Ben Peek's Blog, page 16
January 21, 2013
How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet
How the Dead Dream is Lydia Millet's follow up after the excellent Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, one of the best books, I believe, in the 21st Century so far (an opinion that is subject to change on the century and whim).
Originally published by Soft Skull Press, How the Dead Dream is the first in a trilogy of interlocking novels about extinction, of which the subsequent two, Ghost Lights and Magnificence were published by Norton. I purchased my copy when it was originally published, but have waited to read it since since then for the remaining books to be published so I can read them together--a choice, at the halfway point through Ghost Lights, that I think is going to work out for the best.
How the Dead Dream is the story of T., a young entrepreneur involved in real estate who, in his youth, is obsessed with money, with the figures on it, with the presence of it around him. As he grows older, this obsession matures into a desire for considerable wealth, but under the experiences of life (his parents divorce, his relationship, lived experiences, etc) his love for wealth falters and T. finds himself, eventually, obsessed with animals that are endangered.
Much of the focus of the book is on that transformation. How the Dead Dream is, narrative wise, a character study, and it follows T. from his childhood to his adulthood, stepping aside the plot heavy narrative that was part of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, but without sacrificing the substance that was part of that novel. Millet handles her narrative well--it is not unfamiliar to her at this point--and the shifts in T.'s character are done excellently across the board, with my only caveat being that his final choice to head down the river (in a way that is not reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, despite what many others say) being the only misstep that Millet makes in terms of characterisation. Otherwise, the shifts are done well, with the use of coyote, his family, and his relationships well employed.
Yet there is, by the end, a sense of incompletion within the text. It is a difficult issue to address, because the book itself is the first of a 'trilogy', and thus I shouldn't expect it to be complete within itself. How then, do you judge a sense of incompletion? Is that not, by its very nature, part of a sequence? Well, it is, but part of the problem arises from the choice in narrative style that Millet has chosen. With a plot heavy narrative--one that genre fiction favours, for example--books in a trilogy can have a sense of closure baked into them by tying up a certain amount of plot lines, character arcs, etc. In Millet's novel, since the narrative is so strongly tied to T.'s life, to his emotional growth, and the theme of extinction, Millet has the problem that she doesn't have enough to tie up for a sense of closure, while leaving enough hanging so that it can thread its way through the following books. In the end, what she attempts to do is to tie up her plot through her theme, while leaving the narrative of T. incomplete, and it's not entirely satisfactory, though her narration in the final pages is full of excellent prose.
Which is, of course, something that can not be ignored, since How the Dead Dream is an excellently written novel, with many fine turns of phrase. Her social observations are baked into her prose and are, at turns, insightful and funny, but can also be switched off to let the emotion of the scene--such as lunch with his father--flow. In this regard, Millet never skips a beat, and thus the novel, as it works towards its thematic conversation of arguing the responsibility of humanity in relation to other living creatures on the planet, is always done in a fine and measured hand, though your enjoyment of it, I imagine, will ultimately be decided by your response to her position in the book.
Originally published by Soft Skull Press, How the Dead Dream is the first in a trilogy of interlocking novels about extinction, of which the subsequent two, Ghost Lights and Magnificence were published by Norton. I purchased my copy when it was originally published, but have waited to read it since since then for the remaining books to be published so I can read them together--a choice, at the halfway point through Ghost Lights, that I think is going to work out for the best.
How the Dead Dream is the story of T., a young entrepreneur involved in real estate who, in his youth, is obsessed with money, with the figures on it, with the presence of it around him. As he grows older, this obsession matures into a desire for considerable wealth, but under the experiences of life (his parents divorce, his relationship, lived experiences, etc) his love for wealth falters and T. finds himself, eventually, obsessed with animals that are endangered.
Much of the focus of the book is on that transformation. How the Dead Dream is, narrative wise, a character study, and it follows T. from his childhood to his adulthood, stepping aside the plot heavy narrative that was part of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, but without sacrificing the substance that was part of that novel. Millet handles her narrative well--it is not unfamiliar to her at this point--and the shifts in T.'s character are done excellently across the board, with my only caveat being that his final choice to head down the river (in a way that is not reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, despite what many others say) being the only misstep that Millet makes in terms of characterisation. Otherwise, the shifts are done well, with the use of coyote, his family, and his relationships well employed.
