Hotel de Dream by Edmund White 2007

Edmund White’s not quite latest novel – he published another in 2012 – is a story conjured from the last tubercular breaths of Stephen Crane, the great American writer whose novel The Red Badge of Courage, 1895, experimental in its day, dealt with war’s dirty emotions. It can’t be called an early novel because Crane died 5 years later at the age of twenty-nine.

White imagines that Crane, who imagined the American Civil War from an eighteen year old private’s standpoint, dictated a novella to his wife Cora when he was too weak to type. Cora was older and sturdier than Stephen. Her career included journalism as well as running brothels. Crane’s physique was slight and his life short. White seems to tip him, on his death bed, off the comfortable mattress of heterosexuality by inserting into his publications list the unpublished The Painted Boy, a tragic tale of gay love in late 19^th century New York. Cora faithfully takes it down in longhand.

But White doesn’t quite tip Stephen onto the floor. Cora knows Crane’s heart lies with a married woman who rejected him in early youth. Enthusiastic promoter of Stephen’s poetic sensibility, Cora is now faced, in The Painted Boy, with another possible source of jealousy. Is Crane, whose sex life has aferall been lived on the disreputable brothel-haunting fringes of heterosexuality, really an ‘invert’? Cora staunchly swipes her jealousy aside and trundles the pain-wracked Stephen off to a German sanitorium for a last ditch stand against death .

Maybe White is suggesting something different. Just as Crane’s experimental Red Badge was written without the slightest knowledge of Union foot soldiering in 1863, so his (White’s fictional) The Painted Boy is imagined without knowledge of homosexual love. In other words, Crane’s generous imagination was the foundation of his art, often described as redefining realist north American fiction. So continues the great literary debate and brain-teaser: what on earth is realist literature anyway? And who coined that deathly prescription ‘write what you know’?

Every layer of Hotel de Dream is compellingly imagined with minimal fuss. White adds just enough colour and poetry and historical detail to create rippling literary images. A reverberating minor character is born in one sentence, one line of dialogue. Like White, Crane has been called an impressionist. Crane is slipping away, his head full of poetry and money worries. But it isn’t his inevitable death propelling the novel. It’s the completion of The Painted Boy. The dictation of it connects Cora’s chapters and Stephen’s. The latter flickers between first and third person. Cora’s remain firmly in the third person.

Fin de siècle London, New York, Havana, Dover, Badenweiler in the Black Forest are manifested in the coalition between Stephen’s tubercular visions and Cora’s delusions of his recovery. Questions about which is the stronger and most vivid dreamer is the book’s foundation. On it character differences are built: large forthright Cora, and Stephen, with whom White imagines Henry James to be in love, mercurial and getting slighter by the second. This was the dawn of the office worker and the skyscraper. According to Wikipedia, in 1908, the foundations of the Manhattan Municipal Building sank 44m into old New York.

White and Crane offer us master classes in writing historical literature. Both rest their imaginations on meticulous research. The world of The Painted Boy, the book inside the book, mixes street gang with office work with back street castration with Mafia terror. All serve the helpless pursuit of beauty. Perhaps White is giving poor old von Aschenbach in Death in Venice a gentle prod in love’s direction, and the eminently respectable Thomas Mann.

The Castle by Franz Kafka 1924

The Castle is a nightmare. The village that K, a snobby young man who believes himself to be sexually irresistible, is stuck in, crouches beneath and is the property of the Castle. The village streets elongate and contract nauseatingly. Two days seem to stretch into decades. There’s masses of snow, the Castle’s impenetrable ramparts are off stage, minor characters are invariably ugly. Night prevails. So, gothic as well as nightmarish.

Minor civil servant K has been summoned by the Castle to do an ill-defined job in an unspecified place. He needs to talk to someone in the Castle. He can’t. He doesn’t have the right contacts. He trudges through the snow from pub to schoolhouse to villager’s house to another pub and back, following dead end leads. It’s what happens in nightmares. Despite your best efforts, you don’t get anywhere. The landscape randomly shifts and at each change of scene you’re filled with hope for escape and vindication. Next moment you know you’re still trapped. K has sex with a girl whom he wants to marry more or less on the spot, he’s propositioned by a few more girls, and has some difficulty with two young men who should be his assistants but aren’t. He has an even tougher time with a pub landlady, a school teacher, a large cat, a barmaid, a volunteer messenger who’s nonetheless employed by the Castle (workfare, anyone?), and a keyhole or two. Nobody’s on K’s side. Everyone badmouths everyone else. Everyone uses everyone else. This is a bad place. Kant wouldn’t have liked it.

According to David Graeber in his hilariously astute The Utopia of Rules, 2015, Bismarck’s unified Germany practiced the idea of the rational state with gusto. Bureaucracy ruled. The Deutschepost was its most efficient avatar. In 19^th century Europe and in the USA, half of government budgets were routinely spent on national postal services. Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl is set in post WW1 Austria, but the life of mean officialdom and bread-crumb wages from which Christine tries to escape was rooted not just in the Treaty of Versailles but in the Holy Roman Empire, later Prussia. Rooted in the military in other words. Particularly moving and pathetic is The Castle’s messenger, the original postie. He offers himself up as a slave in a desperate attempt to keep in with the Castle. It’s as though he‘s rushed off to sign up for the military. Not so different from the tragic business of job self assessment in which you gamble on marking your self down in order to get your boss to mark you up.

K’s nightmare is his failure to communicate with the official, any official, who’ll tell him what his job is, how long it’ll take, give him the wherewithal to do it, and pay his wages. The brilliance lies not in the book’s prose or its form. The former is plain song breaking into necessarily abstract but sometimes harmonious bureaucratese, that nasty soothing meaninglessness. The latter meanders messily: dreams don’t do cause and effect. The brilliance is its contradictory heart. K tries to understand the irrational bureaucracy he can’t even gain access to, let alone get lost in. He’s led round the houses in every sense by the villagers, Castle analysts to a woman and man. He spends pages and pages talking to them about it, thinks incessantly about it, stays awake all night worrying about it.  Every life devolves round it. Everyone is a conspiracist.

Postal services are designed to facilitate communication (email etc being the latest ). On the argument that postal services, especially the German one, were the model for modern bureaucracies, K’s problem is that the rules for official communication he comes up against are insanely capable of justifying irrational behavior. It’s a general problem. Human beings have an inexhaustible fund of logical reasons for justifying their actions. It doesn’t necessarily make doing those things ok. Graeber’s book contains, among other things, a thrilling anthropological exploration of the idea of rationality.

