Michael Marshall, "The Genesis Quest" (2020)

 I really enjoyed Michael Marshall's The Genesis Quest (full title: The Genesis Quest: the Geniuses and Eccentrics on a Journey to Uncover the Origin of Life on Earth), which is recently out in paperback.

Usually I read books quickly, but this one took me a time, because each chapter is so full of toothsome detail: an expert's guided tour through the many and various scientists who have tried to answer the fundamental question, how did life arise on Earth? It's a question that entails a deeper one, ‘what is life, exactly?’ which Marshall does not shirk. The whole is written with wonderful clarity, occasional moments (especially in the footnotes) of nimble wit, and above all without cutting corners or skimming past any of its rich and fascinating narrative. I know a great deal more about crystals, cells, membranes, RNA, DNA and many other things now than I did before I read this.

Reading made me realise how far it is possible to know a vast amount about the various biochemical and other aspects of ‘life’—and we know more now than at any time before in human history—without that automatically leading to a situation in which we are able to frame ‘answers’, let along ‘an answer’, to the fundamental question posed. Many solutions have been proposed, but there isn't one that garners widespread scientific support, let alone which solves or provides consensus. Remarkable, really.

So, yes, we still don't really know how life came about. It seems the debate is split between those who think that life began with self-replicating proteins is some primordeal soup (it has been shown, by Sidney Walter Fox and others, that amino acids can spontaneously form complex proteins and perhaps even can aggregate into sort-of protocells), and those who believe that membranes are key, since all this amino acid action and metamorphosis will tend to fall apart again without a container of some kind to keep it all in. The ‘membrane-first’ school includes people like David Deamer, William Hargreaves, and Pier Luigi Luisi (Marshall works, creditably, to include as many female scientists as possible in his account, although his narrative is still pretty bloke-heavy). A third theory puts the emphasis on energy, a constant input of which is needful (say some) to counter the entropy that would otherwise collapse the possibilities of complex life as an onward growing phenomenon. Marshall relates the excitement at the discovery of those lifeforms that have evolved around alkaline deep-sea hydrothermal vents, far from the sun, which some think provide the source for all life, though Marshall remains unconvinced by this line.

But though all three theories have supporters, there is no general agreement on which one is closest to the truth. Marshall himself seems to incline towards the ‘chemoton’ model, first proposed by Hungarian scientist Tibor Gánti (though it was, it seems, initially greeted with ‘lack of interest, incomprehension, ridicule and malevolence’ in Gánti's homeland):

The underlying thought behind the chemoton model is that genes on their own, a metabolism on its own, or a membrane on its own cannot achieve very much. The essence of life is the interaction of all three. While most researchers interested in the origin of life were dividing life up into its subsystems, in the hope one of them might be enough to get life started, Gánti instead tried to imagine the simplest possible organism that had all three. [250]

Marshall is too scrupulous a scientist to thump the tub for any one theory, when the science is so contested, but this ‘everything at once’ theory is the one towards which his book leans.

 One thing that I got from this slow, detailed account of the many theories of life's origins was a sense of deep time. Say we started (as most scientists agree we did) with something simple: life as it has now evolved is dazzlingly complex, and that, chemoton model or no chemoton model, is not something that happened overnight. The great gulfs of the past are overgrown with the gradually complexifying forms of this stuff, this thing, this life. That in turn made me reflect on something Marshall does not discuss, since it's not part of his brief: consciousness—specifically, the startling recent-ness of self-aware, self-reflexive minds. For most of that huge backward and abysm of Earth's historical past nothing has both observed and reflected upon the fact there was anything worth observing and reflecting upon. That's a development in life that happened, like, five minutes ago, basically. Nor will it last: ‘before too many billions of years have passed, matter will be too spread to ever condense into new stars ... on this view, we exist in a special period in the universe's history: the one short epoch where isolated pockets of life can emerge, before everything becomes fundamentally uninteresting’ [291] Woh! Marshall adds, with a characteristic touch:

There's a curiously profound line of dialogue in Avengers: Age of Ultron, a film that's otherwise a bit of a mess. The android character Vision is told that the human race is destined to become extinct. He replies: “yes. But a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts.”

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time” as William Blake noted, a piece of profundity that takes its place in a larger body of work determinately not a bit of a mess. Marshall doesn't quote Blake, but he's right about this line from Age of Ultron. And his whole book is precisely as curious and profound as the wisdom he identifies here. Very highly recommended.

2021 Booker Prize Longlist

 

The Booker Prize shortlist is announced at 4pm tomorrow. I'll update this post then.

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[14th Sept 2021] So: the shortlist is:

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam. [Update 28-12: review here]

Bewilderment by Richard Powers. I'll link to my review of this when it comes out. [Update 25-09: review here]

The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed, which is great to see here. I haven't posted a review, because I know Nadifa (she was, until recently, a colleague at RHUL), but I like this novel very much.

Damon Gagut, The Promise

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

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[Original post, 13 Sept] I've read ten out of the thirteen longlisted titles, and will read any of the by-me unread three if they make the shortlist. I read these novels because I haven't been very assiduous in keeping-up with contemporary fiction this year, and I feel I should be doing more on that front, both as a reader and a practitioner. 

