer of 1914, Viv Spencer, the headstrong 23-year-old only child of a British chap thoroughly of the nineteenth century, joins her father’s old friend Tahsin Bey on an archaeological dig in Turkey (the ambitious Spencer patriarch wishes for her to be “son and daughter both – female in manners but male in intellect” [p. 13]). When the war begins, she is quickly whisked away from Ottoman territory, carried to English travellers by her new German friends (“The Germans said they shouldn’t be with her when the English couple arrived, it would only create discomfort” [pg. 29]) – but not before Bey, with whom she is falling in love, reveals himself to be an Armenian patriot. Back in England, the naïve Viv lets slip this information to impress a young intelligence officer. Two years later, whilst on a dig in Peshawar, she learns that just days after the German interception a British wire containing his secret, Bey was shot dead in Turkey.

Betrayal, then, is a key theme of the novel, and is mirrored in the journey of its other protagonist, the Pashtun Muslim, Qayyum Gul. We first meet Qayyum as a soldier in the 40th Pathans, in which capacity he quickly loses an eye at Ypres. Back in Peshawar, his younger brother Najeeb misses the train on which Qayyum returns home from his Brighton military hospital, but does meet up with Viv, who has unbeknownst to them all shared a carriage (scandalously) with Qayyum on the train from Kabul. Najeeb consequently becomes a lover of European culture; Qayyum falls in with Ghaffar Khan. “Everyone, even Najeeb, assumed Qayyum’s stand against Empire stemmed from Vipers […] But he had never felt closer to the English than on that day. […] It was later, at Brighton, that the questions began. It was because of the nurses.” [p. 293]  That is, his shabby treatment in England had betrayed his sacrifice to the British Empire, which he in turn betrayed with Khan; and Najeeb betrays that emergent Indian identity by wearing a frock coat at the Peshawar Museum.

Again, then, we arrive at breadth. The novel foregrounds this sweeping aspect of its narrative by imposing a Classical frame around the interlocking stories of betrayal: it begins with a prologue set in 515BC, when the Persian strongman Darius sends his trusted Greek friend and adviser, Scylax of Caria, on an exploratory expedition beyond the bounds of his empire to Caspatyrus (modern-day Peshawar), from which distance Scylax begins to write great anti-imperial tracts. The circlet that Scylax was granted by Darius before his departure to Caspatyrus is the archaeological artefact which powers first Tahsin Bey’s excavations, then Vivian’s, and then Najeeb’s: it becomes a symbol not of betrayal but of potential redemption. What comes to matter most to each of them is not the imperial bonds between Darius and Scylax, which the latter broke in supporting his people’s revolt against the Persians, but in their personal friendship – and in the individual bonds which link people to those around them rather than to distant powers, such as those between Scylax and Heraclides, the Carian hero whose history the former wrote: “Continents are cut up this way, and that way,” Najeeb imagines Scylax telling Darius’s widow. “Islands extend themselves across seas and mountains. What is any of that when compared to Heraclides?”[p. 386]

Perhaps inevitably, not all of this comes quite to line up in the course of just 350-odd pages – Shamsie has taken on just a little too much. How do the biological brothers, Qayyum and Najeeb, map onto Darius and Scylax? How does the feintly inappropriate burgeoning relationship between Tashin Bey and Viv relate to the frowned-upon yet somehow more wholesome love between Najeeb and a girl originally promised to another man? Shamsie is interested in how layers of history fall one upon the other to create a texture which surrounds and perhaps defines us despite ourselves – “I know the stories of men from twenty-five hundred years ago,” Najeeb sighs, “but I’ll never know what happens to you [today]” [pg. 160] – and so exact parallels aren’t necessary. But in the competing architectural styles of Peshawar, or the city’s urban myths featuring real historical figures – “children were still threatened into good behaviour with warnings [of] the terrible [Maharajan Italian mercenary Paolo Avitabile, or] Abu Tabela” [p. 183] – Shamsie conjures with history without producing the trick. Perhaps the novel is ultimately about throwing off history – “To you history is something to be made,” Najeeb says to his brother, “not studied” [p. 228] – but if so it spends rather a lot of time in the past.

Within these broad and slightly sketchy bounds, however, Shamsie alights upon a range of the competing power dynamics of colonial Peshawar to some good effect. In the relationship between men and women, and English and Indian, in particular she shows how segregation and delineation serve to preserve and empower existing privileges and elites. Perhaps most memorably, Viv reflects on a peculiarly Anglo-Indian example:

Memsahib. […] In this country filled with titles and honorifics nothing pre-existing had suited Englishwomen; while the ubiquitous ‘sahib’ came to rest comfortably on the shoulders of Englishmen, something other than ‘begum-sahib’ had to be devised for their female counterparts. As if to say that Englishmen and Indian men, for all their differences, could still be described in the same language but the women of the two races were so far apart that they had to be categorised separately, kept separate. [p. 300]

A God in Every Stone is at its most perceptive in moments like this. History again plays a part here, as a story told by whichever party wishes to control another: “Of all the fantastic tales you’ve ever told,” Qayyum writes to Najeeb, “none is more fantastic than that of the kindly English who dig up our treasures because they want you tk know your own history. Your Museums are all part of their Civilising Mission, their White Man’s Burden, their moral justification for what they have done here.” [p. 232] Najeeb never comes quite to agree, but by the same token comes to be the novel’s balancing figure, the one the reader assumes embodies its core message: he ends the novel both as as “campaigner for freedom from Empire for the people of India and Britain”, and, despite his mother’s intitial refusal to allow him to study “this English word, this ‘Classics'” [p. 168], also Viv’s archaeological assistant. That may be an over-neat resolution for a tightly-plotted, immensely readable, but thematically baggy novel; but perhaps indeed all fruitful new relationships involve just a little betrayal of the past.

