The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq

I first read Michel Houellebecq when I was fresh out of university and working a dead end job in the early 2000s. At that time I was the kind of person who would drink too much, rant about politics, throw a pint glass through a window and then burst into tears.  Every night of the week. And this, it seemed to me at the time, was essentially what Houellebecq did on the page. For that I had to love him. Then he got taken to court in France for saying that Islam was the stupidest of all world religions, and he was wholly contemptuous of the entire affair. His responses to questions at the trial were indicative of the caustic sarcasm running through his fiction. When asked in court about his views on religion, Houellebecq famously replied that if the Qur'an was a joke, the Judeo-Christian bible was so boring that it made one want to shit. Who could fail to love that?

But a decade later, I'm not the sort of person who drinks a litre of whiskey and throws Nazi salutes at parties anymore. That kind of lifestyle is not really sustainable, nor, arguably, desirable. It comes about in the first place more through a kind of desperation than out of any coherent worldview. Going back to Houellebecq now, I wondered if it would be like meeting up with an old friend and discovering your paths have diverged so much that you no longer understand each other at all. For Houellebecq too is supposed to have grown up. Certainly, that's the hype around the Map and the Territory. And the same French literary establishment who once looked upon him as a reactionary, a charlatan and a chancer saw fit in 2010 to award the book the Prix Goncourt. 

The Map and the Territory tells the story of Jed, a contemporary artist, from his time at university through to the end of his career, with particular focus on his first two periods of production. Jed initially uses photography as his medium, and creates a series of photographs of Michelin maps of France. He meets a beautiful Russian PR executive from Michelin who helps him become relatively famous for these works. In true Houellebecq style, she also becomes his girlfriend. But here some of Houellebecq's fabled maturity is evident, because his treatment of the subject of contemporary art is actually quite subtle. At the same time as he uses Jed's work and career to quietly satirise the corporate nature of the contemporary art world and to investigate the cultural decline of France (all the buyers are foreign, as are the people who now travel to Michelin starred hotels), he steers well clear of the ignorant and ugly treatment of visual art as a con job that so many writers and journalists seem to think passes as incisive satire.

Jed really has no idea of his motivations, nor any coherent message to articulate through his work. None, at least, of which he is aware. When a newspaper reviewer gives his debut show its first theoretical interpretation, Jed is interested in how the journalist reads the work. "It's not stupid, what he's saying," says Jed. And it's not. But equally, it's an arbitrary reading foisted upon the photographs by someone filling pages in the culture section. In all of this, Houellebecq draws art quite well, and with some sympathy, without making any claims for or against its value. This is one of the major strengths of the book, and also the strongest element of Jed's characterisation.

Jed's girlfriend returns to Russia and the second period of his career begins. He starts to make paintings, as he did before art school. He paints images of people and these images represent different types of vocation. As his second major show approaches, he needs a piece of writing for his exhibition booklet. Jed's gallerist recommends Michel Houellebecq as a French writer who, while unpopular at home, can bring in the overseas money.

Now, generally this kind of self-referential postmodernist inclusion of the author as a character in his own work would piss me off to the degree that I wouldn't be able to finish the book, but this is another thing Houellebecq gets right. In fact, when Houellebecq the character is in the novel, the book is at its most entertaining. A bizarre recluse of a man, who admires pigs but has a guilty addiction to a variety of cold hams, the fictional Houellebecq is both sympathetic and pathetic. Houellebecq the writer plays entertainingly with his public image as a depressed, misanthropic alcoholic without ever glamorising any of those things.

Jed offers to paint the writer's portrait, and since the two men are alone in the world and neither has any friends, they form a kind of attachment. Here we see a familiar trait of Houellebeqc's fiction, which always concerns itself with isolated male characters, adrift from social norms and social relationships. Houellebecq has never been interested in realistic depictions of how affection develops between people. For him, the family is dead and the world inherently lonely. The Map and the Territory is no different in this respect. In fact, many of the ideas underlying the earlier Houellebecq books are present in this one, including many that I always took to be pure provocation. The eulogising of prostitution as a vocation, for example, which sat so comfortably in the gleefully amoral Platform, is rehashed here when Jed paints an image of an escort. Here again are reflections over the cultural corrosion of Europe. And when Jed is too drunk or too reticent to ask for a blowjob, he is said to have neglected his "sexual rights." Many of the clearly reactionary views about race and gender that were so brazenly flaunted in other novels are taken for granted throughout this book.

So I wonder now whether I misunderstood this writer all along. What I thought he was saying for the sheer joy of the shattered taboo may always simply have been garden-variety bigotry, just entertainingly expressed. And while I for one am not against a reactionary writer expressing reactionary views, it seems bizarre that these views have suddenly become acceptable to wider literary culture now that he has stopped expressing himself in the amusing and irreverent fashion that made his earlier work so enjoyable. This goes also for the bleak pessimism of the work. When the world as a meaningless, cruel and cold theatre of the absurd is presented in reckless and boisterously offensive prose, it's actually a lot more interesting than when someone tries to paint the same picture using the realist tradition. The nihilistic pessimism that was such an essential colour of the earlier satires just seems like a narrow and blinkered view of the world here.

Stylistically, this book also shares much with earlier works. The narrator of Atomised is a faux-objective semi-academic voice from the future, looking back upon events. In The Map and The Territory, the narrator is a future art historian, looking back at Jed's career, who goes into long factual digressions. In the final part of the novel there are several familiar touches of grotesque horror. And, like the vast majority of this writer's books, the novel closes with a meditation upon the end of the human race. One major difference between this book and earlier ones is however that Vintage have done an appalling job of proof reading the translation, leaving in place many grammatical errors and bizarre constructions such as "this further complicated the situation further."

In the end then, coming back to Houellebecq after ten years away was more the experience of meeting with an old friend and discovering you never knew him in the first place. He is more or less the same as he was, but you see him differently now. He has assets that you had always missed through your own youthful self-absorption. And it turns out that what you liked about him most was probably in truth never really there, but only what you saw of yourself.

An Open Letter to Eleanor Catton

Earlier this year I read Eleanor Catton's book The Rehearsal. I finished it late at night and I wrote her a letter. The next day I thought what I had written was maybe a bit over the top, but I thought maybe I would send it anyway, since I imagined her struggling with a new book, unsure of her future. I thought, surely it can't hurt to get fan-mail. But I never did send it. And now she's won the Booker Prize at 28 years of age, so now I never will. 

But here it is. 

Dear Eleanor Catton,

I read a lot, and I also write a lot, but I haven't written anything like this before. I suppose this is a fan letter.

I just read The Rehearsal. I think the last time I remember being so impressed by a writer was when I first read Elfride Jelinek, or possibly when I read Blindness by Jose Saramago. In both cases I was torn between feeling a huge excitement at the possibilities of fiction and a kind of yawning terror at the impossibility of my ever producing something so wonderful. I reminded myself that both Jelinek and Saramago were established masters of their craft. I'm only 31 years old. Eleanor Catton, you are younger than me. Eleanor Catton, you are fucking with my head.

