Ambulanse by Johan Harstad

Ambulanse begins with a story narrated by an paramedic who is haunted by the memory of a woman he was too late to save many years ago on his first day on the job. He is also haunted by the idea that his wife might some day leave him, and by the thought that his young son will one day be alone and won't know how to cope. "Hold on," he says, "the important thing is just to hold on." Until the ambulance arrives, or just in general. Life is a matter of not giving up. But he's concerned about Andreas, his son, because he and his wife have never given the boy any cause for anxiety. Each night the boy comes into their room and waits for one of them to wake. They invite him into their bed. They've made him feel so safe and secure that he is totally unequipped for the loneliness of life. Little Andreas thinks there will always be someone there for him. 

So, when the paramedic and his son go to a cafe together on the way back from the cinema, the ambulance worker disappears to the toilet and doesn't come out. He leaves the little boy at the table and sits in a cubicle for over twenty five minutes. He sits and wonders if the little boy will be panicking, crying, or just frozen in silent terror. Or maybe he'll just be sitting there at the table, singing happily, secure in the knowledge that Daddy will return. Finally the narrator snaps out of it, gets angry with himself for testing the child and comes back out of the toilet. Of course, the little boy is nowhere to be seen.

This moment of horror doesn't last long. The man finds his child sitting at another table, singing to and chatting with an older man, who is writing something on a piece of paper. The child was never for a moment concerned. They make their way home and neither of them says much about the incident, since for the child it amounted to little more than a happy distraction. Later that night the ambulance man is called out to an emergency at the same flat where he found the dead woman on his first night on the job. In that flat he finds the man from the cafe. The man is still breathing. It's just a matter of his holding on. And so they drive into the night.

In this first story the groundwork is already laid for the themes and connections of the book. Each of the stories here is narrated by a man. All of the stories relate in some way or another to loneliness. The ambulance from this first story drives through many of the others, until near the end of the book we get the story of the man lying on his back inside, speeding towards the hospital.

There are various other connections between each of the 11 short narratives in Ambulanse. So many in fact that I would argue this book is actually an unconventional novel, even if it was published as a short story collection. For example, several of the characters find themselves sitting up late at night watching someone calling himself Las Vegas trying to win credits on a remotely activated TV gambling game, while text messages from lonely teenagers scroll across the bottom of the screen. One narrator joins the game on a whim, calling himself Caesar's Palace, and this leads to a brief text-message communication between two stories. Nokia phones are another connecting factor, as is Sarah, an anorexic 15 year old who is mentioned by characters in at least two stories before she appears in person; first as the daughter of one narrator and, a little later, as the love interest of another.

The story in which Sarah features most centrally concerns a teenage boy who can't manage to rescue a practice dummy from the bottom of the swimming pool in swimming class. He needs to do it so that he can get a passing grade in Physical Education and go to the same sixth form as the troubled anorexic girl he is in love with. In his frustration he breaks into the leisure centre one night and uses a rock to sink himself to the bottom of the pool, where he kisses the dummy and has a conversation with her. It is the closest he can get to kissing Sarah, who was the last person to give the dummy CPR.

This theme of stunted communication runs all through the book. A man trapped in a collapsed building uses his Nokia to play Snake instead of ringing his family for help. Sarah's therapist spends his evenings in sessions with a fully automated and extremely limited online psychiatrist. "I'm not doing any progress," he types. "How long have you not been doing any progress?" comes the reply. At least two characters have almost given up on communicating all-together and are more or less house bound. Neither of them is quite sure why. And the last, perhaps most beautiful story in the book concerns an old man ascending in a air-balloon into the heavens, where he hopes to be reunited with his deceased wife. He talks to her memory the whole way up and drops photographs of their time together down onto the city.

Johan Harstad was born in 1979, which means he is two years older than me and he published this book when he was in his early 20s. What struck me most when I was reading it was that it was a book I would have wanted to write at exactly the time he wrote it, except that I didn't have anything like the skills to pull it off. Reading this book, you know that you're reading someone who got their first mobile phone around the time they got their first serious girlfriend, who listened to Radiohead as a teenager and believed deeply in the alienation of millennial life. This is also someone who was playing with form and trying to link disparate elements together into a whole, in the way PT Anderson did in Magnolia (or David Mitchell did, to a more half-arsed degree, in his early books). For all these reasons I would say that Harstad articulated a moment in time here, a moment which has not yet been reappropriated as fashionably retro: the moment just after the 21st century began.

