Short story: Assessors

From: 36dale42@283East.net

To: assessors@central.net

Subject: Application for re-assessment

I hereby humbly present my case and hope, that in your enduring collective wisdom, you will accede to my request. I am sure that you will agree that my record of service has been excellent, my disciplinary record exemplary and my performance statistics at worst acceptable, sometimes outstanding. I acknowledge the extent of the cost associated with my request, but firmly believe I have ample years of active service before me, offering me the opportunity to repay whatever new investment might be needed. In any case, costs incurred can also be at least partially offset by my recovery, should that come earlier than I predict. In my present state, I am nothing but a burden.

As you know, my name is Dale, my descriptor 42. I have over thirty years of service and have regularly retrained and re-skilled. I was built up to type 36 over seven years ago, though I have not had any new hardware fitted for more than twenty years. When I researched the products on offer with my managers, we repeatedly came to the conclusion that the more recent advances in the capabilities of mindset chips had all been aimed at those requiring access to and processing of images, sound and other multi-media information. For some time my role has been purely technical, meaning that I process information rather than present it. I also access text and numerical sources rather than multi-media. So we decided, rightly, that the extra cost, re-build and training time were not worth the marginal benefit that upgraded hardware would provide. If those decisions have led, inadvertently and unintentionally, to an obsolete flag being raised on my capabilities, I would like to take this opportunity to request a reassessment of the advice and decisions of my line managers over the last two decades. This request should be considered as separate from and in addition to the assessment request I detail below. Throughout I was acting in good faith. It was never my intention to seek less responsibility and lower workloads on the basis of my possession of only older access and processing capabilities. I should therefore not be held personally accountable for the consequences of those decisions, which were not mine alone.

After completion of my training, all of the pre-loadings were a complete success and I have always installed downloadable updates as soon as they have become available. The only exception to this was last year’s three dimensional production unit module. I could not install it properly, since the older version of my mindset chips did not completely support the interface with thought assumed by the software. Since I am not involved with innovative design and, for at least ten years, have not once been called upon to specify a part for manufacture in real time, neither I nor my manager saw this as limiting.

I have served in several domes, the current being 283East. For five years I was Chief Engineer in 527West, the largest dome on earth. All of my service has been on earth, but neither I nor my managers have ever felt that this reflected anything other than the essential nature of my work. As above, if my decision not to take an overspace posting is now interpreted as evidence of inflexibility or unwillingness to accommodate change, then this would be an invalid conclusion. My transfer from that highly responsible position came about only as a result of the need for a highly experienced and heavily loaded operator to oversee the commissioning of 283East, then a start-up project, the first for several decades. It was also the first on earth to apply from the start the now universal dome standards agreed towards the end of the last century. Though 283East has not been a fault-free project, records from each year of its existence show that it has steadily become established as a fully functioning facility. Though it still houses predominantly types 5 to 16, its year-on-year profile has shown improvement for the last six years, showing that it is becoming steadily more attractive as a location for skilled operators. It also illustrates that developers, who always have a choice as to where they place their plants, are increasingly choosing 283East. I therefore consider it justified to claim part of the credit for creating those steadily improving conditions within the dome.

I have travelled in and out of 283East regularly during my service here and have never before experienced a difficulty of any kind. It was on the occasion of my last return to 283East that my problem arose, a problem that took all concerned completely by surprise. It is this difficulty which now forms the basis of my formal request for assessment.

I was called to Central for a meeting. Though most of our communication is electronic, it has been the practice of dome engineers to convene every few years. The face-to-face nature of these meetings has often provided insights and ideas that have been repeatedly overlooked in one-to-one electronic links, even threaded discussions. The latter provide a perfectly sound method of exchanging factual information, providing feedback or communicating the technical performance of our systems. But it has always been during the face-to-face symposia that new ideas have surfaced. It seems that the dynamic of a larger, paradoxically less structured gathering encourages and promotes the exchange and development of ideas that a purely line individual would not have the confidence or conviction to air. I know there is research material to back this up, but I am unable to offer references, since my newly acquired type 16 mindset does not allow access to the relevant archives.

