Just a little peep from me: a review of Kirsty Murray’s India Dark on Radio National’s The Book Show.

Also, something a bit novel. If you’d like to read a book with me, and hear me discuss it with some special guests (very special guests!), get cracking on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. I’ll be reading it for the Kill Your Darlings Culture Club podcast. Believe me, you want to read this book. It was Fitzgerald’s sophomore book, and it actually features a scene in which one of the characters refers to his first, extremely successful, novel, This Side of Paradise. It’s just like staring into a tortured soul. Seriously. The podcast airs on Tuesday December 14. Get thee ready!

Imagine a city where you can tell a person’s social position, what language they speak and their background just by looking at them. Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head tells us that Shillong, in India’s north east, is such a place:

Firdaus knew that the woman waving to her from the window of the beauty parlour, her friend Sharon, was a quarter British, a quarter Assamese of the tea-planter variety, and half Khasi.

Firdaus is an outsider, a teacher at the Loreto Convent. She has no Khasi blood, unlike the majority of Shillong’s inhabitants – she is a dkhar, an outsider, a ‘permanent guest of the hills-people’. Four years into her PhD, and she still thinks of ‘English literature as a vast grey 19th century amorphousness’. Her supervisor, Dr Thakur, is as scattershot and adamant with his advice as Thor on a bad day, and her thesis topic is sadly undercooked: ‘Something like the values of characters like Elizabeth Bennet … how she manages to get around … prudishness and arrogance and that sort of thing.’

Another local, Aman Moondy, is preparing to sit the Civil Services exam. It’s his second attempt; having been assured by his philosophy teachers that there was no future in that ancient art of knowledge, the exam seems like the only way out of Shillong. What he really loves is music – Aman’s band, The ProtoDreamers, imagine themselves as Pink Floyd and as the trigger for a new creative scene.

This part of India bears the marks of its neighbours – Bhutan, Bangladesh, Burma and Nepal. Chinese restaurants jostle for space among the kwai (betel nut) sellers and aloo-wallahs. But this doesn’t mean that its inhabitants attend harmoniously to life and each other. Instead, Firdaus and Aman are uncertain of their welcome. For dkhar, violence can bloom like a terrible flower: see a street vendor pummelled for fun by Khasi youths.

Eight-year-old Sophie feels alienated, too. Not only from the people in the Ladybird books she has read (‘Jane, will you help Mummy bake a cake?’), but also from her parents. In fact, she thinks that she’s adopted – how else can she become Khasi, like the others?

Anjum Hasan was born in Shillong. She writes it as a loose tangle waiting to be tightened – racially motivated acts span the gamut from merely rebarbative to fatal. Lunatic in My Head is an immersive way of discovering a part of India we know so little about.

(Cross-posted from mwfblog.)

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy are three of my favourite books in the world. The books, if you haven’t read them, follow the adventures of a young girl called Lyra, who lives in a parallel world to ours, where humans’ souls exist outside their bodies and take animal forms. The sheer imagination that suffuses the novels is wondrous, and is underpinned by Pullman’s powers of characterisation; Lyra and her companion, Will, who’s from our world, are no mere products of ink on paper, but are as present as living, breathing flesh; as are their animal souls.

One of the most striking preoccupations of the books, and a common target for commentary since their publication, is the strength and corruption of its fictional church, called the Magisterium. In Northern Lights, the first of the books, the Magisterium has built a laboratory to perform dreadful experiments on children in the name of trying to eradicate Dust, which they believe is a physical manifestation of sin. The books are peppered with zealots of all kinds, from the lethal Mrs Coulter, a power-hungry associate of the Magisterium, to fanatics willing to flagellate themselves in advance punishment for crimes. Pullman’s fictional assailment upon wealthy, corporate churches was echoed in his personal statements, with his famous quote ‘My books are about killing God’ earning him plenty of ire from Christians all around the world.

His new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which I reviewed recently for The Big Issue, tackles similar ground in a more radical fashion. In fact, it might be seen as the thematic prequel to the His Dark Materials books: it sets up the structures and mythology that Pullman had Lyra tear down. Pullman reimagines the original Christian birth as a double: Mary is the mother of twins, Jesus and Christ. Christ is the early forerunner in the story, a child who performs miracles and often assists his more compulsive brother, Jesus, out of trouble. As the brothers age, the differences intensify – Jesus becomes a charismatic religious teacher devoted to God, who repels with disgust Christ’s attempts to persuade him to capitalise on his influence and assemble a structured church, ‘all answering to the authority of one supreme director’.