You probably think there are all kinds of things wrong with The Rehearsal, given that it's a few years since you wrote it. I want to tell you, the book is note perfect. It is incredibly beautiful, well executed and true. I don't usually even like similes, but almost every one of yours shows the reader something new, and does so with revelatory clarity. You put a poet's grasp of imagery into a prose work, but without sacrificing narrative thrust or characterisation. How can you craft so many flawless sentences?

The vision The Rehearsal presents of social structures and the way people relate to themselves is realised with complete integrity. It is compelling to read. The interlinked stories are all equally fascinating. The structure of the overall narrative serves the themes at the same time as it triggers emotions and generates colours in such a way that one could be forgiven for missing how virtuosic its construction actually is. Your book is brilliant. Congratulations.

You probably don't even want to hear about that book anymore. I see from your Wikipedia page that you have another novel you're working on. I imagine you have other projects too, and it's likely you want them to be very different from what you've done before. I'm sure they will be different, and I'm sure they will be excellent. If you are ever subject to doubt, please don't be. You are what so many of us want to be in this life. You are a great writer.

Best regards,

Vince Stephen.

Paul Bogard: The End of Night.

A square inch of silence and a black night sky full of stars. These are two experiences which are becoming hard to find, and difficult to remember. 'The End of Night' chronicles Bogard's efforts to rediscover and rekindle our relationship with the night, and to remind us of the importance of unpolluted darkness. Ironically then the image that fuels these efforts is of a snowstorm. Bogard offers a memory of his eighteen year old backpacker self walking into a snowstorm, on the edge of the Sahara desert, except that the snow isn't snow, but a swirl of stars from one horizon to the other, swirling in a darkness that has depth and structure.

From that darkness Bogard's first stop is the Las Vegas strip, the brightest real estate in the world, where the brightest beam of light on Earth shoots into space from the apex of the Luxor casino's black pyramid. This is a Bortle Class Nine sky, the brightest kind, the kind that is setting the trend for a planet that is losing its darkness. And Las Vegas is a striking example of the trend. "In less than a human lifetime," Bogard points out, "what was almost an entirely dark place grew to the brightest place in the world." What was not so long ago dark desert land is now illuminated by ten million bulbs.

Much of the book is about how this increasing illumination is effecting our experiences of the night-time. Disappearing are the days, or rather nights, when one could stare into a sky full of stars, contemplating the universe and one's place in it, dreaming and breathing in its beauty. By way of a personal pilgrimage, in a somewhat hushed and sober part of the book, and in an effort to rediscover a little of these lost nights, Bogard journeys to the Massachussetts woods where Henry David Thoreau lived alone from 1845 - 1847 to, in his own words, "live deliberately." Here Bogard follows Thoreau's ghost through the "real darkness", Bortle Class 1 darkness, the darkness of stars and introspection and wildness. Here, as elsewhere in the book, there is a sense of the existential, human significance of our connection with wildness, in all of its forms - "the unknown, the mysterious, the creative, the feminine, the animal, the dark." There is, Bgard argues, a primitive kind of humanity, a more fundamental, essential kind of humanity, that diminishes as the connection becomes more tenuous.

As well as the existential, psychological impact of ever brighter skies, 'The End of Night' also looks at the ecological impact. From birds and bats drawn far from their natural feeding habitats to feast on the swarms of insects caught in the thirty-nine 7000 watt lamps of the Luxor Sky Beam, too tired to fly back to their young, to newborn sea turtles unable to find their way to the ocean because of the bright sodium lights of beach communities, to nocturnal migrating birds confusedly circling lit towers until they drop dead from exhaustion, to the fish, insects and plants whose internal circadian rhythms have evolved in synchronicity with the cycle of night and day, darkness and light, and are now upset by the artificial extension of the day. Bogard points to the impacts of "the blitzkrieg of artificial light" on not only the orientation and circadian rhythms, but also the predation and reproduction of the thirty per cent of vertebrates and sixty something per cent of invertebrates that are nocturnal. We are, he says, only beginning to understand the full ecological impact of this "blitzkrieg", but it seems intuitively logical that these turtles, birds, bats, fish and plants cannot have had the evolutionary time to fully adapt. It is the book's exploration of the different impacts of this evolutionary shortfall, as regards animals and plants, but also humans, that offers much of it's appeal.

The World Health Organisation now lists night shift work as a probable carcinogen, owing in large part to reduced levels of melatonin, ordinarily produced when the body senses darkness. With this information Bogard introduces perhaps the most resonant section of the book, in which he explores the impacts of disrupted circadian rhythms in humans. To do so he follows and talks to a few of the twenty million American night shift workers, the cleaners and caretakers, the drivers, nurses and service industry workers. There is the woman who has existed for years on two or three hours of sleep a day, the locomotive engineers who fall asleep on the job, and a nurse who drives home with her pony-tail trapped in her car's sun roof to jerk her awake should she fall asleep. All of them are awake during their biological night, when their physiology is telling them to sleep. All of them talk of fatigue and disrupted sleep patterns, depression or illness. Most of them are African Americans. These are sobering human stories. They are also, because of their familiarity, and because also of their seeming inevitability, tragic.

If much of 'The End of Night' explores the negative impacts, human, existential and ecological, of artificial light and brighter nights, as much or more relishes and celebrates the beauty of darkness, and also the beauty of darkness in interplay with good, directed lighting. One of the book's most beautiful and absorbing passages has Bogard walking the streets of Paris (the City of Light) at night with Francoise Jousse, the engineer responsible for lighting most of the city's monuments, bridges and boulevards. Walking with Jousse and listening to him expound on the ideas, designs and practicalities of lighting the Notre-Dame cathedral (there are, for instance, two spotlights directed towards the cathedral which are hidden inside two book stalls on the sidewalk across the Seine) the Tour St.-Jacques ("the light falls from the top, and when it reaches the ground it makes a splash.") or the Pont des Arts bridge (illuminated by projectors under the bridge facing the river) is like being lead by the hand through the hidden passageways and undiscovered dimensions of a sleeping city, its treasures and secrets revealed by its custodian and architect, it's beauty brought out by the interplay of darkness and light.

The beauty of darkness is celebrated also in a study of Van Gogh's oil painting, Die Sterrenacht (Starry Night), which hangs in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Painted in 1889 from his sanitarium window at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, it depicts a swirling night sky with yellow-white stars and a crescent moon, and at the bottom of the canvas, a few orange gas-lights in the windows of houses. Bogard dismisses the idea that the sky in this painting is entirely an impressionistic expression of the artist's madness, or of his frenzied energy, and puts the idea instead that this is a painting of a time and a sky that no longer exist. It is, Bogard argues, an imaginary sky "inspired by a real sky of a kind few of the fifty million MoMA visitors have ever seen," a sky before electricity, when the swirling white of the Milky Way and the flashes of red, green, yellow, orange and blue in the stars were there for all to see, unhidden, unpolluted.

