Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“OBLIGATE CARNIVORE and other stories” by Stephanie Johnson (Published by Quentin Wilson, $NZ35) ;  “THE ELEVENTH HOUR”  ” by Salman Rushdie (Published by Jonathan Cape, London; in New Zealand marketed by Penguin, $NZ38)

 

            Reviewing a collection of short stories is very like reviewing a collection of poetry. Some of the stories [or poems] will be outstanding, some will be amusing, some will be frightening, some will be forgettable and a very few will be profound. Stephanie Johnson has so far published 16 novels  (two of them published under a pseudonym), two works of non-fiction, two collections of poetry and three collections of  short stories. Obligate Carnivore and other stories is her fourth collection of short stories. It contains 27 stories and of course it is impossible for me to give an account of all of them. So first let me state the obvious: Stephanie Johnson’s writing is still in top form. She gives us us a variety of genres, ideas and a well-used wit when it is needed. She can be scathing sometimes, but only when she really has to. In short, she knows what she is doing. I will not attempt to make comments on all the stories in this collection. In fact, while I read with pleasure all of Obligate Carnivore and other stories, I have decided to deal here with only the first half of this collection.

            So here are some things you will find.

There are some tales set in Australia, a country with which Stephanie Johnson is well acquainted.  Set in  Australia are “Blue Zone” which shows wealthy Kiwis and others in Australia showing their complacence about their country and their own crassness. “Is She Where” is a sad story of a man who can’t deal with courtesy.  “Bear” concerns an Aussie academic, getting old and losing the taste for chasing women at academic gatherings

Away from Oz, Johnson often makes use of ambiguity, the best example being “Eruera und Ich” in which we are forced to question the value of a sort-off hippy-ish life. And there is a similar ambiguity in the way she deals with “My Lady’s View, 1972”,  a tale about pot-smoking women when they were younger.

There are sad tales of old age and dying in “Ground Bones” and in “Institutional Memory” which has a foolish old man still trying to be a rake when he’s really past it.

And of course there are the serious things – the profound things in fact. Without giving away all the details, “Paternity” it is a very persuasive tale of “soft” racism which can seep into the minds of people who believe they are upright and honest. “Shell Piano” is a fantasy about Katherine Mansfield attempting to write a full-length novel as tuberculous meningitis gnaws at her. The sad fact is that she never wrote a full novel, and that is the sorrow of it. There is deep irony in “The Sensitive Reader” – suggesting that, in literature, being too sensitive can destroy the colour of writing. Then there is “The New Zealand Experience”, written in the first person, longer than most stories in this collection. It begins as a rollicking  story of two young cocksure men (one Australian, one American) who buy a crappy van and try to explore New Zealand while doping themselves up. All good fun until it turns to something very sinister. Once again, there is much hard irony here, especially when these two travellers make all sorts of flippant and  condescending comments about the country they chose to explore.  And just to put the cream on the cake, let me tell you about the protagonist – the main character as shown on the cover of this book  - the Obligate Carnivore. It is at once funny and horrifying – in fact its outcome is sheer grand guignol, which will appal some readers and make others laugh. Dare I say that I am always on the side of the cat.

And that, I repeat, is only half of this collection.

Foot Note: For the record you can find on this blog reviews of Stephanie Johnson’s novels “The Open World” , “The WritingClass” , “The Writers Festival”  and the non-fiction “West Island”  a very interesting account of New Zealand writers, poets and other artistic people who emigrated to Australia. One of my favourite books.

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Why is Salman Rushdie’s latest collection of stories called The Eleventh Hour?  It is because “the eleventh hour” in our life is when we become aware that life is short. After all, when the twelfth chime strikes, we die. So here there are stories featuring old age. The Eleventh Hour is made of two short stories and three novelle.

A short story called “In the South” opens the book. In the southern part of India, two old men live next door to each other and often quarrel with each other, but only gradually do they understand that they really need each other…or at least one of them does.  Of  course you wouldn’t expect an acerbic writer like Salman Rushdie to present all this as sweetness and light, but it is a realistic image of what old life can be. And concluding the book, there is the short story  “The Old Man in the Piazza”, this time set in Italy. An old man, who enjoys sitting in the piazza, begins to be seen as a sort of wise man who can answer every question and give people advice… not that he himself believes that he is really all that wise. We come to understand that words are very limited things. At least, that is what I think Salman Rushdie was suggesting.

