Jack Messenger's Blog, page 4
September 8, 2018
September 3, 2018
Do the Wrong Thing | Malcolm van Delst
[image error]Ribbon of Memories: a book review of Do the Wrong Thing, a novel by Malcolm van Delst
On several occasions, I was fortunate to hear Malcolm van Delst, a writer based in Vancouver, Canada, read aloud from a work-in-progress called Do the Wrong Thing. The extracts she read left me puzzled and intrigued: I was unable to grasp exactly what the book was meant to be about, and exactly what she aimed to achieve. Do the Wrong Thing seemed to consist principally of details and fragments – often, details of fragments – set down more or less at random, from the life of a young woman whom I took to be the author herself. Now that I have read book one of Do the Wrong Thing (others are yet to be published), I am still puzzled, but the mists have cleared enough for me to relish the journey even while the destination remains obscure.
It’s unwise to review something that has yet to appear in its entirety, as any surprises in store can overturn assumptions and thoroughly embarrass the reviewer. Suffice to say, Do the Wrong Thing is – so far, at least – a kaleidoscope of memories linked by subconscious attraction and the sudden remembrances provoked by the work of recording them. This might sound chaotic and unsatisfying; however, if one relaxes into the book, so to speak, and travel with no thought to arriving, things start to happen. To use an analogy that quickly sprang to mind while reading, it is as if we are watching a family’s 8mm home movies, randomly and with little context other than the comments and exclamations of the hosts. It is we who do the job of interpretation.
In some ways, Do the Wrong Thing is a metafictional novel (memoir? meditation? remembered dream?) par excellence, for it contains deliberate errors, metatextual tags, lists and poems, plus the occasional illustration. The writer’s own voice breaks through the text with apologies and excuses and explanations of her difficulties in remembering/reconstructing the past. Gradually, one comes to know the mind of the rememberer, and/or the mind of the central character, until the immediacy of the encounter between reader and author feels exhilaratingly personal and intimate. It is as if we are in the unmediated presence of another consciousness.
Conventional minds such as my own tend to baulk at this kind of approach, but Do the Wrong Thing is powerfully seductive: it is possible to enjoy it almost against one’s will. Ava’s journey from toddler to puberty is accompanied by parents, uncles and aunts, school friends, cats and farm animals and, above all, an ever-expanding host of brothers and sisters (it is a Roman Catholic household). There is an oddly timeless feel to this largely rural milieu, so that it is abruptly surprising to learn we have reached the 1970s, for example, when David Cassidy and the Bay City Rollers caused teeny-boppers’ hearts to flutter.
The perils of childhood and the kind of mystified insightfulness it often possesses are brought to bear on parents, in particular, but also on the changing loyalties and precarious alliances between school friends, as well as the menacing unknowability of certain teachers and older brothers and cousins. Children have to be tough and remember to forget the things that frighten them.
There is a gathering storm behind book one. Teenage years are the next to be recollected, I presume, and they have been presaged by an increasingly virulent rejection of organized religion (the gruesome crucifixions and bleeding hearts on display throughout the family home are thoroughly repellent). Something nasty might be waiting patiently for the opportunity to strike; at any rate, some significant break, some defining moment, will surely take place because, one senses, it is from beyond that pivotal point that recollection and reassessment are made possible.
Where exactly is Do the Wrong Thing headed? Does it know? These questions cannot yet be answered, but we can look forward to making up our own minds as more is revealed. I, for one, will be along for the ride.
Frog Style Media | ISBN 9780994755018 (eBook)
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August 25, 2018
Coming Your Way Very Soon
(Leaves on the line notwithsta...
(Leaves on the line notwithstanding)
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August 20, 2018
I enjoyed this easy-to-read police procedural mystery. It...
[image error]I enjoyed this easy-to-read police procedural mystery. It’s set in present-day Japan (Tokyo mostly), which is a fascinating milieu and a character in itself. I liked the treatment of the police investigation, which struggles to catch up with murders and break-ins on the eve of treaty negotiations between Japan and the United States. The police make errors, hope for some luck and are generally uninspiring investigators who rely on experience and informants more than they do detective skills. There is a great deal of interesting history, especially pertaining to Japanese swordmaking and martial arts, while the plot involving Fukushima, US military bases and corrupt politicians is easily believable. Criticism of the United States’ militarization of the region (indeed, the whole world) is spot on.
