The Northern Clemency – Philip Hensher

In a nod to the nineteenth-century narrative tradition that it seems to have been plucked from, Hensher’s latest novel can be dubbed both a tale of two cities and, for this reader at least, a tale of two books.

A book laden with dust-jacket claims heavy enough to sink a battleship - a “condition-of-England” novel, a “condition-of-humanity” novel, “reminiscent of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels” - it bored with kitchen-sink details for 300 pages before setting off on an engrossing ride through 20 years of English history. Politically centred about the 80s miners’ strike in Sheffield, it also examines the bloating of the middle-classes and the death of 70s-born radicalism.

It’s also a book rooted heavily in the everyday, as Hensher dissects the progression of familial relationships as children grow into adults and parents seep into old age, and he does so expertly. The dialogue is never anything other than thoroughly readable and painstakingly believable, and this is something that Hensher clearly prided himself on in his writing of the novel, having said in an interview with Safraz Manzoor for a Guardian Podcast: “I always find it absolutely incredible when I read most novels set in the 1970s that people pay so little attention to the way people expressed themselves.”

And although the first 300 pages tire somewhat with their seeming lack of direction, the following 450 pages provide a justification for the author’s whopping introduction. It is the first 300 pages that set up the minor tensions that Hensher manipulates and exploits in a way that make the second-half’s revelations so engrossing and, more importantly, convincing.

I’ve already mentioned the kitchen-sink, and Hensher draws heavily on spirit of the kitchen-sink dramas of Ken Loach in weighing out the balance of the political and the personal in this extremely weighty tome.

In the same interview with Manzoor mentioned earlier, Hensher refuted Manzoor’s observation that “some people have said that there isn’t enough politics in [the book]” by saying “I think it’s constantly political.” And it is in the way that the north-south divide is political, in the way that the change of polytechnics into universities was political, in the way that having an affair with your boss or turning an old warehouse into a restaurant is political, in the way that, really, everything is political if you want it to be.

The novel encapsulates all of the aforementioned events, and it is really more of a politically-subtle piece than anything, as Hensher is well-aware:

“My starting point was to evoke the domestic texture of life…to focus on small events…the miniature features of people’s lives, and to extrapolate a sort of political implication from those.”
And this is where a large part of the book’s charm lies. Who would want to read a 750 page novel of overt political soap-boxing? And how would it be a novel if this is what it did?

What we have here is a novel that takes in and spits out the prominent political issues of the final 30 years of the 20th century, not a political textbook. And thank God for that, because if we had a textbook instead we’d be robbed of one of the memorable novels of the first ten years of the 21st century.

Points of View - Poetry Review - Volume 98:2 Summer 2008

Poetry is a thoroughly different beast to prose, and consequently deserves to be read in a thoroughly different way.

My preferred method, and most poetry readers have their own method of choice, is to read it through first without stopping to annotate or consider thoroughly, just concentrating on getting a feel for the poem and it’s narrative thread and general message. Others prefer to read aloud to get a feel for poetry in the mouth, the full sounds, but as I often read on the train this may strike some of my fellow-travellers as a little odd. Furthermore, I feel I can gauge a poem’s sound pretty well without having to read it aloud, as I can enounce it in my head.

After this, I comb through it with a pencil, making annotations on rhyme, meter, syntax, imagery, or whatever strikes me particularly relevant for that poem.

This is where poetry differs from prose for me, for while I do make some annotations when reading prose, they are nowhere near as thorough as those I make when reading poetry.

Poetry is wordsmithery at its highest form, delicate threads of sentences and punctuation interwoven to make a blanket of sound, rich in terms of layered meanings, imagery and simple flow of language. To put it simply, everything matters in poetry. When you’re working with perhaps as little as four lines, there is no room for superfluity, and this is where the beauty of poetry lies for me.
After reading poetry, prose can often seem like the work of children, simple and bare to the point of inanity.

This is the first issue of Poetry Review I have read. It begins with about 50 pages of poetry, selected from various new volumes. While I enjoyed some of the poems, I’d much rather read a whole volume of poetry by one poet, as this allows themes to circulate, it allows feelings and a sense of something to brew into something fit for imbibing. The kind of poetry reading where we jump between authors is almost like snacking – it satisfies a quick need but leaves us essentially unsatisfied, needing more.

Next comes about 15 pages about ‘Poets into Prose’, and this was far and away my favourite section of the magazine. Poets cannot help but be poets even when writing prose, and it is consequently a rich, slower prose than that of pure prose stylists. Alan Brownjohn’s ‘There and Back’, a story of a trip to Bucharest, stood out.

