Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

I heard an author interviewed on the radio. He described a character he had invented, a fellow called Quichotte (that’s key-shot, by the way), who himself had been invented by another character in the same book (Quichotte), who had already been invented by the author. The characters have families, each having one son, one imaginary, the other – well - imaginary, but at least in possession of a formal and formally imagined birth, the other a product of parthenogenesis.

All these people, both the real-imaginary and the imaginary-real, live in the United States, amongst other places, a country which, as places go, is regularly imagined and sometimes described. The author’s point, if it might exist in the singular, is that it was time to update the idea of Miguel de Cervantes, who four hundred years ago imagined a character called Quixote (key-ho-tay) emerging from the pages of a discarded Arabic text discovered on a rummage through a second-hand stall on Toledo’s market. That’s Toledo, Spain by the way (population 84,282, occupying 232.1 square kilometres and 89.6 square miles, if you are so inclined). Or so we are told. But he made it up, alongside the said Quixote’s (key-ho-tay’s) popular culture-driven madness that demanded he set off dressed as a film star to do good in the world. Geddit?

Quichotte proceeds in a parody of said key-ho-tay back and forth across the United States, accompanied by his real-imagined and imaginary-real playmates, old flames and the not wholly imagined but apparently unattainable beauty, Salma R, among them. They get up to some good, but predominantly they observe and relate. They relate to their relatives, who are mainly from Bombay, and to their acquaintances, who as often as not abuse them on the basis of their skin colour, which is brownish, and as a consequence accuse them of being terrorists, bombers, jihadists or merely general extremists before pulling their guns. This causes our characters, both real-imaginary and imaginary-real to suffer significant but mild crises of identity. More accurately, their identities would be in crisis if they could ever find them or even define what they were looking for in their continual search for said qualities. Rule one: carry a gun. Self-defence. Get the retaliation in first. Rule two: read the book.

As I sit here in my room (population one), I imagine my rather privileged position. There cannot be many reviewers of a Quixote parody who can also claim to have written one. In his search, Donald Cottee, my own imagined key-ho-tay, examines his identity and origins from the perspective of a second-hand Swift Sundance parked on a campsite in Benidorm. In his radio interview Salman Rushdie, from here on called ’the author’, talked about his own origins.

The author went to Rugby public school - for our American friends, here public means its exact opposite, private - blame the English - and sang Christian hymns with his Muslim voice at school assemblies. Also, for the Americans again, rugby with a capital R is a town (population 100,500) and should not be confused with the sport of the same name, team population 13 or 15 depending on social class, whose name is in fact often capitalised, which was first invented in the same establishment, the school, population 802, established 1567, not the town, origins debatable, but probably iron age. It has progressed.

But he and his family, the author Rushdie that is, and therefore their combined roots, were also from Bombay, if you are English or perhaps Portuguese, which most English don’t appreciate, or Mumbai if you are Indian, but there is no such language as Indian, so this term must apply to residency. But of course the author Rushdie was not resident in Mumbai-Bombay at the time, hence his presence in Rugby (public school, where public equals private) where he tried to work out where and who he was.

And so to the United States where he is lumped together with others whose skin is tinged, coloured (not orange or red, unless you are an Indian, but that’s another story) or brown - let’s call it Black - by another broad church (C sometimes) of people, who skin is pink, red, but not Indian, or even orange – let’s call them White, who, if they live in New Jersey, need regular check-ups to ensure they have not morphed into mastodons. Geddit?

Let’s stir into this heady mix a manufacturer of opioids, fentanyl for sublingual use, just to be accurate, a terminal cancer, several close shaves involving gun owners trying to retaliate first and lots of encounters with popular culture, Holly-Bollywood and the like, and you arrive at where you have been headed all along without ever consulting a map or making a plan. And we have not yet even mentioned a Dr Smile or a Mr DuChamp. Get it? Read the book. It’s splendid. Funny. Political. Perspicacious. Now there’s a word.

Mary Swann by Carol Shields

I have just completed four years of thinking through a project. There were several false starts, many rejected, some reworked ideas. What I wanted to achieve was tangible, but I could not grasp it. When I thought I had it held, it would melt away or fly out like squeezed soap. Some six months ago things gelled and I began in earnest to write Eileen McHugh, a life remade. It’s the story of a sculptor who left no work, but who, by accident in this case, had become sufficiently recognized for a biographer to reconstruct her life and remake her lost work.

With the book complete and published, I decided it was time to relax and took up Mary Swann by Carol Shields. I found and bought it in a charity shop bag-full because I knew the author, not the book. I began to read and the experience was uncanny.

Mary Swann concerns of life and work of a poet from rural Canada. The town of Nadeau was both small and insignificant, until, that is, the world discovered a slim volume of a hundred or so poems by one Mary Swann, insignificant herself, until she was murdered - shot, bludgeoned, dismembered - by her husband in 1965.

Born in 1915, the exact date still debatable, she lived out her anonymous, almost hidden life, even from locals, on the farm. Elsewhere in the world this would be called a peasant holding and her life would be characterized as mired in poverty. Mary Swann had no domestic help, no appliances, none of the trappings of modern life. She never drove a car. Isolated, remote, poor, dilapidated are words that applied equally to the setting of the life and the person who lived it. Nothing much is known of her relationship with her husband, who killed himself after murdering his wife. The erasure was complete, except that they had a daughter who is alive, but is unwilling to discuss family matters.

But Mary Swan wrote. She wrote pithy, crunchy verse that inhabits the world this side of the garden gate but seems to dig deep into the infinite internal space of being. Academics, having discovered her work, likened her to Emily Dickinson. Mr. Crozzi who originally accepted her poems for publication and produced a couple of hundred copies of Swann’s Songs, the perhaps appropriately titled slim volume, was the last person to see her alive, apart from her husband. There are estimated to be about 20 extant copies of the collection. But the content has found its admirers and champions. There are even academics whose reputation is built on the critique of Mary Swann’s verse.

There is to be a symposium on the poet and her work and Carol Shields follows the lives, testimonies and experience of a group of interested parties. There are academic researchers, who cooperate by competing. There is Rose, the Nadeau town librarian, timid, self-effacing and suffering. There is Crozzi, perhaps a little crazy, the publisher and a long-standing journalist in the local press, though himself an immigrant. He is an eccentric, opinionated type who dearly misses his deceased wife. He also likes a drink or two. There are Sarah and Morton, academics with their own lives to live who have championed Mary Swann’s work.  And there are others. Via the experiences of these characters and others, we piece together something of the life and work of Mary Swann, though, like everyone else involved, we never know her and her work remains enigmatic.

What for me was utterly uncanny, was that this was the exact form I had chosen for Eileen McHugh. Exactly what makes an artist? Why do we try to express ourselves in these arcane, often esoteric forms? What is authorship? What constitutes recognition? Who controls that process? How does life influence art, or vice versa? How do we recall our interactions from the past with someone we never thought we would remember? At eighty per cent through Mary Swann, I felt like I was reading a different version of my own book and I concluded I was very glad I had not read Carol Shields’s book before inventing my own.

