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‘Farewell Olympus is a witty and sharply written comic no...

[image error]‘Farewell Olympus is a witty and sharply written comic novel with an engaging hero dazed and confused by almost everything, from his beautiful but enigmatic girlfriend to the fast-multiplying conspiracies to have him kidnapped, tortured and murdered. An intelligent pleasure.’ (Paul Hoffman, author of Scorn and The Left Hand of God trilogy)

 

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An Interview with Andrea Lechner-Becker

Andrea Lechner-Becker lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Her debut novel, Sixty Days Left, was published on 15 May 2018.

[image error]What would you do with just sixty days left?

That’s the question Willow must ask when, after a terminal diagnosis, she moves from Wyoming’s wide-open spaces to Portland for Death with Dignity. In this diary-format novel, Willow explores her present and her past, while realizing that every decision forms her future.

Andrea, would you describe Sixty Days Left as fitting into any particular genre?

I don’t really know what genre I’m in! The difference in literary fiction vs. contemporary fiction vs. women’s fiction confuses me, frankly. I write stories with strong female leads, so does that make them women’s fiction? They take place in the present day, so it’s contemporary? But they’re smart and deep and psychological, so are they literary? I don’t know. I just like telling stories that smart people want to read. Whatever genre that is, works for me.

How realistic is Sixty Days Left?

Sixty Days is very realistic. There are many people across the United States who move to Oregon for a Death with Dignity. And I think that’s a total bummer, which is why I wrote this story.

How long did it take you to write?

Sixty Days Left took me three years because I only did it Saturdays! I think, having the focused time to work on a piece full-time, it would probably take me a few months.

What was your hardest scene to write?

The begining/end of Sixty Days gave me a real go of it. That chapter is the most dramatically different chapter from my original drafts. How do I bring the reader in to care about Willow, even though they’ll know she’s dying?

Loneliness is a major theme in Sixty Days Left. Talk to me about its inclusion.

Part of the research I did for this book included reading a lot of writings from cancer patients, whether terminal or not, and I was struck by how much one of the main things everyone wanted was to share. They wanted to talk to people without judgement, without hearing ‘you’ll fight this!’ and all the things most people say. They mostly wanted to be heard and to feel less alone. In a disease, whether terminal or not, the person with that disease is the only one who can really understand it. It’s a very intimate relationship that very squarely no one else will or could ever truly understand. That can all feel really isolating and very lonely.

It’s another theme that doesn’t require that the reader have terminal cancer to understand. We can all feel lonely and be inspired by Willow’s refusal to wallow in it.

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People often have strong views on physician-assisted suicide. What are yours?

‘… don’t use the term suicide. It’s aid in dying, think of it as a fluffy pillow or morphine, a way to alleviate the pain of death.’ Sixty Days Left

Willow makes a point in the book to please not call it that and I stand behind her on the principle. From what I understand, terminally ill people do not like the term suicide because there’s an insinuation that the person who commits the act does not want to live. There are a lot of semantics that could go into the definition, and the terminally ill have to struggle with a disease ending their life prematurely. If they don’t like it, I don’t like it.

Do you have any views on the religious implications of aid-in-dying?

There are certainly sects of religious beliefs that disagree with someone ending their life naturally. I believe strongly in hearing out people with these beliefs, which is why I wrote this blog. However, I don’t understand where the line is in this belief. What is so much more right about allowing a doctor to keep someone alive via feeding tubes? If the concern is someone thwarting God’s plan, doesn’t modern medicine also have a responsibility to abide? Death is the natural order of things. As the Bible says, ‘You sweep people away in the sleep of death – they are like the new grass of the morning’ (Psalm 90.5).

You are young and healthy. What was it like constantly to be thinking about death?

