Lisa Moore: February

Moore, Lisa (2010), February, Chatto & Windus
ISBN 9780701184902

February is the first book off this year’s Booker longlist I finished, and I am not happy. Luckily, it was not shortlisted. Originally published by House of Anansi Press in 2009, this novel, Canadian novelist Lisa Moore’s third offering to date, is an interesting little critter though. In slightly more than 300 pages, Moore attempts to present an account of loss to her readers, the loss suffered by a family when Cal O’Mara, husband and father, suddenly dies in a terrible accident, leaving a surprisingly large family. In a flurry of short chapters, Moore shuffles her reader through different points in time, looking not just at the fateful day when the family learned of Cal’s death, but at various small events between that day and the day, 16 years later, when his son becomes a father himself. This sequence of events suggests a saccharine ‘circle of life’ kind of rhetoric and structure, but Moore tries her utmost to sidestep this danger. Most noticeably, the sequence of events does not directly correspond to the sequence of chapters in the novel as the reader jumps back and forth between various points in time until dates start to matter less and less as various events start to develop a kind of synchronicity. Moore doesn’t dwell on the details of the accident, they are important only inasmuch as they matter to Helen O’Mara, Cal’s widow, and her process of grieving. Her focus on small everyday details and emotionally fraught observations function as attempts to ground Helen’s grief in a common understanding of depression and emotional duress. We feel with Helen because we recognize parts of what she is going through. At the same time, the book scorns actual realism, unfolding, rather, like a strange, melancholic dream. All this is interesting, intriguing, even, but Moore isn’t content with letting her material work its magic on its own, and so she laces her writing with sentences that try too hard, structuring her chapters like short stories aiming for the utmost effect. This makes for many moments that are at best precious, at worst terribly, terribly annoying.

On 15th February, 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank 267 kilometers east of Newfoundland. All 84 men who had worked on it died as a Rogue wave struck the cumbersome vessel and caused a chain reaction of malfunctions, that ultimately led to the rig’s capsizing and striking the bottom of the ocean. February looks at the aftermath of the Ocean Ranger disaster, taking a fictive family to illustrate the plight of the 84 families who were devastated by the events during Valentine’s night, 1982. In her acknowledgments, Moore tells us that she has researched this incident thoroughly, and throughout the book the only obvious inventions are the O’Mara family members themselves. All the details of the oil rig sinking seem/are genuine and well-researched. Given the recent oil spill catastrophe in the gulf of Mexico, Moore’s novel might seem oddly timely and prescient, but on the other hand, ecological concerns play at best a very minor role in a book that is concerned with the impact of such catastrophes on those who are left behind, the workers’ families. In fact, Moore’s book doesn’t need the exact incident in order to work, its emotional gambits are relatively independent of this exact incident, there is nothing in it that is intrinsic to this specific catastrophe. On the other hand, once picked, Moore makes the best out of the material at hand. She -excuse the pun- floods her book with maritime images and metaphors, linking her novel to a vast and rich literary tradition that contains the Bible, Herman Melville, Anatole France and countless more recent books (think The Perfect Storm). This, though, feels added to the book. Reading the book, we get an odd feeling of incongruity: on the one hand there is the emotional, personal aspect. With occasional flashes of great emotional insight, Moore works on the particulars of everyday feelings, confronted with loss and age, with childbirth and responsibility, with love and heartbreak. Her voice is very well suited to express this kind of discourse.