What’s so awful about K’s nightmare is that the bureaucrats, the ones whom carriages whisk out of the Castle and who’re back inside before K can drag himself off his straw pallet in the filthiest corner of the lesser of the two pubs, aren’t faceless. They’re real by hearsay, they have names, even have names that differ by one letter alone, they leave footprints in the snow, but they’re just beyond reach. They’re ‘veiled in mist and darkness, …’ p9, and they laugh at K, toss him excuses, roll their glib rationality round their mouths.

Kafka died before he could finish The Castle. Maybe he’s sitting on a heavenly cloud editing away right now. Wikipedia tells me he had a plan for ending the book. For sure the nightmare gets more nightmarish. Kafka’s surreal imagination takes off with the passage near the end of the book in which a long corridor (standard nightmare prop in my unconscious) hosts a ludicrous internal-post dance: a lowly office servant delivers and retrieves (hardcopy) files at doors. But this requires bargaining, begging, negotiating, humiliation, scattering of papers in fury. ‘Then even this excellent servant would sometimes lose self-control, he would go to his barrow, sit down on the files, wipe the sweat from his brow, and for a little while do nothing at all but sit there helplessly swinging his feet. All round there was very great interest in the affair, everywhere there was whispering going on, scarcely any door was quiet, and up above at the top of the partition walls faces queerly masked almost to the yes with scarves and kerchiefs, though for the rest never for an instant remaining quiet in one place, watched all that was going on.’ p260.

Inside some of these doors are the senior civil servants K is desperate to extract a decision from. They’re in bed (the corridor is tenuously in a pub). Here’s civil servant Bürgel expounding his theory of night time interrogation: ‘The night time interrogations are, indeed, nowhere actually prescribed by the regulations, so one is not offending against any regulation if one tries to avoid them, but conditions, the excess of work, the way the officials are occupied in the Castle, how indispensible they are, the regulation that the interrogation of applications is to take place only after the final conclusion of all the rest of the investigation, but then instantly, all this and much else has made night interrogations an indispensible necessity.’ p247. A few pages later at 5am and K falling apart from lack of sleep, he says to himself, ‘’For the gentlemen here it is always noon.’ … Once it sounded like … daybreak in a hen-roost. Somewhere indeed a gentleman imitated the crowing of a cock.’ p257.

And this is decades before digital communication was a twinkle in the US military’s eye. Much more horrifying is the grip of modern bureaucracy, corporate and state the both, when you can have thousands of friends you’ve never clapped eyes on in your life, and will never, let alone bureaucrats.

The Castle is a nightmare to read. One of them that after the fact you know is a work of genius.

Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge 1977

Our criminally psychopathic rulers, liars, lovers of remote war and death, are intent on destroying our world. Beryl Bainbridge is well out of it. She was writing in more innocent times. Armed police, in mid 70s NW London at least where Injury Time is set, could become minor comics in a farce, and children become minor characters who’re annoyingly unable to read and extremely rude. Bainbridge’s main characters, especially Binny, a single mother, don’t fear their children will be blown apart by a bomb, drown in an electrically-charged Thames swollen by melting Arctic glaciers, or be poisoned by carcinogen-packed food. Parents in Beirut and Baghdad, in Nigeria and Turkey, were as off the mainstream media map as they are today.

Bainbridge’s imagination is surreal and just this side of cruel. She refrains from skewering her characters because they do so themselves. They talk at cross purposes, belittle each other while pretending affection, ignore reality, and get shot not in the head or heart but in the ear lobe. Divorced Binny (in the mid 70s a woman could still catch something called loose morals from divorce. Middle class men still talked about playing the game, hence the title.) has been having an affair with pipe-smoking, married Edward for years. She’s fed up with ‘being hidden in the shadows of the saloon bar.’ p5. A married colleague of Edward plus his wife are invited round to Binny’s for dinner. The colleague, says Edward, is a broadminded sort of chap, his wife too mousey to object. Binny’s noisy and demanding children are hoofed out of the front door. An unexpected guest is Binny’s boozy friend Alma who’s having husband trouble. Bainbridge has set us up for a raucous evening. I was also pulled along by the prospect of fatality, as in Another Part of the Woods 1968 (see my blog May 2015) and quite a few in The Birthday Boys 1991. But Bainbridge is the mistress of anti-climactic climax. She’s also very good at women extracting themselves from relationships which the men love – Edward believes Binny yearns to ‘put intricate little bundles of socks into his drawer.’ p6 – and which the women realize they can’t stand, neither the men nor themselves in relation to the men.

Armed robbers ensue. Armed police stage a stake-out of Binny’s house. The radio informs the surprised hostages that a bank has been robbed down the road. They don’t put two and two together. Nobody is as the men believe they are. Edward wets his pants when threatened. Ada is more sexy piece than old soak. Edward’s colleague’s wife is living the horror of being rejected by a lover. Edward’s colleague is himself getting his leg over. There’s a pram in the hall and a bicycle. Shins are cracked. Taps are turned on, doors are slammed. Binny is raped, or she supposes she’s been raped, by one of the rather amenable armed robbers who has red hair. Edward wants to go home. Binny is repulsed by him.

Bainbridge whips around with great verve inside every character’s head in order to give us an inside story invariably and absurdly at odds with their persona. That’s the heart of her comedy and since dialogue is how characters deceive themselves and everyone else, and since a character’s interior is likely to be equally deceptive, the reader can enjoy the jolly japes in the belief that actions speak louder than always funny and laconic words. I wasn’t disappointed. Bainbridge is excellent at last page climax. Just for a laugh, her characters complain about the housing market as well as modern children.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James 2015

This is Jamaica’s Book of the Dead, or rather Book of the Killed. Its opening voice is a politician’s, murdered some time after 1959, murderer uncaught. ‘Dead people never stop talking,’ he says. And the 12 narrators, only three of whom survive the book, never stop. In December 1976 seven young Kingston gunmen fail to assassinate the Singer, named only once as Bob Marley. He’s the book’s off stage heart, the other characters’ raison d’etre, the ‘you’ the murdered politician, one amongst the cacophony of voices, talks to. He’s silent.

