My friend Jonathan, who accompanied me on my holiday in Sri Lanka, is a keen photographer, so I thought I’d ask him how to take a good shot of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. ‘You want an awesome shot?’ he asked. ‘Okay.’

Not exactly what I’d had in mind.

What I did have in my mind after reading Running in the Family, though, was a wonderful, intimate portrait of 1920s Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon. Though Ondaatje is well known for his fiction, including Booker Prize winner The English Patient, he is also a poet and non-fiction writer, and now lives in Canada. Running in the Family was a product of multiple visits Ondaatje took to the land of his childhood and is the product of his attempts to comprehend and reconstruct those years. Though it can be classed as a memoir, Ondaatje alludes to his process of storying the material: ‘I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or “gesture”‘. If it is to be termed as such, then this book is a gesture of grace and colour; a promise to bear, carry and perform history as if drunk on memory.

Oft-colonised Sri Lanka has a fascinating and tortuous history, and its parapets and creoles multiply with alarming alacrity for a reader unversed in that history. It’s pleasing, then, that while this book has a personal, familial focus, it can also illuminate certain aspects of the events that shaped the island nation. Ondaatje, as a scion of a well-known Burgher family, is well positioned to cast light on some of those events. At one point, he visits with John Kotalawela, Sri Lanka’s third Prime Minister, who served in the Ceylon Light Infantry with Ondaatje’s father, Mervyn. But this is not a political memoir; it is a personal one, and Ondaatje’s telling of the meeting is dominated by the fact that the animals in the household were fed before the people, while the meeting itself centres around the wildness Kotalawela remembers in Ondaatje’s father.

Of all the memorable personalities that appear in Running in the Family, and there are many, Mervyn Ondaatje is one of the most arrestingly portrayed. Sent down from Oxford University for a prank, Mervyn was a ‘veriest rogue’ kind of fellow: wilful, changeable and a terrible dipsomaniac for a good part of his younger years. Thoughtful and loving when sober, and unstoppably manic when inebriated, Mervyn once took off all his clothes on a train and threatened the driver with death unless he stopped the train. He proceeded to then go through all the passengers’ luggage, claiming that bombs were secreted there. When he lined up the ‘bombs’ outside, they were pots of buffalo curd, a common Sri Lankan foodstuff. Tales such as these are not told with bitterness or aggression, but rather keen curiosity and tenderness.

Just as Running in the Family is not a political memoir, neither is it a linear one. Short chapters with headings like ‘The Courtship’, ‘Monsoon Notebook (i)’ and ‘St. Thomas’ Church’ are interspliced with pictures of the Ondaatje family and their friends, including the only picture the author has of his parents together: an expensive black-and-white portrait in which they are both making mischievous monkey faces rather than the staid smiles dictated by the age. In some instances, Ondaatje chooses to interpret his recollections through the medium of poetry, and though his poems are strikingly heart-on-sleeve (or they were for me, obedient denizen of a satirical age), they are also strikingly, heavily evocative and often sensual, as in ‘The Cinnamon Peeler’:

I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers

And of course, through the filter of Ondaatje’s anecdotes, the wondrous splendour of Sri Lanka itself is radiantly apparent. Despite its political troubles, it is a land of diverse beauty and the source of innumerable stories. Whether detailing the procedure with which he would, as a young boy, ride the giant kabaragoya and thalagoya lizards over a wall; or writing about ‘the most beautiful alphabet’ of the Sinhalese language, ‘created without straight lines because the locals wrote on brittle Ola leaves that would fall apart if a straight line was wrought through it’; or explicitly treating the many names and identities – Serendip, Ratnapida, Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seylan, Ceilon, Ceylon – of his home country, Ondaatje continually adverts to the multifaceted allure of Sri Lanka. Since it is Ondaatje, this is done, as are all other tasks in this book, with deceptively casual grace.

In Running in the Family, Ondaatje writes of ‘a house that is an island’, and this book could easily be subtitled ‘an island that was many lives’. With prose – and sometimes verse – that easily echoes the gravid air of Sri Lanka and the lyrical anarchy of his parents’ social set, Ondaatje uncovers a series of familial narratives with sweetness and a meandering intent that are lovely to behold.