Obviously the cost of moving people from all over the world into Central, not to mention providing for them during their stay, is nothing less than immense. But each symposium has produced new initiatives and several of these have led to significant and ongoing efficiency savings everywhere.

At this last symposium I offered a paper on energy re-processing and recovery systems, facilities to ensure that almost every joule of extracted energy can be directed towards its intended use, thus achieving minimum wastage. I had, of course, pre-loaded the text and all relevant associated documentation into all delegates’ mindsets some weeks before the conference, a process that would normally signify completion of the project and publication of its findings.

But as usual the face-to-face presentation required me to provide the extra detail that identified precisely how the system could be best applied and where the greatest benefits would accrue. Discussion therefore prompted some redefinition and reformulation of minor aspects of the paper’s content. Though I accept my bias, I remain firmly of the opinion that the system would have operated as originally described and that my presentation of it was competent. The changes that were incorporated into the specification as a result of discussion merely had the effect of honing my work to a perfection that is often not possible for an individual to achieve, especially an individual working largely alone in a relatively remote posting.

I accept that one or two influential delegates asked penetrating questions about my claims for the system, and I also accept that some of my conclusions were modified. But the changes were minimal and did not undermine the validity of my findings. If the recreation I suffered on returning to 283East came about as a result of reports from the symposium that questioned my performance, then I would like to claim that these criticisms have been both overstated and misinterpreted. I refer assessors to the record of proceedings which by now will be generally available. Again, I apologise for not being able to quote a reference, since my type 16 status now blocks my access to the relevant material.

I took the transport as requested at 11am on the morning after the conference ended. Obviously the ports were all busy and their bandwidth fully occupied. It is not my intention to point accusing fingers at the operators, but I did feel on entering the terminal that operations seemed generally rather fraught. Many of those present, myself included, commented on the brusque and impatient manner of several staff. I was not one of those who openly blamed this on inborn characteristics of the human types represented. I have never allied myself, my thoughts or my mindset with such attitudes, though I must admit that here in 283East there is a general and prevalent tendency to undervalue the contributions, capabilities and potential of certain identifiable human types. I have operated in 283East for several years, and I cannot guarantee that some of these attitudes might not have rubbed off onto my own mindset. Assessors will be able to judge for themselves whether the associated motivation coefficients indicate that these are my own thoughts. I remain confident that they will not rise above mere association, and, indeed, association at very low level.

Not only were there several thousand delegates taking pre-arranged slots, but there were also many thousands of short-term mindsets on their way to recreation. Again, I accuse no-one of incompetence, but in such a busy period it would only have taken a stray thought to mingle two streams, thus causing my problem. I mention this now because, if that was the case, then somewhere there is a menial with a newly acquired type 36 mindset, and that could be dangerous.

I still have sufficient access to material to be able to do some research. As a type 16, my access is limited, of course, to historical material, documents that long ago were assessed as containing no contentious or current content. So I took the opportunity of a few minutes down-time yesterday to search for experiences similar to my own in the past. In the early twenty-first century, soon after the beginning of the First Information Age, there was a much lauded opening of a new travel terminal. Then, of course, travel technology was at a very early stage of development, so much so that it still generally involved physically moving objects around the globe in real time. People used to stand in line to file onto metal aircraft which had to take off from and land at specially designed ports, vast fields that had to be large enough for the craft to accelerate under friction through its wheels in order to generate a lifting force which would eventually take it into the air. These ports were apt to become so congested that the experience of travel was anticipated with nothing less than dread. And, it goes without saying, the air through which the craft flew was not toxic in those days.

Travellers at the onset of the First Information Age even took things with them, physical objects packed in boxes that also had to be loaded onto the aircraft. I was surprised to learn that tourism was already common, though it was a tourism that we would not recognise. It seems that tourists at the start of the first Information Age actually took their bodies with them. For centuries, we have regarded tourism as synonymous with experience, pure experience, a mental, intellectual stimulus. Centuries ago, people physically transferred themselves to different destinations. This was seen as part of the experience. Since that era was well before the creation of dome standards, one can only presume that these destinations were actually sufficiently physically different to justify both the cost and the risk. It goes without saying, of course, that the era in question pre-dated the necessity of habitable dome technology.