And between these two short stories, there are the three novelle one set in India, one set in England, and one set in America – in other words, the three countries Rushdie knows best.

“The Musician of Kahani”, set in India, is the real highlight of the book – very readable and, in its own ironic way, very funny. India has been decolonised and is no longer part of the British Empire… but some conservative Indians still pine for the older days and still insist on using the Anglo street-names that are now supposed to be defunct. Meena has married an old academic, Raheen. But it takes a long time before they give birth to their one-and-only child, Chandni. Chandni turns out to be a musical prodigy – in childhood she can play perfectly on the piano works by Beethoven, Mozart and all the classics; as well as becoming an expert in playing the Sitar. She becomes a phenomenon. She is known world-wide… and of course people want to exploit her. I will go no further in this synopsis for fear of spoiling the jokes that come. Suffice it to say that a popular sportsman wants to marry Chandni, and the planned wedding allows Rushdie to satirise the crassness of Bollywood-style wedding; and in the character of Raheen he chortles at all the gullible people [academics included] who fall for money-making gurus. And even Chandni’s final revenge in really a great joke. Rushdie is not ridiculing the Indian nation, but like all the real satirists, he is ridiculing what is extreme or foolish.

“Late” is set in England – specifically in the university of Cambridge. It is a ghost story but, as it develops, it is ultimately a very didactic one. A young Indian scholar, Rosa. has been given the task of going through the papers of the late S. M. Arthur, who was best known for a novel he had written set in India. I thought this novella would deal with the clash between the values of a young Indian woman and the values of a deceased old English man. But that is not where it goes. S. M. Arthur appears [as a ghost] to Rosa, and tells of how he had been misused because he was homosexual, not only at Cambridge but when he was working at Bletchley Park during the Second World War… by which time, you will understand that Rushdie has created an amalgam of E. M. Forster and Alan Turing. So the sorrow was that he was never given freedom and honours when homosexuality was still a crime. Only when he was long dead did he get given, late, the honours he deserved. Hence the title “Late”. Okay, all in a good cause, but apart from some amusing tales about snobbery at the college, “Late” is too much like a lecture, but it is an interesting read..

And so to “Oklahoma” which is [obviously] set in the U.S.A. Some Europeans settle in  America. They make themselves erudite and like talking about Kafka and James Joyce and other worthies. The story is supposed written by a man called Mamouli Ajeeb… and there is a manuscript about a man fearing madness… and there is a lost uncle who might have gone to Oklahoma. Dear reader, though there are some interesting flashes in this novella, I think that in this one Rushdie overreaches himself, getting into the land of cryptic.

Footnote: Some comments. I’ve noticed that Salman Rushdie often refers to films he likes and remembers, and this happens in different parts of The Eleventh Hour. I have very mixed feeling about his works. You can’t help admiring a man who was hounded by fanatics who called fatwa on him and set out to murder him.  He had to go in hiding for over a year… and when he was able to come out again, he was almost murdered and knifed, losing one of his eyes. I aways admired his greatest book Midnight’s Children and I still do. But even while reading his memoirs of his time in hiding, Joseph Anton,  I saw an awful lot of egotism in his writing… and in his Fury , he does seem to be settling scores with people.

 

 

Something Old

 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 year or two ago.     

“DARKNESS VISIBLE” by William Golding (First published in 1979)

There was a long hiatus in William Golding’s work. He had published his three novelle under the title The Scorpion God in 1971, but then eight years went by before his next novel, Darkness Visible, appeared. In an interview [available on line] his daughter said that Golding worked and re-worked this novel very carefully. It is clear that he was once again dealing with the problem of evil, or if you prefer sin, just as he had done in his earliest novels. The very title tells us what he is doing. The phrase “darkness visible” comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost where Milton is describing Hell. Read carefully, we see evil all the way through Darkness Visible, countered only by a few who are righteous. Darkness Visible is his most metaphysical novel. It was applauded by reviewers when it was first published, winning a prestigious prize. But it was, and is, a difficult novel to read. Darkness Visible is presented in three different parts. When I first read it, I thought it was really three separate stories. Only in the last part did I understand how the novel binds together as one narrative. As the novel was written in the 1970’s, when censorship was loosening up, Golding for the first time occasionally has characters saying words like “fuck” and has some detailed sex-scenes, though there is nothing joyful about them.