James, 2015 Man Booker winner, pitches an extreme fiction into Jamaica’s extreme history. When the Brits departed two years after the Bay of Pigs, they effectively handed the new nation to the USA. Cuba is only 300 km away. By the mid-70s, Mr Clark, a (fictional) CIA officer in Jamaica, ‘talk about Cuba like a man who can’t accept that him woman don’t want him no more.’ Thus speaks Josey Wales, the most lethal and brilliant gang leader and ghetto don of the four decades and three continents the novel spans. Marley’s real seven would-be assassins were never caught let alone identified, a lacuna created by suppression, extra-judicial killings and civil war in west Kingston, but at the same time a fictional space into which James pours the truth.

By p15 he’s told us the story of one of the assassins. ‘By 1971 I shoot my first shot. / I was ten. / And ghetto life don’t mean nothing. Is nothing to kill a boy. I remember the last time my father try to save me.’ Two days later Bam Bam witnesses his father beat and rape his mother with a broom stick and then one of his mother’s clients beat his father, ‘rub my father lips with him gun,’ rape his father in the mouth and then blow his head off. The boy’s mother laughs and kicks his dead father. Her client shoots her in the face. Already the descriptions of violence are so shocking I wonder how these human beings are possible. I’m certain James is telling the truth. Then I remember what Bam Bam said four pages back.

The murdered politician, whose voice bookends four of the novel’s five sections, was the hope of the new nation. (How many times has that story transpired in neo-colonial Africa, India, Latin America, especially in Africa, especially in the Caribbean?) Instead Michael Manley, ‘who look like white man but chat like bad naigger when [he] have to,’ was elected in 1972 on the slogan ‘Better Must Come’. ‘But,’ says Bam Bam, ‘worst come first. Two men bring guns to the ghetto. One man show me how to use it. But ghetto people used to kill each other long before that. With anything we could find: stick, machete, knife, ice pick, soda bottle. Kill for food. Kill for money. Sometimes a man get kill because he look at another man in a way he don’t like. And killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.’ p9.

Into music and the Singer, Bam Bam channels all his longing. The Singer must get out of the ghetto. He must make a hit song. He’s hope amongst the ‘dunes and dunes’ of garbage, ‘like the Sahara just switched out sand for junk and smoke. …’ says the CIA station chief, Jamaica. p207. ‘Beauty,’ writes Alex Pierce, a white US music journalist in town for the Singer’s 1976 Peace Concert, ’has infinite range but so does wretchedness and the only way to accurately grasp the full unending vortex of ugly that is Trench Town is to imagine it. … To understand the ghetto, to make it real, one should forget seeing it. Ghetto is a smell. … Fucking hell,’ Alex says a paragraph later, ‘Shit sounds like I’m writing for ladies who lunch on Fifth Avenue.’ pp81,82. There’s a problem, James is saying, with the aesthetics of violence. He isn’t Tarantino the master joker. He trusts the scales of justice to weigh each voice well and to release truth from individual skins or rather larynxes. It’s the Book of the Dead. The ancient Egyptians were black Africans.

So not one truth for sure, but a throwing of every one of James’ gargantuan writing powers at his country: he creates a wild cubism way beyond, I’d imagine, the imagination of even William Faulkner, whose 1935 As I Lay Dying he acknowledges. His narrative voices range stylistically from paragraph-free stream of consciousness to finely etched literary description, dialogue seguing into internal conversation without too many speech marks because a novel plays with both limitless subject and contingent object.

The story isn’t told, or shown much. It accumulates, each voice mumbling or screaming or manipulating or lying or singing. Bam Bam, locked up by Josey Wales in a shack the day before the assassination attempt with five other coked-up, wound-up boys, three guns each, misses his target, the Singer’s head and his heart and Bam Bam’s 15 year old voice breaks into climactic poetry.

When Alex says, ‘… I am slowly realising that even though the Singer is the centre of the story, it really isn’t his story. …’ he mimics the reader’s progress. James demands patience. The accumulating story settles itself around you, plenty daggers concealed under it. ‘Like there’s a version of this story that’s not really about [the Singer], but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that might actually provide a bigger question than me asking him why he smokes ganga.’ p221. Yes, I thought, it’s about the CIA destroying Jamaicans’ hope, template for and copy of other countries. Tristan Phillips, inside New York’s Rikers penitentiary, tells Alex: ‘People like me, our life write out before we, without asking we permission. … Maybe somebody should put all of this together, because no Jamaican going do it. No Jamaican can do it, brother, either we too close or somebody going to stop we. … / Shit. / Damn. / People need to know. … We could’a really do it. People was just hopeful enough and tired enough and fed up enough and dreaming enough that something could’a really happen.’ p568. By the end of the novel, 1991, all but one of the three known witnesses to the attempted assassination have been killed. An unknown witness survives. The former is a terrified white man. The latter just wants to survive her not so new life in the US. Despite the passage of nearly 40 years, Marlon James is a brave man. Too many novelists have been accused of writing the truth.

The book’s technical extremity pushes against its beauty. As I Lay Dying has 14 narrators in a quarter the number of pages. Initially I thought Seven Killings had at least 30. Some, like Bam Bam’s, are ghetto Jamaican. Josey Wales speaks how it suits him. ‘Always speak proper English when you want a man to know that this argument is over,’ he remarks, p419. The CIA speak crude, arrogant American, openly mendacious. By the end of the book, Alex can slip in and out of Jamaican. Nina Burgess, the woman narrator, is determined not to speak it. A Cuban arsonist’s English is Spanish-inflected. Unlike the others, though, the Jamaicans are self-conscious speakers. They know about the politics and colour of language and, as narrators do, they adopt other voices in the telling of their own stories. No wonder I more than doubled the narrators in my head. Their wit is fixed-blade sharp, their thinking quick and deep, especially when they cut Babylon’s representatives off at the knees. Batty-boy and pussy-hole aren’t insults but descriptions. In ghetto Jamaican, irony, Alex remarks, is underutilised. Sometimes the book asked me to drop it.

Each section is one day’s events narrated by the many elbowing each other off the page. M.M. Bahktin thought Dickens did heteroglossia, the novelist’s highest function, pretty well. On a comfortable cloud in heaven, Bahktin is reading A Brief History of Seven Killings, I hope. The book is very long, sex often seeping into the violence. At times I got a bit dazed. The enormous cast, the historical and geographical sweep, require four pages, Tolstoy-like, of dramatis personae. Few characters are stupid and none is innocent let alone nice although some are damn jackass, like the rastas from the posh end of Kingston. Is the Singer so? Is rescuing one of his would-be assassins from posse (gang) murder and keeping the boy close to him a fool’s act, ignoring Cassandra’s wailing? Or is it a clever stunt to neutralise an enemy? Is it an act of goodness? Is James enlarging the already giant myth of Bob Marley or is he asking the reader to turn him back into a man? One of his most beautiful songs, the posthumous Buffalo Soldier, is about the black US cavalry regiments who fought in the Indian Wars from 1866. The native Americans whom they killed called them buffalo soldiers. Whether they were dragooned or volunteered is irrelevant. Slavery was abolished in the US in 1865. The Singer understood and grieved for his people’s violent history.

