The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, published in 2000, won the Booker Prize for that year. Set in Canada, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, it tells the story of the Chase family who made a fortune manufacturing buttons. The 1930s sees the button market in a precarious state. Norvel Chase, the company director, a well meaning but traumatised war veteran, makes a last desperate effort to save his family from financial ruin. He persuades his eldest daughter, Iris, to marry a wealthy and, as it turns out, deeply unsavoury, Toronto businessman. The consequences of this ill advised plan become the subject of the rest of the book, as told by Iris in her old age.
Iris tells her story, in a kind of top layer to the book. She also describes writing a book about her experience – a second layer. And within her book there’s a further story – a sci-fi tale written by Iris’s boyfriend who makes a living submitting material to pulp magazines. The resulting Russian doll of a novel suggests ambitions to comment on the nature of storytelling. It isn’t the most straightforward of reads, but neither is it as precious as it might sound from this description. According to The Blind Assassin, writing is often a less-than-heroic business, misleading, prone to exaggeration or simplification, distasteful, silly, whether we are talking about pulp sci-fi, or Virgil’s Aeneid, which through the eyes of Iris appears as a violent melodrama.
With all that said, fiction is still credited with special powers in revealing truths. Iris is able to say things in fiction that are impossible to say in her real life.
This book is a mixture, sometimes an uneasy one, of the literary and the low-brow. It’s knowing and arch – unable to fully commit to a straightforward story because it wants to remain above such things. The author holds the story at a distance, which also describes the experience of reading it. The Blind Assassin is undoubtedly interesting, but maybe more interesting than enjoyable – easier to admire than to love
Bird by Bird is a book on writing by Anne Lamott, published in 1994. It is well known enough to get a mention on Ted Lasso. I’d never seen the title on any ‘how to write’ book lists, so decided to take a look.
We start with advice to write by advancing step by step. It’s no good imagining you will hold an entire story in your head before you begin. Write small pieces and put them together. If you have to prepare a piece about birds, take it one bird at a time. Other topics covered include finding a writing partner, taking notes of things around you, discovering your own voice, and how to avoid getting sued by the people who you might use in your writing.
Fairly soon after beginning the book I started to feel uncomfortable. This is why:
Bird by Bird’s building block approach is also the suggestion of a more recent book by George Saunders, called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, where good writing is explored through a selection of Russian short stories. Remembering A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, I realised Bird by Bird does not use examples to show good writing in action. The quotes we get are the pithy wisdom kind, amidst much biographical material from the author’s life. When Bird by Bird mentions what it considers bad writing, namely ‘the comics’ and ‘formula films’ once again there are no specific examples. Which comics exactly? All of them? Just because writing is in a comic doesn’t mean it’s bad. And which films? Do you mean the ones that follow mythic structure like Star Wars, explored in such a fascinating way by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey? The lack of specific examples left the book’s advice, even if often sensible, feeling anecdotal rather than substantive.
Then there was the intrusion of the author’s religious beliefs into the book. I think the religious references were designed to give a sense of the big picture that a writer is supposed to be considering. For me, they revealed a certain outlook which can be as limited as any other point of view. For example, the author goes with her church group to a nursing home. She doesn’t want to go, old people and their health issues making her uncomfortable. How can God allow people to live in this state? There might be a sense of personal honesty in the way these less than flattering feelings are described, but I did not admire how they were then rationalised. There is mention of a medieval monk, one Brother Lawrence, who opines that the presence of leafless, winter trees must demonstrate a God who loves all things unconditionally. Otherwise why would such useless things exist? Similarly, says Anne Lamott, the presence of God’s unconditional love is demonstrated by people who ‘are no longer useful in any traditional sense of the word’? I sat back. Did I just read that? Seriously?
I thought of an observation made by the secular Shakespeare who tells us, ‘reason not the need. Our basest beggars are in the merest thing superfluous’. Who’s to judge what is important and useful? Not Bird by Bird I would suggest. Maybe think of the high esteem in which elders are held in other cultures – Native American culture for example. Why not have a look at Story Writing in a Nursing Home, A Patchwork of Memories edited by Martha John – a book resulting from story writing classes conducted by a volunteer teaching service. Older people are a treasure trove of memories and overlapping lived experience, causing one of the older participants in Martha John’s book to suggest that, ‘we’re a sort of patchwork quilt’. A patchwork quilt, a sense of something that has grown over time, giving a warm sense of continuity and stability, is a much better image for older people than a leafless tree, so useless that it can only be loved by a particularly forgiving and accommodating deity.
