Anne Fine – The Tulip Touch

Winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (now the Costa Book Awards) in 1996, Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch forms part of the oeuvre of her work for older children and teens. This is due in no small part to the more dark and challenging subject matter of this book, which explores childhood abuse and neglect, and at heart is a story about how we ignore the suffering of others for the sake of our own convenience.

The story’s narrator is the young Natalie Barnes, a girl of ten or eleven who is quiet, relatively studious and unimposing. Her family run hotels, and after moving into the Palace Hotel and moving schools once more, Natalie encounters Tulip Pierce, a strange, dishevelled and aggressive girl who lives nearby. In Tulip, Natalie senses excitement and danger; while  in Natalie, Tulip senses a willing playmate for her cruel games. The two girls become best  friends, and Natalie is drawn into Tulip’s increasingly bitter and mocking world. The novel turns on half-truths, glimpses and hearsay: we learn that Mr Pierce, Tulip’s father, is mean to her, that he makes her drown kittens and occasionally thrashes her. None of this is witnessed directly by the reader but is told through gossip and overheard conversations between people who heard it from other people. Tulip remains an enigma to us. While the adults around Natalie and Tulip (parents, teachers, guests at the Palace) seem to “understand” that Tulip “has had a difficult upbringing”, none of them are willing to truly take her on, preferring to get on with their own lives. Tulip becomes increasingly spiteful and cruel; and after a literally inflammatory evening, Natalie decides that she too has to start looking after herself and decides to “dump” Tulip as a friend. Thus the betrayal is set in motion and the scene is set for Tulip’s final revenge…

She tugged so hard at me, I had to go. But as I stumbled after her, still looking back, I knew I was bewitched. The Tulip Touch had really got me this time. I knew I’d dream of fires forever, and wake in the middle of my dull, dark nights to see the flames she might have lit in me still shooting up to scorch the sky. I’d see whole streets, entire cities, burning. I’d switch on my bedside light and, for a while, the old familiar pictures on the walls and clothes on the chair might blot out the smouldering visions. But I’d be sure Tulip was lying in wait in some bleak bedroom. And I’d know the minute my room was dark again, she’d pick up where she left off, and send more of her own imaginings into my boring dreams, to set them ablaze with her own growing frenzies.

The Tulip Touch is a smart and sad novel, bristling with danger and excitement. Aimed at children in their mid-teens, it deals with the cliques and (dis)loyalties of high school kids, with the carelessness of parents and the limits of our empathy for one another. It raises uncomfortable questions about all of us, about our apathy or complicity in social injustice, and – as the dark text on the novel’s sleeve reads – reminds us that no-one is born evil.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Cancer Ward

Solzhenitsyn was always to be considered the great moralist of the Stalinist regime. Sent to a gulag for criticizing Stalin in a letter, he suffered first-hand the degredations and cruelties of Soviet rule. Awarded the Nobel Prize, exiled from Russia, only to eventually return, Solzhenitsyn’s life and works are intricately bound up with the fortunes of modern Russian history. Perhaps his most emblematic work is the short and marvellous One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicting daily life in a Soviet labour camp, but it is in Cancer Ward (1967; banned the following year in the Soviet Union) where the scope of his ideas first found a substantial home. Primarily both allegorical and semi-autobiographical, Cancer Ward is set just a couple of years after the death of Stalin, and is set in an Uzbek hospital ward. It tells of the fortunes of a group of cancer patients; their illnesses, their histories, their hopes for recovery, their relationships and their treatment under Stalin.