Tim Liardet sums up individual poets very succinctly, but we can apply his comments to poetry as a whole, as an art form distinct from prose:

‘All good poets…have created [their] own dialect and very rarely abandon it.’

(p. 103)

Next come some 30 pages of reviews, followed by a few pages of endnotes, comprising an editorial and bits of prose and poetry.

All in all this is an engaging magazine that is aware of poetry’s marginal place in the literary world, but also seems to sense a second-coming. As Fiona Sampson states in her editorial:

‘Poetry Review is proud to celebrate and learn from multiple points of view in today’s remarkably fertile poetic climate: whose intelligent fluidity, we believe, will allow the Next Big Thing to emerge.’ (p. 118)

It could just be that poetry’s inherent opposition to the pace of modern life ensures its survival as a future art form, despite many viewing it as an already long-dead art form.

Swing Hammer Swing - Jeff Torrington

As a long-time fan of Scottish fiction, I looked forward to delving into Torrington’s Whitbread winner with relish.

Written in the Scots demotic that his compatriots James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have received so much criticism and acclaim for, respectively, Torrington tells the story of the, literal, decline of the Gorbals of the 1960s over one week in the life of Tam Clay.

Father-to-be, wordsmith manqué, adulterer, heavy drinker and accidental arsonist, Tam Clay is the itinerant voice of the working class.

According to The Scotsman’s obituary of Torrington, the author was "fêted by the London literary establishment as the epitome of the working-class Glaswegian done good," yet the aforementioned Kelman, when his ‘How Late It Was, How Late’ won the 1994 Booker Prize, had his novel labelled as a ‘disgrace’ by one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger.

I’ve very little authority to judge what is authentic working-class Glaswegian voice, having grown up in a middle-class West Midlands family, but there seems to be very little difference between the two voices apart from:

1. Torrington’s narrator, Tam Clay, is a more educated man, making overt references to Sartre, Kierkegaard and other renowned authors.

2. Torrington’s Clay swears a lot less than Kelman’s Sammy Samuels.

Essentially, it seems there is a working class voice the establishment can accept, one that is essentially inferior and happy to be inferior to them, with no pretensions of uprising; and one that they cannot accept, one that is boisterous and is ready to put up a fight in the name of his condition.

Tam Clay is essentially a passive observer, content just to whittle away his life in the Gorbals as it falls apart around him, happy to make comments such as ‘February’s such a waste of a month’ (p.301) and move one without further comment.

Sammy Samuels is mentally incapable of such a comment, as for him it would have to be followed by a string of invective about why February is such a waste of a month and whose fault it is.

Yet this does not make him a disgrace. His is just as legitimate a working-class voice as Clay’s, and possibly more so if it says a few things that you don’t want to hear. Because isn’t that what the working class often is to the establishment, something that they don’t want to hear?

Torrington sums up the difference between Clay and Samuels perfectly on page 140:

‘’It was too bad that the blind in literature were doubly disadvantaged; readers tend to assume they’re symbolic: ‘I presume your blind chappy represents the spiritual myopia of contemporary society?’ ‘Well, naw, as a matter of fact he jist couldnae see!’”

Clay, with his functioning eyes, only observes the surfaces of things, whereas Samuels, with his blindness, sees beneath the skin of bureaucratic injustices to the symbols of power that they represent and cannot help but yell out against them.

Both are legitimate working class voices, but only one is acceptable to the establishment.

Под Русским флагом вокруг светом - (Around the world under the Russian flag)

Reading relies, more than we often realise, on word associations. Particularly adjectivally, words can gather or lose a lot of flavour according to the writer’s choice of one word over another.

Reading a book in a foreign language, one can automatically lose a lot of this feeling, struggling to get a handle on concrete meaning rather than looking for subtleties of meaning, especially when far from fluent in the language being read.

Something I am struck by in the two foreign languages I know well enough to comment on – Russian and Polish – is the relative lack of expression available in those languages, in comparison to English. Often dictionary entries for one English word have cver five or six words in Russian or Polish, and thus, as a foreigner at least, one has to wonder if the subtlety of expression we’re capable of in English would be possible at all in these languages.

Another interesting, and related, point is how the language itself controls our way of thinking. A friend of mine who speaks German says that you have to be incredibly organised in your sentences just to speak the language, and that for him this explains why a lot of Germans are such organised people in general life.