Christ is asked by a mysterious stranger to make a record of Jesus’ doings, and he does so – at first as accurately as he can, but then with some revisions and editing. So we learn that the stories we now know from the Bible were entirely different in the doing; we see the tension of myth and history. For instance, the paralysed man whom Jesus exhorts to take up his mat and walk was not cured, but ’so strengthened and inspired by the atmosphere Jesus had created that he found himself able to move’. And, at a wedding in Cana where the wine has run out, Jesus has a few words with a steward and more wine appears, but it’s not certain exactly how; it’s possible that Jesus has simply asked for more to be brought out.

There is a lot to admire in the book, but there are also disappointments. I have not read anything so beautiful this year as The Good Man Jesus’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, which is served well by Pullman’s easy yet arresting prose. His way with characterisation and dialogue (assisted, of course, by the source material) provides us with a Jesus who is resolute and lion-like in ferocity. But there’s close to no subtlety in Jesus’s diatribe in Gethsemane. In Mark’s gospel, this is a moment of enduring and bottomless faith. But in The Good Man Jesus, Jesus has lost his faith completely, and is using his last moments not for reconciliation but catharsis: ‘Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in our name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love.’ It’s rather too ‘The Church’s Worst Crimes throughout the Ages’, and not strongly foreshadowed in the book; as Rowan Williams said in his Guardian review, ‘nothing in the narrative has prepared us for this; the Jesus of earlier chapters has a robust conviction of the unconditional love of God’.

The Christian story is one that clearly has a powerful hold on Pullman. In fact, such is its power over him that my thoughts upon reading The Good Man Jesus were of a similar tenor to James Bradley’s conclusion in May 5th’s Australian Literary Review (though nowhere near as finely worded) that The Good Man Jesus ‘is a book so bound up in its argument with religion that it is … essentially a religious text, unable to transcend the terms of its creation’. The dilemma faced by Christ – how to represent Jesus’s story and ensure its longevity – is one that accepts the power and grace of that originary story. But while Pullman may have an argument with religion, he certainly doesn’t have anything against the power of story, the sole element of religion that emerges from the book unscathed.

Read the transcript of a conversation between Philip Pullman and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury (whose intelligence and engagement with non-Christian viewpoints make me furious about being in the poisonous vicinity of George Pell), here.

I was going to do an ‘In the style of’ post about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but when I chanced upon Jacob Lambert’s version at The Millions, which not only has five parts but is also really funny, I realised what folly it would be to try and compete. However, I am still really wedded to the idea. For me, The Road is all about McCarthy’s writing style, apocalyptic messages to profligate humanity notwithstanding. It’s the no-space, no-hyphen compound words; and the resolute renouncement of apostrophes in contractions; and the mysterious non-appearance of inverted commas; and all the hair tousling. So I’m just going to herd you on over to Lambert’s parody by way of a choice quote.

Now this is the river, he said, indicating a random mapcrease. We follow the road here along the eastern slope of the mountains. These are our roads, the black lines here. See these roads? The boy seemed confused. What’s the matter, the man said.

I thought it was singular. You know. “The Road.”

The man’s eyes went wide. Where did you get those?

Get what?

The quotation marks.

The boy looked at his feet. Ive. Ive been saving them, Papa.

Well you can’t just use them like that. He took the boy’s face in his hands, more roughly than intended. Everything is precious. Everything. Do you understand?

The boy looked a little bit frightened. Yes Papa. I wont ever use them again. I promise.

Let’s talk about my Too Early Introduction To Tim Winton. When I was a wee tacker with no friends and a constant seat at the library, my parents and teachers often encouraged me to expand my readerly repertoire. As a result, I had a lot of incoming recommendations – one teacher recommended that I read Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, though I must have felt that the rural lives of Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene (really??) weren’t quite up to my standards, as I’ve never read it.

Whether I took to the recommended book or not was pretty unpredictable. My favourite read was Jane Eyre, and it remains so to this day, despite its being an exemplar of the Possibly Crazy White Oppressor’s Simultaneous Despoliation of the Dignity Of Females From Conquered Races And The Lower Classes genre. But when I tried reading Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet on the shelves at home, I was so displeased with what it offered that I didn’t finish it.

