Book of the Month: The Sea (John Banville)

John Banville, the veteran Irish writer of more than a dozen novels, won the 2005 Man-Booker prize for The Sea. It was a surprise winner, piping the bookies’ favourites Arthur & George (Julian Barnes) and Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro) to the post.

The Sea, at 260 odd pages, is not a long novel. Max Morden—Max, we are told, has changed his name, but the reason remains tantalizingly unexplained—an art historian, is the narrator. He has come to a seaside retreat, allegedly, to complete a book he is writing on the French painter Pirre Bonnard. He has been recently widowed, his wife, Anna, having lost her battle against cancer a few months earlier. But there is a reason why Max has chosen to come to this particular retreat, ‘the Cedars’. When he was growing up Max used to come to this seaside resort, which he somewhat mockingly refers to as Ballyless, every year, with his parents. The family was not rich enough to afford to rent ‘the Cedars’ in those days, and stayed in a chalet, instead. During one of his summer vacations Max becomes friendly with the children of the Grace family, a family several rungs above Max’s, who are renting ‘the Cedar’ that summer. Max even develops a crush, first, very briefly, on the mother, Connie, and then, on the daughter, Chloe. He spends a lot of time with Chloe, a haughty, mercurial girl who seems to take special pleasure in tormenting Max and Myles, the latter Chloe’s twin brother who is mute-or is he?; it is left, again, unexplained—and has got webbed feet. Max has a justifiable suspicion that his amative exchanges with Chloe have not gone unnoticed by Rose, the children’s nineteen-year old governess.

The narrative progresses at three levels, each one relating to different stages in Max’s life: the reminiscence of the fateful summer Max spent all those years ago in ‘Ballyless’ with the Graces; reminiscence of Anna’s illness and the events surrounding it; and the present—here we are introduced to an interesting secondary character, Colonel Blunden, who is so ‘old world colonelish’ in everything he does and says that Max can’t help wondering if he, the colonel, is not an impostor.

Banville, a former literary editor of Irish Times, is prodigiously gifted with words. He seems incapable of writing anything less than glistening. The prose, a trademark of all Banville novels is hypnotic. It is so lyrical at times that it is like reading a poem, be it description of nature or Max philosophising on the human condition. This is another thing about Banville: he is not just a novelist; he is also a philosopher. In The Sea, via its narrator, Banville offers interesting comments, not necessarily insights, on the feelings of dislocation and strangeness that are, surely, experienced by all sentient humans at some or the other time in their existence.

The Sea is a finely paced novel. Banville is a master of complex patterns, of which the reader remains aware throughout, notwithstanding the digressive meditations. The narrative, thus, has to it a delightfully meandering sense. Yet, the reader is acutely aware of a sense of foreboding. You know it is not going to end well; there is a tragedy lurking somewhere, but you can’t really put your finger on it. You are sucked in by the mesmerizing quality of the narration. The end, when it finally arrives with its fiendish twist, leaves you gasping with admiration.

Banville is frequently described as a ‘writer’s writer’, and compared to Nabakov in respect of his prose. He also, perhaps understandingly, invites the criticism of being self-consciously stylistic and sententious. If epithets such as ‘velutinous’, ‘horrent’, cinereal’, and ‘caduceus’—I had to look up the meanings of all these words as also the erudite pun on the name of Anna’s physician—irritate you, he is probably not the writer for you. The Sea, I should add, though, is not just about linguistic inventiveness. Underneath the sizzle there is solid substance. It is a worthy Booker winner.

A Literary Evening

The auditorium was half full; or half-empty, depending on how one chooses to look at things. At the stroke of seven the guest speaker, accompanied by the organizer of the literary evening, arrived. The organizer, a middle-aged man with white hair and, in stark contrast, black bushy eyebrows, which gave him a vaguely thuggish look, like that of a Latin American drug baron, began mumbling introductory words, firstly about himself and what he got up to at university, and then about the guest speaker, whose name did not ring an immediate bell—I really should have done my homework, should have ‘googled’ her before turning up for the event. We were told that she was born in Poland, spent early childhood in France, was raised subsequently in Canada, and now lived in London. I was surprised to hear that she had written ten novels; I did not remember coming across any of her books while browsing in high-street bookshops, which I do frequently. The introduction continued, the organizer obviously being filled with the desire to fill the audience in about more examples of the meritoriousness of this multi-faceted woman: she had written several works of non-fiction including a family memoir which had won prestigious commonwealth awards; she had edited anthologies; she was at one time the deputy director of an esteemed art institute and at another the deputy-president of an equally, if not more, esteemed one; she had written extensively for radio and television. And, many years ago, she had co-authored a book on case-studies of Sigmund Freud’s female patients. This had a semi-familiar ring. The organizer concluded his introduction on the note that she was there that evening to read out excerpts from her latest book, a work of non-fiction, on history of mental illness and those who think they can treat it (doctors), concentrating on women, from the 19th century to the present. Throughout this long introduction the guest, a slim, wiry woman with angular features, who looked to be in her early fifties (but who, I subsequently found out, was in her sixties), sat demurely, looking at the organizer’s feet or calves, one of which, as it happened, he scratched vigorously throughout his talk. (Chronic eczema, perhaps? Or psoriasis? Or some other itchy skin condition? Or an allergy to the socks he was wearing (but why, in that case, only one, Watson) ? Or just a nervous tick?) At one stage he paused, leaned forward a bit, opened his mouth a fraction, and I was sure a burp was going to follow; but he did not, and it did not.

The organizer then proceeded to interview the author (or should I say authoress?), essentially going over the same points he had touched upon in his introduction. She let it be known (very modestly) that she was a polyglot, and nodded with an apologetic smile when the drug baron accused her of being a polyhistor. She couldn’t help being one, you see, afflicted as she was with high intelligence and executability. At one stage during the interview she let it slip (very modestly) that she read Proust, all six volumes, when she was an adolescent, and admitted, with all humility, that she used to pronounce his name wrongly. We also learned that she was a feminist (which perhaps explained why she had chosen to concentrate on women in her book on mental illness). In this context the speaker gave a short discourse, no doubt out of a sense of duty to enlighten the audience, who, in all probability, had not read the book she was about to read from, on the historical development of the concept of mental illness. Freud, she informed the audience, was absolutely crucial to the understanding of mental afflictions; the ‘talking cure’ addressed the core of the problems far better than the manipulation of brain chemicals. She recounted, having the decency to look ill at ease, how an acquaintance of her complimented her on the book which was ‘richly researched’, yet so easy to understand. The organizer, also looking ill at ease—perhaps not being accustomed to remain quiet for more than five consecutive minutes—, interjected by observing the book read like a thriller. The guest looked coyly at the audience and said that was her ‘problem’.

Finally the guest speaker read out an excerpt from her book, a story of a Scottish woman from the 19th century—the woman apparently did exist, although the author / authoress had changed her, the woman’s, name to preserve her privacy, although she, the woman, was hardly going to be embarrassed by the revelations seeing as she was dead for nearly hundred years. I am afraid my mind drifted a bit at this stage, and only the snippets of narration made an impact from time to time. The author / authoress concluded that the kind of language used by this woman, while describing her mental anguish in a letter she wrote to the superintendent of the local Bedlam with a request to be committed, proved the universality of Sigmund Freud’s theories; because she, the author, was sure that she, the Scottish mad-woman, had never been acquainted with Freud’s theories. At this stage the drug baron who probably (like me) had drifted off to sleep came back to life and informed the audience that there were individual chapters in the book devoted to famous neurotics and psychotics linked to literature and rattled out the predictable list: Virginia (yawn) wolf, Zelda (yawn) Fitzgerald, and Sylvia (yawn yawn) Plath.

The drug baron turned to the audience and asked, reluctantly, whether anyone had questions for the guest. There were a few hands raised. A distinguished looking man, probably a retired doctor, asked the guest, in an incredibly posh tone, how ‘on earth’ she managed to get hold of the confidential medical records. Either he had missed the point of the talk completely or was insinuating that the Scottish mad-woman was a figment of the author / authoress’s imagination. A trichomally challenged man in his forties—or may be he looked older because of absence of hair—asked the speaker why it was that Freud, more than any other personality from the history of the hundred and fifty years of Psychiatry and Psychology appealed more to the literati. In a self-effacing manner rivalling that of the speaker and sounding apologetic, he mentioned names of someone called Krepelin and his colleague, Alzheimer, who, he informed the audience, espoused the Medical branch of Psychiatry, which was, at the very least, as influential as Freud’s theories, around the same time and not very far from where Freud was spreading his religion. Looking around—an unfortunate move on his part because the long strand of hair he had trained across his bald top (from side to back) that glistened with sweat under the ceiling lights slipped and hung over his ear all the way down to the shoulder, making him appear slightly ridiculous—he hazarded a guess that almost everyone in the audience would have heard of Alzheimer’s dementia, but how many of them, he demanded to know, knew about Alzheimer the man; how many books were written on Alzheimer and Krepelin? The drug baron nodded and confirmed that Freud indeed was popular—“No doubt about it”—and looked expectantly at the speaker who decided that the most effective way of responding to this long query was to launch into an equally long and circuitous reply strewn liberally with clichés: Freud ‘touched’ the inner life; he provided the only coherent theory to explain the long sought after questions the humanity had asked itself over millennia about the causes of human misery and suffering etcetera etcetera. The baldy did not look convinced but decided—wisely, in my view—it was getting late—, to keep his counsel. So that’s it then. That’s why Freud remains popular amongst the chattering classes: he provided answers to the questions that had remained unanswered since the dawn of humanity. Not because it allows one to be prurient and feel intellectual at the same time.