Russian is a fairly regular language in terms of declinations, but very flexible in terms of sentence structure, enabling the same sentence to be given four or five different stresses according to word order. It’s also very particular, with six grammatical cases.

I suppose that the language reflects the heavily stratified levels of etiquette in Russian society, with different forms of address and use of names according to who you’re talking to, while the grammatical cases, typical of Slavonic languages, also reflect this need to know exactly where everything stands.

On the other hand, the malleable sentences could, for the fertile mind, be the spark that fires up the ever-so rebellious Russian mind, or the rebellious literary Russian mind at least.

This is all just really half-boiled speculation of course, but I feel that there is some root underneath all this, although my knowledge of Russian leaves me unable to say much more about it.

The book itself, ‘Around the world under the Russian flag’, is a fairly dry plod through the history of Russian exploration, looking at the scrapes the sailors got into during a three year period (1803-1806) and how they escaped from them. There are a lot of ‘negotiations’ in the book, with the Russians always coming out on top, be it against the Chinese or the Native Americans. Its stoical nature is certainly something that we can still see in Russia’s foreign relations today. Never is a smile anywhere near the surface of Medvedev's or Putin’s face, apart from when strutting about in leather during victory parades of course.

Picture courtesy of: http://psybok.wordpress.com/

The Labours of Hercules - Agatha Christie

Crime writing has always struck me as little more than writing by numbers. The essential frame is laid out and the author has to do little more than stitch a couple of his or her own colours in to make up their own pattern within the confines of the crime tapestry.

As such, it seems to lack any of the scope that makes fiction the magnificent roaming beast that it is, prying into the depths of consciousness, seeking meaning and beauty in real life’s manifold incomprehensibilities.

I once picked up Louise Welsh’s ‘The Cutting Room’ on the back of a wealth of critical acclaim along the lines of ‘this is crime fiction for lovers of literature’, but found it little more than hackneyed and tiresome.

And the same can be said of Christie’s ‘Labours of Hercules’. This time, I picked it up having found it for 50 cents in a small shop in Lisbon. I had run out of English books and Christie drew me in with its classic Penguin cover.

This particular Christie book consists of 12 short stories in which her hero, Hercule Poirot, decides to undertake 12 more cases before he retires. However, each of the 12 must resemble one of the labours of his mythological namesake, Hercules.

A fairly literary idea for a crime novel, and thus I was drawn in a little further.

After rollocking through the first 70 pages, fighting off horrific visions of my future self as a Christie obsessive, I soon hit the albatross of tediousness that formulaic crime fiction inevitably carries around its neck.

Plod plod plod for 25 pages until each little story is wrapped up successfully by Poirot, usually with a twist or two in the tail.

I can’t fault Christie’s construction. It’s tight, decently written, and moves along pacily enough. But there’s just no flesh to go on the bones.

We have a story, but there is very little depth of character, very little descriptive prose, very little of anything other than an author walking us through the pleasant fictional equation of crimes and their solutions.

Like a picture puzzle we slid the pieces into place and are supposed to feel content with the restoration of order that is the outcome.

Like a picture puzzle, we toss it away afterwards and give it little further thought.

Plays: 1 – David Mamet

Reading drama is a thoroughly different experience to reading prose or poetry.

From the more ‘real time’ feel of it, to the fact that it’s essentially an artform taken away from its first home. The novel belongs on the page, is meant to be read silently. Poetry belongs to the page but also the tongue, and we can read it aloud, we can experience it in its proper place. Yet drama belongs on a stage, belongs in front of an audience of more than one, and thus reading it on your own, in the silence of your own head can often be a disappointing, flat experience.

A lot of Mamet’s work has starred the brilliantly nervy William H. Macy, and the image of him acting these roles seemed to only widen the divide between written drama and acted drama.

The same goes for the idea of Al Pacino in ‘American Buffalo’, Mamet’s play about the relationship between a couple of small-time crooks. A lot of the lines seem written around the idea of Pacino in the main role, just as a lot of the characteristics of the persecuted parts played by Macy in ‘The Water Engine’, American Buffalo’ and particularly in ‘Squirrels’ seem scripted around the idea of him in the role.

So while the ideas of the staged version help, are almost an essential aid to bringing written drama to life – I often paused in my reading, imagining the actors on stage pausing, trying to picture each of their expressions – it struck me how much this contrasts to the way film versions of books can ruin a book.

Inevitably turning a novel into a two-hour dramatic piece is going to involve tossing certain elements of the novel into the abyss, but rarely do films ever seem to do any justice to books, and I can only think of one instance – Morvern Callar – where I found a book inferior to its film version.