This then is a book of images, of a snowstorm of stars, of a beam of light, of bats and circling birds, of splashes of light and a swirling Milky Way.  It is also a book of stories, of ghosts from the past and ghosts in the night. It is part pilgrimage and part polemic. But most of all, it is an invitation, offered in earnest, to rediscover and remember the value and meaning of darkness.

The Case of Mary Bell by Gitta Sereny

In 1968, Mary Bell, then 11 years old, and Norma Bell, thirteen years old and no relation, stood trial for the murders of two little boys in Newcastle. Their trial took place in adult court and their names were released to the press to prevent the possibility of rumours spreading locally about other children. Thus Mary Bell became a notorious child-murderer before she reached puberty. A narrative soon developed around the trial and the crime, a narrative that remains to some extent intact to this day, which held that Norma Bell was an easily-led child of sub-average intelligence, while Mary Bell, far more intelligent, was an aberration, a fiend, an inexplicably evil monster.

Gitta Sereny's book, first published in the years immediately following the case, seeks above all to reject this concept of the evil seed, and argues that no trial of a child who has killed is morally worthwhile unless it seeks to understand not only what happened, but also why it happened. Perhaps, she suggests, greater understanding might prevent such a thing happening again. It might also help society understand how to deal with young people like Mary Bell, who are, on the evidence of their actions alone, deeply disturbed.

Sereny has worked with disturbed children. She writes generously and compassionately about everyone involved, and writes from a belief in the need for serious reform of the justice and social service systems. But the truth is also that Mary Bell is endlessly fascinating, and it would be facile to pretend that this doesn't account for part of the book's great appeal. She is simultaneously terrifying, confusing and endearing, and many people who had contact with her in the years this book recounts spoke of the inexplicable hold she could have over a person, and of the complex emotional reactions she awoke in those who were charged with dealing with her. Reading this book, one experiences a similar mix of emotions and unlikely attachment to the child murderer.

The book begins with the events of the summer when the killing occurred, and any discussion of the subject probably requires a quick explication of those events:

On 11th May 1968, Mary and her friend Norma "found" Mary's cousin injured and bleeding behind some sheds. They came to his aid and were later asked to give statements to the police.

The following day, a local mother complained that Norma and Mary Bell had assaulted her three daughters in the local nursery's sandpit, leaving visible marks on the neck of her seven-year-old. The two girls again gave statements to the police. These statements are reproduced in the book. In Norma's account Mary asks one of the children, "Do you know Mary Bell?" and when the the girl replies, "You are Mary Bell," she says, "No I'm not. Can you fight Mary Bell?" She then asks, "What happens if you choke someone, do they die?" and then begins to strangle the girl until the child turns purple. Norma ends her account by saying that she is no longer Mary's friend. What is disturbing though is that Mary's own account is almost identical to begin with, except that she has Norma asking, "Do you know Mary Bell," and then saying, "Do you wish Mary Bell was dead?" Mary then claims she went behind the shed from where she couldn't see what happened next, but from where she did hear some screaming.

On the 25th of the same month, Martin Brown, four years and two months old, was found dead in an abandoned building. Mary and Norma were observed near the scene and they tried to enter the room where he was found. The cause of death was unclear. The policeman working on the case considered asphyxiation as a cause, but dismissed this because Martin's throat was unmarked. (While it is possible to strangle a four-year-old without leaving a mark, explains Sereny, an adult will almost always apply unnecessary force and cause lasting discoloration or damage.) The following day, the local nursery building was broken into and vandalised. Weird notes were found inside, scrawled in childish writing. They read as oblique confessions to the murder but were dismissed as a tasteless prank. The following week Mary Bell and Norma were arrested breaking into the same nursery.

In the meantime, Mary Bell knocked on the door of Martin's house and asked his mum, smiling, if she could see Martin. "Oh, love," said Martin's Mum, "he's dead." Mary, still smiling, said that she knew he was dead. "I wanted to see him in his coffin," she explained. Later in the book, Gitta Sereny discusses the diagnosis of two examining psychologists who stated that Mary Bell was suffering from a psychopathic personality. For me, even as an interested layman, this early incident was a clue that Mary was a psychopath. It also seems that she wanted to get caught. That same week she told other children that she was a murderer and had murdered Martin Brown. Sereny sees all this acting-out as a series of cries for help, which, had they not been ignored, might have prevented what happened next.

Almost exactly two months after the death of Martin Brown, Brian Howe, a child of less than three and a half years old, was found murdered in some waste ground not far from where Mary and Norma lived. Mary and Norma were interviewed several times. Mary called attention to herself by trying to implicate an innocent boy who often played with Brian. Norma eventually implicated Mary, who then accused Norma of the murder.

Having laid these events out in detail, the book goes on to deal with the two girls' time on remand and with the trial. Sereny discusses how the trial was adapted to fit the requirements of two very young girls, how everyone involved did their very best, but how ultimately they were hamstrung by the structure of a criminal trial designed for trying adult defendants, which may not in the end have benefited anyone. Throughout the process, Norma was emotional and childlike, while Mary Bell seemed composed, except when she grew angry. Faced, as an eleven year old, with impossibly complex legal jargon, she nonetheless followed the trial and carefully adapted her account of events to incorporate plausible explanations for evidence she had heard presented against her. She was often blank-faced and was able to discuss topics like murder and death without apparent concern. Sereny points out, though, that all Mary's anxiety was visible in her hands. She constantly made weird gestures and stretched her fingers apart. Mary's vocabulary was also very advanced for her age, and her ability to keep track of the discussion uncanny. She was able to confuse and get the better of her interrogators on more than one occasion. All this ultimately worked against her though, since it supported the idea that she was the instigator and Norma was merely a stooge. Mary alone was convicted. What was completely absent from the trial, and this is why Sereny says she felt compelled to write the book, was any discussion of either girl's background.

And this aspect of the case was not missing only from the trial. For many years Mary's childhood experiences were not known to her carers, and despite being diagnosed as "of unsound mind," she was given little or no psychiatric treatment. Sereny would later write a whole book, Cries Unheard, about Mary Bell's childhood, a book that exposes unsuspected levels of abuse, but even the single chapter of The Case of Mary Bell dedicated to the topic makes it clear that Mary's mother, Betty Bell, was a very unwell woman from very early in her life. Had Betty received psychiatric intervention, or had Mary been removed from her care, argues Sereny, perhaps the damage could have been greatly reduced all round. Sereny is polemical about the need to separate children from unfit parents, a position which might seem controversial until you know that Betty tried to kill Mary Bell on at least four occasions.

Just as there was a lack of medical expertise or psychiatric intervention in Betty's life, so there was for a long time no medical dimension to Mary Bell's captivity. This was a girl in serious need of treatment which, for a long time, she did not receive. Those who dealt with Mary were often dedicated and enthusiastic, but Sereny argues that they needed the support of psychiatrists and psychologists; support which simply was not there. In fact, the ignorance of those with responsibility for the child seems shocking. Sereny discusses more than once Mary's ability to make her adult carers feel they had some kind of special connection with her, some affinity nobody else had. In detention, at least one of Bell's mentors had to resign after becoming convinced Bell was innocent. Several others were unable to cope with Mary's rejection of them. Her mother was allowed visitation rights, despite being the source of many of her mental issues, and was even allowed to photograph Mary in her underwear. The institution where she was held believed they were "doing miracles" with Mary, even as two batches of hamsters died in her care from neck-related injuries. 