It was great! One of the main themes of Sixty Days Left is essentially that we are all on a countdown clock. Willow’s is just more obvious. So don’t take your days for granted, which is something people always say, but when you’re writing a book and constantly thinking about it, you really have to hold yourself accountable to that state of mind. I found it incredibly helpful. If I hadn’t been thinking about what I’d do with just sixty days left, I likely would have not quite quit my job and be publishing this book.

What do you wish to provoke in readers of Sixty Days Left?

I hope readers think about their own mortality and what types of things they can do today to really enjoy the life they have. It’s also why I started the Sixty Days Club, which provides members with a daily act of gratitude to participate in, which is completely free. See www.andrealechnerbecker.com/sixty-day-club.

‘As I look around, indebted for my sight, I see life in everything. In something like beyond-sight, I see the pulsing, rhythmic beat of the universe. I can almost make out the atoms floating, separating, and joining together to fill space in my mind’s interpretation of this moment. Smiling faces of visitors only half appreciate the absolute magic happening all around them. Put down your phones; you’re missing this world’s bounty! Unbothered by their ignorance, life continues in this garden. There’s no better place to touch the heartbeat of existence than right here.’ Sixty Days Left

How important is research to you when writing a book?

Super. I love imagining things one way and writing a draft using just my imagination and then I’ll go to the places or find out the actual medical details to see how different it is. That juxtaposition served me well in Sixty Days Left.

What motivates you to write?

Injustice and hypocrisy. And making people feel the human experience.

Who are your favourite authors?

Milan Kundera is my favourite writer. I tend to go back to Western Lit any time I want to read for inspiration. Then, I’m a self-published author and I like supporting that community. So I try to read a self-pub author once a week.

Do you have any current projects?

I’m working on a retelling of the Sirens in modern times. It’s a completely different kind of book and I’m excited about that.

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GIVEAWAY !Win a Free Copy of Sixty Days Left

 

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This could be you …

There’s a chance to win a free copy of Sixty Days Left by Andrea Lechner-Becker in a giveaway at Compulsive Reader. All you need do is sign-up to their oustanding newsletter (how tough is that?). Good luck!

 

Sixty Days Left is available as an ebook in Kindle format. Andrea Lechner-Becker’s website is at www.andrealechnerbecker.com. You can read the first chapter here.

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The Journal | R. D. Stevens

[image error]Tale of Two Journals: A book review of The Journal, a novel by R. D. Stevens

There is a key moment in Robin Stevens’ The Journal when Ethan Willis, a young man who journeys to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand in search of his missing sister, Charlotte, is confronted with the brute existence of Evil in the shape of S-21 in Phnom Penh. S-21 was a major Khmer Rouge torture chamber, where many thousands of people were murdered. Ethan gazes at the crude paintings made by former prisoners on the walls of their hell; sees the blood and the smiling onlookers depicted in the images. In the visitors’ book he reads the wholly inadequate responses of western tourists: ‘How terrible …’, ‘Give peace a chance.’ A tearful Cambodian woman says something to him he does not understand, touches him momentarily.

Ethan is much concerned with depth. Digging deep into life can reveal complexities that confuse and unsettle. Yet Evil is not inexplicable: it has causes and contexts, victims and perpetrators. Neither is it inevitable: it can be prevented and extinguished. Gazing upon its works with silent incomprehension or with trite responses only prepares the ground for its return. Charlotte says in one of her invented aphorisms, ‘If God exists, why wouldn’t one day of evil a year be enough for us to tell the difference between right and wrong?’ But telling the difference is not the issue; it’s making a difference that counts.

Ethan’s quest for his sister is of course another manifestation of the male quest for an absent/abducted female, with profound roots in western myth and culture. (For instance, is it by chance or subconscious calculation that Ethan shares his name with Ethan Edwards, the agonized and lonely outsider who propels that great conflicted exemplar of the search narrative, The Searchers?) It is seldom solely the search for a missing person; often, a principle is at stake, a way of seeing and living, a whole that is no longer whole. ‘I wanted so badly to feel whole somehow,’ Ethan tells us, revealing the lack he knows is there, the impossibility of being himself until he finds himself somewhere on his journey through the heat and dust of Southeast Asia. The sights and sounds of Cambodia, Laos and Thailand are described in a kind of frenzied physicality – unceasing perspiration, the squalor of backpacker hostels, the ubiquitous motorbikes, the contrast between tasteless approximations of pizzas and genuine Cambodian food enjoyed in an unprepossessing structure crammed into a narrow side street.

