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.

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.