This has its advantages and disadvantages. Lisa Moore opts for short sentences, writing, now and then, almost punchlines, but basically, her unsubtle and sentimental use of short sentences is yet another instance of the the stylistic miasma that Hemingway popularized in Western literature. Short, trenchant sentences that clearly aim for depth and miss far too often. It’s raining. We never slept. Fall apart. Not all sentences are like that, but Moore scatters them strategically throughout the book, and after a while, we read even hypotactic phrases with a glum low note at the end. To enforce these kinds of readings, Moore also often replaces the question mark at the end of a question with a full stop, giving her readers no choice but to strike a low note again. The same effect is produced by her constant need to repeat bits and pieces of dramatic monologue or dialogue, but in a shorter, glum voice. What’s more, from the evidence of this novel alone, Moore’s literary talent seems to be closer to the short than the long form. Almost all of the short little chapters are structured like short stories, and what’s worse, short stories tailored on O’Henry’s and Hemingway’s example. They tend to end on moody, emotional last paragraphs or even phrases, and they are weirdly closed affairs, in the sense that many of them produce puns and repetitions and allusions that point not to other places in the book, but that are restricted within the individual chapter. All of this is evidence of strong attention to craft and structure: there’s nothing accidental about these things, as they all feed into the overall mood and emotions of the book. Isolation, loneliness, fear are pervasive everywhere, and with this deft move, Moore manages to compare the surviving family emotionally with their husband and father who died hundreds of kilometers away from the coast, dying of hypothermia in the vastness of the ocean. If this sounds complex: it’s not really. In tone and depth, the book is closer to bestseller epics of the quotidian, for example Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones books, Nick Hornby’s mush or any book from Sophie Kinsella’s growing repertoire.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think that February works best if you can connect to it in some way, if you recognize some of the details. I mean, despite a certain touch of the clichéd, I think many observations, while realized in cheaply sentimental writing, do hit their targets. The way the protagonist worries about aging and attractiveness, the way children can cling to their mother or become strangers to her, and small details, the smells of cooking, and everyday sounds rebounding off the walls of family homes. The plot isn’t as important as the characters are and their observations and the relationships between the characters. There is Helen, widowed by the sinking of the rig. Helen is no idealized wife, we know that there are tensions between Helen and Cal, and in the face of his death, she doesn’t behave as we would expect. She is helpless enough to allow her oldest son John to take over as head of the household. Despite being barely a teenager, he quickly assumes responsibility, starts to work early, and matures within few years. This rapid emotional and personal growth has left him scarred. His mother’s weakness didn’t leave him an opportunity to come to grips with his father’s death, and so he grew into a man who was afraid of open water, yet also a man determined to achieve anything he wanted. Highly successful professionally, we are led to assume that his personal relationships with the other sex are slightly aloof, and stop short of commitment. When an affair of his (the relationship lasted all of a week) tells him she’s pregnant, John panics and turns to his mother for advice. This is how the book starts. As a character, John is less well realized than his mother, and I think that the book, although it is about a circle of life coming together, and a deeply wounded family coming, finally, to terms with Cal’s death. See, although the small chapters are not linked by a narrator and although each chapter is related from the point of view of the specific character which that particular chapter focuses on, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that most of this, in a way, takes place within Helen’s upset mind.

Or within her dreams and memories. Because here is another aspect of the book that fascinated me: the way that Moore weaves this tale of ordinary loss and emotional empathy into a highly literary web. Yes, observations and language are pretty down-to-earth, but within all this lurks a very literary sensibility. The moodiness and gloom, the surfeit of maritime images, allusions and metaphors, and the way that not just the chapters, but the whole book is like a mirror cabinet, references pointing to points within the novel rather than outside. This book, explicitly written with a real catastrophe in mind, based on sound research, seems, at times, almost like a fantasy. I think Moore herself realizes the strenuous and difficult relationship her book has to the real world and extra-literary facts: towards the end of the book, Helen first tells us about the incident by paraphrasing witnesses from another ship that was ready to pick up survivors. Then, after a paragraph that ends, typically, with a three-word phrase (“He is gone.”), Helen shifts gears and tells us: “But this is not a true account of what Cal faces, and Helen knows it. It’s better to keep to the true story [...].” What follows is an imaginative account of Cal’s last hours, not based on witnesses, but based on speculation and empathy. And here’s the fun part: we know that Cal, unlike his rig, is an invention, and the description of his death is anything but “the true story”. The part before was crammed with real world facts. This complete reversal of facticity in a book that uses, remember, the actual name of a real catastrophe, is endlessly fascinating. What Moore offers us is a different kind of truth, a poetic truth, and she liberally, and not without deftness and skill, employs the tools of her trade to get at this special truth. The dreaminess, the internal consistency of images and metaphors, the almost allegorical way plots unfold, all this is not in the service of being precise in a realistic way, it is in the service of being as truthful as possible, and more truthful than simple realism would allow for.

And while all this is interesting, and well realized, it clashes massively with the direct, realistic way her characters experience all this. Lisa Moore wants to have the cake and eat it too. She wants to write characters that are believable, that are realistic, that her readers can connect to instantly; and at the same time she wants to fill the gap in the known facts with poetry, with literary flourishes. She manages to do the first by sacrificing literary artifice and produces, to my ear, third rate sentimental mush that depends on emotional contact in order to work. She manages to do the second by sacrificing realism. The result is a book that is smaller than it could be, less powerful than it should be, and not a very good book overall. It’s not a bad book, by all means, but one can’t shake the impression that Moore has shrunk it on purpose to fit her goals. It’s not enough for me. It might be enough for you. It will not rattle your cage. It will not change your life. You’ll probably not reread it nor recommend it to others. It’s a small book with a huge subject. It may be enough for some readers. That’s the best I can say.