On a practical level Bird by Bird is out of date in the sections dealing with publishing. There is not even a hint that a vibrant self-publishing scene might exist in 1994’s not too distant future.
For me there are much more useful books on writing. I’ll finish by listing a few that have helped me. Whatever kind of writer you are, even an elderly one (!), good luck.
Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939, is a novel by Christopher Isherwood set in Berlin in the early 1930s. Isherwood himself is the central character, a diffident young Englishman, vaguely trying to write, while language tutoring to pay his rent.
Isherwood is mild-mannered, easy-going, inclined to be lazy, preferring observation over judgement. His one completed novel has sold five copies. He is drifting along without much obvious ambition. Meanwhile the society around him is increasingly riven by political zealotry on both left and right.
Is a policy of muddling along, not getting too exercised about anything, an answer to extremism? Maybe this is a book about unremarkable events in a young man’s life, serving as an antidote to the fanatical. On the other hand, it is difficult to claim that Goodbye to Berlin presents aimlessness as an ideal. There’s an interesting scene towards the end of the book where Isherwood gives English lessons to Herr Brink, a master at a reformatory for problematic boys. Brink remarks on the challenge of giving the boys a clear direction and purpose in life. A local engineering firm where many of the reformatory’s charges used to eventually find work is closing down, a victim of the dire economic situation. Without this chance of employment, crime is the next most obvious career option. On a wider level, a society struggling with economic collapse sees millions of people out of work. The aimlessness and frustration that results is a fertile ground for radicalisation, as people flail around for something to give their lives purpose.
So the answer to extremism is not to live a directionless life. After all, Isherwood had the gumption to write a novel about his Berlin sojourn. The book that resulted does not give easy answers. There is no black and white, only shades of grey – quite fitting really for Isherwood’s down at heel Berlin experience. Next time life seems drab, I will recall Christopher Isherwood’s book and start looking for some interesting nuances in the grey situation. These might take on the appearance of colours in the down at heel, gaudy Berlin night club where Christopher meets Sally Bowles.
While answers and clear advice are not what this book is about, there is perhaps a suggestion we take on the difficult job of finding purpose and identity within ourselves rather than going for some easy, ready-made external political or nationalistic option. Write a novel rather than wave a flag.
James by Percival Everett is a 2024 retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both books set in the Mississippi Valley of the 1830s. Young Huck fakes his own death to escape his violent, drunken father, meets up with a runaway slave called Jim and sails down the Mississippi with him on an improvised raft in search of freedom. This time we hear the story from Jim’s point of view.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was very much about a natural, free, frontier existence colliding with a more settled manner of living. Huck is part feral child, part school boy. James in many ways covers the same ambivalent territory. Now seeing things from Jim’s perspective, we learn that Jim, is a secret intellectual. He has been in the habit of sneaking into libraries and reading. He disguises the unacceptable truth of his education by speaking in slave vernacular and pretending to be highly superstitious.
In The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn, literature is an enigmatic idea, sometimes representing the development of humanity, sometimes a symbol of its backsliding from original innocence. In James, literature is more the representation of social struggle. Just as money and power are reserved by one dominant group, so too is learning and reading. In some ways books are just the trappings of success, like fine clothes and big houses. The way to fight back is to grab a pencil and start making your own account, which is what Jim does at huge personal risk. However, as James continues, there is a feeling that literature is not merely a means of waging cultural warfare. There is a potential for writing to be something that unites rather than divides. There are so many occasions in the book when the bitter dividing lines of black and white merge into one another. At one point Jim joins a touring minstrel singing group of white men in black makeup, Jim strikes up a friendship with Norman, who has one white and one black parent. But Norman looks white, acts white but sees himself as black. So, while James is about cultural struggle, it’s also an exploration of grey areas, where divisions are illusory.
Rewrites of famous novels tend to make me nervous. It takes some confidence to put yourself up against a classic author and expect to look good. But James is an excellent read, very funny in parts, unflinching and thought provoking. I have to admit, in straight-forward reading pleasure terms, to enjoying this book more than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I read directly after James. Bravo.