Still, I can't say I've noticed any particular buzz, online or elsewhere, regarding this year's prize. In an unrelated observation, I can't say I've been impressed by the excellence or notability of the books on this year's longlist, many of which are mediocre, half-baked or misfires. This second observation (which, of course, is subject to all the caveats regarding the subjective judgments of my, er, subjectivity) does not in itself entail the former, since there have been years when the Booker list has been mostly crap and yet everyone has been excitedly buzzing about it. And opacities remain in the selection process: not all books are submitted to the judges (costs quite a lot to put a book in, actually) and I'm not sure what rights the judges have to call-in unsubmitted titles. Plus there is the wider problem, pungently articulated in 2001 by A. L. Kennedy (herself a judge in 1996), who noted that the winner was determined by ‘who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, whose turn it is’ and that as a result the prize is ‘a pile of crooked nonsense’. This last seems a little on the harsh side, and I might have preferred Kennedy to whomify her claim (who knows whom, who's sleeping with whom and so on) but there's clearly a large amount of truth in what she says.

We might say that any list purporting to index the best novels published between 1st October 2020 and 30th September 2021 that doesn't include Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney, Animal by Lisa Taddeo, The Angels of L19 by Jonathan Walker or The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck is bound to look hole-y—and those are just the titles I've read! (actually I've haven't, yet, read the Rooney, but the acclaim with which its publication has been greeted makes its Booker-absence look odd). And as I say above, I really haven't been keeping up with new fiction this year, for a number of reasons. Who knows how many other brilliant novels have missed both me and the Booker panel? (I'm very much looking forward to Matrix by Lauren Goff, for instance). Ah, but it's a mug's game, the ‘but why isn't this title longlisted?’ question. The process is a star chamber, and in many cases the star is wormwood.

At any rate, here are links to my blogthoughts on longlisted titles. As regards those not noted here: my review of Bewilderment by Richard Powers is forthcoming in The Guardian, and with two of the titles I feel my critical objectivity is too compromised for disinterested reviewing: Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men (since Nadifa is a colleague of mine at RHUL, and an excellent one at that) and Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (Francis is a friend; I read the book in draft, and am even thanked in the acknowledgements). I have not read A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, An Island by Karen Jennings, or China Room by Sunjeev Sahota.

Rachel Cusk, Second Place.

Damon Gagut, The Promise

Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

Rachel Cusk, ‘Second Place’ (2021)

[Note: this is the tenth of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. For links to reviews and thoughts on the others, see the headnote to this post.]

In Big Tom Hanks, a kid magically inserted into the body of a grown up, works for a toy company. His ideas are big hits (since he has the echt kid insight into what kids enjoy) and he is rapidly promoted. In an attempt to catch-up with him his adult colleagues propose a Transformers-like toy: robots that fold-over and transform into buildings. Playing with a protoype during a company meeting, Hanks’s character says: ‘I don’t get it. So it turns into a … building? I don’t get it.’ I think about that scene from time to time. 

Rachel Cusk’s new novel, or novella, is called Second Place, a play-on-words that refers both in a property sense to second homes, and also to not coming first, not winning the race, trailing behind life’s winners.

The ‘story’ can be quickly summarised. The narrator, ‘M’, is writing to an individual identified only as ‘Jeffers’ (who makes no other appearance in the story except as the addressee to these thoughts). She tells Jeffers that she met the devil on a train journey. Then she talks about seeing an exciting artist, ‘L’, on a trip to Paris. M and her husband Tony live in a big house in the country—East Anglia, I suppose, though it’s not specified—to which is appended, on an adjacent piece of land, the ‘second place’ of the book’s title: a cottage into which M and her husband like to invite artists, to allow them to get away from the city and other constraints and concentrate on ‘the higher things’, making great art. 

So M invites L to stay, which he does, bringing with him his much younger girlfriend, Brett. The presence of Brett upsets and disturbs our narrator, partly because Brett is young and beautiful where M no longer is, and partly because Brett connects with M’s 21-year-old daughter, Justine, who (as is the way with daughters) is more or less disconnected from her mother. But also because Brett, and L, are beastly towards M.

Why is ‘Jeffers’ the addressee, here? As I read I wondered if Cusk meant her readers to think of Susan Jeffers, author of the (once-famous) self-help book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (1987). But the novel ends with a brief postscript that acknowledges the inspiration of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos (1935), an epistolary account of the time D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent in New Mexico in the 1920s, at Luhan's invitation. I haven’t read Lorenzo in Taos, but it seems letters therein are addressed to poet Robinson Jeffers. So there you go. Though he's a painter rather than a novelist/poet, Cusk's ‘L’ is in some sense Lawrence. Just as Lawrence’s stay was chaotic and disruptive for Mabel (at one point he threatened to ‘destroy her’, it seems; which is what L tells M in Cusk’s narrative) so it happens here.

In other words we might read this as a book about art and the relationship of art to life. Perhaps a book about how ‘true’ art is (somehow) disruptive and traumatic and so on. But the obliqueness here misfits this theme, or so I thought. The sense in which Cusk has assiduously worked her Rotary Floor Polisher over the hardwood tiles of her style, until the whole empty room of her novel is buffed and gleaming, jars with those moments when she is striving for something rougher, more vital and raw and volcanic.

One distinctiveness of Cusk is her unembarrassment at penning wisdom-nugget, gnomic, “ah! how true…” sentences. She tells us things about the way the universe is, and especially the way human beings and their relationships are. I'll be honest: I find something cramping in the way her writing gives its readers such little space to disagree:

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal—or can be.

Um ... I'm going to go with: no?

Fear is a habit like any other and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.

This isn’t right, I think. I suppose fear might become a habit (although, surely, often fear is not habitual), but so far from killing what is essential in ourselves, habit is a needful and largely salutary aspect of our human being in the world. Imagine living a life entirely liberated from habit! Re-inventing yourself afresh second by second—you’d have a nervous breakdown. I mean, perhaps that’s Cusk’s point, but I doubt it. You can see, though, why I wondered if the whole novel was addressed to Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented? Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven’t managed to liberate my smallest toe.

