Reading the World - Blog

Canada - A Quick Geography Lesson

10/22/2019

In my last post I mentioned that I was still debating how to fairly split up Canada into regions for my journey - this is, after all, the fourth largest country in the world!

The country itself is split up into thirteen political regions - ten provinces and three territories - which form the overall Commonwealth of Canada, in a similar vein to Australia. However, thirteen is no small amount, and as with Russian, US and China I have instead decided to use the five regions, essentially blocks of provinces, that Canada is often divided into, geographically, culturally and politically - rather than the smaller and more numerous states.

These are broadly, from the east to the west; British Columbia, the Prairie Provinces, the vast North - the greatest landlass of the five regions but the lowest populated, largely by indigenous Canadian - first nations, Inuit and Metis. Then comes Ontario, the franophone Quebec, and finally the Atlantic Provinces. I have landed in Vancouver courtesy of Douglas Copeland's 'The Gum Thief' (review soon) and shall zig-zag across Canada's regions - stopping off twice in the largest regions - the Prairie Provinces (Saskatchewan and Alberta) and the North (Northwest Territories and then, as a final stop; Nunavet; which will take me neatly near to the coast of Greenland as I leave Canada). Make sense? If not, don't worry, take a look at the map below, sit back, and just enjoy the journey....

Alaskan Awakening: the Wild Within and the Wild Without in the Last American Frontier

10/18/2019

“I learned in school that blood has a memory. It carries information that makes you who you are. That’s how my brother and me ended up with so much in common, we both carried inside us the things our parents’ blood remembered. Sharing what’s in the blood, that’s as close as you can be to another person.”

Novel, mystery, thriller tinged with a touch of horror: The Wild Inside is all of these. In her first book, Jamey Bradbury carefully balances genres to craft an intriguing drama set against the backdrop of the Iditarod (an annual long-distance sled dog race run in early March from Anchorage to Nome, entirely within Alaska) and the Alaskan wilderness. The bleak Alaskan tundra, and the subtle hints at the werewolf tradition in this final stop in the USA makes an interesting counterpoint to the bleak Siberian wastelands and folklore of my arrival in Russia back in 2010 with Victor Pelevin’s, Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Whilst the two books aren’t comparable, they underline the proximity of this isolated American state to its vast neighbour and political opponent, just 3 miles (4.8km) away at their nearest point. It is also a poignant reminder of how, nearly a decade after I stepped onto Russian soil, my round the world odyssey is nearing a close. But time for reminiscences later…

This novel focusses on seventeen-year-old Tracy Sue Petrikoff, who is a little rough around the edges to put it mildly. A natural born trapper and hunter raised in the Alaskan wilderness, Tracy Petrikoff spends her days tracking animals and running with her dogs in the remote forests surrounding her family’s home. Though she feels safe in this untamed land, Tracy still follows her late mother’s rules: Never Lose Sight of the House. Never Come Home with Dirty Hands. And, above all else, Never Make a Person Bleed. Her mother having died, her father, in an effort to control her after she is expelled for attacking a classmate, grounds Tracy, forbidding her from doing everything she loves: caring for their sled dogs, going out into the woods, hunting — and racing in the Iditarod.

For Tracy, this is a life-threatening sentence. Driven by an unrelenting hunger and facilitated by a feral skill at trapping, she doesn’t just crave being outdoors, she needs it.
“I had learned pretty quick that a couple days without going into the woods put me out of sorts…If I went too long without hunting, my belly ached something awful and my muscles went all trembly. I felt weak.”

Tracy has inherited these characteristics from her mother, whose death is shrouded in mystery. Their relationship is integral to the book as Bradbury discretely pieces together mother and daughter to reveal a supernatural trait that binds and burdens them:

“Some learning, I had got from books…The other kind of learning, you drink it in, too. It’s warm and it spreads through you, wakes up your muscles and sharpens your mind, and you can see clearly, not just with your eyes but with your whole self, and then you know what you didn’t before. How a squirrel plans its route from branch to branch. How a mouse will hear you before it ever sees you. How a snowshoe hare knows to run in a zigzag, not in a straight line, to confuse its predator.”

When her father isn’t watching, Tracy breaks for the woods to check her traps and is suddenly attacked by a stranger. Though she escapes, the stranger stumbles into the yard of their home a few days later, bleeding heavily from stab wounds.