Sister Charlotte fled the family home, leaving Ethan to cope with his loss amid the silent anger of his morally unimaginative father and his bewildered mother, both of whom created a dull, stifling domesticity that left little room for love or spontaneity. The Journal deftly suggests the emotional vacuum at the heart of the Willis household, the words never spoken and the things left undone. This is another kind of evil, spelt with a small ‘e’ and cloaked in middle-class desperation.

Until she ceases to communicate, Ethan does not have the internal resources to emulate his older sister, whose spell he is under because she has always been just that little bit more mature, more dreamy, less ordinary than he. The Journal is constructed around his recollections of Charlotte, which seep into his mind at unguarded moments: the time she talked about the beauty of the stars; when he found her weeping over a dead hedgehog; when she built him a transformatron from cardboard boxes, into which he could crawl and be transformed into anything he wished – an eagle perhaps, his wings outstretched as he soars around the bedroom – but visible only to her. Visible only to her.

Ethan lives life in modes: survival mode, social mode, cool mode. He is unacquainted with himself, but will gradually learn who he is as his quest develops, as he finds love, and discovers skills and qualities he didn’t know he possessed. He will finish reading his sister’s journal for clues to her whereabouts and will commence his own. There is not just one journal in The Journal, but two.

Ethan has a ‘dark place’ inside him, he knows that much. One of his own aphorisms summarizes his experience: ‘A beautiful world means nothing if everything you care about gets ruined.’ Later, he says: ‘I wish the world could go back to the way it had been before it got ruined. Before it all got so messed up.’ Charlotte tells him not to worry: ‘You’re not stupid. It’s the world that’s stupid.’

The Journal takes itself seriously even as we wonder whether we should agree. Christina in Cambodia is typical of many young westerners whom Ethan meets:

‘I mean,’ she carried on, ‘if you look at objects in the world, stuff that we perceive, like … this glass.’ She picked up her drink and held it in the air, raising her eyebrows. ‘How do you know that it exists? Really exists? Sure, we can say that it exists now, because we’re experiencing it. But if you think about it, the only time you know it’s there is when you are experiencing it. How do you know that anything exists when you aren’t looking at it, or hearing it or touching it?’

Clearly, Christina is unaware that to express scepticism of this nature in an evidential vacuum merely be asserting the possibility of doubt is incoherent. This kind of adolescent thinking has its place, but we should be wary of building a life or a novel upon such foundations. Similar nonsense is spouted by Charlotte: ‘So if all life is suffering anyway, then why not smoke? What difference does it make? If it gives you relief from the torment of living, then it must be a good thing.’ Come back in twenty years and tell us that.

The trouble with travel is that it can narrow the mind rather than broaden it, confirming us in our prejudices and delusions, tutoring us in the ways of self-righteousness. Ethan’s great learning appears to be ‘The world is an amazing place, I know this now.’ That’s all right then. He tells us he ‘felt the attraction of a real travelling experience for the first time.’ His friend Seija says, ‘I travel to see different ways of life and to dive into them as deep as I can go.’ But there’s depth and there is depth, and one suspects that Seija is merely paddling rather than exploring the abyss. In other words, there is nothing inherently praiseworthy about travelling to far-away places – not if it culminates in the kind of solipsistic apotheosis contained in Charlotte’s self-regarding verses: ‘I am the World’ – dear girl, we can assure you you’re not and never will be.

