Week Forty-Two - Jeanette

The End Of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas (2006)

Recommended by Ian

My friend George was at something called a ‘Meaning Conference’ this week. She tweeted and blogged about it. I was rather taken with her thoughts and briefly entered the debate:

Yes, it’s been a very introspective month. I’ve pulled apart my innards in search of meaning within our flawed web of knowledge and, more specifically, my meaning within its strands. This isn’t a bad thing to do, per se, but usually one only does it when not feeling exactly euphoric. Thus, it’s hardly a surprise that such painstaking pondering is tinged with sadness or futility.

The heartbreakingly ironic thing is that this quest for meaning comes because we’re looking to be happy; this (for me at least) is usually an instinctive and unpredictable process, so the pursuit of it in itself brings me the absolute fucking opposite. It would have been Albert Camus’s one hundrenth birthday this week; read (from the fabulous Brainpickings site) what he has to say about happiness, sorrow, and principles. He speaks a lot of sense.

I told somebody this year that I thought the easiest path in life was the hardest in the end. Like Evelyn Waugh’s miserable depiction of relationships last week, what I saw as happening with the easy way in life was a simulacrum of happiness. How far we convince ourselves that this illusion is reality depends on our own capacity for self-deception.

Yet, during this latest bout of reflection, I’ve doubted my belief in those words. Look the part, be the part: perhaps the illusion needs to be there first, to enable the reality to quietly slink in behind it. At the same time, I’ve found that what I believe I am really feeling can be itself chimerical, no more than a forgotten scrap of paper, and perhaps especially so when that said ‘real’ feeling is concealed. When the front presented to the world doesn’t exist, the reality therefore has no reason for being at all.

If I can’t tell the difference between my own fake and real feelings, how can I expect to divine truth and lie in anyone else?

Does that even matter if I get the end result that I desire?

And is it always a physical result, with tangiable proof, that I desire?

Like I said, an introspective month. And it was with this head on that I read The End Of Mr. Y, a novel that’s Alice In Wonderland meets The Matrix meets Poststructuralism For Beginners.

It is only in the logos of metaphora that we are to find the protasis of the past, that glorious illusion which we call memory, that curtain of destiny, drawn tightly over the conscious mind but present in every fibre of being, from sea creature to man, from pebble to ocean, as Lamarck and E. Darwin have maintained. Can this place be real? Perhaps not. For this reason, it is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered.

The End Of Mr. Y is not only a book by Scarlett Thomas. The passage above is from The End Of Mr. Y by Thomas E. Lumas, a extremely rare and supposedly cursed Victorian novel. In it, the narrator relates his discovery of the ‘Troposhere’: a semi-psychic state where minds can be read, others’ experiences understood, and the impossibilities of time and space compressed.

I confess that I almost became lost in this new world, for, given access to another man’s thoughts, who would not roam endlessly within them?

Quite. The Lumas passages in this book are very good; it was an interesting and convincingly Victorian story that began with a sideshow entertainment and ended in Mr Y’s complete capitulation to the Troposphere. Thomas, when she wrote as Dumas, also showed great attention to detail – down to hyphening ‘fair-ground’ and ‘make-shift’ – and I really liked it.

Ariel Manto, PhD student specializing in the works of Dumas and historic thought experiments, mysteriously finds a copy of The End Of Mr. Y and reads it, all the while metaphorically looking over her shoulder for the curse that supposedly dogs this book. Eventually she finds out why the book is considered so dangerous, because it contains the recipe to enter the Troposphere.

                        Make the tincture in the following way:-

Combine one part Carbo Vegetabilis, that is, vegetable charcoal, in the 1,000^th centesima; homeopathic potency, with 99 parts holy water in a glass retort or flask and succuss the mixture ten times.

Carbo Vegetabilis actually exists and so Ariel makes up the drink. Who wouldn’t? I did vaguely consider doing it myself for this post, and if it had been my favourite author or even simply that the required potency had been easily available from Holland & Barratt, I would have done it in a shot. I have, after all, said Candyman five times in the mirror and would so watch the Ring video.

Ariel enters the Troposphere and hilarity doesn’t ensue. For me, and rather unfortunately since it is ninety per cent of the book, Thomas is not half as good a writer of her own story as when she’s pretending to be Dumas. It’s overlong, Ariel is an irritating protagonist, and the dialogue is, at points, very stilted. There are pages and pages of Ariel and her colleagues debating Creationism and the Theory of Relativity. Thomas often introduces fairly complicated philosophical ideas and then, lacking the courage of her convictions, tries to dumb down or clunkily explain them to the reader. There’s also a dated virtual reality feel to the story that I didn’t like.

This is a big shame because when Thomas uses ideas in a subtler and more exploratory way, the book really worked. For instance, there’s a religious undercurrent to The End Of Mr. Y, specifically dealing with prayer.

‘If they pray, I survive. If not, I go to sleep. It’s not death, exactly, but I can’t do anything impressive.’

