The Blue Fox by Sjón

 

Outside Iceland, Sjón is probably still best known as a collaborator with Björk. He has co-written at least one track on almost all of her records, going back as far as her second solo album, Post, in 1995. These collaborations have tended to be more epic in scope than usual Björk lyrics, often condensing landscapes and weird fairy-tale narratives into a few verses with an unconventional but memorable hook line. Perfect examples of this skill are the singles Joga, Bachelorette and Isobel. In his own country, however, Sjón is a well known poet and novelist. He has been publishing for over three decades.

The Blue Fox (origianally called Skugga-Baldur after one of its central charaters) is a very short book. With only a few sentences on many of its 112 pages,  I doubt it would qualify as a novel at all for people who judge these matters by a book's word-count. Sjón learnt his craft as a poet though, and, as his songs suggest, he can do a lot with very little.

The story begins with a hunter tracking a blue vixen through the wind and snow of an Icelandic January in 1883. It's tense, darkly beautiful and faintly ridiculous.  I fully expected that the rest of the book would be a focused account of this chase across the landscape, each detail described in a kind of folkloric hunter-turns-hunted tale set in the storms of an arctic winter. I was settling into this when there was a sudden night sequence in which the fox split itself into four and taunted the hunter in the darkness. And then, before I knew it, the fox got shot, part one ended and the narrative jumped back in time by four days. This is a complex and ambitious book with more depth than many much longer novels. It constantly wrong-foots the reader.

To give a description of the plot, or the implied plot, of this book would be to ruin the experience for others reading it, but I do want to discuss some of the themes. I think this is the only novel I've read that is concerned with the treatment of people with Down's Syndrome. It's certainly the only historical novel I've heard of that has a character with Down's. Sjón introduces the topic in such a way that you start to realise how absurd it is that you never even imagined a character in a novel might have Down's Syndrome, and the little he reveals about this character's life is enough to create a whole alternative 19th Century epic in the mind of the reader. That's not the book Sjón is writing though. Having done just enough, he moves into new territory.

The Blue Fox also made me think carefully about the possibilities for contemporary fiction. It is experimental without being difficult and, more importantly, without pointedly looking backwards to Modernism as so many "serious" writers seem to feel the need to do. At the same time it has an undercurrent of mystical symbolism and bizarre events not so much related to magic realism (a genre I generally dislike), but running closer to surrealism or poetry.  

Impossible and unlikely things take place, but there are many ways of reading this book and a materialist interpretation is left playfully open. To read The Blue Fox rationally would seem reductive though. It would leave the reader with only a catalogue of strange coincidences and events, and that's definitely part of the game the writer is playing. At one point, one of his characters, wasted on hallucinogens at a Copenhagen gathering, stands up and addresses the room. This is his message: "I have seen the universe! It is made of poems!" His friends laugh and call him "a proper Icelander," but his declaration is as good a description as any of the ethos at the core of this little book, which is full of sentences like this one:

Ghost-sun is a name given by poets to their friend the moon, and it is fitting tonight when its ashen light bathes the groves of trees that stand in the dip above the farmhouse at Brekka.

The language is a wonder to read, even in translation. It is, like the book and its concerns, deceptively simple and contemporary without being anachronistic. If I had to find fault, there were one or two occasions when I suspected that Victoria Cribb had translated a concept along with a word in a manner that was not totally successful. When a character gives thanks to Jack Frost for the weather it just feels odd, as if Jack Frost might have been drafted in to replace an Icelandic ice-spirit, but it's difficult to know if this is true and even harder to think of a way around the problem when a writer is making use of local folklore. Aside from that, this edition reads as if the book were originally written in English.

           

I knew when I was reading The Blue Fox that I loved it, but in writing this discussion I have realised how much. I can't decide whether I now want to buy a load more books by Sjón or just read this one again soon, and it is very rare that I re-read a novel. I think this puts The Blue Fox on a list with Generation X, A Clockwork Orange, House at Pooh Corner, Naked Lunch and Lewis Carroll's Alice books. An apparently arbitrary list to be sure, but high praise nonetheless when coming from this reader.