Yet there is, by the end, a sense of incompletion within the text. It is a difficult issue to address, because the book itself is the first of a 'trilogy', and thus I shouldn't expect it to be complete within itself. How then, do you judge a sense of incompletion? Is that not, by its very nature, part of a sequence? Well, it is, but part of the problem arises from the choice in narrative style that Millet has chosen. With a plot heavy narrative--one that genre fiction favours, for example--books in a trilogy can have a sense of closure baked into them by tying up a certain amount of plot lines, character arcs, etc. In Millet's novel, since the narrative is so strongly tied to T.'s life, to his emotional growth, and the theme of extinction, Millet has the problem that she doesn't have enough to tie up for a sense of closure, while leaving enough hanging so that it can thread its way through the following books. In the end, what she attempts to do is to tie up her plot through her theme, while leaving the narrative of T. incomplete, and it's not entirely satisfactory, though her narration in the final pages is full of excellent prose.
Which is, of course, something that can not be ignored, since How the Dead Dream is an excellently written novel, with many fine turns of phrase. Her social observations are baked into her prose and are, at turns, insightful and funny, but can also be switched off to let the emotion of the scene--such as lunch with his father--flow. In this regard, Millet never skips a beat, and thus the novel, as it works towards its thematic conversation of arguing the responsibility of humanity in relation to other living creatures on the planet, is always done in a fine and measured hand, though your enjoyment of it, I imagine, will ultimately be decided by your response to her position in the book.
January 20, 2013
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
I am listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor's new album, Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! and so far, it's pretty good.
January 17, 2013
January 13, 2013
The Hurt Locker.
The other night, I watched The Hurt Locker.
There was no particular reason why I hadn't watched it earlier. I liked Kathryn Bigelow's previous films, though none were truly remarkable--which is perhaps why I didn't rush out for this film when the hype surrounded it--and that continues with The Hurt Locker. Set in Iraq, the film details the last month or so of three bomb disposal personal, quickly approaching their rotation out. After the death of one in the opening scenes of the film, Sergeant William James is introduced, and Bigelow quickly establishes Jeremy Renner's character as the centre piece of her study on war as a drug, helped out by the use of journalist Chris Hedge's quote at the start of the film, "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."
Unfortunately, Bigelow's entire film can be summed up in that quote, and she has established it ten, fifteen minutes into the film. This ensures that the film has all the substance of something like, oh, 'War' by Edwin Starr.
It's not that Starr's song is shallow, because that's not it's point: it's a three minute pop protest that you could play loud and it is great for that. However, Bigelow's film is not a pop song, and that's the problem with her film because, at two hours in length, The Hurt Locker never leaves the pop song mentality--war is a drug--and because of that, her film really does feel largely unnecessary.
This is actually an issue of mine with a lot of film and literature, if I were being honest. So much work can be reduced to a single, three minute pop song in its statement and intent, that I am often left wondering why it is that the artist bothered to make it. It takes months, years even, to create a novel or a film--surely you want to use that time to create something with depth? A cynical part of me believes that this is a result of the growing reluctance in publishers and studios to bankroll and promote work that is not palpable to a teenage audience who, lets face it, are not terribly interested in things that have meaning, depth, conversation, and so forth. Like I said, it's a cynical statement to make, and like most cynical statements, there's a lot of evidence to argue against it, but there's also plenty to argue for it, as well. But whatever the reason before it, the willingness of artists to sink time and money into complex, thoughtful, interesting pieces that form a dialogue between the audience and the artist is something that is becoming less and less done and Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, which received plenty of accolades, is just another in these kinds of work.
It could have been more, naturally, but Bigelow and scriptwriter Mark Boal are deliberate in their intent not to give it any substance. Any conversation about the presence of the US military in Iraq is completely and utterly ignored. The only Iraqi voice in the film is the young boy who goes by the Westernized name Beckham, which allows you to read, should you desire, any number of conservative views into the film as a whole. Personally, while I think the conservative nature of the politics is there, lurking beneath it, I don't think it is the point of the film and its use of Iraqi men and women as bombers and terrorists is, rather than something entirely unpleasant, used to portray the paranoia the soldiers feel when they are out. Since the film is so rigidly focused on the three main men, there's no room for anything but them and their perceptions. But it does remain hard to ignore that because of that the film refuses to give voice to the people whose country has been invaded and their government removed. Even the moment when Beckham is misidentified is one that could have been made into something in the film, but Bigelow and Boal, either afraid of the racism it would lead to, or because of their desire to simply not leave the one note that the film plays solidly for two hours, refuse to follow it.