Yet what I find more interesting is the way that, if a film version of a book has been seen before the book has been read, the faces of the film characters and the structure and impression of the film seem to ruin the book, to pin it down, to constrict it and submit it to degrading simplification. I hate the way films literally and mentally take the book out of your hands.

Yet with drama I always find myself struggling to envisage the drama, to turn it into this thing that is out of my hands, permutated by the actors and directors.

Maybe it’s because the lack of descriptive narrative in written drama means that we’re led elsewhere to look for concrete setting. Yet why is it the image of the actors on the theatre stage that is always the one that comes to my mind, rather than the characters in their fictional dramatic setting?

It seems that drama is much more tied into its own medium than the novel is. That it knows it can never fully break the illusion of fiction and is therefore written with a tacit acknowledgement of this fact, that in ways it is playing up to its inauthenticity.

Why hide the fact that this is a stage direction? Why pretend that this is a character? Why not ham up this line for comic effect?

And all the while prose is much happier to nestle in the comfort of its illusion, worming itself into the downy clouds of reverie, painting pictures that it fully believes in and content in thinking that it’s really managed to pull the wool over your eyes.

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

‘The great American novel’ (TGAN) is a phrase that both inspired and plagued the ‘great American’ authors of the 20th century. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike all wrote books that were dubbed TGAN, while others from Paul Auster to Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Safran Foer all had a pop at doing the same.

But what exactly is TGAN? Something that encapsulates exactly what it is like to be an American, to live in America, at a particular time. Foer’s ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ certainly tried to convey the fragile state of post 9/11 America, but something about his book felt hollow and not as everyman-ish, as all-encompassing as one feels TGAN should be.

Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ hit much closer to the mark, with a character that we could really get our teeth into; a man who encapsulated a huge swathe of American paranoia, and it is from the pen of Bellow that a lot of the conceptions about the TGAN have emanated.

TGANs have notoriously been books that subvert the idea of the American dream without completely debunking it, showing us how and where the image and the reality of America meet; and if this is as precise as one can be in describing it, then Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Corrections’ has to be the greatest TGAN to date.

The title rings throughout the novel in a way that I’ve never known before. Permutations upon permutations of the phrase echoing in the different situations of each of the protagonists’ lives, from the medical corrections of Albert, the father with Parkinson’s, to the sexual corrections of his daughter Denise and the editorial corrections of his son Chip as he writes and re-writes his screenplay.

Chiefly, the corrections we see before us are the manifestations of attempts to alter lives. Gary tries desperately to change his life, trying to halt his marriage from slipping into the mould of his parents’, while his own parents fight Parkinson’s and a family that fails to live up to expectations. Chip and Denise stumble from job to job and city to city and seem to watch the walls fall around them just as the last bricks have been put into place.

The linchpin that holds the book together is Enid, the mother who longs for nothing more than one last family Christmas. The idea of American family Christmas rings out with Hollywood images of snow in huge gardens, new woollen sweaters and an air of general family bliss. It is, to foreign eyes at least, the big send off to a year of American success, a time when everyone can acknowledge just how ‘damned’ well they’ve done for themselves and how saturated in happiness their lives air.

By throwing Christmas in early and keeping the idea of it prominent throughout the book, Franzen is able to pull off perpetual contrasts between these perfect Hollywood family images that we’ve all come to know and the grim, confused and often tragic realities that befall his characters.

But this is common fare, no? So why is Franzen’s book so great?

Because he beautifully and subtly crafts onto the novel the particular something that encapsulates exactly what it is like to be an American and to live in America at a particular time.
This particular generation’s problem, their failure in upholding the American dream, is their inability to escape the shadow of their parents. Their inability to craft their own niche in the America of the dawn of the 21st century.

Here we are in a world where children are still living with their parents into their 30s and 40s, getting divorced, accumulating huge debts, having children out of wedlock and generally failing to live up to the image of traditional American adults as crafted in the boom and bust of the 20th century.

Consequently towards the end of the novel, when his father is nearing death and his mother preparing to ‘make some changes in her life’, the failed-adult Chip, back living with his parents and dressed up like a bad imitation of a real adult in his father’s clothes after failing to make it out of Lithuania with his own, can only think of himself as ‘a child out of Grimm, lured into the enchanted house by the warmth and the food’.

As he slowly faces up to a world without his father and with a different mother to the one he’s known before, he can only see a world ‘colder and emptier than [he] had realised, the adults had gone away.’

This is the great American novel of the far from great American generation.