The Journal is thus principally concerned with western individuals churning up other people’s cultural and physical environments with their motorbikes and all-night beach parties, blithely unaware of their largely egocentric and instrumental approach to the world they despoil. What one might accept initially as gently accurate satire of youthful pretensions becomes the unsettling suspicion that we are meant to take much of this seriously – that the novel is as blind as many of its characters. It is a significant ambiguity that colours appreciation of the novel’s moral stance, which might seem trivial, or empty, or both.

There are also minor problems: an overuse of italics for emphasis (depth); occasional typos; some uncertainty about tenses. These mistakes aside, The Journal is an enjoyable and interesting novel, full of delightful observation, characters at whom we can smile, and situations that can make us wince inside. The countries it visits are immensely real: there is never any doubt that we are there, feeling just as hot and dusty as Ethan, and local people are not presented as curious specimens for our entertainment. As for the ethics of travel, the luxury of choosing what to believe may soon be a thing of the past.

Matador | ISBN 9781788039642 (pbk) | ISBN 9781788034104 (eBook)

 

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School for Scoundrels: A book review of The Well Deceive...

School for Scoundrels: A book review of The Well Deceived, a novel by Isaac Kuhnberg

The haunted and haunting image on the cover of The Well Deceived, Isaac Kuhnberg’s blistering novel of conformity and rebellion, represents, we must take it, William Riddle, the antihero whose journey through a ‘privileged’ education sees him at once internalizing its class-ridden values and resisting instinctively its brutalities, hypocrisies and evasions. Kuhnberg has created a strange parallel world to our own, sordid, sinister and bleak beyond words, yet full of laughs and stuffed with allusion, complete in every way except for one thing: the female gender does not exist.

English culture – literature, film and television – is a fount of public school mythology. From at least the nineteenth century onwards, it was celebratory and unabashed in the service of Empire and Class. Later on, as certainties crumbled amid social upheaval and popular resistance, it was subverted to parody and ridicule – it is quite a way from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to If…. and Tomkinson’s Schooldays, despite the commonality of ubiquitous bullying. Yet Harry Potter is the product of such a system and is a hero. Downton Abbey is his world as much as ours. Public schoolboys still hold the reigns of power.

And some experiences are so awful, so threatening, so full of fearful consequence, that we feel compelled to keep them at a psychic distance to protect ourselves. So, for example, we might employ a Brechtian strategy that erects a barrier of formality around our feelings, as happens in Hitchcock’s late masterpiece, Frenzy (1972). Or we can take refuge in myth and imagination as fuel for rebellion, as in Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968). Something similar seems to be at work in The Well Deceived, which apparently is inspired by the author’s own experiences of public school. Rather than attempting to describe those experiences directly, The Well Deceived evokes another world, another British Isles, that is sufficiently different to be strange, but sufficiently similar to be familiar. By doing so, it reveals the power dynamics that manipulate normality for the benefit of the few: ‘democracy’, class, morality and wealth are each used and abused to maintain the status quo.

The world of The Well Deceived is cheerless, cold and uncomfortable, rather like the squalid descriptions of Hell provided by C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters (1942). Except in the homes of the wealthy, everything is tasteless, and there is nothing beautiful upon which to rest the eye. It is a world of ‘pink tablecloth[s], over which [is] stretched a weathered covering of yellowing transparent plastic, secured to the table-edges with red plastic clips.’ The food is equally bland and nauseating, but somewhere at the back of all this lies nostalgia for a cosy domesticity: manual lawnmowers and carpet sweepers, the ‘sagging brown net of the luggage rack’ in a train.

Welcome to Anglia, whose five centuries of recorded history may or may not be a continuation of our own times – whether something happened to make history start over, whether Anglia and the contiguous northern appendage of Alba are an irreal island in time and space, remains obscure. However, the topography of the twin towns of Ensor and Bune, separated by the River Flux, sounds like Windsor and Eton, and the students at Bune wear Etonian ‘gleaming toppers’.

