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Tuesday 21 July 2015

The Vegetarian by Han Kang






The Vegetarian is a novel by South Korean author Han Kang, translated to English by Deborah Smith. The book is broken into three parts, all of which were apparently published as separate novellas, before being bound together as a novel.

The first part, The Vegetarian, is narrated by the husband of a woman named Yeong-Hye. He begins his story thus:

Before my wife became a vegetarian, I'd always thought of
her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank,
the first time I met her I wasn't even attracted to her.
                                               
In fact, Yeong-Hye's husband picked her out specifically for her mediocrity. He wanted a simple, unchallenging wife who would make his meals and see to his other physical needs. Thus he is seriously unprepared for the day when he comes home to find her cooking seaweed soup, refusing to eat or prepare a meat dish ever again. What's more, his body's organic meat odour has become disgusting to her. What he regards as his conjugal rights he begins to take by force.

Yeong-Hye begins to lose weight. To questions as to why she has radically changed her diet she answers simply that she had a dream. Her family—and particularly her parents, who find her behaviour puzzling and shameful—begin to pressure her to yield to her husband's culinary requirements, but Yeong-Hye is steadfast in her
refusal. By the end of this section of the book, the tension has mounted to an outbreak of actual violence.

So far this book probably sounds like either a farce or a satirical attack on Korea's oppressive cultural conformity and patriarchal structures. Perhaps it all seems a little absurd (although any vegetarian will be able to tell you about the vast number of conversational strategies we develop in order to avoid having to endlessly justify the tiny difference between ourselves and those we are dining with). Certainly this kind of satirical element is present in Kang's novel, but if there is farce here, it is not terribly funny. And something far more complex and subtle is at work too, as suggested by the occasional insights into Yeong-Hye's thoughts:

Sleeping in five-minute snatches. Slipping  out of fuzzy
consciousness, it's back - the dream. Can't even call it that
now. Animal eyes gleaming wild, presense of blood,
unearthed skull, again those eyes. Rising up from the
pit of my stomach. Shuddering awake, my hands, need
to see my hands. Breathe. My fingernails still soft, my
teeth still gentle.


 The novel's second part, Mongolian Mark, centers around Yeong-Hye's brother-in-law, a video artist with a growing obsession with his wife's sister. He becomes both sexually and artistically preoccupied with the idea that she will feature in his next work. He wants to use her to recreate a vision he has had of two bodies, covered in the images of flowers, entwined sexually. Yeong-Hye is pliable and amenable. She likes the flowers he paints on her body because they stop her oppressive dreams. Although it should be clear to the reader by now that Yeong-Hye's behaviour and thinking is disturbed, Han Kang relates this part of the story from the artist's perspective, such that what happens between the two of them seems understandable and almost innocent.

It's not until the third part of the book, which is told from the viewpoint of the artist's wife, Yeong-Hye 's sister, that it becomes obvious how monstrous the artist's behaviour really is. By this time Yeong-Hye is in an institution. She has stopped eating completely, and sometimes she stands on her hands, believing her fingers sprout roots into the ground.

To a degree, The Vegetarian is a story about schizophrenia—about the creeping onset of the condition, the confused and damaging ways in which people can react to it, and the terrible effect it can have on both the sufferer and those around them. Yeong-Hye withdraws from the world little by little, and is almost wholly gone before anyone really realises how little they knew her. In this sense it is a sensitive and moving study of the reality of mental illness.

But this is really not a book simply about a disease. There is also an element of complete comprehensibility in Yeong-Hye's break with reality, in her desire to turn her back on the animal world and embrace the quiet simplicity of plant life. Her sister, In-Hye, when she looks back across their life together, sees that there were signs even in childhood that life's demands, their family life, her position in it, were too much for Yeong-Hye. In-Hye reflects that with slightly different choices, under changed circumstances, or if her own chosen coping mechanisms had not involved a sense of huge responsibility, maybe something in her would have let go too.

This is one of the best books I've read for a while. For everything I've said about it, I think it is ultimately a book about the sometimes horrific limitations of being a human, and about that sense we sometimes have that life as we are living it is a pale imitation of what it could be. But it is also a book about love, specifically about the bond between siblings; a bond which though it might sometimes feel hopeless, though it might be a source of guilt and sadness, and in this case is a largely tragic one, remains nonetheless unique and often meaningful.