But eventually, things diverged. Carol Shields’ Mary Swann concludes with the symposium on the poet’s work, a meeting that brings together the characters we have been following and constructed in the form of a screenplay. A particular thread of the plot begins to dominate. Competition surfaces, insults are perceived, and offense is taken. Difficult to explain events coalesce to identify and conclude what really has been going on in the background throughout the book. By the end of this superbly crafted and constructed novel, we are intimately involved in considerable slices of the contemporary characters’ lives.  Mary Swann, however, lingers in a continued, enigmatic anonymity that remains entirely her own, just as, thankfully, does that of my own Eileen McHugh.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

Having never read it before, I decided that this must be the time. It is impressive, but it comes across like a middle-class Brookside. The writing style is convoluted, verbose and forever playing God. It did have its moments, but as Rossini said of Wagner, it’s the hours in between that are the problem. I’d read it again, however.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

There is perhaps no other tale in European culture that synthesises history, myth, literature and perhaps religion as famously and as frequently as Homer’s Iliad. So often has this story of Bronze Age conflict been adapted, one might wonder why an accomplished writer, known for her apposite, pungent and penetrating comment on contemporary society and its issues should turn to it for inspiration. It is a question that recurs throughout a reading of The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.

Surely an intentional pun on the similar film title, the substitution of Girls for Lambs, plus the associated allusion to insane slaughter and violence ought to point a reader toward the eventual direction of the book. The fact that this contemporary reality emerges gently and subtly is further evidence of Pat Barker’s profound writing skill. In a less accomplished writer’s hand, this rather blunt concept might just bludgeon the reader’s experience with polemic in a similar way to Achilles’s sword occasionally dealing with heads. But in Pat Barker’s hands, the idea works supremely and subtly.

The Silence of the Girls begins with a victory for Achilles in which a Trojan adversary is defeated and killed before his city is sacked. Men and boys are slaughtered, as well as most of the women, except for those deemed worthy of abduction as slaves, an office that would demand regular calls to duty. Young women thus become the chattel of victory, the spoils to be despoiled at the hands of the brutes, all to be suffered in the submissive silence of slavery.

Briseis is a king’s daughter who loses most of her family in the city’s sacking and it is through her eyes that the story is seen. She herself becomes a prize. Achilles, the half god, half man superhero, is the obvious claimant, but Briseis ends up in the confused clutches of Agamemnon. Achilles mysteriously withdraws from battle, apparently to sulk, and the Greek cause in the war with Troy suffers severely as a result.

Now thus far this might sound like a conventional rewrite of a well-known and well covered story, but Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls sees events through the eyes of the newly enslaved Briseis and her viewpoint adds much to the familiar territory. It is through her prism that we see an ancient world that is foreign to us but familiar to her. Her observations become interpretations of its customs, beliefs and assumptions. Like Helen, the beauty whose abduction started the conflict, Briseis is young, eligible and marriageable. Unlike Helen, Briseis was already on a losing side and must endure her gender without privilege, though in the bedroom their differences in position might just have been minimal, mere details of posture. While the males enact their increasingly ritualised conflict, Briseis and the other women hold everything together via food, comfort, kindness and tolerance. Their reward is further use, always with the threat of death nearby, if ever the fancy were to wear off.

In the case of Briseis, the fancy of Agamemnon was always in question, like his geography, but Achilles, it seems, regards her as something more than a mere bed-mate, though he seems have difficulty expressing his feelings. A thoroughly modern man, we presume. When Agamemnon gives way and Achilles claims his prize, there develops a bond which might pass for marriage. But somehow, any acknowledgement of a woman’s rights seems to be beyond the imagination of these committed warriors.

And this lack of ability to see self-interest extended by greater tolerance is doubly underlined when, at the end of the conflict, a sacrifice to the gods is needed to ensure a fair wind for the voyage home and this automatically has to entail killing someone who is young, virginal and female. Old habits, no matter how hard-set, simply do not die.

By the end, the significance of the title and Briseis’s relationship with Achilles has thus become clear. Contemporary films and genre fiction still make their point by sensationalising male violence against women, and perhaps relations between the sexes still bear some of the hallmarks that characterised the behaviour of these Bronze Age brutes. The difference, perhaps, is merely one of degree.

The Silence of the Girls is a challenging read, but not because of difficult language or deviousness of plot. Indeed, like much great drama, we know what is going to happen in advance, since the story is so well known. The joy is learning how things happen and how they are interpreted, and thus the difficulty arises because the reader must operate on different levels of awareness throughout. To ignore this contemporary parallel would render The Silence of the Girls just another re-write of an old story, and it is much more than that.

Sweet Caress by William Boyd

Sweet Caress, the tile of William Boyd´s 2015 novel, refers to the gentle contact the individual makes with the very surface of existence, the contact we loosely call “life”. It presents “The many lives of Amory Clay” that are contained in its principal character’s existence. As has become the author´s forté, William Boyd again brings to life a character who lives through the history of the twentieth century, impinging upon it, influencing it, being influenced and changed by it and thus consumed by it. It´s called life, and it’s linear, constantly reviewed but never relived, always surprising, but at the time apparently predictable. Like history, it’s just one thing after another.

William Boyd´s characters are always carefully but lightly drawn. They are never easily caricatured, and even less easily summarised, rather like people, in fact. Their identity is amassed from their experience of life, congeries of circumstance and chance. And, like a great artist, the author manages to create rounded, credible people from the very lightest strokes of his brush, leaving the reader to create whatever detail makes sense. But they also retain a complexity that makes them convincingly real. These different lives of the subtitle always evolve apparently authentically from Amory Clay´s circumstance and so the transition from one setting to the next, though often abrupt, appears possibly inevitable, but always credible.

Amory Clay, female, lives this sweet caress of life, despite having been described at birth as her parents' son. She is taught an intriguing habit by a relative of describing people in four adjectives. Complex, indulgent, direct, driven. It´s a game that Amory Clay plays throughout her life and one she passes on to others, so this activity emerges occasionally throughout the book and introduces the reader to people that otherwise might take pages to describe. It is the verbal equivalent of a snapshot, a partially accurate freezing in time of a view of another person, but inevitably always taking a selfie.

Amory Clay´s family is inoffensively middle class, dangerously so, especially after her father returns a changed man from the First World War. Parcelled off to boarding school because someone else is paying for the opportunity, Amory does well, resentfully well, until events change her life. There will be no going back. Life´s sweet caress becomes a push onto a different and diverging path.

Photography motivates Amory. From her first click of a box camera, she is captivated by its possibilities. She turns her back of what the average professional might pursue to make a living to explore the possibilities of social record, photojournalism, the bizarre or images of chance. And then she pursues a photographer’s life, making her living from whatever genre of her chosen profession presents opportunity. She is afraid it will not pay the rent, but it does, and often things go quite well, for a while. She has ideas that it might even make her famous, but infamy is always near, always an option, sometimes preferred. Circumstances are often dangerous, both for her and the objects of her gaze, but then danger often unlocks new doors and paves a way via a new chapter to security.

Professionally and personally, Amory Clay visits various countries and continents, places and events, wars and country estates. She has relationships with men she encounters, but rarely on a short-term basis. She both drinks and makes love copiously. She is injured and recovers, partially, she thinks. She endangers her own life and places others in peril, but she adds emotional and experiential value to the lives of all she encounters, including the readers of William Boyd’s invention of her history. She even once kisses a woman, albeit one dressed as a man, in a doorway as a ruse to divert the attentions of potential attackers on the rampage.