In addition, there are stories about an obese boy named Barnaby Bumble (Billy Bunter?), a description of a painting that could have been by Thomas Gainsborough, and the inebriate painter Higgins produces nudes like those of Lucian Freud and lives life as a cross between Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert. Above all, there is the revered Bard, Andrew Wagstaffe, whose Tarquin, Prince of Antibia is half-brother to Hamlet, and whose statue sports stockings that are ‘cross-gartered’ in the manner of Malvolio from Twelfth Night.

Early on, William takes a holiday with his father, an irascible scientist understandably annoyed by officialdom’s disdain for science:

And for the next three days it seemed that happiness was something that could be created magically, out of thin air, and that a limitless supply of it was waiting for me in the future.

This is the last he shall see of happiness. William is sent to Bune, where he knows right from the start he does not fit in:

Their voices were all so self-assured, so confidently Anglian, so effortlessly posh – like the voices of boys heard on the wireless. I did not speak like that. I could not speak like that.

And yet, almost immediately, he begins to adopt ‘his new friends’ comportment and turns of speech and opinions as if to the manor born’ (cf. ‘Two Brothers’ in Malcolm Devlin’s You Will Grow Into Them). Eventually, he makes a special friend of Paul Purkis, who really is to the manor born, and together they construct a literary alternative to Bune, their short stories becoming increasingly scatological. But there are limits, as Purkis explains:

Some areas are off limits, don’t you see? You don’t tread there, and you don’t ask why you can’t. Learn that and you’ll be fine. Disregard it, and you’ll be out on your ear.

One of the things that cannot be spoken of is Union, a mysterious semi-medical process in which something happens to perpetuate the race. William undergoes Union, but the experience is clouded in drug-induced amnesia and clinical impersonality. There is no female gender, no one with whom to procreate. Sex is sterile because it is entirely male–male; what’s more, sexual relations are predominantly power relations that alternate between abuse and expediency.

The absence of females is never explained. There are many possible reasons for the author’s decision in this regard, but it might have been interesting to see how women dealt with the world made by men. Certainly, little of what takes place in single-sex Anglia is any worse than in multi-gender England.

William later becomes the target of the state’s wrath, personified by secret policemen, a network of spies and the faceless National Advisory Council, which is more like a national security agency. Party politics are a sham and interim coalition governments of national unity are anything but. William witnesses a political rally at which state operatives inflict violence completely at odds with media reports of the incident:

‘The truth?’ Haverhill smiled. ‘What is the truth, William?’

‘The truth is what really happened.’

‘And who’s to say what “really happened”? Certainly not you. No, William: the truth is whatever people believe it is. The truth is what people read in their newspaper.’

The Well Deceived interrogates truth, both personal and political.

The last forty pages or so are less assured than they might have been. One suspects the author was in two minds about how to end his story: it appears to be heading for a particularly satisfying conclusion, only to veer off at the last moment. Readers may also find the appendixes unnecessary. Despite this, The Well Deceived is a magnificently realized novel full of wonderful invention and wicked characterizations. From its steam-powered motor vehicles to its urban squalor, it seldom ceases to enthrall and amuse and bewilder. It is angry and sad, refusing to accept defeat although defeat is assured. Thus are we returned to the front cover, which conjures Mick Travis in the final scene of If…., machine-gunning teachers and patrons from his precarious rooftop hideaway, his face forever frozen in defiance and despair.

Clink Street Publishing | ISBN 9781912262922 (pbk) | ISBN 9781912262939 (ebook)

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Farewell Olympus

 

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Farewell Olympus Giveaway

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Black Queen White City | Sonya Kudei

[image error]Tramway to the Stars: A book review of Black Queen White City, a novel by Sonya Kudei

Black Queen White City begins with a number seventeen tram sitting ‘silent and abandoned on the tracks of a turning circle on the outskirts of the city in the middle of the night. On a soft patch of grass inside the circle, a black cat with white paws sat licking its nether regions with meticulous care.’