Despite the fact I'm claiming Harstad expressed in 2002 something many people his age wanted to, it's also true that few of us had yet developed the skills for the job, and as a result this book feels peerless. The closest touchstone I can think of as a writer is Douglas Coupland (who I will defend against any comers—just try me) but Harstad doesn't have the observational irony born of Coupland's generation gap, and his world is somewhat weirder. Harstad is also more experimental with his prose. He works dialogue into his stories without using quotation marks, writes in a style that echoes speech and uses repetition in long sentences, broken up with commas, to build hypnotic, melancholy monologues.

The only downside is that Ambulanse has never yet been translated to English. There are other Harstad books available in translation though, including the book he wrote next: Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? There's a good chance I'll come back with a review of that in the new year.

Nicola Barker - The Yips

                                                     
Following the release of her previous novel, Darkmans, in 2007, Nicola Barker revealed, 'There are writers who exist to confirm people's feelings about themselves and to make them feel comforted or not alone. That's the opposite to what I do. I'm presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters, and my desire is to make them understood.'

And nor does Barker like to sum those characters up in a couple of hundred pages. The Yips weighs in at 560 of them. A comparative lightweight compared to Darkmans, which was nearly 300 pages longer, but it’s still advisable to remember to bend your knees and keep your back straight when you pick up the hardback edition.

This preoccupation with the mundane and the ugly extends to the setting for her novels. Not for her the romance and beauty of Yorkshire or Scotland. Her characters exist (for they could hardly be said to be living) in forgettable places like Ashford and The Isle of Sheppey. Or in the case of The Yips, Luton.

Installed as ‘Britain’s crappest town’ in 2004, a less prepossessing place in England is hard to imagine. But while Luton would appear to be the canvas for only the broadest brush strokes of satire, Barker’s characters are layered and affectionately drawn; believably grounded in darkest Bedfordshire. Just as the Yips describe the inability to hole a relatively easy putt, particularly at a moment of high anxiety, Barker’s characters are all, to some extent, failing to hold their nerve; orbiting around Stuart Ransom, an Amisesque monster. An anti-hero for our time. The name is apposite - he appears to have an inexplicable hold over those in his milieu. From his world-weary, word-chewing manager Esther, to his new ‘friend’ Gene. Barman by night, meter reader by day, Gene has also, astonishingly, survived cancer eight times.

They’d all like to leave him, but for various reasons, find themselves unable to. Ransom is a washed-up golfer. A man who in his youth had the (golfing) world at his feet. But his cockiness and verve have been his undoing and we first find him in the bar of an anonymously awful hotel in Luton, drunkenly sounding off about the relative merits of Japanese and Korean female golfers. Similar in style and stature he avers, but your Korean has bigger tits.

The paparazzi are outside, sniffing blood after an anonymous tip off. We get it - Ransom has become tabloid fodder. A 21st century George Best - an alcoholic, unpleasant has-been, with premature hand tremors and a mobile phone addiction.

Medical miracle Gene’s meter reading brings him into contact with Valentine, an agoraphobic tattooist with a penchant for the 1940s. She lives at home with her mother, who since being hit on the head by a golf ball believes she is French, calls herself Frederique and possesses an unnervingly high sex-drive.

After the bender in the hotel, Ransom wakes in an unfamiliar house to find at the end of his bed...

A woman and a girl. Yes. But the woman isn’t a woman, she is a priest (in her black shirt and dog collar) and the girl isn’t a girl. She’s a...What is she? He inspects the girl, horrified. She’s half a girl. The lower sections of her face is....It’s missing. A catastrophe. It’s gone walkabout. Or if not quite missing, exactly, then ...uh...a work in progress. A mess of wire and scar and scaffolding.

This sequence is so beautifully realised that we hardly care whether any of it is true at all.

Or how about this for the moral anxiety and ambiguity of an illicit kiss...