Then homophobia. In a world where women are pussy-holes or whores or ignored, and guns are Babylon’s gift to the ghetto, men hate and love each other, it seems, in equal measure. Some men, therefore, prefer to be in prison. Prison has books as well as available cocky. Weeper, Josey Wales’ studious enforcer, hates a boy who speaks tenderly of his lover, agonizes about offering his butt to a white man. How can a black man, especially if he wears spectacles and has read Bertrand Russell, let a white man be on top? The last word of the book, however, goes to Nina, the girl with the hammer-head mouth who gives up tramping up and down the road outside the Singer’s house waiting to remind him he had sex with her and therefore owes her money for a visa outa here. In 680 pages, she ditches humiliation and clocks up four identities. If you’re a woman, you’re a target. You can’t afford to stand still. The book’s last sentence rescues goodness, shrunken, a tiny movement towards love, from the rat race, the burnin’ and a’lootin’, the failure to shoot the deputy.

Male isnt an adjective I normally use in an abstract sense but the novel is unremittingly so. And yet I recognise most of it, Nina’s voice giving me a way in. I know the feeling, if not the experience, of sitting on a bus looking like a madwoman after you’ve hit your father back with his own belt, buckle end, and you still haven’t got your visa money. Hate and lack of generosity feel like that. ‘I tolerate Kimmy,’ she says of her sister, ‘because she could never survive me even once talking to her the way she talks to me. I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.’ p158. Yes, I thought, I know that one. Frustration and anger feel like Josey Wales’ determination to kill the peace and replace Papa-Lo, who has a ‘bad attack of conscience’, as don of Copenhagen City, JLP territory. ‘There is only one fact. Your power to kill me can only be stop by my power to kill you.’ p416. Do the nuclear states of this world know they’re using the logic of ghetto dons, and a lot less stylishly? Mutually assured destruction? They don’t even have the excuse Josey offers. ‘… who want peace anyway when all that mean is that you still poor? … a man can only move so far before the leash pull him back. Before the master say, Enough of that shit, that’s not where we going. The leash of Babylon, the leash of the police code, the leash of Gun Court, the leash of the twenty-three families that run Jamaica.’ pp417,418. James’ imagination floods the ground and up comes the dirt.

Papa-Lo has to give way to Josey Wales. ‘Every man who fight a monster become a monster too,’ Papa-lo says. ‘… People think me lose it because it bother me that me kill school boy by mistake, but don’t realise that me losing it because it suppose to bother me but don’t. ‘ p154. Here’s the transition of power described by Bam Bam: ’Josey Wales never could talk like music, not like Papa-lo, not like you [the Singer], so I laugh and he punch me in the cheek. Don’t disrespect the Don, he say. I was about to say you not the Don, but I stay quiet. You ready to be a man? he say. I said I was a man but him gun right up at my left temple before I could finish. Click.’ p37. Then: ‘Nobody ever own a gun. You don’t know that until you own one. If somebody give it to you, that somebody can take it back.’ p71. ‘ … young people don’t want nothing, they just want everything.’ p79. Enormous thoughts, strange fruits. How can you not write an extravaganza in a world like this?

I learned from the novel that you can afford to be stupid if you have almost unlimited power. The CIA in the mid 70s fear a Jamaican Rasta revolution, seeded in London. (Maybe not so stupid. 1976 was the year the UK government had to get an IMF bailout, and coach-loads of huge Yorkshire miners joined a handful of south Asian women on a picket line in NW London.) Josey Wales, brilliant as ever, explains: ‘Peter Nasser [politician, CIA enforcer] pay off three men at the airport to be on the lookout for any cockney-speaking Rastafarian landing at Norman Manley airport, especially at night. For some reason he didn’t think the Rasta revolution would be coming in through Montego Bay.’ p410. The CIA fear commies and homos. In the early seventies, Michael Manley can just about be called a socialist. The CIA very sensibly fear the end of the war between the PNP and the JLP fought in the ghettos. They fear the Singer’s peacemaking. December 3^rd 1976, the night of the attempted assassination, was two days before the Peace Concert and two weeks before an election. Josey Wales again, quoting Mr Clark: ‘… this precious little country you see here? It’ll be Cuba, or worse. East Germany in less than two years if that process isn’t reversed right now. I saw it nearly happen in Chile. I saw it nearly happen in Paraguay. / [Josey reflects] Some of this in some way true. But they can’t resist it, these men from the CIA. Once they think you believe them it’s like lying turn into a drug. No, not a drug, a sport. Now let’s see how far I can go with this ignorant naigger.’ pp413,414. The result? Jamaican drugs and gun wars spread to Miami and New York, where the last third of the book is set.

History doesn’t stay safely in the past, however. In May 2010 in Tivoli Gardens, West Kingston, according to reliable eye-witnesses, 250 people were killed by the police. The extra judicial killings were carried out in the name of the war on drugs, and propelled by the US demand for the extradition of a drugs baron of whom the then Jamaican prime minister was said to be in an affiliate. Official reports put the deaths at 77. In December 2104, after much campaigning for justice, a commission of enquiry began. Not until this month, November 2015, did the commission set foot in the ghetto. As documented in the 2001 film Life and Debt, and in the 2012 report from the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, Jamaican agriculture has been destroyed by IMF subsidies to pharma/food corporations. The ghettos grow, the sufferahs multiply. James transforms their voices not just into literature – which means they’re now talking to readers as well as to themselves – but into a clamour which I hope is the tinnitus Babylon hear into their grave and beyond. I welcome it ringing the truth in my ears because this novel, aesthetically and morally, is hope yet. Its fourth sentence is a line from Buffalo Soldier. Its third paragraph asks the living to listen to the dead.