Wednesday 20 May 2015

The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard





In an unnamed Republic somewhere in central Africa, by the side of a drained lake, a territorial dispute is gearing up between the local police chief, Captain Kagwa, and a revolutionary Pan African communist called Harare. Harare's militia of child soldiers are regularly treated for sickness and disease by the narrator of this book, one Dr Mallory. Mallory, though officially working for the WHO, has taken over an abandoned drilling project to try to find water trapped under the desert. He has dreams of irrigating the Sahara. When the book begins, the local political situation is escalating on all sides. Mallory is reluctantly preparing to leave the area, but when he dislodges the base of a dead oak tree, water begins to trickle out. Before long, this small stream has eroded the ground both before and behind it and grown into a huge river.

Mallory claims the river as his own. A disgraced TV documentarian named Sanger, who has come to Africa to save his reputation, even registers the new river under Mallory's name. And so begins a hallucinatory journey up the river, on which Mallory sets out with a child soldier called Noon, a 12-year-old girl in an ill-fitting camo-jacket. His motivations are unclear even to him. He vacillates between wanting to save the river and wanting to destroy it, but the goal of the mission is in either case to reach the river's source.

J. G. Ballard started his career as a writer of science fiction short stories and weird, surreal and dystopian adventure novels, but he drifted towards a self-created genre that is now often called ballardian. Ballardian fiction tends to be set in a parallel reality, where the corrosive effects of technology and/or social decline are slightly exaggerated to horrific effect. The most famous exception to this trend is Ballard's most read book, the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, which dealt with the writer's own childhood experiences in WWII China. The Day of Creation is the book he wrote after the unexpected success of Empire of the Sun, and in many ways it is quintessentially ballardian. It looks back to his earlier weird adventure novels, like The Crystal World, in which surreal, transformed landscapes were central leitmotifs, but it also makes much of the unsettling presence of technology. The landscape in The Day of Creation is often strewn with refuse. The arrival, early in the story, of Sanger’s documentary crew allows Ballard to insert Mcluhanesque truisms about how sooner or later everything turns into television. Mallory's journey up the river is made on a car ferry, progressively more junked up with cameras, screens, VHS tapes, as well as a black Mercedes stolen from Captain Kagwa. 

On one level, The Day of Creation is a hugely symbolic satirical novel. There are obvious references to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with Mallory standing in for both Marlow and Kurtz. Mallory's belief that he created the river, his naming it after himself, his pathetic attempts to reroute and destroy it, all seem to be insane parodies of European colonialism. Noon, the child guerrilla, becomes obsessed with Sanger's collection of phoney African documentaries, watching their constructed images of African warrior queens and modelling herself after them. She hardly speaks, but instead clicks VHS tapes against her teeth. When she does say the doctor's name she calls him "Doc Mal," as if referring to the illness he represents. As the journey up the river progresses, and Mallory becomes increasingly Humbert Humbert about his relationship to the girl, even their relationship seems to echo the delusional colonialist's distorted view of Africa.

It is often the case that a writer's distinctive features are both their major strength and their key weakness, and that is very much the situation here. I don't know if it is simply because of the myriad contemporary writers and visual artists who continually rip off Ballard (Tom McCarthy, for all he bangs on about Kafka and Joyce, basically grafted Ballard's worldview onto John Berger's G in order to create the formula for his execrable novel, C), but reading Ballard today can feel like reading a parody. If I had to write a treatment for a balladian novel set in Africa, it would be exactly like this book, although I might have missed out the sexual obsession with a child. However, it is also true that Ballard is much a stronger writer of horror and psychopathology than he is a builder of characters or stories. As much as the obsolete technology, descent into amoral madness, murder and social collapse are what make this book recognisably ballardian, and thus a little predictable, they are also where the writing is strongest. In the first part of the novel, Mallory's obsession with the river feels laboured and contrived, and though the story strives to be thrilling it ends up flat and unengaging. As the journey goes on though, as the characters become sicker and and the whole world goes insane, the vision begins to fall in place and the book becomes convincing.