 

“It Makes Me Feel Dispensable”: Chimamanda Adichie’s “Americanah”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel, Americanah, is vital in every sense of the word: it is full of life, teeming with a range of experience and character quite dazzling in its proliferation; it is itself a beating, pulsing thing, with supple and endlessly refreshing prose; and it feels important, the result of and response to a range of literary and extra-literary stimuli which demand – but all too often go without – this kind of elegant reply. Americanah is a book to admire, and one that we should be glad exists. Here is a wise, witty, heavily promoted novel by a woman of colour and talent that is acutely relevant, unapologetically romantic and undeniably complicated. Americanah is a good thing.

It is also baggy, potted and occasionally mean-spirited. I hesitate to point out any of that, if for no other reason than previous critiques of Adichie’s work have been of a poor and disingenuous quality. In the New Inquiry, Aaron Bady has already and with some aplomb filleted the tone of many of these agenda-peddling knee-jerks:

as she becomes a big deal, she becomes a problem—to be blunt—for male writers who prefer that big deal writers be male. Folks who have no problems with Wole Soyinka—for whom the word “abrasive” would be a very diplomatic way to put it—are suddenly appalled at her lack of propriety, her unseemly disregard for the egos of other writers, her astonishing lack of civility to writers who lack her solid personal achievements.

That is, Adichie has mountains enough to climb without my adding further to them. Indeed, it is in many ways churlish and tone-deaf to criticise a novel as expansive as Americanah for the imbalances in its wheeling structures. The story of Ifemelu and Obinze, two middle-class childhood friends in Nigeria who first become lovers and then emigrants – in Ifemelu’s case to the USA and in Obinze’s to Britain – Adichie’s novel struggles to square its migrant politics with its central love story. This isn’t to say that its romance is corny or unsuited to the issues of race, gender and identity which are its thematic focus; rather, it is that Ifemelu’s increasingly prominent role in America as a blogger on race – she writes the much talked-about and trenchat Racteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black – gives her part of the novel a clearer utility than Obinze’s strand of illegal immigrant poverty in London. Ifemelu dominates the novel, her voice and thorough imperfection flavouring and focusing the narrative. In this way, one half of a love story about which we are meant to care deeply – the novel’s final climactic pages deal with it, not with blogging – fades away.

This is in many ways small beer, however. I’m inclined, as always but in this case even more so, to put a lot of store by the words of Aishwarya Subramaniam: “While reading this book I mentioned on twitter that it was like being among brown friends. The book itself seems to get that, and get how comforting, and how important it can be.” In large part, this is the feeling that Americanah is most interested in evoking. It wants, like Ifemelu’s blog but without the reactionary posing, to show us Western civilisation from an angle different to that taken in most middle-brow, middle-class novels about star-crossed lovers going to university. In this, it is both more or less successful, for instance, than Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, a campus novel which focused on race in America from the inside. On Beauty is minutely structured, very evenly written, and at times integrates its themes more organically with its form: characters discuss race more subtly, have conversations less avowedly About It. This renders Smith’s novel a better crafted novel in most of the usual senses, but Adichie has an answer to this argument: one of Adichie’s writing friends (herself not entirely likeable, but at the same time someone with whom it is hard always to disagree) groans about the literary fetish of subtlety. “‘Nuance’ means keep people comfortable so everyone is free to think of themselves as individuals and everyone got where they are because of their achievement.”  That is, Adichie is writing a different kind of novel – and she is doing so deliberately to rub prim Western noses in it.

Ifemelu herself becomes rather prim within months of arriving in America – she dates white boys, straightens her hair – but by the time we meet her, and indeed for her around half the novel, she is sitting in an African hairdresser having her ‘do painfully braided. Ifemelu’s hair is “black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon”, and for her it is a political act to allow it to grow and be dressed in ways natural to it. At the same time, however, she is disparaging of her hairdresser, a woman who says she is from ‘Africa’ rather than from a particular country and to whom Ifemelu condescends about her own Princeton fellowship: “the sort of place Aisha could only imagine, the sort of place that would never have signs that said QUICK TAX REFUND”. Indeed, Ifemelu is prickly about and defensive of her achievements, and for the reader this does not always come across well. Adichie successfully ensures, however, that we understand – indeed, share – those experiences which have led Ifemelu to adopt this stance as the best available to her. “You know it was love at first sight for both of us,” gloats her professor boyfriend. “For both of us?” Ifemelu retorts. “Is it by force? Why are you speaking for me?” If Ifemelu’s blog is at times the over-generalised victim of its own need to declaim, we understand the ways in which Ifemelu must fight for her voice.

This is Americanah‘s great project: to refocus the novel reader’s sympathies. Early on, Ifemelu disparages the novels of “youngish men … packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness.” It’s hard not to think of Chabon or Lethem. Likewise, and as Aishwarya also points out, when Ifemelu joins the Nigerpolitan Club – “a bunch of people who have recently moved back, some from England, but mostly from the U.S.” – we notice the nod to Taiye Selasi’s concept of the Afropolitan, a privileged set of African internationalists whose foibles Americanah seems particularly intent on highlighting. For Selasi, “Most Afropolitans could serve Africa better in Africa”; for Adichie, they are cereal bar-chewing, organic food-eating dilettantes who are no more or less suited to pulling their country up by its boot-straps than anyone else. Americanah is a romance, but it isn’t always romantic. Obinze returns to Nigeria and does not help improve it; he is instead enmeshed in the corruption Adichie suggests is endemic. America is no paradise, either, of course: as in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, Nigerians in the US refer to themselves in ways different than they did before, sit with other children and laugh about things they do not necessarily understand, and limit their public pronouncements, all in a bid to fit in:

During her talks [to corporations and schols] she said: “America has made great progress for which we should be very proud.” In her blog she wrote: Racism should never have happened and you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.