What happened when this particular new terminal opened was that for several weeks the systems designed to keep the travellers and their possessions together simply broke down. In that era, systems still relied on a physical connection between information nodes and, almost unbelievably, on the mechanical operation of human limbs to initiate movement. Quite obviously, such systems could not cope and people arrived at destinations to find that their bags had never left the embarkation airport, or worse, they had been flown to somewhere quite different.

It is ironic that, in the same week that the opening of the new airport terminal was such big news, a professor of physics, an individual whose name has since become synonymous with a particular brand of electronic transit technology, a name I will not repeat to ensure this message is not spam directed as an advertisement, gave an interview to the media. In that interview he claimed that it was already – in the early twenty-first century! – within the expectations of researchers that protein molecules might soon be transmitted electronically as information packets so that they might be moved from one place to another, effectively being recreated at their destination. This, of course, became the basis for the mass transit systems of the Second Information Age.

Even quite well into that age, at least two hundred years after the first successful transportation of multi-cell life forms via data packet transmission, it was still fairly common for reconstruction to fail. In the days of aircraft, there used to be crashes, though of course nowhere near as many as popular perception claimed. They were actually quite rare. But early reconstruction difficulties were often likened to the historical phenomenon of the air crash.

Packet transmission glitches were much rarer than aircraft crashes, however, even in those early days. Fewer than one reconstruction in twenty trillion went wrong, perhaps no more than a single cell in a human. But if that single cell was in a critical part of the anatomy, it could result in non-feasance. Statistics from the era record a one in twelve point five million chance that non-feasance might occur. But, given that several billion transits were being made every year, this resulted in several thousand occurrences of non-feasance and was the cause of the still prevalent neuroses we now call transfer apoplexy. I have never suffered from this condition, and thus reject the possibility that my recreation was self-inflicted. Nevertheless, thank goodness that our transit systems are now more reliable.

But since the mindset system is only two hundred and fifty years old, we have, if anything, suffered something of a drop in quality compared to those early days. Non-feasance of the physical being is now so rare that it is impossible to gather data on it. There have only been two cases of faulty physical recreation on transmission in the last hundred years.

But problems relating to the faulty recreation of mindsets have been consistently and naggingly common. I read reports – albeit unofficial - yesterday that one transmission in two hundred thousand results in some loss of data. Minor losses, of course, are identified immediately when the systems re-boot. Missing data is simply copied afresh when the re-booting checks for updates. It is a different story if the extent of the data loss results in an effective recreation. The resulting mismatch between the scanned reality and the individual’s recorded and expected identity is too great for the automated system to sanction, so all such cases are automatically referred to assessment. The default reboot, of course, has to be the lower status. This, I believe, might be what happened in my case, though there is still room for other possibilities.

I took my designated slot at the transmission office in Central and was sedated an hour after check-in. I took only twenty minutes to achieve rest and was transported immediately. As I explained earlier, the office was inundated and its bandwidth fully occupied. So the transfer took over half an hour. I was fully mobile only ten minutes after the stimulus was administered and I got up to leave reception in 283East feeling quite normal. I did have some immediate nagging doubts about my memory since I knew I had presented a successful paper, but found that I could not recall any detail of my speech.

You will appreciate that these doubts were momentary, hardly formed or considered in the few seconds it took me to get up and head for the exit scans. It was, of course, when I entered the scan that the recreation registered and the barrier dropped. My identity tag had registered correctly, Dale, 283East, type 36, but the scan had mapped my mindset to reveal a type 16.

Now I accept that we all age. I also accept the possibility that performance assessments can be in process and that they have registered and become live between departure and the time we retransmit. I also accept that criticisms of current work could have been lodged following my presentation. But in my experience ageing or short-term regrading has only ever resulted in a two or three point downgrade. In my case I found myself twenty points down.

The transmission staff were apologetic, but they could do nothing since they lacked the authority to examine the transport log. My mindset reboot then took effect and I was recreated as a fully updated type 16. I had left 283East just days before as the dome’s Chief Engineer and now I had returned qualified and loaded only as a panel fixer. Though I accept it is highly unlikely that our systems have made an error, I hereby formally request a manual check of my recreation. My mindset is now limited to archives at level one only, a status I have never before had to endure. I cannot even access the works of literature I read for recreation, since level one archives only allow individuals to experience popular culture. I certainly cannot get into the technical areas I used to browse every day, though I have not found this too distressing since my recreated lower level activities do not demand that kind of material.