The Case of Mary Bell was reprinted in the 1990s, following the death of James Bulger at the hands of John Venables and Robert Thompson. Appended to this later edition is Gitta Sereny's account of the trial faced by Venables and Thompson, which again took place in adult court. To some readers this addition might feel a little exploitative, as if the aim were to resurrect the Mary Bell book with the addition of contemporary material related to a completely separate crime to give it relevance. And to a certain degree I sympathise with this idea, because the two cases are strikingly different in at least as many ways as they are similar. The core ideas of Sereny's argument are, however, relevant to both trials, and it's instructive to see how little had changed in the intervening two and a half decades. More than this though, the Bulger case highlights the destructive consequences of the justice system's disinterest in the motivations and reasons for this kind of crime.

Sereny contends that the murder of Jamie Bulger was a sex crime, and that until this was understood, very little of value could come from the proceedings. The behaviour of the boys during questioning, especially in relation to the batteries found near Bulger's body, supported a sexual motive from early on. It was eventually established that the two killers had forced the batteries into Bulger's mouth—a behaviour which Sereny claims is almost always a sexual act in children. The sexual nature of the crime was in fact clear to the police, but it was felt that discussion of this aspect of the boys' actions would cause only unnecessary distress. Sereny suggests that without taking all this into account, and with no attempt to understand the two boys' backgrounds, the best we can hope for from legal proceedings is a punitive custodial sentence, which might well be necessary, but should be regarded as the absolute minimum response to such a crime.

The second edition of The Case of Mary Bell was published in 1998, and when the two boys were eventually released, sure enough, one of them was sent back to prison for reoffending. It's interesting to note that while Sereny and others suggested that Robert Thompson, who was likely sexually abused himself, probably instigated the sexual element of the original crime, it was in fact John Venables who ended up getting sent back inside for child porn offences. Perhaps Sereny misunderstood the dynamic of the crime, or perhaps Venables' sexual development was stunted by the traumatic crime he committed as a young boy, or by his being condemned to negotiate puberty and the journey into adulthood in a punitive institution.

Either way, the addition to the book of the Bulger material was tragically vindicated by this turn of events and further underlines the key message that Mary Bell was not an aberrant, evil soul, but a vulnerable child damaged by an appalling formative situation.

The girl that emerges through the pages of this book is intelligent, manipulative, strange and impossible to fully understand. She is emblematic of the total failure of society to grasp either the causes of violence or the best approach to dealing with child offenders. The Case of Mary Bell strongly rejects the mainstream discourse around "evil" children, which tends to suggest that we should save our compassion for the victims of murder and for their families. This is a story full of victims, it argues, all of whom deserve our compassion.

Patrick Ness: A Monster Calls.

Conceived by Siobhan Dowd before her cancer took her, and reimagined by Patrick Ness four years later, 'A Monster Calls' is a children's novel of the indelible sort. The story begins  just after midnight. Conor O'Malley, a thirteen year old insomniac, is already awake, reliving the nightmare, "the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming." He hears a voice, a monstrous, untamed, wild sort of voice. He hears a billowing wind and groaning floorboards. Through his window he sees a graveyard, a church tower, and the steel lines of a railway track glowing in the moonlight. From the centre of the graveyard there rises an old yew tree, its branches twisting and creaking, forming a terrible face, a colossal spine and torso, a moving, breathing skin of woven needle-like leaves.

These opening pages are foreboding. Children's stories do not usually begin quite like this. There is an uneasy restlessness behind the words, and the same restlessness twitches at the margins too. Here, in the white spaces, Jim Kay's distressed inky doodles scratch, sprawl and smudge the edges of the pages, closing in on the text as Conor's nightmare closes in on him. Kay's obsessive monochrome details border the story throughout, sometimes bursting into beautiful full page or double page illustrations. They are midnight landscapes, bristling, sinewy and moonlit. They are of the same material as the text, inseparable from it in any meaningful sense.

Setting its black knotted hands on either side of the bedroom window, the monster glares in at a sleepless Conor. It roars and screams and pounds its fists against the house. It smashes a fist through the window, shattering glass and wood and brick across the floor, filling the room with its warm breath and its angry bellows. The white space of the page collapses into shadows and splinters.

"Shout all you want," Conor says, "I've seen worse."

In the author's note to the book Ness confesses to only one self-imposed guideline: "to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked." This seems like a sensible way to have gone about things. Ness and Dowd never met. He was handed her beginning, premise and characters by her publishers, Walker Books, and asked to, or felt like he had been asked to, in his words, "Go. Run with it. Make trouble." And that's what he has done.

Ness tells a story about stories, and not one of them, the frame story or the others, is ordinary or familiar. Each one troubles. Each one runs into the other. Each is a kind of inverted fairy-tale, populated with the familiar stock-characters, but without the stock morality. In one, for instance, we follow a noble Prince and a beautiful Princess into exile, fleeing hand in hand from an evil Queen, and from a kingdom rightfully theirs. They stop one night in a wood and rest beneath a tree. In the morning the Prince is distraught to find his love dead by his side, murdered in her sleep. Heart-broken and vengeful, he returns to the kingdom with the Princess' body, raises an army and overthrows the wicked Queen. In the name of his love he liberates the people of the kingdom from the Queen's despotic rule, and so, it seems, all is well. But then the monster, as the book's omniscient, omnipresent story-teller, takes us back to the dark of the night beneath the tree, and from the darkness he teases a different story, one which disfigures, or exposes the first. And this is what Ness does too. He teases out unseen, unfamiliar strands of stories from the dark, shadowy parts of the seen, familiar ones, and so the stories and their meanings become relative, shifting and contorting to accommodate the shifts and contortions of their neighbours. Each story is also, in and of itself, a commentary on the act of story-telling, challenging and toying with our intuitive responses to seemingly familiar stories.

'A Monster Calls' might have been another didactic children's book, a poe-faced message with a story attached as an afterthought. But instead it is a fully-formed, evolving story, a thing born of a dying breath with its own breathing musculature, and its own hulking shadow. It broods and bruises like Ted Hughes' Iron Man. It is beautiful and dark, restless but unwavering.