It’s safe to say that we’re used to thinking of the living and the dead as pretty different creatures. Leave it to Neil Gaiman – winner of winner of 3 Hugos, 2 Nebulas, 1 World Fantasy Award, 4 Bram Stoker Awards, 6 Locus Awards, 2 British SF Awards, 1 British Fantasy Award, 3 Geffens, 1 International Horror Guild Award and 1 Mythopoeic – to bring members of the two camps together in his newie, The Graveyard Book, which has wonderful illustrations, just this side of spooky, by Chris Riddell.

Nobody Owens is just a baby when the man Jack enters his home and kills his family. Nobody – Bod – escapes the same fate, having wandered out of his cot, and his room, out into the night and into a graveyard. A plump and shimmering woman, Mrs Owens, is surprised to see him there. She is, after all, a ghost, and babies fleshy with life don’t often stumble into graveyards at night. Her bafflement doesn’t last long, however, and Mrs Owens persuades her husband, Mr Owens, that they should take care of the baby. They ensure that his childhood is safe and loving, and the Freedom of the Graveyard enables him to see in the dark and walk some ways that living usually cannot.

But it is Bod the man Jack was after, and even in the graveyard, he is not safe, for Jack is still searching him out. To make sure Bod is prepared for the Outside, his guardian, Silas, seeks out an education for him that covers everything from his letters to Fading and Sliding and Dreamwalking. These lessons prove useful, whether to escape the company of Ghûlheim’s ghouls, Victor Hugo and the Thirty-Third President of the United States (they take their names from the last meal they had), or the mysterious fright of the Sleer, which slumbers in a tomb beneath the graveyard. Of course, it’s not only the lessons he received that helps Bod to emerge from these otherworldly encounters unscathed; often, his survival depends on his thoughtful nature and his quick wits.

In The Graveyard Book, like many of Gaiman’s other works, we see what might happen if our ‘normal’ world was revealed to have fantastic elements operating throughout it. Gaiman is adept at adopting various mythical characters – witches, werewolves, ghouls, ghosts – and creating circumstances for them to collide with regular people. He also throws in a couple of his own creations, and other novelty in his storytelling comes from playful cross-history tension – when quizzed about his education to date, Bod says: ‘Letitia Borrows teaches me writing and words, and Mr Pennyworth teaches me his Compleat Educational System for Younger Gentlemen with Additional Material for those Post Mortem.’ It’s always a pleasure to see how Gaiman tumbles wondrous creatures free from their historical binds, and The Graveyard Book‘s recombinant mythmaking continues his track record of creating delightful otherworldly entertainment.

Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay, her memoir about chronic illness and recovery, is an incredible book; and one of its most interesting lines for me was: ‘A lyric speaker must occupy the lyric moment as it’s happening. Or so it seems to me at this moment.’ I took Manguso’s ‘lyric speaker’ as a reference to a lyric poet and, hideously underacquainted with poetry as I am, took recourse via The Oxford Companion to the English Language (well, okay, Wikipedia – I have tried to get a copy of the Companion from work, but I think it’s out of print) to find out what kind of a poet that was. The Companion says that a lyric poem is ‘usually a poem with rhyming that expresses personal feelings’. Okay, so pretty broad and, as it turns out, not really a good definition to base my research about Manguso on, as she’s an acclaimed prose poet. (Yes, I know I shouldn’t be using Wikipedia for ‘research’, but I am on holiday, dammit.)

Nevertheless, I enjoyed Siste Viator, her second book. Manguso’s poetry often takes the form of short stanzas, much as in her memoir. Often, she uses two-line stanzas, which, aligned in a poem’s spine, create a raft of spaces and lines that evoke a dangling rope ladder. My experience with these contraptions is that I detest every step I take on those unsteady rungs, but when I get down to the bottom, I look up and admire the beauty of the thing, and the tensile-then-slack ways of my once-consort. I often felt the same way about Manguso’s poetry, which is so footed in a personal vocabulary of emphasis and excogitation and reference that it can seem unmired and stakeless to a reader not privy to the writer’s emotional matrix. (However, Siste Viator does include a couple of pages of notes at the end, which include a number of fascinating nods.)