By the end of this beautiful novel, we feel we not only know Amory Clay, but we also empathise with her and identify with her. Saying goodbye leaves almost a sense of bereavement. We have lost someone close and dear, perhaps we have even lost a part of ourselves, as a certain Lady Farr comes to the end of her adopted aristocratic life. It is she who writes her contemporary journal as a commentary to the memories of Amory Clay, the photographer, and who is, we know from the start, that same Amory Clay who became Lady Farr. How she became a titled landowner is just another story, completely unlikely, but no more so than any of the rest and, in the hands of William Boyd, utterly credible. Our encounter with Amory Clay’s many lives takes us to places we have never been and will never go, allows us to share a life we will never live and enriches our own memory via its shared, imagined, experience.

As ever in William Boyd’s writing, there is always one real gem only partially hidden amongst the history. In Sweet Caress it appears via a photograph taken by chance in Vietnam by Amory Clay, a record that will have to be expunged from the record if history is to remain written in its usual partially inaccurate way. But why single out one particular gem in this veritable jewel box of a novel?

The Innocent by Ian McEwan

The Innocent by Ian McEwan is a spy novel. It's a love story. It's not a whodunnit, but it is a who did what. It's also a tour of 1950s Berlin. Getting tied up in labeling genres becomes a pointless exercise, when it is far easier to state that this book is a novel. And this label denotes something much broader, deeper and certainly less predictable that any genre placement. When an author writes a novel, the imagination involved can take the book, its characters, the writer and then the reader along any path, towards any subject. Like the writer, a character need not feel duty bound to spend every waking hour in pursuit of a linear plot to ensure it reaches some endpoint. Life, like experience, itself, is not like that. No matter how focused we may become on any activity, consciousness always presents us with a jumble of stimuli and experiences. We may select  what we choose to see, to hear or to acknowledge, but the rest is always there, intruding. And for The Innocent of Ian McEwan's novel life takes numerous unforeseen turns, despite having started in a form that for most people would itself be a very special starting point.

The principal character is a telephone engineer-cum-electronics whizz-kid. But we are in the 1950s, when such things still relied on old fashioned telephones, cables and, crucially, tape recorders. This last ingredient gives away the fact that the novel is set in the permanent spying of the Cold War and this is also spiced by the setting near the division in Berlin between East and West, between a British-American capitalist enterprise and Soviet communist experiment. The plan is to tunnel as far as a run of cables on the other side, listen in and then analyse the recorded communications. Our lad from Dollis Hill in London has not only been trained for such work, but has a reputation for being something of a genius of the genre.

But like most lads, he likes a drink and, though he is far from experienced with women, he is also capable of falling for a woman. He, of course, does just that. She is German, older than him and more experienced. An essential art of Ian McEwan's book is the way these lovers discover how to be with one another from their individually different starting points.

Unfortunately, she is married, and the husband, who is still current and not former, is a tough guy who drinks a lot and doesn't look after himself. He unfortunately can look after himself and is well known for doing just that.

It has to be recalled that Ian McEwan's nickname at the start of his career was Ian Macabre, and The Innocent does not disappoint. The triangle works itself out and becomes at least a quadrilateral when an apex is deleted only to be replaced by others.

Love Is Blind by William Boyd

Love Is Blind by William Boyd is a real page turner. But the reader’s interest is never generated by cheap melodrama concerning threatened turns in an essentially linear plot. On the contrary, many a reader might finish this book and muse on exactly what the plot might have been. The revelation is that, as with most novels by William Boyd, it is the credible and unique lives of the characters that have provided both the interest and the stimulus to know more.

These characters are not what might be encountered in most novels of the page-turner variety. Brodie Moncur is a Scottish piano tuner who is employed by the quality makers Channon in Edinburgh. Brodie develops some neat tweaks that enhance the sound and playability of the machines placed under his care. He also has some ideas about how Channon might become a little more than a Scottish name. A period in the company’s emergent Paris office might help.

Brodie’s great idea is to sponsor a concert performer who will thus advertise the brand. An Irishman called Kilbarron accepts Brodie’s offer and all seems to be going very well indeed. And all does go very well, especially in relation to Brodie’s relationship with Kilbarron’s partner, a Russian soprano called Lika Blum.

A novel like Love Is Blind is simply about people. To describe their lives is to spoil the book’s currency. Suffice it to say that there are complications of many kinds along the way. Neither true love nor commerce nor music runs along a smooth path for these characters. Central to the book’s success is the credibility of Brodie’s commitment to his relationship with Lika, however, and it is this that binds everything together.

Brodie’s relations with his family are strained by a father who wants to disown him, and his relations with the Channon company also hit hard times for unexpected reasons. He moves across Europe in search of somewhere both safe and convenient to ply his trade and pursue his interest in Lika. In an unlikely turn of fate, he eventually finds his way to India to work alongside an American anthropologist. But then the detail is the plot, and we learn about his journey to India at the very start of the book, before in fact we have even met to protagonist himself.

But what is so engaging about William Boyd’s characters is their total credibility, no matter how unpredictable the events themselves become. By the end of the book, we feel we really have shared their experience and indeed lived through it with them.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Orlando by Virginia Woolf claims it is a biography. A young man, the eponymous Orlando, is in London in the sixteenth century. At the outset, we meet him in an attic, having fun with a severed head and a sword. Virginia Woolf also tells us to expect Orlando at a later date to become a woman. It is destined to be a book of surprises.

He is, of course at court. Where else? He rubs shoulders with Tudor bigwigs, even monarchs. Of course, he is at court. Where else might such a character reside? Bloomsbury, perhaps… A few years later he even looks up at the dome on Saint Paul’s Cathedral, many decades before it was built. Despite its historical settings, Orlando does not much care for accuracy. It is not long before this biography becomes something decidedly less definable, though its author continues to invoke her declared intention of presenting the life of an individual.

Orlando, both the book and the character, is rather hard to define. Though it ostensibly focuses on the life, or perhaps lives of an individual, the book is not a biography, even a fictional one. It's not really a novel either, since it offers neither thread of plot, nor characterization, nor description of relationships. There is a lot of name dropping, and many references to historical figures, but history it definitely is not, the author often preferring to drop personal opinion almost at random alongside a name. Orlando meets and even spends time with several literary figures from the past, notably Pope, who is even quoted from time to time.

The writing is often poetic, but Orlando is not poetry. Neither is it a poetic novel. Some markers are needed, so here are some highlights from the text to illustrate both the inventiveness of Virginia Woolf and also how the text often appears disjointed, like random flashbacks into a dream.

“What’s the good of being a fine young woman in the prime of life”, she asked, “if I have to spend all my mornings watching blue-bottles with an Archduke?”

“Life and a lover” – a line which did not scan and made no sense with what went before – something about the proper way of dipping sheep to avoid the scab. Reading it over she blushed and repeated,

“Life and a lover.”

He started. The horse stopped.

“Madam,” the man cried, leaping to the ground, “you’re hurt!”

“I am dead, sir!” she replied.

A few minutes later they became engaged.

Orlando lives for the better part of 400 years, at least within these pages, and has numerous different lives, both as a man and a woman. He is a man, becomes a woman, marries and has children, and then becomes a man again. He or she is a writer, a poet, a courtier, whatever the page appears to demand for him, or her. Orlando displays a little in the way of character, let alone consistency within these different identities. The character increasingly feels like a vehicle for the personal gripes of its creator. On several occasions, the reader seems to occupy the back seat in a taxi, with the driver repeatedly saying, “And another thing…”, over her or his shoulder.

