Book of the Month: The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (Liz Jensen)

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is Liz Jensen’s fifth novel. The former sculptor and BBC television producer declared that it was her first grown-up book. It is also her most commercially successful novel, which, by her own admission, brought her financial security.

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is a novel about a bright, precocious, and accident-prone nine-year-old Louis Drax. There are two narrative voices in the novel, one of which is Louis himself. The novel opens with Louis narrating the facts of his life. We learn that he lives with his mother; that all is probably not well between his mother and pilot father (his father lives separately); that he is a deeply disturbed child—he is known as ‘Wacko Boy’ in his school—who is seeing a child psychologist; that he has some bizarre preoccupations; and that he is deeply, almost pathologically, attached to his mother. It takes a while before the reader realises that Louis in fact is in a coma, after he fell off a cliff while picnicking with his parents. The accident-prone Louis, who has had a series of near misses in each one of his first eight years, every time saved by his mother in the nick of time, has finally found himself in a situation that would send him hurtling down a cliff and consciousness, while his mother is too far to save him. However, is it an accident? According to Natalie Drax, Louis’s mother, Louis was pushed off the cliff by his father, Pierre, following a violent argument between her and Pierre in which Louis got dragged in. Her version of the events cannot be confirmed, however, as Pierre has disappeared and Louis is in coma. Certainly, detective Charvillefort has not excluded Natalie as a suspect. When it becomes apparent that Louis is not going to regain consciousness any time soon, he is transferred to a residential clinic in the Provence where he is admitted under the care of the Neurologist Pascal Dannachet, who is the second narrative voice of the novel. Dr. Dannachet, who is having a midlife crisis of his own, predictably, falls for the vulnerable, traumatised and emotionally needy Natalie, and soon their relationship is hurtling down a path, which, he knows in his saner moments, is going to end in a disaster. To add to the intrigue, both he and Natalie receive letters asking him to back off (insinuating unpleasant consequences if he did not), in a handwriting that is a child’s and in a language that is characteristically Louis’s. While everyone assumes that the letters were sent by Pierre, Dannachet is convinced—even though his rational self is telling him that it cannot be—that Louis himself somehow effected the letters. Then Pierre’s dead body is found in a natural cave off the same cliff Louis fell from, and the only way he could have ended up there was if he jumped off the cliff or was pushed. It is also clear that he was alive for quite some time in the cave and probably starved to death. The needle of suspicion once again points towards Natalie. Dannachet, who till now has been indignant on behalf of the falsely-accused Natalie, begins to do his own investigations: he makes a trip to see Louis’s former psychologist; speaks to dead Pierre’s mother (who has never got along with Natalie for whom her son has deserted his first wife); and comes to know certain facts about Natalie’s past life which she has either not told him or has given a version that is very different from those of others. Dannachet then plans a daring experiment that defies logic to get to the truth, which propels the novel towards its dramatic, if somewhat unconvincing, finale.

In The Ninth Life of Louis Drax Liz Jensen tries her hand at a different genre (or perhaps more than one genre) from those of her earlier novels, which were about comedy of manners, contemporary satire, and Orwellesque dystopian future. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is a psychological thriller, a mystery story with more twists than a maze maker on acid. Jensen also makes forays into the neuropsychology of mind (the clue is in the epigraph of the novel, which is a quotation from Paul Brok’s Into the Silent Land). This exploration into the unconscious mind that veers into paranormal, while integral to the plot, assumes an ability on the readers’ part to suspend belief, and those who are unable to do that may find the premise a straw man. Of the two narrative voices in the novel, Louis’s is the more convincing, entertaining, and ultimately very moving. The narrative discourse of Louis is spot on—Jensen has superbly captured the idiolect of preadolescent boys, which adds to the pleasure of reading. Danachet’s views, on the other hand, about what is happening to Louis, appear more to belong to a columnist of paranormal magazines—Ghosts, spirits, afterlife, EVP, UFO, and the comatose boy who practises mind-control—than to a maven of brain pathology. The credulity and naivety of Danachet, who is supposed to be a reputed neurologist, is astounding, as is his capacity to unload seemingly fathomless cargo of clichés. (His dealings with Natalie Drax ought to get him struck of the medical register.) This is is one confused Neurologist in the middle of a midlife crisis more serious than an African republic in the midst of a coup d’etat. Similarly, the portraiture of Natalie Drax as a deeply psychologically scarred (and flawed) person is not convincing. The reader gets no worthwhile insights into Natalie’s cardboard character.

The inspiration of The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, according to Liz Jensen’s personal website, came from a family tragedy in Switzerland in the 1930s, when one of her uncles, after a violent argument with his mother, Jensen’s grandmother, left the house. A few days later, when he had not returned, Jenesen’s grandmother jumped off a cliff. The uncle was never found either. In an interview, Jensen said that rather than recreating the family tragedy in a fictional form, she attempted to recreate the emotions surrounding the tragedy. On the available evidence, she has made a success of it. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax may not be a psychological masterpiece, but it is an entertaining, easy read.

J.G. Ballard: An Appreciation

In 1946, a young man of 17 joined Kings College, Cambridge, to study medicine. He was born in Shanghai to British parents and had spent his childhood and adolescent years in China, a good many of which were in a prisoner camp during the Second World War, when the Japanese captured Shanghai. The family returned to England when the war ended. The young man found life in England ‘cold, grey and dull’ and, he would later recall, he survived the school in Cambridge his parents enrolled him into only because of his earlier experience of the hardships of the internment camp in Shanghai. The young man wanted to be a psychiatrist. He also believed he had flair for writing, and had written some short stories. He disliked Cambridge. The academic snobbery around him left him underwhelmed. (Later in life he would describe Cambridge as an academic theme park). He plodded on for two years but got increasingly frustrated, as he found that the demands of the medical course were so onerous that they left him with little time and less energy to write stories, his first love. When one of his short stories (Violent Noon) won a short story competition held by the Varsity (the Cambridge student newspaper), he believed he had found his calling in life—and that was not medicine. He was going to be a writer. He switched to London University to study English (but dropped out after a year). After a brief stint in a trade magazine, he decided to become a full time writer, and followed no other vocation. Medicine’s loss was literature’s gain. The young man’s name was James Graham Ballard, who went on to become one of the most celebrated writers of his generation and enjoyed cult following.