When, finally, Renner's James returns home, there is a small sense of Bigelow's largely formless narrative being closed off, which is nice, but nothing new is added to the film at this point, and the question you have been asking for the previous hour--"Why am I still watching?"--won't result in anything that rewards your continual presence with the film.
It sounds like I hated the film, but I didn't, honestly. It's not a bad film, just simple, a two hour pop song for the ADD crowd, and these days, I am simply not engaged by that.
There was no particular reason why I hadn't watched it earlier. I liked Kathryn Bigelow's previous films, though none were truly remarkable--which is perhaps why I didn't rush out for this film when the hype surrounded it--and that continues with The Hurt Locker. Set in Iraq, the film details the last month or so of three bomb disposal personal, quickly approaching their rotation out. After the death of one in the opening scenes of the film, Sergeant William James is introduced, and Bigelow quickly establishes Jeremy Renner's character as the centre piece of her study on war as a drug, helped out by the use of journalist Chris Hedge's quote at the start of the film, "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."
Unfortunately, Bigelow's entire film can be summed up in that quote, and she has established it ten, fifteen minutes into the film. This ensures that the film has all the substance of something like, oh, 'War' by Edwin Starr.
It's not that Starr's song is shallow, because that's not it's point: it's a three minute pop protest that you could play loud and it is great for that. However, Bigelow's film is not a pop song, and that's the problem with her film because, at two hours in length, The Hurt Locker never leaves the pop song mentality--war is a drug--and because of that, her film really does feel largely unnecessary.
This is actually an issue of mine with a lot of film and literature, if I were being honest. So much work can be reduced to a single, three minute pop song in its statement and intent, that I am often left wondering why it is that the artist bothered to make it. It takes months, years even, to create a novel or a film--surely you want to use that time to create something with depth? A cynical part of me believes that this is a result of the growing reluctance in publishers and studios to bankroll and promote work that is not palpable to a teenage audience who, lets face it, are not terribly interested in things that have meaning, depth, conversation, and so forth. Like I said, it's a cynical statement to make, and like most cynical statements, there's a lot of evidence to argue against it, but there's also plenty to argue for it, as well. But whatever the reason before it, the willingness of artists to sink time and money into complex, thoughtful, interesting pieces that form a dialogue between the audience and the artist is something that is becoming less and less done and Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, which received plenty of accolades, is just another in these kinds of work.
It could have been more, naturally, but Bigelow and scriptwriter Mark Boal are deliberate in their intent not to give it any substance. Any conversation about the presence of the US military in Iraq is completely and utterly ignored. The only Iraqi voice in the film is the young boy who goes by the Westernized name Beckham, which allows you to read, should you desire, any number of conservative views into the film as a whole. Personally, while I think the conservative nature of the politics is there, lurking beneath it, I don't think it is the point of the film and its use of Iraqi men and women as bombers and terrorists is, rather than something entirely unpleasant, used to portray the paranoia the soldiers feel when they are out. Since the film is so rigidly focused on the three main men, there's no room for anything but them and their perceptions. But it does remain hard to ignore that because of that the film refuses to give voice to the people whose country has been invaded and their government removed. Even the moment when Beckham is misidentified is one that could have been made into something in the film, but Bigelow and Boal, either afraid of the racism it would lead to, or because of their desire to simply not leave the one note that the film plays solidly for two hours, refuse to follow it.
When, finally, Renner's James returns home, there is a small sense of Bigelow's largely formless narrative being closed off, which is nice, but nothing new is added to the film at this point, and the question you have been asking for the previous hour--"Why am I still watching?"--won't result in anything that rewards your continual presence with the film.
It sounds like I hated the film, but I didn't, honestly. It's not a bad film, just simple, a two hour pop song for the ADD crowd, and these days, I am simply not engaged by that.
January 11, 2013
The Tourist, Olen Steinhauer.
Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist is a remarkable in that such praise has been given to a novel that is, beyond its mediocrity, awful.
Opening in Venice the day before September 11th, 2001, The Tourist introduces Milo Weaver, a burnt out, drug dependent black ops agent for the USA, a 'tourist' as he is designated, a man without a home, fixed identity, and moral compass. When his job goes bad, he ends up shot and next to a pregnant woman whose water has just burst and who, sadly, six years later, will be revealed to be Weaver's wife.