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A Thing of the Moment | Bruno Noble
[image error] Painted Ladies: A book review of A Thing of the Moment, a novel by Bruno Noble
The power ‘to see ourselves as others see us’ is described as a gift by Robert Burns, but it is easy also to imagine it a curse. Self-identity is an elusive and shifting construct; anyone with a penchant for introspection quickly finds themselves in a hall of mirrors that reflect different versions of who they are, depending on time and circumstance. Besides, are other people’s perceptions of ourselves any more accurate or any less imposed than our own? Perhaps it is better to be misunderstood from the inside than it is to be misperceived from the outside.
Bruno Noble’s ambitious novel A Thing of the Moment engages with the topic of identity formation via the lives of three young women whom we follow from childhood to adulthood. Sharon has no self-worth and little sense of self; Mie is confident of who she is and occasionally tramples on others’ sensibilities in her march through life; Isabella tends to see herself as if from the outside, her soul or psyche floating like a butterfly out of her body in times of extreme stress. These three separate women – fleeing, respectively, parental rejection, conformism and sexual abuse – eventually encounter one another in the city of London, where each of them eventually finds her own kind of resolution.
The first third of A Thing of the Moment is by far the most successful part of the novel. Its gradual unfolding of the children’s individual lives is compelling and increasingly disturbing, particularly Isabella’s bizarre and horrifying family. Injustice, unfairness, evil – seen through the eyes of a child, these things have an existential weight and determining force that can distort a life forever. Children are often vulnerable and resilient in equal measure, and we are left to wonder which is harder to overcome, specific acts of dreadful physical abuse or a lifetime’s subtle wounding at the hands of the very people who are supposed to care for us the most.
Recent scandals involving the falsification of examination results so as to exclude women from medical school have shown just how patriarchal, conformist and overbearing Japanese society can be. Mie’s ambitions are thwarted by expectations of women’s servanthood to their overworked salarymen, much of which is inflected with sexual licence on the one hand and repression on the other. Later reference to an unnamed film that can only be Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 masterpiece Onibaba, which shares with the novel its theme of the destructiveness of sexual desire, upending it so that the women are the predators, suggests how totalizing cultural norms go to the very heart of who we are.
The remainder of A Thing of the Moment, despite many good things, never quite lives up to its opening, for various reasons. While it is undoubtedly interesting to follow how Sharon, Mie and Isabella come to meet and interact, the alternations between their first-person accounts become choppy and confusing, so much so that, at times, the reader’s attention flags. More damaging, the women’s individual voices tend increasingly to sound the same, and their observations invariably have to be invested with significance or stand for something else, even when it is simply a matter of description:
We strode London’s pavements shoulder to shoulder, occasionally parting company momentarily … and converging again once an obstacle had been circumvented in a reflection of life’s encounters, separations and reunions.
This strikes one as awkward and unlikely, a curious blend of perfunctoriness and overprecision which leads one to suspect that long words are summoned solely to plug holes in meaning and cover over lapses of purpose: ‘I glanced at Sebastian now as he strode insouciant against the stream of ambulatory traffic’; ‘I took satisfaction in the successful collimation of the tree branches with the common’s tangential roads.’ One could argue that because much of this prose comes from Japanese Mie it is excusable (I am reminded of the German nurse in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [1943]: ‘My name is Nurse Irma and I speak really excellent English’). However, Mie speaks quite normally in conversation, and many other similar passages are narrated by others.
Sometimes the writing appears to coast or be in a hurry. ‘The sun lit a canine tooth that rested on his lip,’ for instance, is one of several references to teeth that unintentionally suggests a dog’s incisor has come to rest at the corner of someone’s mouth, rather like a morsel of food. In addition, the male character Sebastian (he of the straying tooth), who links the three women, is comparatively sketchy: it is hard to understand who he is and why he is so damnably attractive.