Ballard is widely hailed as a new age science fiction writer, although he was apparently not very comfortable with this label, preferring instead to describe himself first as a ‘speculative’ and then as an ‘apocalyptic’ writer. Nevertheless, the label stuck, and more than one obituary when he died, paid glowing tributes to his contribution to the science fiction genre. Ballard certainly had passion for the genre. A close friend (and a science fiction enthusiast) reminisced how in the 1960’s he and Ballard attended a Science Fiction convention and how Ballard was disappointed by the pedestrian and commercial interests that seemed to drive many of the SF writers who attended the convention. Ballard published, in the 1960’s, many short stories—his first breakthrough came with the story Terminal Beach— which, while they were not in the typical SF genre, used, cleverly, many of its tropes to generate his unique narrative structure. It would be fair to say that Ballard was never a hard-core science fiction writer; his interests lay more in the realms of crumbling of societal fabric, dehumanisation and such other dystopian themes. Many of his narratives during this period are compiled in Atrocity Exhibition. He also wrote the serial Equinox for the New World magazine, which was later published as the novel The Crystal World, which, together with Crash, he was best known for before the publication of his fictionalized autobiographies (or autobiographical fiction, if you prefer to look at them the other way). It was because of this groundbreaking work (which later came to be known as the ‘New Wave Science Fiction’) that Ballard was hailed as the spiritual Guru of the cyberpunk movement of the eighties. In 1973 he published the surreal Crash (which was made into a film decades later by David Kronenberg) based on the outré concept that modern society found car crashes erotic. According to Ballard’s friends, as a young man he had great interest—bordering on obsession—in assassinations, car crashes and psychosis (probably the reason why he toyed with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist). One publisher allegedly found Crash to be so disturbing that he considered Ballard to be beyond psychiatric help (Ballard himself commented, years later, that the novel was written in a state of ‘willed madness’). While there was something of being deliberately provocative and shocking about Crash, Ballard can never be accused of being outrageous merely for the sake of it—most of what he wrote had the larger goal of making the readers re-examine their preconceptions. In an introduction to the French translation of Crash Ballard wrote that the only ‘reality’ left for the writer to offer ‘in a world ruled by fictions of every kind’ was ‘the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives’. Another classic from the Ballardian cannon was The Day of Creation. In a densely atmospheric novel, in his hypnotic prose, Ballard, in paragraphs after paragraphs, constructed a moody, allegorical and eerie world of occult fear and imperceptible horror.

For those of us not conversant with science fiction, J.G. Ballard is best known for Empire of the Sun. The novel, a heavily fictionalized version of his childhood in Shanghai during the Second World War, was totally different from what Ballard had written until then. The book was a instant bestseller and, although it failed to win him the Booker, earned him world-wide audience. It was made into a highly successful film (by the same name) by Stephen Spielberg, and it is likely that it is this novel that has ensured that posterity will remember Ballard as one of the greats. A sequel (Kindness of Women) followed a few years later, which was a moving fictionalized account of Ballard’s later life, and drew high praise from critics.

Towards the end, Ballard’s writing took another turn as he became increasingly preoccupied with the structures created by modern technology, multinationals and into what abyss they were leading the world. Super Cannes, published in 2000, was not just a crime novel set in a business park (although it could be enjoyed at that level), it was also an indictment of the eve-of-millennium technological complacency and smugness. Millennium People, published three years later, tells, possibly foretells, the story of once-complacent middle-class and upper-middle class people, who, realizing how little they have, decide to start, of all things, a revolution. Kingdom Come, published in 2006, expounded further on these themes and looked at the meaning of middle class existence in the consumerist world of ideal homes and endless sporting events. These last novels, which can be considered as a trilogy of sorts, showed that Ballard had lost none of his inventiveness and still had the ability to suck readers into his world by his mesmeric prose.

J.G. Balard died in April 2009 after a long and stoic battle against prostate cancer. More subversive than Philip K. Dick and at least as shocking and radical as William Burrows, the prodigiously talented Ballard has left behind a vast cornucopia that captures the world in perpetual transit. Novelist Will Self, reacting to the news of Ballard's death, spoke about the influence of Ballard's work that transcended different arts, and described him as one of the writers that had inspired him the most, not in the sense that he wanted to ape Ballard's style or themes, but in the sense that reading Ballard in his formative years made him want to become a writer. A truly great writer has died.

Book of the Month: Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

Heart of Darkness is Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece. First serialized in 1899, the story was published in a book form in 1902. Since then the fame and influence of the book have increased exponentially. Hailed as one of the greatest novels of twentieth century, Heart of Darkness has influenced several works of art including films (most notably Apocalypse Now), novels and poems; one encounters either direct or oblique references to the novel and its themes in journalistic articles and novels (for example, Jonathan Coe’s The House of Sleep).

Heart of Darkness centers around Marlow, an independent minded sailor who is generally sceptical of those around him, and his journey up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, an enigmatic man reputed to be of great abilities. Marlow takes a job as a riverboat captain with the Company, a Belgian concern organized to trade in the Congo.

Marlow arrives at the Central Station, run by the general manager, an unsavoury, conspiratorial character. It is here that Marlow first hears about Kurtz, an apparently idealistic ivory trader, who works at a remote outpost of the company (Inner Station); he is rumoured to be ill, and needs to be fetched back from the Company’s outer post. Marlow also learns that the manager regards Kurtz as his rival. The steamboat Marlow is expected to command has been mysteriously wrecked, and the repairs take several months. Marlow is appalled by the rapacity, brutality and cruelty of the Europeans; the native inhabitants of the region are living and working in subhuman conditions, suffering terribly from the ill-treatment at the hands of Europeans. The cruelty and squalor of imperial enterprise contrasts sharply with the majesticity of the jungle that surrounds the European settlements. The ship is finally repaired and Marlow, together with the manager, a few of the Company’s agents (whom he gives the ironic sobriquet ‘pilgrims’ because of their strange habit of carrying long, wooden staves wherever they go; it is made abundantly clear that they are anything but ‘pilgrims’), and a crew of cannibals sets out on a long and difficult voyage up the river, to the outer post. On either side of the river is dense jungle; the atmosphere is oppressive, unsettling and disturbing; occasional glimpses of ‘native’ faces through the bush and the sound of drums add to the eeriness. At one stage during the journey the steamer is attacked by an unseen band of natives and Marlow’s helmsman gets killed by a spear.