I originally found Steinhauer's book through some favourable reviews of his third Weaver novel, wherein a lot of comparisons were made to early John le Carre, and I thought, "I haven't read a spy novel for years," and thought that was the ticket. Something new, right? A nice, mean, lean dark spy novel, like those that le Carre wrote (and might still do, admittedly--I haven't read his later work). What I should have done was gone and picked up the le Carre I hadn't read, rather than this, because Steinhauer, who lives now in Budapest, has written the white, upper middle class spy novel of family dysfunction that one of his characters decries at a certain point in the book. It is done without irony, but there are many moments where Steinhauer blissfully writes without irony, sadly.
Somewhere in the back of The Tourist is actually a decent spy novel, but Steinhauer's craft fails him on every level and it remains lost as a whole. His prose is workman like, at best, with, "He kissed his wife again, went to the door, then turned back. She looked tiny in that big Disney bed," being pretty indicative of the general level of it. And yes, they do go to Disneyland where Milo's bottom lip will 'quiver' when a ex-KGB man appears and his wife asks to be introduced. Then there's the characterisation, which relies on everyone, especially Milo, being stupid. At times, it is an incredibly stupidity. For example, after his breakdown in Venice, Milo is given a desk job and spends six years tracking down an assassin called the Tiger (yes, the reference is made to the Jackel, acknowledged in the book) and not once unravels that he is an ex-tourist, that he is funded by his own government, by his own boss, even. His friend, Angela, learns more than him in six months, but she is killed for that--and you know she'll die because she has a huge monologue, and that usually signifies that a) the person who is not Milo will die or b) that they are a minor character with a huge reveal that the book has not allowed its protagonist to foreshadow and will be linked to a huge conspiracy plot that, in the end, is totally unimaginative.
Which, of course, is the largest problem with the Tourist. If a plot heavy conspiracy had actually emerged from the book, it would have been possible to forgive the ordinariness of the prose and the stupid, upper middle class family expectations that sweep through the book, but the truth is, the plot is one ripped from a newspaper, one you and I know well: the USA does bad things for oil. Yes. Clandestine government organisations that fear China getting more and more oil try to cut off China's supplies and, yeah, awesome. However, the real problem with the plot emerges in the last quarter of the book, when Steinhauer has his spy turn himself in, thus removing him from the role of the protagonist. He's still there, of course, but he is confined, so it requires characters such as the CIA officer with the lazy eye, Weaver's wife who knew nothing about him, and Weaver's suddenly revealed father who basically fixes everything without Weaver having to do anything, thus removing him from the equation entirely. If that was the goal, then you have to wonder why Steinhauer didn't just write the book from this father figure's point of view, who is a lot more interesting than his protagonist, and actually opens a more interesting door through his connection with the UN, and his desire to play everyone to influence his own seemingly benevolent machinations.
But no, that's not how it plays: instead, Milo, who is taken off stage in what you can only call a failure of craft, finishes the novel watching from a safe distance his adopted daughter get into the car of her real father, and feeling the family drama.
I mean, you know, if that works for you, all good--but it was all shabbily done on a craft level, from the prose to the plot to the tiny things that bind a work together.
Avoid it, in other words.
Opening in Venice the day before September 11th, 2001, The Tourist introduces Milo Weaver, a burnt out, drug dependent black ops agent for the USA, a 'tourist' as he is designated, a man without a home, fixed identity, and moral compass. When his job goes bad, he ends up shot and next to a pregnant woman whose water has just burst and who, sadly, six years later, will be revealed to be Weaver's wife.
I originally found Steinhauer's book through some favourable reviews of his third Weaver novel, wherein a lot of comparisons were made to early John le Carre, and I thought, "I haven't read a spy novel for years," and thought that was the ticket. Something new, right? A nice, mean, lean dark spy novel, like those that le Carre wrote (and might still do, admittedly--I haven't read his later work). What I should have done was gone and picked up the le Carre I hadn't read, rather than this, because Steinhauer, who lives now in Budapest, has written the white, upper middle class spy novel of family dysfunction that one of his characters decries at a certain point in the book. It is done without irony, but there are many moments where Steinhauer blissfully writes without irony, sadly.