But Siste Viator means ‘stop, traveller’, and was a common inscription on Roman roadside tombs. Thus, Manguso invites our advertence to the monuments she has laid to her emotional remains and their targets: ‘I arrive and arrive. Look–I am the statue that thinks it’s running.’ Sometimes, this is literally death itself: ‘My favorite euphemism for death is the future … Will we never live together in the round house?’ In her ‘Address’ poems, the static nature of the published/memorialised poet is emphasised, and the reader bears witness to an explicit exchange between the poet and her target. Some rung-hopping from one of these unilateral calls, ‘Address on the Tenth Day’:

This morning all non-coffee energy comes from having slept in
your blue shirt.

Soon we will fly north and see a glacier: proof that poignancy
can be planned.

Before the needle (poignard) goes in, we must ride in an airplane,
but airplanes also are poignant. Liftoff: the moment that flying
stops being a metaphor.

These poems are often the embodiment of her Decay epiphany: occupy the lyric moment. Thus, they invoke modern equipment, scratch at immediate thoughts and grasp at fleeting mental possessions, bowerbird-like. Manguso is assiduous in occupying the moment. She documents the unexpected expansion of capacity in trying circumstances: ‘I am not asking to suffer less. / I hope to be nearly crucified.’ Relentless curiosity is a vital part of this documentation, perhaps as an aid to understanding, perhaps as part of a forging between the poet and the subject: ‘How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?/ What about reality interests you? / How long can you live?’ Many of the poems in Siste Viator include the reader in their descriptive embrace, and my favourite are those powerful with vatic pronouncement:

Love not the rider but the old rider,
The ghost in the saddle: Obey that ghost.
A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.
But we are not good horses.

But Manguso’s focus is sure, and at the end of Siste Viator, she reminds us what the spectacle of the lyric poet means for the reader:

I am not here to ruin you.
I am already in you.
I am the work you don’t do.
I am what you understand best and wordless.
I am with you in your chair and in your song.
…
Love me hard, pilgrim.

Read Manguso’s poem ‘Address to Winnie in Paris’ at The Best American Poetry blog.

Jesse Ball’s The Way through Doors is an extraordinary tonic to that tiresome lament that the novel is dead, a single-handed draught for the literary chopfallen. The Way through Doors has all the necessary ingredients – sneaky, silvery prose; intrepid storytelling; thoughtful metafictional interrogration; and such tenderness as is rarely well executed – for an actual, real, motherf’ing book of the year. Let’s not pollute this conversation with talk of the recency effect. This is probably the best thing I’ve read in 2009.

Selah Morse, a young pamphleteer, in conversation with his uncle, receives new employment as a municipal inspector. His new colleague, Levkin, gives Selah a new blue-grey suit, like to those worn by Armenian intelligence. Amorphous though the role may be – there are no parameters or tasks – it’s a pleasing one. Rita, the message girl, is particularly pleasing, with her prettiness and the tea she brings. After six or nine months as a municipal inspector, Selah is out on the street, on his way to buy noodles. A fine looking girl with bare shoulders and elegant mien is also out and about, walking down the street, when she is hit by a taxi. To assist her, Selah requisitions the taxi and they drive to the hospital, where Selah poses as the girl’s boyfriend. He selects a name for her: Mora Klein. Mora’s memory has been lost, and the doctor tells Selah that to recover it, Selah must keep her awake overnight, and help her reconstruct her past.

Beginning with a story familiar to The Way through Doors’ readers, that of his initiation into the municipal service, Selah searches for truths with which to anoint Mora’s soul. But the tale is long and gathers up its own turning velocity. Before long, Selah’s story is subsumed by another, told by Levkin; an explanatory spiel that helps Selah to realise that the municipal inspector’s role is as ‘a randomizing element in the psychology of the city’. Soon, another story takes hold, this time the story of ‘the curling touch’, told by the Chinese chef of ‘the best vegetable steamed dumplings in the whole city’. These tales coalesce and nudge one another, pools of inked water that bleed inexorably into each other, but retain their own pigments. The stories are ‘phrases cast upon precise winds’, espousing and embracing one another with a curious and exhilarating logic (or lack thereof).