Thomas explored this within Christian and Pagan contexts, and it really connected with my own thoughts about meaning and purpose (in a secular context). Sola Fide – ‘faith alone’ – is the Lutheran doctrine whereby a human doesn’t have to prove he or she is ‘saved’ through good works. Belief in, and acceptance of, Jesus Christ is the key thing, not external proof. Luther got a lot of stick for this – critics assumed that sola fide offered carte blanche to do whatever the fuck you wanted and still enter the Kingdom of Heaven – but Luther didn’t mean that. He meant that, if you have faith, it doesn’t need evidence for the benefit of others. Jesus Christ knows, and he is the only one that needs to. Thus, I think Luther was saying, it is the ostensible proof itself - the good deeds we may do - that are the illusions. The reality of faith can never be proved, yet it is is entirely knowable by the only force that matters in a Christian sphere.

I love Martin Luther. He was a very logical debater, a fiery-tempered tortured soul, and he nailed tracts to doors. Go to this Luther insult generator and marvel at his caustic tongue.

The other interesting idea in The End Of Mr. Y was drug use and dependence. Ariel’s tincture is not chemically addictive but she’s hooked on the experience it offers, and begins to hate being in the real world; this is, surely, a drug narrative. The real hardcore Class As like heroin and crack are killers of reality; as Renton put it so succinctly in Trainspotting, when you’re not on smack you have to worry about some football team that always fucking loses. Ariel’s trips to the Troposphere become increasingly despondent and dangerous: heroin, after all, screws you up.

This was a frustrating read, overall. So much good stuff, but it needed far more ruthlessness at the editing stage. On the other hand, perhaps it was its very laxity that allowed my mind to wander so. The book certainly gave me more fodder for rumination rather than providing an escape from it: I never would have made the sola fide analogy without it.

Blimey, this is a long post. I guess it’s been brewing for a while. But before I let you go, you have to hear about Ian. Or Crackers (to give him his full title). We met on a record nerd forum before real life, but he soon became one of my most treasured Sheffield friends. He has a very sympathetic ear and an even more sympathetic tone of voice. I love shooting the breeze with him over dark ale and lazy Sunday afternoons. Plus, like James Brown, he’s the hardest-working man in (Sheffield) showbusiness. He’s always got a night on – at the moment it’s the fabulous Jive Juice – and he is a bloody good DJ with an absolutely blinding record collection. I’ve ‘spun’ alongside him and it’s a joy (it’s also faintly embarrassing, as his skills show mine up as pure amateur hour). He has bought and passed on to me numerous awesome records. Including a disco version of Romeo and Juliet.

I’m not sure he and I have talked much about books, because it tends to be records and life. He was the final person to submit his recommendation. Classic Crackers. (In fact, he was so late that I’d devised a Plan B: to ask this really cute guy I’d seen around for a recommendation, as an in to talk to him. It was probably a good idea that Crackers came through. It might have all gone a bit Love Actually.)

Ian, I’m sorry I didn’t like this book very much. But I liked writing about it very, very much. And I liked writing about you very, very, very much.

Week Forty - Jeanette

The Politics Of Breastfeeding by Gabrielle Palmer (2009)

Recommended by Kris

I have never breastfed, nor have I ever been breastfed. (I will resist saying ‘and I turned out okay’ because, obviously, that is debatable.) Thus, my opinions of the subject are not grounded in any practical experience.

Doesn’t mean I don’t have any, though.

The benefits of breastfeeding are incontrovertible and to deny them would be stupid. I totally believe that it is a natural process and women should be supported to breastfeed both by healthcare systems and society at large (with the vested commercial interests of artificial milk companies kept at bay). However, what I do get troubled by in breastfeeding dogma is that it’s sometimes accompanied by an implicit (or even explicit) judgement against women who can’t breastfeed, or who choose not to. For me, the narrative can run perilously close to an antifeminist biology-is-destiny outlook, where a woman is expected to do nothing but serve her family.

The Politics Of Breastfeeding, I hoped, would give me an insight into how an innate procedure had become such a charged and emotive issue. Why should I feel that something that is such an intrinsic part of being female can be and is used against women?

It is clear from the outset that Palmer is far from a neutral chronicler of breastfeeding.

In this book I examine the political reasons for a situation which has a profound effect on the whole world from the major economic effects of squandering a natural resource to the individual misery of a sick child or an unhappy woman.

Political reasons analysed by Palmer include the desire of governments to support big business, gender stereotyping, exploitation of the developing world, the sexualisation of culture and, ultimately, the structure of capitalism itself.

Breastfeeding, she broadly argues, is denigrated because women are denigrated in society, partly because of their collectively lower economic contribution: child rearing, at least initially, takes women out of work. Individual men and other women can be supportive, but there is a general lack of will to change this situation because breastfeeding is also in tension with free market economies. Breastmilk, after all, regulates its own supply and demand, no money is exchanged, and it cannot be bettered by a substitute. It is thus immune to market forces – or it should be.