Since our narrator is free from many of the things that enchain the rest of us—poverty, the grind of work, the mind-forged manacles of doctrinal ideology, religion and so on—this may be irony. I'm not sure though. M goes on, referring to her husband:

I believe Tony is free, and his freedom doesn’t look like much. He gets on his blue tractor to mow the tall grass that has to be cut back for spring and I watch him calmly going up and down in his big floppy hat under the sky, back and forth in the noise of the engine. All around him the cherry trees are welling up, the little nubs on their branches straining to burst into blossom for him, and the skylark shoots into the sky as he passes and hangs there singing and twirling like an acrobat. Meanwhile I just sit staring straight in front of me with nothing to do.

Diddums! If why do we live so painfully in our fictions? is asking: ‘why are we so drawn to tragedy?’ then the standard answers to this critical chestnut—catharsis, dignity, Hegelian dialectical synthesis of life and death into something positive—have no place in this short novel. There’s something else, aspiring perhaps to Kafka’s ‘axe to break up the frozen sea within us’, although if so the refinement of these characters, not just their level of wealth and privilege but their supersensitivity, limits the the novel's follow-through.

It all suddenly became too much for me, and one day when I was lacing my shoe I fainted and remember nothing of what happened for the next twenty four hours—it seemed I was on holiday, lying on the bed with a smile on my face, while Tony and Justine took turns sitting anxiously beside me.

It's like the old kids' rhyme: one, two/buckle my shoe/three, four/pass out with the sheer crushing-ness of existence and fall on the floor. Nice to be the centre of attention! Nice to be noticed, and cossetted, and so on. And if you find you aren’t being treated like that, then perhaps a strategic illness is needful to refocus other people’s priorities. Of course, you can’t be ill all the time:

One night, when Tony and I were going to bed, I flew at him in a rage and said all kinds of terrible things, about how lonely and washed up I felt, about how he never gave me any real attention of the kind that makes a woman feel like a woman and just expected me to give birth to myself all the time, like Venus out of a seashell. As if I knew anything about what makes a woman feel like a woman!

Tony is a solid, dependable sort; so it may be that his heedfulness lacks the spicier je ne sais quoi M actually craves. At all times hold in mind the Bart Simpson mantra: attention garnered for bad reasons is better than no attention at all. What does M get from inviting L to stay with her? Could it be that some part of her actually wants this kind of thing?

I heard L. say:

‘Let’s give her a moustache, the castrating bitch!’ while Brett shrieked with laughter … blotting the figure’s upper lip with thick black strokes.

‘And let’s give her a nice fat little belly,’ Brett cried, ‘a barren belly like a middle-aged lady’s! She’s skinny all over, but her belly gives her away, the bitch.’

‘A big hairy moustache,’ L said, ‘so we know who’s in charge. We know who’s in charge, don’t we? Don’t we?’

This clonking orgy of rudeness reads clumsily, the more so because so much of the rest of the novel is so carefully focussed, tonally and stylistically. It doesn’t help that Cusk feels the need to ram the point home:

And the two of them howled, while I stood in my wedding dress beyond the window in the glade where night was falling and trembled, trembled to the soles of my feet. It was me they were talking about, me they were painting—I was Eve! A terrible darkness flooded my mind.

We might chalk this up to an attempt to move Cusk’s usual idiom into something Lawrentian, something more hyper-active and passionate and furious. In Women in Love (1920) the various women and men all stew in the blood-pumping intensity of their various relationships. At one point, for no particular reason, Hermione picks up a glass paperweight and hits Birkin on the head with it. This is Birkin’s reaction:

Birkin, perfectly direct in his motion, went out of the house and straight across the park, to the open country, to the hills. The brilliant day had become overcast, spots of rain were falling. He wandered on to a wild valley-side, where were thickets of hazel, many flowers, tufts of heather, and little clumps of young fir-trees, budding with soft paws. …

Yet he wanted something. He was happy in the wet hillside, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly among the primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up to the arm-pits, lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.

But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir-trees, that were no higher than a man. The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly.

Chacun a son gout, we might say (chacun a son ooh! argh! ouch!); but it takes Lawrence’s slightly unhinged extremism of approach, his existential Year Zero fundamentalism, to make this work (‘Birkin thought about Hermione and the blow. He could feel a pain on the side of his head. But after all, what did it matter? What did Hermione matter, what did people matter altogether? There was this perfect cool loneliness, so lovely and fresh and unexplored. Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman’). Cusk can’t manage the all-in, scorched earth quality of Lawrence, and we’re left with a kind of cliché adolescent moodiness, the shallow cycling of trivial ups-and-downs. Conceivably this is Cusk’s point, although if it is I'm not sure I take the force of it.

I couldn’t keep still any longer and I ran through the house and through the kitchen, where Justine and Kurt were standing quietly at the counter, shelling the mountain of peas that had just come in from the garden.

‘Isn’t it beautiful outside?’ I said. ‘I feel so alive today!’

They both lifted their faces and stared dumbly at me, and I left my bag on leaves on the counter and ran on, up the stairs and into my room, and I closed the door behind me and dropped down on the bed. Why didn’t anyone want me to be happy? Why were they all so disapproving, the minute I showed any excitement and high spirits? … Oh why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realise how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time?

From reading other reviews of Second Place I discover that these more heightened, cartoony moments are adapted from mis-en-mélodrame passages in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s original book. But I’m not going to read that work, and have little sympathy with a work of modern fiction that requires the crutch of such an obscure text to hobble its way along.

