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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.