A Northern Ireland family - Reading In The Dark by Seamus Deane

Reading In The Dark is a first person account of an extraordinary childhood. On the surface, the family seems to be stable enough. They are Catholics and the novel’s narrator is about half way along his parents´ progeny. Nothing special there... They are not rich, and apparently not poor. They get by.

The lad explores the neighbourhood, makes friends, starts school. Eventually he proves to be quite academic and he clearly goes from personal success to further personal success. But all the time there’s something in the past that labels him. There are people who call him strange names, accuse him of things he hasn’t done. He does not understand, but feels the consequences.

Life can be complicated when you’re born to a Catholic family in Northern Ireland. The boy grows up in the 1950s and 1960s. Via short, dated chapters, arranged chronologically and starting in February 1945, we able to build and perhaps experience the lad’s world. We share the boy’s new experience, feel the changes in his life and body as he does. But there is always something unsaid, intangible, but undoubtedly real and of consequence. Everyone seems to know something, but he has little idea what it all means. Mother and father remain reticent. Relatives and acquaintances allude to Eddie, the boy’s uncle, who is not around any more. Clearly Eddie died in strange circumstances. But in the Northern Ireland of the 1950s, you have to be careful what you say, when you speak and whom you mix with.

Just being seen talking to Sergeant Burke, the policeman, can result in your being labelled a traitor, a collaborator, or worse. The boy’s relationship with the Church and its clergy is both fascinating and surreal. There are moments of humour, times of fear, often juxtaposed. There’s a maths teacher whose class rules are so complex that any response seems punishable. Serves them right… It seems that whatever contribution an individual might make has the potential to render that person in need of strokes, but the ground rules demand that no-one may opt out. It’s the same in the wider society. When you’re a Catholic in Northern Ireland – and perhaps if you are not! – there are no fences you can sit on. Whatever you do it will be wrong.

There are enemies on both sides of every fence, so wherever you climb down, beware. Tread carefully, know your place, stay on your guard. But what if, like our young lad, you don’t know what to beware of? Slowly, however, the real truth behind Uncle Eddie’s fate emerges. It’s only then that the growing boy, and indeed the reader, realises just how complicated – and vindictive – life can be. Reading In The Dark is a highly poetic novel. The scenes are vivid, beautifully portrayed. They are short, but each adds its own new detail to the bigger story of how a family has learned to cope with its own chequered past. 

Those who don’t know the mistakes of history are perhaps doomed to repeat them. Those misled by untruth are not necessarily liars when they restate it. But complicating the past probably confuses the present and disturbs the future. Seamus Deane’s novel, Reading In The Dark, is a vivid and moving portrait of a family troubled by a past it dare not admit.

A review of Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

In her novel Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel presents a series of characters who ought to be Mr and Mrs, or Uncle and Auntie Normal. They all live near the M25, London’s orbital motorway and inhabit places as interesting as Slough, Maidenhead and Uxbridge. Even distant Essex gets a mention.

But many of these people aren’t normal, or average, or even alive, for that matter. Many of them are in fact the dreaded four-letter d-word, the word that the book’s principal character prefers not to say out loud. Alison is a medium. This m-word applies to her trade, not her stature, which is determinedly out-size. She is a large woman, fat, to be precise, if that is not an f-word. She regularly communicates professionally with the spirit world in front of a live audience. At least some of them seem to be alive.

Alison works with an assistant, Colette, a woman with a history of her own. They even live together, but don’t start thinking there’s any funny business between them. Oh no! This is the M25 we are near, after all.

Alison and Colette have their own lives, and their own pasts. Alison’s seems to be the more lurid. Mother was a professional woman, the kind that admits to the world’s oldest profession, and so can’t be sure who might have been Alison’s father. The mother and all the candidates for the role of father are now ex, deceased, d-word, but of course Alison is a medium – a large medium – so she can effectively meet with them whenever she wants. One of them is called Keef, but he probably spelled it Keith. Colette’s past is much more mundane, but it has had its ups and downs. She has had her share of dealing with men, enough to have them come back to haunt her. She seems to value the stability offered by Alison’s regular work. They even buy a house together, one of those new ones on an estate.

But don’t you think there’s anything going on between them! There are pleasant, even amusing moments in beyond Black. But overall the book is too long and presents little to challenge or inform the reader. These are people we have to take at face value, since their engagement with the world seems to go no deeper than this. And it always seems strange that, given the number of d-word people who clearly don’t exist any more, that a medium quite by chance encounters one of them who knows someone in that night’s audience. The chances of that happening must be very slim indeed, a lot slimmer than Alison, at least.