Zadie Smith - 'NW'

I can't make my mind up about Zadie Smith's NW. I know that it's good, that it's a deliberately and expertly crafted work, with engaging characters and a considered punch, but I'm not sure that I really enjoyed reading it, not in a looking-forward-to-taking-the-train-to-work-just-to-have-some-time-to-read-it kind of a way, which admittedly is a measure which points more to a type of reader than it does to a type of book. And I want to write about the book on its terms, not on mine, or at least to declare my terms early on. To which end, and in short, I'm a sucker for an overarching narrative.

But NW is not a conventionally told story. It does not have an overarching narrative, not as such. It is much more a portrait, a landscape rendering of the North West of London, centring on the streets and the estates of Kilburn. At one point the author pauses to offer to her readers, "A local tip: the bus stop outside Kilburn's Poundland is the site of many of the more engaging conversations to be heard in the city of London," and it is I think the pulse of those conversations that Smith tries to evoke in 'NW.' As such it is a portrait too of the working classes who inhabit those streets and estates, and of those that have left, and in this sense it is also a sympathetic, studied celebration of identity.

So, as a portrait NW is excellent. It evokes in three faithful dimensions the noise, the claustrophobia, the breeze-block stairwells, the tube trains and the pubs of its subject, so much so in fact that it is difficult to follow the characters through these spaces without relapsing into memories of similar spaces outside of the book. The trouble is, I was usually more interested in those relapses. It was an act of self-discipline to return to the book. I'm not sure why.

The characters are likeable and all in all suggest a very tolerant and hopeful view of the human race. They all exist mostly in the space between adolescence and adulthood. Each struggles with an existential and indefinable longing for a definable self, and each, so seems to be the point, is ironically defined by the struggle itself. Probably the most endearing of the cast is Felix, a charming, humble "bruv" eager for something better and somewhere different, with a predilection for imagining the future through a movie lens ("Shit like that. Just rolling in his brain"). There is also Leah, a kind-hearted liberal sort ("wide open to the entire world - with the possible exception of her own mother"), and Nathalie, her best friend, an ambitious but lost sort ("wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television"). The are others too, most notably Annie, a rather tragic ("designed for a life that never happened") varicose-veined Holly Golightly who struggles "between the pretence of lightness and the reality of weight." In Annie 'NW' has its most charismatic and challenging presence. She is the one character who exists for her own sake, who doesn't seem to have a point to make, who, what's more, has no interest in having anything of the sort.

The same cannot be said for the author. 'NW' is a fragmentary book with only the occasional nod to conventional modes of story-telling. There is a faint impression of an arc running through each character's section, there are a few poetic coincidences and there is even an end of chapter cliff-hanger. In each case the effect is to create a dissonance, to point towards what the book is not and so at the same time towards what it might be trying to be, what it is or might be trying to say. It's as if Zadie Smith wants to offer us those conversations at the bus-stop outside Poundland verbatim, but doesn't quite feel able to without reinterpreting or sub-titling a few of the more vernacular idiosyncrasies.

The most conspicuously unconventional section of the book is that given to Nathalie, being broken into one hundred and eighty four fragments spanning two or three decades of her life, from adolescence to adulthood. The effect of these fragments is perhaps to echo the disconnections in her life, and to reiterate the idea central to this book, that a life is not a story, and that to search for one is a peculiarity of the modern human condition. And it is a point which is made well, if not too subtly, and if not entirely with conviction.

Perhaps I've been too harsh. Perhaps what I have interpreted here as a lack of conviction (the almost embarrassed look-the-other-way inclusions of the odd narrative convention) is in fact an ironic comment on the point itself. Perhaps Zadie Smith, no different in this respect from her characters, is also (knowingly?) unable to separate herself from a cultural inclination for story-telling, an inclination which seems to have become accepted as part of our psychological make-up. I think this is the point Zadie Smith sets out to examine, and, though I can't say I enjoyed the book, I do think the examination was worthwhile.