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884, tells the story of a young Missouri boy growing up in the 1830s. With no mother and a drunken, abusive father, Huck is on the cusp of feral child and school boy. Maybe he is a bit like his country, which is moving out of its frontier phase into a more settled existence. This ambivalent position underlies the conundrums of the book. Huck’s guardian, Widow Douglas tries to ‘sivilise’ Huck by sending him to school, which can feel restrictive and false compared to Huck’s freewheeling former life spent out in the woods. On the other hand Huck’s father Pap, a drunk, coarse, and violent man, hardly suggests the virtues of a simple life close to the land. Then there’s the presentation of books and learning. Books might be the guiding light of Huck’s friend Tom Sawyer, but they appear to be as misleading as they are illuminating. For Tom, if it’s in a book it must be true, an idea that leads to all kinds of nonsense as the boy tries to apply the stuff he has read in books to real life. Finally, there’s conceptions of justice, which might be the complex business of law embodied in the upstanding character of Judge Thatcher; or the ‘natural law’ of an individual’s conscience. Here things get murky as we see Huck’s ‘conscience’ manipulated by a kind of social indoctrination. The young boy has always seen slaves as possessions. Huck does end up helping a slave find his freedom, but he feels his actions in doing this are the result of personal weakness rather than the dictates of his conscience.
The book is written in an apparently plain, homespun, but carefully constructed vernacular style – Huck’s narration falling somewhere between wild and civilised. The story is, in many ways farcical, the bigger picture saved from silliness by the sense that the plot’s crazy twists and turns, often cooked up by Tom Sawyer from his reading, represent the uncomfortable meeting of books and reality. I sometimes found the knockabout business rather hard work to get through, but there were always interesting ideas bubbling around beneath the surface.
Overall The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deserved classic, and an interesting road marker on the road of America’s development as a country.
Western Lane is a 2023 novel by Chetna Maroo, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s in the tradition of stories where children with issues are straightened out by the discipline and purpose found in sport. Described like this the book might sound formulaic, which it’s not. The children involved here are three generally well behaved, quiet girls, struggling with the death of their mother. They have been brought up in the UK, but are very much part of the tightly knit London Asian community in which they live. The three girls are only ‘wild’ when viewed through the perspective of their highly traditional aunt, who thinks wearing shorts and running qualify a girl as ‘wild’.
The story focuses on the youngest girl, Gopi, who responds best to her father’s coping mechanism of playing squash. Attending a local sports club called Western Lane, she enjoys the discipline and focus of squash, becoming fascinated by the sports personalities. Playing with a promising boy, with whom she develops a close connection, Gopi makes rapid progress, so much so that she is entered into a tournament. But hanging in the background of this positive story is the threat that with her mother gone, Gopi might be sent away to live with her Aunt Ranjan, the same aunt who thinks the wearing of shorts is a definition of wild behaviour.
Sport in a story is generally a metaphor for trial and eventual redemption. This is true here, with squash uniquely fitting to the situation of Gopi. Players are tightly confined in an enclosed court. Gopi lives in a tightly knit community, with Aunt Ranjan representing its most conservative aspects. Squash is about discipline, and in a normal sports story this is what a troubled youngster would probably need most. In Western Lane there is, ironically, a compelling sense that rather than self control, Gopi essentially finds freedom through the game. It’s this tension between freedom and restriction that really drives the story. The contradiction is explored in such a way that you might even end up feeling that the universe is a big squash court with the stars as smudges on the walls.
With some books there’s a worry in reviewing them that you might give away what happens at the end. Will Gopi be allowed to play squash long term? Will she get together with her training partner boyfriend? I can’t give away the end in this case, because even in reading the book I don’t know what happens, so enigmatic are the final pages. But by then, you do feel that whatever restrictions life brings along, there is the possibility of making them into a squash court, and whacking balls off the walls in fascinating ways.
Western Lane is an excellent sports book, using a familiar idea to explore unfamiliar territory, both social and philosophical. It’s also a rarity these days in being a story with children as central characters, which doesn’t see itself as only playing to an audience of children. The walls around the classification of this novel are interestingly transparent. Bravo.
Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in America as The Last of Mr Norris) is a 1935 novel by Christopher Isherwood, set in Berlin during the Nazis’ rise to power. An unassuming English tutor, William Bradshaw, describes a friendship with Arthur Norris, a furtive man of refined tastes and straightened circumstances who he meets on a train.
