Susan Hill - The Woman In Black.

The best ghost story I know is Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw.' It may be the only really good ghost story I have ever read. James' ghosts occupy psychological spaces, for the most part, and are the more disconcerting and the more convincing for it. Susan Hill's 'The Woman In Black' is different. It's ghosts are more old fashioned, and are to be found in graveyards, behind locked doors and barred windows, and in fog choked swamps and marshland. And when I first met them, on the London stage.

Stephen Mallatratt's theatrical adaptation of Susan Hill's short novel has been running at the Fortune Theatre, London, since time began, or thereabouts. I went to see it a couple of weeks ago, just as time was rumoured to be winding down. The cast of characters is played by two actors, both excellent. The staging is simple and clever, the theatre small and intimate. When the play finished I bought the book, and I read the book with the images and the sounds of the stage still resonating. And so this review can not help but be a review of the play and the book together.

The story begins as so many ghost stories do, with a frame narrative, in which our narrator, an ageing, somewhat subdued, "even-tempered . . . predictable" Arthur Kipps, sits by a fire blazing in the hearth, engaged in the "soothing business of lighting a pipe", his family sat around him. He is invited to join in with the traditional Christmas Eve telling of ghost stories. Shaken, he abruptly makes his exit, leaving his family "in a state of consternation and bewilderment" and the reader with the lingering, ominous thought that, "the truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible" than the "ghoulish, lurid inventions" of the usual stories. This is how the book opens. The play opens with Kipps standing centre stage reading the opening lines of the book ("It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk's Place on my way from . . .") in a slow, deliberate monotone. Both beginnings point to the ostensibly plain, unadorned, and so credible character of our narrator, and, in turn, the credibility of his story.

The "altogether more terrible" truth unfolds in Arthur Kipps' past, in a small, insular, fog-swathed town called Crythin Gifford, where, as a junior solicitor, he is sent to attend to the affairs of the recently deceased Mrs Drablow. And it is here that the eponymous 'Woman in Black' appears (a young woman "so pathetically wasted, so pale and gaunt with disease, that it would not have been a kindness to gaze upon her") and disappears, usually preceded by a rustle. Soon after Kipps moves to Eel Marsh House, a suitably gothic structure, surrounded by marshland, approachable only via the narrow "Nine Lives Causeway" and isolated from the town when the tide is in and the causeway submerged. Here he is haunted by strange, ominous sounds - a horse and carriage sinking into the surrounding marshland, the screams of its occupants, one a child; a rhythmic bumping, a "familiar sort of sound" from behind a locked door. When reading these passages I could not but hear again the sounds from the theatre, and so recall the tension evoked there. The success of the theatrical adaptation depends I think on these sounds, which in combination with the simple, sparse staging, commit the audience to engaging with the story on their own terms, and with their own imaginations. Little is directly shown. Susan Hill does likewise. Enough is left unsaid, and enough unseen.

In both the novel and the play, the space that is most vividly seen is that of the room behind the locked door. In the novel it is described with the same detail as are the marshes, or the house, but it is more vivid, more conspicuous, because it does not fit. It does not fit with those other settings, or with the impression of the woman in black who stands gazing out over the marshes from its barred window. Outside of the room, and until the room, the story is monochromatic, a sort of dull russet brown. And until this point, everything has a feeling of weight, and decay. When Kipps finally shines his torch into the room there is colour and lightness. The effect is, in context, disconcerting. On the stage the effect is similar. Whereas for most of the story the staging has been minimal, a couple of chairs and a basket serving for half a dozen different settings, the room behind the door is busy and cluttered. For the first time the audience is jolted from their own imaginations and asked to really look at something - a fixed, meticulously arranged space. The sudden shift is disconcerting, and disorientating. It is doubly so when our eyes fix upon the source of the rhythmic bumping "familiar sort of sound" that has been haunting Kipps' nights.