Much as they urge us to think otherwise, the infant feeding product companies are not philanthropic organisations, but competitive commercial enterprises. It is in their interests that women find it difficult to breastfeed.

Palmer is especially and justifiably critical of artificial milk company policies in the developing world. Here, she looks at the Nestle baby milk scandal. The company gave free samples in hospitals, using salespeople dressed as nurses on maternity wards, disrupting the appetite of the baby for breastmilk, and then – with a baby dependent on formula – began to charge for the product. Not only did this get mothers to introduce a pointless and expensive substitute, it caused infant death and disease since the immunising effect of breastmilk was lost. Read the powerful 1975 pamphlet The Baby Killer.

So, is this all of historical interest only? Since 2003, when the World Health Organisation and UNICEF published The Global Strategy For Infant And Young Child Feeding (‘the code’), all national governments have been compelled to promote breastfeeding, and this includes protecting it from aggressive unethical marketing by artificial baby food companies. However, it hasn’t stemmed marketing of breastmilk substitutes; Palmer now looks at the subtler strategies of today, both in the developed and developing world. These comply with the letter of the code, while violating its spirit. Tactics include retaining the name ‘formula’ – conferring a scientific and medical aura to the product – to the creation of ‘follow-on milk’ and its association with very happy and healthy babies. She convincingly argues that the powerful images created by adverts such as this one, below, work to undermine medical advice for exclusive breastfeeding.

A less successful argument for me was when Palmer tackled how women see their own bodies.

Her [a woman’s] perception of her own breasts may be as sexual objects. She may value them herself in this way and feel some anxiety that breastfeeding may take away their sexiness. For many women, displaying the allure of their bodies might be the one time they feel powerful.

Damn right they’re sexual objects! It’s not my perception; Palmer implies in this section that a woman who enjoys her breasts in an autoerotic way, or who loves partners exploring them, has somehow internalized a male way of looking at her body.

They [women] have been programmed to perceive suckling as a sexual activity performed by adults.

I haven’t been 'programmed' to perceive anything of the sort. It feels nice to do that.

I believe there is an argument to be made here: that the aggressive sexualised culture we are in means the breast is treated as an erotic plaything, and that breastfeeding is so troubling to some because it highlights the breast’s other (practical) fuction. But if Palmer was driving at this, she fails to express it clearly; and her near-denial of the especial sexual pleasure found in the breast is plain wrong.

I was also angered by her analysis of feminism and breastfeeding.

Some 1970s feminists had ambivalent attitudes to their bodies and reproduction. In the striving for equality, some women came to scorn birth and breastfeeding.

I absolutely disagree with this sweeping statement. Reproductive rights – from abortion to paid maternity leave – were cornerstones of 1970s feminism. The fight for women to control their own bodies encompassed supporting a woman to give birth, and to breastfeed unimpeded if she so chose. But because some women decided not to – for any number of reasons – doesn’t mean they had ‘ambivalent attitudes' to their bodies. I would say these women had a very clear attitude to their bodies. For instance, Palmer brings up Shulamith Firestone who wrote, in 1970's The Dialectic Of Sex, that reproduction and child-rearing should be as artificial as possible.

Now Firestone’s argument for laboratory reproduction is a nuanced one. It is part of her analysis of how the family, and reproduction, oppress women in culture. Creating and raising children outside of women’s bodies and the traditional family unit, Firestone argues, will help eradicate the gender differences used to subjugate. Now this wasn’t (and still isn’t) a mainstream viewpoint, but Palmer dismisses and mocks Firestone without covering her argument properly, and this does her a great disservice.

Palmer’s use of the first person, and her reliance on anecdotes alongside research, generally sat ill with me. It was more conversational than I would have liked, and the overall book structure wasn’t too logical. There were also areas that she didn’t cover that I feel would have enhanced the book: for instance, it would have been interesting to understand more about the link with cancer prevention (and to look at a different image of the breast: as a site of disease and death).

But, I’m glad I read this: I feel more informed about how breastfeeding has become imbued with dozens of meanings over the years, many of which damage women. I suppose, not being a mother, and never having talked to my own mother about this, I look at the issue from a societal point of view over a child right perspective. Seeing the strands of this book that I’ve teased out in this post confirms this.

Kris herself is very eloquent in discussions of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. I don’t always agree with her viewpoints, or she with mine (but that’s the beautiful milk of life). She more than puts her money where her mouth is: Kris works tirelessly to support women in the transition to motherhood, and helps them to experience positive birth and parenting.

I remember my favourite Kris moment. Someone trotted out the line about how people get more conservative as they become parents. Kris fixed her with a steady glance, and said that no, certainly not in her case. On the contrary, Kris said she had become more radical because parenting made her question societal ‘givens’. She thought far more about the world her daughter was now part of.