So to one of my laborious synopses

PART ONE – MATTY

During the Blitz on London, when the firemen are desperately trying to put out fires as the bombs fall, out of nowhere walks a young child – a boy who is scorched and deformed by the fire. Some of his skin has been burnt off and he looks almost grotesque. He is given a name but gradually he becomes known as Matty. He is sent to an old-fashioned boys school, always set aside from others because he is so unusual. A teacher called Mr. Sebastian Pedigree teaches Classics and likes telling the boys about “Greek love” [i.e. homosexuality]. Mr. Pedigree is clearly a pederast [obviously William Golding gave the character the name Pedigree because it is close to Pederast.] Mr Pedigree likes taking individual boys into his study for extra tutoring. Some boys like him. Others are wary of him. In a tragic situation, one boy dies. For his misuse of boys, Mr Pedigree is sent to prison, cursing young Matty for catching him out…. And in this first chapter we are aware of evil and perhaps sinfulness. The opening sequence about the Blitz reminds us of the horror and destructiveness of war, made by human beings; while the sequence of the boys school tells us of the abuse of the innocents.

Matty is given a job at an ironmonger’s factory. In fact he has little work to do there, apart from delivering items - but he is treated well. Now a young teenager, he is attracted by a girl at the counter selling artificial flowers, but with his shyness and his deformed face he does not make any contact with her. He takes to walking and understands how cruel life can be. He goes into a deserted church and, with his deformed face, he will never be loved by a woman. He weeps, but he knows that this is reality.

In young adulthood, he migrates to Australia in the hope of never having to deal with the likes of Mr. Pedigree again. [For the record, William Golding spent some time in Australia before he wrote this novel…. and the Outback is like the wilderness of the Bible.] Matty is now always asking himself “Who am I?”. He goes through the Bible and then asks himself the deeper question “What am I?” And this in turn leads him to how different he is to other people. He asks “Am I only different from them by face?” Could it be that he too is a morally flawed creature? In Australia he makes a living doing odd jobs, moving north to the hotter parts of Australia. He gets lost in the Outback, almost dies, is noticed first by an Aborigine and fully rescued by an Aussie stockman. He becomes an eccentric – a sort of hermit seen in the park, preaching – still clutching his Bible… and finally he ships back to England. The imagery as such that he is almost like John the Baptist, although Golding never overtly uses Christian images.

Years have gone by. Far from the Blitz, England is now in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  Mr Pedigree has come out of jail… then gone back in again… then come out again.. He is now an old pathetic man, trying to haunt public lavatories and he gets into trouble. And Matty returns…

And we now get passages from the journal Matty has been writing. He sometimes sees himself as 666 – the Beast. He – like everybody – has a core of evil. But he now sets the Bible aside and listens to the voices in his mind as he feels some remorse for the way he dealt with Mr. Pedigree. After all, his turbulent  thoughts seem to have reached some form of calm. He knows what evil is; but as he works peacefully as a school’s groundsman he also think of redemption.  Can the evil be redeemed?

 PART TWO – SOPHY

Mr. Pedigree is still around. He is caught out stealing books in the children’s section of a bookshop. But that is only a small event in this section of the novel – which is why I at first thought this second part of Darkness Visible had nothing to do with the first part.

The Stanhope family are upper-class. When they were young, the Stanhope girls Sophy [Sophia] and Toni [Antonia] were admired as well behaved little children… but now Mr. and Ms. Goodchild , the people who run the book store, regard them as haughty and negative. What they do not known is how disorderly the Stanhope house is. The girls have to live away from the main part of the house. They don’t really have a mother. Their father has had mistresses and has settled with a woman the girls call “Winnie”. Making matters worse, there is strong sibling rivalry between Sophy and Toni.  Sophy is always annoyed by the fact that Toni is faster with witty words. Toni is better-looking than Sophy is. Toni is brighter in company and seems to do better in school. So Sophy drives on resentment. She spitefully leaves nasty things about.  She alerts Toni and their father that “Winnie” has been sleeping with another man. The father, from this point, relies on a series of women only. His hedonism is clear. Sophy gradually begins to see that Toni is not as clever as she seemed. Puberty comes along. Toni is indifferent about it. Sophy is enraged by it. But it is Toni who gets duped by one man, and then Toni is caught up in very dodgy people, taking her overseas and being involved in terrorism. And Sophy, just out of curiosity, decides to try sex. She takes a random man, loses her virginity in a car [this is where William Golding has some effing-and-blinding and graphic details]… but she feels nothing at all. Then she has sex for money with an old man. She has become totally impassive.