Ifemelu was not black before she reached the US, she says; Obinze was a scion of the comfortable bourgeoisie before he was reduced to cleaning toilets in London. Americanah is not a story of culture clash, but of culture change; its trick is in seeking to do to the novel what is done to her characters, but in reverse: adapt it, change it, make it talk to and about different constituencies. “To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context,” says that writer friend at one point. Like every other character in Americanah she is seen occasionally to wear feet of clay; but she is also shown occasionally to be right, and in this her emphasis on context is demonstrably important. No one person, no one country, no one form or style or mode of representation should be seen always to be the best, the most appropriate, the default. Ifemelu is sometimes awful, but she is sometimes worth emulating; Adichie’s structure is sometimes disciplined, and it is sometimes baggy. So what? That is rather the point, and I can’t imagine any other book on the Women’s Prize shortlist being this scattershot ambitious, this intermittently expansive and this imperfectly precise. It is not for nothing that another synonym for vital is necessary.

 

Re-Reading “The Lord of the Rings”

I wrote an A-Level essay once about how JRR Tolkien cared almost exclusively about the shape of hills. Not unsurprisingly, I did it to be contrary; but I think, too, that my Lord of the Rings reading had always been fraught with self-inflicted difficulty. My first exposure to LotR was Ralph Bakshi’s weird, but not entirely unsuccessful, 1978 animation-and-rotoscope adaptation of its first two volumes. Of course, I’d already read The Hobbit and enjoyed it immensely; and, knowing no better, my child’s brain immediately hit on the idea of trying to find the point in this wildly different text of Tolkien’s at which Bakshi’s film had left off: why read it all, I reasoned with charming ignorance of the novel’s discursive unadaptability, when I’d already seen half of it.

This was a fateful choice: not only did I start The Two Towers only to realise I knew the thrust of what happened; the separation between the text and its adaptation left me foundering. The Return of the King, with all that cod-Biblical stuff picking up threads almost entirely dropped by Bakshi, was even worse. Having confused my reading entirely, the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring read bizarrely, Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday existing in a different prosodic universe to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

So when I write not that I’m re-reading Lord of the Rings, in a real sense I’m reading it for the first time: or at least, doing so in the right order for a change. It’s also been many years since I cracked the spine on a Tolkien book, and in those years the impossible happened: a successful adaptation of his work appeared. The first thing that has surprised me about Fellowship‘s first book, however, is how of a piece it is not with Jackson’s Rings movies, but with his Hobbit trilogy: travelling from Hobbiton to Rivendell, Frodo and the gang are almost constantly referring to Bilbo, actually walk past the trolls of Tolkien’s earlier novel, still carved in the stone of Gandalf’s spell, and the wizard himself strains beyond all telling to retcon The Hobbit in order to fit this newer, darker narrative.

The story of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, the way in which it began as a sequel to The Hobbit but grew in the telling, is well known. Before the deterministic epic first beings to appear around Weathertop (“I dwelt there once,” Aragorn says of Rivendell, his syntax suddenly shifting, “and still I return when I may”), Fellowship is as interested in The Hobbit as Jackson’s second trilogy is indebted the other way around: all the forward references in The Desolation of Smaug – the appearance of Legolas, the use of Athelas, the new focus on the Necromancer – shares more with the opening of Tolkien’s great epic than many of the nay-sayers might like to recall. Like the movies, Fellowship is slow and sluggish with referential baggage.

It’s been so long since I read these books that I’d also forgotten how episodic they are: the journey from Hobbiton to Bree takes a look time, and the hobbits spend a number of consecutive nights with an array of characters, from Farmer Maggot to Tom Bombadil, Barliman Butterbur to Gildor the High Elf. In this context, the most prominent theme of Fellowship’s first book is kindness, is hospitality: each of these characters shelter Frodo and his friends from the darkness of the outside world; each thus takes on a burden, but in doing so relieves Frodo briefly of his greater one. Gildor protects the hobbits from the Nine, Bombadil from barrow-wights; Butterbur albeit belatedly reconnects the travellers with Gandalf, whilst Farmer Maggot shows quite exceptional bravery in the face of the Black Riders (who in truth only come to resemble the terrible ringwraiths of our memory at Weathertop).

In contrast, Strider – or, since the secret of his identity is kept for only a few pages,  Aragorn – commandeers the hobbits’ quest, and it’s at this point that the narrative begins to change. By the time that Frodo is galloping, on Glorfindel’s horse, away from the Nine, we have entered a very different novel. Where Farmer Maggot or Tom Bombadil belong to a pastoral world in which everyday virtues can persevere against evil, by the time the hobbits cross the Bruinen they are in a Manichean world in which only elf-magic can heal you of a wound by a Morgul blade. This all happens gradually, reducing the variation between what are otherwise forbiddingly uneven tones and moods.

None of which, of course, are original observations about this most read of novels. But for a reader who once bounced off The Lord of Rings more times than hobbits might slightly repetitive be rescued at the last minute by the arrival of an expected friend, the ease of the journey from Hobbiton to Bree came as something of a surprise. This first book is undoubtedly still a structurally unusual effort (Gandalf goes on for pages about Gollum’s story – why is this needed now, why are his exhortations to Frodo to be brave not kept, as Jackson kept them, for later in the narrative?); but those films are now separated entities from the books themselves … and reading a book from beginning to end, it turns out, isn’t always so bad an idea.