Despite these problems, some of the more provocative aspects of A Thing of the Moment are nested in its second half. Materialism and idealism – in their philosophical meanings – rub shoulders amid the bloody apocalypse of Smithfield meat market. The body and the soul, the outer and the inner, the visible and the hidden, coalesce in sexual promiscuity and the performativity of dancers and clients alike in lapdancing clubs. A reader’s response to an attractive young woman’s claims to liberation, control and freedom discovered while dancing naked for the pleasure of men has to be cautious because, after all, that is what many men find it expedient to believe. To the novel’s credit, dancers do move on in their jobs and opinions, especially when human trafficking seeps into the profession.
The novel’s faltering steps ensure that it is the aqueous and menacingly real opening to A Thing of the Moment that lingers in the mind. John Fowles’ The Collector (1963) has taught us to beware collectors (especially collectors of butterflies), for their obsessions can mask unhealthy desires and dark secrets. It is our own lifetime’s work to flesh out our cookie-cutter selves. Nobody else has the right to do it for us.
Unbound | ISBN 9781912618361 (pbk) | ISBN 9781912618378 (eBook)
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August 19, 2018
‘The third most enjoyable aspect of Farewell Olympus is h...
[image error]‘The third most enjoyable aspect of Farewell Olympus is how Messenger effortlessly inserts new evidence, time and again, that makes us realize what fools we were to think we knew what was happening – or to understand the characters and motivations of the various protagonists. The second most enjoyable aspect is the dry British wit that keeps you smiling – not guffawing but smiling, and occasionally bursting into a giggle. Messenger is especially good at alluding to French and British perceptions and distrust of each other. But the most enjoyable aspect of Farewell Olympus is the ever-changing relationship between the half-brothers. For the first time in their lives, they end up needing each other if they are to survive amid the mysterious thugs. What really scares them, though, is the possibility that they may actually come to like each other. Farewell Olympus makes me wish I had spent a portion of my youth in Paris, chasing dreams and those gorgeous but incomprehensible women. But you and I can ponder this path not taken by reading Messenger’s – I mean Howard’s – deft and witty tale.’ (Amazon US review)
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July 31, 2018
A Body’s Just as Dead | Cathy Adams
[image error]Rights and Wrongs: A book review of A Body’s Just as Dead, a novel by Cathy Adams
At the current dismal juncture of US social and political history, it is dismaying to witness the ignorance and prejudice, the violence and demagoguery, the greed and stupidity worn as a badge of honour by so many politicians and their supporters. Whence comes their rejection of truth, science and rationality? Why such disdain for intelligence, compassion and empathy? Why the obsession with guns?
Wisely, Cathy Adams’ admirable novel A Body’s Just as Dead chooses not to tackle these issues head-on; instead, it addresses the social and economic contexts in which they flourish. Set in Drayton, Alabama, the novel follows the many troubled members of the Hemper-Boyd family as they struggle to stay afloat in a sea of debt, joblessness, criminality and recurrent tragedy. Yet this is by no means a depressing story. It is frequently very funny indeed and often moving. Adams’ deft handling of comedy and pathos is interleaved with significant little details and interludes of interiority that invite us to revise our opinions of individuals whose histories she discloses. This is a difficult and beautiful achievement for any writer.
As so often in real life, claims to rights in A Body’s Just as Dead – particularly misinterpreted Second Amendment rights – go hand in hand with the denial of rights to others, dishonesty and phony patriotism:
Pete-O had told a few people he had lost his legs in the Gulf War, and besides that, he always wore a ‘God Bless America’ cap with a flag pin stuck in the side. Nobody was going to tell a man who’d had his legs blown off in Afghanistan that he couldn’t bring his dog with him into Waffle House or Kroger’s.
Pete-O actually lost his legs to diabetes. He and many millions of his compatriots have genuinely been betrayed and marginalized by political and economic elites, but they have been persuaded that the fault lies with immigrants and others intent on depriving them of their rights (there are only so many rights to go around):
We still live in a free country, or at least we’re supposed to. But all people like you can do is to take our rights away one by one that men fought and died for, and you think we’ll just sit back and take it.
In the United States a great deal of rights talk is wedded to the love of readily available firearms. ‘Pete-O bought a double-action autoloader, and [nephew] Jack was so enamoured he could hardly take his eyes off it.’ At the firing range, Pete-O regularly proclaims:
‘Here’s yours, you son of a bitch,’ right before he squeezed off a few rounds. One day Jack asked him who he was talking about, and he said, ‘Jack, there’s a new one every week.’