It’s really hard to stand up to inequality, especially if the first task is to convince that there even is an inequality. Those who are driven and articulate enough to do this are rare. Kris is one of them.

Week Thirty-Eight - Jeanette

 Three To See The King by Magnus Mills (2001)

Recommended by Aaron

Aaron. Wonderful Aaron, Nottingham's best drummer (well, before he moved to London), and one of my very closest friends. We met at a project centred on youth justice a few years back. I always thought he looked interesting, right from the very first meeting. By degrees, we found out that we each liked good music; I told him about Seasons They Change, he told me about his bands, at first the post-rock Souvaris...

…and, more recently, the played-on-Radio-One synth majesty of Cantaloupe.

The last time I saw Cantaloupe play live, Aaron’s movement and sound transfixed me. I’d never seen or heard him drum like that before. He’s technically excellent, but there was something else there that night. It was catharsis, and it was electrifying. This is why we produce (or attempt to produce) any kind of art, right? We seek to work through the chaos in our heads, where feelings are apt to bang around like armour-plated fleas against the inside of our skulls.

Three To See The King is a brief book, and like last week’s Explorers Of The New Century, something of a comment on the intricacies of human behaviour masquerading as a relatively simple fable.

I live in a house built entirely from tin, with four tin walls, a roof of tin, a chimney and a door. Entirely from tin.

This is the unnamed narrator who, isolated but self-sufficient, lives alone on a plain ensconced in his rather spartan tin house. There are a few others around: the ‘half-friend half-nuisance’ Simon Painter, the nearest neighbour at two miles away; plus Steve Treacle and Philip Sibling, and a couple of others beyond that.

We rarely saw each other because we preferred it like that. So was my understanding of the arrangement anyway.

At the furthest point of all is the magnetic Michael Hawkins. This fellow has grander plans than simply living in his tin house; he wants to construct a canyon tin-house community. This is particularly painful to the narrator, because living in a canyon was once his very own dream. Now here was this Michael Hawkins, who everyone loved, actually doing what he himself always aspired to. How annoying is that? One by one, the plain’s diaspora cluster around Michael Hawkins, while extra people, new settlers, arrive to help with and live in the canyon.

‘Michael’s work never ceases!’ he said. ‘Day after day he conducts operations in that canyon! It’s already deeper and wider than any of us could have ever imagined, yet still he goes on.’

Three To See The King is not as cleverly structured as Explorers Of The New Century, but there’s something more human about it. It deals with jealousy and the hard, hard, task of standing alone when everyone else is flocking around what is easiest or what is shiniest. That it does this so successfully, without bitterness or solemnity, is a great credit to its author. It has much, also, to say about the unspoken tropes of community behaviour, and how taboos and structures invisibly formulate (and can strangle).

It’s not without its flaws. I found its female characters awful, especially the shrewish Mary Petrie. In this book men are the movers and shakers, and women, at best, support them and, at worst, hold them back. It seems Mills is another author like Michael Chabon who rather thinks women are a bit of a bother to construct properly, since I can’t really see that Mills created these female archetypes as any kind of comment on gender roles here (and, if he was, it is a seriously misjudged one).

A shorter entry this time, but that's no bad thing; it befits a shorter book. And, 'FYI', I have decided to abandon the alphabetical order aspect of my remaining books (it's already been disrupted once, and do something once, and you'll do it again). Love to Jude. Amen to she and I, and you, reading the fuck out of the rest of this year.

Week Thirty-Seven - Jeanette

Explorers Of The New Century by Magnus Mills (2005)

Recommended by Hamish

            even in hiding

            the full moon

            teaches us a lesson

Hamish is a poet. The haiku I quote here are all taken from his 2009 book, Our Sweet Little Time, in which he charts a year, the year his daughter was born. The haiku are beautiful, of course. Not only paeans to his wife and daughter, and observations of the shifting rhythms of pregnancy, he speaks of a sharpened sense of season. Things will change and everything takes on a newer meaning.

            winter dusk-

            the sound of knives sharpening

            from a nearby tree

Re-reading Our Sweet Little Time in anticipation of writing this post, I experienced Hamish’s words in a way I didn’t at my first reading. No, I’m not pregnant, but yes, I do feel at a precipice. As if something is swelling within me. I find myself turning over different situations incessantly in my mind. Some are within my control, some are without, but this inner churn has heightened my perception of nature, of both its constancy and its changes. I’ve been up on Loxley Common a lot this year, sometimes to read or to walk with friends, but often, simply, to be. I feel the bracken against my legs and grab at the long grass. I went this morning. October is pinching, and the visitors to the common are fewer. The young lovers who stole kisses over the summer have returned to school, perhaps even split up; the preteens playing with water pistols and frisbees probably won’t do so next year, for they will feel too old for such uninhibited childish pursuits.