So, however unfair it may be to Mr Winton, I’ve kind of nursed ill feeling towards him since then – more than half my life. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for Cloudstreet then, and I’m certainly not opposed to trying again in future. Occasionally, I have considered a dip into the Winton oeuvre, but every time I thought about it, I’d think of reasons not to go ahead. For example, not so long ago, a couple of my friends attempted to read Cloudstreet, and found it incredibly hard to get through. Nevertheless, I’m not one to ever say never, so I read Breath when I was on holiday in Sri Lanka.

Although it seems that I am gratuitously mentioning my tropical sojourn every time I draw digital breath, I feel like the setting of the ‘I Finally Give Tim Winton Another Go’ melodrama was important. It’s not that I’m so literal as to think a beachside location is integral to appreciating Breath. But interspersing my reading stints with the occasional surrender to tiny but powerful waves, on a shoreline tremendous with whiteness, lent another dimension to my experience of Breath’s grace and power.

Breath opens with Bruce Pike roaring up the road with another paramedic to a house where a seventeen-year-old kid has died of asphyxiation. Jodie, Bruce’s colleague, assumes that the teenager has committed suicide. Bruce knows better; he may be ‘arrogant, aloof, sexist, bad communicator, gung-ho’, but he knows what young Aaron’s motivations were, just like they his own. Once, Bruce – Pikelet – was a kid from Sawyer, ‘a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers’. But then he chanced to follow his mate, Loonie, clinging gamely one day to the tie-rail of a flatbed truck, and he saw the ocean.

Pikelet’s first glimpse of the surf and its inhabitants haunts him: ‘How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant’. Pursuing the surf swallows up his time, and his fledgling adult identity: to follow the surf is to defy his father, who is petrified of the open water. Pikelet and Loonie get their start with a motley group of surfers, before they succeed to the mentorship of Sando, a ‘huge, bearded, coiled-up presence’, whose ability in the surf is unparalleled in their small acquaintance. Before long Pikelet and Loonie are striving to the heights that Sando sets them, and competing against each other for his regard and the wildest wave.

What blew me away was the sheer physicality of Winton’s ocean. I’ve never felt more terrified and awed and seduced by a description as I have when reading Winton’s Old Smoky, the wave that baptises the boys as local surfing mavericks, and the Nautilus, a notorious wave that taunts Pikelet and Loonie with its unpredictability and danger. Breath parses the surf in straightforward poetry, from Old Smoky’s immense ’sound of sheetmetal shearing itself to pieces’ to the gentler water’s ‘cauls of fizz and light’, which accompany the surfer who’s taken on the impossible and won. I’ve never seen surf like that, but I’m pretty sure I will always be able to call to my mind’s eye the spectacle of thousands of cubic metres’ worth of spine-snapping water curving in a wall towards a person, tiny on a board of fibreglass and foam.

In some ways, the novel’s structure is but a viable vehicle for the absolute, unbiddable presence of the water. Something that I read about Tim Winton and Breath, long before I ever read the book, is James Ley’s comment that ‘Winton is a high symbolist working in a realist mode’. I came across this quote at Kerryn Goldsworthy’s blog, and it stayed with me for two years. Ley’s comment deeply affected the way I read the book. Aspects of the novel feel like they are in service of the novel’s focal symbol, the breath, including Pikelet’s sexual relationship with Sando’s wife, Eva, who herself seems merely perfunctory at times.

Nevertheless, what a way to shirk any indifference I felt about a writer many consider Australia’s finest. Good to meet you again, Tim.

When I read Indignation over the summer, I really enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t have read it unless my boyfriend hadn’t been given it by an Icelandic friend he’d met in Tanzania and if I hadn’t been on holiday in paradisiac Sri Lanka, which was satisfying my hunger for hammocks and beers so generously that all I could do was read the books I’d brought and then everyone else’s. Despite appearances, I’m not trying to flaunt my bourgie lifestyle – only point out how improbable and extreme were the circumstances of reading only my second ever Roth tome. Whatever, you like holidays too.