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

To say that Pulphead comes recommended would be a bit of an understatement. On Amazon, pretty much the only negative review of the book is a rant about the decline of the essay form written by a man who only ever gives one-star reviews and claims to be a Pulitzer Prize winning short story writer. A quick Internet search reveals that the closest this individual has come to the winning the attention of the Pulitzer Prize committee is a rabid comment he once posted on their official website. So let's regard Amazon as a forum of unanimous praise. In more established outlets, the book has drawn favourable comparisons with David Foster Wallace's essay collections. In fact, someone writing for The New York Times Book Review stated that Pulphead was the "most important collection of magazine writing since A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

As with anything that comes with so much positive hype, it's initially difficult to enjoy Pulphead. The first piece in the book is an account of a Christian Rock festival, most of which Sullivan dedicates to recounting his experiences with the enormous vehicle he is forced to hire for transport, and a group of 20-something mega-Christian woodsmen who he ends up befriending onsite. There's a flashback to his younger days as a believer, and a brief discussion of the possibility that Christian-rock is the only genre of music to have effectively excellence-proofed itself, but mostly the piece is a portrait of the author, his wheels and a group of guys he once met. The autobiographical nature of the writing, combined with the way Sullivan mixes slang, Christian jargon, straight magazine prose and arcane vocabulary might remind some readers of an eloquent blogger, or summon the spectre of Hunter S. Thompson.

But this comparison with the King of Gonzo is not as negative as it might seem. Most writers who take influence from Hunter S. Thompson tend to ape his irreverence, wild metaphors and penchant for detailing his own substance abuse, while lacking his respect for language and forgetting that it was his originality which made him popular in the first place. What Sullivan has in common with The Good Doctor is his ability to make himself an asset to the story, revealing unexpected truths as a result. Everything Sullivan examines he can trace back to himself. As Henry David Thoreau said, "We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking." Sullivan leaves no such room for forgetting. Pulphead is gleefully subjective, and it ends up all the more convincing for it.

It also becomes apparent, as you read further, that Sullivan's use of language is extremely flexible. He adapts it greatly depending on his subject matter. When he writes about a Tea Party rally, he writes the best part of the piece in the first person plural, such that for a while I was almost fooled into believing he was a supporter. It's a clever move and one which highlights the writer's ability to sympathise with his subjects and their concerns.

His essay about the TV show, The Real World USA is probably the most extreme example of this linguistic empathy. The piece is full of "I was like..." and "He goes..." in place of the usual dialogue markers, and features Sullivan addressing his readers as "bros," and refusing to explain the concept of the show because, "Fuck it! You know how it works." These are all ticks that could be initially irritating if you don't find them amusing, but Sullivan adapts the argot of airhead reality TV stars in order to expound a thesis on the genre which was new to me and also very persuasive.  And I quote:

There was a time when people liked to point out that reality TV isn't really real. "They're just acting up for the cameras." "That's staged." "The producers are telling them what to do!" "I hate those motherfuckers!" and so forth. Then there was a sort of deuxieme naivete when people thought, Maybe there is something real about it. "Because, you know, we can be narcissistic like that." "It's our culture." "It gives us a window onto..." And such things. But I would argue that all these different straw people I've invented are missing the single most interesting thing about reality TV, which is the way it has successfully appropriated reality. 

He goes on to explain that reality TV casts are now made up of people who have spent years watching reality TV, and that being on a reality TV show is now simply a right of passage for many people. The casts of these shows now comprise of:

people whose very consciousness [has] been formed by the shows... Now, when you watch a reality show—when you follow The Real World, for instance—you're not watching a bunch of people hurled into some contrived scenario and getting filmed, you're watching people caught in the act of being on a reality show. That's the plot of all reality shows, no matter their cooked up themes.

This situation has meant that producers need to work harder and harder to find people who aren't "hip" to the game, and who will come into the programme and display some semblance of spontaneity. "Have you seen reality TV recently?" asks Sullivan. "From what can be gathered, they're essentially emptying group homes into the studio. It has all gotten very real."  

This short essay on the meaning of reality TV appears in the middle of a profile of a man called the Miz, who became a star on an early series of The Real World, and has since made a living being that guy off the real world, travelling from city to city to do meet-and-greets and spend several hours of heavy drinking and "straight wildin' wildin'" in sponsored nightclub appearances. (There is, apparently, a whole economy based around what people do once they've been on a show.) Embedding an editorial or historical essay into an otherwise narrative piece of writing or a portrait of an individual is one of Sullivan's key techniques. It's a technique that serves him well.

In fact, the book is probably at its strongest when it comes to profiles of musicians. Sullivan has a rare ability to write about music, but he also has deep sympathy for his subjects and he manages to write about both Axl Rose and Michael Jackson in a way that humanises both figures while dissecting American society at the same time. The piece about Michael Jackson, written after his death, is particularly moving. Sullivan places Jackson back in American history. He contrasts the way that Jackson interacted with the black press with the way he spoke to mainstream journalists, and points out that all the majority of us have ever seen of Jackson is a man defending himself against a hostile white media. It is so difficult for me to remember that Jackson was a black man that I had never even thought of this before. Sullivan also writes at length about the talent and drive Jackson had, at one point giving a description of Jackson's famous televised Billie Jean performance—the first time he publicly did the moonwalk—which is so well written that when I watched the video I saw at least two things I'm sure I otherwise would have missed.

Axl Rose, on the other hand, is shown to be a man best understood in relation to the fact that he escaped from a shit-kicking life of petty violence, drudgery and bigotry in central Indiana, a place Sullivan describes as "nowhere." And Sullivan is qualified to make the case. He's talking about the place where he grew up. He goes in search of Rose's old friends and manages to make Guns 'n' Roses lyrics seem to be the howl of a soul without a home.

I hope it is clear now that Sullivan is never just writing about the subject at hand, but always about a myriad of cultural concerns and connections. His pieces on lost Blues singers and hidden American Cave paintings are complex interventions into America's view of itself. And all the while, he is a very entertaining writer. Sometimes he is fucking hilarious. By the time it gets to the end of the book, where Sullivan discusses TV show One Tree Hill's use of his house as a set, or gives an account of a stoned trip to Disney land, he has won you over so much that you welcome these further dispatches from his life.

So I'm adding my voice to the chorus of approval for Pulphead, something which can only reduce the chances of your enjoying it when first you pick it up and begin to read. You should persevere though. It'll be worth it.

Coda by Simon Gray

I was staying with my wife's family in Trondheim the Christmas when Harold Pinter died. My father in law told me at the dinner table that the playwright was dead. I instantly felt sick. I had to go upstairs and take a minute to myself to process the news. While I was sitting up there, I wondered how it could be that this news had hit me so hard.

I am no devotee of Pinter. At that time I had read maybe one of his plays and a couple of admittedly excellent short stories. I had read and admired his impeccable Nobel Prize acceptance speech and I knew of his relationship to Beckett, whose work I had loved since I was a teenager. But I wasn't someone who read Pinter. Not really. Not like the vast numbers of people who really read Pinter. So why was I so affected by his death?

And then I realised it was because of Simon Gray. Pinter was a close friend of Gray's, and as such he is a recurrent character in The Smoking Diaries, the series of supremely engaging and tangential autobiographical books Gray began writing when he had to give up alcohol and began to have sleeping trouble around the turn of the 21st century. In the books, Gray presents himself as somewhat in awe of Pinter. As a fellow playwright, Gray finds his own life's work far less valued both by public and critics than the work of his friend, and at one point in the series it becomes clear that a very famous publishing house are courting Gray only because they believe that a contract with him might lead to a subsequent deal with Pinter. Despite this, Gray draws his friend with such affection and clarity that when he died I actually felt I had lost a personal acquaintance.

