bukes #83-#86
Dec. 31st, 2009 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
realthogAnd so the final posting for 2009 of these occasional informal notes about the books I've been reading. I'd better say a loud and blustery HAPPY NEW YEAR here at the front, rather than after the notes, or no one will know that I've said it.
Here we are, then:
book #83: The Saskiad (1997) by Brian Hall
This is a novel that's all about story, which is as you might expect for a tale that bears so many subtle homages (most of which I through ignorance missed) to The Iliad. In the early chapters of the novel our 12-year-old heroine, Saskia -- growing up in what remains of a Long Island commune, presided over by her self-absorbed New Ager mother Lauren -- is so completely engaged in her favourite books that her experience of life is at least half the time fantasticated almost beyond recognition. Hall manages to convey this through a narrative that could at any moment have flown off the rails into incomprehensibility but somehow remains not just clear but vivid; it's an extraordinarily impressive trick, and I am very jealous.
(This is not a book that I can imagine loses a shred of its impact if you know the bones of the plot in advance, so I'm happily going to divulge them. If you're one of those people who refuse to read Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" because you already know how it turns out, skip ahead, please, to my notes on book #84.)
The intensity of the prose drops off after this as we get into the tale's main plot. Saskia, whose intelligence and oddballery make her always the outcast at school, befriends newcomer Jane Singh, an Anglo-Indian who's a year older but in Saskia's class. The two revel in each other's fantasy worlds. One day a card arrives from Saskia's father, Thomas, who abandoned the commune when Saskia was a toddler, inviting her and Lauren on a trip to Scandinavia to take part in a Greenpeace-like project protecting a threatened river. Lauren declines to go, so everyone agrees that Jane can go in her place.
The main part of the book takes place on that Scandinavian excursion, while it becomes ever clearer to us that Thomas is a fount of deception; the increasingly improbable, always self-aggrandizing tales he tells about himself and his exploits are in their way as fantasticated as Saskia's mental adventures in the worlds of Captain Hornblower, Tycho Brahe, Odysseus and the rest, but are very significantly more dangerous -- especially to the two impressionable adolescents, who take what he says at face value. Saskia of course sees nothing of this: he is the wondrous father who was for so long lost to her, now returned to her life. His frequent spoilt-brat behaviour seems to her to be a perfectly reasonable reaction to the actions of the fools and scoundrels who surround him. Because Thomas and Jane are the most precious people in Saskia's life, she essentially throws the two of them at each other . . . and we discover that paedophilia is another of Thomas's enchanting traits.
The affair between Thomas and Jane continues even after Thomas "reluctantly" comes back to live on the commune, and even after he has regained Lauren's bed. At one stage he comes within a whisker of bedding Saskia herself, but what must be his solitary surviving scruple dissuades him at the last moment. And slowly, as Thomas's fits of temper become ever more frequent and ever more infantile, Saskia begins to realize that this supposed angel is truly a monster.
In the final major section of the book she escapes the commune to New York, where (and again this is a neat trick for Hall to pull off), in order to survive, she somehow manages to exploit her sexuality and the gullibility of young males without ever quite losing that feisty, imaginative, intelligent spark that makes her such an appealing character -- without losing her integrity, if you will. Eventually home calls her, and she returns to the commune, where, while still in essence the same Saskia as she was before she left for the Scandinavian trip, she very swiftly re-evaluates the people there, discovering that her mother's boyfriend Bill (back on the scene after Thomas's latest departure) is far from the oaf she thought he was; that her younger quasi-siblings are people in their own right, with character-strengths of their own, rather than just the "crew" to be bossed around; and so forth.
A fair number of comments I've seen about The Saskiad describe it as a coming-of-age tale, but my own feeling is that this is an inaccurate description -- or at least a misleading one. Saskia's adventures haven't filled her with a new confidence-of-self or made her into a somber, grounded young adult: her tale has, rather, been a sort of voyage back to the beginning. Of course she's older and more knowledgeable, and better able to understand the world, but in the most important sense -- the shipmate-of-Hornblower-one-moment-and-assistant-to-Tycho-the-next sense, she hasn't changed at all. It's as if she's discovered that she doesn't need to come of age.
All in all, a very disturbing book -- at least for this reader -- but one that I value having read and will, I'm sure, remember for a long while.
Incidentally, the PW review of The Saskiad, as cited on the book's Amazon page, must be one of the least accurate even PW has ever published; there is even a suggestion that fans of Jostein Gaarder's quite extraordinarily dissimilar novel Sophie's World will want to grab Hall's book too on the grounds that it's the same sort of thing. It's as if the reviewer read a brief outline of The Saskiad and then winged it from there, filling in the details with suppositions based on what the plots of template coming-of-age novels are supposed to be. One of the great strengths of this novel is that it breaks quite a lot of the rules, so the reviewer's description ends up looking pretty goddam silly.
book #84: Saint Hiroshima (1987) by Leigh Kennedy
Some novels spend a very long time on my shelves before suddenly the moment is exactly right for me to read them: they're novels I know are going to offer me a marvelous experience, and I don't want to run the risk of missing out on a single scintilla of that experience through launching myself upon the voyage when the tides aren't quite right, or something. Choose your own cliche: you know what I mean. So for years the books sit there, and on occasion I gaze at them with a loving eye -- sometimes I even pull them down off the shelf and fondle them before putting them back again -- until finally, one day . . .
