Adrian Selby's Blog, page 6

Hiding the ventriloquist*

“My name’s Gant and I’m sorry for my poor writing.”

So begins chapter one of Snakewood.

As I planned out the book I fretted a great deal over how to immerse readers in the lands, cities and lives of the world of Sarun, in which the story is set. I recalled how vividly I daydreamed myself into Middle-earth as a teenager, following paths and roads hinted at in the texts but never walked.  Tolkien’s were the first of many books I would admire over the years that followed for their ability to transport me utterly to an unfamiliar, magical place.

These are the books that made me miss my bus stop and left me dazed as I walked into the office, trying to tear my brain away from Thomas Cromwell’s poignant, tender caress of his daughter’s angel wings (Wolf Hall) or the faerie-soaked fields of Edgewood (Little, Big) and back to those essential first steps of a new day – kettle, teabags, email.

So when I started writing Snakewood, I thought, what do I need to do to deliver that level of immersion?

Of course, I needed to build a vivid world, and a magic system that integrated with that world, defined it and its many cultures. The wider reality of life being lived needed to crowd the edges of the story, but no further. I wanted also, like every writer, to make it so that the reader feels the scuff of boot, the scratch of stubble or the smell of a mortal wound.

The obvious answer to the latter was to go first person; put the reader behind the characters’ eyes, seeing what they see. There’s a marvelous directness to first person – a mainline into feelings and thoughts – bringing the reader down from the sky of the omniscient narrator into the streets and fields.

But it was after reading James Joyce, Irvine Welsh, and especially Peter Carey’s True History Of The Kelly Gang that I realized the subliminal tension present in any first person narrative: the author is, necessarily, speaking for the character. It’s pure ventriloquism. No character’s internal monologue picks out the world and the speech of others so as to create just this story, using just these details, to engross, challenge and entertain. The authors I mentioned above, like so many others, have experimented with that act of ventriloquism – Joyce with stream of consciousness in Ulysses, Welsh with the strong, literal vernacular of Trainspotting.  Carey played with the words and grammar so as to make it seem as though he wasn’t there at all, that this was Ned Kelly’s own hand.  To wit:

“… a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow.”

More than ever before or since, I felt as though the author had disappeared. Ned Kelly was speaking, unable to express his feelings eloquently or write them down properly.  The lack of eloquence was perfect, and at one point in the book, hugely moving.  I loved it.

If Snakewood is a ‘found footage’ collection of narratives to be written ‘in their own words’, then Gant, as a poorly educated mercenary soldier, should struggle to express himself too.  Gant’s narrative is central to the novel, for he is its emotional anchor, its principal ‘good guy’ and the great joy and challenge of writing it.

Every writer should be terrified of what they’re about to do when they start a book.  I was terrified at the thought of writing a limited third person narrative with consistent, but not perfectly consistent, grammatical flaws on top of all the other things I needed to get right.  It was the most challenging part of my attempt to disappear as an author; hoping that Gant, and the other narrators, would come through more purely.  I wanted the characters of Snakewood to immerse you in their story and their world.  Not mine.

*This post was first published here, on John Scalzi’s blog.  Thank you John.

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It’s Snakewood launch day :) Listen to Chapter 1 here:

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I used to stand in bookshops pt 2

I was gearing up to tear up, March 17th, when I’d finally see my book sit quietly on a shelf alongside hundreds of others, as though it was the most ordinary thing; just a book, on a shelf.

I was preparing myself to be, well, a bit underwhelmed? The anticipation couldn’t possibly deliver a satisfying payoff, so monumentally had I wished and dreamed of seeing it.

Then, on Twitter, someone posted a picture of it in a branch of Waterstones and I saw that the Brighton shop had stock a week early.  So I popped in.

I was trembling as I walked up the stairs and into the SFF section.  Nope, not on the table, where were the…ahh, the hardbacks.  At the bottom, in the corner, surrounded by Brandon Sanderson.

Just another book.

A moment of disbelief.  Then, I don’t know, something settled inside me, or, not inside me so much as beneath me; the ground had hardened, the quiet of the numinous pressed into me.  I was outside time as I reached down for it.  My own book.