The Double by José Saramago 2002

Reading the late great Nobel Prize winner’s 2002 novel is to enter into a genial and ironic conversation with him. Of his other work, I’ve only read The Elephant’s Journey 2008 and The History of the Siege of Lisbon 1989  (Isee my blog XXX) so I can’t claim to be an aficionada, but his method of provoking me sinfully to scrawl large exclamation marks in the margins to designate his jokes, reaches in The Double, in my limited Saramago experience, a zenith. He jokes about characters’ autonomy from their writer, plot conventions, time, cause and effect, about being sick when there’s nothing to sick up (detail). Unusually unsavage jokes about the absurdity of humans’ thoughts, feelings and actions unfurl. I doubt Saramago did opium, but there’s a curling pipe dream quality to his writing which exactly and beautifully contradicts the way his characters blunder, trapped by the fate their writer’s given them, into dead-end, or eternally reproducing (which is the same thing), tragedy.

Gaspingly clever, lyrical and widely philosophical, influenced by Borges and Marx, Saramago scares the living daylights out of his protagonist Tertuliano Máximo Afonso. I’ll call him TMA, ugly it’s true, but Saramago never shortens his self consciously ridiculous (by Iberian standards) name and I have a word count and time limit. Saramago induces thoughts like: what I’ve just written means nothing more than I’m in time and space, but that doesn’t make what I’ve written a waste of time. Saramago marks up in fluourescent orange the illusion he’s creating, but in his world nothing people do is a waste of time, nor is anyone stupid. They’re the source of enquiry, speculation and now and again adamant opinion: ‘All fate’s reasons are human … anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.’ p226. And let’s, he suggests, cut rationality down to size: ‘… human actions, generally speaking, are determined by a concurrence of impulses flowing from all the cardinal and collateral points of the instinctive being we still are, along of course with a few rational factors which, against all odds, we still manage to slip into the motivational weft.’ p222.

TMA, a history teacher, is scared because one evening he sees his exact double. His double is acting a bit part on a video recommended by a slightly arrogant colleague wishing to relieve TMA’s depression. As in The History of the Siege of Lisbon, so in The Double. A life can be imagined as the consequences of one action, random or intended – ah but what does intention amount to? – or the effects of one event. TMA doesn’t launch into a research project on an apparently impossible phenomenon. His author doesn’t go for cause. He goes for effect, the history of the consequences of the phenomenon. Which are, because TMA is fictional, inevitable. Nonetheless his fate’s reasons are human. That horrific ball of glass the examining eye doctor shoves into your eye ball (the meaning of eye balling) is the scrutiny to which Saramago subjects fate (gods, political/financial elites, the IMF, call it what you like), conformity and ID, and which came first, the original or the duplicate, that question so beloved of artists. Am I a mistake, TMA asks, a product of a chance event? TMA’s double is an actor who’s his own double. False beards, forged signatures, a gun, sex under false pretences, cowardice, petty rancour and bitter revenge all come on stage. Common sense is a witty character whom TMA ignores.

And time. Time’s always running out for characters, let’s face it. TMA concludes that ‘the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds, …’ p191. He continues scaring himself. ‘If the future is empty … then nothing one might call Sunday exists, its possible existence depends on my existence, if I were to die now, part of the future, or part of possible futures, would be cancelled out for ever.’ And if he’s someone’s duplicate, doesn’t that mean he can die another person’s death?

Saramago’s free use of commas, his few paragraphs and full stops, his dialogue packed intimately on the page without quote marks and with caps alone to show change of speaker – no crowd scenes in this book – are well known. What his style also does, as well as increasing his characters’ intimacy, is make himself intimate with his characters: ‘There is some doubt as to whether what we have just written, from the word Honest to the word need, was actually generated by Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s own thought processes.’ p146, with reference to a random thought about housewives who used to put blankets and overcoats into pawn.

Saramago plays with tense. It’s like stopping believing in god. God says verb tenses shall be consistent and a story shall run from back to front. TMA proposes to his head teacher that history can be taught front to back. Stories shift in time, especially when ‘the seed of an action pregnant with future consequences’ p205, is sown. Verbs are capable of flipping in one sentence from simple past tense to past conditional to future without rendering themselves nonsensical. On p173 Saramago says, referring to TMA and his double, both still up, plotwise, for being the original, ‘… it is legitimate to say that what will be has been, and all that’s lacking now is for it to be written down.’ Get your head round that one.

Here’s his reason for avoiding full stops. ‘ … people’s lives could also be told from front to back, one could wait until they ended and then, gradually, follow the stream back to the source, identifying the tributaries on the way and sailing up them too, aware that each one, even the smallest and feeblest, was, in its time and in itself, a major river, and in this slow deliberate way, alert to every scintillation on the surface of the water, every bubble risen from the bottom, every sudden downward flurry, every stagnant stillness, reach the end of the narrative and place after the first of all moments the final full stop, and to take the same amount of time that the lives thus told had actually lasted.’ p180. On-stream, product of constipated tech-speak, has just acquired a new and gorgeous meaning.

And here’re a couple of sample Saramago jokes, albeit snatched, screaming, from their context. ‘… the fervent bedtime prayer of many people is not the ubiquitous lord’s-prayer or the perennial ave-maria but ‘Deliver us, O Lord, from evil and, in particular from the wrath of the meek.’’ p33. And one which also illustrates his dialogic magic: ‘… I really don’t know how to thank you, and let me just say what a pleasure it’s been to meet you and talk to you, Well, I have my moments, today you found me in a good mood, or perhaps it’s because I felt as if I were a character in a book, What book, what character, Oh, it doesn’t matter, let’s get back to real life, and leave aside fantasies and fictions, tomorrow I’ll make you a photocopy of the letter and post it to you at home, …’ p218.

Being an underpublished writer, I have a love-hate relationship with hope. So the following appeals: ’… it is a well known fact that no human being … can live solely on hope, that strange psychic disorder indispensible to normal life, …’ p130. Great writers help us not to be destroyed by contradictions.

Family Album by Penelope Lively 2009

A large English family sufficiently well padded to go a bit eccentric comes to no great harm in Penelope Lively’s charming low-key novel. The snap shots start in 1960s and give up the ghost to digital devices in 2008 when emails begin to infiltrate the text. The by now globally-flung children don’t, for this reason, fall out of touch. There’s an air of Virginia Woolf’s 1937 The Years to the book, in tone and structure, but without the bottomless sadness and peerless prose. I’d have preferred a more stringent and original trip into the 21^st century.