As Alison and Colette examine their past and current lives, Colette starts to tape their conversations with a view to putting it all down on paper. She might even write a book. But the recordings are regularly interrupted by memories from the spirit world who always want to have their own say. At least the dead are electromagnetic. I mean, it’s all in the past. Can’t they just let go? Thus we examine the two women’s identities. Beyond Black presents a sometimes funny, generally entertaining, if rather long read. But it is a book that challenges little and does not inform. It also only inhabits the surfaces of its characters. But then they do live near the M25.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Russian Pianist Elena Lasco plays jazz in Teulada-Moraira´s Auditorium

Elena Lasco’s jazz presents an eclectic mix. But this is eclecticism with focus, a focus that is provided by her perhaps unique musical personality. She is classically trained, out of a prestigious Moscow music conservatoire, no less. She was a child prodigy and learned the Russian greats, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But then this was also the Soviet Union of Nikolai Kapustin, as jazz idiom composer of dots on paper, a writer who formalised music that almost sounds like it might have been improvised. Elena Lasco’s interest in jazz clearly derives from the post-war American greats, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson, Thelonius Monk. And, unlike Kapustin, she does improvise. She also composes, and that’s where the eclecticism emerges. At her recent solo concert in Teulada’s new auditorium, Elena Lasco exhibited not only consummate pianistic and improvisatory skills, but also she delivered wit and originality. This she presented her own variety of eclecticism, a character that paradoxically is no mixture. It is nothing less than her own complex statement. She played Ellington’s “A Train”. But it’s not Ellington’s “A Train”, it’s “Don’t Take This Train”, a self-mocking variant of Strayhorn’s music. So here is the mix: jazz standard, reinterpretation by Elena Lasco, improvised upon by a performer of the same name and presented on a brand new Steinway. It was quite an evening! “There’s That Rainy Day” follows and then personal takes on “Autumn Leaves” and “I Love Paris”. “Stella By Starlight” is followed by “A Sad Day” and then “Round Midnight” appears as something completely different, but with a feminine angle. “A Night In Tunisia” takes on a new feel, something more classically oriental than the original. “All The Things You Are” unfolds, and then Caravan, to return us to Ellington. “My Funny Valentine” is a sad song given a happy ending. But while Hines, Peterson and Garner come to mind, so do Rachmaninov preludes, occasional pieces by Prokofiev, Tchaikovskian paroxysms and Chopin-esque lyricism. Musical quotes are peppered everywhere, sometimes obvious, sometimes disguised beneath an improvised sheen. The music has a brilliance throughout, but the wit and sophistication still shine through. This is music that deserves repeated listening. Elena Lasco is a pianist, a composer and a performer. How’s that for eclecticism?

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru

In his impressive and successful novel, Hari Kunzru explores the nature of identity. For some people a sense of belonging is very strong, whereas for others such feelings are mere illusion. The former group may cite social group, language, culture or religion as evidence of their stance, while the latter group, perhaps, may cite exactly the same subject matter to prove the opposite. The more politically inclined may even cite our relationship to the means of production as the primary source or personal and social identity.

In that case, the way that we make our living provides much of what we perceive as identity, and, in Hari Kunzru’s book, The Impressionist works through several quite different lives. It’s not that The Impressionist, the principal character of Hari Kunzru’s novel, has no identity.

Indeed, The Impressionist has a whole host of them, and all of them are both complex and, at the same time, completely credible. It is those around him who endow him with the trappings that confirm who he is. 

And he, of course, responds, donning new lives according to each new coat he wears. The book’s style seems to owe much to the magical realism of Salman Rushdie. There is also a superficial similarity of subject matter, since The Impressionist begins in colonial India where we witness our hero’s chance conception. There are royal parlours, low-life slums and chance encounter. We see the inside of an English public school, a prestigious university and eventually travel to Africa in a professional but doomed role. 

And throughout, The Impressionist seems to do no more than merely fit into the niches that have apparently been prepared for him. Everything he tries on fits him well. So, as we follow The Impressionist on his personal travels through multiple identities, we are challenged by the transformations. They are opened up by chance encounters, but yet they also seem inevitable. We are thus encouraged to look at our own lives and ask how many times we might have changed our own spots. A reader with a strong sense of identity might find such a challenge quite threatening. But then it’s just a story, isn’t it?

Several characters in search of a plot – The Country Life by Rachel Cusk

The Country Life by Rachel Cusk presents several promises, but eventually seems to break most of them. When Stella Benson, a twenty-nine-year-old, leaves home suddenly to take up a private care assistant’s job in darkest south England, it is clear that she is running away. From what we do learn later, but by then we perhaps care rather less about the circumstances.

From the start there was a problem with the book’s point of view. Stella presents a first person narrative couched in a conventional past tense. Events – albeit from the past – unfold along a linear time frame, but despite her removed perspective, she apparently never reflects beyond the present she reports. Given Stella’s character, this may be no more than an expression of her scattered immediacy, but that only becomes clear as we get to know her via her actions. This apparent contradiction of perspectives has to be ignored if the book is to work, but once overcome The Country Life is worth the effort.

 Stella - to say the least – is not a very competent person. But then no-one else in this little southern village seems to have much about them. She becomes a live-in personal carer for Martin Madden, a disabled seventeen-year-old who lives with his rather dotty parents on their apparently luxurious farm. Stella has neither experience, nor presumably references, nor the pre-requisite driving licence. Her employers don’t check anything, despite their reported bad experiences in the past.