We are first introduced to Pavel Nicolayevich Rusanov, a snivelling Party man who wears thin-rimmed spectacles and has swallowed the callous collectivized propaganda of the state. He sits in pompous judgement over his fellow cancer sufferers, most notably Oleg Kostoglotov (seemingly based to some extent on Solzhenitsyn himself), an embittered yet intellectually lively critic of the regime, who attempts to form relationships with two of the female nurses on the ward, Vera Gangart and the young nurse Zoya. Through these characters and others, Solzhenitsyn explores the impact of Stalinist rule, both on the individual and on society as a whole. The idea of the “cancerous” Soviet state with its “tumours” of labour camps is central to the novel’s themes; just as Kostoglotov, discharged from the ward towards the end of the book, realises that his life cannot ever be quite the same; so, in the zoo, gazing at the caged animals, he comes to understand that Russian life, too, cannot go “back to normal” following the horrors they have witnessed. Through the character of Rusanov Solzhenitsyn explores the human and intellectual fallacies of ideology; subsuming all thought, all feeling and all reason under the cold metal sheet of official state policy, a trick of despots and totalitarians everywhere, which allows human life to become cheap, which ultimately permits the most horrific crimes and destroys empathy. It is a sense of individual liberty which Solzhenitsyn seems to champion; whilst not any kind of cheerleader for Western liberal capitalism, he uses a barbed wire to scar the face of Stalinist propaganda, revealing the wounds beneath.

Also, of course, the book functions as an examination of the state of post-Stalinist healthcare and the suffering of those with cancer, both male and female (although the novel focuses mainly on the men’s ward, one touching scene in particular involving a vibrant young woman about to have her breast removed will stay with me). Solzhenitsyn depicts the realities of the patients: their fears, paranoia, obsessions and denials, as well as the doctors and nurses: the paucity of resources they have to work with, the overstretched system, and even a discourse on the relative merits of public and private healthcare through the private doctor whom Vera goes to see. Cancer Ward is sometimes a difficult book; easy to admire, for sure, but not easy to love. Discussing the artistry of prose in translation is always a tricky business, but Solzhenitsyn has a clear, plain and somehow sneakily profound manner of writing which gets under the skin; despite this, the book, clocking in at 570 pages in my edition, often feels longer than it is and can become turgid in places. There is little amusement here, and although there is a curious sense of life-affirming freedom embodied in Kostoglotov, it remains – as Solzhenitsyn’s legacy bequeaths its own Soviet X-ray to us – bristlingly ambivalent.

This autumn I learned from experience that a man can cross the threshold of death even when his body is still not dead. Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests, while you yourself have gone through the whole psychological preparation for death – and lived through death itself. Everything around you, you see as if from the grave. And although you’ve never counted yourself a Christian, indeed the very opposite sometimes, all of a sudden you find you’ve forgiven all those who trespassed against you and bear no ill-will towards those who persecuted you. You’re simply indifferent to everyone and everything. There’s nothing you’d put yourself out to change, you regret nothing. I’d even say it was a state of equilibrium, as natural as that of the trees and the stones. Now I have been taken out of it, but I’m not sure whether I should be pleased or not. It means the return of all my passions, the bad as well as the good.

John Green – Paper Towns

.John Green’s Paper Towns has only just seen a British release, although it has been available in America and Canada for a couple of years now. Having been enthusiastically pointed towards it on various occasions, I was excited to finally get my paws on it a week or so ago. It’s one of the most fun, smart and touching books I’ve read for some time, and certainly one of the best YA novels I’ve ever enjoyed. The story revolves around the mercurial and enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman, a young woman about to graduate high school. She knocks on the door of her friend – and the novel’s protagnist – Quentin Jacobsen one evening and persuades him to join her on a crazy night of pranks and revenge. The next day, Quentin – who’s been head over heels for Margo for years –  finds out that Margo hasn’t turned up to school, and it soon becomes apparent that she’s run away or vanished. But Q quickly realizes that Margo seems to have left him some clues to her fate, and the narrative follows Q and his nerdy, quick-witted friends Ben and Radar as they try to find out what’s happened to Margo.

