Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE METHOD ACTORS” by Carl
Shuker (first published in 2005) and “THE LAZY BOYS” by Carl Shuker (first
published in 2006)
I
have just been considering Carl Shuker’s novel A Mistake, and I have seen an interview Shuker gave to the New Zealand Listener’s Diana Wichtel (NZL 9 March 2019) in which, very
incidental to talking about his new novel and his writing career, he excoriates
reviewers for the negative things they said about a novel written by a friend
of his. Later Wichtel jocularly refers to Shuker as the “scourge of reviewers”. Okay, authors will always be in tension with
reviewers – its part of the reality of publishing and reviewing. But just to
make it clear that, as one of those pesky reviewers, I’ve taken Shuker
seriously since his first novel appeared, I’ve decided to display here reviews
I wrote of his first two novels.
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The following review of Carl Shuker’s The
Method Actors appeared in the Sunday Star-Times on 18 September
2005. Apparently to provide room for a large photograph of Japanese people in
the street, parts of the review were cut. On the whole, this didn’t make much
difference to its meaning. But the loss of the second-to-last paragraph changed
considerably the impact of my review. I produce below the review as I wrote it,
putting in bold and into square
brackets those parts that the newspaper edited out. Two things I regret – that
I didn’t try to explain the title The Method Actors, and that I didn’t say
something about the part of the novel that,
for some reason, has lingered longest in my mind – the section in which
an elderly Japanese finds ways of pretending that Japanese atrocities (in the
1930s) in China never happened.
So here’s the review:
[Up on
the northern side of the Pacific, the islands and people of] Japan will
always be [something of] a challenge
to most of us New Zealanders. We share the same ocean, we trade, [we gulp down much of the same media culture],
and hordes of us each year play tourist in each other’s country. Maybe we think
we actually know each other. Still, there’s this impenetrable gap between our
cultures. Westerners can live in Japan for years, and still not get a fraction
of the nuances of local life and customs.
It’s
this sense of foreignness and alenation that is caught most startlingly in this
accomplished debut novel.
Carl
Shuker follows the lives and thoughts of a group of young gaijin (foreigners) and Japanese in modern Tokyo. [There is a linear plot of sorts.]
Meredith, daughter of a dodgy New Zealand judge, is in search of her brilliant
but erratic brother Michael. The novice historian Michael was in the midst of
an investigation into Japanese war crimes when he went missing. As she
searches, Meredith’s discovery of the Japanese past and present is
counterpointed with viewpoints radically different from her own. They include
Yasu, a young Japanese who cultivates hallucinogenic mushrooms for druggie
tourist, the Frenchman Jacques and the Chinese-American Simon Chang, whose
Chinese views on the Japanese are informed by a long history quite different
from that of Westerners.
The
novel’s blurb claims that it “leaps effortlessly from character to character”.
[But] this isn’t quite true. [There are times when] the narrative
voices sound too similar and its quite an effort to recall which narrator we
are meant ot be following. Even so, the variety of personalities finally
convinces.
[And, more than linear plot, there’s that ]
pervasive sense of cultural dislocation. It’s signalled by a sort of running
gag in which Shuker keeps cutting back to the inept essay a student is writing
on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a
play in which a brother and sister are shipwrecked, like Meredith and Michael,
in a strange foreign country.
Shuker
paints an environment in which young Westerners (language teachers, exchange
students, businesspeople) wander, blank-eyed and alien, through Japan’s
neon-lit streets, looking for anything to hang on to. Divorced from their
roots, they grab sex and drugs as meaningless diversion. Language is telescoped
into a vaguely familiar international babble (mushrooms are always “shrooms”,
air-conditioning “aircon”, Japanese women “J-girls” and so on.) [And pop-culture references are the
international lingua franca.]
Dialogue bristles with allusions to Hollywood movies, rock songs and cult TV
series. But what they all mean to young Japanese is not necessarily the same as
what they mean to alienated young New Zealanders.