But the tongue in his mouth is no longer his instrument. It is heavy with longing; unwieldy; a damp, feather eiderdown of desire. It is too late, he tells himself (never more cynical and adept than in this instant): the trigger has been squeezed, the deathly mechanism has been enabled, the fatal course of a bullet has now been set. No amount of bleating or praying or willing or cajoling can halt it or stall it or call it back.

And I guess that’s the point. Despite the frankly bonkers cover and a reputation for being a ‘challenging’ writer, Barker is Self with characters you care about. As elegant as Barnes, as evocative as Carey, and as uncanny as early McEwan.
Admittedly there are times when the dexterity and spinning plates can leave the reader on the verge of dizziness. And, perhaps inevitably with a novel of this length, there are moments of bagginess, and some of the meaningful conversations are perilously close to overdose.
However, these are only minor gripes. The joyful prose and the interweaving of plots and characters make The Yips about as impressive and simply enjoyable as a novel can be.

And Stuart Ransom, an over-the-hill, egotistical substance addict, is a star for the new millennium.
Perhaps they’ll rename Luton Airport after him.

Nicholas Carr - The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we read, think and remember.

'The Shallows' is haunted by the presence of HAL, the malfunctioning supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and specifically by the scene towards the end of the film when HAL pleads for its life, or rather for its memory circuits: "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? . . . Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid." At the beginning of the book Carr positions himself as HAL, his mind, like the computer's memory circuits, not going, but changing: "I feel it most strongly when I'm reading . . . I feel like I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." By the end of the book, having explored the impact of the Internet on our brains, our minds and our emotions, Carr has changed places. He now stands with the human figures in the film, who, in contrast to HAL's "outpouring of feeling . . . go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency." This, he argues, is the inevitable outcome of our increasingly addictive, and increasingly dependent relationship with the Internet.

The thrust of his argument is that the response/reward distractions of the Internet, the multimedia, the hyperlinks and the adverts, the tabs and the windows within windows, the e-mail alerts, the social web-site updates, are all together eroding our mind's long established habit, born of Gutenberg's mechanical printing press, of deep and linear reading. And in turn our inclination and ability to think deeply. This is the 'intellectual ethic' fostered over centuries by the 'technology' of the book. It is not, Carr argues, the intellectual ethic of the Internet: "we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler."

Much of the earlier part of the book charts the biological and neurological history of the human brain, from Aristotle's theory that the brain acted something like a refrigerator to cool the blood, to the Industrial Age metaphor of the brain as a mechanical contraption, each part fixed and unchanging, to the prevailing modern day understanding of the brain as something altogether more organic, as something that is able to adapt, sometimes within a period of days, to environmental stimuli. Thus our brains "register and record experiences in neural pathways" and these pathways strengthen or weaken according to habit. Our brains behave like plastic.  Carr cites lots of research to illustrate the point. For example, a British research project  involving London cab drivers, which found that, "the drivers' posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial representations . . . was much larger than normal . . . (and) the longer a cab driver had been on the job, the larger his posterior hippocampus tended to be." And then there is an experiment in which two sets of pianists are asked to practice a melody, each group with keyboards but one group only imagining that they are playing. The result is identical brain activity in both groups. The point of course is that our brains, and specifically the pathways therein, evolve according to our thoughts, and our thoughts in turn evolve with the technologies we use.

From this premise Carr asserts that the technology of the internet, as well as fostering a more distracted 'juggler's' mode of thinking, has encouraged a shallower way of thinking too, in large part because we have come to use the internet, and the computer more generally, as an external source for our memories. Put simply, and in modern parlance, we have outsourced our memories. And while this in itself may not be a revolutionary idea, the simplicity and clarity with which Carr illustrates the workings of our memories makes it at least a forceful, and subject to your way of thinking, a frightening idea. He explains that we have two parts to our memory, our working memory, capable of storing no more than four or five separate ideas at any one time, and our long term memory, a much larger space where some of those working memories settle down, and take root. It is how the Internet effects the dynamic between these two parts of our memory, one the thimble, the other the bath-tub, which provides, to my mind, the book's most compelling indictment of the Internet's influence on our brains.

Just a note here on that "to my mind." This book is not set out as an indictment. It does not read like a polemic. It is not a Luddite's attack on the Internet, informed by a nostalgic conviction that the best of times are in the past. It is a lucid and empirical, and also human account of the impact of a technology that has become an integral part of so many of our lives.