Green’s novel is eminently readable – I brushed through Paper Towns in just a few days – and extremely funny. I caught myself chuckling out loud on many occasions. “Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes diplomacy alone will not be sufficient and that force will be required.” The wit is one of the three things that make this novel so enjoyable: the others are a fast-paced and well-plotted narrative; and a genuine sense of profundity and thoughtfulness, as the motif of the “paper towns” is developed by first Margo and then, later, Q. (A “paper town” is a fictional place surreptitiously added to maps by cartographers in an attempt to “copyright” their maps; any other map they see which also contains this fictional place, they will know it’s a rip-off of their product). Green uses the idea to talk about the banality of suburban life and the feelings of helplessness and lack of self-understanding that these teenagers are feeling. The situation of these kids – about to leave high school, fretting over dates for prom and starting to realise that they will soon be leaving the school and one another for the final time, along with the maelstrom of emotions that leaving entails – will be familiar to everyone. It is a frequently genuinely touching novel interspersed with moments of hilarity and excitement, as well as John Green using the narrative to plug his favourite bands, which frankly I have no problem with at all when he has such good taste (the Mountain Goats, Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, the Violent Femmes, all get a mention). Anyone who enjoys YA fiction, or really, anyone who enjoys exciting and intelligent writing, should read this book. I adored it.

William T. Vollmann – The Rainbow Stories

If the community of contemporary writers is like a school, William Vollmann is the weird kid who sits in the corner drawing dead bodies and aimlessly unbending paper clips over and over again. The Rainbow Stories was Vollmann’s second work, published in 1989, and borrows the structure of the colours of the rainbow to tell a series of unconnected stories concerned with outcasts, victims, freaks, losers, dropouts and those who exist on society’s fringes. “The White Knights” uses Vollmann’s trademark semi-reportage style to tell the reader of a community of neo-Nazi skinheads in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in the 1980s, and “Ladies and Red Lights” employs the same technique for the prostitutes of the area (Vollmann has spent a lot of time writing about prostitutes in his career, including a book, Whores For Gloria, on the subject). In both cases, what marks out Vollmann’s writing is that it is not what one would expect: compassion. There is no tenderness, no “understanding” of how these people came to be, and little empathy: Vollmann is harder on the reader, less straightforward, and totally non-judgemental (in any direction). These stories are morally blank, direct, honest – what we make of them is up to us. As the book develops his palette expands: “Scintillant Orange” retells the Christian myth of Abednego, Shadrach and Mesach being thrown into the burning flames in ancient Babylon with a curious modern sheen; while “The Yellow Sugar” uses a medieval Muslim myth to prick hypocrisy and violence (no doubt inspired by the time Vollmann spent in Afghanistan as a young man). “The Green Dress” (subtitled “A Pornographic Tale”) is the story of a fetishist who steals a woman’s dress which he sexually worships, while “The Indigo Engineers” is a quasi-futuristic story about dead animals being stuffed with mechanical parts to fight brutally for entertainment – it’s Robot Wars, ten years before Phillippa Forrester and Craig Charles ever heard of it.

Perhaps the most emblematic story, though, is the longest in the collection: “The Blue Yonder”, a tale – inspired, like many here, by real life  - of a mentally disturbed and possibly schizophrenic man, who, in his night-time guise as “The Zombie”, stalks and brutally murders homeless people, stuffing their mouths with cleaning fluid before decapitating them and leaving their heads in dumpsters. As the “day-time” version of the killer, known as “The Other”, starts to become dimly aware of what his alter-ego is doing, their battle of wills takes place amongst a backdrop of the winos, junkies and alcoholics who populate the park benches and underpasses of San Francisco. These are, then, stories of the dispossessed – and here we mean the truly dispossessed, those whose dispossession makes us not uncomfortable but often glad. There are no easy answers, no quickly identifiable “victims” and “oppressors”, often those dispossessed here are bad people, violent, brutal and cruel. They are stories of those who seek to dominate and wield power over others, who themselves victimise and Otherize groups around them. He dares us to empathise with these scenes from nightmares, dares us not to look away (a five-page description of a tramp’s autopsy in “The Blue Yonder” will turn the stomach), challenges our own moral and societal assumptions. If there is a writer who immediately springs to mind reading Vollmann, it is William S. Burroughs, in his nightmarish depictions of violence, brutality and the very fringes of socially acceptable behaviour.