Somewhere in the back of The Tourist is actually a decent spy novel, but Steinhauer's craft fails him on every level and it remains lost as a whole. His prose is workman like, at best, with, "He kissed his wife again, went to the door, then turned back. She looked tiny in that big Disney bed," being pretty indicative of the general level of it. And yes, they do go to Disneyland where Milo's bottom lip will 'quiver' when a ex-KGB man appears and his wife asks to be introduced. Then there's the characterisation, which relies on everyone, especially Milo, being stupid. At times, it is an incredibly stupidity. For example, after his breakdown in Venice, Milo is given a desk job and spends six years tracking down an assassin called the Tiger (yes, the reference is made to the Jackel, acknowledged in the book) and not once unravels that he is an ex-tourist, that he is funded by his own government, by his own boss, even. His friend, Angela, learns more than him in six months, but she is killed for that--and you know she'll die because she has a huge monologue, and that usually signifies that a) the person who is not Milo will die or b) that they are a minor character with a huge reveal that the book has not allowed its protagonist to foreshadow and will be linked to a huge conspiracy plot that, in the end, is totally unimaginative.
Which, of course, is the largest problem with the Tourist. If a plot heavy conspiracy had actually emerged from the book, it would have been possible to forgive the ordinariness of the prose and the stupid, upper middle class family expectations that sweep through the book, but the truth is, the plot is one ripped from a newspaper, one you and I know well: the USA does bad things for oil. Yes. Clandestine government organisations that fear China getting more and more oil try to cut off China's supplies and, yeah, awesome. However, the real problem with the plot emerges in the last quarter of the book, when Steinhauer has his spy turn himself in, thus removing him from the role of the protagonist. He's still there, of course, but he is confined, so it requires characters such as the CIA officer with the lazy eye, Weaver's wife who knew nothing about him, and Weaver's suddenly revealed father who basically fixes everything without Weaver having to do anything, thus removing him from the equation entirely. If that was the goal, then you have to wonder why Steinhauer didn't just write the book from this father figure's point of view, who is a lot more interesting than his protagonist, and actually opens a more interesting door through his connection with the UN, and his desire to play everyone to influence his own seemingly benevolent machinations.
But no, that's not how it plays: instead, Milo, who is taken off stage in what you can only call a failure of craft, finishes the novel watching from a safe distance his adopted daughter get into the car of her real father, and feeling the family drama.
I mean, you know, if that works for you, all good--but it was all shabbily done on a craft level, from the prose to the plot to the tiny things that bind a work together.
Avoid it, in other words.
January 10, 2013
Photo Book Reviewing
So, this year, the girl and I are attempting to read fifty two books, one book a week, basically. Others may do more, others less, but this seemed reasonable. We also decided that we would blog about each book we read and write comments, reviews, etc. She said she wasn't much of a writer and I said, "You should do photo reviews."
I said it full well knowing it would be much, much more difficult than what I would do, simply writing about it.
Here's the first one, Will Self's Umbrella.
[image error]
Link.
I said it full well knowing it would be much, much more difficult than what I would do, simply writing about it.
Here's the first one, Will Self's Umbrella.
[image error]
Link.
January 7, 2013
John Clute on Steampunk: Revolution, edited by Ann Vandermeer.
John Clute wrote about Steampunk III: Revolutions on Strange Horizons and my story, 'Possession', gets a nice mention:
You can buy the book here.
Some of the stories assembled in Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, attempting to fulfill the programme signalled in the subtitle, carry on from there, others play with toolkit, I think less fruitfully, partly because the underlying command that nothing be invisible in Steampunk can create an adhesiveness that binds story to the world being depicted, certainly if the author has nothing subversive to say, so that some tales (no names this time) in the anthology are still-born. Others are not. Nick Mamatas's "Arbeitskraft" (2010), which includes the Marx quote I copied above, quite brilliantly incorporates into its very sympathetic portrayal of Friedrich Engels a savage analysis of what it means when human beings are literally transfigured into chinks in the world machine. Ben Peek's "Possession" (2007) transforms the world into a hole without bottom or god, and immersion of its denizens in eternal darkness as a process of corrosion. Jeff VanderMeer's "Fixing Hanover" (2008) makes a silk purse of story out of a pig's ear: a storyline so heavily trailed that only an intensely skilled unpacking of events could manage to make it new: but VanderMeer, who had sometimes in his earlier work had difficulty with the beat of Next that drives all great story, had no difficulty here. Jeff Ford's fine "The Seventh Expression of the Robot General" (2008) is almost tangible in its melancholy. N. K. Jemisin's "The Effluent Engine" (2011) so winningly depicts early nineteenth-century New Orleans that its failure to do very much to argue an assertion about gender freedom in Haiti seems less an error than (perhaps) a confession that the tale has not yet fully been told (and is a story I'd almost prefer, without being stubborn about it, to call something other than Steampunk).
