The Panic Hand by Jonathan
Carroll (1996)
Recommended by Ellen
I was on the phone to my
esteemed co-blogger.
‘Yeah, I can talk, that’s
fine, Jude. I’m at home. I’ve just had a tea of chips and vanilla vodka.’
After our chat, I picked
up The Panic Hand and immediately
read the following line:
Some people change as they grow older, while others only become more
of who they were at fifteen.
*blushes*
I have read a
Jonathan Carroll book before – actually, I’ve read it three times. I was given The Land Of Laughs, Carroll’s 1980 debut
novel, in my early 20s; it was a
present from a man I didn’t know very well. I was grateful, because it was a
nice gesture, but I was rather perplexed. My confusion was not as to why he’d
given me a book (I hoped it was because he liked me as a person, but also
suspected there might have been a more, erm, ‘earthy’ motive); but rather why
he’d given me this book.
As you can see,
it is part of a series called ‘Fantasy Masterworks’. Orcs and elves and forests
and sun gods and women in Red Sonja
costumes. Not for me! I liked Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Angela Davis.
I slung The Land Of Laughs on my bookshelf and I
didn’t read it.
A year passed.
One day, I got sick. A week later, the lurgy still hadn’t gone anywhere.
Confined to bed, wastepaper bin emptied out for a sick bucket next to me, I
needed something to distract me from self-pity. Dostoyevsky and Davis weren’t
about to do that. So I picked up The Land
Of Laughs.
It wasn’t
‘fantasy’ in the way I had pigeonholed the genre, at all. It was easy to forget
it was anything other than well-written realistic contemporary fiction until
the last third. Then – holy, holy! – it slides into something completely
incredible, yet at the same time, utterly logical. It’s about how we escape
from the world into books. I escaped from my illness into The Land Of Laughs, and the other two times I’ve read it have also been
when my body wanted to hide for a while.
The Panic Hand, a
collection of Carroll’s short stories, was
the trickiest of my Two Readers books to track down so far: out of print, not in the library, not in any
secondhand shops. Less than twenty years old, and the recipient of great
reviews, it seems to have sold little and faded quickly.
Which brings me
nicely to a conversation I remember having with Ellen. A brilliant
singer-songwriter, and former part of the psychedelic folk band Saint Joan, Ellen
and I had met through a mutual friend at 2008’s Green Man Festival. I was
immediately taken with her: charming, literary, funny. We both loved many of
the female artists who had spent years in obscurity before being (re)discovered:
Bonnie Dobson, Linda Perhacs, Vashti Bunyan, Susan Christie… ‘They were so good,’ Ellen said. ‘Why didn’t people
pay attention at the time?’
Ellen’s own
album, 2009’s The Crescent Sun, was
poetic and nuanced and superb, but also served to answer her question: why
people don’t pay attention at the time. Put out by a label that almost
immediately went under, the album got snagged in the record industry’s cogs. The Crescent Sun wasn’t widely reviewed,
and was difficult to find even in the early days of its release.
As for The Panic Hand, it too seems to have
been badly served by its industry. That terribly misjudged cover must have had something
to do with its failure. Just as I was put off The Land Of Laughs because of its association with stereotypically
nerdish fantasy, The Panic Hand screams
trashy-horror-bought-at-a-petrol-station.
That embossed font! That blue demon claw! That small (i.e. not ‘literary’)
paperback size! Toss it back in the bargain bin.
The panic hand
is not a blue demon claw. It is a computer game played by Heidi, a
twelve-year-old girl with a stutter. Heidi also conjures up a beautiful mother,
Francesca, because she wants to see men falling in love and having sex with
Francesca. These men always do, that is apart from our narrator: he’s far more
interested in Heidi (in her personality, and in her vagina).
And that’s
Carroll in a nutshell. We don’t get caught up in how Heidi created Francesca, she just did, because magic is
everywhere, and the reader must accept this. In fact, it might have even been
the narrator who invented both Heidi and Francesca. At the end of the story,
we’re left wondering about the narrator’s intentions towards the daughter of
his real-life girlfriend. Many of Carroll’s narrators are, to put it mildly, flawed.
It’s hard to
précis these stories, because they usually only sound worth reading once you’ve
given away the ending. The same with quoting chunks of prose: his writing is
good, yet it’s the plot and its twists he excels at rather than any stand-alone
lyricism.
A bizarre
obsession of Carroll’s – it’s there in The
Land Of Laughs, too – is of how animals watch us, judge us, relate to us. He
imbues his animals, usually pets, with as much character as his humans. There’s
also a powerful quasi-religious element to The
Panic Hand stories. Just as Carroll accepts the personality of animals and
the existence of the supernatural, he deals in hell, God, and angels throughout
the book. The divine might not be conceptualised in the usual way, but its
essence is consistent. It adds a magical realist morality to these tales.
I didn’t think
this was as fabulous as The Land Of
Laughs, but I think that’s because it frustrated me to get into one of Carroll's intriguing
concepts, only to have it end five pages later. I like Carroll when he explores his ideas, revealing them
slowly, rather than just exposing their raw meat. It felt as if many of these
stories should have had more time invested in them.
Nevertheless, even if those ideas aren't fully developed, they're original, and have a lot in
common with children's literature in both their whimsy and their scale.
For years, this small house had hosted family after
family of losers, creeps, cheque-bouncers and wife-slappers who hadn’t paid
their bills, loved their children, cared for anything other than their own thin
skin. Then one day a family moved in and suddenly everything was different.
These people loved each other, their lives, the house. […] The house gave back
whatever it could to show its appreciation. It kept its windows from breaking
in a storm, when the roof leaked into the parents’ bedroom, the house kept the
leak from falling on the bed and ruining the patchwork quilt.
[quote ends here: Blogger won't let me unindent the text!]
So if your guttering keeps breaking, look to your humanity as well as your drainpipes. The Panic Hand: where the world is alternately sinister and hopeful.