The allotted hour came to an end. The Drug Baron ‘warmly’ invited the audience to a nearby bookshop where the author would be available to ‘personally sign’ (is there any other way?) copies of her books. Wine and orange juice would be served. I decided to give the book-signing a miss. I did not have an overwhelming desire to drink canned Tesco juice and cheap wine, and risk a stomach-upset. As I was exiting, I heard raised voices from my left in the crowd. A big paunchy man wearing a crumpled jacket and, I noticed, walking next to the baldy, was talking either to himself (not very likely; he was talking loudly) or to the baldy (possible, but the baldy gave no indication that he was listening) or to no one in particular (again, not very likely; the volume of his voice suggested that it was for the benefit of those around him) or to those in the throng (likely). ‘Total bollocks!’ he shouted. ‘Never heard such rubbish in my life.’ This seemed to have little effect; no one from the throng responded or showed in any way that they concurred with the fatty’s analysis. Feeling the need to make more impact, he yelled, ‘My wife is an organic psychiatrist; I am not going to tolerate this.’ It was not immediately apparent to me (and probably not to those who were listening to the rant) what he meant by ‘organic' psychiatrist. I had heard of ‘organic vegetables’ and ‘organic chickens’. Surely, he did not mean that his wife was unadulterated by fertilizers or pesticides or any other synthetic chemicals. I thought about asking him what exactly was he trying to convey about the properties of his psychiatrist wife when he described her as organic, but thought against it. The fat man was looking around as though he would like nothing better than to wring a neck and wouldn't be too choosy about which neck his fingers wound around, and it was not as important as that, anyway. I came out of the building and took a deep breath of the cold fresh air.

Book of the Month: A Hot Country (Shiva Naipaul)

Shiva Naipaul died in 1985, when he was only forty. If he is remembered at all these days, it is as the younger brother of Sir V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Laureate. He was one of the most accomplished writers of his time. His first novel, Fireflies, was published, when he was twenty five, to great acclaim, and won a number of awards. The second, Chip-Chip Gatherers, followed three years later, and was very well received critically. Martin Amis wrote that it was exhilrating to be alive at the same time as someone who could write like Shiva Naipaul. There then followed a long silence of seven years which Paul Theroux (in his reproachful, rancourous memoir, Sir Vidia's Shadow) attributed to the Writer's Block. This was not strictly true, as Naipaul, during this period wrote the brilliant travelogue, North of South, ; Black and White , the grim story of the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana; as well as a collection of short stories. Then came, in 1980, A Hot Country.

Shiva Naipaul once said in an interview that he regarded his fiction and non-fiction work as one body of work as his non-fiction research yielded experiences and information that he developed into novels. One can easily see the common motif betwwen North of South and A Hot Country, Naipaul’s last and the shortest novel to be published in his life) set in the fictional, politically volatile country of Cuyama, apparently a disguised version of Guyana.

The novel tells the story of the crumbling marriage of Aubrey St Piers and his wife Dina as the country is descending into a chaos around them and is heading towards totalitarianism. The author tackles serious themes such as the decline and corruptions afflicting many African countries post-colonialism, and the tensions between different communities and races in these countries, originally deracinated by the colonial masters and who have been co-existing harbouring deep suspicions and prejudices against each other for decades. The author’s take on the situation is relentlessly pessimistic (not unlike that of V.S. Naipaul in his African novel A Bend In The River), which, by the time you finish the novel, fills you with gloom. It has to be said, though, that in light of what is going on in many of these countries, Naipaul’s novel, written more than two decades ago, seems very prophetic. The story of the protagonists and the supporting characters take a subservient position to these grander themes that are clearly very close to Naipaul’s heart; indeed some of the charaters such as the English journalist Alex seem to have been introduced only so as to allow the author to make the point that what goes on in these colonies hold very little interest for their ex-masters, although they have, from the historical perspective, sowed the seeds of the discord.

What makes this novel a joy to read is Naipaul’s language which is precise, elegant, acutely observant and brilliantly evocative. This is a literary book which strives to make serious points, and offers (as the author has done in his other non-fiction work) explanations which may be frowned upon by the politically correct.

In Sir Vidia's Shadow, Paul Theroux dismissed Shiva Naipaul as a poseur who aped his much more gifted elder brother. There are undoubtedly many similarities between Shiva Naipaul’s thematic concerns and attitudes, as reflected in his work of fiction and non-fiction, and those of V.S. Naipaul: the social and political conditions in the African third world countries, especially the former colonies. Both tend to take a rather stark view of life (V.S. Naipaul more so in his later works) and are not overly indulgent towards mediocrity. Neither of them is shy of telling unpalatable truths, and, unsurprisingly, not everyone likes what they write.

A Hot Country is a fine novel. And when one considers it with the rest of Shiva Naipaul's (slim but very impressive) oeuvre, it is impossible not to wonder how he would have developed had he lived longer.

Hopefully

Hopefully, the weather will do us a favour and it won’t rain over the weekend.

Hopefully, England will qualify for the Euro 2008. (They didn't, and Lord be praised! Can we now watch some cricket with its microseconds of excitement deliciously scattered over five days?)

Hopefully, the wine won’t let us down.

Hopefully, we’ll get tickets for the opera.

Hopefully, the meeting will proceed uneventfully.

Hopefully someone, one day, will visit this blog; hopefully someone will like some or more of the write-ups; hopefully someone might decide to leave a comment or two; hopefully, even if no one visits, I shall have the enthusiasm to continue blogging in a year’s time.

Hopefully gets my goat. I am developing a dislike for hopefully that is in danger of mutating into pathological hatred. Hopefully, I don’t like; I don’t like hopefully.

‘What’s wrong with hopefully?’ I hear you asking. Let me explain. Allow me to put forth my case.

When I say I don’t like hopefully, it’s not hopefully, strictly, that I dislike. Oops. . .walked into the trap, there, didn’t I ? Ignore, the previous sentence. I am human, after all; I am not perfect. (But I have the smartness to realise and humility to accept my mistakes.) Let me start again. When I say I don’t like hopefully, it is not hopefully that I dislike. That does not make sense either, does it? Let me have another go; hopefully, I’ll get it right the third time. I know, I know; some of the smart Alecks amongst you are smirking. I shall say no more other than refer you to the last parenthesis. I shall have a third go at what I am propounding, although, strictly, it is a second go. Oh dear! It is not going well, is it? I seem to have the knack of getting into a trap, getting out, turning around, and walking into the same trap. Let’s have a totally new beginning. (I am going to ignore the impish murmurs I can hear from the pranksters amongst you that new beginning is a tautology. It is not, always, in my view, and I shall say nothing more on the matter; I am not going to be waylaid into a discussion on tautology when what I am hoping to do is educate you hopefully, sorry, on hopefully. There! That is the correct usage: I said I was hoping to; I didn’t say hopefully, not, needless to say, because I am not hopeful, although I have never been of absurdly optimistic disposition either.) So, where was I? Oh yes! My position, so to speak, on hopefully. Let me begin by saying that I think it is a perfectly decent word. It has been used, I am sure, for a long time. Oxford English Dictionary records its first usage in the seventeenth century (and, no doubt, word-detectives, if they get wind of the fact that BBC 2, determined to reduce prescription use of sedatives and hypnotics, are intending to re-launch Balderdash & Piffles, will dig up even earlier usage of the word, which will send shock-waves amongst the language-wonks). There are instances, though I can’t think of any at the minute, when hopefully will do; nay, only hopefully will do. However, I shall humbly suggest that such instances, and my inability recall any as I write is a proof of it, if needed, are few. Certainly, OK, ignore the word, Indeed will be more appropriate in the context, given my position (metaphorical) on hopefully, the examples I have given above, the last one, you, at least those amongst you who have an eye for subtlety, will not have failed to notice, being my modest attempt at irony, are not of them, the instances.

Hopefully is an adverb; obviously; like obviously; exactly; like exactly . . .all right; I think I have driven home my point. And the last time I checked an adverb qualifies a verb, gives us additional information about it. So, if we take the first example, the weather, when it does us a favour, it does so hopefully! The wine will not let us down. And how will it not do that? Hopefully! How will we get tickets for the opera? Not by on-line booking; not by standing in the queue; but hopefully! How will the meeting proceed? It will proceed not only uneventfully, but also hopefully. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it; or doesn’t it? What, of course, each of the sentence is attempting to convey, is the speaker is hopeful of whatever that he / she is hoping would happen. It would be fanciful to assume that abstract concepts or inanimate objects are invested with emotions such as hope. Wouldn’t it be correct to say, say, We are hopeful, or, if that sounds cumbrous, Let’s hope, or With luck?