I bought Saint Hiroshima in the late 1980s, quite probably (shamefaced confession) as a remainder; I see that Leigh kindly signed it to me in '97, but the book was a longstanding possession by then. The other day, soon after I'd finished reading Brian Hall's The Saskiad and was wondering what next to read, I caught sight of the green spine and the old Bloomsbury logo out of the corner of my eye and, bang!, the book was in my hand. After waiting two decades, I read it in a day.
That last sentence tells you quite a lot about how good a book Saint Hiroshima is. It gains its title from an opening sequence, a childhood experience of small-town Katie Doheney: the same day that she's the close-up witness of a horrific traffic accident she hears (yes, hears, because the installer's having difficulty getting the picture to stabilize) a tv programme about the Hiroshima bombing, and the two events become conflated in her mind. Thereafter she has a phobia about The Bomb; the woman who died in the traffic accident, and whose smashed-up body came crashing down right in front of Katie's aghast eyes, becomes a personal archetype, Saint Hiroshima.
The other main protagonist is Phil Benson, a phenomenally talented musician. The two of them are pulled together as if by a force of nature during their adolescence and become teen sweethearts; for the rest of the book they succeed, through happenstance, through lack of self-faith and/or ambition, through folly and through a sort of reverse serendipity, in drifting inexorably further and further apart -- this even when a horrifically cruel trick played on them crams them together for a couple of weeks in a cramped bomb shelter, believing the nuclear holocaust has come. For a long time, though not lovers, they remain each the most important person in the other's life, but by the novel's close I was reminded of that merciless Leonard Cohen throwaway line at the end of his account of a doomed love affair: "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. That's all. I don't even think of you that often." Katie and Phil have become, as it were, "oh, just someone I used to know".
The book has a lot more plot than I'm indicating above; but really it's a novel that's almost less concerned with plot than it is about tale-telling -- and the tale-telling is an absolute joy. Saint Hiroshima was well worth the wait.
book #85: Third Girl (1966) by Agatha Christie
I've never been much of a fan of Agatha Christie's work; this means that, unlike the case with most of her mystery-writing contemporaries, there are still quite a few of her books I haven't read. So, every once in a while, I treat myself to what would be a trip down Memory Lane were it not for the fact that, never having read the novel before, I don't have the memory in the first place.
Third Girl is one of the later Poirot novels; as soon as I spotted the copyright date I knew not to expect too much, in that by this stage Christie was not as fully in command of all things as once she might have been (note my polished tact), and it seems that no one at Collins, her longstanding publisher, quite had the courage to tell her so. In fact, I noted only a single out-and-out plot howler (in one chapter Poirot recalls doing something that the preceding chapter's description tells us quite explicitly he did not do) and it doesn't impact anything else in the plot so doesn't matter. I think it was in At Bertram's Hotel, another late-order Christie novel, that one of these little forgetful glitches made the triumphantly revealed solution to the mystery in fact impossible. Third Girl, mercifully, doesn't suffer that problem; what it does suffer is a solution that depends on such a staggering implausibility as to leave one dumbstruck. No one expects Golden Age mysteries to bear more than a passing resemblance to real life; but at the same time you don't expect to be asked to accept something that quite simply couldn't happen in the world. In this instance, the artifice is that a young woman -- the "third girl" of the title -- has not noticed over a period of months that one of her two flatmates, both of them supposedly about her own age, is actually her hated stepmother with a wig on.
Some of the events along the path that leads to this calamitous revelation are entertaining in a slight way, so the couple of days I spent with the book weren't entirely wasted. Hm. I'm probably just saying that because this is supposed to be the season of good will . . .
book #86: The Angel's Game (2008; trans from the Spanish 2009 by Lucia Graves) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Though I bought this a few months ago I decided not to plunge into it immediately but, rather, to wait until the moment was just right -- yes, that same phenomenon I've mentioned before. Then, after a while, I realized that the "just right moment" would be the holiday break between Christmas and New Year -- i.e., that The Angel's Game would be my Christmas present to myself. And so it proved.
I read Zafon's previously translated book, The Shadow of the Wind, a few years ago, when it was relatively recently published here in the US, and enjoyed it beyond all measure: it's certainly among my favourite novels of all time, and I may well have pinned you to the wall at some time or another to insist that you read it not next month, not next week, but right now. So you can imagine my eagerness for The Angel's Game.
