David Zimmer’s life collapses when his two sons and his wife die in a plane crash. He finds, if not meaning, then at least something to do, by writing a book about the silent films of forgotten star, Hector Mann. Hector Mann disappeared mysteriously in the 1930s, and is presumed long dead, but now in the 1980s Zimmer gets a letter from his wife, saying that Mann is alive but ailing  in New Mexico and would like to meet Zimmer before he dies.

I first read this book four years ago, and didn’t enjoy it as much as this time. I thought it was too derivative of his other work then, but now I think it’s brilliant with subtle intertextuality.

David Zimmer was Marco Stanley Fogg’s friend in my favourite Auster book, Moon Palace. I would like more than anything to read the continuing adventures of Fogg. This will have to do for now. One tantalising reference to the events of that book is the fact that Zimmer named one of his sons ‘Marco’. No more is said than this, but it put a smile on my face.

The rest of the intertextuality is only now being revealed. Auster published this novel in 2002, but it contains references to works he has completed since. [Spoiler alert] In New Mexico, Mann has spent years making films no-one else is allowed to see, films which his wife will destroy on his death. One of them has the title Travels in the Scriptorium; another, The Inner Life of Martin Frost. The first, of course, is the title of Auster’s 2007 novel; the second of the film he released this year.

Zimmer gives us a scene by scene breakdown of The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the only secret film of Mann’s he gets to see before they are destroyed. I’ll find it interesting to compare with the ‘real’ film of that name.

The threat of the destruction of these amazing secret films makes the whole novel feels like a tragedy at times. Auster reveals something in me, because I managed to feel like the novel had a happy ending when the films might be saved at the end, even after the sad death of Alma, Freida, Hector and possibly David.

9/10

Graham Greene-ish. A 25 year old British man who has lived with his parents up until now is sent to work on a secret tunnel in 1950s Berlin, a joint project between the British and Americans. He falls in love with a divorced German woman who introduces him to sex and love. Their relationship is threatened first when he rapes her (having tasted power and wanting more of it) and again when her ex-husband turns up and he feels pressured to be the strong man he has never been.

The prose only sometimes achieves the clarity and beauty which make McEwan one of my favourite writers. But I see in this novel interesting roots for later themes or scenes - Leonard rehearses a letter in much the way Robbie does in Atonement; the descriptions of Berlin resonate with those in Black Dogs; the couple have not so a disastrous wedding night as in Chesil Beach, but a disastrous engagement night for completely different reasons which still manage to tear the couple apart. Indeed, the ending of the novel is - SPOILER ALERT - quite similar to Chesil Beach.

7/10

Published in 1965, The merry-go-round in the sea is a superb novel. It manages to be both simple and complicated in its themes and prose.

Rob Coram is six at the beginning of World War Two when his favourite cousin, Rick, goes off to war. The novel follows them both over the next eight years, as Rob grows in his awareness of the world and Rick comes home depressed and restless.

I’ve read few novels which have evoked the landscape so well as this one. Stow manages to describe all the smells and sounds and sights and perceptions of the Geraldton town and countryside, and reproduce them as a precocious child would sense them. His prose is both precise and poetic.

As a coming of age novel, it works well too. Stow shows how the passage of time alters Rob’s perception of the world, captured well in the title. Rob thinks that the mast of a wrecked ship out at sea is a merry-go-round and he’d like to one day swim out to and play in it. He clings onto the belief even when his mother tells him it is not so. A few years later he manages to swim there with his friend and can look back with a bittersweetness at his old innocence.

But it’s also about Rick growing up, or refusing to grow up; coming home from the war and realising that he can’t settle down into what he sees as the suffocation of the suburbs.

As well as this, it’s a novel about family, a large and extended family which has stayed close and has its own web of folklore and custom.

One thing it’s not is a page turner. The prose is so pristine and the scenes so self-contained that it didn’t have a strong narrative drive for me.

8.5/10

I remember Silverberg fondly from the days in my teens when I lived SF. He had ideas as good as Asimov but heaps more style and strong characters. I went back to him because it was late at night, I’d been reading a lot of theology and one of his books was sitting unread on my shelf.

