A Division of the Light: Christopher Burns

This novel is exquisitely written - a masterclass in understated narrative.  It's a clever book and, for the reader, a difficult book - there's already a one star review on GoodReads from someone who had expected it to be a thriller.  A Division of the Light is not about plot - more about ideas - and the characters move on wires manipulated by the necessity of developing those ideas, playing out the central premise of the novel.

Are our lives controlled - are events 'meant' - or are we at the mercy of random forces?  When Alice Fell decides to walk down a different street and is mugged, she is photographed by Gregory Pharaoh, also there by chance on his way home from an assignment.  It is the beginning of an obsession, and a collision with the elemental forces that recur like motifs throughout the book.  The patterns in the narrative echo the patterns of light Gregory plays with in his photographs.  How much of what we see is merely illusion?  How do we know what is true?

This is a difficult feat for a writer to bring off - a novel of ideas, a narrative of patterns, dependent on the interplay of three characters who are essentially unlikeable.  Alice is a manipulative ball-breaker who uses her sexual power over men and always stops short of commitment.  Her boyfriend Thomas is so lacking in self-confidence and motivation he has made Alice the whole of his world and in so doing, undermined any security he had left.  Gregory is selfish, egotistical, dispassionate, used to getting exactly what he wants, and holding the world at the other end of his camera lens.  His values are pictorial values.

The onmiscient narrator maintains a distance, wide angle, occasionally zooming in on some small detail - a triangle of light at the base of Alice's throat, the way lead melts and flows like lava from a burning building, the way shadow outlines the anonymous bones in an ossuary.  The narrator, like the photographer, controls what we see.  There are continual parrallels between photography and writing.  Is it legitimate for Gregory to photograph his dying wife?  We feel immediate revulsion, but is that any worse than writing about it?  We need some kind of record to stave off the terrible anonymity of death.

This is the question Alice faces in the ossuary where she goes to help Gregory set up a photo-shoot.  Initially disturbed by the collection of bones, she comes to view it as 'a library of the dead, an assembly of untitled books whose pages had all been ripped out and scattered.  It was both a memorial and a prophecy.  Death was an inescapable solvent that stripped away personality, history and identity.  These people, whoever they were, whichever sex they had been, had left nothing behind but their bones.  Their lives had vanished without an entry in a ledger, or name on a gravestone, and, most cruelly of all, without an image'.

At the end of the novel I was full of admiration - the technique is faultless, the narrative arc perfectly resolved, but it left me curiously unsatisfied.  I would have liked passion, to have warmed to one or other of the characters.  But that is a purely personal response. As Gregory remarks in the book 'passion is no guarantor of truth'.  I suspect that the novel fulfils its author's intentions and it isn't up me to wish it any different.

Christopher Burns has had a rough ride as an author.  Last published in 1996, his five previous novels were celebrated - Whitbread prize novels.   But, like many of us, he was a victim of the mid-list slaughter among publishers and agents.  It is terrible for an author, praised, well reviewed, writing good books and led to believe that they are on the verge of something even bigger, suddenly to find one day, without warning, that agents turn the cold shoulder and publishers no longer want to know you.  The damage this does to a creative ego can't be underestimated.   But Chris has persevered and kept on writing, through all the bad times, and has finally found a small, literary publisher, Quercus, who values what he does.   He is also a superb short story writer (About the Body) and has a chapbook Lexicon recently published by NightJar press.

The Return of Captain John Emmett: Elizabeth Speller

I bought The Return of Captain John Emmett and began to read it believing it to be  literary fiction.  I was quite surprised (and pleased) to find it morph into a thriller.  Laurence Bartram's life, like thousands of others, has been dislocated by the first world war, and his mind too has been affected by personal trauma.  As the narrator remarks 'Extreme violence changes everything.'   When he's approached by a young woman who asks him to try to find the truth behind her brother's suicide, Laurence agrees partly because his life is empty and partly because the boys had been childhood friends.  Very soon he realises that there is more to John Emmett's death than has ever been acknowledged.  A series of killings, beginning with the death of a young officer on the front line, comes to light and Laurence is drawn into a complicated, dangerous investigation where nothing is quite what it seems.  As Laurence says to his friend Charles,  'I didn't know it wasn't going to be simple.  It isn't like your storybook sleuths.  Everybody isn't either good or bad, with clues and a tidy solution to be unravelled.  Everything here goes round in circles.'

I enjoyed the novel;  the period atmosphere is beautifully evoked and it's well paced and plotted.  It kept me guessing too - just when I thought I had an inkling about who the perpetrator was, the ground shifted under me.   There was only one reservation.  The prose is curiously dispassionate - though this may be intentional - echoing the emotional detachment of the narrator.  It was all very careful and elegant - something you can admire yet not be moved by.  I would have liked to be more involved.