The writing here is frequently grandiloquent and poetic: sometimes to Vollmann’s credit, sometimes to the mere bafflement of the reader, and I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that there were times I wished the narrative onwards and was, well, confused and – at worst – bored by Vollmann’s Pynchonian flights of prosodic fancy. The stories here bear great potential, but next I think I’d like to read something more recent of his work; I hear that Europe Central is a fine novel. In the meantime, to read something original, dark and unsettling, one could do a lot worse than checking out The Rainbow Stories.

Eoin Colfer – Artemis Fowl

Artemis Fowl (2001) won the WH Smith Children’s Book Award and the Children’s Book of the Year Award at the British Book Awards. It has spawned a whole series of Artemis Fowl stories and made Colfer’s name as a prominent writer of young adult fiction; a name he recently turned to good use writing the completed continuation of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series, And Another Thing.

The eponymous Fowl is a twelve-year old, suit wearing and hyper-articulate criminal mastermind (well, nearly), living in a large Lara Croft-esque mansion just outside Dublin. With his trusty bodyguard Butler he seeks to restore the Fowl clan to their previous days of vast criminal wealth. In this first installment, Artemis discovers the Book – an ancient document containing the secrets of the fairies, who in Colfer’s world are not Tinkerbells flitting prettily around lampshades, but a whole society living deep underground, with a crack squad of agents ready to deal with any trouble. We are introduced to the plucky Captain Holly, the first female fairy on the force, her disgruntled boss Commander Root, and – in a stroke of characterization immediately reminiscent to anyone who’s seen any action movies – the nerdy, paranoid but good-natured techie, a centaur named Foaly (I kept picturing Topher from Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse in this role). When Artemis Fowl reads a copy of the fairies’ Book, he resolves to steal their gold, no matter what the cost, and for the first time in history, launches a “hostile act” between the human and fairy species – he kidnaps Holly and holds her to ransom. Soon, Holly, Root, Foaly and more are caught in an exciting hostage escape, involving trolls, magic, guns, laser technology, and other tricks perfectly designed to get young readers’ hearts racing.

What makes the story touching are the glimpses of Artemis’ humanity peeking through the surface: his concern over the whereabouts of his father (missing at sea, presumed dead), the occasional twinges of conscience he “suffers” as he puts his Machiavellian and (almost) perfectly conceived plan into action. I will be teaching this novel soon to a group of Year 8 pupils, and look forward to how excited I predict my pupils will be to read Artemis Fowl: it is well-paced, witty, referential enough to raise knowing smiles and exciting enough to generate all kinds of childhood wish fulfilment fantasies; I want to be a fairy-battling criminal mastermind too! Well, let’s face it – who wouldn’t?

Richard Russo – Empire Falls

Pulitzer Prize winner in 2002, eh? Very nice, Mr Russo, very nice. Empire Falls is, in its own way, rather marvellous. John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany is one of my very favourite novels, and I was often reminded of it reading Russo’s warm and comforting novel, 500 pages of humdrum, small-town American life in a depressed, post-industrial Maine town. It’s a good, big, old-fashioned novel, no tricks, no gimmicks, no postmodern quirks and hiccups – it has character development, relationships, themes, betrayal, love, loss, jealousy, it is substantial, like a bear hug: Empire Falls is a mug of hot chocolate before bed, a reminder of a simpler but perhaps more satisfying time for novel reading. Miles Roby is the middle-aged, soon-to-be-divorced protagonist who runs the Empire Grill, in the town which bears the novel’s name. A thoughtful and even submissive character, Miles watches his ex-wife run into the arms of the self-styled “Silver Fox”, one Walt Comeau; watches his skinny young daughter navigate her way through the perils of high school, watches his reprobate father scrounge off everyone and anyone – and ponders both his own past, his future, and his perilous business relationship with Francine Whiting, the matriarch of Empire Falls, the owner of what remains of the town’s once proud industries (including his own Grill) . Mrs Whiting inherited the businesses after her husband, one C. B. Whiting, put a bullet into his skull some years before the narrative of the novel begins. The shadow of the Whiting empire, deacyed, hangs over the town, while Mrs Whiting rattles around her home, with only her psychopathic cat Timmy and crippled daughter Cindy – she deeply in unrequited love with Miles –  for company. The majority of the novel’s action, though, revolves around Miles Roby; a calm, pensive and well-developed character, like all the people in this novel. Russo is a good writer, no doubt, in the true, old sense of the word.