The Way through Doors is not so much a story as it is about story. In many ways, it is Kafkaesque, its teetering dimensions reminiscent of a swimming pool with, impossibly, no bottom. Yet it retains the best aspects of story itself, including its capacity to illuminate the oddnesses of our narrative-hungry human race. Ball’s interest in exhibiting how we prioritise narrative above reality can be seen in his other work, too. He is a creative writing teacher, and one of his writing exercises is an exercise in lying: the student is to convince a friend that they did something that has never happened, using as persuasive ballast the student’s knowledge of what characteristic their friend holds most dear about their self. Also in Ball’s well-stocked and unusual arsenal is the tumbling minstrelry of Boccaccio; the evident teller’s enchantment I associate with the Australian ‘yarn’, something told for the sake of itself; the universality of folk tales; the metafictional defiance of Calvino; and a crooning tenderness that is all Ball’s own.

With all its superincumbent passageways and blithe ladders, The Way through Doors should be a virtuoso reading effort. But, instead, it’s one of the most dazzling and joyful reading experiences that has ignited my reading this year.

A little venture into Jesse Ball’s website.

Something to listen to, this time: the review of Evie Wyld’s After the Fire, A Still Small Voice I did for Radio National’s The Book Show. I get some tonal variation in my voice after the first thirty seconds; just be patient. Wyld won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for this, her first novel, which was also easily one my favourite things I’ve read this year. Listen to the rest of the show, as well: Reif Larsen discusses the books he likes to collect, Andrea Goldsmith talks about grief and poetry, and Kevin Rudd’s summer reading list is revealed.

I reviewed Alex Miller’s Lovesong for The Big Issue. It’s a lovely book exploring the ownership of one’s story and the proposition that when someone tells you a story it becomes a gift. Ken, an ostensibly retired writer, has returned to Melbourne after a sojourn in Venice. Before long, though, he’s captivated by the exotic smell of pastries wafting out from where the drycleaner’s used to be, the beautiful dark-eyed woman who runs it and her husband, an Australian man with beautiful hands, ‘the hands of a capable man’. He discovers their names – Sabiha and John Patterner – and clamour arises within his writer’s heart for the ‘ancient buried sorrow’ he sees in Sabiha’s eyes; the ‘simple love story between them, this Aussie bloke and his exotic bride’.

There is a lot of pain in this book, but Lovesong is also unexpectedly playful. Ken’s circumstances mirror Miller’s own: Ken’s ostensible last book was called The Farewell – a barely disguised Landscape of Farewell; and the accomplished writer cherishes his memories of the Tunisian city El Djem. John Patterner is not free of Miller’s arch self-mirroring, either. Patterner’s Melbourne University education, favoured North African restaurant in Paris and country town provenance are all lifted, bare-facedly, from Miller’s own history. ‘Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait,’ says Ken (pace Lucian Freud) to a nosy interviewer.

Miller is a fantastic writer who is equally capable of the lyrical and the laconic. An example of the latter:

The coffee was steaming. His mother had named Tip for the white tip on her tail. John had not given names to his animals. His father’s old horse had been a big lumbering brown gelding named Beau. A great farter. A monumental farter. When his father spurred Beau up the bank of the creek the horse let out a series of mighty farts. Real stinkers. It would take your head off if you were tailing him too closely.

The other thing is that Miller has a real knack for names. I don’t know how many times I read a modern realist novel or short story and roll my eyes at the names. Wrong names can pull you right out of a narrative – if they’re too sterile, too pretty or too odd, they don’t work. Of course, it’s hard to pick monikers that could come out of a phone book without just flipping open the White Pages. But it’s not often you come across an author with the knack for picking proper nouns that lend a heartbeat to what is really just ink on a page. Sabiha and the two Hourias; John Patterner; Andrea and Tumas Galasso; Ken and Clare. Just kind of strange enough, kind of pedestrian enough, just they-live-right-round-the-corner enough.