The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal.

Sure. Bollocks to ‘reality’. Except … what if ‘the unreal’ turns out to be not an aesthetic transcendence, and rather a subconscious still marinaded in adolescent insecurity and histrionism? What if, instead of D H Lawrence, you end up sounding like Pitt The Younger in that Blackadder episode, where he reads his teenage poetry to the unimpressed royal butler? (‘Why doesn’t anyone want me to be happy? Why are they all so disapproving?’) ... Tom Hanks isn’t actually a kid inside an adult body, you know. He’s just pretending to be one for that movie. A movie actually made by a kid would be a mess. And ‘I don’t get it’ might mean: I have, due to my own inadequacies, missed the deeper sophistication and point of this. I am only too aware of my manifold inadequacies, believe me. But ‘I don’t get it’ might mean: this robot turns into a building? What?

Nathan Harris ‘The Sweetness of Water’ (2021)

 
[Note: With increasingly baroque recursion, I note that this is the ninth of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. My blog of the last of those (Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle) began:

This is the eighth of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have now read. When I blogged my reactions to the last one I finished (Mary Lawson's Town Called Solace), I prefaced my blogpost with this paragraph:

This is the seventh of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. My thoughts on some of those are blogged here (specifically: Damon Galgut's The Promise, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This). My review of Bewilderment by Richard Powers is forthcoming in The Guardian, and with two of the titles I feel my critical objectivity is too compromised for disinterested reviewing: Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men (since Nadifa is a colleague of mine at RHUL, and an excellent one at that) and Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (Francis is a friend; I read the book in draft, and am even thanked in the acknowledgements. Cool, eh?). That leaves six: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, An Island by Karen Jennings, China Room by Sunjeev Sahota and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.

Will I read more? The shortlist is announced this coming Tuesday. Realistically I'm unlikely to read those of the longlist that don't make that shortlist, if I haven't by then. Although I do have a copy of Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, and it’s not very long, so I might jot down some thoughts about that over the weekend.]

***

There’s an interesting debate to be had on the topic of debut novels, though I’m not sure where or even if that debate is happening (I daresay it is, somewhere, and I’m just ignorant). Has the cultural logic of debut fiction changed, do we think? Put it another way: do new writers have to, as it were, ‘grow up’ in public in a way they didn’t have to in previous literary-historical periods? One model, perhaps a common one nowadays, is: a promising writer publishes her/his first novel. There are things to like and admire about this book, although it also shows manifold signs of inexperience, awkwardness, technical flubs, oddnesses of pacing or characterisation, clumsiness of style and so on. But there is promise, and readers are forgiving enough for Promising Writer to put out another novel. This is less marred by the faults of the debut, though P.W. is still perfecting her/his craft. By Novel 3, or maybe Novel 4, s/he has really got into their groove.

Was it always like this? Or did a different model use to obtain whereby (for instance) a would-be novelist spent many years in the practice nets of the short story before daring a long-form fiction, or else one where s/he wrote a series of novels that remained unpublished before finally starting to get things right with a book they were happy to send off to publishers?

I daresay I’m being naif, but it seems to me a very contemporary sort of question. I read a lot of SF and Fantasy and ‘growing up in public’ definitely seems a publishing problem in those genres. Perhaps it is in literary fiction too.

At any rate, here is Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water written by an individual who is, judging by his author photo, fifteen or thereabouts (‘Doogie Howser, M.F.A’). I mean, I’m old and ugly and Harris is young and good-looking, so chalk my comment here to sour grapes if you like. But still.

The front cover, as you can see above, comes with an endorsement by Richard Russo (author both of the 2001 novel Empire Falls and the 1998 Twilight movie screenplay, and therefore evidently an individual we should heed) according to whom Sweetness of Water is ‘better than any debut novel has a right to be’. This perhaps looks praising, although it might actually just represent disappointment with the contemporary state of the debut. I mean, what rights does a debut have anyway? Does a debut author have the ‘right’ to produce a Portrait of the Artist or an Adam Bede? Seems like a screwy way of putting it, even if Russo means to locate the rights of readers, in terms of what they can reasonably expect from a read. But perhaps that's the point. We are not within our rights to expect a masterpiece with a first novel.

Not that The Sweetness of Water is a bad novel. It’s not: it’s fine. It’s set in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War (a period that seems to occupy for US writers a position somewhat akin the endlessly renovelised Tudors in the UK—the 2017 Man Booker list included three such historical novels, including the eventual winner Lincoln in the Bardo). It tells the story of two brothers, recently freed slaves: talkative Prentiss and his silent brother Landry. We soon discover that Landry’s silence indexes his trauma: when, still a slave, he had been used as a literal whipping boy, scapegoatishly enduring punishments for others. Now the two young men have been freed, though they have neither money nor prospects. They camp in a wood, trying to snare rabbits to eat and here they encounter George Walker, a white man who lives nearby with his wife Isabel. 

George is wandering the woods because he has just that day learnt that his son, Caleb, was killed in the war. George and Isabel are contented enough in their marriage, though they are rather distant from one another. Rather than farm the land he inherited, George has been selling off parcels of it in the nearby town of Old Ox to get money. But now that Caleb is dead he decides not to sell any more of his patrimoney, and to cultivate peanuts instead. He hires Prentiss and Landy to help him, treating them with quiet respect. This inflames resentment and prejudice in the town, where there are plenty of demobbed and unemployed white soldiers looking for work. The story moves forward in a relatively unhurried manner—Caleb, it turns out, is not dead (in fact he deserted) and he returns home. George visits a prostitute called Clementine, but for conversational rather than carnal reasons, since he can’t really talk to his wife. Things bubble along, with slowly growing and nicely-turned tension, and for a while this all works pretty well. But then about halfway through Harris evidently decided he needed to light the blue touchpaper, plotwise, and the latter half of the novel is a glut of Western cliché: murder, arson, a racist sheriff, a corrupt judge, a jailbreak, pursuit by a galloping posse, etc, etc.