Sentence adverb. I knew someone was bound to mention this unwholesome twentieth century fashion, which, in the twenty-first, is becoming disturbingly widespread. A sentence adverb refers to not only a part of the sentence, but also a whole, independent, sentence or clause, which is implied. Thus, Hopefully implies It is to be hoped. Economical? May be. (Ungenerous, more like). Elegant? Certainly not. It jars; it irritates; its usage is silly; it’s semiliterate nonsense.

What did you say? Why am I persecuting hopefully? I am not persecuting anyone or anything, and even if I were, I wouldn’t do that hopefully. Oh! I see. Why am I persecuting hopefully? I see what you are getting at. There are hundreds of words, well, at least dozens of them, I agree, which people use routinely in the same way as hopefully. Why am I, as you have chosen to put, persecuting (although, persecute, if I may point out, has negative connotations, as if I am maltreating hopefully, I mean hopefully, which, I shall thank you to remember, is not my intention at all) just one? In my view none of the other adverbs, or sentence adverbs as some self-appointed language mavens might say, is misused as much as hopefully, although, I feel compelled to point out, since no one else, so far, has, that I have gone to some length not to use any in this what the Germans would, surely, describe as a ratiocinative Kritik (well, not ratiocinative, of course, unless they are proficient in English, which, some of them may well be). Indeed the misuse, and I am choosing my words carefully, is bordering on molestation. If I were hopefully, I would be seriously considering taking an injunction against these language-chavs. Also, I have to start some where, and I might as well do that hopefully, I mean with hopefully.

There are some dictionaries, including, disappointingly, The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which appear to be coming around to the view, one can’t help feeling not without a sense of resignation, that it is OK to use this once useful adverb in such a distorted manner on the tenuous grounds that more and more people are doing it. It is like saying if you are a teenager, it is OK to traumatize your naval with piercing and tattoo hideous designs on your lower abdomen with an arrow pointing south (or something subtle like that) because some other lobotomised juveniles are doing it; or it is OK to have sex with a donkey (or pig) if you live in Norfolk. It is not OK to abuse donkeys (or pigs or any members of anthropoidea), and it is not OK to abuse a language.

I urge you to follow the advice in the notice Edwin Newman reputedly put on his office door: Abandon Hopefully All Ye Who Enter Here.

Book of the Month: Holy Cow! (Sarah Macdonald)

Poor Sarah Macdonald! She leaves her cushy job as a television broadcaster in Sydney, Australia, leaves behind the exciting lifestyle of an F-grade celebrity (albeit with the minor inconvenience of being pestered by a deranged stalker), and arrives in New Delhi, ‘the most polluted city in the world’. Years ago, she backpacked in India—a rite of passage for the children of the affluent in the West— and hated every minute of it. Why is she coming back? What masochism pushes her to return to a country that offered her nothing except explosive diarrhoea the first time around? But, as the Indians featuring in this ‘Indian Adventure’ seem to be very fond of exclaiming, ‘What to do?’ The poor girl is in love. Her boyfriend, who works for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), has the misfortune of being posted in New Delhi, and is missing Macdonald ever so much (and she him, isn’t it sweet?) that she decides to brave the inclement, inhospitable, hostile country, and her unhygienic, sordid, offensive, rude inhabitants.

Things begin to go pear shaped for Macdonald soon after she boards the plane headed for India at Singapore. She is convinced that the scrawny, senile Sikh sitting next to her tried to touch her nether region when she was asleep. When she buzzes for assistance the airhostess is dismissive of her distress. The Indian ‘trolley-dollies’, Macdonald informs us, are ‘rich girls whose parents pay a massive bribe to get them a job involving travel and five star hotels.’ These ‘brats’ apparently view passengers as ‘pesky intrusions way beneath their status, and detest doing the job of a high-flying servant.’ (Out of kindness (or the fear of getting sued) Macdonald does not name and shame the airline, but one would be well advised, after reading the conduct of the aforementioned ‘rich brat’ (or ‘trolley-dolly, take your pick), to avoid all of them. Travel by British Airways. Or, even better, Air Australia.)

Things do not improve for Macdonald when the plane finally lands in Delhi. The landing, needless to say, is ‘dreadful’, but that, Macdonald consoles herself, is only to be expected in a country where ‘women are blamed for sleazy men’, and planes are sprayed with ‘foul smelling insecticides’. The passport queue for ‘foreigners’ is impossibly slow while ‘Indians swan past smiling’ (would this ever happen in Australia or Europe or America?), and it takes half an hour (thirty whole minutes!) to find her luggage. When, after somehow surviving this ordeal, Macdonald steps out of the airport, she discovers to her horror that the whole place is teeming with Indians. There are more Indians here than bacilli in a petridish. And their intentions with regard to Macdonald are not honourable. Most of them seem to want to kidnap her in their Oldsmobiles under the pretext that they would take her to her destination. And then, out of the smog (this portmanteau appears at least five times on each of the next forty pages when Macdonald describes Delhi’s pollution), emerges a hand and grabs her bag. ‘Dazed, disoriented, dusty’, and (now) petrified out of her (very considerable) wits, Macdonald collapses on the ground, when her boyfriend comes to her rescue and whisks her away from the crowd that, Macdonald would have you believe, had gathered with the sole purpose of tormenting her. ‘A tad melodramatic’, I hear you murmuring. Not at all! Macdonald is an intelligent, sophisticated, independent, capable career woman, who, I shall thank you to remember, has survived the stalking of a psycho. It is just that from the heavenly Sydney, where everything is picture-perfect, she has landed in shitty (metaphorically as well as literally) India. ‘What to do?’

Macdonald then gets a taste of Delhi’s traffic, which achieves the dual feat of being alarming and annoying at the same time. Every motorist drives with ‘one finger on the horn and the other shoved high up a nostril.’ Judging by Macdonald’s blood-curdling account of her journey through Delhi, you get the impression that the traffic system there is invented by someone who enjoyed crashing cars and trains as a child, and who has a marked reluctance to provide anything useful by way of road directions. And then there are the emaciated, sickly cows that roam unhindered through the traffic eating garbage and plastic. Macdonald observes that she finds it ‘hilarious’ that ‘Indian (read Hindu—Macdonald uses these two words interchangeably) people chose the most boring . . . and stupidest animal to adore.’ Travelling by railway—she is going to Derradun, and further on to Rishikesh— does not bring much joy either. She does not dare to look out of her train’s window at slum dwellers shitting by the railway-line. Macdonald is a tough cookie. She has survived a stalker and sperm-covered letters from her fans, but the bum-salutes of the ‘scrawny Indians’ are a bit too much (like a full English Breakfast) first thing in the morning. In Derradun Macdonald is fleeced by a cabbie who, she decides, is a homosexual because he appears way too friendly towards another man. Macdonald does not have anything against homosexuals (or, in this case, a crypto-homosexual); what she takes objection to is bad, reckless driving. The cabbie, the improbably named Kunti—it’s a woman’s name—shows Macdonald glimpses of near-death experiences. When they finally reach the destination they are gheraoed by screaming schoolgirls, who, having apparently never seen a White face in their lives, pester her for her autograph. Rishikesh is a ‘dirty, dusty strip of clogged streets' where ‘spirituality is for sale.’ At every step Macdonald is hassled by beggars and hucksters, forcing her to conclude that Indians are ‘either deaf to the word ‘no’ or they are the biggest optimists in the world.’ By this time all that the poor woman is wishing for is peace and quiet. ‘The filth, the misery, the public nose-picking, the pissing, the pooing, and retching out giant spits of phlegm’ have bruised her delicate sensibilities. But ‘What to do?’ It is difficult to escape Indians in India. Everywhere she looks ‘is a mass of begging, pleading, needing, naked wretchedness.’