Trams. Cats. Circles. We are immediately alerted by these allusions to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1966) that we should expect the unexpected in Black Queen White City, an ambitious novel that aspires to paint its own universe (no less) by means of framing devices, parallel worlds and an eccentric cast of characters that includes the white city of Zagreb itself, where the author was born.

The novel also draws on other sources, most notably the local myths and legends surrounding Zagreb, plus Tolkien and Dante, and even Marvel/DC superheroes. The result is frequently compelling and thoroughly enjoyable, the novel’s dark vision balanced with humour, pastiche and irony. Central to the latter is the narratorial voice which, although far too fond of simile for its own good, deflates pretention and pomposity, and takes the magical and fantastical in its stride while relishing the description of architecture and its sinister transmogrifications.

[image error]Alejandra Pizarnik’s disturbing short story La condesa sangrienta (The Bloody Countess, 1968), based on the notorious life and legend of Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Bathory, whose alleged torture and murder of hundreds of young women places her on the same blood-soaked pedestal as Wallachian Prince Vlad the Impaler, haunts Black Queen White City, in the shape of the Black Queen herself. Her Stargate-like ascension towards apotheosis is at the heart of the novel’s finale, when the different narrative paths converge in a tumultuous Night of All Hallows.

[image error]Black Queen White City is in many ways a gothic fantasy of resurgent Evil opposed by a rag-tag group of individuals brought together by circumstance. Chief among them is Leo Solar, a Star Daimon (one of many), who falls to Earth in a flash of lightning that tears the abandoned tram and frightens the cat. Leo was unintentionally responsible for making the Black Queen as powerful as she has now become – so powerful, in fact, that she is poised to escape her prison–kingdom beneath Bear Mountain. A group of schoolchildren led by the redoubtable Stella inadvertently unleash the monstrous creatures serving the queen when they play the game Black Queen One-Two-Three. The resulting destruction alerts Dario, an ineffectual young man under the thumb of his landlady, that something odd is going on.

Black Queen White City is positively cinematic in its cutting back and forth, and its impersonations of other stories; occasionally, one can almost see the camera’s point-of-view-appropriation of the set and its background artists, particularly when Leo penetrates the circles of hell surrounding the Black Queen’s underworld fortress. Then again, perhaps this is more painterly than cinematic (the author is also a painter, and the illustrations in this review are her own); the scenes of peasant life painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, for example, are recognizable ancestors to the camera framings in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Who will read Black Queen White City? Adults who enjoy fantasy and spectacle, no doubt; also a younger audience, provided they can cope with the grisly bits (but then, children often love the grisly bits). The novel works at various levels of sophistication; rather like the superhero films of today, different people will enjoy different aspects. There are problems: the aforementioned over-attachment to simile; the frequent redundant word which, I imagine, is a holdover in the author’s otherwise impressive command of her second language; a series of structural choices that militate against narrative tension and reader involvement. And while the majority of characters are enjoyable company, many readers will want more of the Black Queen than they are given. Evil characters are invariably more interesting than the good ones, and it’s likely the Black Queen would have received a warm welcome much earlier on in the novel. As it is, she is always the major threat but seldom a principal protagonist.

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Sonya Kudei

Black Queen White City is often charming and intriguing. As in all ‘big’ stories, there are longeurs, but the novel is undeniably the product of an immensely fertile imagination brimming with confidence. There are many stand-out scenes in addition to Leo’s arrival on Earth: Stella’s descent into the school basement, for instance; the mysterious tram; those architectural transformations. There is also an entirely unexpected illumination of a minor character that is genuinely poignant. Like Bulgakov, Sonya Kudei knows that the secret of the fantastical is to ground it in the ordinary. Zagreb never seemed so mysterious.

Trierarchy | ISBN 9781999645311 (pbk)

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Farewell Olympus Unveiled

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Farewell OlympusHELLO PAPERBACKS AND EBOOKS !