Alison and Charles bring up their six children in Allersmead, a by-today’s -standards enormous house standing in a quarter acre garden. It’s in a slightly superior suburb, one imagines, somewhere around north London or possibly Wimbledon. All the children, not just their parents, use ‘one’, that peculiarly elite English and distancing neuter singular pronoun. It’s ok for Alison and Charles born before WW2. But not, one imagines, for their unsumptuously educated children.

Immaculately arranged impressions of their childhood string the book along. It’s a necklace whose design is pleasingly irregular. Its gentle irony glints. Its dialogue is a positive bling of individuality. Sad the offending pronoun strips off characters’ nakedness to hide them behind English upper classness, personned by thousands. Maybe it’s Lively’s connecting device. Paul, Gina, Sandra, Roger, Katie and Clare are wonderfully distinct. Their parents Alison and Charles don’t get much subjectivity, much voice, since this is their story from their children’s perspective, but Lively does a good job of creating Alison’s irritating garrulousness – plump, forever greying, earth mother – and Charles’ sarcastic shamefaced silence – study-skulking, non-academic writer. They’re caught on the wrong side of modern parenting, throwbacks to a pre WW2 world. Then there’s the mystery of aging Swedish au pair Ingrid.

Short passages about Allersmead as the creaking repository of memories, a character in other words, are the least successful. Lively isn’t Virginia Woolf. But she’s good. Clare’s handstands turning into modern dance, Paul’s druggy and alcoholic mess, Gina’s journalistic drive, Roger’s passion for the mechanics of biology, Sandra’s entrepreneurial talents, Katie’s anxieties, all unfold small event by small event. A birthday party concealing its own nastiness, a family picnic in which food fails to smother unhappiness, a wedding anniversary unequally welcomed, and then there’s Ingrid. And who did take the scissors to Charles’ manuscript, the one about teenage rites of passage?

What’s at stake? Not a lot. Lively’s not Beryl Bainbridge in her menacing 1968 Another Part of the Wood either. The children have flown the nest to all over the world, the house is falling apart and Alison’s Motherhood classes are failing – unlike her fantastically successful cookery classes. Charles’ refusal to be a father is backfiring, publishers are ignoring him. But it’s all alright in the end. Neither fate nor social morality draw blood. Margaret Thatcher is mildly referenced. Sandra will most likely drop her boutique and go into property development. Is Paul’s dysfunctionality in his genes or down to Charles’ lack of nurture? And who really called the shots in the marriage? But I’m glad Penelope Lively’s no elderly Doris Lessing either, whose 1988 The Fifth Child so shockingly hates the humanity.

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo 2013

I’ve pulled back from dumping my blog because I thought it took up too much damn time. Instead I’m inaugurating two rules. One, 500 words max. Two, sentences two-clause max. I’ll see how it goes.

We Need New Names is sometimes, if you know anything about Zimbabwe, too painful to read. A small girl first person narrator, circa 2008, speaks from a cardboard and plastic slum called Paradise. It could be anywhere in NoToilet majority Africa, except that the president of this particular country raised ‘opposition’ suburbs to the ground in 2007 and bought off the parliamentary opposition in 2008 with Mercedes Benzes.

Darling’s friends and adventures are many. Always hungry, they steal guavas from rich gardens in Budapest. They roll around the graves in Heavenwards. They act up to foolish NGO photographers, hiding their buttocks. Trousers in Paradise come with shameful holes. Half way through the book, Darling’s auntie gets her a plane ticket to small town US, from where she continues to strip the skin off the US in her matter of fact, shocked, funny, fuming, galloping voice.

People live without papers for 40 years imprisoned in the US, desperate to go home. They live without taps, toilet or brick walls imprisoned in Zimbabwe, desperate to escape to the west. There’s no happy ending. The title is a statement of fact, and of faith in the 99%. (Darling demolishes Occupy in one scornful sentence. But she doesn’t demolish names.)

Cleverly and movingly, NoViolet Bulawayo – you’d have to say something about names with a NoShrinking name like that – slides into Darling’s tale the collective, contemplative, sadder and slower-rhythmed voice of émigré Zimbabweans. In the US, names ricochet off 24-7 TV and pizza-guzzling. They lose their meaning. One-size-fits-all dieting becomes big-thighed African women even less than it does European women. The latter are taught to value individuality and proceed to crucify themselves on conformity. But one size must fit all. US poor peoples’ houses aren’t bulldozed under the nose of the military. No way. Their mothers aren’t shot (although their brothers may be.) Their fathers aren’t lost to The Sickness and migrant labour in South Africa. No. Instead, they’re invisible. And, like Tshaka Zulu whose cardboard spears are met with US police guns, they go mad a lot. They betray each other with a white lover. Their sons go on tour to Afghanistan, after their Ghanaian illegal father has hit them on the face for daring to talk about joining up. They get sick and can’t pay for  a doctor. Their dead lie in a gourd-shaped plastic urn rather than in ground where their ancestors will welcome them.

Bulawayo won the Caine Prize in 2011. Her prize-winning story Hitting Budapest about Darling, her friends Chipo, Bastard, Sbho, Godknows et al became this passionate, funny, terribly sad book’s first chapter. Exuberant, forthright voices talk about a merciless world. Chipo, raped at 11 and therein lies another story, 10 years later tells escapee Darling on long distance phone where to get off. Chipo and her daughter, whom she’s named Darling, have not been destroyed.

Each chapter is a story of Zim slum and immigrant US small town  life, but Darling repeats again and again that she’s not telling NoToilet Africa’s story. She’s telling her particular stories, and her friends’ and her family’s, her Paradise’s and her country’s, of 50-odd African countries. Finally she’s 18 and community college beckons. Ivy League? Brains without money without scholarship? Forget it.

Every essential crick and curl and feel underfoot is here. Bulawayo writes about people deforming themselves in order to survive. Darling has to tolerate the tiny child at a US wedding who isn’t beaten for throwing a ball slap into her, an adult’s, face. But beating children raw for small rudenesses is no solution either to wild adult frustration with a world which, since Cecil Rhodes rode into town in 1889, continues killing everything good.

Ok 660w and that last sentence has three main clauses.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani 2009

Enjoy this witty plot-driven romp round Nigerian slang, middle class poverty, eye-popping elite wealth and petty fraud, if making millions (US dollars, not nairas nor pound sterling, the only currency with a surname) on email scams is petty. The title’s an email opening line to a US businessman. 419er Cash Daddy aka Robin Hood aka poor relative who didn’t even make it to university, gets distinctly unpetty when, flowing with enough cash to buy support, he eventually runs for governor of his state in eastern Nigeria. How else to spend all that money? Employ Indian girls who speak no known Nigerian language to squeeze your (always male) facial pimples. Shoes made of every possible reptilian skin. Cash Daddy’s best mate is called World Bank.