Thus Stella becomes part of a rather mad family called Madden. Stella steadily learns more about the Maddens. They have their past, both collectively and individually. Pamela, a wiry, sun-tanned matriarch, is married to Piers. They have children, all of whom seem to have inherited different mixes of the foibles on offer. There’s a local scandal or two, rumours of mis-treatment, sexual impropriety and more, but it always seems to dissolve into innuendo. This, perhaps, is the country life. Stella herself is incompetent in the extreme. She gets sunburnt - in England(!), soils her shoes with melted tar from the road, gets drunk several times, falls into the pool, gets lost, cuts up her clothing, behaves inappropriately, steals on demand and can’t find the garden gate. It’s quite a week.

As the book progresses, it seems unsure whether it should be a sit-com or a farce. But at the centre of The Country Life is Stella’s developing relationship with Martin. He is used to being the centre of attention and knows how to play the part, how to manipulate. He may, it seems, have inherited much from his mother and perhaps a lot less from his father. The Country Life is beautifully written. It is both funny and engaging. Stella’s life becomes increasingly a farce, however, and this crowds out some of the other themes that might have come more interestingly to the fore. Rachel Cusk’s writing is always fluent, perhaps overdone here and there, but when you are that good at it, a little over-egging just adds to the richness.

Of Wit and Tragedy - Sculptures by Hanna Gerlind Glauner in Alfaz del Pi

Sculpture is capable of presenting itself in a highly conceptualised manner. Shapes can be featured purely as themselves, as forms that require us to interpret, associate and eventually explain so that we might make sense or perhaps no sense of them. At the opposite end of the spectrum, sculpture can also be utterly representational, more so than in painting, since an object’s third dimension can be real, rather than realised. Occasionally a sculptor can entangle and combine these extremes and thus play with observers’ intellect as well as their vision. When the process also involved wit and invention, the mix can become compelling. Such is the experience presented by the work of Hanna Gerlind Glauner, on show until October 30 2011 in the Klein-Schreuder Sculpture Garden, Alfaz del Pi.

Hanna presents objets trouvés, bits of metal rescued from scrap yards in Spain and Germany. Dismantled, inverted or reassembled tools form the bulk of these objects, but there are carding combs, scissors, jump-lead clips and stocky marine nails as well. What is remarkable is Hanna’s vision in assembling them to form provocative, funny, tragic, moving images.

Rumpelstiltskin is dancing so hard he is coming apart. Crusaders approaching Jerusalem is close to a cartoon. A young couple out for a walk has the father pushing the pram. There is a bishop with acolytes almost hiding in his robes.

But then there’s boat people, a row of round-head clips counting themselves along the length of piece of iron that would sink. Meanwhile, four dividers stand legs apart and align their adjusters to mimic the raised rifles of Goya´s Third of May 1808.

The inventor of the wheel presents his concept. He is tall and one-legged, and so needs the wheel. A young girl is tall and elegant. Another carries water in Africa.

Thus Hanna Gerlind Glauner´s beautiful objects both amuse and provoke. Her observations possess both beauty and poise in their solidified imagination. Her exhibition in the Klein-Schreuder Sculpture Garden, Alfaz del Pi should not be missed. Full details are at http://www.klein-schreuder.com/index.htm.

Between The Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger won the Booker Prize and was notable for its intriguing form. I thought it would be a hard act to follow. It would need a great writer to be able to make a repeat match of both originality and style with engaging content. So on beginning Between The Assassinations I was prepared to be disappointed. I need not have worried because Aravind Adiga’s 2010 novel is perhaps a greater success than the earlier prize winner.

The novel does not have a linear plot, nor does it feature any resolution to satisfy the kind of reader that needs a story. But it does have its stories, several of them. Between The Assassinations is in fact a set of short stories, albeit related, rather than a novel. But the beauty of the form is that the book sets these different and indeed divergent tales in a single place, a fictitious town called Kittur. It’s on India’s west coast, south of Goa and north of Cochin. Kittur presents the expected mix of religion, caste and class that uniquely yet never definitively illustrate Indian society.

And by means of stories that highlight cultural, linguistic and social similarities and differences, Aravind Adiga paints a compelling and utterly vivid picture of life in the town. The observation that this amalgam both influences and in some ways determines these experiences is what makes Between The Assassinations a novel rather than a set of stories. It is the place and its culture that is the main character. The title gives the setting in time.

The book’s material thus spans the years between the assassinations of the two Ghandis, Indira and Rajiv. So it is the 1980s, and politics, business, marriage, love, loyalty, development, change and corruption all figure. Aravind Adiga’s juxtaposition of themes to be found in Kittur town and society thus leads us through times of questioning, rapid change and wealth creation. The book’s major success is that this conducted tour of recent history never once leads the reader where the reader does not willingly want to go.

The stories are vivid, the personal relationships intriguing, the settings both informative and challenging. Between The Assassinations is a remarkable achievement. The author has succeeded in writing a thoroughly serious novel with strong intellectual threads via a set of related stories that can each be enjoyed at face value, just as stories, if that is what the reader wants. Writing rarely gets as sophisticated as this or indeed as enjoyable, since humour, often rather barbed, is always close to the surface. Between The Assassinations is a wonderful achievement.