Farewell Olympus Has Arrived!

It’s been a long haul with all sorts of interruptions and difficulties, but, finally, the moment the whole world (well, me, anyway) has been waiting for is here. Readers will be able to choose between paperback and ebook editions (Kindle and everything else) via all major online retailers: Amazon, Lulu, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Nook – the list is endless. The paperback will be distributed worldwide and will take around eight weeks to appear in stock. In the meantime, eBooks are go! You can preorder them now and, as you’ll see below, it pays to do so early.

Preorder Farewell Olympus via this page.
[image error]Cover Design

Here is the brilliant cover, designed by Dave Pettit. Dave has already gone well beyond the call of duty by listening patiently to my vague and ill-informed ideas, then coming up with something that exceeded my expectations. I love it! I am particularly impressed by the way he has used the diagonal of the staircase in the photograph as the angle for the title. The lovely photograph comes from Pixabay, a wonderful source of free images that I thoroughly recommend. It shows precisely the kind of street I was imagining for the vicinity of Howard’s apartment. It would have been a shame to obscure the image with a panel of text, so Dave’s design solution is ingenious. Also, the downward slant echoes one of the themes of the story, in which Howard, the main character, is often obliged by his half-brother, Eugene, to climb stairs while laden with heavy luggage.

The cover also lends itself very well to promotional panels like the one here, which I messed around with on a draft blog page. When it didn’t look bad, I then took a screenshot, which I cropped and – Voila! as they say in Cuba. Which brings us to the Giveaway.

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#KindlePaperwhite Giveaway

With every preorder of Farewell Olympus, readers have the chance to win a Kindle Paperwhite worth £110. And the more they encourage others to enter the Giveaway, the more chance they have of winning. So feel free to enter by preordering now so that your book is delivered promptly on launch day, 17 June, before the Giveaway closes on 19 June. Don’t forget, start your entry by preordering here. Spread the word. And good luck!

Thank You

My thanks to all readers for their patience and support over this past year, which has been packed with health problems. I shall be thanking you all again quite soon in the run-up to launch day with another special offer, so keep an eye on your in-box. And please don’t hesitate to email me about anything. I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Launch Day Countdown

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Four American Tales Q2

Nadine stole a white Plymouth Roadrunner early Friday evening. She took it from an airport parking lot, which bought her the weekend before it was missed – a couple of weeks if she was lucky. Earle had shown her how and when to take an automobile. ‘Stay calm and act natural. Once they’re on the plane, there’s nothing they can do. You’re the new owner. Remember that.’

‘A Hundred Ways to Live’, Four American Tales

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Scorn | Paul Hoffman

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Spirit of the Times: A book review of Scorn, a novel by Paul Hoffman

The cover (designed by MECOB) to Paul Hoffman’s Scorn is an adaptation of Velázquez’ magnificent portrait of Pope Innocent X. The pope’s gilded throne and the rich fabrics draping his body speak frankly of wealth and ease, while the man himself is unsettlingly shrewd, calculating and worldly, his watchful eyes already hinting at the existential anguish and capacity for horror depicted in Francis Bacon’s wonderful series of studies of a caged and screaming pope.

We should never judge a book by its cover, of course, but in this case we might wish to bend the rule: a figure of immense authority and power is seated within a blood-red void, seemingly unaware of the angel of death perched confidingly against the crown of his head, as if eating into his brain. The image is arresting and hyperbolic, and it prepares us for what is to come.

To call Scorn a work of righteous anger would barely do justice to its earth-shattering rage, its apocalyptic howl of protest, its caustic humour, irony and indignation. The power of these emotions literally cannot be contained; the novel overspills its own boundaries, spreads outwards into the world by means of its copious epigraphs and epilogues, illustrations, quotations and allusions – even mixing genres and providing external links. ‘Real people,’ such as Tony Blair and the Queen, converse with outlandish fictional characters; reality intrudes at every moment. Conventional storytelling alone, it seems, is not enough to carry the burden of the novel’s scorn.