And I haven't been disappointed. Don't get the idea at all that this is simply a retread of The Shadow of the Wind, despite being set in Barcelona in the years leading up to 1930, and despite the reappearance of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books: the tone here is less one of magic-realism-meets-gothic-fantasy, although there's plenty of that if you want to wallow in it (which, obviously, I did), more one of a dark fantasy whose secrets are, with exquisite timing, unfolded in front of you, the storyteller all the while drawing you into the confidence -- which you gleefully agree to share -- that the exposure of each new secret is merely his excuse to offer you tantalizing peeks at the hastily vanishing coat-tails of a whole crowd of further secrets whose bringing into the light he will deliberately, almost sadistically, delay until later. As I say, you're made to be complicit in this whole business; if you can read this whole book without a happy grin of bamboozlement on your face much of the time, then you're not the same reader that I am.
Whatever:
Young David Martin, orphaned at an early age, wants to be a writer and is given his big break writing Grand Guignol fiction for the back of a Barcelona newspaper. After a while, an entirely dishonest Barcelona book-publishing partnership steps in, giving him a six-year contract to churn out pseudonymous penny dreadfuls several times a year. The novels are a huge success, but keeping up the word-count is surely killing David . . . and then, encased in a slice of his life that is also an ingenious ghost story, there comes an invitation from a mysterious Paris publisher, Andreas Corelli, to duck out of his contract with the Barcelona crooks and instead write a single book for a fee that's far beyond whatever ransom a prince might think himself worth. The solitary catch is that David won't be told the subject of the book until after he's signed the contract and accepted the cash.
There's a problem. The crooks want to hold David to his contract with them. That little difficulty disappears when the two principals are horrifically murdered and their offices burnt to the ground. But this is only the beginning of the series of grisly murders that surround David's engagement in the book commission, which is in effect to write the testament of an invented religion that's even more destructive (takes some doing) than the established ones. David tries desperately to steer a course that will allow him to keep "the boss", Corelli, placated while at the same time preserving the lives and well being of the woman he loves, the bookseller he loves, and the breezy young assistant he's either too stupid or too ethical to love.
I'm not going to go any further into the copious plots of this marvelously plot-rich reinvention of the Faust myth than that: read it for yourself, please do. My sole carp is that the translation seems for some reason far less assured than that of The Shadow of the Wind: there were plenty of occasions when, had I not been so swept up by all the rest (there were late nights involved, and long sessions in the bathroom), I might have taken notes to send to Ansible for the Thog's Masterclass collection. The importance of this cavil can be inferred from the fact that I didn't stop to make those notes: the book moves like a rocket all the way through from the start to page 531. I think it's perfectly possible I read the endpapers and the back cover before able to slow down enough to stop.
Recommended? Oh, yes, I think so.
======================
I feel privileged to have ended my 2009 reading with three such extraordinarily fine novels out of four. Thank you, novelists everywhere. And I hope that everyone finds as many good books to read in 2010 as I've been lucky enough to discover in 2009.
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Date: 2010-01-01 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 03:48 am (UTC)And to you, K. Let's hope we can all get together in '10!
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Date: 2010-01-01 03:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 03:47 am (UTC)I have The Saskiad shelved in young adult. Is that appropriate?
It depends. I see no reason why a YA shouldn't read it: it depicts either real life for them or a Dreadful Warning. But a lot of their parents might have a fit.
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Date: 2010-01-01 03:56 am (UTC)PS:
I have The Saskiad shelved in young adult.
Good ol' PW, eh? I'll bet you a buck the guy never bothered to read the book. From the description s/he gave, you'd be absolutely right to think it just another YA coming-of-age novel.
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Date: 2010-01-01 03:58 am (UTC)Of course, I can't imagine the kids who shop that shelf will ever pick it up. Ever. It's not Twilight, the "Warriors" series of cat fantasies the boys are reading, or Harry Potter. *sigh*
I'm gonna leave it right there. Just LET some parent come take me to task. :-D
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Date: 2010-01-01 04:07 am (UTC)I never checked PW; just the blurb on the back.
Yes, but the PW "review" will have affected the way the book was marketed, not to mention the blurb on the back. You're quite right to keep it where it is; it'd be silly for a bookseller to do otherwise, is wot I think. At the same time I get very angry that what's actually a pretty damn' fine book has been bibliographically confined forever to Category Hell because some dumbfuck hack at PW couldn't be bothered to read the thing.
the "Warriors" series of cat fantasies the boys are reading
I got nearly 50 pages through one of those.
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Date: 2010-01-01 04:15 am (UTC)The other day, a 10-YO corrected me that the cats were in CLANS, not TRIBES. BECAUSE THE AUTHORS ARE BRITISH.
O_O
I nodded, chastened.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 08:08 pm (UTC)I read The Saskiad when it came out. It got a lot of attention. It was marketed as adult fiction.
BTW, for something very like cognitive dissonance, read the verses Fledgist posted in my reading List entry, written by Lord Byron about -- Daniel Boone!
Love, C.