SQUAWK OF THE YEAR

Wherein we squawk about our favorite books from 2016.

Bill Kirton:

A lot of my 2016 reading was escapist – stories by the best sellers who’ve earned their reputations as reliable providers of thrills, suspense, twists and satisfaction and who don’t need reviews from me to confirm their excellence. On the other hand, there were others who had nothing like the exposure of these big boys and girls and yet who produced highly individual, accomplished novels which deserve a wider readership. Black Sheep Boy is one of them.

I bought it on the recommendation of a friend, otherwise I don’t think it would have registered on my radar. As the title suggests, it’s a series of episodes in a life, but a life far removed from that of a comfortable old guy living in Scotland. The first person narrator is a young boy who lives in the Louisiana bayou and, as well as sharing his personal pains and pleasures with us, he evokes this highly individual context and its customs. Throughout, the fact that he is, as the blurb warns us, ‘small, weak, effeminate’, frequently creates conditions, oppositions and alliances which set him at odds with that same culture with its fixed notions of how men and women should be.

So the exoticism of the content is already fascinating to a reader far removed from its everyday manifestations, but the main power of the book is the voice in which it’s related and the way he shares with us the discoveries his experiences bring to him. The rhythms and music of the prose, the delicacy of the images he conjures up, and the beautiful mix of ‘normal’ English and the gentle patois of the bayou are captivating. Interest never wavers, from the simplest stories he recounts to the questions of identity he asks of others and himself as he grows into and struggles to understand and withstand the dilemmas and threats posed by his sexuality and his gender. Themes of mysticism, justice, impotence and survival weave through it all, taking different guises in the various relationships he forms and experiences he enjoys and/or endures.

And, in the end, so closely do we empathise with his thoughts and feelings that the specificity of his sexual and gender-related issues broadens into reflections on identity and purpose which relate to the whole process of how we become who we are and continue to evolve through more of its iterations. It’s beautiful, thought-provoking, essentially human and an excellent read.

Pat Black:

I thoroughly enjoyed Frances Larson's Severed, a grisly but compelling history of decapitation. I also loved Peter Hill's memoirs of his time working on Scottish lighthouses, Stargazing.

But the blue rosette goes to a book I haven't reviewed - I, Partridge, by Alan Partridge. The audiobook is narrated in-character by Steve Coogan and was probably the funniest book I've ever come across. As if I needed to look any more of a lunatic on the morning commute. Eat my goal! 

Marc Nash:

I had a year of big thick post-modern works and lots of non-English fiction in translation.

Most of the Po-Mo was pretty disappointing with the honourable exception of Sergio de la Pava's "A NakedSingularity", but it was the non-English fiction that blew me away this year. Valeria Luiselli's "The Story Of My Teeth" was good fun, both of Yuri Herrera's 100 page novels were very evocative and lyrical in their brevity. Both of those authors are Mexican. But the winner was Korean author Kan Hang's "The Vegetarian" which despite a completely redundant third section, parts one and two were so stunning and beautiful and haunting that the limp part 3 simply didn't matter. Highly recommended. 

Worst read of the year Gillian Slovo's "Ten Days" purportedly about the London riots of 2011 in which just a single rioter makes an appearance and he's rescuing a child from a burning building. utterly misses the point. 

Melissa Conway:

After a lifetime spent reading whenever a spare moment presents, I’m lately in this weird bubble of book avoidance, with the excuse that I simply can’t spare the time. I didn’t read much in 2016, but even if I had, my year’s best pick would have stood out from the rest. Rebecca Lochlann’s The Sixth Labyrinth is the first book in the second Child of the Erinyes trilogy, a love triangle driven by divine destiny to be reincarnated through the ages. Great writing, highest recommendation.

J.S. Colley:

My have-read list for 2016 is woefully short. I will mention HillbillyElegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance.  The author’s family moved from addiction-ridden Appalachia to Ohio, where he was able to overcome his inherited geography and make it to Yale Law School. Although it didn’t fully live up to my expectations, it came close.

I’m currently reading Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes, published by the newly-formed Aardvark Bureau, about South Africa’s only “ethical pest removal specialist.” So far, I’m enjoying it. Perhaps I’ll write a review when I’m finished.

I wish you all happy reading in the new year!

HERE I AM

by Jonathan Safran Foer

571 pages, Hamish Hamilton

Review by Marc Nash

And yet you chose to give it 4 stars...

Indubitably Foer is a skilled, talented author. Lots of bon mots, observations, modern homilies and pocket-sized bites of philosophy in this tome, "…that man finds it hard to accept insults" being one little gem. But for all the weight of literariness and learnedness, somehow it seems like he wasn't even trying. Firstly, the subject matter of Here I Am is as it ever was with him, middle-class New England Jewish family life (at least this time he moved it from NYC to Washington, but that's about the limit of radical departure). In the same way that Tarantino needs to make a movie without a single gun or a knife in it, Foer needs to write fiction outside of the bubble of New England Jewishness. Of course he can write what the hell he likes, but to be considered a true literary force, that is my recipe. Roth did it, even if most of his characters were Jewish, many still had an everyman feel so that they spoke for all of America. I just don't know how much of the tight Jewish focus (cultural and religious) here will be accessible to non-Jewish readers. And yet you chose to give it 4 stars...

Okay I don't mean he put no effort into this. But he certainly doesn't seem to be moving out of his comfort zone. This reads like the output of a thousand and one Friday Night Sabbath dinner conversations, talks across wedding and bar mitzvah party tables, taken verbatim and set down here, some actually within the settings of Sabbath meals and funeral and bar mitzvah tables. Except... the style being wholly a mix of extended dialogue or inwardly directed reflections, this is a book entirely without joy, which through their humour Jews usually manage to insert into their exchanges no matter how morbid they may be overall. Take the dialogue - it is always bitter and grudging one-upmanship. The humour is lacking. The children wisecrack as if they were adults, wordplay to the fore, but again without true feeling. The kids are wise before their time intellectually, but emotionally they seem completely bereft (not unlike what I extrapolate Foer himself to have likely been as a child, intellectually precocious, but emotionally stunted – more of which later). For the self-reflection, it is handled in leaden fashion. In conversations with others, more often than not his wife as their marriage falls apart, someone says they lack one thing but have plenty of its opposite, which only goes to prove that they have the other thing in spades after all. This gets very tedious rather quickly as a device or form of logic I can tell you. The other unconvincing technique is for the character to take you out of the present by recalling something from the past, more often than not from their own childhood, and then that further devolves to another past association even further back, neither of which were experienced as such back at that time, before eventually coming back to the comparison in the present. It all seems like the most clunky way to set up a metaphor. For example, a memory about the day they got their rescue dog starts with speculation as to how dogs get their names, before eliding not so smoothly into how tropical storms get their names, the worst of which have their names retired like baseball jerseys, which returns us to the original notion that the character's grandfather who has just died is a one-off whose name will also be retired and not passed on. Now the whole point of the book is about being in the present, trying to be real and the person you are rather than the distorting roles of parent, spouse, etc., because of the compromises duly entailed in such relationships, and naturally there is a search back into childhood for clues to inner consistency and the person you truly were constituted to be, but 600 pages of this just drags. His eldest son lives online and plays "Second Life" – there he actually summed it up in one metaphor. He could have left it at that. And yet you chose to give it 4 stars.

