Papercuts

Warning: Total Perspective Vortex!

The Road



I've just read The Road, a haunting, post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy. While it describes momentous events, it does so through the very intimate story of a man and his son as they struggle to survive. In McCarthy's story, the only good thing left in the devastated world is the father's love for his son and the son's love for his father. They walk a deserted highway, scavenging for whatever food they can find, hiding from roving bands of cannibals, and hoping that somewhere there might be others like themselves.

The subject might seem like a departure from McCarthy's usual novels set among cowboys and ranchers in the American West, but his themes of physical survival, forces of nature, love, fate, and moral goodness run through it. And his descriptive language is just as rich and evocative as always. Below are some samples to whet your appetite.


"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looks toward the east for any light but there was none...."



"When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of colour. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose of the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. he knew only the the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."



"They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land....the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through he streets like squid ink uncoiling along a seafloor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

Hidden depths

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A New 44 Scotland Street Novel

"Angus, dispirited...looked down into his coffee cup. And a coffee cup, as we all know, is not something that it pays to look into if one is searching for meaning beyond meaning; coffee in all its forms looks murky, and gives little comfort to one who hopes to see something in it. Unlike tea, which allows one to glimpse something of what lies beneath the surface, usually more tea."

Alexander McCall Smith's new 44 Scotland Street novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, is delectably light and fluffy.

And it is more like tea than coffee. :-D

You can buy it at Fishpond.

Divisadero

Michael Ondaatje's brilliant new novel Divisadero is a haunting series of interlocking stories of characters who emerge from their own privacy only just enough to connect with each other. Ondaatje's narrative lets them keep their privacy, with only tantalising glimpses into their lives:

"Anna had met no one like him. There appeared to be no darkness in him. Though he would tell her of an earlier relationship that had silenced him completely, and how he had almost not emerged from that. He was in fact coming out of that privacy for the first time with her. All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love -- seemingly the most natural of acts."

"I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us. Just as there is, in the real landscape of Paris in Les Miserables, that small fictional street Victor Hugo provides for Jean Valjean to slip into, in which to hide from his pursuers. What was that fictional street's name? I no longer remember. I come from Divisadero Street. Divisadero, from the Spanish word for 'division', the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning 'to gaze at something from a distance.' (there is a 'height' nearby called El Divisadero.) Thus a point from which you can look far into the distance.
It is what I do with my work, I suppose. I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see them everywhere...."

"In spite of everything that had existed between Coop and Anna for those two months on the Petaluma farm, they had remained mysterious to each other. They'd really been discovering themselves. In this way they could fit into the world. But years later, never having married, never having lived with anyone in a relationship that intended permanence, she still sidled beside her lovers as if she were on Coop's deck, glowing in secret with the discovery of herself. So there had always been and perhaps always would be a maze of unmarked roads between her and others...one still needed to move warily, with hesitance, within it."

You can buy it from Fishpond here.

The Post-Birthday World

Many people have compared this novel with the film Sliding Doors, where two possible futures are played out. However Sliding Doors is all about chance: whether the heroine catches her train just in time and gets home and catches her partner cheating; or whether the doors of the train close just before she reaches them, and she doesn't catch him out. The Post-Birthday World is much less about chance, and more about choice.
It is the story, or stories, of Irina, a book illustrator in a happy but mundane relationship, who is tempted to begin an affair with another man.

Irina and her partner Lawrence have an annual tradition to have dinner with Irina's colleague, Jude, and her professional-snooker-player husband Ramsey Acton, on Ramsey's birthday. This year Jude and Ramsey have divorced, and Lawrence is away on business, but Lawrence urges Irina to keep the tradition, and make a fuss of Ramsey on his birthday. Dining alone with the enigmatic and mercurial Ramsey, Irina finds herself unexpectedly drawn to him, and is tempted to begin an affair.

At this point the story splits, with one Irina saying goodnight and going home, and looking forward to Lawrence's return; and the other Irina choosing to kiss Ramsey and see where it leads. These are the post-birthday worlds: one in which Irina continues her pleasant and orderly life with Lawrence, and one in which she embarks on a steamy affair with Ramsey which will turn her life upside down.