Finally Marlow and his crew reach the Inner Station, where they encounter degringolade. A half-crazed Russian trader, who meets them as they come ashore, assures them that everything is fine. The Russian claims that Kurtz has enlarged his mind and cannot be subjected to the same moral judgments as normal people. The Russian also reveals to Marlow that it was Kurtz who had ordered the attack on the steamer to make them believe he was dead in order that they might turn back and leave him to his plans. Kurtz, in fact, is dying and apparently deranged. He has achieved a God-like status among the local Africans. He is no longer an idealistic man; he participates in diabolical rites and leads the Africans into pillaging expeditions in search of ivory. The collection of severed heads adorning the fence posts around the station attests to his “methods.” Marlow somehow manages to bring Kurtz back on to the steamboat, and the return journey begins. Kurtz, his health rapidly deteriorating, discourses at length, which only serves to reveal his megalomania and madness.

Kurtz entrusts Marlow with a packet of personal documents, including an eloquent pamphlet on civilizing the savages which ends with a scrawled message that says, 'Exterminate all the brutes!' Kurtz dies, uttering his last words—'The horror! The horror!' Eventually Marlow returns to Europe and goes to see Kurtz’s 'Intended' (his fiancée). She is still in mourning, even though it has been over a year since Kurtz’s death, and she praises him as a paragon of virtue and achievement. She asks what his last words were, and Marlow not being able to shatter her illusion of Kurtz, tells her that Kurtz’s last word was her name.

Heart of Darkness is intense, subtle yet profound, compressed and, above all, proleptic in its vision. It is not just a condemnation of a certain type of adventurer who could easily take advantage of imperialism’s opportunities; Conrod is exploring, exposing, the hypocrisy of the Imperialism, in a manner that is as complicated as it is confusing. By the 1890s, most of the world’s ‘dark places’ had been placed at least nominally under European control, and the major European powers were stretched thin, trying to administer and protect massive, far-flung empires. Cracks were beginning to appear in the system: riots, wars, and the wholesale abandonment of commercial enterprises all threatened the white men living in the distant corners of empires. Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially power over other human beings, inevitably corrupts. The men who work for the Company describe what they do as 'trade', and their treatment of native Africans is part of a benevolent project of 'civilization'. The reality, starkly described by Marlow, is torture, cruelty and slavery. Kurtz, on the other hand, is open about the fact that he does not trade but rather takes ivory by force, and he describes his own treatment of the natives with the words 'suppression' and 'extermination': he does not hide the fact that he rules through violence and intimidation. His perverse honesty leads to his downfall, as his success threatens to expose the evil practices behind European activity in Africa. The book, at the very least, offers a harsh picture of colonialism.

Madness is an important theme in Heart of Darkness. The theme serves two purposes. Marlow is told that Kurtz is mad, yet his madness is only relative: his actions, brutal and ‘crazy’ as they are, are qualitatively not much different from those of the 'sane', manager; indeed, the only difference between Kurtz and the rest of the Company agents is that Kurtz is not fork-tongued. Is there such thing as insanity in a world that has already gone insane? And, if Kurtz is indeed mad, is his madness the result of him being removed from his social context, and, on a remote African island, being allowed to be the sole arbiter of his actions? Kurtz has no authority to which he answers, but himself, and this is more than any man can bear.

The book is also about moral confusion. Marlow, Conrad’s protagonist, rejects the concept of accepting the lesser of the two evils. What is worse: the hypocritical and malicious colonial bureaucracy, or the openly malevolent, rule-defying Kurtz? During his journey Marlow witnesses a number of absurd situations to which the Company subjects the natives: at one station, for instance, he sees a man trying to carry water in a bucket with a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches native labourers blast away at a hillside with no particular goal in mind. The absurdity and inanity to which the natives are subjected are as terrifying as Kurtz’s homicidal megalomania.

Darkness is obviously important enough conceptually to be part of the book’s title. The title, though, is ambiguous. Does it mean the centre of the dark place? Since the narrative takes place in Africa, is Africa the ‘darkness’ and is Marlow journeying to its centre, its heart? But London, too, is described as 'the centre of brooding gloom', and the 'White Sepulchre' is clearly Brussels. Or is it the case that darkness described in the book metaphorical? The inability to ‘see’ another human being and failing to form any sort of sympathetic communion with him; the sinister, mysterious, obscure ‘heart’—the dark? The ‘Whiteness’ is associated not just with civilization, but also with hypocrisy, ivory, cruelty, and death. The title appositely introduces the paradoxes and enigmas of the tale. Fog, which Marlow repeatedly encounters during his voyage, seems like a corollary to darkness: fog not only obscures, but also distorts.

It is interesting that while the story takes place in Africa, the Africans, themselves, remain peripheral. Beyond outward, physical description of their activities and appearances, Marlow provides no insight into their minds. He is not interested in them. For him they are objects—at one point he describes his helmsman as a “piece of machinery”—that provide a mere backdrop to the moral and philosophical themes Marlow wants to ratiocinate. This has not gone down well with some African critics. According to Achebe, Conrad was 'a bloody racist', who 'eliminated Africans as a human factor' and the result was 'an offensive and totally deplorable book', a racist or colonialist parable in which Africans are depicted as 'innately irrational and violent', and in which 'Africa itself is reduced to a metaphor for that which white Europeans fear within themselves'. 'The people of Africa and the land they live in remain inscrutably alien'. This kind of dehumanisation, Achebe argued, is far harder to detect than colonial oppression and open racism. While Heart of Darkness offers a powerful condemnation of the hypocritical operations of imperialism, it also presents a set of issues surrounding race that, for some, is more troubling. Feminists, too, have attacked the novel for the portrayal of women in it: they occupy the traditional places of domesticity (for example Kurtz’s fiancée), and are almost never present in the narrative. Also interesting is the setting of the book. Conrad, who was born in Polish Ukrain, became a naturalized British citizen in 1886, and all his books, beginning with Almyer’s Folly which appeared in 1895, were written in the language of his adopted country. His decision to set the book in a Belgian colony and to have Marlow work for a Belgian trading concern probably made it easier for British readers to avoid seeing themselves reflected in Heart of Darkness.