If the novel has flaws, they are in its pacing; it isn’t until quite late on that the stakes are raised, and it does go through some doldrums half way through. But the reader should persevere: the explosive and revelatory events in the book’s final sections are a worthy pay-off, all the more so for the painstaking character development that Russo has delivered. Janine, Miles’ ex-wife, proud of her weight loss and first experiences of orgasm; the shy and troubled young John Voss, a school colleague of Miles’ daughter Tick (Christina); and Tick’s on-off jock boyfriend Zack, the son of rising police chief Jimmy Minty, one of Miles’ great life rivals. All of these characters and more are given life and personality, lightening up Empire Falls until it feels as realistic as, yes, the blue-collar worlds that Irving creates. A reader “immerses” themselves into this book, reads it by bedside lamp and locks out the outside world. I shall miss Miles and his vertigo as he stands in front of the church, paintbrush in hand; I shall miss the genuinely moving relationship he has with his daughter (finally the one true and genuine instance of love in the whole novel), and the sense of frantic excitement Russo created in me as John Voss returns, menacingly, to school. I shall even miss Max, Miles’ wheeling, dealing father, food in beard and glint in eye, sponging money for booze off another sucker.

All of this mirrored, of course, in Russo’s social themes: the decay of post-Reagan America, the closing of the textile mills, the unemployment, the sense of being trapped, the decline and fall, the trash making its way down the river. In the end, how do people cope with these tragedies? These quiet, slow infestations of hopelessness and the death of a meaningful future? They deal with it, of course, in the way the human beings always have and always will: with each other. Empire Falls is marvellous, if not revolutionary: cuddle up to it.

William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying was published in 1930, and continued Faulkner’s tremendous run of genre-defining Southern literature. Present here is all the intensity, latent violence, religiosity and melancholia which marks the tradition he helped define. Addie Bundren’s death in her family home is marked by her eldest son Cash knocking together her coffin from within view of her window, her teenage daughter Dewey Dell standing over her waving a fan, and two other sons – Jewel and Darl – arguing with their father about his plans to fulfil Addie’s request to bury her in Jefferson, Mississippi; an arduous journey which takes up the majority of the novel’s narrative. Or, rather, “narrative”. As ever with Faulkner, this work is as much about style as it is about the story or the characters or the themes. The text is divided into short sections, each of which is narrated by one of various characters in the story. It is Darl who has the most sections to his name, and thus becomes the de facto protagonist of the novel, but all the major characters: Dewey Dell, the father Adse, Cash, the youngest child Vardaman, even Addie herself as well as various neighbours and even some minor characters – all have sections where they narrate. This allows Faulkner to dive into the inner lives of each of these characters and reveal the gulfs between them, the chasms in communication they suffer from, and the rival interpretations of one another’s actions which dominate the novel thematically. This is a rich vein in Southern writing – Carson McCullers’ superlative The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter also turns on notions of the impossibility of human being to truly and honestly communicate their inner selves to one another – and it is mined to great effect here by Faulkner. It is most clearly demonstrated in the character of Jewel, a headstrong and stubborn young man, who rarely narrates in the novel and is defined more through his actions than his words. And while Jewel is regarded as callous and unfeeling  by the majority of the people around him, his actions reveal a man who cares deeply for his mother, risking himself on more than one occasion for her. Meanwhile, Dewey Dell – often seen by others as a soft and dreamy young woman – plucks up the courage to go to the pharmacist for drugs to get rid of her unwanted child; conceived with a local farmhand Lafe. The pharmacist makes her perform sexual favours for him before giving her medication which doesn’t even do what she wants; in this chapter, and in Addie Bundren’s own chapter, in which she laments the death of her girlhood and innocence through a loveless marriage and a continuation of children (including one – Jewel – with another man) Faulkner displays the concern for women’s positions and women’s difficulties of the time, propped up by a literalist Christian dogmatism which victimised women – which he also displayed in The Sound & The Fury.