I passed the next few hours in work much as I passed the minutes leaving the shop and walking back there; agitated, on the verge of tears, knowing nothing would ever be the same again, and nothing could now undo what I had worked for and what Rhian and I have sacrificed so much for.

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They followed their mercenary calling…*

The poem ‘Epitaph On An Army Of Mercenaries’ by AE Housman** is one of my favourites, and graces Snakewood as its foreword. It was an influence on the novel not so much because it happened to be about mercenaries, but because I had challenged myself to tell a story about them such that a reader might find sympathy with them, and engage with them in their attempts to right their own self-centered wrongs.

The contradiction at the heart of Housman’s poem is that, although they fought for pay, it was that very contract that underwrote their being willing to stand firm when everything around them collapsed. It makes them seem heroic but reminds us twice, notably at the end of both stanzas, that it was only for money they made a difference in that anonymous conflict’s darkest hour.

Kailen’s Twenty, the mercenary crew at the heart of Snakewood, were the best crew of them all, all elite soldiers, drudhas (my world’s version of alchemists), horse-masters, sappers, diplomats; a team that, for a price, could and did make a decisive difference in the favour of those who could pay it.

Mercenaries, as characters, are at their most interesting when that hard-bitten professional objectivity, that disengagement with the rights and wrongs of a conflict, butts up against a situation where they must choose a course of action they have a direct and personal stake in.

It’s very difficult to identify with someone who does not align with any cause. While not technically a mercenary, Han Solo, a smuggler out to make a buck, spends most of Star Wars making money out of the rebels, not giving much of a fig for their cause, until he’s guilt tripped into it. Why? Because underneath the rogue is a man with a heart, a man that knows right and wrong. In this respect he is an interesting and sympathetic protagonist because he has an arc; cynical smuggler out to make a buck turns good guy and falls in love.

In Snakewood, the two main ‘good guys’, Gant and Shale, are ex Kailen’s Twenty mercenaries still plying their trade fifteen years after the crew disbanded. Then they get a message from Kailen telling them to go into hiding because the old crew are being hunted and, so far, successfully killed. Now they have a cause, albeit a ‘debt of honour’ to Kailen, with whom they made their fortune, to seek him out and help him.

Hopefully, they have become two mercenaries you can side with, yet the fact that they let absolutely nothing stand in their way as the novel progresses illustrates their moral ambivalence to almost everyone else, something that has informed their whole adult lives. They do not burn down evil empires in Snakewood, they are merely contending with price of their former sins.

As readers we can identify with morally dubious protagonists if we can understand their moral framework as part of an internally consistent worldview. When someone ‘wrongs’ them, readers are capable of, I believe, great empathetic gymnastics regarding their retaliation. We can suspend, if you like, our own moral framework and immerse ourselves in theirs.

In that regard, mercenaries can perform a service as well as anyone else in literature. While they are atypical protagonists they can present us with dinstinctive ways of understanding human conflict, of rights and wrongs substantively different to our own. I hesitate to claim such a lofty achievement with the mercenaries of Snakewood. But in a world where professional soldiers are predominant because the magic system strongly favours those who spend their lives using it, they were a pleasurable challenge to me as a writer, in trying to create ‘good guys’ out of them.

More generally, I strongly believe atypical protagonists provide one of literature’s most important services and chief pleasures; exposing ‘humanity’ as a complex, sometimes contradictory quality, the appreciation of which is crucial to our growth as people.

Some of my favourite atypical protagonists come from some of the most capable hands there are. I urge you to read these, or in Macbeth’s case, see it:

Ned Kelly, in True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Briony Tallis in Atonement, by Ian McEwan

The marvelous Cugel, from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books

Macbeth, by you know who.

* This piece first appeared on “RagnaBlog”

** http://www.poemtree.com/poems/Epitaph...

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Books – The Bone Clocks

The title of David Mitchell’s marvellous book almost fully encapsulates it, as all its characters, deathless or otherwise, serve its dominant theme: the misery of ageing.