It is my belief that the addresses on several packets of data were wrongly assigned during my transmission. I can only think that one of the migrant menial workers was occupying the same channel as myself and by some corruption or thought initiation error packets belonging to that subject became attached to my stream and vice-versa.

This could have serious consequences if the menial in question transited to a port without automatic type scan recreation. Many places where such menials operate are served by such obsolete ports. Many of the outlying mines or production units, for instance, still use this equipment, despite its specific exclusion in dome standards for almost a century. If that is the case, there is currently, somewhere in our sphere, perhaps even in a power generation dome, an archive level one individual with a newly recreated type 36 mindset. If that individual is also fitted with an enhanced memory like mine, then he not only has access to technical, managerial and political data at archive level three, he also has the ability to store and process it without the personal assessment rating that ensures he has the mental facility to handle its complexity, its significance or its potential to harm.

It is therefore in the spirit of community and concern that I formally request a reassessment of my recreation. If as a result of age or performance reports I merited such a severe downgrading, then so be it. All I can offer as comment is that effecting such a change on transit seems a rather cowardly way to announce such a drastic downgrading. If, on the other hand, my level three archive access has been transferred in error to a level one mindset, then I urgently encourage the rectification of the mistake. As a type 36, I had access to very sensitive material and my mindset was equipped with some powerful retrieval and processing tools. In the wrong person, such facilities could be extremely dangerous. I therefore request a formal reassessment and I look forward to receiving your reply.

Dale42, 283East, type 16 (recently recreated from type 36, Chief Engineer)

I hereby certify that that the above text was created by the above operator in my presence at a single sitting within a screened environment and thus without access to external input. It can therefore be presented for assessment.

Certified and witnessed by Wayne82, 283East, type 21 (283East Local Assessor)

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes, when reading a big book, one gets the feeling that the author set out to achieve size, as if that in itself might suggest certain adjectives from a reader or reviewer – weighty, significant, deep, serious, complex, extensive, perhaps. Sometimes – rarely, in fact – one reads a big book and becomes lost in its size, lost in the sense that one ceases to notice the hundreds passing by, as the work creates its own time, defines its own experience, shares its own world. Even then, reaching the end can often be merely trite, just a running out of steam, the process thoroughly engaging, the product, however, something of a let down. Rarely, very rarely indeed, one reads a big book that actually needs its size, justifies itself, continues to surprise as well as enchant and then, finally, stuns. Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin is such a book, a giant in every sense, a masterpiece beyond question. 

Blind Assassin was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000 and charts intersecting histories of two well-to-do Canadian families, Chase and Griffen. The two Chase sisters, Iris and Laura, are quite different people. Born into the relative opulence of a Canadian manufacturing family, they have a private education of sorts, experienced throughout and yet alongside something vaguely like a childhood. Various aspects of twentieth century history impinge upon their lives and eventually force their family to reassess its status. Economic downturn, war and family tragedy take their toll on the father, who becomes less able to manage either his own life or his business. Something has to give. Ways of coping must be found. 

Iris, the elder sister, is the first person narrator of about half of the book, the other half being devoted to a book within a book, a novel in the name of Laura, the younger sister. This novel, entitled The Blind Assassin, is an eclectic mix of experience, sex, fantasy and politics. It has made a name for Laura and retains a significant cult following many years after its publication. Laura, herself, died in a car accident. She drove off a bridge into a ravine. The car belonged to Iris. 

There was never any real explanation for the event. Iris, meanwhile, has been married off to an older man, a Griffen, who seems to treat her like so much chattel. But then he is an industrialist with the wherewithal, not to mention capital, to assist the bride’s family business in its time of need. Iris, therefore, experiences the Canadian equivalent of an arranged marriage. 