This then is a ghost story which in its component parts is familiar. There is the frame narrative, the reliable narrator, the claustrophobic settings, the barred window and the locked door. There is also the twist at the end, which although not especially surprising is perhaps all the more dramatic for its tragic inevitability. And yet, despite or because of its familiarity, it works. The book is well written and the play is entertaining. In both, the plot is well handled. I don't know if I would have liked the book as much if I had not seen the play first. Both together took about five hours. I would gladly have given a few more.

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.

The Blue Fox by Sjón

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           

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

Zadie Smith - 'NW'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Rabbit Howls by The Troops for Truddi Chase

Originally published in 1987, When Rabbit Howls was presented as the first account of child sexual abuse to be written by a survivor, as unbelievable as that may seem given the shelves of rubbernecking misery porn now available in all good bookshops. It was also the first personal account of Multiple Personality Disorder (currently known as Dissociative Identity Disorder) to be presented to the public. Truddi Chase's psychotherapist,  Robert A. Phillips Jr. Ph.D., lays out the premise in his introduction: Truddi Chase, the first-born, has slept since she was two years old. The person who now appears to be Truddi Chase is in fact a conglomerate of 92 separate individuals who operate through a shared body. These people, collectively known as the Troop Formation, collaborated in the writing of the book as a part of the therapy process, each of their contributions originally showing distinct handwriting styles. Their stated aim in creating the manuscript is to bring attention to the horrific realities of child abuse—at the time of the book’s publication even more of a taboo than it is today—and lay bare the nature of life as a multiple, with its attendant confusion, amnesia and loneliness.

Yet things are more complicated than even this summary suggests. For a start, the Troops have chosen to write the book in the third person. Maybe this is a logical solution to the difficulties any reader would encounter in distinguishing between 92 potential first person narrators (Falkner eat your heart out), but it doesn't explain how or why the story is often focalised through the mind of The Troops' therapist. Stanley, as the Troops prefer to call Dr Phillips, is almost as much the protagonist of the book as any of the woman's myriad personalities. When we read about the progress made in therapy sessions, revelations come to us through Stanley's mind. We learn about his client's condition as we watch him struggle to diagnose and treat her. We're even granted access to conversations and thoughts he has in situations where his client is nowhere to be seen. Again, there may be a technical explanation for some of this: when a new personality takes control, the previous one often melts away, returning later with no memory of what has happened in the interim, so an external eye is necessary to give the story some kind of coherence.

This is a paradox at the core of the book. In order to show the realities of their Disorder, the Troops are heavily reliant on the conventions of fiction. In their own introduction, they acknowledge that the book condenses four years of therapy into a nine month narrative, and while one secondary character is a distillation of many real people and situations, another character—the expert psychologist Stanley turns to for advice and a second opinion—is actually a reflection of the shared ideas and conclusions Chase and Phillips came to through their sessions. The reader is thus forced to make a decision on how much of the book to take as non-fiction, how much should be read as a symbolic expression of the truth and how much might be pure fiction. According to the book, Chase changes appearance visibly when she shifts identities. Her cheek bones move, her eyes change shape. She also radiates energy which can jam electrical equipment and blow out light-bulbs. None of this is too difficult for me to deal with—my own mother's eyes change colour radically depending on her mood, and I've known more than one person who can't wear a digital watch—but the fictional structure of the book necessarily throws some of its wilder claims into question. Add to this the fact that the closing section is given over to a story told by one of the Troops, a mysterious and poetic Irishman named Ean, who seems to transcend time and space and to predate Chase's birth by at least a century, and it is easy to feel that as a non-fiction book When Rabbit Howls is structurally compromised.