Beautifully written, atmospheric, and powerfully, Heart of Darkness vividly evocates the sense of desolation and bleakness Marlow encounters in Africa. It is also remarkable for its intellectual subtlety, satirical boldness, and linguistic verve. This is all the more impressive, as Joseph Conrad, born Josef Teodor Korzeniowski, in the Polish Ukraine, never studied at university and did not begin to learn English, which was his third language, till he was in his twenties. The styles employed in the book are as varied—colloquial and conversational, philosophical and sophisticated, and lyrical—as they are confident. The linguistic virtuosity of the book is breathtaking. Heart of Darkness is the work of a genius.

Julie Myerson's Lost Child

I must confess that I have not read any of Julie Myerson’s books—fiction or non-fiction. Indeed, I do not own a single book of hers (and I have a few in my collection). That said I have been tempted on a few occasions to buy her books; for example, a few weeks ago I came across one of her early novels, Sleepwalking, which was available for a pound in a second-hand book-sell. While browsing through high street bookshops I have thought of buying some or more of her books, but, immediately after thinking about it, the question pops in my mind: do I really want to spend eight pounds on them; and the answer is in the negative. The storylines of some of her books seem interesting. She has written a work of non-fiction, titled Home: the Story of everyone who Ever Lived In Our House, which was described as a triumph by Philip Hensher. (I live in a similar kind of house, though not as old, and have often wondered about the people who lived in it and the lives they led.) I was however a bit put off to learn that it was not exactly a history of her house; in part it was historical fiction: she gave fictionalized accounts of how she imagined the families, who occupied the house at different times, led their lives. At nine pounds a copy, the book was not exactly cheap.

In case you have never heard of Julie Myerson, please be advised that she is a British novelist, who was once shortlisted for the Booker prize (Something Might Happen). She has published five novels in the last fifteen years, which, while they have attracted lukewarm praise from some critics, have not quite propelled her to the A list. Last month, Myerson revealed, publically (but with great reluctance and trepidation, she insisted), that The Lost Child, her most recent novel, contained a detailed account of her real life son Jake’s addiction to cannabis, and how she was forced to throw him out of their million-pound family home and change locks. It has to be said that for someone who was reluctant to talk about the skeleton in the family cupboard, Myerson did not do too badly: she managed to get on the pages of the literary sections of most of the broadsheets. There she was, in The Times, staring at you from a photograph, looking forlorn and tragic, pale golden locks flowing down to her shoulders, her expression suggesting a deeply private, incommunicable anguish of someone who has had a car door slammed on her thumb. Even the tabloids, not exactly known for their contribution to literature, were expatiating on the subject and inviting comments from their readers (on whose reading lists, inasmuch as they make any, it can be safely assumed, Myerson hitherto had not featured) for their views and comments on whether Myerson did the right thing in chucking out her 17 year old son.

‘This has been a terrible week, today has been a terrible day and yesterday was one of the worst days,’ she said tremulously, on the verge of tears (the very sympathetic interviewer of one of the broadsheets would have you believe). ‘I have done very controversial thing,’ she continued. ‘If you betray your child and throw him out you will get the flak. But I don’t care what people say about me in the press. It is nothing compared with watching your boy walk away . . . It’s really hard to talk about it.’ She then went on to speak volubly and laid it all bare so to speak: the relationship problems between her and her husband (Jonathan Myerson, who is also an artist and once made a documentary that was nominated for an Oscar) who apparently got depressed, the graphic details of how they discovered their son’s cannabis use, the domestic violence and the son perforating her ear drums, the son trying to sell cannabis to her other two children, her own pot-smoking in her younger days—but only on a few occasions (so that’s all right, then)—, the details of her parents’ broken marriage and her father’s rejection not just of her but of her son before he (the father) committed suicide and so on and so forth. If the woman yammers this much when talking is difficult, you wonder what she would be capable of when it is easy. In the end, Myerson professed to have been taken aback by the level of attention she was getting, and said she disliked the denunciations to which she was subjected in some of the tabloids. Did she expect this response from the media? Of course not. ‘I thought the book would speak for itself,’ Myerson said. ‘Reviews would come out, good or bad, some challenging interviews. . . . But I never thought the press would do this to my kids. If I had known, I wouldn’t have published. It’s not fair on my family.’ If you are thinking that this begs the question of why she made the revelations in the first place, Myerson is ready with an answer. ‘There were so many more people suffering things similar to us, we felt we had to raise awareness. People need to go public. I understand why people wouldn’t do this to their child. But I decided I would.’ So, we are to believe that it was the spirit of public service, public education, raising public awareness, call it what you will, that influenced Myerson’s decision to go public about her son’s cannabis use. Myerson says she had to write this book; she did not have a choice; she had to get this out of her system. But it was not just that; she also wanted to raise public awareness. Her son allegedly smokes skunk, which, Myerson and her I-am-hundred-percent-with-Julie-on-this-husband, in an hour long television programme—yes, they allowed themselves, very reluctantly, one would guess, to be filmed, all in the spirit of public service, I shall thank you to remember—informed, their faces longer than the Nile, is much stronger than cannabis. (Who would have thunk the humble dobbie would wreak such havoc on a family?) To make the whole thing spicier, the cannabis-smoking son has been on an interview-spree, refuting almost everything his mother has claimed. He has described her as ‘insane’, ‘obscene’ and an ‘author’! And Bloomsbury , Myerson’s publishers, who had originally planned to bring the novel out in May (which would have received a spattering of tepid reviews without anyone really taking notice, which, regrettably, is the lot of most B-list novelists) decided to rush its publication ahead of the schedule. If you thought that they were driven by the desire to cash in on the publicity generated by Myerson’s revelations and while her (pretty) face was still on the pages of most newspapers, you would be wrong. Nothing could have been farthest from the publisher’s mind. They too wanted to do what they could to raise awareness of the cannabis—sorry, skunk—addiction. In a statement Bloomsbury announced: Given this week's extensive speculation about Julie Myerson's The Lost Child, we felt that it was right to bring forward publication to allow everyone the opportunity to buy her brilliant book and consider the complicated questions it raises.’