But it's not just remembered conversations at social functions. When you read Foer's email exchanges with the actress Natalie Portman with whom he was collaborating on a film of his non-fiction work and for whom he walked out on his wife without checking that Portman was of similar mind towards him (which she wasn't), you realise that the intense exchanges in the book are exactly how Foer thinks and expresses himself in real life. The book is him talking aloud to work himself out having depth charged his own marriage. I gauge that the period of writing this book (his first long fiction in 10 years) coincided with his secret one year separation from his wife, and therefore I am forced to conclude the creation of this book seethed and roiled in those feelings. Foer seems to be asking the reader to forgive the character (who is perpetually asking for forgiveness for things he is unsure of and as to why). Or perhaps it is Foer himself who is asking us the reader for forgiveness in the guise of this book. For how emotionally sophisticated could he be not to check that the inamorata feels the same way towards him? And this guy is supposedly a great observer of the human condition on all our behalves? So it is not as I first suggested that he's not trying, for indeed he is working very, very hard to try and figure it out. But it smacks of indulgence. Of a laughable private grief we really shouldn't be asked to rubberneck in on. Do I care that he and his literary power couple wife have crashed and burned their relationship? Not really, but then I don't live in NYC and have never been invited to any of their dinner parties at which books like this are seemingly composed. Is the subject matter of what it means to be a parent and a long-time married spouse legitimate for literary treatment? Of course they are. Am I particularly interested in them myself? Not terribly much unless they're attacked in a really off-kilter or politically radical way (i.e. whither marriage, why have kids? Etc.). But again, I am beached by the narrow Jewish filter which Foer brings to these themes and feel he has filed off any such universally interesting burrs that the subject could possibly offer. And yet you chose to give it 4 stars.

There is an interesting speculative backdrop of the geopolitical situation in the Middle East which Foer takes in a fascinating direction. But sadly he doesn't really develop it, and apart from stranding an Israeli family member in America, I actually question why it is in the book at all. Yes it allows Foer to compare American Jews with Israeli Jews (or just 'Israelis' as he makes the point), but again who really cares, apart from perhaps US and Israeli Jews? I'm a British Jew and I'm not really all that bothered by these distinctions. But, and here I give him credit, his speculations on one future for the Middle East provoked my imagination. Albeit I think he made a miscalculation. He talks of an 'inverted' or 'reverse' diaspora, that when Israel is under a major threat of destruction at the hands of its hostile neighbours, American Jews are called upon to rush to the holy land and come to its defence. But that is not what I understood by the term 'reverse diaspora'. So I was stimulated enough to go away and write a 2000 word short story on what I take that term to mean and if you're really interested you can read it on my blog from next week. So a bit of a law of unintended consequences there. The only positive way I felt provoked by this book. Maybe it bumped up my rating, earning Foer an extra half a star or so. And yet you chose to give it 4 stars.

One final gripe. The book never really builds up a head of steam, largely with its reversing and forwarding back over the same incidents and time itself, like trying to tow a car stuck in mud, gunning the accelerator and just getting further mired. Additionally, it's also because of its monochromatic tone, but whatever energy it has is completely leached out by a painfully spasmodic, desultory and irrelevant last 45 pages or so that go absolutely nowhere.

And yet you chose to give it 4 stars.

SQUAWK OF THE YEAR

Wherein we squawk about our favorite books from 2015

J.S. Colley:

The books I enjoyed this year are, in no particular order:

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper, a story about an 83-year-old woman who sets out to hike 3,232 kilometers across rural Saskatchewan, Canada to the sea. She leaves a note for her husband, Otto, that reads, “I will try to remember to come back,” and a box of recipe cards so he won’t go hungry. Russell is their neighbor who has loved Etta from afar for years, and James is a coyote who befriends Etta on her long journey. It’s a poignant novel covering a myriad of themes, ranging from aging, illness, death, friendship, love and loss.

The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt: A Novel by Tracy Farr. After losing her mother and her father, Lena Gaunt is introduced to the Theremin, a musical instrument that is played without physical contact. (This is a real instrument—who knew?) Sounds are produced by the oscillations of the musician’s arms and hands. But that’s not the only odd thing about this novel. The protagonist is a bisexual, octogenarian junkie. While I thought a few of the plot points were forced—something that has annoyed me with a few works of modern literature—it was, overall, an excellent read.

It’s fascinating what will spark a novelist’s imagination. Tracy Farr read about the Theremin and, from there, created this whole world—this fictional life—of Lena Gaunt. Imagination truly is a gift, for both the reader as well as the writer.

The Moon Casts a Spell: A Novella (The Child of the Erinyes) by Rebecca Lochlann. I wanted to give a shout-out to this companion novella to Lochlann’s larger volumes in The Child of the Erinyes series, which follows the lives of three people through various incarnations. In this installment, fate brings them together on the “windswept isle of Barra, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides.” The atmospheric setting casts a spell over the reader. Will the trio ever discover their link to the ancient past? This novella will help Lochlann’s fans endure the wait until the next full-length novel in her new series is published.

Bill Kirton:

Lisa Hinsley was a very gifted, sensitive young author. I first came across her through her book, My Demon, which I enjoyed very much. Through a friendship on Facebook, I also came to know her as a warm, compassionate person who had lots of time for other people and was perennially positive. This was true of her even as she fought cancer for three and a half years, telling us of her tribulations but with never a sign of the self-pity or ‘Why me?’ which comes so naturally with the condition. When she went into hospital for the last time, she was the focus of an online party which she herself described as, literally, 'a party till you drop’. It was a joyous event which went on for many weeks, filled, on Lisa’s insistence, with laughter and happy, uplifting contributions. If any partygoer let any of the underlying sadness show, it was Lisa who raised their spirits through her astonishing bravery and example. She died on December 9^th this year, just 2 days before her birthday, but left an example of how to live for everyone who knew her, even if only online.

So, while it’s always difficult for me to say which of the books I enjoyed is ‘better’ than the others, this year the choice is easy. It’s Stolen, by Lisa. Not because of its deathless prose, its insights and revelations or any particularly literary qualities (although it has plenty), but because it was written by one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known. I don’t believe in an afterlife but I really wish there were one - just for Lisa.

Pat Black:

For new books, I enjoyed Sarah Lotz's The Three. Part ghost story, part conspiracy thriller, written in a unique style. Extremely unsettling. 

But my choice is Roger Deakin's Waterlog. Classic nature writing, one of the best books I've read in years. 

Marc Nash:

Michel Faber - The Book Of Strange New Things

A story that dissects a husband and wife's love so expertly.

A book that tears back the veil of communication and how double-edged it is and how easy to misinterpret meaning.