Back in Delhi she is pursued by pushy Punjabis who, even though they barely know her, want to be ‘rrrreeeely friendly’ with her. (Very rum! Why are they so friendly? They must have some ulterior motive.) Over the next few months Macdonald visits her new ‘frrriends’ (Indians apparently role their ‘R’s when they get excited, which, judging by Macdonald’s account, happens pretty much all the time)—for get-togethers, New Year’s Eve parties, and marriage ceremonies—which gives her an opportunity to observe Indians’ (multitudes of) foibles. Such as: all Indian/Hindu women are marriage obsessed; they all have a ‘hair fetish’ and sport long thick hair flowing down to their hips—it apparently requires great courage to break this convention and cut your hair. They all wear saris, and if you happen to spot an Indian/Hindu woman wearing jeans, rest assured you are seeing a rebel who may even be risking death from her irate family. All marriages in India are apparently arranged—the elders in the family trample on the wishes of the young, and, if the young have the temerity to strike their own path, the parents either commit suicide or disinherit the Black Sheep. (The divorce rates in India at present are considerably lower than those in the West, which, one guesses, is because the abused brides are too frightened to leave abusive relationships—lest their own parents commit suicide for bringing shame on the family—or, worse, have been murdered by the draconian in-laws because the dowry was not big enough.) The statistics in this ‘corrupt country’ is not to be believed. The marriage obsession of Indians/Hindus—those with whom Macdonald socialises are unable to come to terms with the concept of pre-marital sex—is matched only by their obsession about their looks. They all want to be fair. ‘Pale is best, pale is the most beauteous’ opines one young woman, and advises Macdonald that it is ‘bestest’ to stay inside for staying pale. Macdonald also discovers that ‘India’s behaviour’ is still dictated by ‘upbringing and wealth.’ (Shocking! Where is the guillotine when you need it?) If you are wealthy, you can ‘treat people dreadfully’ in India, and ‘get away with it.’

India, Macdonald concludes, is a man’s world, where girl babies are aborted and female infanticide is more common than barbecues in Australia. There is so much testosterone floating in the air it is a surprise women don’t grow beards. Wherever she goes Macdonald is encircled by ‘giggling idiots’ and ‘constantly followed’. Indian men have no manners—they scratch their balls and adjust their penises oblivious that they are in the presence of a refined woman who thoroughly disapproves of such disgusting habits. Talking of penises, it seems they are on display everywhere: the men piss everywhere, and there are so many of them that Macdonald wonders whether ‘Indian men have chronic urinary tract infection.’ But undiagnosed medical condition is not the only hypothesis Macdonald entertains—another hypothesis, quasi-sociological, is offered. ‘Baywatch’ apparently is to be blamed. Too many Indian men have lost their heads having watched way too much of this sitcom, and they, Indian men, now think that all Western women have big breasts with erect nipples and enjoy being seduced by hunks on the spot. (Macdonald, by her own admission, is not well endowed in this department, and to describe scrawny Indian men as hunks is like calling ‘skinny’ Starbucks muffin healthy.) Occasionally a ‘bastard’ grabs Macdonald’s crotch or pinches her breasts in a crowd. It is obvious that this male-dominated sexually repressed society (could this be the same land which gave the world Kam-Sutra and Tantric Sex?) where women are treated as sexual objects and possessions, is not ready—and probably will not be ready—for, let’s say, another hundred years, ‘Baywatch’. Liberalisation of economy may bring prosperity for some, but, if your minds and attitudes are not liberated, emancipated women will consider you a piece of shit.

To add to Macdonald’s deepening sense of impending doom, she contracts double pneumonia and has to be admitted to the Apollo hospital, a private hospital that is situated next to a ‘wasteland full of rubbish . . . cows . . and a small slum’. (Macdonald notes all this while she is wheeled into the hospital.) 'Apollo' ‘boasts first world facilities’, but Macdonald’s experience, you are sorry to read, is different. The nurses have dreadful needle technique and seem to have only a nodding acquaintance with the English language. The doctors seem obsessed with getting her sputum and, when she can’t produce, even offer her to teach the ‘Indian morning croak and spit’ that she so detests. Finally, the hospital gifts her a stomach bug. Conclusion: if you fall ill in India, God is your only saviour (not if you are an atheist, of course). You’d have thought that the poor girl’s cup of woe is not only brimming, but is overflowing. Unfortunately, the trials and tribulations of this ex-celebrity from Sidney, concerning her health, are not yet over. Macdonald begins losing her hair rapidly and, in a matter of few weeks, becomes, more or less completely, bald. That can’t be good for her in a country with a ‘hair fetish’. How much more should she suffer?’ As it turns out, a lot more.

Concluding that if she has to survive in this noisy country, she will have to, somehow, find inner peace, Macdonald hires a yoga teacher (who is so effeminate, he could be, should be, surely ought to be, gay), and, when that doesn’t work, checks herself for a ten-day residential course of Vipasana, which, she is surprised to learn, is a technique that began in India (admittedly aeons before Indians got into the habit of spitting, shitting, and urinating in public), and not in Western Australia. Macdonald survives the ten-day course of ‘extreme meditation’—she is not allowed to speak at all during the course—by playing various indie-band songs in her head (not sure whether Buddha would have approved of this), but still is not anywhere within sighting distance of inner peace. Plan A has not worked out, but the clever Aussie has Plan B in place. She is going to check out India’s religions. And what better place to start than Amritsar where she can visit the Golden temple, the ‘high Church’ of the Sikh? She even gets to see the GratnhSahib, which is their, Sikhs’, ‘Bible’. Macdonald tracks down a bizarre bunch of ‘Western Sikhs’, Westerners who have been converted to Sikhism by one Yogi Bhajan, who has used the ancient Hindu rope trick of Kundalini Yoga, which, Macdonald lets it slip, is very good for sex. She then meets the secretary of the headquarters of the Faith who orders her to immediately become a Sikh if she wants to avoid the three big scourges of humanity: mental depression (Sikhs are always happy), AIDS (Sikhs are faithful to one partner), and cancer (Sikhs don’t smoke and their body-hair absorb all of Sun’s rays.) From Amritsar, it is Kashmir (Indian controlled). Travelling in the most militarised region in the world, ‘the highest battlefield on earth’, Macdonald is taken aback by the death-toll—apparently, in the last ten years, nine people have died in Kashmir every day. Her response to this frightening statistics is: ‘This is shit!’, which, she helpfully points out, rhymes with a couplet, written by one Fir Das, that proclaims as regards Kashmir: ‘If there is paradise on earth, then this is it, this it, this is it.’ She also thinks that lotus is a perfect symbol for Kashmir and its valley: ‘Out of slime, out of shit, out of the crowded worn land, rises glorious perfection.’ (It seems Macdonald's mind just can’t get away from shit.) Ever the learner, she tries a few pages of Koran in her hotel room, and magnanimously decides that Mohammad was probably an OK guy when she cannot find any specific advice he has given to women about how they should conduct themselves—just an urging that they should guard their modesty. She also makes the discovery, which will surely shock Indians, that Kashmiri Muslims hate India and would rather be with Pakistan if they can’t get their independence.

Next stop is Kumbh Mela, or the ‘Pot Festival’, the biggest freak-show on earth, when such a mass of humanity (comprising superstitious Hindus, who else?) gathers on the bank of ‘shallow, stinky’ Ganges, it can be seen from ‘outer space’. And, if you are as keen an observer as Macdonald, you will notice ‘craters full of rubbish’, ‘squalid camps’, ‘beggars with twisted bones’, ‘scrawny (Macdonald seems very fond of this word when she describes Indians—the tedium would have been a bit less had she used some synonyms at times. Did she not think of ‘weedy’or ‘scraggy’ or underweight’, or, if she had the other meaning of the word in her mind, which may well have been the case, ‘stunted’ or ‘inferior’?) men in loin clothes’, and ‘people praying to plastic-doll gods’. She hears stories from gullible Indian / Hindu women of Shiva who gets ‘stoned’ and is ‘unkempt’, and Krishna, ‘the randy cowherd’, who ‘seduces thousands of cowgirls with his raunchy flute-playing.’ Then there is the inevitable cavalcade of India’s Sadhus, or holey men, who, Macdonald notes with satisfaction, when seen from near, have ‘bowed bodies with bandy legs’ and sleep in ‘naked huddled heaps’ in the open (although quite a few of them have long John Henries—one has even wrapped his round a bamboo pole!) Remembering her journalistic roots Macdonald ‘interviews’ a few. The sadhus don’t disappoint, and are full of fantastic stories and wild prognostications. In other words, full of shit.

The dernier cri among Western tourists with a conscience is to make the pilgrimage to Dharam Shala, in Himachal Pradesh, one of the Northern Indian States in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the Dalai Lama, a favourite of many a Westerner, runs his Government-in-Exile and spreads his message of peace and love. Dharamshala it is Macdonald heads for, but not before she has a taste of yet another ‘crazy Hindu festival’, Holi, a festival of ‘lust rather than devotion’, she concludes after orange powder gets rubbed into her hair, yellow powder is poured down her top, and her breasts get fondled, all of which sends the poor woman running for safety into her friend’s house—who, very uncharacteristically for an Indian, has given Macdonald only an oblique hint of what to expect by suggesting that she should wear ‘something old and disgusting’— screeching like a panicking rodent. The Dalai gets a big thumbs-up from Macdonald after she attends his sermon. She also makes the discovery that Buddhism and Hinduism have many commonalities in their philosophies. Next stop is Judaism. Macdonald learns that many Israelis (for reasons that are not immediately apparent to her) dig India, and think India is very shanti (Sanskrit word for peace), which she, India, Macdonald reminds us (in case we have forgotten), is anything but. She rubs shoulders with the Kabala groups which don’t seem to have any problems in accepting her amongst them, and the orthodox Chabad Lubavitch group which clarifies that she can never ever be Jewish. Shit!