It may or may not be relevant, but it has to be noted that Virginia Woolf, for all her talent as a writer, for all her skills as a constructor of dream-like word pictures, was mentally unstable, and became more so as she aged. The unfortunate observation about Orlando is that the book appears to be a series of randomly assembled, almost disconnected thoughts, illusions, memories, prejudices, spiteful digs and opinionated rant. Orlando is also no less of an achievement for any of this, however, since it contains some real gems, but also much that is impenetrable and obscure.

What is clear, throughout, is Virginia Woolf’s 1920s version of feminism. It provides a thread that binds together the bones this book, but it is a thread that is far from golden, and the skeleton thus constructed has little recognizable form or shape. Also, in fact, she often seems sanguine, almost defeatist in her analysis, more often than not equating “female” with poverty, ignorance or failure, even when the female characters themselves, as individuals, are nothing less than assertive. It could be, of course, that she is projecting stereotypes associated with the people she describes, but it is hard to be convinced of this, since consistency is not a word that can be used in describing Orlando, which is a unique book, its success a genuine achievement of a vivid and strange imagination.

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

The Long Take by Robin Robertson is a novel. As its title implies, it owes much to film and is conceived as a series of cinematic scenes set in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They alternate between New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and follow the progress of Walker, who is trying to earn a living, survive and become a journalist. The scenes are arranged chronologically, but there is no attempt by the author to link them as a narrative. They thus present the reader almost with glanced insights to a life which is largely lived elsewhere, within the principal character’s experience, which we only ever fee we partially share.

On the face of it, Walker appears to be a rather conventional young man. He does not seem to be particularly ambitious. He is not assertive, and rarely takes the lead. He is not driven by urges to succeed, dominate or enrich himself. But he does not seem to form relationships easily, though neither does he obviously shun them. There always seems to be something in the way.

He does become interested in the personal histories of down-and-outs who sleep rough on the streets of the cities he inhabits. He is interested in them as individuals, concerned to know where they come from, and how they managed to finish up poor and destitute. He does find some common threads, and these form an essential element of the book’s plot.

Walker himself is a veteran of the final battles of World War II. He participated in the D-day landings and suffers regular flashbacks to the experience of being on a Normandy beach without cover and being shot at. He lost many comrades in battle and seems constantly to ask what gave him the right to survive. Perhaps this enduring trauma of war is what repeatedly denies him the self-confidence, self-awareness or perhaps ambition to participate in life, except as an almost detached observer. It is also the aspect of life that denies him a means to share the lives of those around him. He seems cocooned in a past that haunts him and controls the way he relates to others.

I have deliberately chosen not to mention The Long Take’s most obvious characteristic before describing its content, because questions of form can often dominate when they do not deserve to take pride of place. But now it is time to state that Robin Robertson’s novel, The Long Take, is written in verse, and this makes it rather unusual. Now as with all verse, the act of reading it is a rather different experience from reading prose. There is a necessary and inevitable need to pause, to absorb words, to observe lines and to identify the flow of rhythm. And it is via this use of verse that the author also more finally tunes the reader’s moments of complete concentration on and dedication to the text. What works extremely well in this scenario is the focus on the details of Walker’s experience, both in his current life and on those beaches during wartime, whose memories endure. The Long Take often tingles with a reality that can also sting. Walker’s regular flashbacks are also indicated typographically, appearing in italics to give them the stress that the reader thereafter subconsciously assumes.

What does not work well is the characterization associated with the books protagonists. If this were a film, then most characters other than Walker would probably appear rather as no more than cameos. But this is a small criticism, because the enhanced emotion offered by the verse more than compensates for any lack of descriptive context. The Long Take cannot be read quickly. It's a verse form demands the reader’s concentration and commitment. It is, however, a rewarding experience and eventually an intensely moving book, describing lives destroyed by the continued experience, as well as the historical reality and unseen consequences of war.

Milkman by Anna Burns

Milkman is a novel by Anna Burns. It won the Booker. It is a book. It's a book about a place, a place which is not named, but we know where it is because its divisions, borders, red lines, call them what you may, are currency in its social divide and international renown. It's a place that's part of somewhere else, or isn't, depending on your view of history, even though it's the present, its present that is the only relevant place to inhabit. There is another place over the border, and, yes, another one over the water, but in the past those from over there have often been this side of the ditch to leave their marks and then go home again, or not, which is at the root of the problems of this place with its border, its division, its divides, this side of the water. Like anywhere, there are people throughout to this place, but, unlike almost everywhere, they very rarely have names, or if they have them, they don’t want to use them, believing, clearly, that the name would incriminate, accuse, label, even identify in this situation where to be known always carries risks. If you are Milkman, or even a milkman, you can live with the label, possibly because it strikes fear into those who hear it, fear of association, or of reprisal, or of identification, or even of not getting your pinta. That's what the capital letter can do, or undo, if you don't have one, just one, at the start, making one a name and the other, well, a name, but not a name to identify, only a name to label. But then there are lots of labels this side of the water. There are labels above all others, which might determine where you live, might reveal what you believe, might dictate where you might walk, and where you might not, where you might drink, or buy chips, where the rest of the shop snubs you and you might even forget to pay, for your chips, of course, for you are always likely to pay, eventually, in other ways. It's these labels that make you walk faster through the ten-minute zone that divides the divisions, the road where you are being watched, counted, logged, photographed, recorded, identified as identifiable, in the future as well as in the present, which itself will become a permanent past if your name, still unspoken, receives the celebrity of appearing on someone’s file. Unless, of course, you are that Somebody McSomebody who is already known, already logged, already identified, probably already filed, in which case that Somebody McSomebody would probably not want to be seen, not want to venture into that ten-minute no-somebody's land, not anybody's land, that works like the border between over there and over here or the ditch between over here and over the water, keeping apart, keeping division. Unless, of course you are family, in which case you are known as brother or sister and by number, first, second, third etc., or you are known intergenerationally, like mama or papa or granddad, who might even still have a name, like one of your brothers, which is better not said in any case, being that it would be recognized, labelled, identified or merely chiseled into a headstone. That's always the risk, especially when your family is known to be sympathetic to causes unspoken in private but inevitably adopted in public, because the photographs, the records, the files prove you still live over there, on that side of the ten-minute zone that marks the division. And, when you have decided who you are or who you might become, should you agree to continue to see a milkman or other for the purpose of something other than acquiring milk, then you need to watch your back to make sure your maybe-boyfriend is not watching you while you are at your deception, which is not deception, because you're not trying to deceive. And then, in the end, you are at the end of the book, which is not really a book, but a train of thoughts, events, thoughts about events, and analyses, rationalizations of the irrational, all inside the head of an eighteen-year-old woman, who happens to come from one side or other of the divide, in the divided land, that's one side of the border and another side of the water ditch that separates it from over there. You have travelled the roads, lived the short lives, felt the threats, been taken to all the places the eighteen-year-old has deemed you will see, felt the confusion life has brought to her life, and experienced the lack of ending that inevitably applies to things that have no end. The only certainty, and this at least is certain, that this book, that actually might not be a book, but thought, experience and imagination, is a worthy Booker and arguably one of the greatest achievements in the history of things that generally are called books.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan won the Booker prize for 2014, an award that was probably deserved. Much has been made of the author’s a relationship with his father, who was a prisoner of war in southeast Asia when the Japanese were building their railroad to the north using forced labor. Approaching the book as a tale of this war time experience would be a mistake, however. The personal experience of the 1940s is most certainly there, but it is by no means the totality of the book.