A science fiction world that wears its inventiveness very lightly, yet somehow manages to authentically conjure up a truly alien sensibility.

A novel about religious faith which I would normally run a million miles from rather than read and enjoy.

Superlative.

THE GARGOYLE

by Andrew Davidson
498 pages, Cannongate

Review by Marc Nash

I can’t remember why I bought this novel originally three years ago. I know I must have got influenced by some buzz around it at the time, but when it arrived and I saw the cover, it went straight to the bottom of my TBR pile and has stayed there until the interval between Amazon vouchers meant I finally turned to read it. It just didn’t seem to be my type of book and having read it, it isn’t, but not because of the book I imagined it was going to be.

A nameless male narrator is a coke-fueled porn actor and producer who stacks his car into a creek and suffers all over burns. In his long hospital stay as the medics try and rebuild him, or at least recoat him, a mysterious woman comes in to visit him and attend to his mental recovery with strange stories claiming they are not only star-crossed lovers, but that their suit goes back to 1300 and she is therefore 800 years old, and has loved him in many historical guises. He not unreasonably pegs her as a schizophrenic, but accedes to her ministrations and fable spinning.

So we get stories from different eras and cultures, where two characters always embody them and these sections reminded me a bit of David Mitchell’s "Cloud Atlas" in their scope. We also get the woman’s own 800 year story, of how she was adopted by a Medieval nunnery having been left at the door, had a supernatural/divine facility of understanding all languages (which is never explained or justified) and becomes a scribe in the library where she discovers Dante’s "Inferno" and certain mystics who at the time were regarded suspiciously as being on the cusp of heresy.

There is no doubting Davidson’s research here, into "Inferno", German medieval mysticism and the treatment of burns (which for me was the most riveting parts of the book), but they don’t quite hang together. She tells her own personal story of their long love in episodes as a tease each time she breaks off, but they just seem lumpish and not embedded to what has gone before. The other stories represent their love as well, but I feel the book would be no poorer if they weren’t there somehow. The research is rigorous, but the weaving together of motifs is far less so. The woman carves stone gargoyles, hence the name of the book and the man may resemble a gargoyle with his burns and face mask, but it needed a bit more layering until the reveal as to why gargoyles are so important a motif, which comes right at the end. Without it, her journey from nun-scribe to lover outside of the Abbey suddenly jumps eight centuries to her being a sculptress. I just didn’t buy such a leap.

He is a pretty loathsome character, so it’s hard to have sympathy with him. Couple that with the conundrum he faces trying to work out whether she really has lived 800 years or is a madwoman, it is hard to involve yourself in the dilemmas of the book. And, as with his research, clearly Davidson can write, as occasionally he unfurls a rather beautiful metaphor, but too often the writing is unremarkable, so that couldn’t carry me along in an engrossing way either. There is a section where at whatever level of consciousness, the narrator undergoes a journey into the Inferno; now I haven’t read Dante, but the writing here is so unimaginative that I cannot believe it adds anything on the original. In the end the section becomes just another episode in the book, almost stand-alone, when it should surely have much more power and reverberation rumbling through the rest of the book. The boom is a treatise on love, experienced through the ages almost eternally. But there are no real fresh insights into the subject, despite the hokum logic and rules Davidson establishes for the world of this book. He can’t seem to recall any of the history of their shared love she reveals to him and this is also never explained or justified. In the end I just didn’t care for their deep love through time. She might have been an interesting character, either as a schizophrenic (which was always held back in the mix rather than forefronted), or even without the cloud of mental illness hanging over her supposed character, her manic sculpting artistic self was potentially an interesting character study too. But because Davidson didn’t want to commit his view to the reader too early, neither of these are as fully fledged and developed as to make them interesting.

So The Gargoyle is not a book without merit certainly, being a literary work, but not one for me I’m afraid.

RICHARD III

by Candice Holdsworth and Robin Gilbert-Jones
18 pages, Wry Republic

Review by Marc Nash

Prompted by the discovery of King Richard III's bones under a car park, the authors offer four vignettes asking the reader to reconsider the artistic and historical view of the short-lived King and to suggest parallels with our own age as to how politics, media and art establish reputations according to prevailing agendas.

The vignettes take the form of a theatre review by Queen Elizabeth I, a groom's speech by Henry Tudor on the occasion of his fifth wedding, a letter from one of the young princes imprisoned in the Tower and lastly an eve of battle proration by Richard III himself. They pull off the not inconsiderable feat of sounding authentic to the language of the time, yet with modern sensibilities resonating behind. The notion of a Queen penning a theatre review is a good one, while she is fully aware of the spectre of etiquette ranging through to self-censorship in how Shakespeare portrays a recent historical figure on the other side of the political spectrum from her House of Tudor.

Henry's wedding speech is full of self-righteousness as he talks in terms of divine forces of good and evil, where he himself of course is god's vicegerent. The contrast with Richard's speech where he talks in similar terms, but eschews a divine force for the crushing attestation that humans are responsible for their own state of affairs, rather than projecting them on supernatural forces. He is aware that he is a ruler over "a kingdom of rats", who knows his lowly, mortal status. There is nothing holy, though all mankind may well be damned by our foibles and failings. The echoes of Henry's points of reference, put me in mind that Henry's wedding speech was itself a sort of pre-campaign ejaculation, as he was about to go into battle to ensure he sired a son and heir. It wasn't so much a consummation of marriage as a start of a siege. It made me feel utterly despondent for his bride who was to end up executed.

The most touching of the stories was that of the young Prince Richard of Shrewsbury. He recounts a couple of days activities, in which unbeknownst to his callow mind his life was threatened with being cut off. His tone is one of excitement to be out the tower, that it is all a great big game he was involved in at the generous and imaginative behest of his "Uncle Richard". So much so he looks forward to spending more fun time in the Tower. His narrative voice is precisely realised as a tutored, noble tongue, whereby his boyish excitement can only express itself via terms such as "marvellous" and "terribly exciting". In today's parlance, he might have declaimed his adventures to be "sick" rot "awesome". The poignancy of this tale reminds one of Emma Donoghue's "Room" and its five year old captive, also made to perceive he was involved in an ever-present game.

There's no doubt all the stories work individually and as a whole, but I'm unsure as to the offered aim of both reconsidering Richard's status in our cultural perceptions and also the translation to today's politics. If anything, such divergent views on that period of history does represent our age in simply adding a myriad of contrary viewpoints, contributing to the furious babble in which no one gets heard, no one's opinion is changed and no real debate can ever get heard. The cacophony and jangle Elizabeth complains of the cheap seats in the pit in her review, which she expects to be avoided by the design of the upcoming Globe theatre in Southwark. And even though today's reconstructed Globe Theatre plays host to school parties and tourists, we the subjects have discovered our voices. And through the explosion of online and social media, we risk deluging and drowning out all discourse, this book at least adds its voice in a refined and quietly self-confident manner.