The book is split into decades, charting the life of Holly Sykes from the teenage heartbreak that makes her flee her home in Gravesend in 1984 to her cancer-ridden old age on the Irish coast in the very convincing near future dystopia of 2043.

Her life is bound up in a sort of supernatural war, which, you know, spoilers, the first hints of which is seeded very early on by her younger brother Jacko giving her a picture of a maze which he begs her to memorise in case one day she needs it…

Very soon afterwards, the supernatural events impose themselves as she becomes formally, albeit superficially, embroiled in this war.  This world of the magical hidden behind the ordinary is of course familiar territory ploughed by many other novels.  Two my favourites in this oeuvre, and therefore strong recommendations, are Weaveworld by Clive Barker and The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub.

As with Cloud Atlas, this is many peoples’ story, and with each decade comes a different narrator, among them a cocky and amoral Oxbridge type called Hugo Lamb, Holly’s war journalist husband and a once adored and now faded literary novelist Crispin Hershey.

The war is explained and progressed from the perspective of these and other characters, but, this being David Mitchell, it’s the detail of their lives, almost short stories akin to his revered ‘Russian Doll’ novel, that absorbs.  The ‘main thread’ of the war finds its way into their lives at various points, but is never there consistently through each of them.  We’re effortlessly jetted around the world through their lives and more importantly through their eyes.  Despite their differing life experiences they nevertheless share almost identical reflections on the awfulness of ageing, whether it’s Lamb’s reflections on a decrepit and senile but once upon a time ‘bon vivant’ that he visits, to Hershey’s withering self-disgust as he assists the world in its heaping of indignities on his once proud reputation – a cliché of a loveless upper middle class marriage and spoiled kids followed by years of heavy drinking and professional spite and envy on the literary circuit.  Each of them finds a kind of redemption, and I like that Mitchell has varied both the outcome and the impact of it for each of them.

Of course, in saying that the novel is structured so as to be like a series of short stories with beginnings through to ends, that contribute fully and seamlessly to the story arc of a novel while each separately explores the same theme across successive decades, illustrates amply Mitchell’s formidable and layered storytelling.  That he’s able also to convincingly immerse us in past, present and future, in locations as diverse as Syria, Japan, New York, Kent or the Alps only adds to the wonder of a book that needs to feel big, dealing as it does with the ramifications of his invented metaphysics.  This is a war spanning millennia that is imminently coming to an end, the combatants of which, again, to avoid spoilers, clash directly over the proverbial (not literal) fountain of youth.

As with his other novels, including my still favourite The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I could not put this book down.  It’s gripping, full of heart and just pure storytelling, so get lost in it this January, when all else is rain and runny noses.

(The picture shows a view onto a jetty near Cliffe Fort, Kent)

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How Sláine and a handful of mushrooms defined the magic of Snakewood*

My debut fantasy novel Snakewood, due out in March, is the realization of a world I first dreamed up as a teenage boy. I’d like to introduce you to the way magic works in that world – no lightshows and fireworks, just thick bad-tasting gloop known as ‘fightbrew’ that makes you superhuman!

The magic in this world comes from the plants, in particular their consumption or use.

I confess I always struggled a bit with the traditional idea of magic as lightning bolts and fireballs, the ‘Marvel superhero’ type of magic. It’s the atheist in me I suppose. Of course I was and still am enamoured by epic fantasy that is full of such things, but when it came to me dreaming up my own fantasy world and how I wanted it to work all those years ago, I was influenced a great deal by two things: Pat Mills’ Sláine from 2000AD, and, er, magic mushrooms.

Sláine was in the awesome british comic weekly 2000AD that my granddad got for me every Saturday morning. Sláine was lifted straight from the Irish mythological hero Cú Chulainn who was famed and feared for his riastrad or ‘battle frenzy’. Sláine’s ‘riastrad’ harnessed the power of the earth to effect a ‘warp spasm’, a body deforming battle frenzy that looked just plain epic in the hands of the artists Massimo Belardinelli and, later, Simon Bisley. Sláine metamorphosed into something frightening and powerful.