Perhaps the word marriage is a little overstated. The partnership could be better described as a merger, or a union, if that were not a dirty word because of its political connotation. And so the octogenarian Iris, clearly anticipating the end of her days, embarks upon a cathartic outpouring of personal and family history in the hope that an estranged granddaughter might just understand a little about other peoples’ motives. 

The book takes us through Canada and north America, across to Europe, via an imagined universe, to political commitment, direct action and its inevitable reaction. Iris needs to write it all down. And so she works her story out, constructing it, perhaps reconstructing it, maybe inventing it from memory and relived experience against a backdrop of contemporary Canada and her own failing health. Her vulnerability, in the end, is our debt, our penance, perhaps. She is a wise old woman with much to hide, but her acerbic wit is undiminished by age, her observations of others stunningly perspicacious. It is not often that a novel, a mere flight of another’s fancy, achieves the subtle, stunning and surely enduring power of the Blind Assassin. 

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July’s People by Nadine Gordimer

In July’s People Nadine Gordimer presents a scenario laden with fears. Written in 1981, the book presents a South Africa afflicted by near-worst case Cold War disintegration. With rumoured external support, the urban black population has instigated a revolution of sorts, transforming the cities into war zones. No longer “nice” places to be, they are no longer home for decent white liberals like Bam and Maureen and their youngsters.

Twenty-five years on, it is this aspect of July’s people that grates. The scenario now seems horribly and, perhaps, naively, simplistic, improbable. At the time, people saw things differently, from a perspective that is difficult to communicate to anyone who did not live in through the Cold War.

But then this is an unimportant point. We do not criticize Orwell for the passing of 1984 without Big Brother. Neither do we regard Huxley’s current lack of either Bravery or Novelty as a restriction on the relevance of his book to our world. Similarly, the scenario of Margaret Attwood’s Handmaid’s Tale makes the novel both possible and successful, but its likelihood is no more probable as a result of this well-conceived fiction.

So Nadine Gordimer’s scenario, once accommodated, can be taken as a given, an imagined premise upon which the free-standing substance of the story both develops and succeeds, and then this becomes a strength of the book, not a weakness.

Bam and Maureen, long-time employers of a “houseboy” called July, decide on flight. They pack what little they can in the bakkie – a go-anywhere, basic truck of local manufacture, and set off, mother, father, their two boys, and July, their “boy” to seek safety. Bam bought the truck for bush trips, weekends when they might commune with nature in a limited, controlled way, protected from the harsher demands of Mother Nature by the maintained proximity of a retreat to urban protection.

But now the laden truck is driving into new territory. The city is uninhabitable and the journey to July’s rural home area is potentially one way. And so the white-black, black-white relationships of employment, protection, patronage, reliance and condescension are reversed - or at least questioned. And so the liberal white family must come to terms with the precarious necessity of rural poverty. They discover things in themselves that a sophisticated city gloss has hidden or suppressed. They realize how dependent they have been upon status, a commodity not valued in a fundamentally more cooperative way of living.

July’s People is presented from Maureen’s perspective. She is thirty-nine, a fundamentally confident, though constantly doubting, forceful mother and wife. As the book progresses, she tries to preserve the memory of the family’s former life as a way of protecting herself and her brood from the threats of new unknowns. Their “boy”, July, is generous, kind, but also pragmatic, and realizes he must make sacrifices on their behalf.

July’s People is ultimately enigmatic. It remains undermined to a degree by the hindsight-rendered unlikeliness of its scenario. Its most powerful statement is the way in which the sensibilities of the urban sophisticates are questioned by mere natural necessity. It is a short book, but feels much bigger, much more of a statement as a result of Nadine Gordimer’s pithy, abrasive style.

Just as the rural poor find a use for everything, Nadine Gordimer wastes not a single phrase or even word, and neither does she consume more than she needs. The book’s prose is economical in the extreme, the language sometimes pricking like the thorn bush described. It remains a moving book about culture and social identity, despite the unlikeliness of its setting.