On the contrary, The Narrow Road to the Deep North presents several lives in all their contemporary complexity. The style is varied, sometimes disturbingly disconnected.  Often there are short sentences delivered like punches, and then long passages that seem to meditate around the perimeters of their interest, perhaps without seeming to engage in content. But don't take any of this as criticism (except, of course, in the literary sense): it's merely an attempt at observation and description. When a reader approaches a book, it's often useful to know what not to expect.

A character who remain central to the novel is an individual called Dorrigo Evans. We follow his life, his loves and, to some extent, his profession. Married to Ella, he loves Amy. And, for Dorrigo Evans, it seems that however fleeting the thought, however inconsequential the encounter, it is destined to be remembered, to be recorded and then recalled when least considered, if, and only if, Dorrigo Evans chooses to do so. Thus, life seems to aggregate around these characters to create a shell of allusion, association and chance, mixed with a fixer of self.

The wartime experiences are indeed central, however. They are not a blow-by-blow account of conflict, nor of the confinement which ensues after capture. There is something of the day-to-day suffering via forced labor and deprivation that these men suffered, some in the extreme, but more important is the continual challenge of survival, the daily challenge of reaching tomorrow. How these men cope with their privatization is central to Richard Flanagan's approach. And by the end of their captivity, everyone involved remains forever changed, forever scarred by the experience. Except for the legion who died, of course, for perhaps they were by then beyond suffering.

It's not a one-sided account, by the way. Richard Flanagan attempts to enter the minds of the captors, the Japanese soldiers who are responsible for creating the conditions that impose suffering on the captives. The attempt is not totally convincing, but the story of the Korean guard, conscripted to do Japan's dirty work, with the same level of choice as the captives he helps to torture and who is eventually tried for war crimes, is one of the most successful, powerful and memorable aspects of her book. And then there is the amputation episode… Realism rears its features here, and they are vivid.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is not a novel that can be reviewed easily. It is complex, involved, subtle and involving. These are characters – particularly Dorrigo Evans – who seem utterly credible. We are interested in their lives, because they make mistakes, imagine themselves in the wrong while doing something right. This makes them as vulnerable as the real people they never quite become. But they get do on with it. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is a beautiful book.

Self-promotion or self-demotion? An emotional observation.

I read quite a lot. I also try to review each book I read. Sometimes it’s a cursory mention of themes, settings and plot, just enough just to keep the memory alive. I find it helps, because with the help of these little clues I often find that some time after finishing a book I suddenly understand it better after re-reading the review and thereby appreciate more completely what it was trying to say. If, of course, the book had anything to say! 

Usually, my reviews of 500 to 1000 words, sometimes longer if I decide to include grab-quotes. I keep the reviews in a commonplace book that I started in August 1973, immediately after some of the most interesting years of my life when I was an undergraduate in London. These years are condemned to remain no more than memories, it seems, but the memories remain strong.

My reviews are rarely judgmental. I am not keen on star ratings, though some places where I share my reviews demand them. It seems to me the height of self-delusion to use a single, five-value scale to quantify eternal opinion on work that might be as diverse as a haiku or Ulysses. Equally facetious is the banal “I liked it” which, like all clichés, should be avoided like the plague.

What I try to do, sometimes, is to mimic the style of the book. This means that reviews of nineteenth century fiction are longer than those for books from the 20th century. The draft of a recent review of Middlemarch had so many subordinate clauses, asides and God‘s-eye-view observations that the first sentence reached 200 words. I remember it made the point I intended, but I ditched it.

So, with the decades of summary reviewing behind me, one would have thought that completing an author interview would be a trivial exercise. But no. I was just ten questions into the process when I realized I had spent over an hour at the task, and I had written very little indeed. The process suddenly took on an importance I had not envisaged developing when I started.

In the final analysis, the book that formed the basis of the interview, Eileen McHugh, a life remade, must speak for itself. The review is merely an aide memoire. The book must speak for itself. It will have to, because trying to express where it came from was a disturbingly cathartic experience which probably only skirted clarity. The interview is online at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/philipspires.

Scott-King's Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh

Scott-King's Modern Europe is a short, perhaps over-short novella by Evelyn Waugh. Written in 1946, it visits a fictitious part of Europe largely unknown to its determinedly English protagonist. In 1946 Scott-King had been classical master at Grantchester for twenty-five years, we are told in the tale's first sentence. This locks the book's principal character firmly in his place within the English class system, sketches his likely character, with its staid dedication to what has always been and remains "right", and posits him without doubt in the apolitical conservatism of an ultimately submissive establishment. It's the kind of England that used to believe that fog at Dover meant that Europe was cut off. Thus Waugh presents him to his undoubtedly sympathetic readers.

Out of a non-political blue comes a request from the little-known and less understood and now independent state of Neutralia that Scott-King attend a national celebration of a long-forgotten national poet called Bellorius. The writer died in 1646 and left a fifteen-hundred-line tract, written in Latin hexameters, of unrelenting tedium. It described a journey to an unknown new world island, where there subsisted a virtuous, chaste and reasonable community, Waugh tells us. This utopia was left forgotten and unread, until it appeared in a German edition in the twentieth century, a copy of which Scott-King picked up while on holiday some years ago. Thus the teacher of classics began a relationship with this European obscurity that led to this invitation to visit his homeland.

Scott-King's Modern Europe is so short that any more detail of its plot would undermine its reading. Suffice it to say that the international delegation is not what it seems. Things do not go to plan, or perhaps do, depending on your perspective on Neutralian politics, whose internecine struggles could not be further from anything associated with aloof Britishness, let alone it's higher class relative, Englishness. Life becomes unbearably complicated for the scrupulously fair Scott-King. He may, perish the possibility, suffer such ignominy as not having enough traveller's cheques left to cover his hotel bill!

As the farce develops, the celebration of Bellorius morphs into something decidedly more contemporary, whose limits become ever more blurred. Most of those involved are revealed, in some form or another, as frauds, except of course for the stolid and enduring Englishman of the title, who throughout remains the epitome of the innocent victim. If there is fault in the world, then it's all the fault of foreigners, those who live over there, those who speak the unintelligible languages that aren't English and live in those unbearable climates that have sunshine. They do not play fair in politics, and confuse responsibility with gain, All unthinkable at home, of course...

It all works out in the end, after a fashion. Let it be recorded here only that, true to the values of the English Public School where Scott-King has taught, it is a former pupil, ever loyal, that eventually extracts his former teacher from his troubles. But what is enduringly interesting about this little book is the depth of the metaphor that classical education presents. It is a culture in decline. Its vales are destined not to endure. Inevitably, the values enshrined in the assumption of this enduringly educated state are set themselves to disappear. The English surely are going to become like the untrustworthy, squabbling, divided Neutralians, and all the other foreigners with their unacceptable strange ways, who previously had only ever lived "over there".

Written at the end of the second world war, when perhaps mythically the British had stood alone, the book is perhaps the author's reflection on events that saw the division of Europe into opposing camps. The territorial integrity of the United Kingdom, and essentially England within it, had been maintained. But those "over there" we're still foreign and thankfully they weren’t “over here”. Their values weren't our values, and yet their influence was all-pervading, or at least potentially so. Britain, and the English on the throne within it, we're still alone, still threatened. This is the culture that is suffused throughout Evelyn Waugh's little book and it is the assumption that makes its reading now at least poignant. It might even have been written a week ago, based on anyone's list of presumptions that surrounded the Brexit referendum. Everything that was not an English value is manifest in this non-culture of Neutralia, a nation that needs to invent heroes raised from within the mediocrity of its unrecognized and - even more reprehensible - unrecorded past. How non-English can one get?