Bradshaw is a quiet observer of Berlin life. He notes how the political powers-that-be are increasingly classifying people as in or out, worthy or unworthy. By contrast, Mr Norris Changes Trains is a work of observation rather than judgement, seeing people as an intricate mixture of attributes. The book is too enigmatic to have a moral as such, set in a world where, ironically, a black and white conception of good and bad has led to moral collapse. You could, however, in a roundabout way, say that Mr Norris Changes Trains is an argument for accepting that life is complicated. It doesn’t shout its message’, and if the bag search in the opening train scene had found Mr Norris Changes Trains, it would scarcely have merited a glance. Only in this manner could the book cross the border and in its own sly way, inform us of how things are. The book takes a different approach to the much more in-your-face articles of the journalist character, Helen Pratt, who gets the publication she is working for closed down, before she swans off to continue her hard-hitting journalism in America.
I have read that Christopher Isherwood ended up losing faith in Mr Norris Changes Trains, which is a shame. I thought it a great book – engaging and fun, as though P.G. Wodehouse decided to indulge his darker side. Norris makes me think of a Bertie Wooster figure, presented here in later life as a kind of con artist making a feckless living using his smart contacts, while Jeeves metamorphoses into Schmidt, a self-serving thug who intimidates his master. And yet the book is also serious and relevant, both to the times in which it was written, and to any situation where people believe in simple solutions to complex problems
Enter Ghost is a 2023 novel by Isabella Hammad, telling the story of Sonia Nasir, an actress of mixed Palestinian/Dutch ancestry, working in London. With her career and personal life at a crossroads, she visits family in Haifa, Israel. Here she meets a theatre director, who persuades her to get involved with a local production of Hamlet.
Hamlet famously recruits a group of players to portray the crime that he suspects his uncle Claudius of committing – murdering his father and then marrying his widowed mother in a scheme to usurp the throne of Denmark. Hamlet tells his actors that the purpose of a play is ‘to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature’.
Mirrors are a thing in Enter Ghost. Sonia mentions them a number of times – in a late night scene when she mistakes a reflection of herself for an intruder, and in the climactic performance of Hamlet, when stress seems to provoke an out of body experience. A mirror reflects you back to yourself without judgement, showing rather than telling, like a good play or novel. But, while a mirror does not judge, nether does it flatter.
Enter Ghost refuses to come to a verdict or ‘take sides’ in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. While apparently told from a Palestinian perspective, we have a clear idea of the social soup which lies beneath the false certainties of national or racial badges. Reading about a person of Dutch Palestinian descent, brought up in London, hassled at a checkpoint by an Israeli soldier who turns out to be from Leeds, you begin to wonder how people find it within themselves to become so bitterly divided. And yet, while the book declines to pass judgement, it does serve to hold up the sort of pitiless mirror that refuses to allow anyone the luxury of fooling themselves. The story culminates with the performance of Hamlet, where a group of Israeli soldiers arrive and then lurk with unknown intent. Are they here to shut the play down? Instead they watch, as Hamlet stages the performance in which he hopes his uncle Claudius will see his own misdemeanours. ‘The play’s the thing in which to catch the conscience of the King,’ Hamlet declares. The soldiers are not judged but they are invited to judge themselves. On this occasion at least, they seem to take the point, and withdraw.
Enter Ghost is more about ideas than action, but there is still excitement, tension and emotion. In particular, I found the production of Hamlet, with the soldiers hovering close by, to be very powerful. This is not an ‘issue’ novel, but neither is it escapism. It really finds a balance between a novel that takes you away, and a relevant book that engages with the world we live in. Enter Ghost is fully deserving of its various prize nominations. Highly recommend.
White Noise is a 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. It describes a period of crisis in the life of Jack Gladney, an American professor, working at a pleasant college campus in the small town of Blacksmith.
The first part of the book describes Jack’s daily life, his work as a leading exponent of Hitler studies, and his home life with his wife, and array of children and stepchildren.
All trouble seems to happen far from the College-on-the-Hill, disasters watched on television, terrible histories studied in rooms beside leafy quadrangles – until an accident at a nearby railway depot involving a cloud of toxic gas, changes Jack’s perspective.