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July's People

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I read A Thousand Splendid Suns having just finished Kite Runner. I would like the opportunity to live life again (who wouldn’t?), if only to have a chance of reversing the order of this experience. I suspect that had I read A Thousand Splendid Suns first then none of the criticisms I raise about the book would even have been imagined, let alone expressed. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a wonderful book, a compelling and gut-wrenching story of two women, Mariam and Laila, who share a husband throughout the years of Afghanistan’s tragedy and turmoil. The fact that Khaled Hosseini can sustain expression, narrative, emotion and interest across two novels with ostensibly similar themes in the same territory is testament both to his supreme skill and the depth of the country’s despond.

Where Kite Runner tells the story of two boyhood friends approaching maturity, separating and reuniting, A Thousand Splendid Suns presents two women who are forced together by arrangement. As in Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini presents ethnic and social class differences as the givens of the story. Similarly, Afghanistan’s turbulent thirty years from the mid-1970s is more than a backdrop: it is the very substance of the idea, eventually revealed as the flesh on the story’s bones, the driving force of circumstance that creates the inevitability of the characters’ fate.

And this is why I wish I could read both books again in the different order, because too often in A Thousand Splendid Suns I felt I had been there before. The backdrop came just too much to the fore, in some parts so much so that I felt Mariam and Laila became puppets of its detail and demands.

That, I suppose, may also be part of the point. Whereas Kite Runner concentrated on male experience, A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on women and, given what happened in Afghanistan over those decades, it may be that the sense of subservience to the turn of events is the very essence of these women’s experience. Thus, it is almost true to say that they were not, themselves, protagonists. They were done unto.

Mariam and Laila differ in age, ethnicity, birthright and social class. They both, and for different reasons, finish up unhappily married to the same man, Rasheed, older than both combined, brutish, bigoted and sadistic. Rasheed is thus a symbol for the traditional male role without declaring himself as such. In Western terms, we read this “tradition” as misogyny, however, and it is here where I find the book’s weakness. In my opinion – for what it’s worth, and not much at that - A Thousand Splendid Suns would have been an even greater novel had Rasheed been cast as a more liberal figure and had he also suffered as a result of his own conflict with the requirements of changing times. But Khaled Hosseini made A Thousand Splendid Suns from the women’s stories and a more complex role for their husband might have deflected attention from them.

The two women had quite different experiences of youth, and demonstrate quite different capacities to relate to others and even to life, itself. But they have enough in common to need to act together, to need to form a relationship, less than an alliance, more than acquaintance. Pragmatism might have been easier, but the two women develop a real bond, a relationship that shares out the pain, disappointment and unfulfilled dreams of their marital confinement. There is tragedy aplenty and ultimate resolution of a kind.

And then it was the eventual similarity between Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns that prompted me to take my eye off the ball, to lose a little bit of interest in the story at mid-point. But if this is a criticism then it is an extremely minor one. As I suggested at the start, had I read the two books in the opposite sequence, I would probably have levelled my criticism differently. But having also said in a review of Kite Runner that I would not criticise the book for a lack of explicit position on the politics, I feel that in A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini ought to have said more about the status and role of women. Mariam and Laila live a tragedy, but they are also offered as icons for something bigger, which is women’s position in the society at large. In A Thousand Splendid Suns I thus wanted the author to offer explicit comment on the plight of his characters, at least some general comment, even a dose of polemic to merely label absurdity. Alternatively, as I stated earlier, he could have made Rasheed, their aging husband, a little more complex, a tad more endearing in order to offer a source of the social attitudes without the need to justify them.

But these are all minor points. A Thousand Splendid Suns is, in its own right, another supreme achievement by Khaled Hosseini and a further reminder to all of us that ideology imposed blindly can be a blunt and dangerous instrument.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns

Masterpiece: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

The fly cover of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan describes the book as “a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his powers”. On Chesil Beach was recently short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but lost out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering. I have read both books and, for me at least, what is so amazing is the mere fact that two such utterly different concepts could have been considered for the same prize. It is reassuringly astounding that the “genre” of literary fiction can be home to every style, every emotion, every approach, every outcome, everything imaginable and much that is real. 

Those who write book blurbs are often prone to hyperbole. The greatest, the best, the most, the biggest, the most superlative are terms of mundane commonplace. The term “best selling” is usually an empty platitude. “Real” often signifies “very”, but without the latter’s imagined meaning. 