Waugh's humour enlivens the story and his unapologetic Englishness almost renders himself as the principal character. It's is short enough to be read in an hour, but it's sentiment and message will resonate very strongly with contemporary readers. In Britain's current political context, Scott-King's Modern Europe is a little book with a big message.  

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson seems to explore the identity conferred on an individual via family. "Seems to" is important here, because what exactly might constitute family for Gretel, the novel's principal character, is always a negotiable point. For many of us, the concept of family can be clearly defined. Its reality is often identifiable, possibly supportive, even dependable. But for others a family can be a site of struggle, a source of conflict, an indefinable and disquieting lack of trust. In either of these extremes, or indeed anywhere else on the spectrum that links them, a child is his or her own individual, an individual that can react against or absorb into whatever form a family might take. Equally, that individual can adopt the family norms, be they for eventual good or ill. Everything Under examines some of these possibilities from Gretel's point of view, Gretel the daughter of a mother she increasingly seems not to know and has not met for many years.

Gretel seems to live a simple, dedicated and ordered life, with perhaps more than an element of self-imposed isolation. She is a lexicographer, examining the accuracy and scope of dictionary entries. Words thus matter to her. They are her bread and butter. Though she has not seen her mother since she was sixteen, she still has vivid memories of words they shared, words her mother invented to label things otherwise indescribable. As an adult, Gretel finds her world turned upside down by the reappearance of a woman she probably only ever partially knew, but whose own identity has now been transformed by age. Communication is hit and miss, sometimes lucid, sometimes mythical, sometimes disconnected. Gretel, however, decides to relive her past via the family life she can either remember or reconstruct, reliably or otherwise via conversation and reflection with her mother.

And that life was indeed somewhat unconventional. She and her mother lived on a boat that was moored on a river. The waters were, it seems, always murky. Gretel never really knew her father, and one of the areas she tries to uncover via her partial engagement with her mother is nothing less than the truth about her own beginnings. The water on which the family boat floated stayed murky throughout Gretel's childhood, and, it seems, has not cleared since then.

Complicating the scene is the fact that she and her mother used to communicate via code words, sounds they themselves invented to describe the unknowns, the lurking dangers or merely the otherwise unspeakable things that can surface to threaten these lives lived in a microcosm of their own invention. There is apparently much to uncover, and not all of it is accessible. And when this private language, these codes for the unmentionable, invade either a mother's or a daughter's memory, they are used to hide something difficult, to obfuscate, as if to ensure their meaning remains unknown, unacknowledged.

Characters alternate between the present and memories of a limited family life on their moored boat. There are demons to confront and assumptions to deconstruct. The water, if anything, becomes murkier when stirred. And if there is a criticism of this forensic reconstruction of a shared but only partially remembered past, then it lies in its tendency to over-complicate. It is perhaps minor point, but one might have expected Gretel, with her professional desire for accuracy in everything to do with words, not to tolerate such obfuscation.

Mother and daughter's invented vocabulary seems, however, to extend to only a few words. This is hardly the "language" we are told they shared. The words reappear in different contexts to indicate apparently different things. Unpicking how these labels have been applied to their shared experience forms a significant element of plot. But again, though much is made of these few words, they hardly constitute the "invented language" of the book's preamble.

Everything Under thus evolves into a complex, complicated and inevitably confused uncovering of this relationship between mother and daughter. Truths are revealed and unconsciously absorbed detail is newly remembered to add context. Throughout, however, we feel that, in essence, things were probably a little simpler than each character's desire to speculate might allow. In some ways this is the book's strength, since Everything Under is a tangle of memories, a tangle of relationships and possibly an undergrowth of old stems that even the participants have neglected to prune.

Everything Under is a challenging read around what is essentially a simple idea. But, when reality finally knocks on the door and these characters find they must own up to the detail of their family life, there are revelations and surprises which, paradoxically, change nothing. Perhaps many families are like that.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Reviewing books that one has not enjoyed is a pointless activity. Better just to put them on the shelf and forget them. Perhaps a second exposure, some years hence, might reveal what first impressions missed. Likes and dislikes, in any case, are wholly subjective, usually identifying something internal to the reviewer: only rarely do they relate to anything of substance in the object of the review. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry thus presents a problem. The book came with the strongest of recommendations alongside published reviews that heaped praise. And the book has many positive qualities. It is set in Victorian England and in several ways, it is highly evocative. There is a formality of style, a definite floridity in his language. These people exude politeness and decorum. They even write letters to one another, letters that are reproduced in full between the chapters that bi-locate between London and the Essex coast.

The scenario involves Cora, a recently widowed Londoner, her companion Martha and a child Francis, who, we are told, has significant problems with behaviour. The loss of a husband is felt deeply, and a sojourn by the sea, the Blackwater estuary in Essex being the place chosen, is prescribed. In this small town there are people who live from the sea, people who do rural things, and a vicar, plus his wife and some surviving children. The place also has a secret, though apparently not so secret, myth of a great sea creature, a sea serpent or winged dragon that appears irregularly to wreak havoc on its victims. And it is evidence of this beast that forms the prelude to the tale, evidence that is quietly forgotten for several chapters.

The Essex Serpent also presents aspects of Victorian life as substance in its story. There is disease, with early death, infant mortality and consumption, their combination making a point about the fragility of life. There is the barbarity, by today's standards, of medical treatment. There is violence on the streets of London and severe punishment for those who transgress the law. There is destitution and homelessness, though perhaps not in the direct experience of these characters, but manifest in their enlightened attitudes towards charity. And, within these horizons, relationships develop, characters ail, people disappear in mysterious circumstances and, throughout, there is the expectant foreboding that the Essex serpent casts over anything that cannot be fully explained. One is never in any doubt, however, that everything will eventually be explained.

So where, given the start of this review, are the problems? Let's start at the beginning. Before we meet any of the characters, we are presented with an episode that suggests the book will be primarily concerned with the monster the locals believe inhabits the waters of their Essex estuary. But, given that the power of the serpent's presence is used throughout the text more to signify a threat and create tension than make actual appearance, then this introduction is misplaced.

Secondly, too often the characters appear only when they are needed to drive a plot. The much-discussed behavior problems of the boy Francis hardly seem to figure in his mother's consciousness until the plot requires his action. Then, having exhibited no particular unpredictability thus far, he conveniently delivers when required.

Thirdly, the letters that these characters write to one another seem to be included as plot devices rather than as intended communication. They do not appear, despite the different signatures, to be written in different styles. They contain little small talk and thus do not seem to be letters at all.

Fourth, it appears that these characters are in fact modern people with modern sensibilities, cast in an era where they can highlight cultural and attitudinal differences that might surprise the reader. But the characters, themselves, hardly reflect the assumptions they would be expected to espouse.   No-one is racist, there is no antisemitism and the poor tend to be judged deservingly. These people remark on things about the society that, if they had contemporary Victorian sympathies, they would hardly notice

Fifth, and possibly I am wrong here, there seem to be some factual errors in the book. On a couple of occasions, these people, who give such obvious import to flowers, trees, vegetation and wildlife, make clear errors about what they have seen. At one point a character muses on something they simply cannot have experienced, though the fault here lies in technology, not nature. I could back up these assertions with the detail, but I have no desire to undermine the experience of potential readers of a book with details that some other reader might not notice or choose to ignore. For me, personally, these obvious errors undermined the solidity of the scenario and rendered the characters less than credible.