This
can be a difficult novel. I could have wished to lose some of the glibness of
later chapters, where Meredith meets a Japanese sage, and he discusses in
detail the bloody expulsions of Christians and Westerners from Japan three
hundred years ago. This seems a way of rounding off and preaching about
otherwise unresolved issues of Japanese historical violence. Occasionally, too,
I found the 500 closely-printed pages a long haul. Yet in the end the fine and
copious detail is part of Shuker’s conscious method.
[ Is this the best novel a New Zealander has
ever written about Japan? I’m not enough of an expert in the field to make that
call, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t. Is Shuker’s ultimate message the
unknowability of a foreign culture – like E.M.Forster renouncing English
knowability of India in A Passage to
India? Perhaps. That such a comparison is worth making is an indication of
the worth of The Method Actors.]
[This is a densely-written, ambitious,
demanding novel.] If Carl Shuker goes on as he has begun, he has a
formidable literary career ahead of him.
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The following review of Carl Shuker’s The Lazy Boys
appeared in the Dominion-Post 28 October 2006. It is reproduced here
unaltered from the way it appeared in the newspaper, though I can note that one
sentence, in which I referred to a then-topical murder case, was edited out.
Yes, I was less impressed by it than I was by The Method Actors, but
that doesn’t mean I denied its authenticity. Shuker’s recent interview with
Diana Wichtel suggests it has at least an element of autobiography.
So here’s the review:
Before
you can really get into Carl Shuker’s second novel, there are a couple of
awkward things that have to be negotiated. First, there are six pages of
underpunctuated James Kelman-esque stream-of-consciousness drunken rave, the
thoughts of a student far gone on the piss. Six pages is about the limit that
this sort of thing can stand.
Then,
not too many pages later, there is one of the longest, most explicit, detailed
and painful descriptions of masturbation ever to appear in print. Not a few
male readers, I suggest, will be crossing their legs and whimpering.
These
terrors negotiated, you can more or less see where the novel is going.
The
year is 1994. (It must be, because there are two or three references to the
death of Kurt Cobain). Richard Sauer is an eighteen-year-old first-year student
at Otago, rapidly going to pieces. He’s spent up large from his student loan
and allowances, mainly on booze and drugs. His credit card is running out and
he is unacquainted with lectures and course-work. He’s just been kicked out of
a student hostel for drunk and disorderly behaviour and the proctor’s office is
chasing him on a sexual harrassment charge after an incident at a party.
So
he goes home for a while to Timaru, to cool off at Mum and Dad’s.
But
it’s boring there. There’s nothing to connect with.
So
he smokes and drinks and masturbates and beats up the family’s pet dog
(literally) and nearly sets fire to the place.
Whereupon
he returns to Dunedin, moves into a grotty student flat and the pattern
continues as before. He smokes, drinks, masturbates etc. Only now he starts
reading books about alienated serial killers who have carried out luridly
sexual murders. And he sees how psychologically similar to him they are.
There’s
a very strong theme of enforced macho posturing. Fairly early on you twig that
Richard Sauer is a vulnerable, pathetic kid. He’s useless with girls. He
blushes easily and lives with strong guilt feelings about his masturbation.
He’s actually bored with drunken parties and loathes painting his face and
going to the footie at Carisbrooke and pretending to enjoy it. But then it’s
the pretend-macho thing to do – like burning books and couches in the street.
And in the background there are high school memories of the utter terror boys
felt at being called faggots.
The
cover blurb compares the novel with A
Clockwork Orange (no way) and Less
Than Zero (maybe). At least the idea of self-destructive nihilism is there.
But oddly enough I found myself comparing it
with Camus’s L’Etranger because of a
peculiar problem Shuker creates for himself. It’s that first-person (and in
this case mainly present tense) narrative voice.
Like Camus’s improbable hero, Richard Sauer
tells his own story and there are times when he is just too articulate and
self-aware about his condition. In other words, the author turns puppet-master
and makes him a mouthpiece for his own thesis.
As
a rubbing-your-face-in-it presentation of student grot, grunge and sleaze, this
works. But though it shares a theme of role-playing, it is not the complex,
imaginative thing Shuker’s stimulating Prize in Modern Letters-winning debut The Method Actors was. And I admit to
finding very irritating Shuker’s habit of leaving out bits of conversations
with rows of dots, thus “…..”
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