Hamish and I have now been penpals for thirteen years – not prolific correspondents, either one of us, but I value my connection with him immensely. We used to know one another in the flesh, yet the decision to sustain our acquaintance by post was exactly the right one. My relationship with him is now so pen-and-ink based it would probably feel very strange to actually speak with him. We’ve followed each other through several changes, not least geographical (the ‘I’ section in my address book is entirely him, four-times crossed out, and one current. Counting up my own house moves, I am but one behind him). I never expect to see him again, but I never expect to lose touch, either.

            sometimes the leaf

            you think is a frog

            is a frog

So I love Our Sweet Little Time. But don’t take my word for it…

            ‘Hamish Ironside understands the art of writing.’

                                                            - MAGNUS MILLS

On the evidence of Explorers Of The New Century, Magnus Mills knows whereof he speaks. This book initially seems to have much in common with The Ascent Of Rum Doodle – a clever satirical adventure tale that depicts the Imperial-era Brits with their enormous sense of entitlement writ large.

‘Very good. Now it’s far too cold to stand here making speeches. I’ve no time for such flummery, so without further ado I think we’ll make an immediate start.’

This is Johns speaking, the wayfaring leader of one set of explorers. He’s ‘not in a race with’ (is in a race with) another exploring party, led by the more austere Tostig.

Tostig raised his field glasses and continued to watch as the distant, tiny figures inched across the scree. ‘Eleven men,’ he said. ‘And two dozen mules. Roughly two dozen. Far more than he needs, I would have thought, unless he’s counting on heavy losses.’

In between moans about the perishing weather and sleeping arrangements, Tostig and Johns continue to snipe at each other – in the most gentlemanly way, of course – as the journeys progress. But where are the parties going, and for what purpose? Early on, we learn it is for some form of Scientific Enquiry, following the Transportation Theory of one Professor Childish; as we press further, we understand that the mules are nervous of the destination; and it is only when we are nearly there (at ‘the Agreed Furthest Point’) that we truly understand the full weight of the expedition.

The reveal of the story is so very very clever that I can’t possibly spoil it for you; hints along the way, tiny asides where I thought, ‘oh, that’s a bit odd, why do they care about that so much?’ all fell expertly into place. I steadfastly blundered down the wrong track for page after page, believing the book to be using magical realist strategies to make an obscure point about isolation, before I almost literally slapped my forehead in recognition at what Mills was actually doing. The use of language and manipulation of reader assumptions is extraordinary.

Although this structural brilliance is an outstanding quality of Explorers Of The New Century, what I found most intriguing was its portrayal of hope. This wasn’t very hopeful.

Without further delay, the expedition continued northward, gradually moving away from the river. Snaebjorn took the lead. The day’s journey was unremarkable, save for a small incident around about noon. During the brief twilight there was a whirr of wings high above them, as in the flight of a passing bird, and a moment later a sprig of foliage fell in their path. Snaebjorn saw it and picked it up. The sprig was withered and dry, but nevertheless its discovery brought encouragement to the entire party. All agreed that somewhere ahead the land must be green and fertile, and on this assumption they pressed forth with renewed vigour.

             But, unknown to them, the bird had lost its way.

Cutting to the quick of any investigative pursuit, whether of the body, heart or mind, Explorers Of The New Century looks at the psychological tricks we devise to sustain hope. For, without hope, how do we know we’re on the right track, even if we get a sprig of foliage dropped in our path? Is the alternative – capitulating to fear, and giving up hope – cowardly or realistic? At what point are we Macbeth, midway in our own river of blood, when to retreat is as destructive as to forge on?

            heart skipping

            a beat, flipping

            like a landed fish

Contemplating metamorphosis and journey as I am, the danger of being a landed fish looms large. In the past, my own river has surged to reclaim me; I hope, hope, that it will ever be so.

Week Thirty-Six - Jeanette

The City & The City by China Miéville (2009)

Recommended by Dan

Dan moved to London only a few weeks before I left. I knew of him, of course; he was a teenage friend of Jude (she writes of him here), and I’d often heard her talk about him, flushed with shared adventure and affection. I remember saying to Dan as I left the capital, you’re great, and I wish I could know you better.

Lovely Dan! I was right that he was great, and justified in my wish to know him better. Last time I saw him was at the Duckie club night a couple of months back: we hit the floor in rare style. Amongst the unbridled joy, I remember getting upset when Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ came on. (I love Robyn, and I love that song, but those lyrics, sweet Jesus Christ.) Jude gave me a pep-shout over the Scando beats, while Dan bestowed a glowing solidarity smile. Thus I danced (and not on my own).

I do like a cracking detective novel. I particularly enjoy the ponderous end of the genre, where everyone’s a bit dour and the author sprays the bodies with philosophy as well as gunfire. I recall reading Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow in the mid-1990s – it was the book de jour then – and being very impressed with just how expansive yet specific its plot was, the story as bleak as the Copenhagen skies.

The City & The City is – as its title spells out – similarly tied to a place. Or, rather, two places. Beszel is a metropolis somewhere at the very east of Europe, its crumbling architectural grandeur intersected with modern squalor.