The wonderful thing about The Post-Birthday World is that the two stories really are parallel: Irina is the same person regardless of her choice, she has the same strengths and weaknesses; in the parallel storylines she has to deal with many of the same challenges. In both stories she struggles to assert herself with her partner and to find her own professional identity. And Lawrence and Ramsey, while being very different to each other, also have a good deal in common. In neither story does Irina have an easy time with her chosen mate, but in both she learns a great deal.

It's a brilliant book, vividly-written and full of humour and irony. And there's a very satisfying twist at the end.

You can buy it from Fishpond here.

New Philip Pullman novel!

Once Upon a Time in the North

Philip Pullman has written a new novel, Once Upon a Time in the North, about the early life of Lee Scoresby, a character who appears in the His Dark Materials trilogy. You can read all about it on Beattie's Book Blog here.

And you can buy it here.

All the Pretty Horses (Border Trilogy S.)

Set in 1949, this is the tale of a teenaged Texan cowboy who decides to pack up and seek his fortune in Mexico, along with a friend. They set off on horseback, leaving behind everything they know. The people and situations they meet will test them physically, emotionally and morally.

Along with the serious moral and philosophical elements of the story, there is a wealth of darkly comic dialogue and offbeat characters. And also some of the richest and most lyrical descriptions of landscape, animals and people that I have come across.

It's a book that needs to be enjoyed slowly. Although it portrays dramatic events, the style is subtle and elliptical, and it's easy to miss important details. And the lushness and lyricism of the descriptive writing requires slow savouring. Below are some samples:

"As he turned to go he heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. he could feel it under his feet. It came boring out the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in this hands in the passing ground-shudder watching till it was gone. Then he turned and went back to the house."

"They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."

"They spread their soogans and he pulled off his boots and stood them beside him and stretched out in his blankets. The fire had burned to coals and he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands."

"...inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed in their articulations and of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned."

Uncle Fred in the Springtime

Fans of P.G. Wodehouse will need no encouragement to read this story in which the eccentric Uncle Fred meets not only the inhabitants of Blandings Castle, but also the efficient Baxter! Sir Roderick Glossop, brain specialist, has a small cameo part.

Yes, it's Edwardian country-house nonsense, with a plot so farcical and convoluted I'd hate to have to draw a diagram, but it's also totally brilliant and hilarious.

Wodehouse's observations of his characters are inspired. Try this:

"...there entered a young man of great height but lacking the width of shoulder and ruggedness of limb which make height impressive. Nature, stretching Horace Davenport out, had forgotten to stretch him sideways, and one could have pictured Euclid, had they met, nudging a friend and saying, 'Don't look now, but this chap coming along illustrates exactly what I was telling you about a straight line having length without breadth'."

And try these, from Uncle Fred himself:

"'I seem to have a vague recollection of having met him somewhere, but I can't place him, and do not propose to institute inquires. He would probably turn out to be someone who was at school with me, though some years my junior. When you reach my age, you learn to avoid such reunions. The last man I met who was at school with me, though some years my junior, had a long white beard and no teeth. It blurred the picture I had formed of myself as a sprightly young fellow on the threshold of life.'"

"'We start out in life with more pimples than we know what to do with, and in the careless arrogance of youth think they are going to last for ever. But comes a day when we suddenly find that we are down to our last half-dozen. And then those go.'"

"'You can't compare the lorgnettes of today with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said that the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holster and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes, as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.'"

Timequake

For the first few chapters I was thinking, Vonnegut is a genius...

...but what the hell?!

He's writing a book about how he tried to write a book that didn't really work?!

After that I just settled in for the wild ride.

There are bits and pieces of autobiography, fiction, and fictional biography (the life of his alter ego, writer Kilgore Trout, and others). There's even fictional fiction, if that's possible (he recounts stories written by Trout). And there are plenty of silly jokes and random observations about life and a miultitude of other things.

The randomness and lack of structure is part of Vonnegut's point here - just as his refusal to differentiate major and minor characters was in Breakfast of Champions - life is a random mixture of crazy, wonderful, and horrifying things and people. And sometimes we get to make choices and sometimes we don't, but either way we have to manage the best we can.

Ting-a-ling!

A Fancy Man

This book is absolutely dazzling, if such a gritty, honest book can be dazzling. It tells the story of the love affair of a very young woman and an older man in a small rural town which heartily disapproves. He is an alcoholic farm worker trying to raise two young children on his own, and she is a rebellious schoolgirl whose only hobby is riding her pony. How their story works out, with all its twists and turns, is a fascinating journey.