DIARY OF A HERETIC

by Kathleen Maher
185 pages, Beekman Press

Review by Marc Nash

This is a book about cognitive dissonance, the ability to deeply hold two contrary beliefs simultaneously. All its main characters succumb to a pull-me, push-you of their emotions as they realise their beliefs have feet of clay and yet still follow them. And why wouldn’t they, since those beliefs revolve around a religious cult?

Malcolm owns a coffee and pastry shop and is in mourning for his dead lover Colin. He has a keen mind and desires to make his shop a centre for debating ideas “a coffee klatch with pretensions”. However his pastry chef Carlos sees his opportunity to twist it to his own ends. Instead of a talking shop, they conspire to create a religion with Malcolm as the Prophet and Carlos the business manager. They call it “Religion without Rules” and Malcolm’s shaken certainties after his lover’s death are embodied by establishing a huge role for doubt as much as the role of faith. Chocolate éclairs wryly replace the wafer as the Host, while there is a hilarious section where Malcolm’s attempt to compose a skeptical doctrine of the signs of mystical experiences while he himself fasts, is constantly interrupted and undermined by the hotel’s room service trolley of culinary delights.

While the cult grows at a huge and profitable rate, the motives of the followers in joining up is never probed. But rather than that being a flaw in the novel, the reader quickly appreciates that if the cult prophet himself can delude himself as to his own motives, then why wouldn’t a host of people in search of certainty also fall under the spell? Malcolm knows he’s head of a cult and that his pulpit proclamations are empty. He knows Carlos is conning him both in business and the bedroom. He knows that his fantasy love object Tyler is a lookalike of his dead lover Colin. And yet he continues to pursue all these aims, desires and actions. Sometimes we do know the truth, but are utterly powerless to change our course of actions in order to attain it.

The other thrust of Diary of a Heretic is that of the tease. Carlos the humble pastry chef starts off merely preparing sumptuous cakes and breakfasts which have both Malcolm and us the readers salivating. Carlos fondles and palpates Malcolm stuffed full of calorific food and fit to burst with his aroused desire. But Carlos plays Malcolm before the reader’s very eyes for a good chunk of the book and the reader is invited to surrender to its deliciousness anyway. It’s a grooming process and quite uncomfortable in places but reads utterly authentically.

Once they have consummated their business relationship-cum sex, the tension shifts to the mental tease of the relationship between Malcolm and his nursemaid-cum-minder Maggie. Malcolm is utterly dependent on her emotionally and shares all his intimacies with her to keep him sane among the lies that he is peddling and his disorienting celebrity that keeps him isolated under lock and key. Their relationship is a tease as it veers between the poles of love and hate, underpinned all the while by the knowledge that as a gay man he has no sexual interest in Maggie and an underlying suggestion that Maggie may wish for that to be different. It’s a far more sympathetic relationship to follow than that of Carlos and Malcolm which is transparently manipulative. This is a relationship of unrequited love and fragile neediness.

Ultimately for me, I found myself far more interested in the key relationships than any social satire aspect. I don’t know if this was the author’s intent, that the idea of a cult was to just serve as the context for these tangled relationships to play out, but it did reduce the social commentary’s significance in my eyes. If you like a read that profoundly maps the ups and downs of human relationships, then this book is for you. If you want a trenchant dissection of the operation of a cult, then this possibly isn’t the book. Once I appreciated this, I allowed myself to be wrapped up in its human warmth and foibles.

EVIE AND GUY

by Dan Holloway
128 pages, Lulu

Review by Marc Nash

What a fantastic concept for a book! George Perec may have written a whole novel without a single letter 'E' (ironic seeing as there are four in his name on the spine, bet he still got paid royalties though), but Dan Holloway has created a work of literature constructed almost entirely from numbers.

Each chapter represents a year in the lives of the eponymous Evie and Guy. The text is constructed of dates, times, duration and the parentheses reporting interruptions or other impediments to finishing, the act of masturbation. And that's it. A matrix of numbers that look random and yet means so much. For this is a book about relationship as measured by time. A clusterf*ck of a read, both literally and metaphorically.

Relationship, not in that wooly sense of you and your partner, but an actual physical relationship of two bodies (objects) in proximate space. Though the two narrative timetables are separated in the text, Evie’s following on only after the entirety of Guy’s, the reader is silently entreated to superimpose them to try and render meaning. To see where their onanistic acts might coincide (the only way perhaps for them to mutually consummate their love?) or perhaps where they are cast down in their own solitude and simultaneously scratch their own sexual itches. The beauty and simplicity of the 10 digits of the numerical palette are arranged and rearranged with subtle differences so as to offer different emotional tenors and different physical alignments.

I’m reminded of the fathers of forensics such as fingerprinting, who patiently built up a database until the sample was large enough to be able to pronounce it a science that followed rules and predictable observations. Here the reader, if they are so minded, can plot the blow by blow comparison of Evie’s times and dates with that of Guy’s to glean the emotional state of their relationship at any one moment. Was Guy frotting himself to death in a particular year because he was unfulfilled by Evie, or separated from her? Did the Fall of the Berlin Wall give him a hard on in front of the TV that he just had to relive himself? For her part, Evie’s self-pleasuring never falters while with Guy and it is only when he is dying that she becomes less surefooted (handed?). Once she has honoured his passing, she reasserts her sexuality and is able to fulfill her pleasures as before. Guy’s dishonour roll of interrupted or failed tommy tank manoeuvres attests maybe to the more mechanical torquing of the male member, that there is a climactic destination that has to be attained, else it is a failure. A dud. A blank. Even the name 'Guy' perhaps stands for every (male) man perhaps? This is a book about both relationship and gender, employing numbers but not by the numbers.

I don’t think its canvas is quite as large as the author perhaps imagines, citing the artistic language of Rothko and Emin in his preface. It’s actually way more intimate and I believe all the better for that, so that it is not weighed down by notions of grand art and experimentalism. But it is interesting, that just like an opaque piece of contemporary conceptual art may rely on its title and or an explanatory text, “Evie and Guy” hinges on that one page explanatory preface and the sole appearance of words in the numerical narrative at the year 1995 to draw the novel to its conclusion.  I read the book first without the preface and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the set of figures in the brackets represented. It was only by reading the explanatory words of the preface that those important contextualising devices were set in place.

A brave work, but in form and content. And one that could reward endless revisiting with full attention to detail. Plot your own matrices and enjoy!

 

THE UNFORTUNATES

by B.S.Johnson
176 pages, Picador

Review by Marc Nash

A book that comes in a book-shaped box! Twenty-seven sections, one labeled ‘first’, one ‘last’ and the reader is free to choose the order in which they read the interceding 25 sections. This isn’t a device for the sake of being tricksy, but the author wants to replicate the random and unreliable nature that our memories work.

A writer and journalist is sent to cover a soccer match in a Midlands town. As he steps off the train two hours ahead of kick-off, a host of memories rush into his head, as this is a town chockfull of resonance for him. He met one of his best friends who was at University here when he had travelled up for a collaboration on student newspapers. His friend died of cancer at just 29 and the book is a series of chopped up recollections of the triangular friendship together with the man’s wife, the narrator’s own love life, the disease and the nature of writing itself.