Still, it can't be easy for 92 people to write a book by committee, and this is the structure they chose. It is through this structure that the duel stories of Chase's childhood and her journey through therapy emerge. The woman who comes to therapy says that she has only five memories of her whole life. She also says, "I don't believe I have what most people would call emotions or feelings—just an awful fear, a guilt I can't define, and a sense of impending doom." It becomes clear that most of her memories are held by her other selves, each created to deal with a particular set of traumas or to serve a given purpose. Many of them are children, like the Rabbit of the title, who was created to experience pain on behalf of those among the Troops who could not stomach it. Others are adults with various skills and identities, like Mean Joe, the large black man who serves as protector of the vulnerable Troop members, or Sister Mary Catherine, a nun who detests the sexuality of some of the more wanton girls among their number. Still others are dead, unable to continue living after a particularly foul piece of treatment. They are represented by their mirror images. The  woman becomes aware of the Troops as they emerge to write or tell their stories. Then, once they have receded, another member of the Troop Formation, called the Weaver, weaves a barrier in place to prevent the woman's access to the damaging realities of her past.

Slowly, Stanley comes to understand that the woman he thinks of as his client is not at all the original Truddi Chase, but just another created identity; she is an empty shell designed to operate in the world without the memories of the abuse or pain which the others hold. She is not the first-born, who is either asleep or dead, and who has been so since an act of penetration at the age of two. She is, it transpires, nothing more than a vacant puppet who does and thinks only as instructed by the Troops.

This is a deeply disturbing idea, more disturbing for me than this book's repulsive descriptions of child abuse and bestiality. It raises questions about the idea of the self that go well beyond the symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder. How many times have I found myself doing something I could never have predicted I would do, or watched myself behaving with a cruelty or anger that seems to come from elsewhere? If Truddi Chase is out at the far end of a continuum, at a point where the self is totally fragmented, it is nonetheless easy to see echoes of her condition in anyone's life. We all suppress inconvenient and painful memories and alter our body language and voice unconsciously in different situations. I can go a whole day without really interrogating my motivations for anything I have done. Even as I write this I have the sense that I am taking dictation. A key difference might be that most of us can make a story of our lives in which we work to blur the contradictions so that it sounds like the tale of a single individual. This for the Troops was an impossibility, such was the extremity of their experience and the outcome of their coping mechanisms.

Which raises the question, Where did they come from? How were the Troops created? Nobody has an answer to this, and it is another troubling element of When Rabbit Howls that Chase, or the woman, was totally unaware of her other personalities until she entered therapy with Phillips and began work on the manuscript. Dissociative Identity Disorder is a controversial diagnosis to put it lightly, and it does seem a little uncomfortable that throughout the book the Troops emerge under or following sessions of hypnosis. Could it be that the act of remembering—the process of creating the narrative—called many of these persons into being?  Could this process at least have made more concrete something which was previously abstract?

At whatever point it happened, each of the Troops were born in order to make sense of, or survive, something unbearable. It may well be that they existed fully formed long in advance of discovery. But it seems at least plausible that the fully fledged indentities and names of the Troops may have come into existence in response to the need to articulate through language the hidden rage and horror which the fragmented aspects of Truddi Chase had always held. Thus the Troops could be partially the product of the story they tell. This is not to question the reality of Chase's multiple persons (which would be an incredible arrogance), but ask whether, at one stage or another, the dire need to articulate a story might have been the foundation for the way in which that reality was experienced, understood and expressed.

Jonathan Frantzen: 'The Corrections.'

'The Corrections' is about a family which is at once ridiculous enough to keep the reader at a healthy psychological distance, and realistic enough to resonate, sometimes disconcertingly, with one's own familial bonds. Each section of the novel (after a brief prologue) focuses on different members of the family. The first, entitled 'The Failure', introduces us to one of the two sons, the adolescent middle-aged Chip. Chip is a Marxist academic, former professor and writer of a screenplay that begins with, "a six page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama"  and continues with conspicuously frequent and salacious references to a student character's breasts.  He rails against the cynicism of a consumerist culture, is seduced by a student ("Melissa swung a leg off the sofa and planted a stockinged foot on Chip's leg, close to his hip . . . Through his jeans Chip could feel the deliberate flexing of her toes.") into an Advil fuelled Holiday Inn affair and, at the end of the first section, is aboard a plane to Vilnius where he will defraud American investors. On the face of it then he seems like a thoroughly likeable character. But there is a problem: sometimes he is very likeable and sometimes he is very unlikeable, but rarely at all is he ever anything in between. He doesn't quite fit together. He's not quite three dimensional, at least not all at the same time. He is a dissonant note. But, the dissonance is only really noticeable later on, and is relative to the brilliance with which the rest of the cast is drawn.