This is Elizabeth Speller's first novel.  She wrote a memoir, which I read a couple of years ago, called The Sunlight on the Garden, about her difficult childhood.  That, too, had a certain detachment that prevented me from being emotionally involved with the characters in it. So perhaps this coolness is a characteristic of the author's prose.   Odd, because Elizabeth is a brilliant poet who has won several prizes for her poetry, which you can read online on her website.

Although this is literary crime fiction, there are several elements of the classic crime novel  in The Return of Captain John Emmett - the lonely, slightly awkward, male detective who has an upper-class sidekick who goes fact finding - in this story it's the old school chum Charles with his private income and high-powered sports car.    The open ending leads me to believe that Laurence and Charles will be problem solving again quite soon.  And I will be happily reading on, though not quite as enthusiastically as I read Kate Atkinson or Ann Zouroudi.

The novel is already a best seller, but the author has had a great deal of help to get this far.   In the acknowledgements she admits to being 'extremely grateful' to her agent and the two assistants who apparently helped to get 'the first draft of this book to a state where it could be considered a novel.'  She also thanks Lenni Goodings at Virago for 'her confidence and continued investment' which were 'hugely encouraging'.    A copy-editor and another publisher's editor are also thanked for 'pushing the book forward', not to mention the assistance of Richard Holmes.   Publishing isn't a level playing field these days.  I wonder how many other brilliant first novels are out there, being lamented by talented writers who don't have that kind of support network.   This may sound rather ungracious, but it's a fact of modern publishing.  Who you know is important and having an enthusiastic agent is essential if you want to be hyped into best-sellerdom.

Roz Morris: My Memories of a Future Life

My Monthly Indie E-book.

I'm having a lot of fun trawling through the world of independently published E-books and finding some brilliant reads.   Like hard-copy books, there's a deep morass of crap to wade through, but the cream has a habit of rising to the top. I rely on recommendations.  There are now several E-book review sites to help you choose,  including Cally Wight's new Indie E-Book Review,    and the Indie E-book Collective on the amazing Good Reads review site is fantastic.  Amazon's Kindle reviews are also useful - if a book has more than 20 five star reviews, they can't all be written by the author's family - can they? 

Roz Morris is a best-selling children's author and ghost-writer under a number of alias's.  She moonlights on her own account, writing literary fiction with a twist, and has opted to publish her adult novels herself as E-books after finding her publishers less than keen to support her change of tack.  Why they didn't want this one is beyond me! Apparently they didn't like the para-normal element.  Still, it's out-selling many of the conventionally published books on Amazon at the moment, so that must make Roz smile all the way to the bank.   

My Memories of a Future Life explores the world of professional classical musicians and the less respectable world of the mediums/spiritual healers who specialise in regressing people through their past lives.  Roz Morris' original take on this was, what if, under hypnosis, the subject wanders into a future life?   ‘I thought .....   Who would do that? Why? What would they find?'    Having read Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, which also explores the murky lives of charlatans preying on the vulnerability of their clients, I was quite intrigued by the subject matter.    What I got was a first class page-turner.

It's a romance and thriller woven together.  Some reviewers have compared it to the The Time Traveller's Wife.   The writing is strong and original and the plot really carries you along.  As a writer who has suffered from RSI, I really could empathise with Carol, a gifted pianist whose wrists hurt too much to play and who doesn't know what else to do with her life.  Through her flatmate she comes into contact with a spiritualist healer and begins to experience the dark underworld of the paranormal.  She is thoroughly sceptical and manages to keep her common sense intact while her life suffers a number of earthquake moments.  It was an excellent read.

Thin Paths by Julia Blackburn

I love Julia Blackburn's work - her biography/memoir 'Daisy Bates in the Desert' is one of my favourite books.  Add to that the fact that I live much of the year in an Italian mountain village not far from Julia's home in Liguria and you can see why Thin Paths - Journeys in and around an Italian Village was a must for me to read.

My partner loves climbing mountains, so we've been exploring the 'thin paths' that spread like a spider's web over the slopes for several years now.  These paths are very old, some of them are paved and walled and date back to Etruscan or Roman times.   This one is a carefully constructed series of stone steps.

 Often they lead to abandoned hamlets of stone houses high on the mountain-side - now ruined and overgrown,  but which used to be inhabited every summer when livestock was brought up to the high summer pastures.

Some were permanently inhabited by people who lived, precariously, off the land.  Inside, oddments of furniture still rot in rooms exposed to the elements, cattle chains and implements dangle from rusty hooks.  You get glimpses of an old way of life, gone for ever.

There are also other, less pleasant, memorials here.  Crude metal crosses, shrines, stones roughly inscribed with names, that mark the places where men were killed during the brutal civil war in 1944/5 between the fascists (both German and Italian) and the partisans (mostly peasants trying to protect their homes, crops and their way of life).   Communities up here are scarred forever by it - still living beside families who took the other side, or who betrayed friends or relatives.  Terrible things happened which those over 70 still remember witnessing. 