There’s still a buckletload of stuff about the shape of hills, though.

Things Are Going To Get Better: Chasing Mod’s Tail

In an interview I did about a year ago on Severn FM, I talked a bit about Steve Marriott and the Small Faces. In the context of a discussion about my musical influences, this might have seemed strange: given the unapologetic Americana bent my songs tend to exhibit, the blue-eyed soul of those cheeky cockney Mods doesn’t seem quite to fit. But the Small Faces wrote and played songs that channeled the best of the American soul and jazz which first inspired the Mod movement whilst refracting it fairly radically through an English sensibility. If I don’t always achieve quite the same trick, it’s not because I not-so-secretly want to be a Texan, but because I don’t have the facility Richard Weight describes in my Christmas book this year, Mod: A very British Style:

A childlike awe is visible in the facial expressions of the Small Faces when they met Diana Ross and the Supremes on the set of Read, Steady, Go, the TV show on which soul stars from across the Atlantic regularly performed. [… But] Steve Marriot […] insisted that the Small Faces were not just mimicking their black American heroes: “Everyone’s got soul, but as far as Negro soul singing goes only they can do it. But white artists can interpret coloured soul into their own. You don’t have to be born on the wrong side of the tracks. [pp. 82-3]

Marriot’s clumsy language is indicative of the ‘race music’ tourism of which some Mods were guilty, and which eventually curdled into the shape of the Skins. But Weight sets out to show how his ‘big three Mod bands’ – in this version of Mod history, the Small Faces, The Kinks and The Who – as well as other artists of the time, principal amongst them of course The Beatles, weaved music hall and other English accents into the American sounds with which they first fell into love.

Not least because of its inclusion of the Beatles and music hall in a discussion of Mod, Weight’s book is not without its critics. (Amongst Mods as amongst so many other cliques and cults, no single summative statement is ever without its critics; there will always be a self-appointed Face willing to question its purity.) Most excoriating of all has been Paul Hooper-Keeley‘s response:

Any book that has the final phrase, “We’re all modernists now”, is always going to be a broad brush generalisation of misinformation, quotes taken out of context, and another outsiders [sic] version of the truth to be taken with a large pinch of salt – and this latest book on our scene is no exception. Quite what the fascination is for non-Mods to spout on about our scene when they are neither part of it, nor even fully understand it, is beyond me.

What, then, should I make (other than my perennial status as a third-class ticket), of the fact that Weight’s book spoke rather clearly to my own experience of Mod – and suggested surprising ways in which an affiliation no longer particularly conscious still influences not just how I dress, but also how I think? You might turn to a more considered, and conciliatory, response to the book from within the Mod fraternity, such as Mark Raison’s:

The first thing to say is Mod: A Very British Style is not directly about the Mod Scene, so the events, bands, people, politics and intricacies of what could be called the core Mod Scene are of little interest here and largely ignored. What Weight’s book is, is an exploration into how the original Mod movement drew their influences from American, European and Afro-American styles in music, art, fashion, architecture and design and how those strands have been absorbed into the British mainstream. It examines attitudes towards class, consumerism, race, sexuality and countless other topics. It is a story of how a cult became a culture.

This is just right, I think. As Ian Penman wrote in the one of the most thoughtful – although not always, for instance in its erroneous supposition that A Very British Style fails to mention the Situationists, the closest – readings of the book, Weight spends little thought or time on the early, critical phase of Mod, in the bifurcated jazz clubs of Trad-vs-Mod Soho. Not a history of the movement per se, then, A Very British Style is more properly a social history of youth culture which takes as its founding premise the idea that Mod has been the most visible and enduring influence on the way in which young British people, and particularly young working-class British people, have attempted to express and shape a distinctive identity within a broader culture that either forcefully or quietly denies them agency or advancement. This makes it not a book to be consulted before a trip to a Brighton boutique in order to understand the optimum length and point of a shirt’s collar; but it makes it something rather more interesting. A Very British Style may be a little rushed and even – gasp, fellow Mods! – a little populist; but it’s also about the subculture’s radical social, rather than sartorial, aspects. To illustrate this point (and it is true of his book that it turns to this device rather too readily), Weight quotes someone else:

By the early 1960s the Mods had evolved into a kind of living parody of the expectations and aspirations of post-war British life. Finding jobs in shops and offices, they adopted a mode of dress that satisfied the white-collar requirements to ‘make a good impression’ with a vehemence that turned the markers of class identity upside down. Away from the workplace they cultivated a demeanour as preoccupied and self-important as a City financier. […] The special privilege of parody is that it allows its authors to participate in the very set of conventions they mean to debunk or transcend. [Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America, pp. 130-5]

As an ignorant sixteen year-old A-Level student from a council house my parents had purchased on the strength of a brewery worker’s salary, I was initially interested in Mods because I liked paisley and Ocean Colour Scene. But I think there was also precisely something about the sharper-than-thou, ambiguously gendered, fierce pride of Mods which attracted me to, and then provided the tools to access, a means of being both socially fluid, doubly contrary, and true to my roots. Mods refused to accept that drinking espresso, reading literature or wearing tailored clothing were somehow the preserve of the middle class (the Skins missed this point when rejecting their forebears as class traitors during the 1970s). Their enthusiasm for the stuff of modernity was also not a capitulation to blind consumerism – the exercise of taste and discernment, that famous Mod attention to detail, was in fact a rejection of the indiscriminate materialism for which we all now seem so trained.