The novel is short yet endlessly rich in theme and symbols; the image of the family carting Addie’s coffin across the Southern landscape has an almost Biblical feel to it, as the buzzards collect around the wagon, stinking more and more each day. Darl, the “intellectual” one, the thoughtful and intense one, juxtaposed throughout with the independent Jewel and the stoic Cash,  is suspicious of the whole enterprise from the beginning, becoming more and more disillusioned with the process of taking Addie to Jefferson, until eventually he sets fire to the barn where the family are staying overnight. Rather than face the law and any potential fines, Adse has Darl committed. Again, Faulkner makes us think about the gulf in communication and understanding between the family members. Is Darl a heroic figure here? Misguided? Or actively malevolent? And Adse, insisting that the family travel across rivers and fords for days on end with a stinking corpse in a coffin to honour his wife’s wishes to be buried with her people – is he a selfless, dedicated husband? Or is the whole episode merely an excuse for Adse to get some new false teeth from Jefferson? The ease with which he introduces the new “Mrs Bundren” in the novel’s final line suggests a less-than-noble motivation for him. There is no objective or even subjective narrator to tell us. Only a succession of individual voices, each given to us with their own foibles and illusions, all in Faulkner’s distinctive and effortlessly beautiful stream of consciousness prose. Of course, let’s make no bones about this: As I Lay Dying is frequently – especially at the beginning – a confusing novel, where the reader is often unsure as to who is related to who, or about whom various characters are speaking, or even what is actually happening on the page at various moments. It is a rewarding reading experience, and I am well aware that if I read this novel again in three months and then wrote about it, it would read differently to this. Such is the way with William Faulkner.

Tom Robbins – Skinny Legs And All

)Where to begin? Just where to begin? I’ll come right out and say it upfront: Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All (1990) is some of the most fun I’ve had with a novel in a long time. Happily, it’s also one of the most intellectually exciting and provocative novels I have read for months. I came away from this book somewhart dazzled and with my mind spinning with ideas – I can honestly think of no higher compliment to pay a work of fiction. The plot is, well, ludicrous: our story opens with newlyweds Ellen Cherry Charles and “Boomer” Petway – he a deceptively simple redneck welder, she a wannabe rebellious artist from a deeply Christian family –  making their way to New York in Boomer’s customized truck: customized to look like a turkey. After a passionate fuck in a deserted cave, they leave behind a dirty sock, a spoon and an old can of beans, who – yes, they are characters in the story – meet up with Painted Stick and Conch Shell, ancient religious instruments coaxed back to “life” by the couple’s copulations and Ellen Cherry’s passionate pleas for her husband to call her “Jezebel”. Painted Stick and Conch Shell are determined to return to their old home, Jerusalem; and Dirty Sock, Spoon and Can o’ Beans are more than happy to go along for the ride. All of this serves as a prequel to the main axis of the novel: the restaurant Isaac & Ishmael’s, opened by an Arab and a Jew in New York, where Ellen Cherry eventually gets a job as a waitress. The main attraction at the restaurant, which is constantly suffering bomb threats and terrorist explosions, turns out to be a beautiful teenage girl who belly dances under the name of Salome, and who ultimately promises to dance the Dance of the Seven Veils, sending the clientèle into a frenzy. While all of this is going on, Ellen Cherry’s fundamentalist preacher uncle Buddy is planning to bring about the Rapture by paving the way for the Third Temple of Jerusalem to be created. The novel is structured into seven sections, titled “The First Veil”, “The Second Veil”, and so on, each of which, at its conclusion, pulls away another of humanity’s willing deceptions, frauds or canards, bringing us closer and closer to the true state of human affairs.