Then a few years later I tried some magic mushrooms. It was an epiphanic experience that left me in awe of how much I could be transformed, at least in perception, by such a small and simple thing as a mushroom.

As with all such stimulants/hallucinogens, there is a potentially severe downside, and excessive use of any drug will debilitate and damage its abuser. There is a high price to pay.

We have all read plenty of fantasy where the power of magic comes at a terrible price, the One Ring and the sword Stormbringer being two of the most famous examples.

I thought it would be fascinating if warriors could take a concoction of stimulants that would actually transform their capabilities, make them super-soldiers, resistant to poisons, stronger and faster in mind and body, able to see great distances, and all of this tethered to their consumption of ‘plant’ mixed into special brews. Fightbrews. But they had to pay a high price for these brews, their bodies slowly wrecked by their taking them, until they were used up or dead; old junkies effectively, half mad and physically broken.

I found it interesting also to imagine that transformation having a lasting effect on their appearance, riffing off the idea of woad warpaint and having these brews change warriors’ blood and even skin colour. Thus the warriors of my world have coloured skin – from reds, blues and greens to browns and yellows, according to the origin of the ingredients of their brews.

When I came then to think about the first story I would tell in this world, I was immediately interested in telling a story about these soldiers and what happens to them on these brews. It didn’t, however, feel that interesting to tell a story about them when they were at their best, all but unstoppable. But it did feel interesting to focus on them in their old age, how they coped when they had paid the price for years of brews (they call it ‘paying the colour’) yet were now facing a deadlier threat than any they’d faced in their prime.

Of course, when fightbrews determine who prevails in war, the recipes and their ingredients become more valuable than gold and diamonds. The ramifications of this for my world and its peoples were huge, and I hope that how I portray it all through the characters makes for an original and exciting new world for you all to enjoy.

*This piece was first published on the Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog, here.

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I used to stand in bookshops…

…as a teenager, then a man in my twenties and thirties and I used to look at the science fiction and fantasy novels and believe I, also, was a writer, when I wasn’t.  I couldn’t stand the thought I wasn’t a writer.  When I wasn’t.  Still then I wouldn’t dare call myself an author.  That was a special title, deserved only for those whose books surrounded me, maybe too pretentious for anyone, let alone me.  (Which is wrong, but it was a satisfyingly cold-edged ruler by which I could precisely measure the extent of my shortfall).

So I’d be jealous, standing in the bookshop, before the sff titles, telling myself I could do better than them.  When I didn’t.  And I couldn’t.  I’d look between the surnames beginning ‘R’ and ‘T’ and just wish, as airy and pure a wish as winning the lottery or wishing to fly – my name, on a spine, this story in my head about these two mercenaries running from the sins of the past, there, before me.  I was Barry’s answer to Walter Mitty.

Then I broke, one day in my early thirties.  I couldn’t go on calling myself a writer, when I wasn’t.  I gritted my teeth, unable to face being an old man, who, to paraphrase Kev ‘s* words ‘never really tried’.  Instead, I would be good enough (no accident of words that) to tell my story so well that other people would read it and they would stand with my mercenaries, see through their eyes and feel what they felt.  So I began the research and got to know all the people of my novel a whole lot better, so I could tell their sad story.  I am Goran.

Somehow I managed it.  I entertained sufficiently the handful of people who could take Snakewood from a Word doc and put it into a bookshop.  My goal was only ever that at least one other person ‘got’ the story and went on its journey while thoroughly enjoying it.

Among the many things still beyond me as a writer is the ability to describe how it feels when a dream comes true, and is then exceeded dramatically.

So I’ll stand in a Brighton bookshop in March, thirty eight years after I knew what I wanted to be, and I’ll finally call myself an author.  But the one thing that’s different about the dreams I had and the reality that’s coming is that I can now visualise the book, I have its shape, its cover, its ‘typesettedness’ in my hands.  Today that cover’s out there, as is an excerpt and the wonderful map.  You can find it here at www.fantasy-faction.com.

*Kev, a sleazy character in Ricky Gervais’s Derek, lays his soul bare at about 2:12 in the link, and it’s beautifully done, a moment that I rave about here.