The story of the problems of Myerson’s middle class family is not unheard of in this day and age. Whether Myerson and her artist husband did exactly the right thing or whether they could have done something different (from giving the dope-smoking, kleptomaniac teenager the heave-ho and getting on the blower to Random House) will be a matter of opinion. Nothing wrong in Myerson incorporating this traumatic episode from her life into her fiction. (She is an author, remember?). Doesn’t it seem a tad curious, though, that she decides that the most opportune time to raise awareness about the scourge of cannabis smoking by young adults, and its pernicious effect on their parents of artistic temperament, who—what nuisance!—are forced to spend their time (which, otherwise, could be profitably spent going to theatre) looking for therapists, full three years after she gave him the boot, prior to the publication of her latest novel, which, incidentally, contains an elaborate account of the whole thing in one installment? Do I hear someone muttering that this is a nasty little scam worked out by the family and their publicist? That is harsh and cynical—almost as harsh as Jeremy Paxman, who tried to send Myerson on a guilt trip on Newsnight (with his impressive, if predictable, routine of crossing and uncrossing his legs, raising eyebrows till they disappeared into is hair, becoming red faced as though he was either choking on a fish bone or about to have an apoplectic fit, attempting to look incredulous, disgusted, contemptuous at the same time, and—this is the trademark of all Paxo’s interviews—rudely and repeatedly interrupting and not letting the other person finish, all of which has the effect of making you feel sorry for the interviewee). Surely, she wouldn’t do it to her first-born just to sell more copies of her novel (although, the publicity she has attracted, some of which admittedly (and unsurprisingly) negative, will do no harm to the novel’s sell).

Will this, Myerson’s sixth novel, finally catapult her to the A list of novelists? I doubt it.

Book of the Month: Blaming (Elizabeth Taylor)

Blaming is Elizabeth Taylor’s last novel. Taylor was dying when she wrote it, and, according to her daughter, Taylor knew that she was dying. As the cancer eating Taylor from inside grew, so did her determination to finish the novel. There are unexpected deaths in the novel, which dexterously explores the feelings of bereavement: helplessness, anger, guilt, and blaming; and one wonders whether the knowledge that she was not for long for this world was a determinant of the way Taylor, a cheerful personality (according to those close to her) who believed in living life to the last moment, shaped the story and its progress.

Anne and Martha are the two protagonists of the novel, who meet on a cruise. As the only English-speaking people on the cruise the two women form temporary camaraderie people, who have not much in common with one another, form on holidays, and which, Anne is certain, will not blossom into a friendship beyond the cruise. However, the fate has something else in store for her. The lives of the two women, who could not be more different from each other in respect of their attitudes, viewpoints, sensibilities and perceptivity—one, a middle-class, middle-aged, stolid, haughty, and somewhat snobbishly upstage English housewife with conservative tastes; the other, a young, somewhat abrasive American, an aspiring writer with mood swings—, are intertwined by a tragic event. Anne’s husband Nick, who, we are told, is recovering from a chronic, serious ailment, dies suddenly in Istanbul. Stranded and utterly bereft in a foreign land, Anne accepts the succor Martha—who cuts short her cruise in order to be with Anne in these difficult times—provides. Back in England, however, Anne rebuffs Martha’s attempts to get in touch with her, as much for her desire not to want to be reminded of the Istanbul nightmare with which Martha will forever be associated as for her, Anne’s, wish to go on with her quiet, aloof widowhood. However, Martha is not so easily rebuffed; she has a way of getting under your skin. Martha finally secures an invitation and re-enters Amy’s life and, despite herself, Amy begins to warm up to the brash, quixotic and irritatingly intrusive young American, and her lover—the penurious and stingy, almost ungenerous, and outwardly passionless Simon. When Simon is transferred back to the USA he asks Martha to marry him, and she, on an impulse and much against her better judgment, consents. Before leaving for America, Martha visits Amy one last time.

Elizabeth Taylor, together with the other Elizabeth (Bowen), belonged to that category of women writers—Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rosamund Lehman, Olivia Manning, Rose Macaulay, E.H. Young and Barbara Pym are some other names that come to mind—who, for the want of better phrase, can be described as ‘English’. Most of Taylor’s fictional creations belong to the middle or upper classes; and their sensibilities, attitudes, haughtiness, and pretensions are quintessentially English middle-class. They take immense pride in their worlds which rarely extend beyond Home Counties, and generally view anything that does not fit neatly into their ordered, if somewhat limited, repertoire of experiences with suspicion that borders on condescension and distaste. (The reluctance to embrace new with open arms and hearts is not unique to the English Middle Class, though; the attitude of the Working Class towards anything newfangled is one of deep suspicion and hostility.) Amy, in Blaming, is a resentful traveller, the first thing that comes to her mind while walking barefoot in the grand mosques of Istanbul is verrucas. Bourgeois femininity perfuses Blaming as thick, sugary syrup permeates pastry. Taylor, however, never allows her narration to be weighed down either with mawkish sentimentality or crude satire, wherein lies her brilliance. The erudite writing may not induce a belly laugh, but Blaming is strewn with deliciously droll descriptions of English mannerisms, habits, idiosyncratic discourses, priggishness and a highly developed sense of entitlement that will seem whimsical to an outsider. The world inhabited by Taylor’s fictional creations may appear to be outwardly comfortable, even bland, but it is not without its share of intrigue and maliciousness. The cosy housewives, who lead cosy lives and speak précis, grammatically correct English, are capable of impressive deceit, conceit and petty cruelties—all so that they can score petty points over their social rivals. With almost surgical precision and aplomb, Taylor lays bare the frailties and fatuities of the world surrounding her. Most authors, it would be fair to say, draw inspirations from their environs, and it is no surprise that Taylor’s novels (with their astute observations and commentaries relating to the upper and middle classes) mirror the quiet middle-class, if somewhat limited, social milieu she mingled with. Born Elizabeth Coles in Reading, she was educated at the Abbey school (the same school to which Jane Austen, with whom Taylor is occasionally compared, went), and, before her marriage to John Taylor in 1936, worked as a governess and in Boots Lending Library. She lived in Buckinghamshire for almost all of her married life, and, whilst leading a well-to-do middle class life—dallying briefly, like all well-to-do people with conscience, with Communism, and holding lifelong left-wing sympathies—, surrounded (probably) by a happy family, produced a dozen novels, all of which ‘shrewd and affectionate portrayals of middle-and upper-middle-class English life’ (according to an introduction by Virago which reissued a number of her out of print novels a few years ago), at a steady rhythm, over three decades.