Men are to be used. She lives a while with a prim man, who almost expects her to marry him. But she’s not interested in sex anyway and she’s bored with him. She eventually slaps him off. She spends time cruising around bars and discos [remember this is the early 1970s]. She thinks she has a mate of sorts, a real thug called Gerry who lives by theft. She enjoys some of the criminality. But she is soon bored by this life, she suggest that they could make much money by kidnapping the son of a very rich man… but it comes to nothing… and all her plans are pointless. There is a sense of the  pointlessness of her life. She finally confronts her father, wanting him to explain why things have gone so badly for both of the sisters. There seems to be no real explanation.

So where is the sin that we saw in the first part of this novel? First we have seen human-made war and pederasty. Now we see despair, impassivity, envy and crime. Of course you could blame the upbringing that Sophy and Toni had gone through, but there is something more profound than that. So we come to some sort of answer…

PART THREE – ONE IS ONE

… which I will deal with briefly.  At the bookshop, there is sometimes a gathering of people who regard themselves as intellectuals. Sometimes they come together in what amounts to being a sort of séance. One of the group is Edwin Bell, who had been in the boys school when Matty was there… And at a certain time a man butts in and starts talking about religion. Clearly this is a sort of avatar of Matty. He disappears. Old Mr Pedigree also reveals who he is, upsetting Edwin Bell. Matty turns up again in another form and chastises pederasts, being backed up by Edwin and a person called Sim….

… but in his journal Matty writes “What good is not directly breathed into the world by the holy spirit must come down by and through the nature of men. I saw them, small, wizened, some of them with faces like mine, some crippled, some broken. Behind each was a spirit like the rising of the sun. It was a sight beyond joy and beyond dancing. Then a voice said to me it is the music that frays and breaks the string.” He now does not chastise the fallen but looks forward to redeeming and curing them. He has made it clear to himself that evil is born within us and our origins, but we must repair the string. By the time Mr Pedigree talks directly to Matty, it is obvious that Matty is the human consciousness – or a kind of angel.

I admit that I found the last section of Darkness Visible to be almost cryptic. I also admit that I did not fully understood all the conversations that characters spoke. Maybe somebody could untangle them for me. I do not think that William Golding was pessimistic in presenting us with so much evil. It is a reality after all. And in the end he is suggesting that we human beings are the ones who have to steer the worst of us into being something better.

Footnote: Just a suggestion here.  Most of the novel is set in the 1970’s. I wonder if Golding, now ageing, presented the environs and the city so negatively because he was reacting to new mores that were alien to him. Just a thought.

 

Something Thoughful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.      

ON BEING HARRASED BY MAURICE SHADBOLT

            Whenever I am sitting in my living room and I look through the window towards down the street, I find myself being harassed by Maurice Shadbolt.   There he is with his thick spectacles, his moustache and his nose – at least that is the way I have seen him in  photographs. I have no particular interest in the late novelist Maurice Shadbolt, but his presence can be unnerving. The fact is, of course, that I am not seeing a man at all. I am looking at a tree down the road and I can see boughs and large twigs crossing one another and making what seems to be the face of a man – a particular man.

            Making faces out of things that are not faces is a very old phenomenon, probably going back to primeval times. Imagine our distant forebears making their way through a dense forest when they see a giant looking down at them. It takes them some time to realise that they are really looking at a tree – and the odds are they would then make the tree into some sort of god. After all, when the wind blows, the tree moves and its arms display their psithurism with all their hushing. Isn’t it talking?

We shouldn’t ridicule these ancient beliefs. Only a few generations past, it was common for people to amuse themselves by looking at “pictures in the fire”. As they gathered near the fire, the coal would burn, the smoke would rise, and images – including faces – would appear. Of course they were merely playing a game, but it did show how our vision could deceive us.

Then there is the matter of distance that deceives us. In the early 20^th century, there were still people who believed that there were canals on the planet Mars. Such ideas have long since been debunked, partly because better telescopes now exist and the planet has been scanned at close quarters.  Even so, we earthlings can often have wrong perspectives when we look at something in the distance. Well do I remember walking the length of a long shore, and seeing a large tent in the distance… and when I got there, it turned out to be a large rock.

So… I do not take the image of Maurice Shadbolt too seriously… though I do wish he would go away.