The prose is crowded, bursting at the seams with similes, analogies, metaphors, bustling and jostling for position on the page. A police car has “blue lights flashing like a mutant shoppers’ special at a post-nuclear K mart”, for example. At first this was overwhelming and even off-putting, but Robbins’ maximalist style is just another function of his overactive imagination and energetic, rollercoaster mind. Don’t be fooled by the plot description above: this is a profoundly serious work, even as it is couched in absurdities and levity. It is a deeply feminist book; as Robbins delved into the history of Jerusalem and the religious conflicts which have marked it, he reveals the domination of the patriarchal clerics over the Great Feminine, Astarte and shows us how, since the dawn of Abrahamic faiths, religion has functioned as a tool of the patriarchy, suspicious of the feminine, suspicious of the female sexual appetite and female power.

Despite an often ostentatious masculine display that would indicate otherwise, the sexual drama (or melodrama or force) was largely, historically, directed by the female. That was particularly true among human beings, in which species the male had gone to ludicrous and often violent lengths to compensate for what struck the more insecure of men as an inferior sexual role. One of the lengths to which they went was the establishment of patriarchal religion and the recasting of a father figure as the producer of the show, although from the very beginning, the cosmogonic principle has been feminine. Those men, envious and anxious, not only fired the Great Goddess (who smiled upon all manner of sexual expression, including that which moderns were to label “promiscuous” and “pornographic”), but they also spent thousands of years and billions of dollars trying to conceal the fact of her existence.

A few months ago, I wrote here about Umberto Eco’s tedious and overblown Foucault’s Pendulum. You, Umberto Eco, are you paying attention? You want to write about the intricacies of religious history and have a madcap narrative too? This is how it’s done. Religion, feminism, art, the intractable problems of the Middle East, and the existential crises of an inanimate can of beans are the concerns of this dizzying, hilarious and stupidly entertaining novel, in which the misogyny of religion (“Jezebel!”) is torn apart, in which the women villified by Judeo-Christian mythology (notably Jezebel and Salome) are recast as challengers to the dominant narrative of masculinist religious discourse, in which the vapidity of much postmodern art is punctured (defeat as a form of celebration, hypocrisy of anti-establishment artists), in which a pink spoon has as much personality as a human being, in which a foot fetish is explored, in which ideas burst off the page and ram their way into your brain. I shall certainly be reading more Tom Robbins in future – in the meantime, Skinny Legs and All has served as a marvellous introduction.

George Orwell – Coming Up For Air

Ah, it was all fields round here when I were a lad.

Coming Up For Air (1939) was the last of Orwell’s “social realist” novels; published just before his two final great staments, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. And while it bears more, at first glance, in common with the likes of Keep The Aspidistra Flying than with either of those two, one of its charms and intrigues is how the germs of those later two majesterial works are latent here. The story concerns one George Bowling, a chubby middle-aged travelling salesman living in the English suburbs just before the outbreak of World War 2. Bowling constantly refers to himself as “one of those middling types”; his lifeless wife Hilda gives him little joy, his job is acceptable, his house in the anonymous Ellesmere Road pleasant enough but uninteresting. As the war seems to loom on the horizon, his thoughts turn back to his childhood in the English countryside village of Lower Binfield. A time of idle boyish pursuits: fishing, bicycle racing and chasing girls. Bowling is seized with a sudden urge to revisit his old home, to visit the world he knew before World War 1 came along and changed everything. What he finds, of course, is a world changed: the town has expanded, factories dominate, the quaint family businesses all closed down now; the family friends are dead, the childhood sweetheart grown fat and boring – bombers circle the skies in preparation for the coming war. Even George’s idyllic boyhood pond, scene of his most treasured fishing memories, is now a rubbish tip.

Don’t mistake me: Coming Up For Air is not a tedious, quaint, fatuous Laurie Lee-style nostalgia fest for a hopelessly romanticized bygone time. Bowling’s sweet memories contrast sharply with his retro-active intellectual knowledge of what must really have been happening at the time – the unemployment, the poverty and the workhouses; in this strange way, the novel seems to prefigure the fascination with the permeability of memory which marks the works of Ishiguro; and Proust himself is mentioned (as someone Bowling “wouldn’t have read”). What Bowling understands at the end is that the old world has gone, he lives in changed times, times where nostalgia, rose-tinted spectacles and the yearning for the past are as antiquated as the pewter dishes of the “sham countrified”, expanded Lower Binfield.