Harris’s prose is almost—but not quite—there. Having decided, bravely, to devote a good portion of his novel to the quotidian and ordinary, the understatednesses of life, Harris doesn’t trust himself not to bore his reader and so gussies-up and overclocks his descriptions. The first time George tries to hire Prentiss and Landry, they decline:

“Why can’t you take no for an answer, mister?” Prentiss said. He whirled back to face George. … The pain in George’s face, so immense it might split him two [sic], was momentary, and he managed to disguise it with a grin. [46]

Disappointment that these two strangers won’t come work for him, that pain: not a raging toothache or axe to the cheek. And Prentiss really has no business whirling, I feel. There's a lot of that in this book: ‘George wheeled away from his friend’ [120]; ‘the other boy whipped about’ [143]; ‘Caleb lunged out of bed’ [340] and the like. I can't say all this dervishism serves the novel well. It's Harris swinging, and missing, at intensity. I hate to say it. Perhaps I’ll just whisper it: less is more.

When Caleb comes home he notices that his parents have grown apart, or as Harris styles it: ‘it was then he noticed the vastness of the space between his parents’ [73]. Caleb fancies toothsome young August (though she is set to be married to somebody else), or as Harris prefers to puts it: ‘in the curling of his toes and the clenching of his teeth as waves of joy coursed through him, it was as if a bell beneath his ribcage had lain at rest … [and now] the pealing of that bell shook his entire being, great jolts of delight’ [144]. George likes coffee:

George had risen early and brewed a cup of coffee. The first sip alone was so gratifying that he might as well have been a dog loosed from a kennel and given over to the smell of a fresh cut lawn, such was the rush he felt. He let it sink into him and thought of nothing else. [161]

I mean, Less Is More is not inscribed on Mosaic tablets such that all writers must obey, but there's loads of this in Sweetness of Water and it drags, it drags. Harris is reaching for a vehemence of affect that this style does not deliver.

The wind was so violent it felt as though it might cut through flesh like a whip. It quieted for a spell before it kicked up one last time and took off in the direction of town. [313]

I’m sorry: I just don’t believe in this wind, as described. ‘Caleb’s teeth began to chatter, the frozen air cutting through the vacant part of him that had, just a moment ago, been overcome by anger—by the swelling need for retribution’ [342]. If you say so, pal.

He awoke to an orchestra of horse hooves [205]

Writers, especially new writers, genuinely do deserve praise for trying to avoid cliché, working towards vivid newness in their similes. But, again: I don’t think this one works. Woodwind hooves, brass hooves, violin hooves, cello hooves … with all that sounding LSOishly in our ears, here’s George about to leave his farm for the last time:

The sun had risen in full now, and the farm sparkled under its canopy of soft yellows, the barn no longer red but burnt orange, the fields burnished with gold. The effect would wear off as the day progressed, but it was a sight to behold when the morning light poured in. He would miss it dearly. [255]

That last sentence is, simply, a failure of tone. If the Thomas Kinkade kitsch of the previous description has not conveyed that George will miss his farm, that telling-not-showing thumb in the balance at the end is only going to index the prose's failure in that regard.

I’m being hard on this novel I know, and certainly harder than is charitable. I'm sure Harris will grow more in control of his instrument as he continues writing. And there are genuinely promising aspects to this novel: the main characters are sharply delineated and easy to imagine, the dialogue is often flavourful and effective, the treatment of racism—clearly a main thrust of this novel, and clearly an important and worthwhile topic for contemporary fiction—avoids the Scylla of hysterical melodrama and the Charybdis of bland pieties: Harris dramatizes the way people (sometimes even the same people) can be kindly and foul to the racial Other, and his town has a real, variegated, people-rubbing-along-with-people vibe. But in too many places the tone slips, or the plot jolts mode, or something marks the point where the author is overcompensating his inexperience, or not trusting his reader to be interested in the understated and ordinary. It’s a decent novel. It’s not a Man-Booker-worthy novel.

Maggie Shipstead, ‘Great Circle’ (2021)

 

This is the eighth of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have now read. When I blogged my reactions to the last one I finished (Mary Lawson's Town Called Solace), I prefaced my blogpost with this paragraph:

This is the seventh of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. My thoughts on some of those are blogged here (specifically: Damon Galgut's The Promise, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This). My review of Bewilderment by Richard Powers is forthcoming in The Guardian, and with two of the titles I feel my critical objectivity is too compromised for disinterested reviewing: Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men (since Nadifa is a colleague of mine at RHUL, and an excellent one at that) and Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (Francis is a friend; I read the book in draft, and am even thanked in the acknowledgements. Cool, eh?). That leaves six: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, An Island by Karen Jennings, China Room by Sunjeev Sahota and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.

So, last-be-first, this leaves five. Is Great Circle good? Is it! 

No, seriously: is it?

My two immediate take-aways from reading Great Circle: 1, Shipstead is a very talented writer, and 2. Great Circle is a mess. That latter isn’t necessarily a bad thing, actually. Mess can be creative, can work to its own aesthetic effectiveness, the whole Les Murray ‘Quality of Sprawl’ thing. But I’m not sure the sprawl, here, actually does work towards effective aesthetic ends. Indeed, since one governing aesthetic principle of this enormous novel is that of an arc returning to its origin point to make a circle (not a mediocre circle neither, but a great circle), I’d say that ‘2.’ tends to vitiate the effectiveness of Great Circle as fiction.