Kingsley, CD’s nephew and the book’s narrator, doesn’t take long to divest himself of anti-corruption scruples when he, first, fails to get a job despite his top class engineering degree, and second, unable to bribe (long-leg) his way to success, loses his girl to a spectacularly ugly competitor. Kings signs up to the avuncular gravy train. Thereon I was wondering if this was a rake’s progress. Certainly not. Nwaubani’s moral is you’d better be clever enough to fool even your ever-vigilant mother to avoid a grisly end like Cash Daddy’s. Over-weaning, childishly money-mad, politically naïve Cash Daddy. Kings loses another gorgeous but moral girl along the way. Not to worry. He gains Thelma of the gigantic breasts.

Does this mean that corruption is endemic at the highest level in Nigeria? Yes. It also means that Nigerians are like everyone else. They dislike discomfort, are shit scared of poverty where poverty means no toilet to shit in nor tap water to drink nor medical care free at the point of delivery, and have their eyes on the prize. Money. It’s the only way you can look after your family, your village, your neighbourhood. Nigeria’s penal code outlaws 419ing but not, it seems, backhanders from oil companies whose revenues flow into the UK, US, Canada etc etc. 419ers are indeed petty by those standards. And engaged in taking back from the robber countries listed above.

My only quarrel with the book, plotty as it is, is a loose end. What does happen to Kings’ sister whom he stops marrying the boy of her dreams? Peripherally, I was enchanted to discover that tokunbo, the first name of a Nigerian friend, means, in pidgin/Nigerian slang, second hand, as in ‘na who want buy tokunbo car?’ http://www.naijalingo.com/words/tokunbo

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma 2015

‘… Mother,’ says 9 year old Ben, who with his three older brothers lives in a small town in western Nigeria, ‘spoke and thought in parables.’ p105. Africa is the continent of parables and proverbs, and The Fishermen, as fables do, speaks about the deeply personal in the same voice as it does about the hardest sideswipes that fate and history and politics can deal out. It no more stomachs the west’s saucer-eyed innocence of crimes against Africa than it countenances life stripped of spirits and myth.

The Fishermen, its four brothers, their mother and father, their two younger siblings, dances step by carefully-placed step into tragedy. But Obioma’s no Sophocles or Shakespeare. Gruesome death there is, plenty of it. Such is the transformational power of Obioma’s writing, however, that his voice is, actually is, the voice of Africans’ oral tradition. There, death isn’t the end of the story. From the book’s last pages, Obioma frees hope. It flies into the future.

The story hinges on one huge event. Father, who works in a bank, is mercilessly transferred to a northern town fifteen hours drive away. Thereafter, Mother, as well as running a small shop in the local market, is responsible for keeping her six children in order, four of them head strong boys. Visiting only every few weeks, in their eyes Father shrinks from ‘mammoth frame … into the size of a pea’ and ‘his long arm that often wielded the whip … snapped like a tired tree branch.’ The four boys ‘broke free. // We shelved our books and set out to explore the sacred world outside the one we were used to.’ pp14,15. They and some of the town’s street boys alight upon the Christian town’s forbidden spirit-riddled river. It’s also filthy. Before the colonists came, it provided clean drinking water and fish. It used to be, quite sensibly, worshipped as a god.

‘Follow us, and we will make you fishermen!’ says Ikenna, the oldest brother, 15 years old, to Obembe and Ben, the two younger brothers. Boja, a year younger than Ikenna, is already a fisherman. Tadpoles, which Ben sees as whales, small fish, grey and slimy, and once a fish big enough to sell, are their catch, metal fish hooks on ropes their weapons, an adjusted hymn their delightful fishing song.

A neighbour whistle blows. Father, on one of his visits, whips the boys raw. But worse, he steals their song and title. He insists that they’ll become fishermen of the mind, of good things. In English, the language of “Western education”, they’re forced to chant, ‘“We are unstoppable.” … “We are menacing.” “We are juggernauts.” “We will never fail.” “That’s my boys,” he said, our voices settling like sediment. “Can I have the new fisherman embrace me?”’ p44.

And from there, the tragedy of Ikenna, on whose shoulders Father casts the mantle of guiding the younger ones, Ikenna, Mother’s first born and dearest, unfolds. It engulfs the family.

They live in western Nigeria, which is Yoruba. Father’s job is in the Hausa-speaking north. English is the desired language of education. But Igbo, spoken in eastern Nigeria and carrying the memory of the 1967-70 civil war, is the family’s first language. Nigeria is said to be a name cobbled together out of ‘Niger’ and ‘area’ by Lady Lugard. Her husband Lord Lugard cobbled the country together. He gets a mention in The Fishermen. I can imagine Lady Lugard’s ghastly accent, called Received Pronunciation, sliding those two words together. Igbo meanwhile, as Ben explains without rancour, is structured to contain hidden meanings. After Ikenna has reluctantly agreed to lead and guide his siblings, Father says, ‘”always remember that a coconut that falls into a cistern will need a good washing before it can be eaten. What I mean is if you do wrong, you will have to be corrected.” … for although the vocabulary for literal construction for cautionary expressions such as “be careful” was available, [our parents] said “Jiri eze gi ghuo onu gi onu – Count your teeth with your tongue.” … it was the way they learned to speak.’ pp45,46. The language itself contains the parable.

The book’s structure contains another layer of parable: each chapter title, first sentence and second paragraph asserts and expands the mythical dimension of its particular protagonist: ‘Chapter 3 The Eagle // Father was an eagle: // The mighty bird that planted his nest high above the rest of his peers, hovering and watching over his young eagles. … Our home … was his cupped eyrie: a place he ruled with a clenched fist. … had he not left Akure, our home would not have become vulnerable …’ ‘Chapter 4 The Python // Ikenna was a python: A wild snake that became a monstrous serpent living on trees, on plains above other snakes. Ikenna turned into a python after the whipping. It changed him. The Ikenna I knew became … a mercurial and hot-tempered person constantly on the prowl.’ ‘Chapter 7 … Mother was a falconer:’ And many others. Locusts are forerunners, the madman whom the gods destroy, dead Ikenna is the sparrow, Boja is a fungus, grief is spiders, creatures crawling, flying, swarming, slapping meaning and drama onto sadly human lives.