Macdonald then zooms off to Mumbai, a ‘third world New York’, which, she, in a (rare) moment of magnanimity, concedes could well be a ‘Western metropolis in a grimy, green-house affected, post-apocalyptic world.’ In Mumbai Macdonald meets the Zoroastrians, or the Parsees, and finds them suitably eccentric and some or more of the practices of the orthodox Parsees—as recounted to her by admittedly very odd characters, some tales so bizarre that you are surprised it does not occur to Macdonald to check their veracity—appropriately revolting and outdated.

If you thought that Macdonald has had enough of India’s religions and Godmen, you would be wrong. She flies to Kerala, a South Indian state, to spend time in the ashram of one Mata Amritanadmayi, or, the ‘Mother of the Divine Bliss’, who specialises in hugging and kissing her disciples—‘even blokes’—and makes their aspirations and desires come true. Macdonald gets her share of hugs (and, you guess, smelly bosom and armpits, since the Mata hugs, non-stop, for hours, from the early hours of the morning till late in the afternoon), and, to her surprise and delight, her breasts start getting bigger! Is it a gift bequeathed by the ‘Mother of Divine Bliss’? Probably not, because they, her breasts, are also painful. Assuming that no Indian male doctor would be prepared to touch her breasts (unless he is a pervert, which he may well be seeing as he is both Indian and male, in which case he would want to grab them in a crowd or in the dark, but not for a medical examination) the ABC starts a nationwide search for a female doctor and after only a day finds one. The woman, who has appalling bed-side manners, informs Macdonald that she, the doctor, does not think that she, Macdonald, has got cancer, but because she, Macdonald, is ‘old’, has ‘no children’, and is ‘Western’—all ‘verrry bad’—a mammogram would be advisable. Macdonald is not prepared to take further risks with her health in India. Wisely she flies to Australia, and, after the mammogram is clear, unwisely, flies back to India. Guess what she does upon her arrival? Of course, she flies off to spend time in the ashram of another Godman. And of course she finds him phoney. Despite visiting so many faiths and Godheads the poor woman is no closer to finding God in this overcrowded, faecal country than an anorexic is to having a square meal.

The ‘adventure’ is nearing its end and the expectation is Macdonald will continue slagging off India. We know that it is not like Macdonald to give way to fashionable squmeashness on these matters. We want the character assassination and sartorial deconstruction of Indians to go on. We love (or, as Indians would say, ‘lurrve’) it when she is so catty. Inexplicably the tone softens, becomes mellow. Macdonald starts going to discotheques and even shakes a hip to the tune of saccharine Bollywood ditties. What is going on? Has the shallowness of the superficial middle class Punjabi kudis who have befriended the brave adventurer, rubbed off on her? Have they finally managed to corrupt her? The signs are ominous: Macdonald meets some Bollywood stars and goes starry eyed; she even manages to finagle, via her husband’s ABC connections, three and a half minutes of ‘interview’ with Amitab Bacchan, the ‘Big B’, the impossibly tall and pot-bellied screen-God of India, which sends her friends back in Delhi caterwauling with a mixture of admiration and ecstasy. She watches Bollywood Masala movies and enjoys them. She even has some kind words to say about Hinduism, which, she declares, is a tolerant religion that will absorb everything and survive the onslaught of globalisation. All of this strikes you about as convincing as the explanation of an Auschwitz commandant at the Nuremberg trials that the incinerators were erected to burn garden rubbish.

The ‘adventure’ is almost over, but not before Macdonald has visited another religious jamboree, a Christian one this time, in South India. She is accompanied by two of her Australian friends visiting India for the first time, and Macdonald records, with perverse satisfaction, their sense of horror and disgust at the crowds and the heat and the cockroaches in their living quarters, none of which bothers her, of course, now she has become a veteran of Indian conditions. The (by now) customary long list of dirt, filth, boorish behaviour of some, superstitious behaviour of others etcetera is supplied. She suspects (probably rightly) that many of the ‘devotees’ thronging the festival of ‘Our Lady of Velangini’ are in fact Hindus, who are treating the Virgin as just another Goddess belonging to Hindu pantheon. (Either that or they have come for a weekend of fun-fair.) The priest explains to her that Hinduism’s cultural bindings don’t change their great religion (Christianity). ‘Externally these people are Hindus, but internally they are Christians’ even though they are ‘not prepared to accept Jesus alone as God.’ Macdonald likes the style of the priest.

So far so good. You are beginning to wonder whether Macdonald isn’t finally beginning to feel relaxed and notice something else than the crowds and filth. The good spell does not last for long—the twin towers in New York are attacked by terrorists on September 11. Macdonald is shocked; she is furious; she feels the return of ‘a new depth of hopelessness’. ‘How could God allow this?’ she asks. The world, she declares, has changed forever on September 11 2001. (You do not expect Macdonald to know this, of course, but on September 11 1973, in a CIA-backed and financed military coup in Chile, the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was usurped, Allende was killed as the American bombs dropped on the presidential building, and the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet was installed—one of the many ‘terrorist acts’ of the USA in Latin America.) But the Indians around her do not seem to have noticed. The reason? ‘In a land used to deaths, disaster and disease, life goes on as usual.’ Then the USA’s ‘War on Terror’ begins with an attack on Afghanistan, a time for personal anguish for Macdonald as her husband, Jonathan, is stuck in Afghanistan. Fortunately it all ends well, and Jonathan returns to India unharmed. The couple decides that it is time to go home. Back in Sidney Macdonald rediscovers her relationship with nature. She ‘bathes with inner joy’. Floating in ‘clean water’ her body is ‘buoyant with the love of life.’ She enjoys the ‘silent mornings’ and doing nothing but ‘gulping lungs full of fresh air’ and ‘staring up at the high, endless bright blue.’ She walks through ‘pristine quiet’ of the suburban bush and is ‘delighted’ to see ‘open joy and easy lives’. The contrast with India could not have been starker. As you finish reading the last page you can’t help wondering whether the title ‘Indian Nightmare’ (instead of ‘Indian Adventure’) wouldn’t have been more apt for her book.

Westerners writing about what Paul Theroux once romantically described as the ‘turd world’ run the risk of falling into one of the two traps: either they are gushingly enthusiastic about everything and manage to sound in the process patronizing—they might marvel, for example, the strong body odour of the natives; or they animadvert everything and everyone all the time, make unfair comparisons with ‘home-countries’, revealing, in the process, their ignorance of the history, exuding, like pumped up raisins, smugness and vanity in equal measure. It would be safe to conclude that Macdonald comfortably avoids falling into the first trap. In fact she does not seem to care much for ideas or understanding the context as she passes sweeping, often inaccurate, judgments. That can be a problem: trying to draw generalized insights or truths from one piece of information is a bit like using Eaton to explain the British empire: what you end up with is so much devalued cliché, prejudice and generalisation that the conclusions are cartoonishly worthless.

Macdonald has a keen eye for the grotesque, and she ferrets it out with a skill that would rival that of an aborigine smelling out sources of underground water. And wherever she finds Bizarreries, she does a demolition job on them—and on India’s (probably undeserved) reputation as an exotic—worthy of an Iraqi looter. There is, however, a fine line between irreverence and scorn, and Macdonald does not always manage her balance while walking it. Too often the narrative mutates into a dyspeptic, petulant, aggravated rant, a long symphony in B Moaner. Time and again, while reading her rantings you think: 'The woman probably has a point, though God knows why she has to make a five-act play out of it.' There are repetitive descriptions of crowds, filth, excrement, poverty, and uncouth Indian men, produced with the ruminative relish of a person who works for the sanitary department giving a recital of the worst barrel he has collected in an interesting working career. It just gets tiresome after a while, making you wonder whether it wouldn’t suit everyone well if the woman were off somewhere else. The unrelenting tone of sanctimony, which the patina of easy-to-read, often witty, prose cannot hide, adds to the reader’s ennui. Macdonald wears ethics the way tarts wear make-ups. While there is some attempt at introspection towards the end, it strikes as a bit hollow. Macdonald seems to have a genius for missing the point; it is almost as if the light of knowledge has blinded her. Things are, in essence, what we make of them. It is a shame Macdonald chooses to make what she does of what she experiences in India.

When she is not carping Macdonald takes on the self-appointed role of an ethnographer and political commentator. Here is a comment on Kashmir: ‘India will never give up its share of the state . . .Pakistan will never give up trying to get all of Kashmir.’ You suspect the situation is a tad more complex than this. There is a lot of immature stuff about India’s religions and religious rituals. Reading these juvenilia you can’t help wondering whether Macdonald is not out of her depth. In fact you can’t help thinking that she would be out of her depth if she were standing on a wet tea-towel. But then, to be fair to her, Macdonald is not making tall claims. This is a work essentially of an unserious nature; if you are looking for depth here you are diving at the wrong end. Such books, often, also have a particular kind of moral silliness about them which some might find charming, especially as it is disguised from their authors.