The title refers, as a preliminary note informs us, to global topography: ‘put a blade through any sphere and divide it into two preface halves, the circumference of the cut side of each half would be a great circle’. The main import of this is that, back in 1950, pioneer female aviator Marian Graves attempts aerially to circumnavigate the globe along one such great circle, starting and finishing in Aukland NZ and crossing both poles. She almost makes it, but in the end disappears in Antarctica and is never heard from again.

Marian is one of the novel’s three main characters, although most of her chapters are devoted to her growing up in Depression Era America, learning to fly, engaging in bootlegging, surviving world war, and shagging a lot of people, not all of them happily, and from an alarmingly early age. Another significant chunk of the narrative is devoted to a second character, Hadley Baxter, who grows-up a spoiled child actor (first on TV as the star of Katie McGee, an iCarly-esque hit, then a Twilight-style movie series called Archangel). She also has lots of unedifying and worryingly-early-years sex, does Hadley, and then she sabotages her own career out of, basically, boredom; after which a producer persuades her she’ll get an Oscar if she plays Marian Graves in a biopic.

These two narratives, Marian's and Hadley's, constitute the bulk of the novel, although there’s also a cameo by a Trans character called ‘Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly’, a Native American who lived 1790-1837. Born biologically female he persuades his tribe that the gods have remade him as a biologically exact man called ‘Gone-to-the-Spirits’, and even takes a wife: but someone watches him washing in the river one day, ‘and saw that Gone-to-the-Spirits had breasts and no cock, though he claimed to have been fully transformed into a man’ [105]. This provokes mockery in the tribe, leading to a new name ‘Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly’. He may or may not have magical powers. Bears pop up from time to time in the other two narratives.

These elements are bundled together with a pitchfork, swapping from storyline to storyline in jarring and irregular ways, and more to the point shifting tonal gear within storylines. One major flavour in the stew is High Melodrama: Marian’s mother gives birth to her on the USS Josephina, which ship is then torpedoed, Lusitania-like, by a German u-boat, with Marian’s father—the boat’s captain no less—leaping into a lifeboat at the last minute with his baby in one hand and a pistol in the other. The narrative succession of adventures, scrapes, bonking, pantomime villains and eccentrics is all fine and good—moonshine! sex! Japanese soldiers bayonetting hospitalised men in a Red Cross tent! Night Witches! (‘Russian girls in old biplanes—they fly over German lines at night and drop bombs by hand. They cut their engines and glide in—whoosh in the dark, like a broomstick passing over’ [454])—if you’re in the mood for all that, it’s dandy. But it seems to me that Shipstead’s real skill, actually, is for a more dialled-down, cooler, and arresting sort of prose. The 21st-century Hadley Baxter strand has lots of leering, celeb-gossip, casting-coach and debauchery stuff in it, but the sections in which it really hits home are more carefully and precisely pitched. For instance (‘Mitch’, here, is her legal guardian, a film producer):

Once, when I was fifteen and on hiatus from Katie McGee, my dirtbag friend Wesley and I liberated Mitch’s Porsche in the middle of the night so we could drive out to the desert to drop acid and watch the sunrise. We’d had visions of lying on boulders under the starry sky, but it was freezing and windy and we ended up sitting in the car with the heater on. Once the drugs kicked in, I didn’t like how his face looked. I kept trying to focus on anything but him, but his horrible face kept looming closer and closer, gray and papery and blank, as though someone was shoving a wasp’s nest at me. Dawn had been a red slit, night sliced open with a scalpel, with the bristly silhouettes of Joshua trees raising their clubbed arms against it. [160]

Lovely writing! Shipstead is especially good on night-time light effects as correlatives of a kind of existential dolefulness. Here she is with a different feller, in Las Vegas:

When we were fucking, he murmured my name in my ear while my face was in a hot pillow darkness, and I found I was crying. Outside, the desert faded purple and then black, while someone turned up the dial on the city, lit up that tangerine net, ready to catch some unseen circus performer falling from the sky. [370]

But this kind of thing is too easily swamped by all the more rumbunctious saga-adventure gubbins. Hadley’s parents died when she was very small—the light aircraft they were piloting crashed into Lake Superior. Again with the melodrama, and the over-obvious threading of linkages between Hadley and Marian, of which this novel provides many too many. The story also piddles around for far too long: not until the final hundred pages do we get to Marian’s big cirumglobal flight. The whole novel, if you’ll excuse the phrase in this context, lifts off the ground at this point, which only leaves the reader wondering why she had to wade through so much material to get here.

The slow predawn glug of fuel into the tanks, the walkaround, the checking of checklists, the coughing start of one engine and then the other, the roaring run-up and the heavy acceleration into lift … The city spreads to the south as they rise; bays and inlets eat away at the log northern finger of the North Island. Farms gridded off by belts of alders and eucalypts pass below, low green mountains, the shore with its wide ruffles of surf. Then water, only water. …

Light winds. Harmless clouds strewn loosely as spilled popcorn. Eddie moves between his desk and the cockpit and the Plexiglas astrodome, taking his sights and making with calculations with the leisurely assurance of a tennis pro lobbing balls. He traps the sun in the sextant, hands up notes with course adjustments, plucking first Norfolk Island out of the empty blue, then Nadi in Fiji, then Apia in Samoa. Lagoons like turquoise amoebas. The bits of land scattered across the Pacific are so sparse that the existence of each island seems startling, perplexing, almost worrisome. How did this wind up here all alone? What will become of it? [525]

A mess, tonally and structurally, with many, many lovely bits and pieces. Liver Meringue pie. A Hungarian goulash with melted marshmallows and hundreds and thousands sprinkled over the top. That time in Friends when two pages of Rachel’s cookbook stuck together and she accidentally made beef trifle. You might wolf it down. Joey did.