Ascension Church is at the end of VulkovStrász, its windows protected by wire grilles, but some of its stained panes broken. A fish market is there every few days.

Beszel has a ‘topolganger’ city: the brasher Ul Qoma.

The Old Town of Ul Qoma was at least half transmuted these days into a financial district, curlicued wooden rooflines next to mirrored steel.

I love the concept of twin cities.

When the Yugoslav conflict was raging, and Novi Sad was always referred to with ‘war-torn’ preceding it, I truly understood the worth of the twin city theory. Novi Sad could have been Norwich. My heart ached for our city siblings over in Serbia, ethnically ripped apart, bombed, polluted, destroyed.

Beszel and Ul Qoma, however, are twinned in an altogether more fantastical way. They exist in the same geographical space, overlaid with one another. The city streets are woven, yet each space remains separate. Not quite parallel, but never integrated.

I could not fail to be aware of all the familiar places I passed grosstopically, the streets at home I regularly walked, now a whole city away, particular cafés I frequented that we passed, but in another country.

The citizens of Beszel and those of Ul Qoma are not only separated by language and custom, they are actually forbidden to acknowledge one another. If they accidentally look, they must ‘unsee’ immediately, or they breach, and breaching is punished by Breach.

Still with me? Good. What’s that you say? Not complicated enough for you?

A secret colony. A city between the cities, its inhabitants living in plain sight. […] Unseen, like Ul Qomans to Besz and vice versa. Walking the streets unseen but overlooking the two. Beyond the Breach.

This is Orciny, a third city. Overlaid with the other two. Not quite parallel, but never integrated. Or does it even exist at all? That’s what Mahalia Geary, a foreign student, was trying to determine. And then she wound up dead. Inspector Borlú of the fabulously-named Extreme Crime Squad follows her trail: it takes him through Beszel and Ul Qoma, forcing him to confront physical, metaphysical, and emotional borders.

The sleuthing aspect of the book is good at the beginning, but unfortunately I worked out Geary’s killer two-thirds in (although not the exact reasons for her death) and I hate being right in detective fiction. It feels as if Miéville used the crime as a glorified MacGuffin; he wanted to explore the idea of liminal physical space and consciousness, and he decided a murder was a sufficiently dramatic way to do so.

The City & The City does fail, for me, as a detective novel and a police procedural, but perhaps that doesn’t matter too much, for it succeeds in its loftier ambitions. The separated Besz and Ul Qoman inhabitants spoke to me as a stylized version of what actually happened in some parts of Eastern Europe at the fall of communism: the new nation-states wrought fresh borders and, in cases like the former Yugoslavia, these came with a rhetoric of intense nationalism to pit neighbour against neighbour.

I found the novel’s idea of ‘unseeing’ still more powerful. Inspector Borlú is constantly seeing (and then forcing himself to unsee).

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and I should not have seen her.

In real life, we are all too adept at unseeing. If it doesn’t fit with the narrative we know (or the one we wish for), we quickly unsee it, sometimes without our conscious mind even taking a role in the process. A thing can be as blatant as bloodstain on a white sheet, but if we assiduously unsee, it will not alter the story we tell ourselves. However, the awkward fact remains: evidence of the eye has a nasty habit of being far more reliable than evidence of the heart.

We can, and will, forever unsee that too.

Week Thirty-Two - Jeanette

Londonstani by Gautam Malkani (2006)

Recommended by Malcolm

When you’re in the back seat a some pimped-up Beemer it’s basically your job to be cool. To just chill, listen to the tunes an stare out the window like some big dumb dog with a big slobbery tongue. DMX pumpin so loud out the sound system you can hardly hear what the other guys’re sayin up front.

I don’t have a Beemer (much less one with a spoiler or whatever constitutes ‘pimped-up’ these days), and you can replace DMX with Shirley Collins, but this pretty much nails what I’ve been feeling this week. Indestructible. Obviously there’s a risk of outrageously poor decisions as a result (just ask King Canute), but when it gleams like this, who gives a shit?

The teenagers of Londonstani certainly don’t give a shit. Soaked in young urban Asian culture, Hardjit, Ravi, Amit, and our narrator, Jas (the Wil-Wheaton-in-Stand-By-Me of the group) cruise around Hounslow avoiding college, lusting on girls, picking on ‘coconuts’ (Asian outside, white inside – i.e. ‘listening to fuckin Radiohead’), making pin money by unblocking stolen mobile phones, and commenting on the key issues of the day.

Now that we cleaned these streets a saps, coconuts an Paki-bashing skinheads, we gotta do something bout all these buses. Even with a special slip road for them outside Hounslow West tube station, they always managed to cause chaos there. It was the same near Hounslow East tube, Hounslow Central tube, Hounslow railway station an Hounslow bus station (though I in’t sure it’s fair for us to have beef with buses hangin round that last one).