Towards the end of the time that Gray was writing the third book in the Smoking Diaries series, The Last Cigarette, he was himself diagnosed with cancer. Lung cancer, appositely. He was trying to kick the habit at the time, and so he closes the book by reflecting that he'll soon be coming, one way or another, to his last cigarette. 

Coda is the book Gray wrote after being given a one year prognosis from a doctor. The moment the news is broken is appalling, because neither Gray nor his wife has any wish to know. He is actually in the process of framing another question entirely, but only gets as far as "How long..." before the doctor jumps in with the predicted limit to his life. From that point on he is a man sentenced, faced with the task of consciously living his last days. He and his wife travel to Crete, and it is from there that he writes the majority of the book.

It's a running gag in Gray's memoirs that he always ends up writing around the topics he feels he really should be addressing. He will often break off in the middle of a childhood story to reflect, for example, on some perceived humiliation visited upon him by the staff of a local cinema. On the island of Crete he tries to write the story of his initial diagnoses, and of the subsequent medical treatment to establish the details of his illness, but he spends at least as much time discussing his hotel room, other tourists and the books he has brought with him. Where this style is one of the great joys of reading the earlier books, in Coda the habit takes on a new poignancy, because who wouldn't want to avoid thinking about the situation Gray now finds himself in?

The fact is, of course, that he can never really stop thinking about it for long. He interviews himself on the relative merits of his work, and discusses the feeling of shame which has dogged him through his whole life, a feeling which tempts him to view his cancer as something deserved, not just because of the abuse he has subjected his body to, but also on a more metaphysical level. At night his usual insomnia is augmented by panic attacks. When reading the newspaper he finds himself turning first to the obituaries. Yet, Coda is not a morbid book. In fact, it seems Gray might finally have mellowed towards the end of his life. There is a sense throughout that he doesn't want to waste his last days on bile or negativity, and as much as he can be brutally honest about the fear and anger he inevitably feels in his circumstances, he will just as often pause to reflect over the sheer pleasantness of a day gone by.

One of the great strengths of Coda is that Gray assimilates a subject almost impossible to write about into a style he has already made utterly his own. The book is constructed of his signature looping, discursive, virtuosic sentences and the incredible tonal balancing act will be familiar to readers of his earlier books. But this book is necessarily a unique creature. The most touching moments are often simple anecdotes, as when he visits an ailing Pinter, or speaks with a local beggar he knows well and discovers that her friend of seventeen years has recently died. He can't help but see everything through the prism of his diagnosis, and, though he never labours the point, neither can you. 

Coda is quite a beautiful book. For a memoir of terminal illness it is surprisingly warm and positive. You could read this book without having read the other memoirs—Gray's voice is strong enough that the book would stand easily alone—but it probably functions best as the close of his work. It is always a tragedy when a gifted artist dies, and Gray certainly showed no sign of losing his skills, but his readers are blessed that he had the opportunity to make a final statement. A few pages from the end of Coda he writes that he will soon write his last words on the subject of himself. It's difficult to imagine how that knowledge must have felt to a man who had spent the last five years chronicling his life in the most impressively unflinching fashion.

On the same page however, just slightly earlier, Gray has already made what could be the definitive statement regarding the purpose and value of his work. Craftily, he hides it in a discussion of the writer Stefan Zweig. The weakness of Zweig's autobiography, submits Gray, is that he avoids the tackier, grimmer side of life. Zweig lived through a devastating period of history, and ultimately took his own life, yet his writing is clean, polite, almost saintly. "He was a good and honourable man," writes Gray, "in ways which we no longer know much about, but finally no man can speak for the turmoil of his time unless he speaks from the turmoil of himself."   

Con Slobodchikoff: Chasing Dr Dolittle

Towards the end of 'Chasing Doctor Dolittle', in a section about how he contrived to confuse a trail of ants, Slobodchikoff, author, animal behaviourist and Professor of Biology at North Arizona University, runs through a series of questions that he sometimes asks his students. First he asks who thinks that humans can think. And then who thinks dogs, then cats and finally ants. To the first question every hand every time is raised. To the second usually about two thirds, and then one third and then, finally, in response to the last question, most of the time, he says, not one hand is raised. Now I know very little about animals, except what I have picked up from the occasional David Attenborough documentary, but I think if I was in any of those audiences, well I think I would have raised my hand confidently in response to all four questions. If I could say that I might have not raised my hand for the fourth, I think perhaps I might have found this book to be more revelatory than I did. And I think it does set out to be revelatory.

In 'Chasing Dr DoLittle' the reader is invited to play the role of the eponymous doctor while the author assumes the role of his faithful parrot Polynesia, interpreting for the reader the whistles, grunts, groans and movements of a varied pageant of creatures including prairie dogs, honeybees, ants, lizards, chickadees, ravens, squid, whales, chimps and chickens. And as these creatures run, shuffle, swim and dance across the pages he offers his interpretations with the attention to detail characteristic of someone who loves what they do, and with the succinct and vivid language of a writer who likes his reader. Slobodchikoff, in his approach and in his style of writing, is not unlike Konrad Lorenz, and while he is perhaps never quite as charming or as endearingly surprising as Lorenz (I'm thinking here of 'King Solomon's Ring') he does sometimes, talking to the lizards on his front porch, or avoiding a swarm of angry African bees, come close.

The swarming African bees are terrifying. Their cousins, the everyday honeybees are much more civilised. Dancing circles and figures of eight, they can communicate to their fellow bees the distance to and direction of a nectar source, and can adjust any number of the variables to account for 360 degrees of direction, and for distances of anywhere between 300 feet to several miles. That's about 100,000 'words' for the combination of distance and direction. And Slobodchikoff would argue that they are words, without the inverted commas, in that each variable can be altered to change the meaning of the communication. The type of dance, whether a circle or a figure of eight, a waggle, shuffle or tremble, is, for example, equivalent to a noun, referring to a measure of distance, whereas the angle of the dance serves the purpose of an adjective, indicating direction. In much the same way an ant can alter the chemical make-up of deposited odour packets, as well as the distance between each packet, to communicate the distance, direction and quality of a food source. And the common variety household dog, in its anal secretions, can encode enough information to assemble a reasonably dependable Wikipedia entry.

Prairie dogs on the other hand don't need anal secretions, or Wikipedia to communicate. Their alarm calls are packed with information, about the type of predator in sight for example, whether it be a man, a coyote or a hawk, and about the colour, shape and size of the predator, as well as information about its distance and speed. It is the experiments which explore these calls which take pride of place in this book. In one such experiment three students are sent out into a colony of prairie dogs, each wearing a different coloured shirt, and the resulting calls of the dogs (who are not dogs, but rodents, like squirrels) analysed. Each call is a combination of different frequencies of sound, and in the analysis only one of the frequencies, the one associated with colours, changes. The students are sent out again and again, changing appearance, distance, direction and speed, and the resulting calls analysed. And the conclusion is that prairie dogs  seem to have something like a grammar. There are parts of their calls that serve as nouns (human, coyote, hawk), adjectives (yellow, blue, red), verbs (running, walking) and adverbs (quickly, slowly) and, what's more, the parts can be combined in different ways according to shifts in context.