So what can we make of “a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his powers”? In the case of On Chesil Beach this blurb is an understatement, but it is essentially accurate and justified. If I were to write a blurb for this Ian McEwan novel, I would use a single word: masterpiece. I will offer only the merest summary of the plot to provide context, because the book effectively deals with just one event, a newlywed couple’s wedding night. What happens to them is the book’s crucial point, so to reveal it would render the reading less rewarding. 

Suffice it to say that Edward and Florence are newlyweds and they are in a Dorset hotel for their honeymoon. This is the early 1960s, an era when sexuality was not discussed or even approached in the manner of even half a decade later. Edward and Florence are products of their age and of their upbringing. Ian McEwan tells us much of these aspects of their characters in asides and cameos throughout the narrative. 

When I reviewed the same writer’s Saturday, I described the book as time turned inside out. In that book, across the span of a single day, an entire family is presented through its past, its aspirations, its identities. On Chesil Beach accomplishes a similar feat across a smaller canvas, but in a much more concentrated form, replete with comment, detail, analysis and observation. Florence is solidly middle class, Edward less so. She is a violinist from a musical family. He likes Chuck Berry. They are deeply in love and they marry, but they remain children of their age, and there is the rationale for the book, an examination of their private ideas on how to cope with adulthood, alongside an account of the practicalities. 

On Chesil Beach has limited objectives, lives mainly in the events of a single evening, but, like Saturday, turn its time inside out, so we have beautifully detailed pictures of both of the nuptials’ families. Coping, or not, is what characterised the age. On Chesil Beach is a masterpiece, beautifully conceived and executed. Do read it. 

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A review of The Gathering by Anne Enright

Anne Enright’s The Gathering deserves every ounce of praise it has received, and perhaps a bit more. It’s a family history of the Hegartys, told by Veronica after the death of her brother, Liam. So, and therefore, it is a wake, a stream of consciousness response to bereavement. There are more than shades of Molly Bloom here, as Veronica recounts intimate details of her own and her relatives’ ultimately inconsequential lives. And despite its obvious – and necessary – preoccupation with death and mourning, it is eventually an optimistic work, as optimistic as it can be when we are all revealed as rather inconsequential, temporal additions to the grand scheme of things, a grand scheme which, itself, is neither grand nor, indeed, a scheme. In such a void, we need blame to compensate grief. And after that is duly apportioned, at least we can just get on with it. 

What The gathering is not, by the way, is the kind of book that would appeal to anyone wanting instant gratification, a murder on every page, celebrity, wealth, empty melodrama, character that can be worn, or even axe-grinding. It is not snobbish to say that The Gathering runs kilometres above such pulp. That it deals with the lives of ordinary people in a less than successful family is stated at the outset by the author. 

Of the Hegarty family experience, Veronica writes, “the great thing about being dragged up is that there is no-one to blame. We are entirely free range. We are human beings in the raw. Some survive it better than others, that’s all.” Now this is fascinating, because a little later she asserts that when individual Hegartys feel aggrieved with their lot, there is always someone to blame, “because with the Hegartys a declaration of unhappiness is always a declaration of blame.” So within the family, blame is impossible to apportion, but always applied. Given my own assertion that we often need blame to compensate grief, this leads us to an understanding of Veronica’s diatribe, her frustration at being unable to find someone to blame, but needing to do so in order to cope with the loss. The book, then, is her personal catharsis. 

The beauty of The Gathering is its ability to remind us, fairly constantly, of the dysfunctional nature of the Hegarty family, whilst at the same time recording that most of those involved, in one way or other, find some kind of fulfilment in their lives. Liam, the brother who committed suicide by jumping off Brighton pier, was undoubtedly one of the casualties. And eventually the whole family shares his tragedy and, at the very end, ride through and past it. One aspect of the Hegartys is particularly enigmatic, however, and that is their relation to religion. There’s a priest, now an ex-priest, if that is possible, in the family and, at least nominally, they are Catholics. But the religiosity in Veronica’s narrative is less than convincing and hints at the grudging, though perhaps she cannot admit this, even to herself. If she were still practising, she would be more deferential. If she had rejected her faith, she would be more cynical. And if she were a sceptic, her attacks would be more vehement. 