A special pleasure of reading Blaming is some or more of the characters, be they the eccentric factotum of Amy or the precocious daughters of her son, James. The conversations of Isobel and Dora, Amy’s granddaughters, are hilarious; they also reveal the keen eye Taylor had for how children talked and behaved. According to Taylor’s daughter, she found children’s conversations interesting and would talk with them for hours. Some of the conversational gems in Blaming were taken from the comments Taylor had recorded from her granddaughters’ conversations (whom she looked after) in real life.

Taylor, although she is rarely credited for it, was a modern novelist. The plot of Blaming, such as it is, can be summarized in two sentences; it is a vehicle for Taylor to explore themes such as guilt, recrimination, and emotional connectedness. Amy is left staggering in the wake of a sudden traumatic event—the event itself, the death of her husband, is elided, as if of no importance other than a catalyst for what then unfolds—that is to have a profound influence on her life, but the adjustment does not influence her moral compass in a meaningful way, does not broaden her horizons. Taylor’s vision is unsentimental and remorseless. At the end of Blaming one is left with a feeling of muted bleakness. This is a splendid, erudite and superbly intelligent novel.

Holiday in CAR

Have you heard of Bangui? No? Never mind. How about Bossangoa? Does the name ring a bell? No? I guess I shouldn’t bother with ‘Barberati’, ‘Carnot’ or ‘Bambari’. All of these are towns (or cities) in a country called ‘Central African Republic’ or ‘République Centrafricaine’, in French. I am not making this up. This country does exist and, as the name suggests, it is situated in Central Africa, five hundred miles north of the equator. It is a landlocked place, surrounded by countries like Cameron, Chad, Sudan, Republic of Congo, and last (but not least) Democratic Republic of Congo (not to be confused with the Republic of Congo). It was the former French colony of Ubang-Shari, which, upon its independence from the French in 1960, became ‘Central African Republic’ or CAR.

What did you say? Sounds interesting? You would not mind visiting it? Well, if it is the ‘real’ Africa you are looking for, according to one website, Central African Republic (CAR) may just be your ticket, ‘a country of staggering rare natural beauty, with some of the world’s most amazing wildlife’. It is slightly smaller than Texas, which makes it pretty big—Texas, as we know, is pretty big—the additional bonus being there are no Texans in CAR, although they would definitely consider visiting the country with their families and children (who are called Chardonnay-Mercedes and Tyler-Morgan) soon as there are decent eating joints opened in CAR, serving hambergers or grilled T bones or, for that matter, any flesh incinerated at 325 degrees. You can watch the gorillas and elephants in the Dzanga-Sangha National Park, situated in the south East Corner of the country, provided, of course, you manage to get there. The people of CAR, comprising more than 80 tribes or ethnic groups, are open, friendly and generous. You visit them in their huts and they will be very happy to share with you whatever tree-roots they happen to be sucking on to. CAR remains, sadly, the most underdeveloped, disunited and poverty-stricken country in Africa. Which, you will have to admit, is impressive. It is quite an achievement to pip so many other worthy contenders in that continent to the post and emerge a winner. And—here is a surprise—the country should be, in fact, prosperous, rich as it is in important minerals such as Uranium, and dimonds.