If you think you want to be a writer, don’t do a Kev.  Don’t do a me either.  I can’t imagine how much better a writer I’d be now if I had some more willpower, more guts, earlier in my life.

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Books – The Children Act

I’ve written here about my miserable realisation I wouldn’t read more than a couple of thousand books in my lifetime, if I really went for it.  I thus struggle to read more than one or two books by any author because there are so many more authors to read.  How could I read another Philip K Dick while I’ve not yet read The Odyssey?

Nevertheless, I keep returning with relish to Ian McEwan.  With The Children Act I delight once again in his sublime prose, but also the gossamer feel of the stories.  From The Child In Time, through Atonement, to On Chesil Beach he balances whole lives on the point of a pin, a moment in time, fates curling away like skin through a peeler from their previous trajectories.  Whether it’s *that* moment in On Chesil Beach or the ‘next moment he’s vanished’ horror of The Child In Time, the glance between Joe and Jed in Enduring Love or, now, The Children Act, where a boy’s life is determined by a song and a kiss, McEwan revels in the delicate nudge of circumstance, a butterfly effect culminating in dragging great anchors through the deeps of his characters.

I’m always in awe of his mastery of the form, an ability to surf entire lives in a page, and yet also find the simplest, most right words to depict particular events.  Early on, High Court judge Fiona Kaye is facing her husband’s accusation that she is frigid:

“‘It’s been seven weeks and a day.  Are you honestly content with that?’…Seven weeks and a day also had a medieval ring, like a sentence handed down from an old Court of Assize.”

With characteristic efficiency McEwan tells us a lot about Kaye’s husband from his noting their lack of sex to the day, as opposed to a more vague ‘It’s been weeks’.  But, though it’s the third person narrator, the thought that is triggered by this is perfectly right for Fiona herself, being a judge, McEwan limiting himself to the allusions that would keep with the character herself.

His sentences are pared down to their essence, there is no fat.  The power comes from what he chooses to describe with those sentences.  Near the end, as Kaye plays a duet with a colleague at a party, McEwan applies a very gentle pressure to the moments, the most delicate of hints that there is a wrong coming, barely more than a change in the air, a taste in the mouth.  It’s all that’s needed to hold you to the pages as the end nears, your immersion in the moment of the events playing out is subconsciously preparing, anticipating a payoff.

The novel is short, deceptively deep: Kaye, the High Court judge, is ruling on a Jehovah’s Witness, a minor, refusing a blood transfusion without which he would die, the challenge for Kaye resting on an assessment of his ‘Gillick’ competence, his only being three months from eighteen complicating the judgement.  It sits in parallel with Kaye’s confrontation of her husband’s marital frustration and infidelity.  His journey is practically off camera, and thus two dimensional, pathetic even.  She is the lens for the breakdown, for the ebb and flow of hate and annoyance, despair and longing that the threat of the end of their marriage triggers.  Everything about her feelings and the gaps and interconnects between her and her husband, the inching through a stalemate back to something more, feels right, feels solid.  It’s only because I try to write books myself that I know how this seemingly effortless ‘rightness’ is far, far from effortless.  The true quality of his work lies in how brilliantly and fully realised his characters are.

And so, inspired, I go back to my own characters; girls, boys, demons, angels and soldiers, begging to be let out of cages drawn with my less artful pen.

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Books – H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald has opened her soul, and unlike most of us, is able to articulate its pain and its healing with a beautiful and haunting power.

H is for Hawk is a memoir that weaves her grief over the loss of her father with her training of a goshawk, but it also follows the life of the author T.H.White, including his attempts to train a goshawk, his account of which became a book in its own right.

But the weaving of this memoir goes deeper than that, as her reflections expand out to contemplation of the nature of belonging and identity.  These thoughts are coextensive with her interpretation of The Goshawk and White’s struggles with the titular hawk as symbolic of his inner turmoil; a psychoanalysis of White and the forces of his parents and his homosexuality on the man he became, and the actions in which those formative experiences and predilections would later, destructively, manifest.