This is probably not a novel for someone wanting an introduction to the author. An easier entry would be High Rise, for example, or any one of the earlier novels. Those particularly curious about Ballard's weird vision of humanity's relationship to technology could do worse than to start with Crash. On the other hand, people interested in reading an alternative take on the European novel set in Africa will probably find The Day of Creation interesting, and I imagine a person could write a Masters thesis on this book's satirical use of colonial imagery. Diehard lovers of the author will find plenty of his trademark idiosyncrasies to enjoy here. Personally, reading The Day of Creation, I mostly wondered whether Ballard's appropriation by other writers and artists hasn't permanently rendered his work a little toothless and boring. 

Friday 30 January 2015

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon


 
Set in 2001, Pynchon's Bleeding Edge is a surreal, insightful, paranoid and funny novel about the time when the Internet started to accelerate its creep into all our lives. Set in New York, the book follows Maxine Tarnow, a Fraud investigator who has lost her licence, as she gets drawn into a web of hackers, left wingers, neo-conservatives and dot-commers, centred around weird goings-on at a tech firm called hashslingrz.

I haven't read Pynchon's last book, Inherent Vice, but I understand it surprised many people . It seems it was a reasonably straightforward humorous noir thriller, while Pynchon fans are used to sprawling, weird and confusing post-modernist narratives in which everything and nothing might be a clue to some vague yet vast conspiracy. With this in mind, Bleeding Edge feels like a combination of Pynchon's older work with some of the tricks he may have learnt from trying his hand at a more conventional genre. The confusing cast of characters, shadowy government activities, paranoid conspiracies and joyously complex sub-plots running through this novel all reminded me of Vineland, but unlike that earlier book, Bleeding Edge follows a single protagonist all the way through, and while the narration is third person, almost everything that happens is focalized through the wise-cracking New-York-Jewish consciousness of our heroine, Maxine.

Pynchon has often been an anarchically comedic writer, and in some ways, Maxine's spunky persona made me wonder whether the author wasn't trolling his super-serious, high-lit loving audience by paying his respects to Janet Evanovich. But Bleeding Edge's protagonist is also reminiscent of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe—a tireless, sardonic investigator in a corrupt world, where the odds are always stacked against the little (wo)man, and where supporting cast members will suddenly turn up dead in observation rooms under swimming pools. In fact, Pynchon seems to be doing for New York in the early 2000s what Chandler did for 1930s Los Angeles. Bleeding Edge lifts the lid on late capitalism to show the grubby reality beneath, where tech firms are laundering operations for Mossad donations, there's no clear line between corporate interests and the CIA, technology is always led by military innovation, and nobody really knows whose side anybody is on.

The term "bleeding edge" appears only once in the text and is used to refer to the most advanced technology: Not just cutting edge, but bleeding edge. However, the title seems also to refer to the ways in which one thing will tend to bleed into another, until all certainties disappear and the question of choosing a side may be moot. Morally guided Maxine finds herself experiencing an unhealthy attachment to a sadistic, neoliberal hitman with a long history of torturing and murdering South Americans in the name of US interests. Deep web application DeepArcher, a kind of metaphysical VR simulator that supposedly operates beneath the surface of the Internet, appears to be a portal of some kind, and may even house the dead. Random number generators cease to be random on September the 11th, and a video appears that apparently shows American agents practicing a dry run on a roof top with a rocket launcher some days earlier, ready to shoot down the planes should one of the pilots bottle out. By the end of the book, the virtual world and the real world have melded together in subtle ways, foreshadowing the way the Internet really would colonise all our lives over the decade following novel's end.

I really liked Bleeding Edge. I love the little details as much as anything: The tech nerd with a foot fetish; the man with a forensic capacity to smell things, whose private hobby is attempting to reconstruct Hitler's scent; the young graphic designer who has spent years and a small fortune trying to get her hair to look exactly like Jennifer Aniston's does in Friends; Maxine's secretary, who almost always speaks in a kind of ironic Blaxploitation jive; the sinister presence of the novel's off-screen villain.

But more than all this, Bleeding Edge is one of the first fictional books I've read that really tries to address the world as it is now. It is a comedy, but it is also deadly serious. In going back a few years to the start of the century, Pynchon is able to say everything about where we are today. It really brought home to me the way in which we are all trapped in the Web; how even those powerful people we assume to be in some kind of control are really just avatars, working within pre-scripted scenarios—as free as the protagonist of a third-person shooter.