Weight spends some time on how the gatekeepers of Mod asked rather more of women than of men. This irony isn’t lost on his central thesis that Mod was a way of working class kids beating at their own assumed game the slumming hippie scions of doctors and lawyers, in order merely to have the chance of a toehold in the world of tomorrow (or, indeed, just of Roman Holiday). This aspirational vision of theirs was self-confessedly over-optimistically envisaged – but it was also often contradicted by their own practice. There is in this scepticism, of course, a further factor in the hostility of contemporary Mods to Weight’s book: it is both critical and revisionist. Mods of the 1970-80s revival were, for Weight, reactionary nostalgics; Britpop’s rejuvenation of Mod failed to have the international impact of the 1960s version; yet iterations of Modernism more alien to Adam of London‘s particular vision of its style – Glam Rock, for instance, or 90s dance culture – managed, in Weight’s ecumenical and sometimes willfully broad-church definition of Modernism (Tinie Tempah is a Mod?), to be progressive and impactful in the way the culture originally intended.

For all the dangers of generalisation and faulty logic this approach involves, it gives fellow travelers like me a frisson of freedom: in the same way that my membership of the Labour Party is a passive one, any full allegiance to the Modernist club founders on my knee-jerk distrust of gangs (Weight attributes this characteristic to the earliest Mods, too); but, by loosening Modernism just a little from the constraints of sta-prests and penny loafers, Weight gives it room to breathe in contemporary life (not least, he argues, in the market halls of IKEA stores). Look at it in this light, and away from the book’s slightly dubious citations, index and illustrations, and Mod still seems not just useful but maybe even vital – and certainly, surprisingly, still keeping the faith in the back of at least this particular ersatz cowboy’s subconscious.

As I said last year to the gentleman that is Alex Huskisson, whose Mystery Train show is now at Stroud FM and to which you should listen regularly: what would Steve Marriott do?

“How Can Such Things Even Be Happening?” Bulawayo, Ozeki, and the Booker

I mentioned, in my first pair of reviews drawing from this year’s Booker shortlist, the sad omission by the judges of M John Harrison’s superb Empty Space. This was a novel, it seemed to me, with all the poignancy and pregnancy the Booker seeks to reward, replete with the subtle craft and canny artistry it likes to encourage. In the comments to a recent post on the blog of science fiction author Adam Roberts, himself a previous recipient of the shoulda-woulda-coulda SF Booker badge, the estimable Matt Cheney agrees:

By your criteria here, it would be hard to make a case for even, say, Harrison’s Empty Space to make it to the list — and I think it certainly deserved to be there. But it’s complex, difficult, allusive, elusive. Certainly not primitivist, unless “primitivist” is stripped of much meaning.

The comment is part of a discussion about the criteria Cheney mentions, a set of propositions Roberts establishes in an attempt to argue not just for the importance of Young Adult fiction but for its primacy in contemporary literary culture. There’s a lot in Roberts’s post to like – I’m particularly intrigued by his idea that education and school represents a dominant strand of post-modern experience – but his position on YA seems unusually wobbly. This has led Nina Allan, who shares my admiration for Roberts’s criticism, to wonder if he isn’t, gadflyishly, playing Devil’s advocate; Allan also pre-empts most of my quibbles with the original post, but I wonder if encoded within it – and implicit in Allan’s response – is a more compelling ‘great definer’ of our age. But more of that anon.

For the moment, it’s worth sticking with YA, not least because Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For The Time Being reads a good deal like fiction aimed at teens for a good part of its length. Half of its pagecount is handed over to Nao, a Japanese adolescent whose diary is found by Ruth, an American writer living on a sparsely inhabited island in Desolation Sound. In reading Nao’s journal, Ruth comes to feel impossibly close to the teen’s stories first of dotcom bubble prosperity in Silicon Valley, then poverty back home in Japan when her depressive father loses his job and takes to placing ill-fated bets as a means of maintaining the family income. Nao’s narrative truly revolves, however, around Jiko, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun who is also Nao’s improbably wise grandmother.

Into this tale therefore enters the concept of Oneness: Jiko’s philosophy is filtered through Nao’s naivety (“everything I write will be historically true and empowering to women, and not a lot of foolish geisha crap” [pg. 6]), resulting in a good deal of restatements of the gnomically obvious. “Being a Buddhist,” Nao tells us of Jiko, “she really understands impermanence and that everything changes and nothing lasts forever.” [pg. 27]   This Cliff Notes approach to Jiko’s beliefs infuses Nao’s half of the novel, in which we are treated to related wit and wisdom ranging across a number of contemporary hot topics: “Everybody in California has ADD, and they all take meds for it, and they’re constantly changing their prescriptions and tweaking their dosages” [pg. 161]; “September 11 is like a sharp knife slicing through time” [pg. 265]; “all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting” [pg. 26].

There’s a reductiveness to a lot of this which characterises the worst kind of YA, the type rolled out by lofty adults to help young people understand what it means to be proper people. (Not for the first time, m’learned friend Martin Lewis nails this problem with concision and vim.) Nao’s passages start off promisingly – the first chapter in particular reads freshly and cheekily, and made me genuinely excited for the novel – but it never really deepens or complicates itself. We might assume, then, that Ozeki simply suffers from the same malady which afflicts many such writers when slumming it by writing from a teen perspective: she simply doesn’t capture the sophistication of the voice. The difficulty is that this is true, too, of Ruth’s passages, albeit in a different way. They very often take the form of dialogues between her and another character – most often another improbably wise interlocutor, her husband Oliver.