Let us look at the history of CAR in the last hundred years. The French occupied it in the 1880s. Why did they go there? You can make your own guess (rich source of minerals and dimonds is a clue). The French occupied an area they imaginatively labelled as the ‘French Congo’ (after the river Congo), which consisted of what is now CAR, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo. The French, of course, were not the only European thieves looking to loot Africa: Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom also wanted a share of the booty. They, the French, labelled what is now CAR Ubang-Shari, because most of its territory is within the basins of the rivers Ubang and Shari. Its capital was Bangui. What was French Congo called before the European occupation? Who knows? We are not interested in trivia, are we? Over the next several decades, the French, like all self-respecting European imperialists, proceeded to systematically siphon off wealth out of Ubang-Shari. In the first decade of the French rule, slave-trading was rife, carried out by local African satraps and tribal rulers, with whom the French formed dubious treaties and whom they provided with weapons to carry out raids. Which, come to think of it, is understandable. Why would you go, uninvited, to distant lands unless you have ambitious, honourable aims such as governing the natives (who did not know how to feed themselves unless a banana dropped off a tree) in the European style (with important but necessary modifications so as to accommodate their inferior culture and intellect), and ramming Christianity down their throats (50% of the country’s population, as a result of tireless Christian missionaries beavering away, has become disciples of J. Christ, while 35% still, stubbornly and ignorantly, adhere to what Christian websites describe as ‘indigenous beliefs’; the remaining 15% have become Muslim). It was only fair that the natives showed their gratitude for your noble endeavours. What the French also did—another frequent hobby of the colonialists—is to arrange, then rearrange, then arrange again the geographical map of the country (and the area), not, of course, bothering to take into consideration trifles such as the wishes of the people, which, if you give it a thought, actually made sense: if the natives had the initiative, they would have done all these things themselves. Since they were obviously not up to the task someone else was going to have to do it for them. In 1890s, the French determined the boundaries of the French Congo with the neighbouring ‘Congo Free State’, an ironic name for a country which was, for all practical purposes, privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium—he was the sole shareholder, to use today’s parlance—and which included the entire area of the present day Democratic Republic of Congo, the DRC (how the Belgians plundered the natural resources of DRC and treated the natives is a story for another day), and the Germans who were controlling Cameron. In 1899, the boundaries with Sudan were fixed. Then, in 1905, the French united Ubang-Shari with Chad; in 1910, it was joined with the Republic of Congo and Gabon to become French Equatorial Africa. They ceded the Western region of the basin to the Germans, and were given, in turn, a free hand in Morocco; but ‘won’ it back from Germany during the First Great War. And that is how Ubang-Shari remained— as part of French Equatorial Africa—till 1945. 1945 was a momentous year in the twentieth century. It was the year in which Hitler, following his own dictum—‘If you win you don’t have to explain; if you lose, you shouldn’t be there to explain’—bid adieu to the world, and, after a brief interlude during which millions of Japanese were murdered by the Americans, the Second World War came to an end. The Europe—and the Europeans would have everyone believe, the world—was rid of the German nasty. Many of the European colonies decided that it was about time the colonialists went back to where they came from. The Ubang-Shari was no exception. The French, were forced to form local assemblies, and eventually, a decade later to be more precise, in 1958—the year in which French Equatorial Africa was officially dissolved—, grant independence. The French initially encouraged a Roman Catholic Priest called Barthelemy Boganda (he was taken away from his farming family, after his mother was beaten to death by the colonial police, and raised by the Roman Catholic priests) to be the leader of the local assembly, but tried to curb him when, to their annoyance, he did not tow their line and began to espouse totally unacceptable ideas such as Black emancipation and complete autonomy. Nevertheless, that is what happened, and, in 1959, the country was on the verge of getting its independence with Boganda poised to be its first president. At this critical juncture Boganda was conveniently killed in a plane crash. From then on, it has been a sad, though predictable, African story of one coup d’etat after another, with a cavalcade of rapacious, grandiloquent, and clinically insane leaders, propped up from time to time by their former colonial masters. What has been going on in the CAR, however, is, let there be no doubt about it, its very own mess. After Boganda was killed and enshrined into the country’s collective conscience as a great martyr—the myth of Boganda has grown exponentially over the decades, and the miracles attributed to him probably rival those of Jesus Christ—the French supported David Dacko. Dacko was a corrupt, nepotistic, and profligate ruler, who wasted country’s resources, and, within five years of independence, despite the French aid and increasing production of diamonds, CAR was staring down the proverbial barrel. Dacko then opportunistically turned to Mao, who was looking for openings to increase his sphere of influence, and requested interest-free loan. An alarmed France decided that Dacko must go and be replaced by a pro-West dictator. The man they chose was Colonel Jean Bedel Bokassa. Dacko was usurped in a French-assisted coup d’etat, by Bokassa, who was to declare himself, a decade later, Emperor Bokassa, and his piss-poor country, which he had plundered and despoiled, an empire. He too was removed in a French-backed coup (Operation Barracuda), the first of its kind in Africa in which foreign troops were used to remove a leader in power. While the emperor was visiting Libya, seven hundred French paratroopers invaded his palace and seized control of the capital. And who was the man who replaced the mad emperor? David Dacko. Decko’s second stint proved to be short-lived, and soon he was removed by General Andre Kolingba, who promptly suspended the constitution and ruled with a military Junta for years. Kolingba was replaced by Ange-Felix Patasse, who matched all of his predecessors in corruption and sectarian politics, if not insanity. In the last decade or so, there have been more coups in CAR than you and I have had hot meals. The current leader of the country, General Francois Bozize, is a veteran of several coups: having been involved in more than one unsuccessful coup over the past two decades, before achieving his lifetime ambition and staging a successful coup in 2003 that removed Ange-felix Patasse. Bozize now finds himself in the same unenviable position as that of Admiral Karl Donitz, between Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s unconditional surrender in the Second World War: presiding over utter ruins and having little control over large part of the country. The country is completely torn apart by the civil war that has raged since General Bozize grabbed power. On the one side are the government forces, while on the other side are the rebel groups, three of them. Needless to say, the rebel groups do not see eye to eye and probably hate one another more than they hate General Bozize. Wait! Did I give you the impression that there are two sides to this conflict? There is a third party. They are the bandits. Hordes of bandits roam the countryside, looting, pillaging and killing innocent people. The rebels say they have taken up arms to restore democracy, and they are going to save the population from the bandits and the evil government forces; all that they ask from people is money. The government declares that they are going to ensure security and usher in stability by putting a stop to all the coups—an ironic declaration from a man who can start a coaching class on how to start a coup—which means they are there to protect the people from the nasty rebels and the bandits; all they want from people is money. That is exactly what the bandits want too. If people do not pay the rebel taxes, they are obviously supporting the governmental forces and deserve the most severe punishment. If they cannot afford the government taxes, that is an incontrovertible evidence that they are in cahoots with the rebels and an enemy of the state, deserving swift extermination. The bandits do not care whom you are supporting; if you do not have money to give them, they will kill you; they will kill you anyway if the fancy takes them. The result? More than 300,000 people have been forced out of their homes in the last five years; one fifth of children die before their fifth birthday; and the average life expectancy is forty years. In large parts of the country, especially those controlled by the rebels and preyed upon by the bandits, there is no health care—Meningitis, Sleeping Sickness, Yellow Fever and many other infectious diseases people in the developed world have not even heard of are endemic; as is violence. The infrastructure is non-existent, with less than 500 miles of paved roads in a country one and half times the size of the United Kingdom. CAR, one of the richest reservoirs of natural resources and diamonds, languishes in poverty, as no investor has the guts to invest in a country where it is easier to start a rebellion than business.

Here is a description of what happened in one of the villages attacked by the government forces, as given on the BBC website:

“One such village, Beogombo Deux, is completely deserted. Crumbling walls, punctured with the occasional bullet hole, are covered with thick vegetation. The school house stands empty, with writing still on the blackboard.
The village chief, Jacques Berte, explains that government soldiers visited the village and accused its inhabitants of helping local rebels. ‘We were sitting peacefully at home in the evening when they burst into the village and started shooting at us. It all happened so quickly. We didn't know what was going on,’ he says. ‘The first person to die was my oldest son. He was just 19. He had only been married for six months….and it happened right in front of me. ‘They let me go because they thought I was too old. But they shot my boy. The bullet hit him in the back and then came out his chest. He just fell down and died. Another man tried to run from his house and they shot him in the back. They went inside and found his older brother and a boy. Then they took them both outside and shot them.’”