As he makes his meandering progress to the football stadium, via café, butchers and pub, he recalls time spent with his friends in various towns. Sometimes the architecture eludes him as he can’t pinpoint which pub or café, or sometimes the architecture itself has changed with progress. Equally he struggles to pinpoint whether the man’s wife, or whichever of his own female consorts was present in some recollected event or not. As much as memory floods in on an emotional level, in its caprice some of the details are denied him and they of course can inflect his emotional response to the memory. It’s interesting that one section is him finally sat in the press box, desultorily composing his report as the match proceeds, limited by both the clichéd language of sports reporting which he’d like to burst out from, plus the word limit of his column inches which pretty much predetermines what he can write even before the match kicks off and play takes what direction it will. On the inside of the box his final match report is printed, and reads very bland and lacking all the linguistic flourishes demonstrated throughout the rest of the book.

There were a couple of places where I didn’t feel the narrative conceit was consistent. It was fortunate that the penultimate section I read happened to be him in the press box of the ground. What would have happened if I’d happened to read that after the ‘first chapter’, the timing would have been way off. This did happen when an early section I read had him on the final part of his walk up to the ground, when later I read sections where he stopped off to buy some meat at a butchers. Just seemed to me that the author could have got around these timing problems easily enough but just hadn’t noticed or tried.

And what of the overall effect of the narrative conceit? My path through is in all likelihood going to be different from any other reader, since their section choices will be different from mine. I think it worked well for both the horrendous rise and fall of hope as the path of the friend’s cancer is traced and also that of memory’s fragmentedness too. As Johnson has his protagonist comment, “yes how the mind arranges itself, tries to sort for things into orders, is perturbed if things are not sorted, are not in the right order, nags away...” This is by far the most interesting parts of the narrative as he struggles over whether it was his first visit to their house, or whether he drove, as his friend had not yet passed his driving test, whether that was the occasion when he’d bought a certain book on architecture and so on. And then in the light of his friend’s premature death, does any of it matter anyway? “My mind passes dully over the familiar ground of my prejudices, so much of thought is repetition, is dullness, is sameness”.

The Unfortunates was definitely an interesting read, if not a gripping one, since the subject matter is both mundane (in the sense of what is being recalled) and grim in respect of the disease. If you’re interested in literary experimentation, or trying to get to grips with a more realistic mimesis of how the human mind works, I’d say read this novel. If however you are after an entertaining read for entertainment’s sakes, then possibly not. It certainly sparked my creative imagination and helped me resolve a project of my own that had become stalled. The idea of a reader navigating their own path through a narrative (and not a quest or treasure-finding one) is deliciously enticing.

VIRULENT BLURB: FRACTURES

by Kneel Downe
275 pages, Lulu

Review by Marc Nash

Kneel Downe is a wor(l)d builder. A fractured, fleeting world like viewing through a spectroscope. But a rich one all the same. It put me in mind of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities", as if refracted through a Jeff Noonian sphere. Indeed Downe acknowledges Noon's influence on the "Blurb" world.

'Virulent', a multi-faceted word that contains notions of virus, of infection, of poison, of spite and malignancy. But this book is all about the transmission of words, like a virus, the spread of an infectious creativity and imagination that gladly smears the willing reader and conducts us into the Blurb world. But it is a fractured one. For the book is made up of different sections, loosely and thematically linked through Detective Kurt Lobo and the nature of the sentient life in this futurescape.

After the single lined prologue that appears to conduct us into the dreams and visions of Joshua Knight, we enter the introduction to a future/alternative world in which Joshua's technology "births a new age" through the drug ReGen. The next part of the book takes us through the various physiological and psychological "Phazes" of the transformation brought about by use of the drug. This is where Downe's skill with language comes to the fore. Compact 140 character what- passages, bulletins, blurbs? populate this section of the book. (Yes, this section evolved via Twitter). Evocative, rhythmic pulses of language, echoing song titles and lyrics and probably fragments of literature too. The language is both skintight and sumptuous to the mind's eye, a world conjured through words, but not the sentence running on after sentence of conventional description you might be familiar with. The compact rhythm drives the pace, yields the tension of each passage, the word choices, the imagery and the assonances fuel the pleasure of luxuriating in language itself.

The next section is "History", equally fractured and fragmented, but giving tantalising glimpses into some of the spaces in between the world of the Phazes. But then comes my favourite section, three narratives involving Detective Lobo written in the style of film scripts. Lobo moves through the ReGen world in suitably noir fashion, encountering his fellow citizens who are all gene spliced with the animal of their choice as they determine their own external appearance according to their self-image. Everyone in this world is pursuing their hedonistic pleasure, while desperately clinging on to life itself. Downe ramps up the threat and menace as new foes are on the trail of Lobo and the third script ends with Lobo surrounded on all sides by enemies terrestrial and supernatural in the Police Station, much like an "Assault on Precinct 13" scenario. And this was my only disappointment with the book, that Downe leaves me hanging not knowing the outcome, which is instead to be resolved in the next instalment of the Blurb. Downe certainly knows how to create an instant devotee, these scripts are just supremely well written and draw you fully into their world.

The final section, the "Fractures Three" is a hilarious psychological interrogation of various super-heroes and villains under the auspices of the Police. None are terribly co-operative, and Downe is playing with the idea of just how conscious of their powers and super-being these folk are, together with that split between the ordinary mortal self and that of the almost demi-god enabled by their powers. More of this as well to come in the future I hope.

 

So surrender yourself to the world built by Kneel Downe, Virulent Blurb: Fractures. A fractured world to be sure, but one erected on weighty linguistic and ideational foundations. Kneel down at the creative forge of Kneel Downe.

SIBERIAN EDUCATION:

Growing up in a Criminal Underworld
by Nicolai Lilin
570 pages, Canongate

Review by Marc Nash

In my review of Lilin's other book "Free Fall", I said that his writing about the war in Chechnya knocked the spots off Vietnam War books. And in this, his earlier memoir about his childhood, Siberian criminal culture is laid bare and knocks all Mafia tales into a cocked hat. Exotic, brutal and frankly bizarre, it's a tale of an old culture with all its values and mores which seem to derive from another planet. But the book is undeniably fascinating.

The Siberians here don't even live in Siberia, but in a region between Moldova and Ukraine after exile under the Communists as Siberia became the preserve of the Gulags and meant the local 'honest' criminals were displaced in the prisons by political prisoners. A fiercely proud and independent criminal culture who stubbornly resisted integration under the Communists, now find themselves trying to preserve their independent traditions in the face of the new Russia and Capitalism. They are guided by a strange mix of Orthodox religion and criminal code of ethics, in which God is used in elliptical codes that the police and authorities can't pierce. They refer to themselves as men of honour, bringing the justice of God to their criminal, anti-authoritarian activities. The body count is high in the book, mainly for those who fall foul of the strange etiquette built of 'honourable' behaviour. And yet this etiquette is utterly predicated on respect like any Mafiosa, albeit one more embedded on your actual deeds, rather than naked shows of power. The language and etiquette apart from being religious is also rather poetic and lyrical, because it's formal. "Dignified criminals introduce themselves, exchange greetings and wish each other every blessing even before they start killing each other". It's like something out of Shakespeare's portrayals of high nobility.