My first Philip Roth experience was with Goodbye, Columbus. I know a lot of people who love that book, but I wasn’t struck by any gigantic lightning bolts by any means. I’m a bit puzzled now, looking at the Wikipedia summary (yes, okay, whatever, I am lazy), about why I don’t remember Goodbye, Columbus more fondly. Some of those later stories sound pretty interesting. But, with reference to the first, titular, story, I can pretty easily explain why I’ve been so reluctant to dive into the Roth oeuvre since then. I guess I don’t really care about classism if the concerns are expressed predominantly within the context of wanting to screw a lady whom society deems inappropriate for you. So, that story kind of stuck in my head, but not in a good way.

A little while back, I expressed my reluctance to choose another Roth to read – mostly because I perceived that his oeuvre was uneven – at Lydia Kiesling’s blog (she now writes for The Millions), to which she replied: ‘Norman Mailer and Philip Roth both belong to my American Post-War Masculine Bermuda Triangle of Doom.’ Which also stuck in my head. How am I supposed to pick a safe harbour in a Triangle of Doom?

But I read this ‘Pulling a Roth’ post in the Wheeler Centre’s Dailies the other week, and it refers to comments Roth made in his Paris Review interview:

It’s all one book you write anyway. At night you dream six dreams. But are they six dreams? One dream prefigures or anticipates the next, or somehow concludes what hasn’t yet even been fully dreamed. Then comes the next dream, the corrective of the dream before—the alternative dream, the antidote dream—enlarging upon it, or laughing at it, or contradicting it, or trying just to get the dream dreamed right. You can go on trying all night long.

…the effects of which are basically ‘I’ve been writing the same novel…28 times.’

I thought again of Indignation, though many months have passed since I read it, and despite the similarities between it and ‘Goodbye, Columbus’, I remembered it with a small glow. (Of course, I was also recalling with warmth my rope bed swinging between coconut palms.) I think half of our holidaying companions read Indignation during those weeks, and we all really liked it.

Indignation is the first-person story of Marcus Messner, the son of a butcher and his wife. Marcus is a pretty good kid who gets excellent grades at school and helps out at the shop but is nevertheless being slowly alienated by his father’s increasingly pathological worrying. So he jumps ship to a small liberal arts college called Winesburg, where he is subjected to all the usual outsider traumas: frat boys shouting ‘Hey, Jew! Over here!’ and a roommate who has an almost demonic lack of regard for him.

But Winesburg is also, of course, the stage for Markie’s big love story, ‘the beauticious Olivia’. And here again the nauseating lusty affection for what a disgruntled Tim Rutten, writing in the LA Times, called ‘the requisite inappropriate shiksa’. I’ve heard a lot about Roth’s uncomfortably one-dimensional, gazed-upon women. But Indignation’s ridiculous affair worked for me, for a few reasons. One: sure, Olivia is mentally ill and is given short shrift as a character. But Messner’s obsessive fantasising is so feckless that it’s horribly sad to witness, especially in conjunction with his other foibles. I realise that if you’d read more than one other of Roth’s 28 books, Messner’s hopeless, useless, obsessive erotic thrall (that’s Rutten again, paraphrased) wouldn’t just be Chinese Water Torture drop #2, but something progressively worse than that. But Messner is an emotional infant, and his love for Olivia makes that clear.

Second, Messner’s über pathetic romance-stimulated body and thoughts are exploding against the backdrop of the Korean War, which is in its second year. Messner, the butcher’s son, is all too aware of what carnage is like: ‘I grew up with blood and grease and knife sharpeners and slicing machines and amputated fingers or missing parts of fingers on the hands of my three uncles as well as my father—and I never got used to it and I never liked it.’ His academic strivings are an attempt to put a gulf between himself and the violent visceral promise of war, and similarly, Messner’s self-imposed sexual deadline becomes more urgent in the threat of being drafted: ‘I was determined to have intercourse before I died.’

{Don’t read the next paragraph if you object to details that are arguably spoiler material.}

Christopher Hitchens was pretty scathing about this whole tra-la: ‘The ordinariness of the prose here (“trammels holding sway” and all that) is matched by the familiarity of the Eros/Thanatos dialectic.’ But for my part, I was relieved to see Roth’s sexual foregrounding anchored by some pathos in Indignation; though Messner is a terribly weird and self-indulgent unit, his defiance of school norms and his bleating anxiety are just sympathetic enough. This makes the novel’s framing conceit (revealed partway through the book) an effective one – Messner’s in hospital, deeply injured, and is narrating the events of his short life under morphine’s potent sway.