I’ll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. It’s all going to happen. All the things you’ve got at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it – at any rate, I knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.

Orwell’s prose, as ever, chimes with the rhythms of everyday speech, the voice you wish you could have: except in this novel, something slightly different occurs. Bowling’s colloquial, uintellectual thought processes bumble along, and something deeper emerges unbeknownst to him; a kind of menace, a darkness and a yearning, floating sleepily above the top of the text, insinuating itself into your mind. The cumulative effect is disquieting and the book is deceptively straightforward. This dual layer of narrative is mirrored in Bowling’s preoccupations and realizations: above the sleepy, brain-dead England hovers the threat: Fascism. And perhaps Orwell summed up this novel best himself in his memoir of the Spanish Civil War: he wrote in Homage to Catalonia of “the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

Coming Up For Air is a fine novel: despite the fact that I struggled manfully through a rather tedious extended section (some thirty pages or more) on George’s boyhood fishing memories – I thought I’d never see the back of his endless descriptions of rods and different kinds of carp, and worms, reels, and so on. While ultimately I found Keep The Aspidistra Flying to be a more satisfying novel, there remains no doubt that Orwell is one of the greatest of English writers.

J. D. Salinger – For Esmé – With Love & Squalor, And Other Stories

The British edition of this slim collection of short stories is called For Esmé – With Love & Squalor, And Other Stories, but it is more commonly known by the title under which it was published in America, 9 Stories. With most of the stories here having appeared in The New Yorker, the collection itself was published in 1953 to instant acclaim. Salinger is in fine fettle for the majority of these pieces, most of which stretch for perhaps ten or fifteen pages. His concerns remain familiar: the suffocation of modern existence; a quest for some kind of meaningful truth in the face of materialist, cynical, ironic culture;  and the precociousness (and preciousness) of the types of people he writes about: jaded ex-college types, lazily downing highballs and waving a too-clever hand at the vista of civilization before them.

The collection begins with what might be its high point: “A Perfect Day For Bananafish”, in which Salinger once again focusses on the Glass family (as in his superlative Franny & Zooey), in this case the unstable brother Seymour and his wife Muriel, lodged in a coastal hotel. As Muriel fixes buttonholes and chats on the telephone with her mother whilst lacquering her nails, Seymour lounges on the beach until a young girl he knows invites him for a swim. The story is touching, funny, profound and finally shocking, examining a whole culture and how we as humans interact with that culture in one fell swoop. The collection almost (but not quite) tops it with the second story, “Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut”, in which two hip ex-college roommates, Eloise and Mary Jane,  spend a lazy afternoon drinking, discussing their past, their husbands and their children. It is quietly devastating and demonstrates the sheet heart which underlies all Salinger’s writing. Other stories tread similar emotional terrain: “Just Before The War With The Eskimos” is quintessential Salinger, peopled with bored bright young things, disaffected and yet more than those cliches suggest – always truly human and sad. Meanwhile, the titular story is set in wartime and narrates the memories one young soldier has of a girl he knew whilst training in England. While this is the only time war is explicitly framing the narratives, it looms darkly behind a good deal of the action in these stories; hazy, violent, dark, sinister, unspoken war. “Pretty Mouth And Green My Eyes” is a story of betrayal, friendship and forgiveness, and the unusual and striking “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” details a few months in the life of a precocious young artist, employed to give correspondence advice to budding artists. He becomes peculiarly taken with the work of one nun, writing her elaborate letters of praise and advice which ultimately lead to her being removed from the program (“the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid“, writes Salinger in this story).

Many of the key themes which dominate the collection: a desire for some kind of meaning which transcends the quotidian, boredom, mental illness, precociousness – are focussed in the final story, “Teddy”, the tale of a young prodigy on a luxury cruise with his family. The story is ambiguous and leaves much to the reader, ending the collection on a thoughtful note – perhaps appropriate for a collection which is rich and serious in subject, and a treat for anyone who enjoys Salinger’s work.