‘Come here, Your Grace. I want to chastise you,’ says one of Scorn’s principal characters, quoting Lt. Harry Kello’s chillingly playful request of doomed Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a film whose theme – the slow death of the soul – is shared by Scorn. The souls in Scorn, however, are murdered rather than eroded. They are the souls of children starved of just about everything that makes life worthwhile, among them decent food and shelter, freedom from fear, love and fellow-feeling.

In Scorn, to begin with, those who scorn are the nuns and priests in Catholic churches, schools and institutions, aided and abetted by the silence and concealment mandated by the Vatican itself. To be clear: Paul Hoffman is not primarily addressing the worldwide scandal of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Rather, his ostensible focus is on the mundane cruelties and deprivations that were inflicted by nuns and priests on a daily basis, and what that does to individuals who then have to make their way in the world.

Or so it seems, for Scorn is full of unexpected juxtapositions and misdirections. Soon after an episode of exceptional cruelty endured by little Aaron Gall (the nearest to a hero the novel has to offer), Scorn wrongfoots the reader by enlarging the scope of wickedness:

While he was being branded on his little soul … Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward was creating the conditions for thirty million people to starve to death. While a few dozens of children were living in fear of Mother Mary Frances, some parents in Xingyang were eating theirs.

This exhilarating and audacious manoeuvre is typical of Scorn’s exploration of power and injustice, which are so imbricated at times as to be mutually indistinguishable. All injustice, every abuse of power, every concealed crime, are interlinked and intimately connected. ‘The spirit of the times,’ we are told, ‘moves through everyone,’ so that a love affair, for example, can perish on the rocks of a historical injustice, the profits from which are still enjoyed by the privileged few.

Appropriately, Scorn’s many adversions to historical iniquities are paralleled with references and allusions to historical fictions, among them Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The personification of Evil, it appears, is a film buff who can quote with ease from works ranging from Double Indemnity (1944) to Pink Flamingos (1972).

In Scorn the story of Aaron Gall’s experiences is coupled with a police investigation into a series of grotesquely bizarre murders. We listen in as victims engage in a verbal battle of wits with their murderer for the higher ground of self-exculpation, offering reasons and excuses, even defiance, each successive victim increasing in sophistication and sophistry. The investigation itself is inflected with issues of class and privilege, antagonism and deceit.

The story becomes increasingly fantastic as the novel progresses, which will enthrall many readers and perhaps puzzle or disappoint others. Much depends on expectations. The novel takes a big risk right from the start by promising (quite literally) that it has an astonishing twist in the tail. Said twist is entirely predictable, however, very early on, so it might have been better left unsaid – not that this a serious flaw, but readers who count on such things are bound to feel cheated.

Otherwise, Scorn is a wildly anarchic, countercultural phantasmagoria of a novel, reminiscent at times of Jonathan Coe’s  Number 11. Its unquenchable outrage and its marked preference for form over character can be exhausting as well as compelling. Its nuances of argument about power and morality are hardly matched by nuances of characterization: persons are more-or-less representative types moved around like billiard balls. This is not a novel of rounded individuals confronting one another in a fully realized world. That isn’t a weakness, but it is a particularity of a book immersed in its own moral purpose. Scorn is often funny even as its purpose is intensely serious: we are called upon to grasp the perfidy of power, the depth of the world’s structural violence, our limitless capacity for self-delusion and hypocrisy.

In other words, Scorn is a witty and acerbic novel that tells the truth, that seeks to animate rather than console. That in itself provides reasons to rejoice, particularly in an era when humanity’s gargantuan appetite for cruelty and stupidity is draped in dazzling robes of blood-red splendour.

ISBN 9781911195436 (pbk) | ISBN 9781911195351 (hbk) | ASIN B0752P8TZM (ebook)

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