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Bryan Lee O’Malley: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life

O’Malley, Bryan Lee (2004), Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, Oni Press
ISBN 978-1-932664-08-9

I’m gonna go ahead and say it: I think that Bryan Lee O’Malley is a genius. Or brilliant, anyway. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life is the first book of his that I read and it blew me away, or rather: it riveted me to the chair I read it in. It is the first volume of an ongoing series about Scott Pilgrim, published with Oni Press. I’ve almost finished reading the second volume and I itch to get my hands on the other volumes that have been published so far. The book is an exhilarating ride, a barrelful of fun, an amazing book, in short and his writer, if this book is any indication, is one to cherish and to keep an eye on. Yes, this series of his is written in a limited register but he owns that format, that tone so completely and utterly, he has mastered the genre so completely that I have faith in his achieving great things in the world of comics. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life may seem slight but it is a great achievement, a book that bursts with a manic, joyful energy, that takes hold of you and doesn’t let go until the last page is turned. Yes, I sound a bit empty there, slinging cheap phrases around, but that’s because I don’t really have the words to truly express how I feel about O’Malley’s work.

Maybe I’ll start somewhere else. When Cornelia Funke, probably Germany’s most well known living writer of children’s and Y.A. Literature, started publishing her Inkheart books (review forthcoming), I was already a fan of her work. She used a fresh and original language, vivid and funny characters. Whenever I extemporized about how good children’s lit could be, I always mentioned her work. Inkheart was (is) a huge let-down. It’s competently written but direly dull, in too many places. It’s smugly literate and annoyingly adult, in all the wrong ways. It’s clearly written for kids but it lacks the spark that animates the best of children’s literature. Before I picked up Inkheart, I never quite knew what drew me towards good or great literature written for young adults, but when I found it sorely lacking in Inkheart, I knew: it was the spark. It can be strong and pronounced, or subtle and quiet, but I found that in all books I admired, it was there. The difference to ‘adult’ literature is, however, frequently read the wrong way. Too often writing for teens is just an excuse to produce shoddy writing. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (review forthcoming) is a particularly horrid example.

Bryan Lee O’Malley, in contrast, does everything right; the spark leaps right off the page the minute you open the book. There’s not a page, not a panel in the book that I would ever label a letdown, a disappointment. Instead of stiffening the dialog Meyer-style, shriveling it up like a raisin, O’Malley’s pen is deft and quick, his language is always fresh, frequently surprising. To my ear he appears to perfectly catch a certain youthful register, but then I’m old, basically inherently lame (saying this is somewhat lame already I’m afraid) but then I’m not here to judge an authenticity contest, I am the reader of this book and for me it all worked magically, perfectly. O’Malley knows when to slip into a teenager corniness, into cool swagger, teen sarcasm etc. This musicality, sureness of tone is further emphasized by the book’s concern with music. Not only is the name ‘Scott Pilgrim’ inspired by a single by the moderately well known Canadian rock band Plumtree, Pilgrim, the character, is also a guitarist in a band and we hear several songs and at one point, O’Malley actually includes the chords to one of those songs. Music also has strange powers; at one point, a band plays a song that regularly knocks the whole audience out.

Speaking of strange powers. The plot is also somewhat strange although it’s, to a large extent, a conventional romance, I guess. The book starts off with Scott Pilgrim on the defense as his friends find out he’s dating a high school girl. Scott is 23 and the girl, Knives Chau, is all of 17 years old, going to a Catholic school, and she’s of Chinese ancestry to boot. She falls in love with Scott, but he, meanwhile has fallen in love with a mysterious American girl, Ramona Flowers, who first appears in his dreams and whom he then meets at a party. As it turns out Scott has a “subspace highway” going through his head. Although Scott is a bit confused about this, this is more or less taken in stride and it’s no oddity in this book where strange, vaguely magical things keep turning up. Scott and his band, for example, have strange powers, but most significantly, Ramona Flowers is not an easy girl to date. We find out that in order to go out with her, a suitor has to fight her seven evil ex-boyfriends first, the first one of which shows his vengeful, jealous face in this book, another one showing up in the next. They are diligent, well-organized and committed. Good thing that Scott Pilgrim is a good fighter, and quite generally awesome.

