Saxophone Dreams by Nicholas Royle

Saxophone Dreams by Nicholas Royle is a remarkably ambitious project. It also presents an immense challenge for the reader. At the end of the process, and from all points of view, I am not convinced that the journey is worth the effort. A list of themes alone is of epic length. We have jazz throughout. There’s Hašek and Ankers, both sax players. They are based in different countries, but manage to collaborate musically via an exchange of tapes. At least the postal system seems to be something less than surreal.

As ever with jazz buffs, there seems to be much name dropping and a lot less musical idea. Then there’s the surrealism of Paul Delvaux. The characters find themselves appearing involuntarily or via dreams in the artist’s paintings, the descriptions of which never really offer any stylistic devices that might convey their content, let alone extend their scenes. The images themselves often involve naked ladies wandering wide-eyed through the night. And it is this image of sleep-walking that underpins much of the book. Apparently in dreams - or perhaps not – these jazz types wander through Europe and witness the fall of Communism whilst encountering one another along the way.

And so we visit Albania, a disintegrating Yugoslavia, a changing Czechoslovakia and a rumbling Rumania. We seem to have hot-lines direct to national leaders who themselves wander in and out of the narrative, some dead, some alive. The book’s narrative becomes unnecessarily didactic rather than dream-like as the text lists strings of facts, Wikipedia-like.

Ian, a black hospital worker from Brighton who always carries drumsticks in his jeans is more of a character than most of the others. He sets off across Europe with a theme of his own to identify the source of illegally trafficked human organs that are feeding business into the pocket of his surgeon boss back home. Ian traces the source of the organs to Kosovo, where ethnic tensions between Albanians and Serbs become part of the story.

Yet another theme… Still with me? Overall, Saxophone Dreams is a well-written and often engaging novel. These people drink a lot, travel quite a bit, perhaps without ever leaving their beds, and seem to enjoy unwittingly acting out stills from paintings. They are into jazz, but play little between the name dropping. They are into politics, but apparently cannot do without a couple of paragraphs with historical background to justify what they think. And they seem surprisingly unaware of the world around them. They are all too busy dreaming, perhaps. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Saxophone Dreams is a pot pourri of ideas, locations, themes and characters that occasionally, just occasionally, delights. But it can be something of a long trip…

Hotel de Dream by Edmund White

In Hotel de Dream, Edmund White presents a fellow writer, a fellow-countryman called Stephen Crane. Stephen is well connected, but ill-equipped. We are in turn of the century England. That’s old-England, by the way, and we are tuning into the twentieth, not twenty-first century. Henry James drops by occasionally. Conrad sometimes stumbles hereabouts and Arnold Bennett throws in an occasional sentence. 

But Stephen’s social life is hardly hectic. He is ill, tubercular, and in need of treatment. He seeks what might be a last chance, perhaps, to deny or merely postpone the inevitable. A clinic in Germany might be able to offer an answer. If only he had the money. While his carer, Cora, struggles to meet his needs, Stephen recalls a street-waif in New York. Elliott is in his mid-teens. He sells newspapers and does a little thieving on the side. Prostitution fills otherwise unproductive hours. Stephen further recalls the boy’s beauty, his wholly pragmatic approach to securing a livelihood and also his syphilis, a condition for which the writer tries to arrange treatment.

Via the germ of memory, Stephen, despite his own failing health, begins to invent a narrative. He writes from his sick bed, his weakness eventually requiring he dictates to his partner. He tells the story of Elliott’s arrival in New York and his introduction to the ways of the street by an Irish red-head boy who is in need of an accomplice. He describes the petty larceny and the occasional servicing of specific services for casual clients that provide the boy with a living. When Theordore, a middle-aged, unhappily-married family man takes a liking to the boy, everyday life takes a different twist. Elliott and his accomplice have just done for Theodore’s wallet. The older man, however, hardly notices the loss, so taken is he with the lad’s delicate, almost porcelain but ailing beauty. 