In an effort to replicate the lives of the group, the language of Londonstani is half A Clockwork Orange and half Trainspotting. This works well as dramatic irony – evoking how streetwise these teens think they are (compared with how naïve they actually are). But, at other points, Malkani over-eggs his prose and it’s like wading through a five-hour Prodigy video transcript.

Jas and the boys are happy just to piss about until they meet an older, successful businessman. Sanjay has women, wealth, a Porsche, and confidence popping out his collar. They’re impressed and he becomes their mentor (in a sense), providing direction to their small-time lives. The character of Sanjay is also a vehicle for Malkani (a journalist at the Financial Times, where he seems to explore some similar topics) to consider a theory of ‘bling-bling economics’.

Urban people have a very different shopping basket than the rest of the economy and therefore they operate at a much higher level of inflation […] This isn’t about society becoming more affluent, this is about a subculture that worships affluence becoming mainstream culture.

I found this all very interesting. I’ve still not shaken the effect that the 2011 UK Riots had on me.

Emotionally, the Riots directly affected me because it was heartbreaking to see a place I used to live two minutes from, Mare Street in Hackney, turn into that violent, unhappy broth for those few nights. But, intellectually too, the Riots held a ghoulish fascination for me. I struggled, and struggle, to understand them. While the media played up the acquisitive aspect of the Riots, it didn’t quite tally with some of the footage I saw: looters grabbing laptops then smashing them the moment they were out of the store. I sensed hot rage at consumerism itself by some Rioters, who felt conned into idolizing stuff by a system that despised them. Just because this protest wasn’t pithily expressed on a placard, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Sanjay’s theory offered me a further insight into this. Societies are notoriously precarious at a time of hyper-inflation; if the urban cultures involved in the riots felt beset by a type of inflation largely hidden from mainstream narratives, then this will have helped fuel the Rioters’ hatred and blind vengeance (yet be incomprehensible to anyone not directly affected by it).

Overall, although it investigates some very interesting tensions, I’m not convinced that Londonstani is quite as deep as it thinks it is. A problem for me was the ‘complicated family-related shit’ that all the characters, especially Amit, go through. This spills over into pure melodrama on occasion, and Malkani seems far less surefooted in writing this than the street-level escapades. It felt tacked-on, as if the author felt he couldn’t write about Asian lives without a handwringing over marital traditions and their fallout. Much more successful (and a far subtler part of the book) is the status of homophobia as an accepted and even endemic part of the boys’ ‘culture’. Jas has philosophical problems with the prejudice but indulges in it anyway; Hardjit, the most virulent in his anti-gay remarks, is also the only one with posters of bodybuilders rather than Bollywood women on his bedroom wall. Finally, and the aspect I liked best of all, was the universal sense of growing into one’s body and emotions. I do, after all, have a very soft spot for books about teenagers.

            Daydreamin is good for you. Better than wankin even.

I wish I could say I first met Malcolm when we were teens, because that would have been a perfect segue; but it was when he and I were in our early twenties. Malcolm was the best friend of my boyfriend, and when I met him I was way impressed – sharp and funny, with a real hedonistic streak. Now Malcolm is a doctor, and he has become sharper and funnier as he’s matured. He even had a reality TV moment on Channel 4’s 24 Hours In A&E.

I love the gallows humour so often present in medical professionals. If you’re dealing with the thin line between heaven and here every day, a head can’t be crammed with ponderous memento mori. Literally, it’s do or die.

And that brings me back to indestructibility. For me, indestructibility comes not from hiding yourself behind ramparts. It stems from being entirely vulnerable. If someone takes your coat, well, let him have your cloak, too.

Week Twenty-Eight - Jeanette

Martin Bauman: A Novel by David Leavitt (2000)

Recommended by Nik

           

                        What is your chief motivation for writing?

(a) Personal satisfaction

(b) Financial reward

(c)  Public recognition

(d) Desire to communicate

(e) Other (please amplify below)

What is my chief motivation for writing?

(a) Sort of, but I wouldn’t call it ‘satisfaction’. I remember after finishing Seasons They Change I wasn’t happy, as such (actually, I was decidedly miserable); but I was utterly fulfilled. This was a very peculiar feeling as, prior to then, I had always found fulfillment and happiness inextricably, and uncomplicatedly, linked.

(b) HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

(c)  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

(d) I wouldn’t couch it in those terms. I do believe that a writer, to exist, needs a reader but – and maybe it’s the legacy of all those critical theory texts (see last week) – I don’t see it as a simple relationship. The writer doesn’t pour communication libations into a reader’s hungry mouth.

(e) This is what I would plump for, as does Martin Bauman.

The only answer I could give to this question would be (e) other. Please amplify below, you say; all right, I will. But I must warn you, it will take more than a paragraph. Indeed, you may say this very novel is my amplification.

I might say that, on some level, this blog has become my amplification. At a time when my creativity is stuttering like a Geiger counter miles from radiation, I am using it a means to keep up a regular narration of my world.