It is indescribably sad that there are parts of the world where people are being killed for a goat or a mattress or a saucepan; that there are parts of the world where people are living like animals in bush. Now the Bozize government has invited the opposition parties and the rebel armed forces for peace talks and Bozize has gone on a spree of signing ceasefire agreements. The aim, ostensibly, is to form a national, consensus government until the next presidential election. Will it work? You hope so for the sake of the poor people of this country, for whom successive decades of corrupt regimes have brought nothing but misery. However, one look at the rogues participating in these peace talks, everyone of whom has blood on his hands, makes your heart sink.

You have become quiet all of a sudden. Do I detect a waning of enthusiasm for visiting Central African Republic? Never mind. As an old Texan saying goes, you should not let so much reality in your life that there is no room left for dreaming.

Book of the Month: Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell’s third novel, is an ambitious tale of interlinked narratives.

The novel opens with the pacific journal of a mid-19th century traveller, and leads the reader, via a collection of letters of a 1930s’ wisenheimer from Belgium, a conspiracy-thriller set in 1970s’ American fictional city of Buenas Yerbas, a contemporary memoir set in modern-day UK, an archival interview of a 'fabricant' in the nightmarish future of cloning, rampant consumerism and 'corpocracy', to the oral testimony of a tribesman belonging to the post-apocalyptic future where the earth has become barren. All the sections, except the Half-Lives: The First Lucia Ray Mystery—an ‘acknowledged’ fiction—are intense first-person narratives.

The narratives, each an independent, well plotted and utterly riveting novella by itself, are connected with others by motifs, some of which obvious, some more subtle. Thus, the first section of the novel, the pacific journal of the stolid and relentlessly conscientious San Francisco notary Adam Ewing, which intriguingly ends in mid-sentence—a trick Mitchell pulls of fairly consistently throughout the novel: each section ends on a cliff-hanger—finds its way, eighty years later, inside Chateau Zedelghem, in Belgium, where it is discovered by the cad and self-styled genius Robert Frobisher, the most endearing protagonist of the novel, who is working as an amanuensis for an expatriate British composer while working simultaneously on his own sextet—the Cloud Atlas. The letters Frobisher writes to his friend, the scientist Sixsmith (his name, one suspects, is a play on the structure of the novel), are found, decades later, by Lucia Ray, a young, intrepid journalist working for a gossip-rag, Spyglass, after Sixsmith, whom she fortuitously meets in a malfunctioning lift, is murdered by the henchmen of the all-powerful corporate company he is working for when he is about to pull the plug on their multi-million dollar project of nuclear power plant because of the serious design-flaws which pose grave environmental threats. This ‘fiction’ is presented to the eponymous narrator of the novel’s next section—The Ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish—a bibulous publisher in the present day England who is on the run from his creditors, and who finds himself tragicomically incarcerated in a home of dementia sufferers after he suffers a mini-stroke, thereby not getting round to read the mystery to its dénouement. Mitchell then propels the reader without much warning into the dystopic world of Sonmi~451, a genetically cloned, inferior, ‘fabricant’ who subsists on soap and serves the ‘purebloods’, the ruling class within the dominant ‘corpocracy’, in a country ‘formerly known as South Korea’. Possessing a ‘soul’ because of an operation, Sonmi~451 is the accidental leader of a rebellion that is quashed most brutally, and she is executed. In this section, which is presented as an archival interview of Sonmi~451 prior to her execution, she describes watching a 'disney' [a movie] from the last century titled 'The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish'; her dying wish is to see the end of this movie, the only time she has experienced unadulterated joy. The sixth section of the novel, its most direful, takes place on the Big Island of Hawaii after 'the fall' [of civilization]. The earth has become a wasteland and is peopled by primitive tribesmen fighting internecine warfare. Amidst this desolation survive remnants of civilization that have some idea about the humanity’s past achievements and apogee. Somni~451 has become the Goddess of the tribesman, Zachry, who narrates the story in a thick dialect—making this section, at times, difficult to read—the origin of which is anybody’s guess.

In this pan-global—each narrative takes place in a different corner of the earth—, time transcending—the novels opens circa 1849 and within 300 pages the reader has ‘travelled’ centuries—daisy chain, with its—to quote a term adored by the academia—polyphonic spree, Mitchell gives a virtuoso performance. In an interview Mitchell readily admitted that the novel began with what he called the ‘Russian Doll’ structure. Said he: 'The main issue I had to approach was how to make the various novellas fit inside each other and to come up with ways of making the preceding narrative appear as an ‘artefact’ of the succeeding narrative. And the thing was to do that thematically, so the whole thing wasn’t a butcher’s shop exercise with stories meaninglessly presented in a gimmicky way, without adding up to much.'

The recurring motifs of the novel do run the risk of appearing gimmicky, even contrived, at places. The wayfaring of the comet-shaped birth-mark on the back of Somni~451 on more than one character is dismissed by Timothy Cavendish, who is perusing the manuscript of Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, as 'far too hippie-druggie-new age.'

Those obsessed with style haul Mitchell over the coals for not having found his own voice—his excellent debut novel, Ghostwritten had attracted similar criticism—but that is in fact the brilliance of this novel: each narrative, set apart in time, space and culture, has its own language which is vividly emblematical of the epoch it is describing. Mitchell is unapologetic about ventriloquising different voices. He declared in an interview: 'It’s a built-in advantage of the first-person narrative—you can use cranky language or even over-literary language. So you can commit all these ‘sins’ and not only are they not sins, but they add to character.' Cloud Atlas is an example of that, times six.

Those amongst us who believed Ghostwritten heralded the arrival of a major literary talent, will find the belief reinforced by Cloud Atlas. This is story telling of the highest order. Read it, and be captivated.