It is a moving book, a wrestling with grief and depression, a desire for annihilation of the self in the ‘everpresent’ of nature, the goshawk’s pure and timeless purpose.  Macdonald flees people and all the trappings of her life, sheds them, and gives us a mesmerising account of the journey there and back.

The book is a vigorous argument for the importance of good prose.  Great prose has always thrilled me, and H is for Hawk is overstuffed with it:

‘The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater.  Things sat in it, dark and very still…There were imperceptible pressures…Something else was there, something standing next to me that I couldn’t touch or see, a thing a fraction of a millimetre from my skin, something vastly wrong.’

This is early on, the depression taking hold.  There are beautiful juxtapositions here – a light that is wet, a light within which sit dark things, something barely a millimetre away that is also vast.  These juxtapositions make us giddy, they define a wrongness in the house around her that is a symptom of the depression she is slipping into, when, as I can attest, the world in its entirety seems wrong, not just distant.  It is the choice of description here, the avoidance of cliché, that works to draw the parallel out of my own feelings.  A more generic description would fail to engage.  This description, my mind’s consumption and decoding of it, is precisely the activity required to create the resonance between her feelings and feelings I remember having.  But this applies to the whole book.  My engagement and emotional involvement stem in significant part from her ability to describe some quite esoteric memories of childhood such that they triggered memories I’d forgotten about but also shared.

More than once in the last week or so I’ve walked into the office and for fully fifteen minutes tried to disentangle myself from her story in order to start my day.

Here’s a snip regarding the man she’s buying the goshawk from retrieving the box with it inside from his car:

‘A sudden thump of feathered shoulders and the box shook…Another hinge untied.  Concentration.  Infinite caution.  Daylight irrigating the box.  Scratching talons, another thump.  And another.  Thump.  The air turned syrupy, slow, flecked with dust.  The last few seconds before a battle…and it’s all happening at once, the man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury…My heart jumps sideways.  She is a conjuring trick.  A reptile.  A fallen angel.’

Then there are gorgeous turns of phrase, almost beyond count, such as:

‘She breathes hot hawk-breath in my face.  It smells of pepper and musk and burned stone.’

Much of the book then, revolves around her growing relationship with the goshawk.  While her memoir fills out around the day to day of her life as she vanishes from society to encompass her thoughts on White and her own mental stability, she writes captivatingly about the hawk, its predilection for play, its states of mind and its savage power.  On top of everything else, there’s an education about training hawks in here, not to mention sociocultural musings on the history of falconers and austringers (the name for goshawk trainers particularly).  There are many threads to this weave of memoir yet the result is vivid and readable.

Later on Macdonald wonders about the nature of ‘Old England’, and how it is really only a construct, a sop, something simple we can put upon the objective past to make us content about it and thus pine for it:

‘Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings.  It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard…We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not.  Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead.  We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves.  We take solace in pictures, and wipe the hills of history.’

Her musings on England are both her own and her wondering to what extent White’s view on such things was.  Much of what she writes of from her own life she explores with regard to his.  They are musings informed by her wandering in the countryside and her coming to know one part of it intimately, that part she hunts with Mabel, her hawk.  It is the classic ‘landscape as collective memory’ that is being explored in this book along with so much else of her heart.  The journey of Mabel’s training, the triumphs and failures, she paints as stemming from but also revealing to her what it is that’s wrong with her, what her own state of mind is.  Training Mabel seems to be a tackling and overcoming of her perceived flaws – neediness, being overprotecting, nihilism.  These are all reflected somehow purely and transparently in the hiccups she has with training the hawk.  Ultimately, Mabel delivers the means of a resolution.

Macdonald’s honesty, her passions and her brutally scrutinised flaws are clearly exposed in this book.  It’s a self-awareness and a depth of feeling that’s so much more profound than so much else I’ve read.  It doesn’t surprise me she can suffer so much.  Knowing this book is ‘true’ is what made it so moving, that and her exquisite ability to express this truth.   I followed her story and its helical mirror in T.H. White’s story with gratitude and admiration.