Mary Lawson, ‘A Town Called Solace’ (2021)

This is the seventh of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. My thoughts on some of those are blogged here (specifically: Damon Galgut's The Promise, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This). My review of Bewilderment by Richard Powers is forthcoming in The Guardian, and with two of the titles I feel my critical objectivity is too compromised for disinterested reviewing: Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men (since Nadifa is a colleague of mine at RHUL, and an excellent one at that) and Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (Francis is a friend; I read the book in draft, and am even thanked in the acknowledgements. Cool, eh?). That leaves six: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, An Island by Karen Jennings, China Room by Sunjeev Sahota and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. Should I read some, or all, of these and so satisfy the hobgoblins-of-little-minds completism that plagues my soul? Or should I wait until the shortlist is announced and pick up those that get through to the final stage? Not all of the ones I have read so far will make the final cut, I think. Which brings me to ...

A Town Called Solace. This slight novel is set in a small Canadian town in 1972. If the title is a nod towards Nevil Shute’s 1950 bestseller A Town Like Alice, the point of the allusion is, I suppose, a kind of ironic reversal: Shute’s novel is packed to the gunnels (whatever they are) with melodramatic action: war, death-marches, love, passion, expiration, trauma. Lawson’s novel, on the other hand, is about three varieties of nothing very much, about the road not taken and opportunities missed. If, on the other hand, the title is supposed to remind us of the Jam song, ‘Town Called Malice’, it’s harder to see the applicability. Weller is singing about Thatcherite urban poverty: ‘either cut down on beer or the kid's new gear/It's a big decision in a town called malice’. Lawson’s characters are all comfortably off, and there's nothing urgently punk-new-wave or satirically barbed about the leisurely narrative Lawson devotes to them.

Most of the novel takes places in two Solace houses, next door to one another. In one lives 8-year-old Clara, with her 16-year-old sister Rose and their parents. But Rose runs away after a quarrel with her mother. Clara is agonised with worry at this, and her anxiety is compounded by the fact that there is an intruder in old Mrs Orchard’s house next door. Clara had befriended Mrs Orchard, a childless old woman who had been living alone since the death of her husband some years before. When the old girl went into hospital Clara promised to keep feeding her cat Moses. But now a strange man is visible through the house windows, dragging in big suitcases and moving Mrs Orchard’s things around.

The other two narrative strands are disposed between these two characters. The strange man is Liam Kane, a young-ish guy who has, to his surprise, inherited Mrs Orchard’s house. Recently divorced, Liam was so fed-up with his big-city job as an accountant that he quit. I say ‘big city’. The job was in Toronto, so, you know, big might not be quite the mot juste. Liam’s plan is to renovate the place (it is in a state of some dilapidation), sell it, and move on with his life. He ends up befriending Clara, breaking the news to her that Mrs Orchard is dead, and generally getting drawn-in to the mystery of Rose’s disappearance and small town life.

The third narrative strand is Mrs Orchard’s. Awkwardly, formally speaking, her interleaved chapters are first-person narrations, unlike the third-person other two strands. In them Mrs O describes life in the hospital, or hospice, as she dies, and reminiscences about her life. Childless after many miscarriages, she remembers how strongly, indeed possessively, she felt about toddler Liam Kane decades before, when his parents brought him over from wartime Britain. Liam’s mother, with two other kids and pregnant again with twins, was too exhausted and distracted to give Liam the attention he needed, and Mrs O was only too happy to act in loco parentis. Decades later she and now-grown-up Liam swap occasional letters, but their earlier time together means a lot more to Mrs O than it does to Liam, hence his surprise when he discovered she had left him her house.

It’s a slow, plainly-written, small-focus novel, this; traditional in form and in characterisation, mildly absorbing but not exceptionally so. How it made the Man Booker longlist, leapfrogging thereby a large number of more notable, more interesting and brilliant novels, is one of those perennial Booker mysteries. If it makes the shortlist I’ll eat my hat. My delicious liquorice topper. The peaked cap I own made entirely of yorkshire pudding.

To be clear: I didn’t disenjoy this. It’s fine. It’s a little too leisurely, pacing-wise, and significant parts of it seemed to me not to work so well. Clare’s 8-year-old portion is an attempt to do that Jamesian What Masie Knew thing, and it doesn’t ring true, or it didn’t for me—James’s little girl understands the materialities and statuses of her world but doesn’t quite grasp the interpersonal intensities and perversities of the grown-up relationships around her, where Lawson’s little girl misses inferences any 8-year-old would grasp (Liam has Mrs O’s keys because she gave them him, Mrs O is dead, etc). There’s a great deal of slighty ponderous Clara observation: ‘the [boxes] must have lots of things in them because they were heavy, you could tell by the way the man walked when he carried them in, stooped over, knees bent’ and so on. My sense of the typical 8-year-old is that the most important relationships in their life are their peer-group, school-friends, other kids; but other than her cool older sister (who disappears very early on) Clara’s key relationships here are all with grown-ups: Mrs O, and then when she goes, Liam. She spends very little time interacting with other kids. I guess there are some kids who are like that.