You can buy the book here.
January 6, 2013
Bat For Lashes - The Haunted Man
This is 'All Your Gold' taken from Bat For Lashes' most recent album, The Haunted Man.
January 5, 2013
Joseph Anton: A Memoir, by Salman Rushdie
One of my favourite books is The Satanic Verses, a novel that I read much, much later than it was published, and after all the drama of it had died down. It was hard, when I had finished it, to see exactly what had upset people--the book was, I thought, ultimately about multiculturalism and how this impacted on migrants and their relationship not just with their new homes, but old--but in the end I figured that I would never really understand, and left it at that. I have never understood the opposition some people and organisations have against works of art, and I have never understood why it is that we ought to be respectful of those organisations when they react so poorly, and censor ourselves.
It is a question that Salman Rushdie brings up in his large, at times unflattering, at times fascinating, memoir, Joseph Anton. In what is ultimately an uneven book, the best of it comes from his discussion early on about the response from the literary world to The Satanic Verses, wherein it is said that he wrote the book to offend, that if he had known that people were going to die, he wouldn't have done it, and so on. For Rushdie--and thus the reader--it creates the suggestion that the author himself was responsible for the situation he found himself in. Whether you like him or not--and there will be many people lined up to bring the axe down on Rushdie for the content of the memoir--the balance of blame and responsibility in this regard seems unbalanced. Regardless of the reaction to The Satanic Verses, once a book, or a film, an album, a painting, any work of art basically, leaves the artist and enters the public domain, its intellectual and emotionally response is taken out of the hands of the artist. Anyone who has ever put anything into the public domain will have experienced that. But the responsibility of that response is in the hands of the responder, not the artist--and there is no driving mandate that says you have to respond to a written work by killing a person, nothing that absolves that killer from their guilt and wrong doing. You can argue, you can critique, you can simply ignore: leaving the violence out is something that separates us from the damaging religious fundamentalists who reacted violently to The Satanic Verses, and whose response, Rushdie attempts to detail, are shaping the century that we are all living in.
He would have been better, perhaps, to have remained on that topic, since it is the most successful, most interesting part of the book. When Rushdie takes Joseph Anton out of this subject and into his personal and professional life, the success of the book is at times difficult to find. To a degree, the best memoirs are the ones where the knife is clear and easy to see, the gossip funny, and the sex plenty; but while his public arguments with John Le Carre are actually quite amusing, the descriptions of Roald Dahl's hands as strangler's hands excellent, and the long, drawn character assassination of his second wife, Marianne Wiggins the most amazing, gossip ridden sordid literary tussle you could ever hope for... there is something in these descriptions that undermines the more worthy discussion of literary worth, the defence of freedom of speech, and religious fundamentalism that is also at play in the book. These descriptions also fairly much ensure that the literary world, which is a series of small, interconnected ponds giving the illusion of one large one, will be completely unable to respond to Joseph Anton without bias, and a more detailed and time free individual would have a great time following the links between reviewers and their relationships with Rushdie and those he slighted in the book. Of those, however, I would like to pause for Zoe Heller's apparently superb hatchet job of Joseph Anton in the New York Review of Books. For those of you who think it is a such a hatchet job, please: it could have been crueller, nastier, and funnier. Instead, it's a decent discussion of Rushdie's novel, though one I don't go along with, but it's also one to a degree that Rushdie predicts in Joseph Anton, by his portrayal of the British media, and a general opinion that those born there have to him.
But the review could have been funnier. Nastier. Crueller. Just saying.
In the end, however, Joseph Anton must stand on its own merits, and it is a mixed bag. The writing is stripped back in style and because of it, criticisms that the book becomes a wall of names by the end are fair enough, and though the names are famous enough to stand on their own, they are, by and large, without character. Likewise, all the political machinations that take place in the middle of the book do risk becoming a list of events that have no grounding, no sense of place, either in history or the book you are reading, and given the size of it, there is a certain weariness that can creep in because of it. The strongest parts--when Rushdie argues for freedom of speech, where he suggests that threat from a fundamentalist world is great--are the meat that both these events and names are filtered through and it does get lost, occasionally, especially when it is painfully contrasted against the unflattering portrayals of the men (and especially) the women of his life. It has hard, after all, to argue the importance of free speech and art in one hand, while in the other, you tell the world that your fourth wife was an ambitious, vacuous woman who used her looks to get where she wanted and left you to fuck an older, richer man who could give her more.