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“She says she’s writing it for you. So do you feel special?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ruth said.

“Speaking about garbage,” Oliver said, “I’ve been thinking about the Great Garbage Patches recently …”

“The what?”

“The Great Eastern and Great Western Garbage Patches? Enormous masses of garbage and debris floating in the oceans? You must have heard about them … ”

“Yes,” she said. “No. I mean, sort of.” It didn’t matter, since he clearly wanted to tell her about them. [pg. 35]

This format is fitting for the book Ozeki has written – which is essentially a disputation, a didact’s philosophy primer – but it grinds wearyingly on over the space of a 400+ page volume that insists upon presenting as a novel. Of course, the diary-reading and letter-writing at the heart of this story – emails and blogs feature, too, but only as spruced-up accoutrements to what is a fairly traditional epistolary structure – are all a metaphor for the act of creation undertaken in collaboration by a reader and a writer. Ruth and Nao are in a mystical way the same person, forming (in the oneness of the – geddit? – now) their story together. This is gratingly obvious early on, and the digressions and multiplying frame narratives Ozeki employs to complicate this schematic endeavour don’t sufficiently distract from a core predictability. By the 400th page – when, of course, Oliver reveals all (“the superposed quantum system persists, only, when it is observed, it branches” [pg. 397]), it comes as both relief and let-down. Perhaps this is true primarily for readers of novels like M John Harrison’s; perhaps there are those for whom the Ozeki will come as a revelation; but one wonders why a novel in the footsteps of Jostein Gaarder trumps a more complex novel with the same quantum-philosophical base.

Which might return us to Roberts’s thoughts: “No SF? No YA? No Crime? Insular, backward looking shortlist.” Except that Roberts does not consider SF’s science to be as vital as YA’s, well, youth. Indeed, in his trio of defining contemporary characteristics, Roberts places technology on the lowest rung. Above it but below youth, in the role of our age’s Ronnie Barker, he sites globalisation. With self-conscious finesse, then, I direct your attention to NoViolet Bulawayo’s tilt at the Booker, We Need New Names.

Darling is another young girl in unfortunate circumstances: in her case, she and her single mother (who operates, at the edge of Darling’s understanding, as an occasional sex worker) live in a Zimbabwean shanty town known drolly as Paradise. She and her friends spend their days causing trouble and playing Find Bin Laden (all these international children are so interested in the War on Terror, one finds), stealing intermittently into the better parts of town to grab fruit from trees and gaze, wide-eyed, at the privilege they cannot quite imagine, “the big stadium with the glimmering benches we’ll never sit on” [pg. 2]. Globalisation, then, touches their lives in a myriad ways: the well-heeled visitor from London who will “throw food away” as if it’s nothing [pg. 7], the charity workers who arrive at the village without the language, who dole out rations and are mocked by the children; the teachers who have “left to teach over in South Africa and Botswana and Namibia and them, where there’s better money” [pg. 31]; and, finally, the family members who have already escaped to America, to work as cleaners and orderlies in luxury quite alien to Darling’s contemporaries.

Indeed, Bulawayo spends a lot of time in the first half of her novel on the degradations which contrast so vividly with these glimpses of the West: the woman with AIDS who hangs herself, and whose corpse is found, dangling, by the young tearaways; the girl who is pregnant with her grandfather’s child, having been repeatedly raped; the sinister village preacher, the satisfyingly monikered Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro, who accuses women of witchcraft and demonic possession in order to abuse them. “There is just no sense in being afraid when you live so near the graves,” Darling says [pg. 132], and there is certainly an air of resignation to Bulawayo’s work. When Darling flies to America to join a relative there, her life – and the prose style itself – changes utterly. We Need New Names proceeds from Bulawayo’s Caine-winning short story ‘Hitting Budapest‘, which is here the first chapter, but the book takes a huge swerve at its centrepoint, shifting from a demotic, almost innocent style, to a breathless, almost bitter one: “If I were at home I know I would not be standing around because something called snow was preventing me going outside to live life.” [pg. 153]

This doesn’t lead very far, however: Darling watches pornography with her new group in America and grows into awkward adolescence; she dismisses the pain of a friend who is physically assaulted by her boyfriend (“I don’t think she had to be all over, like her face was a humanitarian crisis” [pg. 218]); and she returns to her village to be scolded and rejected by her former friends. All this, as in A Tale for the Time Being, is much as you’d expect, a sort of grand thematic tour. On the other hand, it is also written with more clarity and playfulness than Ozeki’s novel, and though it is in its own way just as insistent, it is much less didactic – because much more sprightly. Still, I find it hard not to agree, insofar as it is possible or reasonable for me to do so, with Helon Habila in the Guardian: “To perform Africa […] is to inundate one’s writing with images and symbols and allusions that evoke, to borrow a phrase from Aristotle, pity and fear, but not in a real tragic sense, more in a CNN, western-media-coverage-of-Africa, poverty-porn sense.” Bulawayo has one of Darling’s childhood friends counter this accusation – “You think watching on BBC means you know what is going on?” [pg. 285] – but in her clear and understandable desire to document the deprivations of a country often invisible to inhabitants of the one to which Darling emigrates, she does somewhat load her novel with precisely the negative resignation one assumes she wishes to eschew.