This week’s ‘son of a bitch’ turns out to be a harmless store manager:
Pete-O cocked his pistol. ‘Here’s yours, you son of a bitch,’ and fired …
He was smiling the way he did at the shooting range, like he was in charge of everything and somebody was going to get his.
Guns intervene at critical moments throughout A Body’s Just as Dead, whether in the hands of a child who thinks it’s a toy – ‘Grinning, Rob Jr. held his grandmother’s Smith and Wesson in both hands, pointing it up at his mother’ – or by the red-haired young man who insists on bringing his AK-15 with him to the Tomahawk Diner. That one’s grandmother owned a Smith and Wesson, or that ‘AK-15’ requires no explanation, is astonishing enough for non-Americans, but then we learn this:
Kelley and supporters were recently seen carrying guns on the sidewalk in front of the Glencoe McDonald’s. Open carry laws in Alabama reserve the right for citizens to carry licensed weapons in public venues.
Later on, not entirely unsurprisingly, a chaotic family Thanksgiving dinner erupts in violence.
A Body’s Just as Dead is sprinkled with illuminating asides that touch the heart and reveal character. ‘Janeeca’, the stage name of a stripper at the T&A Lounge, says, ‘People are more interested in what they want to believe about you than in the truth.’ ‘She took a breath and forced a smile again.’ And Lilith Ann’s sudden tears ‘spilling onto the periwinkle sleeve that lay across her lap’ reveal an unexpected tenderness in a matriarch who has had to be tough all her life and is now aware of her encroaching frailty.
Guns are also a signifier of the structural violence that underpins and constrains individuals and communities, whether it be the Monsanto factory that poisoned waterways, the closed steel mill and the empty shops, or the recurring need for warfare to justify national ideologies and the nation’s vast military. Jack’s Uncle Baxter, for instance, ‘After [his] stint in Vietnam … spent time in a VA hospital before being referred to a home for people who were “not right in the head.”’ Baxter once ‘insisted that he had a microchip in his neck, implanted by his dentist during a tooth extraction at the behest of the NSA.’ He is also much given to uttering cryptic quotations: ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep’; ‘Humour is a distancing mechanism for the emotionally insecure.’
There are no jobs for educated young women like Magda, Lilith Ann’s acerbic daughter, no matter what her mother claims:
Of course the jobs [Lilith Ann] was referring to were cashier at Dollar General or Walmart, and baker’s assistant at the Piggly Wiggly. ‘I know you’ve got yourself a college degree, but your daddy and I didn’t pay for it so’s you could take it all the way to China.’
On top of everything else, there is a characteristic distrust of government and anything that smacks of concerted attempts to assist those in dire need of help.
‘Yeah, but you know we don’t have insurance,’ said Kimmy. ‘Robert said he wasn’t going to have that Obamacare the government forced down his throat. Said he’d rather pay the penalty than have the government telling him what to do.’ Kimmy sat back with a smug expression.
‘And that’s exactly the attitude that put him in jail,’ said Magda … ‘So Robert refused to buy something that his family needs that he couldn’t afford before Obamacare made it available just so he can say he’s not going to buy it? And now you can’t get the medicine you need for your kids? Do you hear how asinine that is?’
While A Body’s Just as Dead is thoroughly immersed in its Alabama milieu, it also takes time to broaden our sympathies and place it in wider context:
When people in Pete-O’s country were dumping tea in Boston Harbor and attempting to annihilate the indigenous peoples of what would become the United States of America, Liu Peng’s ancestors were rooted in their central Chinese village, growing their own tea.
In the United States, Peng adjusts as best she can and even takes pleasure from her uncomprehending appreciation of His Girl Friday on television.
Recent controversies about the removal of Confederate war memorials, along with the continuing refusal to acknowledge the genocide of native Americans and the legacies of slavery, are all part of the selective amnesia that grips a deeply troubled culture. And this is exactly how history gets forgotten:
Anniston was known by some as the place where a Freedom Riders bus was fire-bombed by a mob of whites when it tried to pass through the town. When the bus was ablaze, the mob held the doors shut in an attempt to burn the riders alive, but then some say the fuel tank exploded and the mob dispersed. It was a story Robert had never heard before, and he had no idea it was part of Anniston’s legacy. His mother remembered the burned bus, but she never spoke of it to any of her children. This is how the chapters of a town’s history begin to die. People just stop talking about the parts that aren’t nice, and soon what people claim as their history becomes a rag full of holes.