So for me, this was a very, very difficult read. I did finish the book. It had some things to offer. Please read it and make up your own mind.

The Red Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk

Simplicity is a very complex concept. ‘Keep it simple’ is good advice, but not if its result is a dumbing down of content or a dilution of ideas towards the patronizingly inane. Simplicity, when it indicates an elegant and succinct portrayal of otherwise complex material, is what writers often seek, but rarely achieve. For some truly great artists the quality is achieved apparently without effort. This is the quality and the power of illusion.

An impressive example of this complexity of the apparently simple can be found in The Red Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk. So much fiction takes the form of a biography that examples need not be listed. These life stories take many forms, from chronological sequence to end-of-life recollection, from jumbled memories to self-analysis. Very few would follow the highly original form of Orhan Pamuk’s novel and, crucially, the reader of this book will not be aware of its experimental originality until the end, perhaps even some time after finishing the book.

The Red Haired Woman is in the three distinct parts. The novel’s principal character is called Cem, though the narrative is well developed before we are aware of any name. In the first part, Cem is still at school. His impoverished family cannot raise the cash to enable the lad to attend a crammer to assist his studies, so he takes a holiday job labouring for a well digger. We are aware, though never explicitly, that there are complexities in these familial relationships. We are in Istanbul, where we habitually find Orhan Pamuk, but thirty years ago when the city had not sprawled to its current extent and perhaps where certain things were not discussed openly.

Mahmut, master of his trade, is the well digger. He and his two helpers begin to work on sloping ground in Őngőren which, at the time, is a sleepy little place beyond the city limits, where everyone knows everyone else's business and where modernization is just on the horizon. The well diggers go about their task during the day and retire to a bar in town most evenings. There is a theatre group in the town, and one of its members is a thirty-something woman with red hair. Cem becomes obsessed with her beauty and, as often is the case in Orhan Pamuk’s fiction, the sensation becomes all-consuming for this young and impressionable man. Stubbornly, the well excavation does not yield its goal and Cem extends his stay in Őngőren. Perhaps predictably, encounters with the red-haired woman do much to educate the young man. Eventually the labourer leaves the project in strange circumstances before it is finished to return home to Istanbul, leaving behind in Őngőren things that will continue to haunt him.

In part two of The Red Head Woman, we meet Cem again, but now he is an adult, university trained - so the crammer the labouring paid for did at least some good - and on the way to becoming a rich property developer, a significant but perhaps not major force in Istanbul’s modernisation. He is aware of much that he left behind in Őngőren, since the summer of well digging has left many indelible memories. These are brought into sharp focus when a contract to redevelop parts of the area comes across his desk and Cem decides to pursue the project. He thus needs to re-visit to the area and re-tread the only partially recognizable paths he trod during that personally influential summer some three decades previously. Some of the characters he knew those years ago are still around. Some of the issues that motivated dissent are still in focus.

Part three of the book is written after Cem's involvement with Őngőren has concluded. It is in this section that we hear a different perspective on Cem’s life and to reveal its detail in a review would devalue the impact of the book. Suffice it to say that from this different perspective, Cem's actions and memories take on a wholly different character. We knew all along that there was potential for consequences, but Cem never thought to find out what might have happened. But reality catches up, and resentment grows when it is ignored. All experience is particular, and we must all be aware that individual perspectives are nothing more than that, individual. It is the consequences that are shared.

But Orhan Pamuk’s The Red Haired Woman is much more than an individual fictional life. The well diggers, visiting the bar in Őngőren, chat about many things. Repeatedly, two stories are examined from different viewpoints. Oedipus, a man condemned to murder his father and marry his mother, is one. A perspective the well diggers explore is that Oedipus is not aware of the curse that directs his life, and that even when he consciously tries to avoid it shackles, the power of fate further condemns him to its confines. The second story, from the Shahmaneh, features Sohrab and Rostam. Almost counterbalancing Oedipus, this story has a father kill his son. And it is these themes, predetermination, fate, the paternal, maternal and filial, and then eventually powerlessness that form an intellectual backbone in the work. Cem the property developer is set to modernize the place that did so much to influence his personality, his outlook on life and his future. But the place will reassert itself in his life in a different, wholly unpredicted way that Cem, himself, created, but can neither influence nor control. The patricide and the filicide of the stories that obsessed Cem in his youth eventually fight it out in this brilliant book.

The Red Haired Woman, this short, accessible and apparently simple novel thus develops intellectual and philosophical dimensions, blended with its constant undercurrent of political identity and economic change. Only at the end does the reader become fully aware of the complexity of its themes, and how expertly Orhan Pamuk blends these apparently disparate ideas into a biographical whole called Cem, the principal character through which we experience an entire view of the world. And yet the reading of this book, start to finish, is always simple. The style is transparent and the reality is almost tangible. It is both personal and general, mundane and ontological, reassuringly simple and yet emotionally tangled and challenging. It is a perfect example of how simplicity is it the heart of the complex. Or was that the other way around?

Some thought on Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is not an easy book to review. After finishing any book, the reviewing process is always an excellent way of clarifying what, if anything, the particular work may have communicated. With a book like Satanic Verses, however, as with any book as famous, or infamous as this, does one review the book itself or does one review the reaction to the book? Is it possible to review the book without reviewing the reviews? Is there any need to describe the book itself, when it is this well known, or should one concentrate on judging the allegations levelled against it? Should one actually merely ignore the content and deal only with the reaction?

Of course, there are questions that are present throughout the process. They simply cannot be ignored. Satanic Verses is no longer a book that can be approached without prejudice, bias or both. So let this reader state as an initial position that he has always been convinced that freedom of speech always trumps claims of offense, but also that freedom of speech is not a freedom that should deliberately seek to offend, attack or coerce. All lines are fine, as long as they are travelled to reach a destination and not attack it. Literature, like all art, is in the journey, not the end state.

But I am reading Satanic Verses for the first time… I always wanted to read it but shied away for years. I was not afraid of controversy, but I was living in Islamic states and copies of the book were not welcome. This is what we call censorship and I am supposed to oppose it. I am now curious, more than motivated to read it, curious to identify exactly what might have caused offense. Personally, I regard religion as fair game for any caricature or criticism. Religions have never fallen shy of criticizing one another, after all. I have been an admirer of Rushdie’s work since reading Midnight’s Children when it was hot off the press. I was also resident in an Islamic state, one fundamentalist enough to have banned the sale of all alcohol. That's the time when our college library removed all of Rushdie’s work from its shelves because of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa issued just after Satanic Verses was published. That same college term during which I sought Rushdie’s novel in the library, I borrowed and read The Place Of Dead Roads by William Burroughs from the same library. I did point out to the librarians what I had found early in the book and suggested that in the interest of consistency it should also be removed from the library. I was duly informed that it was Salman Rushdie who was banned (note the author, not the book) and so the William Burroughs could stay. Opinion, or even offence, is rarely consistent, and apparently never rational. I hereby find myself reviewing the reaction to Satanic Verses, not the book itself.

Let it start. Satanic Verses introduces its two principal characters in mid-air, as they fall from an Everest-high aircraft that has just disintegrated in flight. Amazingly, they survive their fall, but the novel would read just as well if they didn't, with their lives flashing past dreamlike in the seconds that remain before they hit the ground. Crucially they are both involved with mass media in the form of film and television. One has starred in television dramas based on religious epics. Now why aren't these considered disrespectful?