In short

Kingdoms of the Wall is a competent SF novel that kept me reading but didn’t astound.

The Plot

Kingdoms of the Wall has an excellent setup: a massive mountain dominates the people who live at its bottom. Each year, the village sends up forty pilgrims to attempt to reach the summit and meet with the gods they believe live there. But only a couple ever return and these are either mad or silent. Yet still four thousand people compete each year for the privilege of being one of the pilgrims. The narrator, Poilar, is courageous and ambitious but not particularly intelligent. He wants to get to the summit and achieve glory without really knowing why.  His best friend wants to discover the meaning of it all.The climb toward the summit is a perfect narrative device. Reading a narrative can be so easily construed as climbing toward a summit. I expected, like the inhabitants of the village that there might be something special at the top…

 6/10

Spoiler alert 

Atonement manages to work as both a compelling narrative with popular appeal - the sort of novel you can recommend to people who don’t read literary fiction - and as an extended exploration of life and the nature of writing itself.

Compelling narrative 

The compelling narrative comes from a strong plot and masterful control of detail. It is a love story, but a love story told mainly from the perspective of the person who has come between the lovers.

McEwan gives us two very attractive characters in Robbie and Cecilia - both young, intelligent and vibrant people. We want them to love each other, we want them to be happy.

Yet Briony is likeable in her own way too. A precocious and brilliant child who is on an awkward cusp of maturity and immaturity. Her desire to make life more dramatic, to make it black and white, good and evil leads her to decide that the rapist she saw running away from Lola must be Robbie.

Reading it the second time and knowing what was to come, I was tensely aware of all the small details that were piling up, sending events down the path that would lead to Robbie going to jail for the rape and being separated from Cecilia.  What would have happened if he hadn’t added the impulsive postscript about his sexual desire for Cecilia? Or even if he’d sent the right note, the corrected one? Would he still have ended up in that passionate tryst in the library which Briony interrupts?

What if Briony hadn’t read the note? Would she still have thought Robbie a sexual maniac?

What if the twins hadn’t run away and everyone gone to search for them? Would there have been no opportunity for Paul Marshall to rape Lola?

There are what-ifs in any narrative, but McEwan handles them so well, piling them precisely and expertly.

In part two as Robbie trudges through France trying to get home to Cecilia, the narrative drive is simple and strong: his survival, which would have been suspenseful in any case, is made even more so by the knowledge that Cecilia is waiting for him and their love has been so cruelly interrupted by years in jail.

In part three, we follow Briony as she works in the wartime hospital, ‘atoning’ for her crime by forsaking her dreams and trying to help others. The narrative drive comes from the fact that just like her, we don’t know what’s going on, whether Robbie made it, until, at the end of the section and the end of the novel as she wrote it, she visits Cecilia and Robbie is there with her.

An exploration of life and writing 

Everything shifts with the revelation in the epilogue ‘London, 1999′ that the preceding novel has been written by Briony Tallis, and that in ‘real life’, Cecilia and Robbie both died in the war. It breaks my heart. I’ve gone soft; I would rather things ended where they did and I didn’t have to think of the happy ending as a fiction within the fiction.

But it’s a profound epilogue. Full of wisdom about the experience of being old and looking back on life. And full of insight into writing itself.

Briony writes in first person, asking herself whether writing can be atonement, whether by creating happiness for Robbie and Cecilia she has atoned for her crime. The answer is ambiguous. The problem is that the writer is the god of her novel, and so there’s no-one higher to appeal to, no-one to forgive her for what she’s done.

Thus the final scene as the dying Briony witnesses the play that was never staged with all her family around her has a special poignance. It’s realistic about the consolations that are available in life.  Even if there’s no undoing what’s done, there’s still moments like these of joy and love. Not a happy ending, but a happy scene at the end of a profound life.

McEwan’s In Between the Sheets collection was published in 1978. Some of the stories are typical of his early transgressive work. Others point the way forward to the brilliance of his later career. ‘Two fragments’ is one of the latter.

In twenty pages it manages to tell a whole novel worth of things. It is so compressed, so ripe, so well-developed. The characters feel alive, with years of past and maybe years of future.