They are criminals and yet their code demands they remain humble. They eschew flagrant shows of wealth. The money is really only spent on provisioning everyday living, guns and religious icons. They despise gangsters who wear gold, instead they have their copious tattoos tell their stories for them. At the time of writing this novel, Lilin was a professional tattooist in Italy, bringing his native skills with him. It's hard to see quite why these criminals worked so hard to rob for money, when they didn't really spend it, other than helping out less fortunate members of their community, which usually meant widows of other criminals who maybe wouldn't have needed financial help if their men hadn't worked so fatally hard being criminals... In fact the most money appearing in the book was for a community raised reward to track down the perpetrators of the rape of an autistic girl. And the strange rules of the community meant that only the juveniles could go about seeking out the perpetrators and seeking justice, because they equated to the same age of the victim. This chapter was seriously fascinating and alienating in equal counts.

The mores of the criminal culture is a repellent one. Kids get inducted into knives and then guns. They all have scars from battles with other ethnic groups. They think nothing of disabling a foe in a fight by slicing the ligaments behind the knee. They expect to wind up in jail and indeed the chapter on Lilin's juvenile prison experience is jaw-droppingly powerful in its utter insanity. But ultimately, traditional as though it may be, it still derives from choosing a position and that terrible word 'lifestyle', borne of opposition to authority. It is not morally superior to the corrupt and brutal police, however hard the gangsters proclaim themselves as honourable and fair. The casual and cursory way they refer to police they have murdered to my mind cannot be mitigated by their view of being honourable in all other behaviours.

Yet having said this, the lifestyle and community by the end of Siberian Education is shown to be declining. The culture resisted the Soviet authorities' attempts to crush and integrate it, but as so often, it seems that the lure of Capitalism has done for it. A postcard from a fascinating, far-flung outpost.

THE REDEEMER

by Jo Nesbo

571 pages, Vintage

 

Review by Marc Nash

 

This is my 3rd Nesbo book in the Harry Hole detective series. And I've had diminishing returns with each read. Maybe I was unlucky to have started off at the apex with "The Snowman". Perhaps it's unfortunate that having read the most recent books seven and eight, now I am having to go backwards in the series (this was the sixth), which may not best serve up his work. Or perhaps it's because I have a problem with character-led series. I've said it in my review of "The Leopard", but what new insight into Hole or any other main character can the author reveal by book eight without me the reader thinking why didn't that trait reveal itself before?

 

But that wasn't necessarily the problem with this book, although how many more times can Hole face death at the hands of the killer/save someone from the same, or sleep with someone who turns out to be psychologically damaged beyond good health? Actually, there's considerably less of the first two in this than the others I've read. In fact there's tranches of text where not very much happens at all, apart from characters being en route to somewhere else, or just waiting around in houses and rooms that are not theirs (the Salvation Army own lots of properties for their benighted clients and staff alike). The body count is low in this book, which is not necessarily a problem, but the action around it sags somewhat.

 

There's also a lot about the Salvation Army's history and internal politics within Norway, which was rather dull and maybe of more significance to Norwegian life than it is to, say, Britain's. Instead you get these strange energy flows within most chapters, whereby the crescendoing end of the chapter has to do the work of picking up the flagging momentum that precedes it; but Nesbo has this recurring device of ending a chapter with someone being given a revelation in a bag or by phone message, but the reader doesn't get to see what it is. It just irritates me as a reader rather than playing with my emotions or interest, because it is so contrived. Then there's an alarming plot oversight in which Hole is issued with a permit to collect a new firearm, but the permit is stolen from his home, redeemed for a gun ultimately used to commit a murder. And though the police are aware that his gun has been fraudulently claimed, there seems no comeback on retrieving it or dealing with the consequence that it has become a murder weapon.

 

As to the third of the incredulous strands, that of Hole getting the girl, well the episode in this novel is rather distasteful to my sensibilities. A woman who was raped at fourteen (which is the start of the book), has kept herself pure out of a mixture of her Salvation Army faith and her own trauma of the original rape. And yet along comes our 'Arry, reformed alcoholic (sort of) and sweeps her off her feet, irrespective of the fact she is tangled up in his current investigation. I don't know, I find it a touch troubling that a woman who has eschewed sex after being raped, should finally be prepared to cast off her inhibitions because of Hole (even though ultimately it is he who turns her advances down). I think that represents a bit of moral blindness by the author, since Hole is so identified with Nesbo and Hole is a man who can apparently 'cure' traumatised rape victims of their fear of sex and perhaps also turn homosexuals straight...

 

The only redeeming feature of "TheRedeemer" (geddit?), is that there's actually a rather good character portrayal in it. A refugee from the bloody Yugoslavian conflict is drawn in a fully-fledged and sympathetic fashion. Unlike the other bad guys in this who are just bad (in all senses of the word) and homeless junkies who populate the book as the background service users of the Salvation Army, who are all thinly drawn. I was genuinely engaged by the story and fate of the Yugoslav refugee and Hole himself has some interesting dilemmas and thoughts on redemption itself. But I suspect his thoughts on the matter are not apparent in any of the novels preceding this one and I don't anticipate reading any more of the Harry Hole series to investigate whether I'm correct or not.

AMONG THE HOODS

by Harriet Sergeant
224 pages, Faber 224

Review by Marc Nash

Harriet Sergeant ought to be someone I'm opposed to all down the political line. A journalist for right-wing newspaper "The Daily Mail" and member of Conservative Think Tank "The Centre For Policy Studies" and yet she has produced a book about Britain's underclass youth that shows a real sensitivity, empathy and willingness to engage with people she ordinarily would never come into contact with in her daily life; kids from the 'other side' of the street.

She befriends and mentors a gang of South London teens, as she tries to help guide them from a life on the streets and crime, but comes to see how they are stymied at every stage by indifferent, box ticking State institutions and donation-hungry charities that do little with the money raised. They are trapped by not only their poor standards of literacy (so that they can't fill in complex bureaucratic forms) and chaotic lifestyles that mean they rarely keep appointments, but the move to break away from the 'Hood to a conventional life with such a remote chance of success through the paucity of life skills, is actually a psychologically rupturing decision, since once you repudiate your gang family, there is no returning back into their bosom when society almost inevitably rebuffs your attempts to try and go legit. So most don't even attempt to. Her natural political 'position' ought the criminality is due to family breakdown and a lack of male parental role models, is actually quickly overthrown for a far more sophisticated analysis into the plight of these kids broken at a very early age.