Bryan Lee O’Malley’s art suits the writing perfectly. Generally speaking, it’s very rough, very simple. It’s fueled by a mad teenage energy, no panel is drawn indifferently, reading the book is like taking a fresh breath of air. The characters are drawn in a few broad strokes, with O’Malley’s concentrating upon a few salient details. It’s cartoonish but the difference from many contemporary animated cartoons which it resembles superficially, is in the precision that O’Malley brings to his art. O’Malley manages to get the right angle, the right stroke of the pen to express something, to really animate his drawings. The low level of detail in his panels further accentuates this, his ability to foreground characters, to imbue them with life. His art is simple but it’s also economical, he uses its simplicity in a way that makes further detail, further refinement seem unnecessary. The teenage hyperbole of its writings, the gushing energy, these things seem to ask for this treatment. And, again, unlike many superficially similar animated cartoons, O’Malley not only borrows from the cinema, he puts angels and constructions borrowed from cinema to great use. Despite its simplicity, O’Malley’s art appears, at times, downright glossy, epic.

One last aspect of the book that needs to be mentioned are video games. I think that video games may even be the most important frame of reference here. Not to deny the cinematic aspect of some frames, but the aesthetic frequently is reminiscent of different video games and even the cinematic aspect could have been channeled via video games; one game especially that is mentioned, Final Fantasy, has always had incredibly refined, movie-like cutscenes. The plot, too, is part of a video game aesthetic, the sudden fighting, the fact that defeated enemies disappear and leave money behind (in the second volume, one of the defeated enemies even leaves behind items), the weird special moves and abilities, all this is part of that. And then there are the direct quotes, such as, for example, objects from classic jump and run arcade games that appear in the second volume, or, most significantly, the name of Scott Pilgrim’s band, which, in fact, can be said to sum up an important aspect of the books. The band is called “Sex Bob-omb”, a “bob-omb” being a walking bomb from the classic Super Mario Bros video games.

The combination in the whole phrase that is the band name is probably as apt a description of the cultural locus this book situates itself in, a mixture that makes for great, great fun. The first (and second, so far) volume of this ongoing series are, to use one of this book’s most frequently used words “awesome”. Yes, it alludes to other issues, too, gender, sexuality, perception, but I didn’t have the heart to approach a review of this book from that angle. It’s certainly a rich work of literature, but it’s as certainly not for everyone. If the description appeals to you, don’t hesitate. If you like graphic novels and trust me, don’t hesitate. As for the others: it’s your loss. Seriously. Don’t miss the spark.

Gung Ho: Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother”

Doctorow, Cory (2008), Little Brother, Harper Voyage
ISBN 978-0-00-728842-7

Here’s the thing. I’m not one of those weirdos who make a distinction between good books and fun books. When I had fun reading a book, I had fun and that’s a good reason to recommend any book. But with Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, and his first young adult novel, I must say, I don’t know. Cory Doctorow is no relation to the great American master E.L. Doctorow, as far as I know, but if he were, the apple, as they say, would have fallen far from that beautiful tree (or has it?). Among several flaws, I’m tempted to call the writing sophomoric (but I’m not going to, for reasons detailed later) and, most damagingly, the novel appears to have been conceived in the early 1990s. Hackers, anyone? That said, the book was a whole lot of fun. Thursday on the train to Wuppertal, I was giggling with joy so much that people looked at me strangely (even more than usual). Also, I have ordered it for a friend’s birthday immediately and will continue to recommend it in the future. It’s an insane amount of fun, plus it’s smart and really educational. Any novel for kids that references Emma Goldman and contains a bibliographic essay that recommends Ginsberg’s “Howl” is very commendable. And really, it’s an awful amount of fun.

So, since I just reminded myself of the fun, I’ll start with the good stuff. The story, set in San Francisco, is about four kids who are engaged in a game of Harajuku Fun Madness, which is a quiz/geocaching type of game. The four of them are high school kids who are talented computer/tech whizzes. Marcus Yallow, the main character, has loaded up on gadgets and trickery to circumvent his high school’s increasingly oppressive surveillance tricks. He is the captain of their Harajuku Fun Madness team, and almost indecently paranoid. His home computer, which he has built from scratch, by the way, downloads his email from the server once per minute and then deletes it from the server. During that game of Harajuku Fun Madness, something happens. Terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge, killing thousands in the process. The four kids are near the site of destruction and in the ensuing chaos they are picked up by a group of masked men and thrown into a van. As it turns out, the masked marauders are actually agents of the Department of Home Security (DHS), who suspect the four of being perpetrators of the attack or at least associates of the perpetrators. The fact that they have backpacks loaded with technical devices that are, as I mentioned, indecently well protected, isn’t helping either.