Cast adrift from the untidy realities of the nation’s bloody history, living a life of Target cards, unpaid bills, daily humiliations and frustrated masculinity, men like Robert can only wonder where it all went wrong:
I’ve had the life squeezed out of me everywhere I go. I get shorted every time I get work, and most of the time I can’t get no work. It’s not supposed to be this way. It was never supposed to be this way. Daddy worked at the steel plant all those years and everything was fine. What happened, Mama? Why can’t things be like they were then?
A Body’s Just as Dead has a wonderful, unemphatic ending that hints at the resiliency of people tied together in a family that threatens always to break apart but never quite does. ‘“Can’t you put aside your little hate mail-writing business long enough to put baby Joseph, Mary and Jesus in your window?”’ Kimmy asks Magda at one point. Yes she can.
For many years, much ‘serious’ American fiction – particularly from authors trained by programmes in creative writing – has followed the tiresome trend for microscopicity, whereby the steady accretion of tiny data-packets of description is (presumably) intended to build a world, or at least supply atmosphere. In the wrong hands this exhausts the patience of readers, especially when the writing is stuffed with unlikely adjectives and freighted with ‘significance’. Mercifully, Cathy Adams eschews this practice and writes with a refreshing directness that doesn’t waste time pursuing special effects. Her work seems effortless, which means it takes a great deal of effort, artistry and intelligence. Without exception, her characters are fully realized, interesting and complex; each has his or her own voice. They are from the working class and the underclass, and occasionally the criminal class. Their tragi-comic story is engaged with our times and resonates precisely with the national zeitgeist. A Body’s Just as Dead entertains us, enlightens us, moves us. It is a fine novel and a joy to read.
SFK Press | ISBN 9780997951868 (pbk) | ISBN 9780997951875 (eBook)
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July 30, 2018
Welcome to Saint Angel | William Luvaas
[image error]Land of the Free: A book review of Welcome to Saint Angel, a novel by William Luvaas
Appropriately, this review of William Luvaas’s rollickingly farcical Welcome to Saint Angel was written in the swelter of a global heatwave that broke temperature records around the world, killed thousands and brought drought and disaster. The future, it seems, has already arrived, bearing in its arms the promised gifts of environmental Armageddon and political barbarism. Within the span of a few decades, humanity has moved from a vague awareness that something wicked this way comes, to a confrontation with Earth’s sixth great extinction. We need to relocate to a better place where the water is pure and the grass green, where we can breathe clean air and raise our families in peace. But there’s nowhere left to go.
With its descriptions of a collective madness sparked by mendacity and greed disguised as irresistible ‘progress’, Welcome to Saint Angel has literary antecedents in the cynical realism of Sinclair Lewis and the paranoid desperation of Nathaniel West, plus a liberal dose of Gore Vidal in his Duluth mood. The urban and suburban sprawl of Los Angeles into the surrounding desert – shorn of its remaining Joshua trees – is the outcome of financial skulduggery and shady dealing, the appropriation of land and water, culture in the service of big money, and the trampling of indigenous rights. People need places to live, but this, this is
‘Unbelievable … Out here in the middle of nowhere.’
Mona frowned. ‘Nowhere’s the middle of nowhere anymore, don’t you realize?’
Al Sharpe, the central character and resistance leader of Welcome to Saint Angel, is marvelling at the rapid spread of McMansions over the high desert surrounding his Southern California home of Second Chance Acres, bulldozers and trucks making smooth the hills and eradicating the flora and fauna. Here, in the wilderness, a golf course will be built, its greens and lakes fed by stolen water authorized at unpublicized planning meetings held at ungodly hours. Al and his oddball neighbours will band together and fight the corporations and developers in a battle that escalates into brutal violence and comically ludicrous confrontations and tactics. The conflict is desperate for the defenders of Nature and common sense, who know that the land and the climate cannot support vast housing developments, shopping malls and highways to nowhere in particular, especially as the buildings are thrown up in such haste that they immediately begin to fall apart.
