The Blue Fox by Sjón

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           

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

Zadie Smith - 'NW'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Rabbit Howls by The Troops for Truddi Chase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Frantzen: 'The Corrections.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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