The second section, 'The More He Thought About It, The Angrier He Got', a brilliant title and perhaps worth ear-marking for a possible gravestone epithet, is about the other son, Gary, his wife Denise and their children. Gary is a kind of everyman, reminiscent of Heller's imploding bureaucrat in 'Something Happened.' He seems to sink, inch by inch, into a very modern depression, one which he refuses, and one which we, as increasingly incensed, sympathetically incredulous onlookers, also refuse. After all, as he himself acknowledges, "his seasonally adjusted assessment of life's futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit chemically depressed." It is Frantzen's portrayal of Gary's "mental economy", beautiful and skilful, and with both pathos and farce, that for me leaves the most indelible impression, the shape and colour of which I shall remember long after I have forgotten the details. There have been convincing portrayals of mental illness in literature, most notably perhaps Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', but I struggle to think of anywhere else, possibly excepting the aforementioned Heller novel, where the decline or descent into mental illness has been portrayed so impressively. And having lived in London for the past six or seven years, it is increasingly mental illness, in all it's colours and shapes, which for me most defines the human condition. It is what I want to read about, what I want to understand.

In fact much of the book is about the corrections we make to avoid, put off and account for different forms of mental illness, in ourselves and others. Gary corrects his perception of his own place within his family unit. He repositions himself so as to better fit the ideas others, notably his wife and children, have of him. It is a surrender but the alternative is a nomadic isolation and madness by default.  His mother, Enid, similarly makes corrections and readjusts herself accordingly. She convinces herself that Chip is writing for the 'Wall Street Journal', that Gary is her son before he is Caroline's husband, that her daughter Denise is a small-town girl who respects the boundaries of the marriage contract.  Small corrections but cumulatively enough to effect a fundamental shift and upset the balance between the self and everything else.

Enid corrects too her expectations of her husband, Alfred, who spends his days sleeping and disappearing into his blue leather chair in the basement.  Alfred is a superbly drawn character, and, in the grip of Parkinson's disease, the most explicit representation of mental illness. He is ostensibly a loveable, pitiable old man, with familiar and old-fashioned idiosyncracies, but at his core there is an inscrutable darkness which resonates outwards. One of the most memorable sections of the novel is a dialogue between Alfred and his own clammy, spiteful, sociopathic stool:

"Phlblaaatth!" the turd taunted. It had reappeared on the wall above Alfred's bed and hung, precariously, as if flung there, beside a framed etching of the Oslo waterfront.
"God damn you!" Alfred said. "You belong in jail!"
The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drop on the sheets below. "Seems to me," it said, "you anal retentive personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put 'em in the slammer! And Polynesians, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail 'em!"

To get away with this kind of thing, three hundred and something pages in, is testament to how completely Frantzen has been able to create a story of subtle resonances, of humour and empathy, and, most of all, of convincing, living characters. This surreal passage does not in context come across as ridiculous, but rather as funny and sad and unflinching. And in that respect, if in no other, this passage, for me, pretty well characterises the book.

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

 

Made up of three sections, each ostensibly recounting a long journey on foot and illustrated with photographs as if to prove it, Walking to Hollywood takes the traditions of memoir and travel writing as its point of departure. If it is either of these things, however, then it certainly falls within the outer reaches of the most generous definition. I came away from this book with the belief that Will Self probably did a lot of the walking which serves as the text's foundation, and also that this was a memoir of an abstract kind, what Jonathan Coe would call "an emotional autobiography." That's about as far as the relationship to non-fiction goes.  