His picture of a dystopian London is chilling in its tiny, well realised details. Homeless people use a massive fountain in the public area as a toilet. The everyday experiences of life go on: Henry wakes from a dream; his daughter asks him questions about her body.

Henry has compassion, an unsentimental compassion so unadorned in its telling, helping a Chinese man move a wardrobe, and it’s this that makes me think of his later work.  Because I think he has become such a compassionate writer.  And you never would have thought it reading his first short stories or The Comfort of Strangers.

Saturday is written in third person; Sunday in first person. The two halves complement well, leaving a rounded taste in my mouth.  

On the basis of this dystopian story, I think McEwan could have become one of the greatest SF writers ever.  (Child in Time is further evidence.) Instead, he trod his own singular path which I am so grateful for.

Great review of the collection here: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/16/040448.php

Dirty realism? 

Richard Ford was friends with Raymond Carver.  Figures. The Sportswriter seemed to me like the novel Carver would have written if he ever wanted to. (Presumably, he thought short stories were much more important.) The genre’s usually called dirty realism, but that doesn’t sound right to me, because these writers are both so eloquent, even when they’re writing about the grit of everyday life. Dirty realism sounds like it should describe the sort of boring squalid lives of the characters of Andrew McGahan’s  Praise.

 Both writers have a poetic way with everyday American life, with the small hopes and comforts of ordinary Americans. Carver’s characters were more working-class/trailer trash types, though, while Frank Barscombe, the narrator of The Sportswriter, is an educated journalist who mentions James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

A grown-up Holden Caulfield on antidepressants?

I hope not, but that’s sort of how Frank Barscombe sounds. As a great American character, he falls somewhere between the eloquence of Holden and the ordinariness of Rabbit Angstrom.

 Like Holden Caulfield, he handles a crisis by ringing up various ex-girlfriends / his ex-wife and catching a train into New York.

 Women in Frank’s Life

It is not till the end when he says it explicitly that I realised what he really wants more than anything - reconciliation with his ex-wife, known befittingly as ‘X’. It is an accomplishment that it made me so sad it didn’t happen.

It’s almost as sad watching things fall apart with his girlfriend Vicky. There’s never an argument, only her moving further and further away from him over the course of weekend. The reasons are opaque to me, and probably to Frank as well. They don’t have enough in common? The phony way he spoke to her father? The fact he got caught going through her handbag?

Hitting home: Frank as abandoned writer

What moved me most - or scared me, maybe - was the fact that at 26 (my age now) Frank abandoned his writing career after a successful first book. He got to the point where he couldn’t write; he would sit down to write, but do nothing. Here he is in the novel, thirteen years later, a successful sports journalist with such small ambitions, living under a spell of dreaminess - which seems remarkably similar to life on antidepressants.

Perhaps I should take comfort in the fact that Ford himself seems to have abandoned writing for a while - after two well reviewed early books - only to come back with the gigantic success of The Sportswriter.

8/10

Nicholson the cult writer

Briton Geoff Nicholson is another very underrated writer - at least here in Australia, where it is rare to find his novels in bookshops or libraries.

His preoccupation is a rewriting of urban mythologies and obsessions - lunatic asylums, modern cannibalism, secret clubs, collectors, cult writers, Volkswagons. He chooses a subject like this and then assembles a plot around it, often complete with fascinating asides on the subject’s place in popular culture.

His writing is perceptive and literary, and yet the plot-drivenness makes his work feel more like popular fiction at times. He is perhaps most easily classififed as a cult writer. (Somewhere he has a great definition of a cult writer - something about it meaning you barely sell any copies but someone in a backwater town of the mid-west thinks you’re the ants-pants.)

The Food Chain’s subjects are gluttony and secret clubs. Thus we have cannibalism in London and a chef at a fine restaurant ejaculating in the food, all in the course of a fast pace plot and a novel of just 180 pages.

Plot

Virgil Marcel arrives in London at the invitation of the Everlasting Club, an underground gentleman’s club which has been feasting around the clock gluttonously for three hundred and fifty years. He is kidnapped by a nude model in their employ, who takes him on a tour of British cuisine and kinky sex.