The next time I read The Gathering, I will be careful to note references to religion, since it remains an enigmatic aspect of Veronica’s character. As Veronica’s narration progresses, it feels like she is getting things off her chest, a prosaic enough reaction to bereavement. By the end, we are confident that she has achieved her goal and that she will approach at least the next few days of her life with renewed vigour. Until, perhaps, she is plunged again into the miry uniqueness of who she is, its unacceptability, and its inevitability. For that is who we are. Choice is not ours. 

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Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons is a giant of a book, a giant because of the way in which it gently wraps you into its characters’ world and allows you to feel their lives being lived. It’s a giant of a book in a very small world, a world inhabited by Maggie and her husband, Ira, and, it seems, by precious little else. They are long married, happy, perhaps without really knowing it, and replete with generally unacknowledged failure.

Breathing Lessons starts with Maggie picking up the family car after its repair job and spruce up. She immediately runs into a truck and doesn’t stop. She and Ira then head off on a long drive to a funeral of a long lost friend. Memories revisit high school and adolescence as the widow attempts to recreate her wedding service to bid farewell to her husband. The songs her friends originally sang turn out to be highly inappropriate, depending on your point of view, and some don’t want to try to recreate their youth and so become dignified spoilsports. Some old scores are retallied, none settled, of course.

Then Ira and Maggie set off home and decide to call in on their son’s estranged wife and their granddaughter, a girl of seven, it turns out, they haven’t seen since she was an infant. On the way there is a strange encounter with a fellow traveller. Maggie invents a story, for some reason, which he believes. She pursues the scam, is as duplicitous as hell and carries the whole thing off as if it had been gospel from the start. A strange episode.

Maggie is surprised that she does not recognise her granddaughter. Perhaps Anne Tyler is suggesting that the only really important things for Maggie are those she keeps within the confines of her head. Fiona, the estranged daughter-in-law, seems surprisingly accommodating, even more so when details emerge of how poorly treated she has been by Maggie and her son, Jesse. Maggie and Ira clearly weren’t too good at being parents, or grandparents, either.

Maggie convinces herself that she can get the separated couple back together and cajoles her daughter-in-law and granddaughter to motor back to Baltimore with them. She phones her son and arranges for him to call round later that day, after the travellers have reached the family home. It seems that everyone except Maggie is both indifferent and sceptical, but, for some reason, everyone goes along with her suggestions. And, of course, it all goes nowhere. None of these folk, by the way, could be described as intellectual. Not one of them seems to have read a book or, indeed, ever suffered the trauma of a moment of self-reflection since birth. All anyone ever does is react, and then usually wrongly.

Maggie is the book’s central and essential character. Ira, her husband, for the most part busies himself driving, playing solitaire or teaching Frisbee. But basically he seems to hover around the edge of Maggie’s universe, occasionally putting his foot in it by pointing out the odd reality here and there, realities that Maggie expends massive resources trying to ignore or deny. She makes mistakes. She crashes the car every time she drives (two out of two in the book). She constantly imagines herself as God’s gift, a sort of Mrs Fix-It for everyone else’s problems. But she is singularly unable to organise her own existence. She is overweight and yet overeats. She is full of self-justification, almost invariably based on obviously false premises. And she seems to have developed absolutely no powers of self-analysis or reflection, even when reality occasionally forces its way into her existence to contradict her assumptions and undermine her intentions.

I have to admit that I tried to start the book at least three times without success. For me, Maggie’s character was just not quite credible and, if it were credible, I could find no reason why I would want to read about such a person. I persevered this time, however, and the result was a rewarding insight into an uncultured and eventually valueless approach to life that, I suspect, Anne Tyler suspects may be widespread, though I feel that she would not be as judgmental about it as myself.

In the end, all of the characters in Breathing Lessons are failures, who consistently render their own lives a chaotic mess, both inside and outside their heads. They are surrounded by their own mistakes and missed opportunities. These are people who really work at their incompetence and succeed brilliantly. I can’t help feeling that at least one of them, in the normal run of things, would display an intellect superior to a demented parrot and a facility for self-reflection greater than a sooty fireback. But no one ever does. Perhaps that’s the point.