To the same end Slobodchikoff offers the calls of the Carolina chickadee, which are made up of four syllables, arranged into different combinations according to whether the birds are foraging near the ground, or navigating their way through dense woods. When these combinations are played back to the birds in experiment conditions their responses are as they would be out of the laboratory, but when the four syllables are rearranged, artificially reconstructed and played back, the chickadees do not respond, or are confused, as we would be if someone were to rearrange the words in this sentence into a random order.

In other words, if animals can alter the grammar of their communications according to context, then animals, whether dogs, cats or ants, squirrel-like rodents or chickadees, can think. This is the central premise of the book, though not necessarily its most interesting. Of equal interest are the evolved means by which animals have learned to communicate, like the squid who can flash one colour on one side to warn off a rival, while at the same time flashing a different colour on its other side to attract a mate. And then there are the curious rumbles, gurgles and clicks which make up the rhyming songs of the humpback whales, sung for the most part on their journeys to and from breeding grounds.

Of equal interest too, though only briefly discussed, is the idea that animals perceive time differently, from one another and from us. Human speech played at sixteen times slower than normal speed is much like whale song, and sped up eight to ten times is much like birdsong. So although to us a whale's song might sound like a series of grunts and groans,   and a bird's song a nonsensical twittering, to a whale and to a bird, who perceive time slower and quicker respectively than we do, each may sound much like a sentence would to us.  And perhaps that explains, by way of a hastily cobbled end, why Polynesia was so much smarter than the doctor.

House Mother Normal by B.S. Johnson

After writing a discussion of Chris Ware's Building Stories last month, in which I discussed some common ground between that book and B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, I thought I'd have a look online and find out which of Johnson's books were available these days. Coincidentally, it turned out that this month is the 80th anniversary of Johnson's birth, and later this year will mark the 40th anniversary of his death. As a result, Picador have seen fit to republish a few of his novels that were long out of print, and have in recent years only been available in an omnibus edition. One of these books is House Mother Normal.

It's weird, really, that Johnson fell off the map in the way that he did. He might still be languishing in obscurity were it not for Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography. Why is it that Johnson was so long out of print and so little known in his own country while novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec are available in most decent English bookshops? Unlike those two, and unlike his hero Joyce for that matter, Johnson never really wrote a book that was difficult to read. Some argue that his lack of popularity is simply down to the fact that Johnson's experimental modernist approach to fiction is at odds with English literary culture. All our big names of the last 30 years have been formal conservatives working in a tradition about which Johnson was scathing. We don't mind it when the French, or even the Irish, engage in high modernism, the argument goes, but when a working class Englishman tries to reinvent the novel, we see him as a pretentious irritant.

Well, maybe. But reading House Mother Normal, I was struck by some other issues that may account for Johnson's lack of readers.

House Mother Normal takes the form of eight stream of consciousness monologues from inmates (there is no better word) of an old people's home, preceded by an introduction from the House Mother of the title, who seems to be the sole carer in the institution. At the end of the book, House Mother gives the reader her own monologue and a short closing statement. Each monologue is 21 pages long, and the pages are numbered accordingly. This is because the monologues are simultaneous—while they focus mostly on a given narrator's thoughts and reminiscences, they occasionally make reference to what is happening in the room, and these external events can be found in exactly the same place in each account. For example, a song the characters sing together appears about halfway down the fifth page of each chapter. Part of the experience of reading the book is the process of trying to piece together what is going on in the care home from these fragmented accounts. I found myself flipping back to previous chapters to build a picture of what was happening to the characters. It seems clear from pretty early on that they are being subjected to abuse, but of what kind?

The old people are put to work on banal tasks, made to play a perverse version of pass the parcel, set to jousting one another, and then forced to watch the House Mother "entertain" them. Quite what this entertainment involves does not become clear until the House Mother gives her own account at the end of the book, but it is repeatedly described as "filth." What is in the package the old people play pass the parcel with? It is several chapters before that is revealed. All we know at first is that the contents represent "a dirty trick." And, even once we find out what the parcel contains, it makes no sense beyond an act of saddening cruelty. Here we're staring to get to the problem with the book. But we'll come back to that.

At its core, House Mother Normal is a collection of Beckett influenced stream of consciousness monologues which present the reminiscences of eight elderly individuals, each given a distinct and convincing voice. That said, one of them is too preoccupied with hellish pain in his anus to reminisce so very much, and at least two others are demented to the point of being largely unintelligible. To represent a lack of mental agility in some of his characters, Johnson uses stretches of blank space on the page, a technique which can feel a bit contrived (is there ever a time when the mind is completely without content?) but which is also effective and at times genuinely distressing. To drive home his point about the decline of the mind with age, he also arranges the monologues so that they become progressively more senile as the book goes on, such that the reader can get a sense of what it might be like to lose ones faculties entirely. This dimension of the book shows some real compassion, mixed with a real bleakness. The characters sit and relive parts of their past as best they can until the day comes when their confusion becomes too great. The lives Johnson gives his creations are fully imagined, realistic and scattered with striking details and pathos. As a passionate atheist, and also someone committed to truth in writing, Johnson uses the book to stare down what he perceives to be the inevitable horror of aging and dying. As House Mother says in her closing passage, "worse times are a-coming, nothing is more sure."

This is grim stuff, make no mistake, but it's made all the grimmer by the fact that this is also a book about abuse of the elderly and institutional sadism. House Mother is a monstrous character; so much is clear from early on. She beats her charges with a "twitcher," she feeds them food which she literally considers too poor for her dog, and she organises a farcical jousting game in which two of the more able inmates (or "friends" in House Mother's parlance) push two people in wheelchairs towards each other. The two people in the wheelchairs have to try to strike each other with mops. The game ends with a severely confused man being knocked unconscious.

Here is one of the core issues with the book. Every event that does not take place only in the mind of one of the characters is either an act of exploitation or an act of abuse. Further, the abuse is of an active and perverse kind and I found it deeply sickening. It is often said of Johnson that his books are infused with black humour. A case in point is Andrew Motion's foreword to this edition, in which he claims the author's novels are "lit with bleak comedy." A part of what makes House Mother Normal quite an unpleasant book to read is the suspicion that the acts of degradation and humiliation the characters are subjected to are supposed to be read with a guilty mirth. This possibility seems all the more likely when you know that the book's full title used to be House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy.

It's not more than a couple of years since hidden cameras showed a nurse in an English residential home walking into the room of a frail old woman and punching her in the head unprovoked. The kind of abuse presented in this book is not so far from what still happens today, and it is not amusing. If Johnson wanted this side of the book to be funny on any level, he shot himself in the foot by making the characters convincing and human enough for the reader to empathise with and pity them. If he hadn't done that, but had instead created a farcical tone and two dimensional characters, maybe the insanity of the abuse could have been slightly funny, but this approach would have undermined everything the book says (very effectively) about the decline of human life.