Meanwhile, Virgil’s father Frank suspects his wife is up to something.  Frank is the owner of a chain of successful Golden Boy restaurants, mediocore but reliable family restaurants. The ‘bolden boy’ is a fibreglass statue of Virgil as a young boy that graces the top of each restaurant. He opened a fine food restaurant which failed until Virgil turned it nasty and thus fashionable.

Assessment

I suspect Nicholson plots his novels very tightly, and somehow I think this is the cause of my dissatisfaction… it moves too quickly and mechanically.

But I couldn’t put it down, maybe because of that plot drive. I also love the way he weaves popular culture and urban myth into his novels, and I think he has genuine insight into what it’s like to be alive. 

He’s always entertaining, even when his novels have that unfinished feel like those of Philip K. Dick. Recommended for fans of Dick, Paul Auster, and the Coen Brothers.

7/10

My copy of this novel is a gaudy movie tie-in on special for $2 from Elizabeth’s Secondhand Bookshop in Fremantle. The characters have the same name as the film, but really that’s where the resemblances finish.

 Three divorced women who get together to drink, cast small spells and compare adulteries are entranced by Darryl Van Horne, a rich bachelor newly arrived in Eastwick. Their wild times at his mansion come crashing down when he takes a young bride and his fortune proves to be illusory. The bride develops cancer after the witches cast a spell on her. Are they to blame?

 Updike’s novel isn’t primarily a supernatural one; it’s just a theme or background for what is yet another novel about adultery by middle aged, upper middle class Americans. But his prose is often beautiful and his insights sharp.

(I found a great review basically saying what I’ve just said except better: http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_updike_witches.html )

6/10

The perfect book?

The first time I read it in 2001, every word seemed perfect. A beautiful parable without a word out of place. This time, it wasn’t perfect; some sentences jarred, the novel didn’t absorb me to the same degree.

I think a novel can only ever be perfect for a particular time and place. For one reading only.  And yet with this said, I still loved this novel.

Plot and commentary 

Compared to most novels, the plot is easy to remember; maybe this is why the term ‘parable’ seems appropriate. Here’s the plot with commentary (you might want to look away):

Jim Nashe comes into an inheritance just after his wife leaves him. He leaves his job as a firefighter and starts driving across America in a new car. He loves the freedom, encapsulated in the car with classical music at full volume.

But the money begins to run out when he picks up a hitch-hiker, a plucky young man named Jack Pozzi. Pozzi is a professional poker player, and he has a game the next night at the house of two eccentric millionaires who aren’t very good at cards. It should be easy money, and Nashe puts up his last $10 000 on a whim.

The millionaires are Flower and Stone, and they came into their money through a lottery win. I noticed for the first time the obvious parallelism - Flower and Stone forced into partnership because of good luck and, after they lose the money and then the car and then go into debt, Pozzi and Nashe forced into partnership because of bad luck.

Back up a moment. Stone has built a miniature city. It is a place of both whimsy and menace. Everything looks nostalgic, a little boy is eating an icecream on the street, but in the prison a prisoner is being executed by firing squad. There is a menacing justice in the miniature city.

(Nashe leaves the card room to look at the city; he picks out the tiny figures of Stone and Flower and keeps them. Later, Pozzi pinpoints this as the point when he started to lose. When Nashe smashed up the instruments of reality. Nashe responds by burning the two models. After this, things get worse.)

Flower and Stone extend the mixture of whimsy and menace to Nashe and Pozzi. To pay off their debt, they have to build a stone wall. The stones are the ruins of a castle the millionaires have transported from Europe. The menace comes when their supervisor begins to wear a gun and when they realise there is no way out - a huge fence blocks their way.

I’ve been thinking of Pozzi and Nashe building that wall. It’s a comforting image when I’m not enjoying work. (Which is quite a lot lately.)
 

The endings 

I find it fascinating that Auster has released into the world two official versions of the ending. In the book version, the story ends with Nashe driving into an oncoming truck when he is given a chance to drive his car again in celebration of finishing. There is little doubt that he is about to die.

In the film version, he survives the crash and is picked up the next morning by a passing driver (played by Paul Auster). It echoes strongly with Nashe picking up a badly bruised Pozzi earlier in the novel.