I do find it, in theory, an infuriating proposition that any author might consider each novel an improved iteration of the successive ones. However, late Roth in my case was a far more rewarding experience than early Roth. Indignation puts Roth’s usual ingredients together to create an effective novel; he even manages to make masturbation kind of poignant. Did I just say that? Hmmmm.

Far be it from me to be snobby about people’s reading choices. Just because I haven’t picked up those books about a sparkly vampire yet doesn’t mean I don’t want to be spirited away on a cloud of sparkly vampire romance and anti-feminist values. I am pretty sure I foresee a time in my life when those things will be vital ingredients in Project Hermit Weekend (aka Don’t Forget the Sakatas). But I digress, because I am here, of course, to talk about another couple of vampire books: Charlaine Harris’s Dead until Dark and Living Dead in Dallas.

If you’re into ‘background information’ and all that, then I’ll just point out that these books belong to the Southern Vampire series, New York Times bestsellers that inspired the HBO television series True Blood. Sookie, the heroine of the series (there are eleven books in total) is

blond and blue-eyed and twenty-five, and my legs are strong and my bosom is substantial, and I have a waspy waistline. I look good in the warm-weather waitress outfit Sam picked for us: black shorts, white T, white socks, black Nikes.

Sookie’s telepathic, and she’s suitably ambivalent about her ‘disability, or gift’, which allows her to listen in on the thoughts of those around her. It causes a bit of havoc in her mental space. She found school trying, what with her having to hear what everyone else thought about the problem they were working on, so she gave up on it and started working as a waitress instead. And she definitely doesn’t take many lovers; no one wants to hear exactly what a paramour is thinking when his hand is on your ass. So Sookie is settled enough, in a way: she’s found a way to live.

But she is fascinated by the undead, the vampires who a couple of years ago ‘came out of the coffin’ to live among the living, breathing human beings of the United States. They congregate in New Orleans, a kind of vampire epicentre, but rarely do the exotic creatures have the inclination to visit Sookie’s Bon Temps, a rural northern Louisiana town. So when Bill Compton sits at one of her tables, with his nose ‘like a prince’s in a Byzantine mosaic’, it doesn’t take long for her to think of him as ‘her vampire’.

Harris is a tidy writer, whose generally workhorse prose can be funny or unexpectedly vivid, which makes the occasional gaffe okay. Our narrator, Sookie, peppers her speech and thoughts with plenty of charming down-homey talk (though she gets syrupy when contemplating her beloved). Bill is the classic tall, dark and handsome stranger, with a twist – he likes Kenny G when not cocooned in peremptory silences, and prefers women to wear long skirts.

These are some snappy, sure crime books, and it’s easy to see why Alan Ball jumped at the opportunity to create a series based on them. Each book contains a stand-alone story arc, but the vampire–human dynamic is a troubled one that plays out with plenty of antipathy and violence. Dead until Dark sees Sookie targeted by a serial killer who targets women who sleep with vampires, and in Living Dead in Dallas, Sookie is requisitioned by the vampires of Dallas to help them find a lost brother, who may have got tangled up with a religious anti-vamp group.

But though the books are classified as crime fiction, there’s no doubt what these books are really about:

Suddenly I came. Bill howled as he reached his own completion, and he collapsed on me, his fangs pulling out and his tongue cleaning the puncture marks.

It’s a little bit unfair of me to extract these prototype soft-porn sentences, but they illustrate very nicely the odd take Harris has on her characters’ nocturnal activities. You won’t see any anatomically correct terms in Dead until Dark, for example; Harris prefers a primly indirect approach: ‘He slid directly into me’. But there’s no getting around the rampaging libidos of the vampires and the humans who want to have sex with them (‘fang-bangers’). Twine the regular pangs of lust with the additional delicious kick that vampires get from ingesting human blood, and you’ve got an all-night disco party. When Sookie is wounded with a toxic weapon, three vampires drain her of blood before giving her a transfusion. Sookie may be dying, but for her pale friends, it’s the degustation menu with matching wines. And the blood exchange doesn’t just go one way. Sookie partakes of Bill’s blood – vampire blood is healing for humans – and it ‘tasted good, salty, the stuff of life. My unbroken arm rose, my hand clamped the vampire’s wrist to my mouth.’

As my friend Daisy said the other day, ‘sex and death – what more could you want?’ (Well, actually, I think she said ‘sex and death’ and then shrugged. But that’s not an appropriate way to end a blog post.)