Anyway. I talk to Nik a lot about writing. I talk to Nik a lot about everything. I see him virtually every week, usually at least twice; we’ve holidayed together, I’ve stayed with his parents, we’ve applied to be on Pointless (they didn’t want us), he made me the Madonna T-shirt in the photo, he’s my named next-of-kin… in short, I couldn’t imagine my world without him.

The first moment I really knew Nik and I would be close was during a visit to the West End. This pub was two doors down from our office and Nik, Noshee (she’s coming up in a few weeks) and I would often wander down for a drink after work. Nik and I played on the pop quiz machine.

What came up?

Name the Louise solo singles.

“‘Two-Faced.’”

“‘Pandora’s Kiss.’”

“‘Naked’, of course.”

“‘Light Of My Life.’”

“‘Light Of My Life’ was crap, wasn’t it? Inauspicious start for her.”

“‘Undivided Love.’”

“Oh god, that cover of ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’.”

We smiled at each other. We’ve been smiling at each other for close on a decade now.

Nik, like Gary in Week One, often claims he’s ‘not a reader’ yet regularly scouts for book tips pre-holiday, loves certain authors (notably Alan Hollinghurst), and has always offered very fair and insightful criticism of my own work. He specifically picked Martin Bauman for me because it was about writing.

Baumann, a young Jewish gay man living in early 1980s New York, begins his story – that ‘amplification’ – with a creative writing course run by the monstrous ego of Stanley Flint. I have always been ambivalent about creative writing courses, and Leavitt’s portrayal of Flint brought out a lot of the reasons why. The hysterical diva-ishness of Flint shrouds a deeply insecure man who depends on the adoration of his class. He dismisses would-be writers on very little evidence.

            After less than half a minute, he put the pages down.

‘No, no, I’m sorry,’ he said, giving them back to her. ‘This is crap. You will never be a writer. Please leave.’

The guru complex is overt in Martin Bauman, but I’d wager a less extreme – and perhaps more insidiously psychologically damaging – version of Flint is rife in the creative writing teaching industry. Writers are notoriously competitive (Bauman himself certainly is) and a creative writing teacher is usually one only because of a painful failure to carve out his or her own full-time authorial career. This isn’t good seeding ground for impartial and supportive development of others’ writing, and Leavitt brings this out well.

The other aspect of the writer’s life deftly tackled by Leavitt is the shift in American publishing and the collateral damage it wreaked on writers. As the Reagan era really chomped down, publishing changed from a supportive literary enclave to an aggressive free-market. Bauman, writing saleable ‘gay stories’, initially benefits from this. His work is snapped up and expectations are high. Bauman’s first book, the story collection The Deviled-Egg Plate, gets ‘favourable to mixed reviews’ but his next work, the novel The Terrorist, critically bombs. Bauman hadn’t changed his style or his subject matter much, but his name no longer offers the shock of the new. If one lives by the zeitgeist, one dies by it, too.

More poignantly, since Bauman is writing about gay life in the early AIDS era, his position is a problematic one (and emblematic of the different issues writers outside of the straight white male canon face). Bauman is a naturally personal writer and focuses on love, eroticism, and family, but some see this as an avoidance of political responsibility.

Seamus Holt complained in Queer Times that [my] ‘wan, watered-down portrayal of gay life’ amounted to ‘the worst kind of assimilationist nonsense.’

Holt, whom Bauman meets, is considered by most in the gay community as a bore intent on curbing people’s fun with his incessant AIDS harangues.

Thunderous before a mob of perfectly coifed, elegantly employed young men, he would thrust out his finger like a demonic preacher, and scream, ‘In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead. In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead. In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead, dead, dead.’ […] In the end, of course, history did prove him wrong, though not in the way his enemies would have predicted: five years later, not half, but three-quarters of the men in that room were dead.

This aspect of Martin Bauman brilliantly evokes the terrible human tendency for collective denial in the face of impending cataclysm. Holt-like voices that speak of the real danger are ignored or ridiculed. I’m reminded of one of my favourite works of modern non-fiction, Simon Garfield’s The End Of Innocence: Britain In The Time Of AIDS, and its accompanying 1995 TV programme. These works, which I highly recommend, chart the condition’s social journey, including the way AIDS was both minimised and exaggerated.

[Blogger will only let me embed Part Four of the documentary. Part One is here, and you can find the other parts on YouTube, too.]

Martin Bauman is a book of strong ideas rather than a captivating story but – as our narrator noted – that’s its point. He’s trying to find out his chief motivation for writing. Does he? Perhaps not.

Have I found mine, within this blog? Certainly not. Yet am I, through writing this particular blog entry, glad to remember that moment at the pop quiz machine, Louise’s ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’, and her Tarantino-baiting video? Damn right I am. Indeed, perhaps this is what I have found via this blog: that picking those delicate wild flowers from memory is as creative as scoping out the big existential angst.