In the end, I enjoyed it, though I did at times wish it was slightly more intelligent, and less gossipy. But that said, I read the part where MI5 rip into John Le Carre aloud to my girlfriend because it made me laugh.
It is a question that Salman Rushdie brings up in his large, at times unflattering, at times fascinating, memoir, Joseph Anton. In what is ultimately an uneven book, the best of it comes from his discussion early on about the response from the literary world to The Satanic Verses, wherein it is said that he wrote the book to offend, that if he had known that people were going to die, he wouldn't have done it, and so on. For Rushdie--and thus the reader--it creates the suggestion that the author himself was responsible for the situation he found himself in. Whether you like him or not--and there will be many people lined up to bring the axe down on Rushdie for the content of the memoir--the balance of blame and responsibility in this regard seems unbalanced. Regardless of the reaction to The Satanic Verses, once a book, or a film, an album, a painting, any work of art basically, leaves the artist and enters the public domain, its intellectual and emotionally response is taken out of the hands of the artist. Anyone who has ever put anything into the public domain will have experienced that. But the responsibility of that response is in the hands of the responder, not the artist--and there is no driving mandate that says you have to respond to a written work by killing a person, nothing that absolves that killer from their guilt and wrong doing. You can argue, you can critique, you can simply ignore: leaving the violence out is something that separates us from the damaging religious fundamentalists who reacted violently to The Satanic Verses, and whose response, Rushdie attempts to detail, are shaping the century that we are all living in.
He would have been better, perhaps, to have remained on that topic, since it is the most successful, most interesting part of the book. When Rushdie takes Joseph Anton out of this subject and into his personal and professional life, the success of the book is at times difficult to find. To a degree, the best memoirs are the ones where the knife is clear and easy to see, the gossip funny, and the sex plenty; but while his public arguments with John Le Carre are actually quite amusing, the descriptions of Roald Dahl's hands as strangler's hands excellent, and the long, drawn character assassination of his second wife, Marianne Wiggins the most amazing, gossip ridden sordid literary tussle you could ever hope for... there is something in these descriptions that undermines the more worthy discussion of literary worth, the defence of freedom of speech, and religious fundamentalism that is also at play in the book. These descriptions also fairly much ensure that the literary world, which is a series of small, interconnected ponds giving the illusion of one large one, will be completely unable to respond to Joseph Anton without bias, and a more detailed and time free individual would have a great time following the links between reviewers and their relationships with Rushdie and those he slighted in the book. Of those, however, I would like to pause for Zoe Heller's apparently superb hatchet job of Joseph Anton in the New York Review of Books. For those of you who think it is a such a hatchet job, please: it could have been crueller, nastier, and funnier. Instead, it's a decent discussion of Rushdie's novel, though one I don't go along with, but it's also one to a degree that Rushdie predicts in Joseph Anton, by his portrayal of the British media, and a general opinion that those born there have to him.
But the review could have been funnier. Nastier. Crueller. Just saying.
In the end, however, Joseph Anton must stand on its own merits, and it is a mixed bag. The writing is stripped back in style and because of it, criticisms that the book becomes a wall of names by the end are fair enough, and though the names are famous enough to stand on their own, they are, by and large, without character. Likewise, all the political machinations that take place in the middle of the book do risk becoming a list of events that have no grounding, no sense of place, either in history or the book you are reading, and given the size of it, there is a certain weariness that can creep in because of it. The strongest parts--when Rushdie argues for freedom of speech, where he suggests that threat from a fundamentalist world is great--are the meat that both these events and names are filtered through and it does get lost, occasionally, especially when it is painfully contrasted against the unflattering portrayals of the men (and especially) the women of his life. It has hard, after all, to argue the importance of free speech and art in one hand, while in the other, you tell the world that your fourth wife was an ambitious, vacuous woman who used her looks to get where she wanted and left you to fuck an older, richer man who could give her more.
In the end, I enjoyed it, though I did at times wish it was slightly more intelligent, and less gossipy. But that said, I read the part where MI5 rip into John Le Carre aloud to my girlfriend because it made me laugh.