Will Self has often named his late friend JG Ballard as his biggest influence, but it is William S. Burroughs, the man Ballard called the 20th Century's greatest writer, whose ghost can most tangibly be felt haunting the pages of Walking to Hollywood. This is especially true in the titular middle section, in which the narrative of a journey around Los Angeles is continually disrupted by what Burroughs would have referred to as "routines" — bizarre and surrealistic flights of fantasy in which the rules of logic, reason and physics are very much suspended, replaced by free association, paranoia and all the violence of the Id. Take for example the passage where Will Self, the book's central character, visits Pinewood studios, gets into a fight with Daniel Craig's stunt double and witnesses several explosions before liberating Scooby Doo from the set of The Wolf Man. Despite being overwhelmed by love for the animated dog, he sets him free to roam. Or take, for another example, the incident in which our hero grows enormous and green in downtown LA and decides he wants to fuck a car. Or the occasion when he becomes an actor without agency in a pre-written, computer generated riot. All the while, every character is played by a Hollywood actor, except for the narrator, who is played by two. Self is aware that he is being played alternately by Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis, although he is not always sure which of them is playing him at any given time.

If this sounds confusing and bizarre to say the least, it is only the tip of an intricate and relentless weirdness which can be partly explained by the fact that Self's narrator is in the depths of a severe psychotic episode. In fact, each of the novel's three distinct sections sees the same narrator, Will Self, suffering from a completely different but equally debilitating mental illness.

In this respect the insanity of the routines is far more focussed and controlled than any comparable work by Burroughs, following as it does the internal logic of a particular psychopathology. Self also has a good deal more respect for the conventions of punctuation, for whatever that may be worth. And as the examples given might indicate, the themes and content of the weird tangents follow and reveal the central ideas of each of the book's sections. Thus, in the section on Hollywood, all Self's delusions and "fugues" grow out of one or another cinematic cliché and focus on movies, actors, simulacra and the death of "the real". Yet with only the narrator's mangled viewpoint to guide us, waves of this madness spill into areas where readers might otherwise hope to anchor themselves in some form of external reality. Characters in the story seem aware that Self is being played by an actor, and are sometimes disturbed by this. In one of the funniest passages in the book, the David Thewlis version of Self appears one morning to meet the camera crew he has hired to follow him on his journey. Unfortunately, when he secured their services he was being played by Pete Postlethwaite and they very much want to know what the hell he's done with Pete. They're worried, they say, that Postlethwaite might be having some form of breakdown. Ever since he hired them he's just wandered around LA, muttering "unbelievable bullshit!"

If this camera crew exist at all, how can they have noticed that the narrator has switched from one imaginary representation of himself to another? Their failure to recognise him and their consequent confusion only make sense in the framework of the narrator's delusional system. If we are to believe that any conversation has taken place outside of the narrator's mind, we are left with no idea what it might have been. Of course there is a nod here to the fact that it is all a fiction anyway, none of it is real, but this removal of any fixed point of narrative reference makes at times for queezy reading.

In the two sections, call them related novellas, that frame the section called Walking to Hollywood, Self's narrator suffers Alzheimer’s and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. These stories are restrained only by the standards of the monster sitting between them. As someone with family experience of all the neurological and psychological conditions Self uses as textual tools in this book, I could easily have felt his occasional willingness to play them for laughs glib and unpleasant, were it not for the fact that the whole text seems to float on an ocean of serious sadness, confusion and anxiety for which these problems become symbolic expressions. In this context the humour is more than welcome.

Walking to Hollywood is undoubtedly a unique book. It is sometimes very funny, often well written, but in honesty it is not always enjoyable. Self's use of repetition can be irritating, his jokes are sometimes painful and the concerns are certainly grim. Not to diminish the book's enjoyable elements — there's always a sense of gratifcation in recognising some appalling satirical truth, and any book featuring Scooby Doo is likely to win my heart — but this novel is not really something you are intended to enjoy. It is uncompromising, unsettling and memorable, which might arguably be greater praise.