Holy Cow! is a book to be read on the can where, as Erica Jong once said, your brain goes into beta and your anus does the thinking. Also, seeing as there is shit on almost every other page, reading it in the loo will give you the feeling of being in India.

Chronicles of A Dyspeptic Man: Night Out

It is bitterly cold as you enter the pub, already chastising yourself for agreeing to the night out. Evening out with your work colleagues can be fun if you get on well with them and enjoy their company. If you are in open conflict with some or more of them or have the reputation of being an irascible git, it has its advantages, as you won’t get invited. But what if you are the popular guy in your department, well-liked by your colleagues and— this is the nub of the problem—they labour under the erroneous belief that you like them, and—perhaps this is the real nub of the problem—you lack both the courage to decline the invitation and the ability to think on your feet to come up with a plausible-sounding excuse why you are not prepared to waste an evening of your life in their company instead of doing something useful like watching ‘South-Park’? It is not that one hates one’s colleagues (well, may be, a few of them); it is just that the effort of broadening one’s vowels while speaking, pretending to enjoy billiards, and standing for hours on end in the middle of a throng collectively smelling like a sinkful of unwashed dishes, trying to hide one’s indifference (affecting interest, even) to pointless anecdotes about the domestic lives of people whom one is obliged to see and interact with at work but about whom one doesn’t really care, can be very tiring.

‘Oh, here he is,’ shouts Betty, a pestiferous blonde in her 40s, who works at the reception in our company. She has parked herself on a chair which seemes about to collapse under her weight. Judging by the carnage visible on the table in front of her—empty packets of crisps, salty peas and, anomalously, a half-eaten apple, were lying like road casualties—Betty has been there for at least 10 minutes.

‘Dieting, are we?’ you ask smiling, you hope, maliciously.

‘Get off, you. You are always pulling me legs,’ screeches Betty like a railway engine.

You look around. The pub is not yet crowded. You become aware, at the periphery of your vision, of a presence. A middle aged man with an unhealthy paunch is staring at you, trying, so it seems, to arrange his facial muscles into something resembling a smile, but not making a good job of it. He looks vaguely sinister.

‘Have you met Patrick?’ hollers Betty. ‘He joined our team last week. He is the only man amongst us babes.’

You look at Patrick. ‘Lucky you,’ you say after some time. ‘ Are you settling down in your job?’

‘Yes,’ replies Patrick, ‘everyone has been most helpful.’ He speaks slowly, either trying to convince himself that everyone is indeed helpful, or weighing the possibility that he might be dealing with a retard.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ you ask Patrick with a sinking feeling that he is going to say Yes.

‘Yeh, thanks. A pint of Fosters,’ Patrick replies without a trace of hesitation that has plagued him a moment ago.

‘You know Joe, don’t you?’ Betty points at a waif behind the bar with a ponytail and sparse beard which clings to parts of his face and jaw, like cobwebs.

‘You’ve met Joe,’ says Maria, who, you realise, is standing next to you all along. She is non-descript in the sense there is really nothing to describe.

‘Who is Joe?’ you ask.

‘My hubby, you silly. You came for our wedding reception, remember?’

You then remember, with the exaggerated quality of a stimulant rush, the dreadful reception, held in some hole in the wall, which you had attended, you suppose, for the same cowardly reasons you are here tonight.

‘Of course I do,’ you say. ‘How is married life treating you?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘Joe and she are so much in love,’ Betty interjects.

‘How do you manage it?’ you ask.

‘Well, it is not something you ‘manage’, you see…’, Maria begins explaining as if you’ve asked her to explain the theory of relativity.

‘Sorry, I was asking Betty.’

‘Asking me what? How do I manage what?’ Betty asks. You can almost see her tiny brain trying to wrestle with the obviously intricate question you’ve asked.

Phoney, superficial, breezy and enthusiastic about matters no one with an ounce of brain would care a jot about, and being an interfering busybody. You say, ‘You are so passionate about things. And you seem to be in the know.’

‘I have got a big heart,’ Betty thumps on her bosom, winking at the same time. ‘If only people would care to find out.’

In utter revulsion you turn to Patrick. ‘I’ll get your drink’.

‘I am dying of thirst, here,’ Patrick says with mock-anger.

‘Only figuratively, unfortunately.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind!’

You make my way to the bar. Joe bares his teeth at me in greeting. It is a blow to the optic nerve. Looking at him you wonder whether his blood-line isn’t thinned by a series of peasants and servants.

‘How you doing, Guv?’ he asks cheerily.

‘I doing fine,’ you say.

You order a pint of Fosters for Patrick and a pint of spiced ale for yourself. You are feeling rather hot and, while taking off my coat, you accidentally dislodge a bauble attached to the bar as a Christmas decoration. For some reason Joe finds this indescribably funny. Indicating to a buxom girl hovering behind him that she should serve me my order he rushes out to his wife, presumably to tell her the funny story.

‘I’ve obviously lightened up the proceedings in this establishment,’ you take a pause. ‘Natalie,’ I add, looking at her breasts. In response Natalie shrugs her shoulders, as high as her mammaries would allow, and rolls her eyes towards the ceiling.

You return to where our group was standing.

‘Here you are, Gary,’ you hand Patrick his pint.

‘Patrick’.

‘Sorry?’

‘The name is Patrick. Not Gary.’ Patrick is back to his slow-speaking mode.

‘Funny. I could have sworn you said Gary.’

‘No, it’s Patrick.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I think I know my name.’

‘Fair enough. Patrick it is,’ you concede.

By this time one more colleague, Sebastian, has joined the group. A shortish woman with face longer than the Nile is standing next to him with a look on her face that says she fervently wished she were somewhere else, whom he introduces as his wife. Whether she looks wretched because, like you, she is hating every minute of the dreadful evening or—this is also a possibility seeing her coiffure—because she is mulling over the disastrous, possibly suable, experience she has obviously had with her hairdresser is difficult to tell.

‘So what do you do…Umh,’ you realise that you’ve already forgotten her name.

In reply the unnerving line of her mouth shifts a little so that what you are witnessing is either a smile or a snarl. Sebastian beams.

‘ Jocasta is a painter,’ he shouts over the din Betty and Maria are making.

‘Really? How interesting.’

‘Oh, yes! Jocasta is very talented,’ Sebastian added in an aggressive tone that hinted at unspeakable consequences for anyone who dared to differ.

‘Excellent. Can she also speak?’

‘What?’

‘Just joking. She is very quiet. What sort of painting do you do, Jocasta?’

‘She does acrylic painting,’ yells Sebastian. His wife looks at him as if she would, at that moment, relish nothing more than strangling him.

‘I should slip ground glass in his tea,’ you say to Jocasta.

‘Excuse me?’ So she can speak.

‘With luck, his oesophagus will get ruptured, and he will bleed to death. Or you could put arsenic in his food. That will take time, though, and you will have to be patient,’ you say.

‘Look, I have got a sample of her art-work, here.’ Sebastian produces a small catalogue of Jocasta’s painting with the moronic enthusiasm of a Springer spaniel who has brought something disgusting from the bush and is looking expectantly at you expecting a reward.

‘Umh…That looks…interesting,’ you say.

‘What do you do, then?’ Jocasta asks me.

You tell her your job-title.

‘Oh, so you are Sebastian’s boss who makes him work so hard,’ she says with the air of a woman who has just then discovered the source of the evil blighting her life.

‘I don’t think I could make Sebastian work harder if I tried. I don’t think anybody could make this guy work,’ you pause, ‘harder’.

‘Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho, ho. You are funny, mister,’ says Sebastian.

‘I am not joking.’

‘I am proud of what I do.’

‘Of course you are. And you should be.’ You turn to Jocasta. ‘Your husband is in his job for fifteen years and is dumb enough to be still proud of it.

‘I used to be a teacher,’ Jocasta volunteers further information about herself.

‘So why did you give up? Did the children say,” Boo”?’ you ask, smiling at the same time to indicate you are joking, in case she looks like taking offence at the insult.

‘ I just wanted to do, full-time, what I had always wanted to do.’

Even if you’ve absolutely no talent for it? You say, ‘That is really brave of you. Not many people would have the courage to give up the security of a regular job and embark upon an artistic career, which—how shall I put this?—is a journey into the unknown’, hoping that if she has any regrets about leaving her job, this little speech would add to that feeling. ‘How is it panning out?’

‘Not very well, I am afraid. I am not sure how long this artistic phase is going to last.’ You are pleased to hear.

‘Don’t give up,’ you say. ‘Persevere and you are sure to succeed.’ You sincerely hope that Jocasta would persevere at her painting for a few more years in the false hope that thing would look up, which they most definitely wouldn’t, and, after adding and dividing all the emotions of her ‘artistic phase’ would come up with an average of disappointment, deciding, then, forlornly to return to teaching (at which, you are sure, she was equally inept) except that having spent so many years away from the profession she would get a job only as a classroom assistant, which would add to her sense of failure.

‘That’s what I keep on telling her. You give up too easily, my girl,’ Sebastian’s pat on his wife’s bottom is almost a slap.