In the course of the next days they are tortured, mostly because the DHS agents are irritated that someone who is so paranoid and thorough with encryption would have nothing to hide. When they are turned out again, one among their number is missing and Marcus and friends are in a state of complete shock. The city, meanwhile, has stepped up the surveillance, control and persecution as we see the DHS taking control of the city. Marcus, humiliated, concerned for his friends, comes home to a father who is trumpeting patriotic hooey, to a school where social sciences has been taken over by a class where patriotism and the importance of the DHS are taught, etc.. The hacker can’t believe his eyes. Powered by a different kind of patriotic fervor (the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are quoted roughly 6 or 7 times throughout the novel) he decides to do something. Among other things this involves creating and maintaining an underground Internet-ish web (ok, before we continue here, let me just state that I am probably the most inept guy of my age group when it comes to computers and technology and related issues, so ’tis is very rough and probably wildly inaccurate. If you know my other reviews, you know I’m bad with details, but this is worse. I won’t even attempt to describe what the kid does with Xboxes and chips I never heard of.), and building devices which turn some of the surveillance mechanisms in place into a farce. This then evolves into a nonviolent guerrilla war, complete with a war for media control and the truth. As I said: loads of fun.

And it’s educational, too. Every kid who watches the news and starts to believe the toss about security, Doctorow hands him the intellectual tools to understand the idiocy of such statements, by putting all of this into context. He evokes hallowed American icons such as the Bill of Rights and the American tradition of dissent and revolution. This is a point worth making: Marcus is in strong disagreement with the way the society around him changed, and he rebels. He stands up and takes action. This is no dystopia, the America depicted is not much different from the America (or Germany) today. These changes are all imaginable and quickly implementable. Doctorow is suggesting to his young readers: what would you do? In the final chapter, with everything cleared up (Oh c’mon, it’s a genre novel.), Doctorow has his protagonist work at a company that seems very similar to Doctorow’s own boingboing.net, making it easy for his readers to make the connection to the here and now. In a way his is a fictional enterprise similar to Philip Roth’s The Conspiracy against America, but whereas Roth’s smooth end that blended into history as we know it, was the most damaging weakness of an otherwise great novel, Doctorow’s last chapter invites his audience to do as Marcus does. Read online material, rethink your ideas, stand up for your convictions, hack something.

Here is where my two main gripes with the book come in: ideas and audience. We’ll start with Audience. The book is strangely written. The style is simple and artless, it is functional and generic, which is not a bad thing necessarily. The book is not badly written. To write a book in a way that makes for fluid and fun reading is no mean achievement. What bothered me is something else. A novel that talks about a scene as specialized as Marcus’ and about technologies so far removed from everyday speech habits, needs to make sure that those in the know are not bored and that everybody else knows, roughly, what all the hullabaloo is about. The most obvious way to do this is to include a nincompoop who needs to have all the complicated ideas and terms explained to. This is not just the most obvious way to do it, it is also the most usual. So it’s refreshing that Doctorow’s tactic is different: he opts for the direct address: Marcus appears to talk to someone. Since he turns into a semi-professional blogger at the end it is safe to assume that Little Brother is some kind of extended blog entry. There are two problems with this: one is disappointment: direct address can make for great effect, as all sorts of books have shown (I’ll review two of them within the next week). The other is awkwardness. There are numerous irksome phrases. For instance, each time the word “h4wt” comes up in a circuitous, generic phrase I cringed. Doctorow clearly has trouble fitting these two registers of speech. But then, see, I don’t think he’s interested in doing that.

The same applies to to my second main gripe, his awkward juggling of ideas. His discussion of revolutionary action takes place on a backdrop of American patriotism. The Internet, and especially the hacker scene has, if my outsider’s perception is right, always been highly international. Doctorow is having none of this. He does sprinkle his stars-and-stripes menu with a few international guests, but they are always just that, guests on the sideline. The most impact that other countries’ journalists and hackers have is this:

Most notable is the global attention the movement has received. […] The issue came to a head last night, when the British Broadcasting Corporation’s National News Evening program ran a special report on the fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has covered this story. Commenters on the BBC’s website noted that BBC America’s version of the news did not carry the report.