Madness is here. Naked Abulu has a grotesquely large penis, lives in a wrecked truck and eerily pretends to cook and fucks a dead woman. He’s a prophet. Ikenna believes his prophecy: Ikenna’s and Boja’s deaths follow. Mother in her grief sees spiders, talks to spirits, sees not Ben but a cow. Boja, Obembe, Ben, the Nigerian elite – presidential candidates murdered, presidents poisoned, civil hatred stirred up – all perpetrate acts of violent madness. Father believed he could violently force his sons to become great men. Early in the book, a mad woman is said to have danced naked in the market.

Writers sow story seeds. It’s how plots functions. In this book, it’s what the characters do as well: ‘… the seed of what Ikenna had now begun to act out – a lack of interest in fishing – was sown the previous week. He’d had to be persuaded to come with us to the river that day. So, when he said: “I want to go and study. I’m a student, not a fisherman,” no one questioned him any further.’ p25. But Obioma doesn’t harvest earlier events only at the point they become significant, nor do his backstories work straightforwardly. Rather he sets up a beautiful pattern. Characters relate events as though the reader knows as much as they do and only later is the reader equipped to solve the puzzle. Only when backstories are told does the reader realise the gap in her knowledge. Events that have happened simultaneously to the main story are related much later. It’s like Igbo. Much is hidden. Mystery reappears as revelation. The story moves in many directions at once and time moves sideways as well as forwards and backwards. For example, the complex story of Ikenna’s passport, its relationship to Boja’s death, the intricate relationship between the brothers, comes as a revelation more than half way through the book when I believed I already understood the hatred between the two oldest brothers.

Cain and Abel, Jesus Christ, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and WB Yeats’ falconer (both in the latter’s The Second Coming), countless Igbo and Yoruba scared myths populate the book. Achebe’s title refers to Yeats’ rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. Those lines are peculiarly full of dread. They could refer to the horror of what came after colonialism, after Africa’s and Ireland’s future benign leaders had been slaughtered or overthrown by the departing colonists and replaced, Lugard style, with ghastly puppets. The Fishermen is set in the late 1990s. Father has named Ben after Nnamdi Azikiwe, independent Nigeria’s hope of the early 60s. Ikenna reads a book about an Igbo mam called Okonkwo. In Okonkwo’s colonial tragedy, he sees his own divided family.

The Fishermen is a truly great book from the post-Chimamanda Adichie generation, herself the heir to Achebe. A parable made from a family, a country and a continent, each layer of fable holds the meaning of one in the other, and finally there’s hope. It involves small white rather conscientious birds and Ben’s younger brother and sister, that’s all.

Hatred is a leech in this book but personal blame is absent. When a drama transcends individuals, and the massive forces at play in a person’s life are visible. The sensations of guilt and sin, so hypocritically peculiar to western life, loose their power to diminish the already weak. In this respect, Obioma and Sophocles are relatives.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang 2015, translated by Deborah Smith

A dream shockingly twists the philosophical tale at the end of this small-scale exquisite Korean novel. A dream gorily begins it. A woman’s body is the seat of her madness, the realm of her freedom, her route to vegetable life, her gift to desire, her rubbish bag, her beauty, hers alone, and she can shed it if she wishes.

Yeong-hye dreams about gobbling raw bloody meat, her hands covered in blood, a terrible face appears, hers? Whose is it? She stops eating meat. Her dolt of a husband isn’t happy, her father and mother even less so. Her father force-feeds her meat. She grabs the kitchen knife and slices her wrists. Not fatally.

Yeong-hye’s husband narrates the first section. She’s a body which doesn’t turn him on and doesn’t obey him. Here Han writes Yeong-hye’s dream sequences. Dreams are the least corporeal of human experiences. Yeong-hye’s voice is thus disembodied, broken up, a retching feel to it, and remains so throughout the book. The other voices, her brother in law’s, an artist who compulsively desires her sexually and as an art object, and her older sister’s, who hates and loves Yeong-hye, are written in calm elegant prose without much dialogue. It has a tone of amazement. Is this the world? Is this really where we live? Look, it’s saying, look. The book’s heart isn’t bloody, unlike Yeong-hye’s dreams. Rather its heart is the beauty of flowers, and bodies overlapping. Each section, taking up the tale from a new perspective, overlaps.

Is the book about anorexia? Madness? Freedom? Meat-eating misogyny? Brutal institutions which stick a feeding tube up a woman’s nose? A boring marriage? Nature, trees, the ones who never take sides, to whom humans are upside down? Beauty? Art? Movie-makers as voyeurs? Metamorphosis? Perspective? Responsibility? It’s also contains the energy of colour and sex, rootedness in the earth, rain without which nothing, photosynthesis. Dwelling on the story and characters feels a bit too corporeal.

To the artist, Yeong-hye’s is ‘A body which said so much and yet was no more than itself.’ p87. And yet, ‘Her skin was a pale green. Her body lay prone in front of him, like a leaf that had just fallen from the branch, only barely begun to wither. … her body was covered evenly with that pale wash of green. … A green sap, like that which oozes from bruised leaves, began to flow from her vagina when he entered her. The acrid sweetness of the grass was so pungent he found it difficult to breathe. Whe he pulled out, on the point of climax, he saw that the whole of his penis was stained green. A blackish paste was smeared over his skin from his lower stomach to his thighs, a fresh sap which could have come from either her or him.’ p96.

He’s caught in the sex and art act by his wife, to whom he’s been a rotten husband. Male artists, however, get away with it. Yeong-hye is the one who’s institutionalised. The third section belongs to her sister, In-hye. She starts having visions, dreams, hallucinations, begins to understand her dying sister whose nails are now paper thin, not because she wants to die, but because becoming a vegetable, literally, is the only way she can be free. I deeply admire Han for the simple title she’s given her complex novel, which is fat with meanings and at times nicely erotic. Here’s the formerly boring In-hye, visioning. ‘… summer trees in broad daylight flicker in front of her eyes like huge green fireworks. Is this because of the hallucination Yeong-hye told her about? The innumerable trees she’s seen over the course of all her life, the undulating forests which blanket the continents like a heartless sea, envelop her exhausted body and lift her up.’ p169.

I can hear Jean Rhys, Shakespeare and Haruki Murakami in this book, but also, it seems, Herman Melville. It is, nonetheless, no more than itself. In-hye’s look, protesting that if this is reality, her sister isn’t mad, insists this is the case.