White Noise is about the numerous problems we face in looking at things. At one extreme, there’s low brow news media, and prescient scenes showing rumour and disinformation accompanying the gas cloud crisis. Meanwhile, at the academic end of the scale, we’re asked how a subject like Hitler can be meaningfully studied in a tranquil college environment. An inability to understand the world extends from National Enquirer readers to academics.
In trying to review this book I kept coming back to the idea of ‘the most photographed barn in America’ which is supposed to stand picturesquely in the countryside near The College-on-the-Hill. Jack Gladney and one of his colleagues, comment on the fact that it’s impossible to see this barn for what it is, framed now as America’s most photographed. A book review is similar. White Noise might not be the most reviewed book in America, but it is relatively famous, establishing Don DeLillo’s reputation as a successful writer, winning a place on Time Magazine’s list of best modern novels. A book is tricky to review when it kind of pulls the rug out from under your efforts – suggesting that the more a book is reviewed the less likely we are to really see it – the weight of its reputation changing how we react.
Is this review pointless? I’m in two minds. Considering White Noise was written in 1985, the portrayal of misinformation spreading during the gas cloud crisis did feel forward looking. But the book was for me unnecessarily negative in suggesting that there was no reliable information anywhere. This was misleading in itself. We could include books of biting satire like White Noise in the misinformation category, since satire involves exaggeration, and exaggeration means distortion. Giving in to the idea that reliable information does not exist means accepting truth as whatever gets the most traction on the internet. Still, I don’t want to be negative myself. I did find White Noise an interesting book. It is certainly worth reading as an expression of concerns about trust in information – but I do think it could be seen as an illustration of the problem, as well as a commentary on it.
Rabbit Run, published in 1960, established its author, John Updike, as a major American novelist. The novel tells the story of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a former high-school basketball star, who finds himself in his mid-twenties, marooned in a mundane marriage and a boring sales job. We follow him for three months as he struggles to transcend the limits of his life in Brewer, Pennsylvania – which in practical terms means leaving his pregnant wife, getting his girlfriend pregnant, going back to his wife after she has a baby, and facing eventual domestic tragedy, caused in part by his flaky carry on.
The book, while consisting of the most intimate and closely observed details of human behaviour, has a detached tone. We float above events, seeing them from the perspective of different characters, sometimes switching viewpoint over the space of a paragraph. Although this could be confusing, I did see it as fitting to the story. Harry tries to rise above ordinary life that drags on him. The narrative style reflects Harry’s aspiration. Maybe he would like to be an omniscient author, up above events, describing them in the present tense, like John Updike.
So is Harry’s quest valid, given all the hurt it causes? About half way through Rabbit Run, we get an example of a man who has actually succeeded in leaving the mundane aspects of life behind. Jack Eccles is a young priest who is trying to help Harry repair his marriage. Unsure of what to do, Eccles goes to his boss, Fritz Kruppenbach, for advice. The ‘advice’ Eccles receives is to leave tedious, worldly complications to work out for themselves. The job of Church ministers is not to involve themselves in the ridiculous business of parishioner’s lives, but to demonstrate faith, as it exists above humanity’s petty affairs. Kruppenbach is smug and aloof, only serving to demonstrate that standing above life is not attractive, not something that anyone would reasonably seek to achieve. Eccles storms out of the meeting and continues his best efforts to help Harry. And good for him, you think. Now, mundane details look different. This is where true meaning and compassion can be found. Incidentally, the name Eccles serves as a reference to Ecclesiastes, a story in the Old Testament, where the narrator famously declares that ‘all is vanity’ in human affairs, and people should enjoy the simple pleasures of daily life, which are a gift from God.
I think the book continues to be relevant today as a commentary on efforts, both ancient and modern, to rise above everyday concerns. Traditional methods are represented by the book’s various religious characters. In a more modern vein, I’ve read that Updike wrote Rabbit Run partly as a reaction to Kerouac’s On The Road, where self-involved young people drive around America, searching for themselves, with no thought for those they leave behind. Rabbit himself tries an ‘on the road’ escape early in the book, after walking out on his wife. He drives all night, gets lost, buys some fuel and ends up right back where he started the following morning.
Rabbit Run expresses a desire to transcend ordinary life, while also suggesting – in the manner of Ecclesiastes – that the only meaningful escape available to us lies in ordinary things. In the end Rabbit Run does not promise any kind of silly nirvana, but it does suggest a more liberating and interesting way of looking at the non-nirvana in which we spend our days.
Writing And So On 