Romance is a narrative space that has birthed some enduring clichés: I’d Take a Bullet for You; I Knew I Loved You before I Met You; What Took You So Long? These phrases are attractive because they create a paradigm in which there is only one choice, in which the tragic and the correct are one and the same thing. So it is with the exhortation to ‘Let the Right One in’: this imperative expresses the commentator’s capitulation to life’s generous and resolute pairing strategy. There’s one person out there for you, and when you find them, you let yourself love them, and you let them be with you. But any of us familiar with love’s angled horns knows that love is not the cakewalk that the easy gait of these phrases makes it out to be. What happens, for example, when a person grows to love a predator; when a human falls in love with a vampire?

Oskar is a young boy who imagines the earth of Blackeberg, his hometown, drinking the blood of his bullies; a lonely and damaged child whom older children in his school and apartment block take advantage of: selling him stolen toys at exorbitant prices and calling him ‘Little Pig’. Nosebleeds and wet pants are daily problems, and he’s chubby from the confectionery he regularly swipes from stores. His troubles show no signs of abating, and filter through even to how he spends his time waiting for his mother to come home from work – a scrapbook he keeps under a stack of comics contains clippings about grisly crimes from newspapers and the Home Journal. So it’s no wonder that Oskar is intrigued when a young boy is killed in nearby Vällingby.

His loneliness, however, is about to come to an end. In the courtyard of his building one evening, Oskar is imagining himself the attacker and his bully, Jonny, the victim, when a young girl he’s never seen before joins him outside. Eli is quiet but strange, wearing only a thin pink top against the freezing cold. She moves like a cat. There’s something broken about her, too: her first words to Oskar are not ‘Hello’ or ‘Hi’, but ‘I can’t be friends with you. Just so you know.’ She smells bad, though she looks like a doll, with her pale, white face and dark hair. Two children used to being alone, their interaction prefaced by antisocial stabs: it’s a heartbreaking premise for a novel’s axial relationship. But it’s delicately handled by John Ajvide Lindqvist, as is every passage in which the children’s rapport is the focus. In particular, the way they finally breach their own defensive barriers to become friends – in the committed, obsessive way that children can foster – is beautiful and quick, an insect’s hop between leaves. Since both are accustomed to being almost alone in the world, their love for one another necessitates a rare brand of support and trust. And that’s even before Oskar discovers why Eli is so strange, for she is, of course, a vampire.

The vampire story can be remade and remodelled endlessly, as a series I’m desperately trying to avoid mentioning by name here has recently shown. Lindqvist’s interpolation of the ancient monster into the contemporary context, along with the ethics, the rules and the history of that special flavour of beast, is a successful and cinematic one – it’s no surprise that Let the Right One In lent itself so wonderfully to a film adaptation. Few Western readers would need to be reminded why the vampire – human-like, eternal, predatory – is so compelling a creature, and therefore so prone to recurring in fiction. Lindqvist’s modern interpretation limps a little with the introduction of a medico-biotic explication of the vampire’s hunger, but is wonderful when focused on the delicate, fierce exchanges between Oskar and Eli.

However, this book is not for the reader who is similarly delicate. Crime fiction, even vampire crime fiction, has traditionally accommodated an author’s interrogation of the socio-cultural landscape. In Let the Right One In, the murders that soon creep from Vällingby to Blackeberg are not the only criminal items of note – Eli’s companion, Håkan, is a paedophile who finds opportunities to indulge his vice at the local library, and searches out people for Eli to feed on. Håkan and Eli’s victims are not anonymous or horror-film-glamorous fodder. Vulnerable people are the easiest victims, and so a child, a cancer sufferer, a monobrowed member of a drinking group and a grandmother all succumb to Eli’s unnatural needs. Key to this aspect of the book is Eli’s body, which Lindqvist explicitly renders as a beautiful blank that allows respective characters to perceive her in a range of dangerous and contradictory ways, whether as an object for experimentation, games or desire.

Though as a vampire Eli needs permission to enter a person’s home, she needs no such consent to enter a person’s heart; she has long honed the skills of cultivating human attachment that enable her survival. But it is not only Oskar’s decision to let her – the ostensibly dangerous one – into his life that creates the emotional cynosure of Let the Right One In. At the centre of this book is the combination of sweetness and despair that follows Eli’s decision to abjure her path of centuries to take the risk of letting mortal love into her life, and what that means for her endless existence. It is a decision fraught with the weighty ethics of love, expressed with touching clarity in this book.