This is criticism of America, but patriotic, righteous criticism: look what these countries are doing! Why are we not doing this? Thus, it fits the rhetoric, that the journalist, who finally steps up to the plate, is not just an American journalist, but a local one. But compared to other aspects, this is no major problem.

What is one is this: the American system is shown to be fundamentally sound. Again, there are hints: his friend Jojo is trying to cut down on his activities in the revolt because he is likely to be targeted first, as a Chicano American, but the fact that he’s merely afraid of this is a joke. The events after 9/11, in most western countries have demonstrated, that repression is not color-blind. Jojo makes his point well, he criticizes the racial bias of the judicial system:

White people get caught with cocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crack and go to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the streets and feel a little safer. Brown people see cops on the streets and wonder if they’re about to get searched.

But Jojo isn’t caught, and in the prison where Marcus and his friends are held and tortured, Marcus sees a few Arabs, but that’s it. This discussion feels forced, and in contrast with the main points, it falls by the wayside, and fails to make any didactic impact. If this were not as didactic a novel as it is, it would not be its fault. But it is, and it is. I won’t even mention the fundamental affirmation of capitalism that Doctorow’s romantic idea of hacking puts forth. Well. The book has a clear didactic goal and a laudable one, as well. Doctorow may have chosen right when he decided to narrow his focus as he has done in this book. And this is something he shares with the great E.L., whose novels are also often very focused upon a didactic goal, trying to drive one particular point home. And the results, in E.L.’s case, are masterpieces such as The March. Does Little Brother fall short because the vision it presents it too pedestrian? Maybe.

For a different take on the topic, tune in next week, when I’ll review Charles Stross’ SF novel Halting State. Minus points: no Emma Goldman. Plus points: less flag-waving. I’ll see you.

Flotsam: Stephen Marche’s “Shining at the Bottom of the Sea”

Marche, Stephen (2007), Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, Riverhead Books
ISBN 978-1-59448-941-9

Mark my words. Stephen Marche will be enormous, one of the greats of English language literature, if his second book, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, is any indication. This is is an excellent book. Well conceived and well executed, this is a book the kind of which is rarely encountered. It is a book of fictions that is itself a larger fiction that touches upon many interesting and necessary issues. Before I lose myself in the alleys of my mind, let me tell you: I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is doubtless among the best books I’ve read during the past months, and Stephen Marche may well be becoming one of my favorite living writers, if he can sustain this quality in his future work as well. This book has many ancestors but perhaps none so obvious as Borges and the divine Nabokov, author of a book that is quite similar to Marche’s masterpiece, in several regards: Ada, or Ardor. It is also heavily informed by theory, especially poststructural and postcolonial philosophy. Marche quotes luminaries of the fields in question such as Homi K. Bhabha or Jacques Derrida, but the work is never bogged down by these references and I will try to steer clear of Derrida and Bhabha in this review as well.

“Shining at the Bottom of the Sea” has a lot to say but it does it in a light and enjoyable manner. The fat sweaty man of theory that so often rolls upon the unsuspecting reader in books concerned with postcolonial issues, is luckily completely absent here, although the basic premise and structure suggests elsewhere. The book claims to be an anthology of writers from a former British colony: Sanjania, a Caribbean island. It is completely fictional, as is everyone of the 21 (unless I miscounted) Sanjanian writers included in the Anthology. Stephen Marche pretends to be merely the editor of the volume, who provides an informative preface and a glossary of the writers included in the anthology. The anthology contains Marche’s preface, an introduction by Leonard King, the most famous living Sanjanian writer, three sections of stories and one section of literary criticism by Sanjanian critics and others (including a letter by Ernest Hemingway to John Dos Passos). The scholarly parts of the anthology are (formally speaking) perfectly annotated and bibliographed, most references, of course, being completely bogus.