We get a very insightful report into the poverty of these kids' experience. Where everyday things we take for granted are completely unknown to them. However, everything is monetised inside their heads in their vain attempts to translate them into meaningfulness within their own shrunken value system. We get the crushingly sad outline of how these kids often are hungry and commit street crimes just in order to be able to eat. Because Sergeant shows them a bit of love and loyalty, she is utterly accepted into their lives, whereas the never-ending parade of social workers, parole officers, foster parents and other carers change monthly so that no rapport is ever built up. Sergeant responds to the utter humanity these kids still manage to retain, though she can see that while one-to-one they are essentially decent young people, together in the gang they are vicious and egg each other on. They are bright but untutored. They are analytical, but in a completely unstructured, untutored way. Their analysis runs to what is required for survival, how to read the signs and symbols of life on the few streets they can traverse safely without fear of being jumped by rival gang members.

So as a portrait of the mindset of the likes of those involved in the riots of 2011 the book is a triumph. And props to the author for entering such an alien psyche so far removed from her own. But there were a few psychologically troubling issues that the book didn't deal with. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I did wonder at the exact nature of the relationship between author and the main boy named Tuggy Tug. I don't doubt the author's real intentions to help him and she does admit she made several misjudgements in her actions that possibly gave him false hope and exacerbated his problems. But I also wonder why she became quite so intensely involved in his life over the course of three years. Was he a pet project to save and redeem? Was he a different sort of son she emotionally adopted, the antithesis of her privileged son at a private school and who points out that while she has photos of Tuggy Tug on her phone, she has none of her own flesh and blood son? I was just a little uncomfortable that she didn't make space in the book to seriously analyse these questions in her own mental makeup, because unresolved I think they potentially have sinister resonances. As enlightening as her portrayal of the lives of these benighted youngsters is, I can't help feel that with a lack of full self-awareness as to her own emotional drives, then she was doomed to fail Tuggy Tug. That she would always remain on the outside, not merely through class, educational and value differences, but because her attitude towards him of redemption or salvation is patronising. I had the sense that she was akin to a colonial missionary and therefore unwittingly and well-meaningly exploitative. What's worse, a missionary within her own country, but one so divided from itself that it feels like a foreign land in places. Nor was there any examination of her ready acceptance of criminal behaviour in her presence, particularly in her car around drug taking or dealing. It's clear her sympathies increasingly slide over towards the kids because of the barriers she comes to encounter on their behalf. But at no point is she reflective about why she is prepared to stand their criminality, other than without it they don't get to eat. Again, she may well have perfectly acceptable or understandable reasons for putting up with it, but she fails to offer them here and I think such omission is problematic.

Among the Hoods is an essential read and a troubling one, for both good and bad reasons.

LATE TO THE PARTY

Wherein we examine books everyone else checked out ages ago...

 

American Psycho

by Brett Easton Ellis
384 pages, Picador Fiction

Review by Marc Nash

I'd avoided reading this when it came out, but in a moment of weakness some 22 years later I picked up the free copy I'd scored at a reading I did last year. I was broke and waiting for my Amazon vouchers to arrive before buyring some new titles, so there was nothing left for it but this. I don't think time is the issue here, even though the Yuppie culture of the 90s that the book satirises lies in tatters as financial sectors in economies all over the world collapses around our ears. No, I think the book comes down to taste. Do you buy into the humour and satire and overlook the graphic excesses of torture and violence, or can you simply not get past that?

Patrick Bateman is a Yuppie, living off an unspecified inheritance so that he wants for nothing and seems to do no work whatsoever in his Wall Street firm of Pearce & Pearce where he works in Hostile Takeovers (get it?). Instead we get a litany of his Yuppie clothes, detailing every brand label; his workouts at the gym; his love of gadgets and accessories; his dining out in exclusive or new restaurants; his chasing after cocaine in fashionable clubs; taunting the homeless by flaunting his own wealth and of course his penchant for ultra-violence. First of all, it's worth saying that we have 127 pages of all the above except the violence and this is turgid heavy going. Bateman may well have forensic powers of recall and recognition of brand labels, including for women's clothes, which is bemusing (since when he is shown killing women, he's too febrile to pause to examine their clothes labels), yet neither he nor his yuppie cronies can ever recall the names of other yuppie acquaintances. They can't seem to remember who they're dating either, as in their power games they make sure to screw their confreres' girlfriends behind their backs, and Bateman is often leaving his dates waiting at wrong destinations. But 127 pages of this is as I say highly tedious. If you want a critique of capitalism, then you're better off reading Nicholson Baker's early books, "The Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature". I will give Ellis some credit here, in that his critique is less generalised about capitalism and specific to the Wall Street yuppie culture of the 1990s. But he makes the point quickly about both their inter-changeability for one another, as well as the emptiness of their consumer culture and we don't need it relentlessly rammed in our faces for quite so many pages.

So once the torture and murder kick in, then it becomes a different sort of novel. The graphic detail of the unpicking of his victims matches the forensic detail of listing people's clothes or a shopping spree in an accessories store. And I get that this is the point, the emptiness and vacuity is the same for all sorts of activity. Bateman literally dissects his victims as if trying to get beneath the surface of their material reality, only to find that there too lies nothing. No depth, no profundity, no meaning. While personally not particularly offended by the gross depictions of violence, I do feel there is a dissonance in tone here. While the satire on clothes and clubs and restaurants is clearly comic, such gratuitous detail of torture cannot carry the same comic touch. Hence the novel to me is schizoid and ultimately doesn't work. In the same way that Bolano's chapter in "2666" ultimately just alienates and keeps the reader outside the text.

I did feel that Ellis' descriptions of Bateman's swings between orderliness and disordered mental states to be unbelievable. I just couldn't credit that he could be quite so ordered to hold down a high-flying job, (even if he does no work, again probably the satirical point), when compared with the raging insanity he displays elsewhere. Part of the satire seemed to be how all the clues he left to his bloody activities were ignored by those around him as if they simply couldn't see it. The scene in a dry cleaner’s, when he is arguing about their ability to remove bloodstains from his clothing is amusing. But again I couldn't really buy this whole premise. Dead bodies always betray their existence through smell. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, Bateman likes to keep body parts around long after the event.

For me there remained an unresolved but important question emerging from all of this and one hinted at even within those first 127 pages when he occasionally says what he'd like to do to the person sat opposite him who was irritating him beyond belief; do these murders really take place, or do they only exist inside his head, in which case the book becomes something else and something frankly less problematic, because who among us hasn't imagined a grizzly end for some irritant or other in our minds? When he confronts a fellow yuppie on whose answer phone he had confessed to his vile deeds, the other man says Bateman couldn't have long ago killed a mutual colleague since he had dined with him in London only a week before. Is this again a case of the colleague dining with another interchangeable yuppie believing it to be the man Bateman claimed to have killed? Or had Bateman dreamed the whole thing up? At the apartment in which this grizzly murder and then a further double murder were supposed to have occurred, now is being shown around to prospective buyers by an estate agent with no mention of the blood soaked carpets and walls supposedly left by Bateman. Maybe no one ever dropped Bateman's name into the Police, because these crimes never happened beyond Bateman's fantasies? This just made the book even more unsatisfying for me.