Al, shutting his eyes to promises and threats, believes at first that it will never happen. ‘They must be shooting a movie,’ he comments when he sees a hoarding for ‘Canyonlands Rancho Estates.’ ‘Raise your children under the cheery high desert sun in friendly Saint Angel.’ This is indeed movie talk, specifically Curly Bonner talk: the lure of instant community and fresh air for city-types desperate for escape, whose flight to freedom denies freedom to others, whose paradise eventually becomes a hell from which their children will wish to escape. And so it goes and so it goes.
Paradise is for those who can afford the green fees; those unfortunates who really do need a roof over their heads are not the kind of clientele the unscrupulous Ches Noonan and his co-conspirators are looking for. As Welcome to Saint Angel declares, ‘There has to be some place for the ne’er-do-wells and misfits to go’ but, depend upon it, that place is always elsewhere and far away. There is no room in Canyonlands Rancho Estates for people like Tinkerspoon, Al’s neighbour and hackerwizard, who believes anything is possible: ‘Tinkerspoon leaned conspiratorially over the fence, believing his place bugged (convinced the NSA can read our brain waves).’ It seems the secretive and all-seeing NSA has replaced the CIA as the bête noire of US conspiracy theorists: similar convictions are aired in Cathy Adams’ A Body’s Just as Dead, also to be reviewed here. ‘The fact that none of this could be proven confirmed it.’
Often, however, conspiracies really are true, especially when it comes to making money fast. Boosterism is highly selective in its boosting, so that Ches is set to make millions while native Americans and others who stand in the way of progress risk losing everything.
Welcome to Saint Angel is a rich blend of outlaw pursuit and (Nature’s) revenge tragedy, its families and communities disintegrating, reintegrating, somehow abiding. People and machines get swallowed by bottomless sloughs that spread across the land almost as rapidly as the new houses; Al’s improvised community of partisans operate like guerrillas, setting up camps in canyons and holes in the ground, their superior knowledge of the terrain their greatest weapon.
William Luvaas writes with immense verve and imagination, and has a gift for humour: Al’s pet pig Wallers possesses a genius for comic timing and porcine know-how that makes him one of the finest characters in the novel. The author is also able to describe the flora of the desert and the ways of dust and stone, water and mud, with microscopic precision. Some of this beautiful description feels excessive and occasionally repetitive in the second half of the book, so that one finds oneself skimming at times, impatient with its dazzle. Certainly, Welcome to Saint Angel sags in the middle, burdened by a welter of similar incidents when it really needs to push forward with the story a little more emphatically.
Al’s relationships with women – the how and the why of them – are entertainingly realized and tortuously complicated. One warms to Penny and Mona; there is something about them and the behaviour of their social set around the swimming pool that puts one in mind of John Updike’s Couples. Al is a widower with a close relationship with his daughter Finley, but the remote possibility that Al’s wife might still be alive puts them at odds, reinforcing the themes of distrust and suspicion that sift through the novel like dust borne on the desert air. The past is never dead; it bubbles to the surface and wreaks havoc; there is no solid ground for anyone.
Comedy, humour, farce, satire: whatever you want to call it, at its best, much of it floats on a slough of despair and fury, and thus has a serious engagement with the world. Family and community are reaffirmed by the end of Welcome to Saint Angel, but there is a warning: ‘Everywhere, the bleached bones of houses stood as monuments to greed and human folly.’
They would knock down the mountains and fill the oceans; there would be one endless city covering all the continents and Oceania between. They would name it New Atlantis or Globetown.
Welcome to the Now.
Anaphora Literary Press | ISBN 9781681143200 (pbk) | ISBN 9781681143217 (hbk) | ISBN 9781681143224 (eBook)
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The post Welcome to Saint Angel | William Luvaas appeared first on Jack Messenger | Feed the Monkey.
June 7, 2018
‘A delightful farce … Messenger’s ability to convolute re...
‘A delightful farce … Messenger’s ability to convolute readers’ preconceived notions of the mystery genre creates an ending that is both surprising, entertaining, and humorous … Messenger creates some absolutely breathtaking metaphors … [his] ability to poke fun at the genré’s cliches makes this work clever and fresh.’ (The BookLife Prize)
The post appeared first on Jack Messenger | Feed the Monkey.