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Books – The Goldfinch, The Liars’ Gospel

“if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am.  And it’s there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it’s not.  Dream and magic, magic and delirium.  The Unified Field Theory.  A secret about a secret.”

Theo Decker, the protagonist of Donna Tartt’s brilliant novel The Goldfinch contemplates the way Carel Fabritius’s painting of the same name has dominated his life, a complicated connection beginning with the shocking opening as his mother is killed in a terrorist bomb blast in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in their hometown of New York.  He escapes with a ring given to him by a dying man – to take to an old furniture restorer – and his mother’s favourite painting: The Goldfinch.

His life takes its turns from there, Theo trying to keep the painting hidden, a paranoia about it, and a passion for it that almost drives him mad.  We come to know the people who, in his mother’s absence, will dominate his life:  his gambler of a father; his friend Boris, a kindred spirit that he spirals out of control with in the bleached out and desolate sands of a Vegas suburb; a girl who is the love of his life from start to finish; the furniture restorer whose great kindness is not so well repaid, and a wealthy Manhattan family.

He slides through his adolescence and into an adulthood addicted to pills, wrestling with depression, until he receives some shocking news which precipitates his being drawn into a criminal underworld half a world away.

The book succeeds so resoundingly because of Tartt’s detail; storytelling that immerses you utterly in Decker’s life because it is so vividly nuanced, rich.  It is mahogany-hard in its realness, autobiographical almost.  But Tartt goes much further than tell a story.  Decker’s journey, his surfeit of feeling and rich reflection on his regrets, his pain and of course, most vividly his love, progresses into an almost dream-like finale where he comes to contemplate the nature of self and the notion of a continuum with art.  To what extent did the painting represent him, its subject matter a rich metaphor for his life?  What is our relationship with immortal works of art?  I’m sure Tartt intended this introspection on our behalf as the finale ploughs its deep philosophical ground.  This is an unforgettable book.

 *

“Losing one’s faith is so very like gaining it.  There is the same joy, the same terror, the same annihilation of self in the ecstasy of understanding…One has to lose one’s faith many times before one begins to lose faith in faith itself.”

I include here my thoughts and my recommendation for The Liars’ Gospel by Naomi Alderman because it shares with The Goldfinch a fabulous immersion and a narrative that raises, indirectly here, its own deeper questions.  Alderman has delivered a pungent, flinty Jerusalem you can taste and smell and it empowers her stories of Jesus and those around him; stories about his mother, Judas, Caiaphas and Barrabas.  These bit players in his life are here given their own rich lives, each capable of leading a novel in themselves, each to varying degrees touched by who Jesus was.  By immersing them so vividly in a land and time of which so little is really known – Galilee and Jerusalem being backwaters in the Roman Empire as far as its own historians are concerned – Alderman’s research and fine prose gives an almost ‘photo-realistic’ quality to their lives and their passions.  The book is ambiguous in respect of the theology, neutral as a camera or a historian would be in depicting Jesus debating, or the riots against the Romans.  These are powerful vignettes against a violent backdrop simmering with the threat of rebellion.

Having read the eminent historian E.P.Sanders’ life of Jesus which stripped away the fervour of the Gospels’ message for the reality of the time, there is the same maddening question for us reading this fictional treatment of the world around Jesus as there are for the historians attempting to piece together the origin of Christianity.  Why, of all those who proclaimed to be the Messiah, did this man, little known and little mourned in his own lifetime before a relatively modest number of disciples, catch fire in the minds of those who heard his word so that, only a few hundred years later, he had conquered Rome?  It is, incidentally, a kind of great revenge, this subsequent deification, that creates the book’s most satisfying twist, as it sets itself against the more literal and darker advocate of Jews under the Romans’ heel, Barrabas, Jerusalem’s principle gangster.

Alderman creates a beautiful and quite, well, christian moral out of the aftermath of the book’s critical scene, where Barrabas and Jesus face Pilate in order to determine their fates.  What we know well enough is that the course of history was decided with the outcome of that conversation.  Alderman finds a unique angle from which to create an account of that fateful event; a beautiful, masterful dialogue that seals the fate of the world.

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