Patrick Ness: A Monster Calls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda by Simon Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Con Slobodchikoff: Chasing Dr Dolittle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House Mother Normal by B.S. Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Stories by Chris Ware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading: 

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

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.