You are beginning to lose interest in the conversation and are looking for a way to escape. Just then someone taps on your shoulder. It is Patrick.

‘Hi Gary,’ you say. ‘You still here?’

‘Patrick. I just wanted to ask whether I could get you something.’

‘That’s very kind of you Gar…Patrick, thanks. I wouldn’t mind bitter shandy.’

‘How was the spiced ale?’

‘Dreadful. Undrinkable. Horse-pee would taste better,’ you say. The ale is excellent.

‘Oh! I was going to try it.’ Patrick sounds disappointed.

‘Don’t even think of it.’

Patrick mutters and nods as if his worst suspicions about the human kind have just been unequivocally confirmed, and trundles along to the bar. You wonder whether Natalie would remember your name; then realize that you did not actually tell her your name; then accept the fact that even if you had told her your name it wasn’t likely that she would remember it; and, finally, counterbalance this bitter truth with the solacing thought that if her breasts were half a size smaller, you probably wouldn’t remember hers.

You are painfully nudged in your ribs. It is Maria. She is cackling. ‘Joe asked me to keep you on a tight leash. He is worried you will rearrange the furniture and all the decoration before the night is over.’

I shall certainly rearrange the facial architecture of that cretin. You say, ‘Does Joe own this pub?’

‘Don’t be silly. He just works on the bar.’

‘What does he do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s his job?’

‘This is his job.’

‘Are you saying,’ you say, appearing to weigh your words, ‘this is Joe’s full-time job? I see.’

‘Yes. And he is very happy in it. There are cleverer people like you to solve the world’s problems,’ Maria retaliates.

‘Well, as you said, he is happy doing it. That’s what is important. You have to have that inner happiness. Not everyone knows or accepts what he is good at.’

This seems to pacify Maria, as you expect; she is a bit thick, and not very good at ferreting out hidden insults.

Patrick comes back with bitter-shandy.

‘Thank you . . .’ you pause. Patrick waits. An unpleasant, truculent look comes over his unattractive face. ‘Patrick,’ you conclude. You note with satisfaction that he hasgot a pint of Fosters for himself.

Bette gets up from the chair, which cries out in an excruciating pain-relief. Betty, you notice, is wearing a tight skirt (an unfortunate choice of garment, you have always thought, if one is carrying extra ballast behind), which shows her mammalian thighs and large ugly feet to terrible disadvantage. She is not a site for sore stomachs, Betty.

‘You are a one to talk about keeping others on a tight leash,’ she says to Maria. ‘She can’t hold her drink, this one. I have never been out for the evening when she hasn’t vomited after a few drinks.’

‘I have got a sensitive stomach,’ says Maria, probably her idea of a witty remark.

‘Will you please rush to the loo at the first taste of bile in your mouth, because I have a sensitive nose?’ you say.

‘Why are you so horrid?’ asks Maria.

‘Don’t be horrid to Maria,’ says fat Betty.

‘I am just being practical,’ you say.

‘I went out with Fay last night,’ says Maria to no one in particular.

‘Do you spend any evenings at home at all?’ you ask.

‘Don’t listen to him, pet,’ says fat Betty. ‘He is being awkward.’

‘Anyway, as I was saying, I was speaking to Fay last night . . .’ continues Maria.

You look around. The pub is slowly getting filled by the usual cavalcade of curios one sees in such establishments. An old man with enormous belly and fantastically chromatic nose—is it Rhinophyma? You wonder—from either side of which spreads a dense network of burst capillaries, merging into the unhealthy drinker’s flush on his cheeks. He stands, legs wide apart, arms akimbo, next to our group; casts several glances in the direction of Betty’s buzukas, then looks away.

‘Two years,’ you say aloud.

‘What?’ It is Patrick, standing next to me, making this query.

‘I wasn’t speaking to you.’

‘Yeh, but… What were you saying?’

‘When you look at that fat edentate, what do you see?’ You ask Patrick.

‘A fat what?’

‘Never mind that. What do you see when you look at him?’

‘I see a guy who has come to the pub for a drink. He just wants to have a good time. What do you see?’

‘I see gluttony, greed, sloth, and indecent avarice. And he shall meet his comeuppance.’

‘How?’ Patrick asks.

‘A coronary if he is lucky. A stroke, if he isn’t. That will reduce him to incontinent cabbage. Do you think he will still drag his sorry arse, smelling of urine, here, to have a good time?’ You scowl at Patrick intensely.

Patrick opens his mouth to say something, then closes it again. ‘I’ll get myself another drink,’ he murmurs, and slinks away.

You begin looking around again. A gaggle of mouth-breathers had collected near us. One of the thicos is regaling his mates with the hilarious story of the shit someone called Gerry got into when his bird caught him at it with another bird. Next to him is standing a woman who is giggling as if she were sixteen, but, judging by the dried-cod texture of her skin, she was probably past it when the Beatles were playing.

Just then you hear the word ‘prostitute’ and turn your attention to Maria. Maria is still going on about Fay, who, it turns out, was working for some charity that works with ‘sex-workers’, the politically correct phrase for tarts, to improve their lives and reduce risks to their health.

‘But, wouldn’t the risks be reduced if these unfortunate women stopped prostituting, and got decent jobs, like the rest of us?’ You ask.

‘It’s not as simple as that. Not everyone is born lucky, like you, who get everything laid out for them on a platter. It is a complex issue. These women lead shitty lives, and what they don’t need is ignorant comments from the privileged, smart-arse middle classes.’

Maria then gives you a lecture about how it is not easy life being a prostitute. Apparently sucking every cock on the street is a lonely and dangerous way to live. It takes courage.

‘Let’s have some music,’ says Betty and bends forward towards the jukebox, her rump sticking out and her skirt pushed further up her thighs. You look around to see what the old geezer is up to, hoping that he is looking at Betty’s buttocks and that the excitement would bring the coronary there and then. But he is near the bar, leering at Natalie who, out of a sense of charity, appears to be humouring him.

‘Do you have any recommendation?’ Betty asks me.

‘Bad Company.’

‘Oh! Do you like them?’

‘Can’t stand the bastards.’

‘Why do you want me to put them on, then?’

‘Seems appropriate for the occasion.’

‘Oh, you are wicked, you are,’ Betty’s double chin mutates into quadruple-chin as she cackles.

The song begins. a woman starts wailing why nobody loves her. Probably because you wouldn’t stop singing you think to yourself. You are beginning to get a headache. You look at your watch and are amazed to notice that two hours have passed. Betty is dancing, if that is not a hyperbole to describe the laborious, elephantine shuffling of her feet while rooted to the same spot. Her face is turned upwards towards the ceiling, her eyes are shut tight, and she is silently mouthing the words of the banshee’s song. ‘The silly cow actually knows the lyrics’ You wonder in amazement. Sebastian is gesticulating, and appears to be speaking animatedly, no doubt boasting about how he won a super-deal for the company, lamenting at the same time how is talent goes unrecognised despite years of service. Jocasta, his talentless wife who can’t paint (and probably can’t teach) is looking increasingly mournful. Joe has joined the group, grinning about God knows what as he listens to Sebastian’s boasts. Patrick is nowhere to be seen.

‘OK guys, I shall disappear now,’ you say.

‘Oh!’ say Maria. ‘We are thinking of going clubbing after this. Don’t you want to come?’

‘I’d love to, but I don’t have a low-life visa.’ You say.

Betty wakes up from her reverie. ‘Are you going then? Give the old girl a kiss, then’ she spreads her arms.

‘You are not old, Betty,’ you say.

‘Oh, you are sweet.’

‘You still have a couple of years before you’ll need to be shot.’

‘There he goes again. What do we do with him?’ Betty surges forward, bounces you against her breasts, and plants a slobbery kiss on your cheek, her boozy breath clearing your sinuses.

‘You should do this more often. This is real life, not in your office in front of the computer. You meet real people here,’ shouts Sebastian.

‘Thanks for the advice,’ you say. ‘And you don’t forget to give a good shake or two when you are in the loo, so that you don’t come out with wet undies.’ And you walk out into the night.

Book of the Month: House of Meetings (Martin Amis)

In recent years Martin Amis has been preoccupied with many a weighty matter on which he has written at length, attracting approbation and hostility in equal measures. It feels as though Amis has decided that the rich subject matters of his earlier, incisive, satires—the world of upwardly mobile, Baby Boomer generation—are not weighty enough. He is a writer in search of gravitas.

House of Meetings is Martin Amis’s 11th novel, and it is about, in keeping with Amis’s recent preoccupations (or fascination)—he published a work of non-fiction on Stalin (Koba the Dread) a few years ago—, Russia during the Soviet epoch. More precisely it is about, a large part of it anyway, Russian Gulags, or the slave-camps, in which millions, all Soviet citizens, were incarcerated. It seems that the fierce condemnation of Stalin that was Koba the dread was not quite enough to exorcise the demons—what demons, some might inquire, can someone of Amis’s privileged English background have in connection with a system, of which neither he nor anyone in his family had any experience—and after five years, he has disgorged House of Meetings, the fictional companion to Koba the Dread. It is either that or Amis, going through a creative hiatus after his entertaining (and unfairly panned) Yellow Dog, has hacked out a novel from the material he gathered while researching for Koba the Dread.