Liam’s characterisation lacks nuance: he’s young and good looking (‘ferociously good looking’ one female character calls him), fundamentally decent but a bit randy and a bit shallow, with a history of failed relationships behind him. The—this is a spoiler, I guess, though you can see this coming a Canadian mile away—solace with which the novel rewards him is the love of a good woman.

There’s more heft to the way Mrs O is characterised, although there’s also a necessary static movelessness to the circumstances out of which she narrates. But the big (actually: small, but that’s OK) reveal, to do with the lengths her childlessness and her love for Liam drove her, once on a time, has actual poignancy and of the three she’s the one who reads most like an actual person. But at root this is a nice, Alice Monroe-esque short story (though I think Monroe would have managed a little more leavening acuity and creative friction in her representation) expanded, like polystyrene, to 300 pages.

‘Wonder Woman 1984’ (dir. Patty Jenkins)

 

With a title like that the filmmakers could so easily have given us an Orwellian superhero dystopia (‘Gin soaked tears poured down his face. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Wonder Woman’). But, alas, they decided to go a different way.

The story for this one is centred on a magic wishing crystal, a cluster of coloured plasticky lozenges that grants you, thanks to the sublime and plot-needful Powers of Arbitrarium, just the one wish. In Aladdin the Robin Williams genie prefaces his wish-offer with some qualifications and exceptions: you can't bring anyone back from the dead, you can't make anyone fall in love with you, and ‘ix nix on the wishing for more wishes’. Nobody in Wonder Woman 1984 wishes for anyone to fall in love with them, but the movie gaily violates the other two restrictions. Indeed, WW herself wishes her old boyfriend back from the dead. This is accomplished by having his spirit, or something, occupying the body of a character listed on IMDB only as ‘Handsome Man’. Since every time Diana looks at him she sees the face of Chris Pratt, Pine, Hemsworth (whichever one it is, they all look alike to me) this seemed to me a missed equal-opportunity moment. Speaking as an individual notably challenged in the pulchritude department, would it have been so hard for them to bung Steve in the body of an Ugly Man? We exist too, you know.

Anyway, the more obvious of the film's two villains, Pedro Pascal in a shiny 80s suit (a sort of Bernie Madoff/Young Donald Trump confidence trickster quote-unquote ‘businessman’ type) gets round the ix nix on wishing for more wishes by wishing literally to become the magic wish-granting crystal. His wish is granted, which leaves him afterwards looking like Pedro Pascal in a cheap suit and not, as I would have preferred, the crystal itself, perhaps with some googly-eyes stuck on. This new identity, by a sleight-of-screenplay, enables him to coax people into wishing for things on him so that he can, as it were, take his cut. I mean, it's hard to see how this is supposed to work, but alright.

At any rate it makes Pedro  super wealthy, powerful and leads to a showdown in which he broadcasts to the whole world from a secret TV studio that has the power (presumably somebody at some point wished for this) to override all other TV broadcasts. He offers everyone one wish, thereby skimming the 15% of topslice wish, or however that works, becoming more and more powerful as he does so. Given this opportunity, people say things like ‘I wish to be king’, ‘I wish my nagging wife would drop dead’ and ‘I wish I had nuclear weapons’—loads of people wish for this latter, actually, which puts the nervy people in US and Russian nuclear command in the situation of having to fire off their national stock of the things. Armageddon beckons.

Diana, weakened by having her Chris-wish granted, repudiates it, sending her former boyf down, we assume, to Hades (it's worth remembering that the Greek underworld, which is presumably the one Greek warrior Diana believes in, is a most unappealing place: dark, dreary and entropic. When Odysseus encounters the dead Achilles down there and asks him what it's like, he replies ‘I would rather be the meanest slave of the poorest pig-farmer on earth and be alive, than be king of all the lands of the dead.’ But Steve seems happy enough to expire, or re-expire).

Giving up her wish boosts Diana's Wonder-power, such that she can now fly, like Superman, which I'm pretty sure she couldn't do before. She also gets some impressive new golden armour, which I'm sorry to say made me go ‘Golden Wonder!’ and to snigger. That's just me, though.

The second of the film's villains is Kristen Wiig's Mousy Librarian Woman, although in this film she's Mousy Museum Woman, but you know: same difference. Her wish is to be as strong, powerful and sexy as Diana Prince, which wish is granted. For a while you think she's on the side of good, but then (hail, holy Arbitrarium!) it turns out she's not, and has thrown in her lot with Pedro Pascal. Then she gets a second wish, which surely violates the terms of the wishing-crystal contract, but there you go. This new wish is: to turn into a thundercat, a sort of half-woman-half-cheetah creature, which is just a fucking odd thing to wish for. Each to their own, I guess. Funky Feline and Wonder Woman have a fight, all the while Pedro is granting more and more wishes globally, spreading chaos further and further and precipitating the ever-impending nuclear apocaylpse.

My problem with this frantic, shrieking climax, all wind-machines and Pedro P over-acting villanous glee, is this: does literally everyone in the world wish for dead wives and nuclear weapons? Does literally nobody say ‘I wish this geezer had never had these powers’, thereby reverting the world to normality? Even if such a wish doesn't occur to any of the [does quick calculation on fingers] 6 billion people in the world, wouldn't it make sense for Diana to make such a wish? You might say: ah but she had her wish, when she wished for the bliss of a kiss with her Chris. But Kristen Wiig got a second wish. In the event, WW has to use the Lasso of Truth as, I think I'm right in saying, an antenna of some kind to hijack his broadcasting operation, and tell all the peoples of the world that they should repudiate their wishes and return to the authentic disappointments and thwartings of their old lives. Surprisingly, literally every single person on the planet, with no exceptions, agrees to this. Statistically unlikely, but hey: it's comics.