Bulawayo ends We Need New Names on an ugly image of a dog crushed by traffic on a Zimbabwean road; her final sentence, however, emphasises the “delicious, delicious smell of Lobells bread” which wafts across the scene, as if – aha – to leaven the darkness, to emphasise that all in Africa is not dead dogs in the road. In her second novel, one hopes she succeeds in better achieving that balance. One worries, however, that Philip Hensher is right: that the inclusion from 2014 of American novels in the Booker race will hollow out the prize, render ever more predictable its shortlist; already, in three of these six shortlisted novels (the two reviewed here and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland), America acts as a prism through which more particular struggles are viewed. Hensher, I think, over-eggs his pudding, but concern about a flattening-out is valid: in his own Booker post, after all, Roberts notes that the youth culture he sees as permeating and defining our particular moment was “invented to relieve young people of their pocket money in the 1950s”; in her response to the post, Nina Allan points out that YA is written not for young adults but for “the young adult market“. The characteristic of our age – as Darling, imprisoned in her shanty town and pining for “the TV, the large radio, the beautiful things we don’t know” – is not the youth Nao and Darling share, but the commodification which places intolerable pressures on the lives of all around them, the packaging and repackaging of stuff. Selling to markets is the sine qua non of our technological, globalised, youth-obsessed culture, one in which leisure time expands and is filled not by more time for reflection but by more product – not by what Roberts calls ‘clever clever’ art, but by accessible mass media.

The Booker, one hopes, won’t reward books which play to those pressures.

“Fighting the System is Narcissistic”: Juli Zeh’s “The Method”

The word I first thought of to describe Juli Zeh’s Red Tentacle-nominated dystopian thriller, The Method, was ‘brittle’. Ordinarily, I’d use this word to characterise a novel most notable for its thinness: of plot, of character, or of ‘world-building’. A brittle work, I might suggest, is one which reads easily but feels less than substantial, or which made a sort of superficial sense but which either was either stretched too sparingly over a slim premise, or insufficiently plumbed the depths of a weightier one. This, then, would be how I’d think of a brittle novel. But it is not how I think of The Method.

Zeh’s novel takes place in what we can assume is a relatively near-future Germany, in which the challenges of late capitalism have been met by a rigidly enforced focus on maintaining the health of all organisms and ecosystems: for humans, it is illegal to drink alcohol or caffeine, to smoke or take unnecessary risk; it is forbidden not to follow the advice of your doctor, to the extent that failing to submit to regular testing for intoxicants, contaminants or anomalies is also a serious offence. Zeh’s protagonist, the distant biologist Mia Holl, commits precisely this faux pas – and the novel rolls onwards.

“Our society,” declaims Holl’s primary antagonist, Kramer, a sort of populist public intellectual-cum-media star, “has attained its apotheosis. Unlike every previous or current form of social organisation, we’re not in thrall to the market or religion. We’re not dependent on high-flown ideological beliefs. The smug, self-serving faith in popular democracy has no place in our system. Our society is guided by reason and reason alone.” [pg. 29] Kramer’s fanaticism is married entirely to this assumption: the state which begins to work itself against Mia’s apostasy is entirely confident in its own righteousness, but is blind to the fact that this emphasis on the primacy of the collective good is itself is a kind of ideology more complete and totalised than any other. “Infallibility is the bedrock of the Method,” Kramer concludes with the certainty of a Pope. [pg. 30]

The seed of Mia’s fall from a Kramer-like allegiance to the Method’s seamless certainties, however, is proof enough that, however well concealed, the dystopia has joins. Some time before the beginning of the novel, her brother was tried and convicted of the rape and murder of a woman he was due to meet for a blind date – and subjected to a kind of cryogenic freezing as punishment. Mia cannot believe in her brother’s guilt, and the squeamishness of his sentence – the body, simultaneously so sacrosanct as to be beyond the degradation of the electric chair or the noose, is at the same time treated dispassionately, like “a machine, a walking, talking ingesting apparatus” [pg. 70] – shakes something credulous into her consciousness.

Despite the importance of this conceptual shift to the shape of the novel, however, Zeh is little interested in bringing Mia closer to the reader than she is to any of the characters around her. “Science,” she insists at one point, “broke up the long-standing marriage between humankind and the transcendental.” [pg. 141] All human relationships, and with them the means and drive to express human emotion, have been attenuated by the Method’s relentless focus on commonality: couples are united by the state for their complementary genes. In this context, the only character allowed anything much like an engaging voice is Mia’s brother, who exists only in flashback, and in the externalised ramblings of the ‘ideal inamorata’ he leaves behind for his sister, an AI girlfriend which shared his particular perspective. In the context of the novel’s world, this unique individuality feels almost impossible, arising out of nowhere and floating in total isolation from everyone and everything around it.

I hope this begins to explain the adjective ‘brittle’. The Method has been compared with 1984, but in that novel the key is that nothing exists outside the system constructed by the authorities – even when it might appear otherwise. Mia’s brother is a genuinely sui generis free spirit, even as Zeh holds his sister, Kramer and all the other typologies she animates for the purpose of her civics lesson, at a rigid arm’s length. There is in the midst of this a powerful debate – “What is humankind compared to your dignity?” [pg. 206] – but the balance between individual and state is at times insincerely struck. “Whatever the system, everywhere in the world you see unhappy, unsmiling faces. In our system, there’s a respectable proportion of smiles. Isn’t that enough, Frau Holl?” [pg. 188] This is a limp kind of utilitarianism.