Julia records her own exploration of her village in Liguria and the paths that wind their way up into the mountains.  She records her neighbour's stories; finds the caves they hid in, visits the ruined villages where they were born.  At one point she discovers an entire abandoned hamlet with clothes still in the closets and crockery in the cupboards, left to mice and bats and the predations of the weather.  She has encounters with wild boar, salamanders and snakes.   The book began as a series of pieces commissioned for BBC radio and is composed of journal entries and essays which some reviewers have criticised for being too fragmentary.  It's true that it leads to a certain amount of repetition, but I didn't find that a problem.

What does come out of the book is the terrible hardship of the lives these people lived.  Yet they loved the landscape so much they were often unable to settle in the coastal towns they moved to after the war to get work.

I definitely recommend this book as a window on Italian life.

Two Thrillers: Jar City and Before I go to Sleep

Jar City: Arnaldur Indridasun
As a fan of the Killing, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Wallander, I was delighted to find a new Just-South-of-the-Arctic-Circle  author.  Arnaldur Indridason is Icelandic and his books are set on this cold northern island with its long dark winters, twenty four hour summer days and an inward-looking population of only about 300,000 people.  Jar City is  brutal, absolutely convincing and compellingly written.  I like his characters - the morose detective whose wife divorced him years earlier; the daughter who suffers from drug addiction;  his female side-kick, and the cast of strange characters who inhabit isolated, wind-blown hamlets on the edge of the ocean.

Jar City is a lab which contains biological specimens.   When a middle-aged man is found murdered in his flat with no obvious suspects, a photograph suggests a link to the death of a small girl many years earlier (no it's not about child abuse!).   The solution to the murder and the link, lies in Jar City, courtesy of a rogue pathologist.

The book became a film a few years ago which was a Guardian/Observer film of the week and got four stars from Rotten Tomatoes.  I immediately obtained a copy of the film and watched it, but if I hadn't read the book first I would have found the film quite confusing.

Jar City is the first in a series and I'll definitely be reading more of Indridason's work.

Before I go to Sleep: S J Watson
This is a really excellent thriller.  Although the idea of using amnesia as a device has been employed several times before, the plot still had originality.  A woman wakes up every morning, with no idea who she is, or the identity of the man beside her. Every evening when she goes to sleep she knows that she will forget everything that happened during that day.

‘As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I’m still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me …’

 Every morning the man who shares Christine's bed tells her the story of her life so far and she has to believe him because she has no memories to contradict him.....    Cue, danger!


But there is also a doctor in her life, one who is convinced that her condition is curable.  He encourages her to keep a secret journal and telephones her every morning to tell her where to find it.  Without a memory, Christine is vulnerable, unable to make rational decisions, unable to know whether what she is being told is true.  Her journal is the only record of her life that she can trust.  And the story it begins to unfold is shocking and unexpected. 

S.J. Watson is a product of the new Faber academy for writers - it will be interesting to see how many of them make it into the best-seller charts the way this book has.  I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, found it convincing, and will happily read anything else by S.J. Watson. 

Martin Figura: Whistle

I’ve often been disappointed by poetry cabaret performances at literature festivals - so often over-acted, precious, amateurish, with a lack of balance between poetry and cyber-technology - it’s rare to see something really good. So I approached ‘Whistle’ with a degree of scepticism. And was unprepared to be blown away by it.

It’s very low-tech - a video projector unobtrusively parked, a stage with low lighting, a screen for the black and white images. Martin Figura came on-stage and stood, equally unobtrusively, behind the microphone in the shadows at the side of the screen, dressed in black and white. He began to speak and the images began to flicker across the screen and I was immediately lost in the story.

My mother and I pose in Sunday best
in front of a cottage with roses
around the door. She dreams .....

The performance is a blend of poems, letters read by a female voice (his wife, the poet Helen Ivory), and his own narrative links. There are no pyrotechnics, no special effects, no emotions except those generated by the words themselves and their relationships with the images. I was moved, delighted, saddened, and moved again by the story that unfolded.

When Martin was 9 his father, a polish refugee who came to Britain during the war, murdered Martin’s mother.

‘Through the wall, it causes no more than a ripple
on the surface of milk....’

His father - diagnosed with mental health problems - was placed in Broadmoor, and Martin and his two sisters were consigned to boarding schools and orphanages after an uncle and aunt decided they couldn’t give them a home. Salvation came in the shape of the Piggotts - a large catholic family who had been neighbours and who rescued Martin from school to bring him up as one of their own brood.