There is a caveat here: this is a careful book that does not sweep up the reader in a ravishing feat of storytelling, although Marche certainly would have the chops to pull this off. No, many stories here not terribly engaging nor are they supposed to be: most stories take less up less than ten pages, and the reader is not allowed to settle into them before he is thrown out again by the scruff of his neck. Some stories we are sad to leave, sad stories about love and death, pride and humiliationsome, I’m sorry to say, just pass us by. It’s a credit to Marche’s powers as a writer that we don’t feel this as a loss, it all adds up the big picture. Because this is, after all, what the pattern of stories is about. The stories manage to convincingly recreate a whole culture, the culture of a fictitious country, no less. With the very first story, the very moment Marche steps up to the plate, a swashbuckling history called “The Destruction of Marlyebone, the Private King” by a “F.R. Fisher”, we are captured by Sanjania. This story is three pages long but it packs the punch of a dozen more pages at least.

This story demonstrates many of the strengths of the whole collection. It never descends into low trickery, it does not fiddle with orthography or funny accents. There is a fine line between representing a voice and slipping into racism, and funny orthography is frequently amusing, but not necessarily evocative, certainly not in and of itself. Marche avails himself of an English that is predominantly modern, even in these early stories, supposedly written at the beginning of the 20th century (we’ll return to this in a moment), but he puts a peculiar spin on it, creating a tone that is all his own and that, after a few stories, we will recognize as “Sanjanian”. There are small tweaks on the syntax, but the larger part of the tone is carried by composites such as “oceanshrouded”. Marche fits these words snugly into the fabric of the stories, they never feel odd or like curios, instead we as readers accept that this choice of words is part of the rhythm of Sanjania. Marche’s success works on two levels, this one, the immediately pleasuring power of his writing is one of it.

The other level is cerebral. There is, as would be expected of a project like this, a double bottom to it all. This book is so carefully, intelligently, yes, slyly, constructed it provides hours of cerebral entertainment, even before we come to the “criticism” section. After all, in the first third of the stories, we have yarns that read like 17th century stories, or 19th century Romantic recreations. From the biographical notes, however, provided for each writer, we learn that they, as previously mentioned, are contemporaries of modernism. The style is clearly anachronistic, even within the fictional framework, Mr. “F.R. Fisher” undoubtedly intended it as a stylistic throwback. It’s propaganda, reaching back to one’s cultural roots to strengthen one’s cultural identity against the colonizer, in this case, the “Britishers” as they are often referred to in this book. A second detail that most will immediately remark upon is the very name of the island, since it refers both to the largest and most well known British colony (India) and to the odyssey of the Zoroastrians who fled what is know today as Iran and trekked all over Asia until they settled in India, where they are known today as Parsi.

This kind of cultural fluidity with a strong inner core that travels well (see Clifford and others) works as well for Sanjania. Both culture, that is, cultural travel and identity, as well as geography, literal and metaphorical, play an important role. In a central story, “Flotsam and Jetsam”, a bookseller expounds upon his theory that Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” was written by a Sanjanian and is set in Sanjania. Travelers, i.e. people, ideas and books, are just so much flotsam and jetsam, thrown into the river of time in distress, with all the stories expressing a yearning for the time when the shipwrecks of old Sanjanian culture sailed under full sails (yes, with all the problematic issues associated with that). Again, not to be too repetitive, but the very fact that I can write this attests to Marche’s evocative capabilities, evoking a culture that does not even exist, and doing it in a light and readable manner to boot.

All of this raises numerous questions about culture and colonialism, not least because Marche’s method works from an English core, a colonial norm, everything here reaffirms the strength of the culture of the colonialist, and displays the maze one is sent to when one seeks out one’s own cultures central ideas with the tools provided by the colonialist. It also shows to what extent we’ve all become cultural colonialists, to what extent we’ve become readers who have, theory be damned, accepted certain framings of the story. Marche’s book does a merry jig in our frames, toys with them, by constructing a world without representing an actual world, solely with the constructs we use. He is a jester, laughing at us: this book does not evoke a world in the sense of representing it, it just taps our convention of how a world is to be evoked, read, (re)presented. Marche does not hit us over the head with these ideas, he lets us realize them, as we glide through a sea of stories, flotsam, all of us. This is a very good book. Read it.