I will say that when Ellis describes Bateman losing the plot, the modulations within his state of mind to include anxiety, impassivity, febrile rage, disorientation and a general unravelling, were handled extremely well. I was really invited inside the rollercoaster of Bateman's thought processes during these sections. But again this authentic writing only served to highlight the rather limp satire of the opposite states of mind of the yuppie at a restaurant or getting dressed. So there were enough bits of good writing to say that the book is not wholly without merit, but these I suspect will be dwarfed by that original dichotomy of whether the reader is likely to find the torture porn a turn off, or that it would not hinder them advancing through the relentless pages of the book. For me it wasn't a hindrance, but the unsatisfactory dissonances in tone, the dull expounding on brands and trendy behaviours, certain incredulity at sections of the plot and finally the ambiguity as to whether the murders were even happening, all conspired to leave me feeling this book doesn't work. But at no point did it make me want to pick up an icepick and drive it into the author's brainpan.

THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING

by Ben Marcus
140 pages, Dalkey Archive

Review by Marc Nash

The age of wire and string. Conjures up an image of an art exhibit of found objects threaded together by, well wire and string. You walk around the 'sculpture' in a three hundred and sixty degree circle trying to capture all its textures and perspectives, struggling to see the meaning, wondering if you've missed anything in its very refusal to speak to you. A bit like reading this book in many ways.

For you can let the words and language here wash over you as if you are in a wondrous hot tub, having the lexemes lick at your skin and gently massage the subcutaneous tissue. Or you can begin to feel mounting paranoia of the relentless jets of bubbled water buffeting and barraging you as if trying to dissolve you entirely. Depending on your temperament and predilection, this book will either offer you up its delights, or have you hurling against the wall. I can't take responsibility for this review ensuring the happier of two said outcomes.

The book presents itself as some kind of alien report on human culture. But either the alien intelligence can't quite penetrate the connections between things and the relationship of cause and effect; or they can, but are stymied by the structure of their language and ability to organise their observations using our foreign terms. So what you get here is a series of conflations, whereby images are ripped from their familiar frameworks and soldered together with something rather discordant. So for example, the opening chapter conflates sex and resuscitation of a dead wife with powering up household devices such as toasters. Food is treated as an outcrop of textiles, so that a map drawn upon an animal’s kin supposedly indicates the points at which food can be located according to the very grain of the animal pelt. Which is close to the truth but not quite nailing it. God is conflated with the weather, which again is not so wide of the mark when you consider early religious pantheons. The enunciation of names equates to generation of actual power, which again is a wonky version of what was once believed by mankind. Elsewhere the words we speak, when not construed as formed by the reverberations of wire and string draped across the mouth, are also conflated with weather systems. Tattoos are contraband ways of smuggling films on the skin, which again a tattoo could be read as a cartoon still but also is so wide of the mark.

There is no code here to be penetrated I think. That's why you either just go with it and let the words lap you like an incoming tide, or you blow your brains out at the exasperation of it all. Yet there is an increasing narrative legibility. By two-words of the way through, our non-human observer is able to string together coherent sentences that follow one after another in a logical fashion, even if the internal content of each sentence is still jumbling up its connections and images. The observer is moving towards narrative, towards putting together a block of story-relating text by the penultimate chapter. It's very sly indeed. However for me, the biggest reward was in reading the glossary of terms after each section - just as jumbled up, but a boiled down pith of what Marcus is doing here throughout. In a way, this book could easily have just been the glossaries and it would still have yielded the same amount of recoverable meaning. Some of the 'definitions' were an absolute delight. Whole microworlds of superstitious belief and metaphysics contained in so few words. Indeed there are times when sections of the text read as abstract and abstruse as a religious enchiridion.

So ultimately what is this book for? By which I mean is it worth the read? Well apart from the uniqueness of the experience, I think it possesses a validity in what it does with language if you're interested in that sort of thing. It's noteworthy that the book is short enough not to drag in its opaqueness. Here are our own logics reflected and refracted back to us through this text, showing us up to be absurdly non-rational beings in our habits, practises and behaviour. This is how alien we must seem to a, well to an alien. Ben Marcus has pulled off the not insubstantial feat of being a human writing about seeing humans from a non-human perspective. The aliens have assimilated our lexicon and basic rules of grammar, yet they are producing virtual nonsense text in order to set down their analysis of us. Our language lets them down. Possibly because it seems alien to them with all its subtle shades and ellipses, that is you need to be human to use our language correctly. Or else the language itself is so self-reflexive, that for all millennium of effort, it remains a poor tool for examining and casting light on ourselves, let alone its opacity to a different species.

Heady stuff. Over to you now. Look into, well not your soul, but your central processing chip and decide if you want to spare the necessary RAM to fence with this book.

THE MIRACLE INSPECTOR

by Helen Smith
252 pages, Tyger Books

Review by Marc Nash

What's your favourite cause of dystopian society? Nuclear apocalypse? Viral pandemic? Economic crash and burn? The London of this book has contrived to put itself under a dystopian yoke through democracy! Entrusted with power, the people have wilfully demonstrated either apathy or irony in their choices. Consequently London has saddled itself with a mad self-aggrandising bureaucracy of nonsensical jobs, such as Lucas as the Inspector of Miracles. Though there is a vague unstated threat of worldwide terrorism, more local threats of rapists and paedophiles at large, have led to women being prohibited from work, having no political rights, being largely confined to the house and having to wear burka-like garments when outside in public.

Art, too, falls foul of this regime, since art offers outlets for protest and politicisation. In a world without art there is a diminished notion of love. The novel's husband and wife main characters struggle across the kitchen table to communicate with one another, let alone approach any notion of love. They cast their fantasies and desires outside of their shared house. Angela, although she doesn't understand the concept, wants to be a poet's muse. Her mind flies with some love letters she's been entrusted with which like her, dream of escape beyond London. Lucas visits the wife of his security chief who has been under surveillance, so that Lucas wants to put flesh on the fantasy figure he has been a witness to on screen. With the house under CCTV surveillance, he has to lure her outside, where of course she is clad head to foot in her swaddling attire, so no flesh is visible. In his job as the official investigator into claims of miracles, he becomes attached to a mute girl who only communicates by smiling. His honed senses tells him she has no miraculous powers, yet something about her and her mother who was formerly a news reader means they are included in his plans to escape from London.

The characters' thought processes are impressionistic and mainly inconclusive. After all, they are overwhelmed by trying to match their own limited analytical abilities with the thoughts and necessary conditions on their behaviour embedded by the system. Echoes of Orwell's "1984" here. Put this together with the feminist perspective suggested by the regressive legislation affecting women and you might conceive this to be a political novel. But Smith is far more subtle than that. The Miracle Inspector is more an investigation into the true nature and possibility of love. Characters come to empathise with others around them, make sacrifices, demonstrate an awareness of the 'other'. Verbal communication itself may remain stunted, but a real emotional mutuality is attained. The ending for Lucas and Angela is utterly heart-rending. The young poet who has the novel's final words makes your mouth fall open with the simple but poignant observation he offers.

I described Smith's previous novel as 'slyly subversive'. This novel is all that and more.