Theodore and Elliott the lad become lovers and Theodore’s respectable career as a banker becomes increasingly compromised by the pressure of having to provide with the boy’s needs, his own desires and his family’s respectability. Stephen Crane’s own condition deteriorates. As he heads to the Continent for last-ditch restorative treatment, he has to dictate his writing to his carer, herself a former brothel owner. And so Edmund White skilfully presents parallel narratives relating Stephen’s treatment and decline and Theodore’s self-destructive obsession with Elliott. Together, they proceed towards their perhaps inevitable conclusions. 

All of this happens in around 80,000 words. Hotel de Dream is far from a long book, and yet it manages to pursue both themes adequately. Edmund White’s style is nothing less than beautiful throughout. He is economic with language, but also poetic and in places highly elegant. The book is a real joy to read. But there remains the problem of the subject matter. Edmund White appears to believe that the homosexual, even paedophilic nature of the writer’s fiction is inherently interesting because of its subject matter. Without that, the predictable decline of the writer would be less than interesting. The process was hardly original. After all, Chopin had already trod this path three quarters of a century earlier! And to greater effect! Edmund White does ask some questions about attitudes towards homosexuality, about double standards and also about loveless marriage. But they are questions merely asked. 

There are only cameos of the detailed scenarios that might suggest answers. But at the core of Hotel de Dream is the assertion that Stephen Crane is one of America’s greatest writers. An early death and an interest in risqué subject matter conspired, however, to keep him from the wider public gaze. Though Edmund White’s book works in itself, it fails to convince the reader of this grand assertion about its subject. To make its point, it would need to be weightier, broader and offer much more evidence. Its apparent self-satisfaction with the mere statement of sexual proclivity falls well short of real substance. But then lives may be substantially less than substance. Hotel de Dream is a captivating read and an engaging, often beautiful study. View the book on amazon Hotel De Dream

Lives In Time - The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

For me, The Amateur Marriage represents the sixth time I have read one of Anne Tyler’s novels. On the surface it’s the story of Michael and Pauline. They meet by chance in 1941 in Anton’s, the grocery store run by Michael’s family. 1941, perhaps incidentally, is the year Anne Tyler was born. There was a war to be fought, of course, a war that affected both of their lives. But there’s a marriage, and a child, a daughter named Lindy. Others follow, a boy and another girl.

For Michael and Pauline, life progresses, as does their marriage. But twists and turns take them to places they have never visited. As with other novels by Anne Tyler, there is an obvious and consistent linearity about its time.

A reviewer has to be careful with detail, because what happens to this novel’s characters is a large part of how it happens, and thus an integral part of the book’s rationale. To some extent, a listing of the plot, event by event, would render a reading unnecessary.

But after a handful of Anne Tyler’s books, I am now convinced there is much more going on in them than mere story-telling. In the past I have found her characters shallow, rather self-obsessed, selfish, perhaps. They are people who have lives outside the family, but people who seem pre-occupied with the familiar and seem rarely to confront ideas or experience outside its apparently defining, but only sometimes reassuring confines.

And perhaps that’s the point. It is an American dream, a libertarian ideal under a microscope. It is analysed, picked apart, sometimes reconstructed. The characters are affected by political, social, economic and cultural change. Their lives are materially transformed by the same forces that lay waste and occasionally reinvent their home town, Baltimore. But they, themselves, are mere recipients of these effects, appearing to play no part in their instigation or, it seems, their analysis. They live their lives. They are pushed around by experience, jostled by life, reflect little, internalise everything, only occasionally recognising life’s potential to reform. Time thus moves on. Inevitability looms unexpectedly.

It is not a criticism of Anne Tyler, her novel or its characters to proffer the opinion that everything seems to happen in an intellectual wasteland. People go to college, do law degrees, become involved with good causes, procreate, but moments of reflection seem to be confined to what breed of dog might not provoke allergy. Perhaps that’s the point. Such things are the stuff of life. Time goes on.

View this book on amazon The Amateur Marriage