Like all complicated people, they have lived complicated lives. They have bi-located between contrasting geographical and cultural contradictions and have been at home anywhere and everywhere. Cultural identity is at the core of this work and, like the overall scenario, the concept and its perception are constantly confused by those who receive cultural messages, interpret them and possibly change them. We like to think of ourselves as rooted in our cultures, backgrounds and identities, but these are in a state of constant change, cannot be pinned down by description, let alone defined. Culturally, we are always foreigners, whatever we choose as our convictions. 

Stylistically, Satanic Verses conforms to the author’s norm of magical realism. The word ‘norm’ is problematic until we acknowledge Salman Rushdie’s own observation that this is still ‘realism’. At the level of phrase, every sentence is a vivid and surreal succession of images. Read slowly, these coalesce into a visible kaleidoscope of constant change, where the reader can take nothing for granted, but will want to absorb the experience in real time for merely what each moment brings. Read quickly, and the print evaporates. It's the pictures that count, but they are always fleeting images. Like life, they flash by.

Interspersed with this hyper-reality are dream sequences in which characters whose existence is literal but clearly invented enact film-like sequences that are not quite the religious myths they mimic. Unlike the real characters, who are always vague and negotiable, these caricatures act more like cardboard cut-outs. Here the tone is more naturalistic, no less surreal, but a deal more comic. They seem like the television version of the story that might feature our main protagonists among the cast. And, like in the William Burroughs book mentioned earlier, most religions get it squarely in the neck. Burroughs does it in three sentences, whereas Rushdie is more thorough. And a good deal more comical. Where Burroughs is bad-tempered and dismissive, Rushdie is ironic and sympathetic.

We soon learn that the book’s title derives from particular suras, specific verses that have been edited out of religious texts because they imply things that should not be stated. Meanwhile our principal characters also seem to edit their own identities to suit convenience, assumptions, advantage and aspiration. The characters from religious myth thus seem to act in ways that are wholly similar (not holy) to those of our real life, surreal television stars, film actors, ne’er-do-wells and highly-strung narcissists. Just like the rest of us.

Long before the end, the reader may start to feel punch drunk after being pummelled by combinations of streamed images. Technicolor language and fantastical scenes. But at the end, Satanic Verses presents such a vivid description of a particular character’s experience that any reader will relive those moments for the rest of terrestrial life. The adjective is irrelevant, by the way, since the book has by then confirmed that the terrestrial is all there is to life.

Satanic Verses is thus a meditation on what makes us feel, think and react. We are products of religion, culture, myth, birth right, circumstance and experience, and everything else we imagine. We take everything seriously, including the jokes, the fantasy and the truth, which probably does not exist outside of opinion. We are as constant as our whims and as solid as our dreams. This makes Satanic Verses hard to review. It is an unforgettable experience, that like most myth, will be most vivid for those who believe in its reality and enter into it. Those who stay outside of its world simply don't get it. It’s a book full of questions, without answers, with experiences along the road to the nowhere we inhabit.

4-3-2-1 by Paul Auster

4-3-2-1 in not one book. It is four. And they are in order, 4-3-2-1. Its title, incidentally, could not be 1-2-3-4 for reasons the reader will eventually discover. Ostensibly the novels are the life stories from birth to mid-twenties of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, only child of Stanley and Rose from Newark, New Jersey. But, as has already been implied, Ferguson, as he is usually known, is not just one person with a single life. He is four people, depending on which story one chooses to enter.

Ferguson´s grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe. He became Ferguson as a result of a joke an almost random association of misunderstanding and assumption that recurs almost as a leitmotif throughout the book. It is of course by chance that this name attaches to its future owner. And then, also sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice drawn from a set of options presented by chance, that Ferguson´s life twists and turns along the paths that fork through time.

Ferguson thus becomes four parallel but diverging people. They are him, we believe, because a writer, who may be Paul Auster, maybe someone else, tells us they are all one and the same person. The four become different people as they progress through their years. Parents divorce, or perhaps don´t. The father´s business fails catastrophically. Or perhaps it doesn´t and becomes hugely successful. It might indeed just trundle along, keeping the family in some comfort short of riches.  The mother becomes a photographer, or perhaps doesn’t. There is a family feud, or perhaps it was never even mooted. There´s an accident, a decision, a choice, but not necessarily for the same Ferguson we knew a chapter ago. All events, however, have their consequences.

And these four characters who are all the same person, these four different Archibald Isaac Fergusons live their lives in parallel episodes, are influenced by the same current affairs, politics, crazes, cultural changes and commercial pressures, but they respond and react differently, selectively, individually. Thus they diverge, their paths never to cross again.

Other family members, notable the step-sister Amy – who might be a step-sister in one story, a mere cousin in another – plays her part throughout. Ferguson lives throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He goes to camp, or perhaps doesn´t. He is not drafted to fight in Vietnam, perhaps because all four versions were born with the same body, perhaps because of what time did to that body, or to the mind that associates with it. They pursue a variety of educational options, attend different schools, pursue different interests and adopt different specialities. Their sexual preferences vary depending on which version of the life we opt to follow, and of course depending on the availability or otherwise of partners, and the pressures others bring to bear at certain crucial points in these different lives.

They all negotiate the rise of consumerism and the growing passion for white goods, a proclivity that is crucial for at least one of the fathers. John F. Kennedy is assassinated, as are his brother and Martin Luther King. There are just one of each, but they appear several times. There are riots in Newark and in other cities. There is Vietnam and the anti-war movement, with its activism and demonstrations. There is the pursuit of the opposite sex, or the same sex, or both. There is learning, much of which focuses on literature, and there is academic, economic and social success, failure and a good deal of the mundane interspersed. There is Jewishness and Christianity alongside the secular. There are accidents, fires, break-ups and reconciliations, and all the other things that can go right and-or wrong in any life, but not in any order and not always in the same story. And thus there are four novels, or perhaps three, or two or just one. There are 850 plus pages, of this we are sure.

Long before the end it is quite hard to remember which version of Ferguson went this way or that, made which decision, suffered which trauma, finished or made up with which particular lover (again). But that may just be the point. As in A Winter´s Tale, when Shakespeare resurrects comedy from the depths of tragedy, Paul Auster´s Ferguson eventually reveals himself as one of the equally plausible characters we have come to know.

In that ending of A Winter´s Tale, Shakespeare’s comedy arises from the previous tragedy of Hermione’s death. He brings her back to life from the statue she became.  He omitted to repeat the gesture so that Mamillius, her son, might follow her back to the living, condemning the lad to remain petrified, and dead. And so we must also re-evaluate comedy. All the world may be a stage, with all of us players upon it, but the writer remains the director, the ultimate omnipresent and omnipotent power who wields the weapon of fate.

Diverging plots have also been used in film. In “Sliding Doors”, Gwyneth Paltrow´s character does and also does not manage to enter a London Underground train that is about to depart. Thus two lives live on, perhaps parallel in time, but certainly diverging to very different ends.

Paul Auster´s 4-3-2-1 seems to inhabit the sum of the above territory. The writer directs, of that we are sure. But the novel reminds us, perhaps even reassures us, that the choices we make in life, the paths we take and those we reject determine life´s chances, its outcomes, and perhaps even our personality. We become only what we live.

And then, whatever the destination, temporary or final, we always should remind ourselves that the world remains a stage, except, of course, for the ultimate director, who holds the pen.