The novel is a letter written by an unnamed ‘foul-tempered and vile-mouthed’ octogenarian—he prefers to say, tongue firmly lodged in cheek, that he is in his high eighties, and not in late eighties because of the unfortunate connotations of the word ‘late’—as a long communiqué to his step-daughter. The narrator, who has made a fortune in America, is visiting his mother country. He is travelling on a cruise-ship, up the Yenisei River from Krasnoyarsk and across the Arctic Circle, to Predposylov (a fictional city based on Norilsk), on the outskirts of which, on the slopes of Mount Schweinsteiger, was situated one of the gulags, Norlog, where he was incarcerated for years with his half-brother, Lev. This, as the narrator informs his step-daughter in the first few pages, is a love-story; it involves the two brothers and a Jewess whom both of them love. The narrator is no hero. As a young man, he informs without any trace of remorse, he raped his way, as a member of the rapacious Red army, through East Germany, and received decoration for his bravery. At the end of the war, during one of Stalin’s last waves of terror, he is declared, on the flimsiest of evidence, an enemy of the state and is transported to the gulags in Siberia. Just before his incarceration he falls in love, contrary to what even he admits as his base nature, with a young vivacious Jewess, Zoya, though his passion remains unrequited. Within two years he is joined in the gulags by his half-brother, who, the narrator is inwardly mortified to learn, has married Zoya. The two brothers are released from the gulags in the mid-fifties during the (relatively) liberal Khrushchev era as non-entities. For three years before their release, Zoya has been visiting Lev, travelling all the way from Moscow to the slave-camp, along with other wives of men incarcerated in the gulags, to the eponymous ‘House of Meetings’. Lev and Zoya get back together, but things don’t work out and they separate within a few years. They both get remarried; she to a man considerably older than her—the narrator suspects for his money—who has been in his youth a literary apologist for the Stalinistic regime and has been suitably rewarded; he to a shy young woman the narrator suspects to be a virgin. He has a son, who, predictably, gets killed in the Afghan war in the eighties. Soon after, Lev dies. The narrator, who has amassed considerable wealth in the preceding years, has decided to immigrate to America. Before his departure he meets Zoya who is still married to the old man and is spending more and more time of the day under the influence of alcohol. Zoya rejects the narrator’s proposal to accompany him to America, but comes to his hotel room, later, where, when she is practically comatose with alcohol he rapes her. The book ends with the old narrator dying in a hospice of an immune deficiency syndrome.

Martin Amis, like his father, started of as a comic novelist and writer of social satires. Both of them made their names and reputations with novels that were quintessentially English, Kingsley Amis perhaps more so than Martin, although both, from time to time, have moved into what a critic once described as other countries. For Sir Kingsley, the ‘other country’ was mostly metaphorical—in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Amis pere tried other genres such as horror and science fiction, the latter being a long-standing interest, with mixed success, before returning to, with Jake’s Thing, the terra firma of social comedy, from which he saw no reason to veer till the end—whereas for the son, the ‘other country’ has been metaphorical as well as literal. In his 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow, Amis took on the subject of Holocaust, a daring act for an English novelist, who was born four years after the Second World War, and had no personal connection to the genocide. There are those who believe that it is impossible to capture the full horror of the Holocaust, which was beyond imagination, in a novel, certainly not when the novelist has no personal experience of the horror. But Amis pulled it off, not least by the cunning device of having his protagonist live his life backward, from an all-American citizen in the present day to a newborn German baby in the young century, with visits in between to the death camps, where he had played a not insignificant role. Time’s Arrow remains, together with Schindler’s List (Arc), one of the very few novels written in original English on the subject of Holocaust. In some ways its achievement is greater than that of ‘Schindler’s Arc’ for which Thomas Kenneally won the Booker award—Time’s Arrow, too was short-listed for the Booker, only to be pipped at the post by ‘The English Patient’ and ‘Sacred Hunger’—in that it was a total fiction—the protagonist was a creation of Amis—unlike Schindler’s List, which was a fictionalised account of the heroics of Oscar Schindler. Time’s Arrow was a departure from the novels Amis had published till then, not only in respect of its subject matter but also its prose-style.

In the interviews he gave at the time of the publication of Time’s Arrow, Amis insisted that the novel was one of a kind, that he was essentially a comic novelist and not a political one. The subtext was: Amis had no intention of jettisoning the genre and style that had made his reputation as one of the outstanding comic novelists writing in English. His two subsequent full-fledged novels, ‘Information’ and the vastly underrated Yellow Dog saw him returning to his old style with his trademark fizzy language, which, as one critic (aptly) described, had a domino effect—‘one word or phrase nudging the next into motion and prose zooming along.’ During this period he also published his highly acclaimed memoirs, Experience which examined his relationship with Kinglsey Amis, and the cruelly and harshly reviled Koba the Dread. And now, with House of Meetings, he has decided to dip his toes in the waters of one of the dark chapters of twentieth century history: Stalin’s gulags.

House of Meeting, at one level, boasts of some of the distinctive features—peculiarities for some—that one associates with a Martin Amis novel, particularly intellectual violence. The protagonist is not a character most readers would warm up to: a multiple rapist, who lusts after his brother’s wife (and rapes her, too, when she is vulnerable after his brother’s death), makes his wealth using dishonest means, and legs it to America in the 1980s. The harshness and the daily barbarities of the Gulags are described starkly with no punches pulled. While there are occasional surges of linguistic vibrancy—Amis’s coruscating and sardonic wit shines brilliantly, for example, when he describes the wars between ‘the brutes and the bitches’ in the gulags; it also leaves the readers awestruck, and not only at the excellence of writing— that has won Amis many admirers, the tone, overall, in keeping with the sombre subject-matter, is more measured and subdued. The language, for most part, is sparse, almost minimalist, and, accustomed as one has become to Amis’s customary explosive literary flourishes, it takes some time to get used to the pared-to-the bone style of House of Meetings. It also has a curious effect of disconnecting the readers from the pathos of the story. It is not easy to convey poignancy using this style, which, one suspects, does not come naturally to Amis, unlike, say, Beryl Bainbridge or Muriel Spark. Was Amis responding to the unnecessarily harsh criticism his last novel, Yellow Dog, with its ‘gratuitous word-play’, was subjected to from some quarters?

At less than 200 pages (paperback edition) this is a slender novel, and there are times when the readers may be left with a feeling that Amis is shoehorning too many themes. Therein lies, I think, its drawback: unlike the audacious ‘Time’s Arrow’, it tends to lose its focus at times. Although the narrator declares at the beginning that it is a love-story, it is not just that: it is also a commentary on Russia, and what the narrator describes as its slow decay, firstly under the stifling Communism, and later, under the post-Soviet corruption and chaos. From time to time, true historical events and their descriptions are thrown in for good measure. The diverse, albeit related, elements that form this conglomerate do not always gel effectively; they add very little to the narrative flow, indeed, at times, prove to be annoying distractions.. The narrator’s animadversion of the successive Soviet regimes—Stalin, Khrushchev, and Breznev—is too American in its intellectual posture. It is Amis, the Westerner with his comfortable, upper-middle-class heritage, who is criticising, and not the survivor of the gulags. You are hard pressed to believe that the narrator is a Russian (albeit a one who has lived for more than a decade in the West) and that Russian is his first language. He does not strike as a real character. It is almost as though Amis, preoccupied with moralistic fastidiousness, has little interest in verisimilitude.

In one of Kingsley Amis’s early novels, That Uncertain Feeling, is a passage where the hero classifies the books on his bookshelves into four categories: books which would tell him what he knew already; books which he couldn’t understand; books which wrote things he knew to be untrue; and books which told what he did not want to be told about—“especially that”. It might be argued that ‘House of Meetings’, which, as Amis has openly acknowledged, derives its inspiration from several recent works of non-fiction on this grim subject—the title itself seems to have been inspired by descriptions in Ann Applebaum’s excellent ‘Gulag’ of the designated place of assignation for the men in slave camps and the few wives who made the journey, having been unofficially allowed visits in Khrushchev’s regime to spend a night with them, and some of the experiences of Lev seem to have taken from, with insignificant alterations, from Janusz Bardach’s memoirs Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag—the fictional narrator even recommends this book to his fictional niece—, tells what those interested in the subject already know (barbarities in the gulags), and many others may not want to know (barbarities in the gulags).

House of Meetings is Amis’s bleakest book. It has its moments, but leaves the reader untouched and unsatisfied. It is not quite the epic it aspires to be. In a recent interview Amis announced that his next novel will be autobiographical and ‘everyone will hate me again.’ I certainly hope so. I should rather be hated than pitied as a writer past his sell-by-date. We await the return of Amis of the old.