Daphne Marlatt: Ana Historic

Marlatt, Daphne (1997), Ana Historic, House of Anansi Press
ISBN 0-88784-590-8

I am not sure how to approach this rather short review so excuse me if I digress. It appears that in the last two decades a certain kind of philosophy has turned into “theory”, and many of its adherents seem to believe that within “theory”, philosophy’s rules no longer apply. Mentioning “gender”, “class” or “race” is quite enough, or dropping the name of enough canonized theorists. Thus, essays that do “theory”, often resemble lists of books and writers, containing barely a shred of actual argument. This is not restricted to any kind of theory, it can happen in a deconstructive reading of Dickinson as well as in that unbearable book on Merrill by Gwiazda. When non sequiturs become the main structural principle of an academic work you know you’re in trouble. The only thing that matters in such books or essays is the amount of texts mentioned and the degree to which they fit that book’s idea of “theory”. I have read a review of a biographical study of Elizabeth Bishop where the reviewer’s main complaint is that a passage in the book in question is plausible but “undertheorized”. Huh. I bet it’s also badly argued since the point is tough to argue (the necessity of biographical readings for understanding Bishop’s work) but that’s beside the point.

To return to the novel at hand. It has been praised quite a lot but if you look at the blurbs on the back, you can just imagine the reviews. “Theory” reviews of a “theory” novel. For this is what “Ana Historic” is. The writer is clearly well versed in theory of all stripes. Narrative, gender, power. It never drops the requisite names, but otherwise it’s like a big checklist and most readers will have all the right bells ringing in their heads (Foucault! Butler! Etc.). Often complex novels will make readers think of theory, some writers seem to be eerily conscious of the philosophical implications of what they write. The complexity of Beckett’s or Melville’s prose, Merrill’s poetry etc. will make reader’s minds reach for the thinkstuff. Then there are the less subtle writers, the most brilliant of whom is probably Heiner Müller, who write after or during the advent of theory and whose every scene or line betrays that knowledge. But it’s still exciting, interesting, which is more than I can say about Marlatt. Marlatt will, from time to time, stop and insert blunt pieces of theory, explicitly pointing out some presuppositions in the narrative as the gender roles or power structures. At times this reader had the impression of reading an analysis of a text that never appears on its own. This would have been interesting as well.

However, Marlatt is devoted to be a spoilsport. After doing some analysis she lapses into ‘regular’ writing again, interspersed with some tedious poetry (Marlatt must be an awful poet, if this text is any indication) and, less and less often, “theory”. She is not a good stylist, her prose is flat and uninteresting, sometimes I even had the impression of it’s being intentionally dull. Her being a spoilsport can be demonstrated by opening the book at random but this passage is among the most telling. IT starts out well enough:

not, not…all these elements knotted into the text.

The reader may sigh with slight annoyance, but more often he will chuckle with goodwill. Everybody likes puns. But how does she continue?

not, not…all these elements knotted into the text. silent k. for what? kiss. xoxoxo in code. kisses and hugs. omitted.

See what I mean? Sometimes this book appears to be committed to make this book as straightforward and uninteresting as possible, sussing out every ambiguity or pun and uncurling it. And from beginning to end it’s always the same dull style. And this despite a really good plot.

It’s a book about a woman in our time reimagining the life of a woman in 1873 who is mentioned in brief in some official records. Her notes and imaginings reflect on the way that those who write determine who is remembered and whose story is told and that the circumstances and the society around you determine who writes and who doesn’t. It’s about the power of naming things and people and about the lack of personal choice one has in a society. The book turns out to be a meditation on the limits of writing and thinking as a woman in this culture and language that is still dominated by men and their structures. It is about repression and about discipline, today and then. About questions of power and how they’re interlaced with questions of sexuality. And it does all these things, it bears repeating, in the dullest way imaginable, although, near the end, ten or twenty pages really moved me (the end, again, is awful, awful.).

There is a basic difficulty in judging a book like this. It is based on the difficulty of being a woman in a patriarchal society and a female writer writing in a patriarchal language, and I, a white male, am bound to misread it. The axiomatic canon I use in judging this book may be wrong and not applicable to “Ana Historic”. But then, the question is, what sort of system is it that Marlatt is submitting her book to. If it’s theory/philosophy, it’s not well argued and not original at all, there is not a shred of originality in the whole book, apart from the research plot and the plot is not part of the system. Or is it literature, then the flat writing and the terrible boredom is an important and damaging issue. I have, however, intimated that Marlatt may be an intentional bore. Make people think not like the book, maybe Brecht all over? I get the feeling Marlatt is trying to somehow straddle both systems and is relying on her poetical muscle to make it all work, since she was, when the novel was first published, a noted and acclaimed poet. Also, Marlatt, as many current practitioners of so-called “theory”, seems to believe that you only have to say enough of the ‘right’ things and say them often enough, to make her text work.Sadly, it doesn’t work, none of this. This plot deserves a better writer or a better thinker. It is not well served with Daphne Marlatt.

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