‘Taken prisoner by this bashing, clouting clan. Jammed between
Danny and John, the second and third boys with their shock
white hair and flying fists. Dragged through lanes and hedges
into ponds and up trees for birds’ eggs. ......
Flying over fields on the Honda fifty, being chased
by the mad dog. The mad dog burying bones in your bed;
hurling itself downstairs.......
Family parties at the drop of a hat: party cans and egg-
rolls, trifles and crisps, hokey-cokeys and terrible dancing
to Status Quo.....'

The poems try to claim fragments of memory to bring his mother June to life. There are a few black and white photographs of her as a young woman, a young wife, quotes from her letters, a glimpse of her daily life.

Her own face appears in the furniture.
She shines small brass animals back to life.
A tiny kitchen disappears into the mist

of an afternoon. A sponge cake rises
behind the oven door. He watches
the last slow hour on the factory clock.

... we can nurse baby for half an hour and then you must put him to bed. I insist on this as I want him to know his Daddy as much as me. He must grow up to love us equally. We must give him a good life so he will be proud of us.

Poems reconstruct a family history, trace the rehabilitation of Martin’s father, and the awkward attempts at a relationship after his release.

The girl I’m going to marry
sits with a cup of tea on her lap
while Dad fusses over the gravy,
peels the potatoes under the tap.....

It’s a stunning show because it’s so honest and doesn’t try to push any buttons. There are just the words and the images. Martin is also a photographer, so he knows how to use visual imagery.

I bought the collection, published by Arrowhead Press, so that I could read the poems again. And as I read, I can see the images floating through my head. What it would be like to read the poems without those images, I don’t know, but I have a feeling that they still stand up. Poetry as narrative autobiography is rare - and even rarer when it works as this does. Whistle has won awards, notably at the Edinburgh Festival, and it deserves them.

Martin Figura 'Strange Boy' is my Tuesday Poem over at http://www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

Clips from the show   http://www.martinfigura.co.uk/whistle-clips/

Martin’s website   http://www.martinfigura.co.uk/

Buy the book here:   http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/whistle.html   

Freedom: Jonathan Franzen

Freedom is a highly political book - not that Franzen's other books aren’t - but this is very obviously a ‘state of America today’ family fable - as the Time reviewer puts it 'he shows us how we are'.  Which I find quite pretentious, because  - shouldn't every contemporary novel reflect how we are in some way or other?  What's so special about this one? I want to ask.  And I don't just want to be instructed or admonished, I want to be entertained, moved, shaken out of my socks with sheer joy.

The novel is centred around an American family - not necessarily typical.  Patty is the daughter of a New York politician and her successful businessman husband.  They have four children - all expected to be high achievers.  Patty is a sports star but, curiously, her parents aren’t interested in her or her achievements at all, so caught up in their own lives they don’t even have time to watch her play.  When Patty is raped in high school by a prominent citizen’s son,  their response is all about damage limitation rather than her emotional well-being.

When an accident cuts short her career while she’s still at college she marries - not the rock musician she lusts after - but his best friend - the caring, altruistic, save-the-planet, law student Walter, who idolises her.

Things work out as badly as you might expect.  Their children grow up as screwed up as their parents, and the marriage gradually unravels, against a background of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Haliburton, and skulduggery in high (and low) places.

Walter heads a conservation project that’s a front for coal mining and mineral extraction, and his son Joey gets involved in a dodgy, but lucrative, project selling vehicles to the military for use in Iraq.

The funniest scene in the book is when Joey, who has made a crazy secret teenage marriage, accidentally swallows his wedding ring just as he’s about to embark on a weekend of guilt-ridden adultery, and has to extract the ring from his turds in a hotel bathroom - it brings a whole new meaning to the expression ‘a dirty weekend’!

The style of the book didn’t appeal to me though - it’s narrated in a very old fashioned 'told story' way - and I was sometimes bored by the long political conversations that the characters have with each other - but this is Jonathan Franzen.  He writes compellingly and his characters are always fascinating and three dimensional.

The story is told, like The Corrections, from the point of view of each character in turn, but unlike The Corrections, the voices are not really distinct from each other, but told by the impersonal narrative voice I found frustrating because it distanced me from the people I was reading about and whose heads I was supposed to be in.

But it is compelling and I read to the end (though I skipped through some of the conversations).  I’m afraid I didn’t believe the ‘happy-ever-after’ ending, but that probably has to do with the fact that the plot echoes episodes in my own personal history.  I empathised with battery-chicken Patty, whose legs and wings atrophy as she tries to make her marriage work, and I cheered her on when she finally grasped freedom.  But at the end of the book I was shouting ‘don’t do it’, with all the wisdom of experience.

This novel isn’t JF's best book, but it’s still seriously good.  Incidentally,  Jonathan Franzen’s controversial ideas about the E-book were aired on Norman Geras’ blog today.  Interesting, considering the fact that I read the book on my Kindle!