At the same time, however, The Method can be deliciously cute. At one point, Mia is convinced she will be made a martyr by the state – and Zeh is wily enough to show how a truly totalising system would deny the population even that catharsis, holding them, like the readers of this novel, in endless tension. The Method is in one way much scarier than Big Brother, because it shifts and changes without letting go of its most central, most destructive philosophy. Zeh evokes Kafka in the surreality of Mia’s trial, of the invention of terrorist cells and the insistence that the words ‘No one’, rather than a denial of accomplices, is a codename for one; and yet the intensified media, and fever-pitch fear of those who consume it, feels thoroughly familiar. Simultaneously, there’s a spinning of the assumptions of science fiction:

The Method is based on the health of its citizens, and health is the norm. But what is normal? Normal is that which already exists, the prevailing condition. But normal is also normative – an expectation, the thing to be wished for. The norm is a double-edged sword. A person can be measured against that which exists, in which case she will be found to be normal and healthy, therefore good. Or a person can be measured against an expectation and be found wanting. The norm can be changed at will. For those on the inside, the double-edged sword is a defensive weapon. For outsiders, it’s a terrifying threat. It has the power to make you ill. [pp. 129-9]

There’s something in this passage which rejects measurement, usually the means by which the heroes of science fiction devise their most ingenious solutions. The Method, we come to see, denies the human by understanding it as a collection of attributes to be assessed – “Humans are essentially the packaging for memories,” we are told [pg. 108] – and this hollows out the society it pretends to protect, just as it sterilises the environment previous generations did their best to destroy. At the same time, however, the didacticism of the prose, the discursive style with its constant commentary – “If we were to describe what is currently occurring between Mia and Kramer, we might compare it to the silent roar of a story about to unfold” [pg. 22] – casts a light on every corner of Zeh’s parable. There’s no space in this story – fittingly, perhaps, there is no human depth.

In a recent edition of Newsnight, the Financial Times columnist and assistant editor Gillian Tett gave in to the despair of the West European elite. “Maybe the next decade or two is going to be about people questioning this balance of how democracy works and looking at more technocratic solutions,” she suggested, “because the economic choices confronting the West right now are so painful that the pressure is not going to evaporate quickly.” The Method is the counter to what might in some quarters be seductive counsel: to pass all our futures to technocrats working in long cycles and for a concretised definition of the ‘public good’ will be necessarily to adulterate what we consider as the individual – and what this means for our ability to avert ecological disaster, should we wish to maintain our individuality, is an implicit question.

That Zeh chooses to enact in her novel’s characters precisely the enervation she understands the Method to occasion may weaken, through absence of convincing contrast, the impact of what is otherwise a direct hit. But it also makes The Method an impressively completed edifice: brittle, perhaps, but also rather bold.

“You know my methods. What can you gather yourself?”

“Here is my lens.”

Christmas Eve, in case you hadn’t noticed, is when I re-read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of Blue Carbuncle’. When I took down my bound volume of the relevant year’s Strand magazines (itself a very kind Christmas gift), I noticed the date embossed on its spine: 1892. This was a reminder, if one were needed, that this story is now one hundred and twenty years old. (In fact, the story was originally published in January, so it is almost one year older than that.)

Inevitably, the story creaks in the ways that your great-grandfather’s popular fiction will: all those interjections – “My dear Holmes!” – and all that reporting of action via direct speech – “Pray take the basket-chair. I will just put on my slippers before we settle this little matter of yours. Now, then!” But there are also moments which signify its age in a less grating fashion. Take Holmes’s answer to the question of which newspapers should carry his message to the owner of an abandoned Christmas goose, for example: “Oh, in the Globe, Star, Pall Mall, St. James’s, Evening News, Standard, Echo, and any others that occur to you.” Would that today’s press were so vibrant and varied!

In his The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey makes a good deal of Holmes’s reliance upon and love of the press. For Carey (though alas he doesn’t cite any one story as evidence for his assertions), this addiction to news is in a roundabout way of a piece with the redemptive message at the festive heart of ‘The Blue Carbuncle’:

“[The] contempt among [modernist] intellectuals for newspapers is not, we should note, shared by the great fictional intellectual of the period, Sherlock Holmes. While the intellectuals were busy inventing alarming versions of the masses for other intellectuals to read, Conan Doyle created, in Holmes, a comforting version of the intellectual for mass consumption […] Holmes’s redemptive genius as a detective lies in rescuing individuals from the mass […] by giving an accurate account, before they have spoken a word, of their jobs, their habits and their individual interests. The appeal of this Holmesian magic and the reassurance it brings to readers are, I would suggest, residually religious, akin to the singling-out of the individual soul, redeemed from the mass, that Christianity promises.” [pp. 8-9]

By this logic, ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ is the quintessential Holmes story: the great detective explicitly cites the case as “one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles”; yet even before meeting him he deduces in exacting detail the shape of the life lived by the man who lost his Christmas goose (“it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid on in his house”). From there, Holmes follows the trail through to a villain whom he sets free with the justification of “saving a soul”. Given ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ is set during the Christian festival which most celebrates the potential for salvation, it’s remarkable that Carey uses that word ‘redemptive’; and, if we were to use Holmes’s methods upon an unreferenced passage which also discusses newspaper personal columns, we might be forced to deduce that Carey had on his mind as he wrote precisely Holmes’s little Christmas miracle.

Elsewhere, Carey argues that Conan Doyle’s Holmes practiced a weird kind of anti-intellectualism in his adventures: all those disparaged clerks and, for instance in ‘The Naval Treaty’, a defence of the intellectuals’ hated Board Schools as “lighthouses”. It seems to me, however, that the redemptive power of Holmes’s method – if we are to join Carey in his vision of Holmes as a saviour of the individual against the mass, which on Christmas 2012 as much as on Christmas 1892 it is almost possible not to do –  lies precisely in his intellect. Sherlock Holmes is not an impossible shaman – “Your reasoning is certainly plausible,” says Watson – but an improbable savant. And when one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains – however improbable – must be the truth.

Merry Christmas, everyone.