McCauley's style reminds me of Thomas Keneally's: like Keneally, she not only tells a ripping yarn, but gets you right in among the characters, effortlessly switching between many points of view.

Sue McCauley's Book Council Page is here. Make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the page and read the story about the horse!

Story of a New Zealand River

This novel was written in 1914 and I expected it to be old-fashioned and dull. In fact it's quite a page-turner! Set on Northland's Otamatea River, it describes the journey upriver of an English immigrant to a remote logging settlement; her personal development in this alien setting is chronicled along with the development of the prosperous mill town.

The story has a number of features in common with Jane Campion's The Piano, and there have been allegations that Campion was heavily influenced by Mander's novel, and never acknowledged her debt. To me, there are a lot of differences between The Piano and Story of a New Zealand River...but you can judge for yourself.

I think Story of a New Zealand River may currently be out of print, but it's available from libraries, and you can read it online or download it as an e-book, here.

There's more information on author Jane Mander here.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain

Forget everything you thought you knew about Witi Ihimaera. In this, his most recent novel, he steps outside his usual Maori settings, and into white Auckland of the 1990s. David Munro is a white academic, born into privilege; he is a promiscuous homosexual who is happily married with two beloved daughters. Eventually his nights of casual sex with strangers, his "Nights in the Gardens of Spain", throw his life into chaos, and threaten to destroy his family. How David deals with the conflicts within himself and with the world are the substance of the book.

Harlequin Rex

I've just read this stunning novel by Owen Marshall. It's his second; reviews of his first novel, A Many Coated Man, were not favourable. Landfall's reviewer claimed he was better to stick to short stories: "less is more", said reviewer Andrew Mason. However he wrote Harlequin Rex anyway, and it won the Montana Deutz Medal.

It's the story of a plague of psychiatric illness, nicknamed Harlequin, which causes the higher mental functions to shut down; this leaves only the "old brain" functions, the basic atavistic urges, running suddenly free. Sufferers in the grip of an "episode" hear and smell acutely, and become wildly excited; their mania may be sexual, or destructive, or playful, or murderous. Episodes become progressively more severe; in almost all cases, collapse and death follow.

Harlequin is spreading rapidly in New Zealand, and sanatoria are set up in isolated places to house sufferers until either a cure is found, or they die. Neither the cause of the illness nor its means of transmission are known. Adults of all ages and backgrounds find themselves committed to institutions from which few will ever leave. Marshall's story is set in one such sanatorium, the Slaven Centre, in the Marlborough Sounds. His central character is David, an ex-convict who has reasons for laying low, and who takes a job as an aide. Himself healthy, he becomes a part of this closed and doomed community, sharing the banal tragedy and the constant petty humiliations of institutional sickness.

Marshall describes his style as "impressionist"; His narrative is a chain of sense experiences and passionate emotions, linked by reflections on fate, mortality, personality and humanity. The style reflects the conflict of the animalistic brain, knowing only the moment and its desires, and the higher mind, aware of the passage of time and lost opportunities.

You can read more about Owen Marshall on his Book Council page. Clicking on the picture or heading above takes you to Fishpond.

New J.R.R. Tolkien book

Apparently the manuscript has been sitting around in pieces, and Christopher Tolkien has joined them together.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut died this week. I'm sorry that we won't have any more of his books to look forward to. He has left us quite a few, though...Fishpond has these.

The last one I read was Breakfast of Champions. Boy is it strange! It has no minor characters, and there are a lot of characters. Before that I read Bagombo Snuff Box, which is a collection of his earliest published stories, and an essay he wrote about the process of writing: it's a fascinating window on his creative process.

Dickens theme park

"Housed in a modern, aluminium-clad hangar on the Chatham Maritime estate in Kent, its creators promise a flavour of "dark, smoky, moody London, full of smells and mist"."

Read about it here.

Serial novel

I've just read Alexander McCall Smith's Love Over Scotland. It's wonderful, and a wonderful form: short episodic chapters, originally published daily in The Scotsman newspaper. Each chapter gets to have either a cliffhanger or a punchline. How many regular novels have that?

McCall Smith's website is worth a look, too.