So what I'm getting at here is that House Mother Normal presents a hellish view of life, but also makes you question whether you are being asked to laugh at something which you find deeply shocking and sad. It seems to look for humour where there is none. On the other hand, this is a grim, sometimes scatological, rather perverse, but in some ways brutally honest book about an area of life that most writers either sentimentalise or avoid. It makes the reader look at fears most people try to forget, and then says explicitly: this is coming to you.

In his foreword, Andrew Motion is at pains to point out that Johnson's book is a call to celebrate life in the here and now. I don't buy that. Or at least I would say that if the book is anything of the sort, then it fails on that level, just as it fails on the level of comedy. It is not the tricksy modernist structure that makes the book difficult (in point of fact, the textual innovations make it more readable), but rather the abject nature of the content. Not that House Mother Normal is a bad book. It is far from a being bad. Purely on the level of execution and writing alone, it is excellent. But it is a foul book with a grim vision; it is dark and almost unremitting, with only occasional flashes of beautiful humanity that make it all the more sad and disturbing. So, perhaps it is not so surprising after all that Johnson's work has struggled to find a wider readership.

Building Stories by Chris Ware

In 1969, English experimental novelist B.S. Johnson published The Unfortunates, his "book in a box". A kind of autobiographical novel, it dealt with the protagonist's journey to Nottingham to report on a football game and the memories awoken in him by this trip—specifically the memories of a close friend he had lost to cancer. Johnson chose to publish each chapter as a separate pamphlet collected together in a box in order to avoid imposing a structure on the story. Each event, reflection or anecdote could be read in any order. He felt that this better reflected the workings and experience of real memory, which, unlike a bound book, is not at all a linear phenomenon.

I can't help but think that Johnson also did this because he thought it was a cool idea. He tried to reinvent the novel with every new book he wrote and, as one of the few fiercely modernist English writers, he was actively hostile to conventions in fiction writing. What's interesting is that now, 43 years later, Chris Ware has published a graphic novel that takes a very similar form, and he seems to have done it for very similar reasons. It turns out that it's still a good idea. 

Building Stories comes in a large cardboard box which makes it look like a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle. The comparison is in many ways apt. Inside, there are two hardback books, a series of more conventional comics, several strips printed like broadsheet newspapers, some stories on pieces of A3 card and some small single-strip stories on long folded pieces of paper. There is also a four-panel folding board, which can be stood on a flat surface like a concertina screen. This board features four images of the same building, one for each season of the year, and each of these larger images is surrounded by small narrative boxes and lines of text which move through several decades and across many of the novel's main characters. They live on different floors of the same old apartment building, a building which serves as occasional narrator. On the back of the board are line drawings of each of the building's four levels.

The title of the book is thus a many-layered pun. On one level this is a collection of narratives related to houses and homes, and it focuses on people who live or have lived on different stories of the same building. Taken together, all these boxed fragments also form a single story with several subplots. To the extent that a story is created by the order in which it is told, you could argue that each new reader of this book constructs a different story from the same constituent parts. It actually feels like quite a responsibility, deciding which bit to pick up next.

But it's not only the readers who are engaged in a process of story-building; the people in the book are too, especially the woman who emerges as the novel's central character. A woman with a certain degree of personal insecurity related to her weight, creative potential and her prosthetic leg, she seems to narrate her own life to herself as she lives it. We watch her change from an insecure art student into a lonely and mildly depressed graduate, and then into a somewhat self-involved suburban wife and mother (although not necessarily in that order, of course). And this is where Ware outstrips even Johnson, because a single page in this novel is often a collage of many different times in the woman's life, linked together by a theme or a feeling, in just the way our memories follow their own winding and unpredictable logic.

Everything about the form of Building Stories seems intrinsically interlinked with the concept of memory as a form of story-telling, and what Ware has to say about memory is subtly instructive. When the central character lives alone in her one-floor flat she dreams that she might one day marry and have a child, an ambition she sees as unlikely. The days pass her by and look exactly the same. She lies at home on the sofa or walks to her unfulfilling job in a florist's. She seems stuck in an affectless limbo. In another section of the comic, when she is a married mother, we find the woman reminiscing about her young and single past. She remembers it as a time in which she was freer and had a sense of purpose. A time when her days had meaning. The idea here is not only that we idealise the past or future at the expense of the present, but also that there is no clear way to separate these periods of time. Wound in with this theme is the idea that happiness is not necessarily a state one can aspire to reach. Happiness, in Building Stories, is something that comes momentarily and might sometimes come as a warm memory of a melancholy past, a past which we are, regardless, doomed to recall. How you once felt and how you now feel collapse together with no clear defining line. One of the key themes of this book seems to be that what we recall and what we dream can form the greater part of our daily lived experience.

Reading a graphic novel ordinarily takes me an hour or two, occasionally a bit longer, but Building Stories demands the kind of sustained dedication and engagement you normally associate with written fiction. Although Ware's drawing style is simple, each frame can contain a lot of information and several visual clues. Any given page, many of which work as a kind of puzzle, can be a deeply affecting and involving experience. Because of the way the work is constructed, I had to give over an area of my living room to the project of reading it. For several days it was an ever-present part of my life. Ultimately I would have liked it to have been even longer. The story of the couple who live above the main character, who are stuck in a cycle of mental abuse, was for me as compelling as any part of the novel, as were the lonely landlady who owned the building and the main character's needy daughter. I could happily have read more strips dedicated to any of them.

This is a quiet achievement on Ware's part, since there's not a sensationalist moment in any of the stories. Although Ware doesn't always limit himself to naturalistic storytelling, he is determined, like B.S. Johnson before him, to present realistic characters in realistic, often mundane situations. Even the book’s most cartoonish character, Brandon Bee, is a honey bee beset by recognisably ordinary issues, such as the difficulties of providing for his family and his lust for a woman who is not his wife. There's a telling moment in Building Stories which reflects on this. The main character is trying to find a classic novel to take on holiday and, after rejecting Lolita and Crime and Punishment, she asks herself why she can't find a "great" book about ordinary people doing ordinary things. Chris Ware seems far too self-effacing to be claiming that his work fills this gap, but we as readers might reasonably feel that it does.

If there is any problem with the way Ware's book is constructed, it is that the end of the reading experience can be anti-climactic. There is no natural close to the text, and for me the main character became less sympathetic as she grew older, so it was unfortunate that I ended the book on a section which came late in the chronology of the story. On the other hand, there are few memories which are recalled only once, so maybe it was somewhat artificial to stop just because I'd read everything there was to be found in the box. To meet the book on its own terms a reader might simply continue to shuffle and read, identifying new connections and themes, until eventually their mind is satisfied and moves on to other things. 

Further Reading: 

For more on B.S. Johnson I can enthusiastically recommend Jonathan Coe's fantastic biography, Like A Fiery Elephant.
You might also like this interview with Chris Ware, in which he talks to Rookie's Tavi Gevinson about Building Stories, his drawing style and other things.