Haunted by what she might have done, Tracy returns to the clearing where she was attacked and discovers a pack left behind containing enough money to enter the Iditarod. So begins a series of events that unravels Tracy’s life.

In steps Jesse, a boy about Tracy’s age, looking for work and bearing his own secrets. At first, Tracy is suspicious of him, seeing him as an intruder until she pries Jesse’s history from him and uncovers a connection between them - the stranger. As Tracy and Jesse’s affection for one another grows, Tracy’s fear of the stranger develops into obsession, leading to a tragic misjudgement.

Tracy’s actions may shock, anger, even repulse. The theme of blood is recurrent here interlinking her feral need of animal blood - preferably as it dies - of things needing to be kept to herself alone. The blood motif carries through to her own development into womanhood, her first menstruation coming with fear, confusion on her part, and embarrassment on her widowed father’s; a progression underlined by her qualification from the junior to the adult Iditarod that year – and of course her growing feelings for Jesse. A nod to the Angela Carter/Neil Jordan film “The Company of Wolves” perhaps? In the end, though, she is just a young girl aching for her mother. She searches her memory, recalling conversations and conjuring her image, trying to understand what her mother gave to her:

“I didn’t know I was crying till a sob wrenched itself from me. I covered my face and wept, aching for her. Aching after her. She was just a few feet from me, close enough for me to ask her anything, but I didn’t have no more questions. I only wanted to tell her to stay.”

What does it mean to be wild? This question pulsates throughout The Wild Inside as tension builds and the plot twists and gyrates to an unpredictable ending. Narrated primarily in first person by Tracy, Bradbury chooses to let the story unfold through dialogue between the characters while leaving some details to the reader’s imagination.

There is barely any physical description of the characters outside of “Scott and me both with Mom’s dark hair, Dad’s brown eyes.” Brief descriptions of the landscape paint a black-and-white picture of Alaska, adding a sinister tone to the book.

Bradbury’s prose shines brightest when describing the exhilaration Tracy feels when she becomes part of someone or something she is close to:

“I took Su [one of her dogs] in and bounded down the snowy trail, and the delight that flooded my body was complete and overwhelming, pure, undiluted happiness. I felt the tug of the harness and saw no other dogs in front of me, felt the whole team watching as I led. I bolted my food, barely tasting it, and I scratched at my own ears, and I napped in front of the woodstove and in piles of my brothers and sisters and teammates. I watched white snow fall across the black-and-grey world and the frigid air sent a shot of electricity through me, and I howled, the only way to give voice to my want.”

Those anticipating an adventure novel about the Iditarod will have to find it elsewhere – and Jack London this is not. But those who thrive on the unexpected won’t be disappointed. The Wild Inside is a compelling mystery and suspense-filled thriller that, in getting inside the isolated and feral mind of Tracy give us a glimpse into the character of Alaska itself…

I now leave the US of A (just in time some might say!) and continue onward into it’s massive northern cousin, Canada, similar in size to the US (the fourth largest country in the world by landmass) yet with only 10% of the US population. As with other massive countries, in deference to its size, I shall be reading a selection of books set across Canada. I am currently debating whether to go with regions or provinces and will update on the outcome very soon!

Hawaii: Paradise Lost in the Fiftieth State

10/13/2019

This book by Mark Panek is a sweeping epic tale about the modern Hawai‘i that islanders live in, the one they call their home, the one that is getting harder to live in every day, one that many of them scrape by in to survive.

Hawai‘i takes place in the political vacuum of a recently deceased, nine-term United States Senator. With the formerly entrenched system of good-ol-boy mainland US sinecure up in the air, and Hawai‘i becoming a place where their best and brightest are forced to leave in order to thrive; and a collection of local characters who remain - on convergent paths aiming to improve their lot and their vision of Hawai‘i’s future.

The story is told primarily from the perspective of these characters—Russell Lee, a Hawaiian state senate president; Kekoa Meyer, a smart, middle-aged Hawaiian thug; Makana Irving-Kekumu, a Hawaiian studies professor and activist; and Sean Hayashi, a young real-estate developer. These four unique individuals from vastly different backgrounds, who all have great personal ambition, in essence ultimately want the same thing despite their conflicting views on how to get there and the impact it will have.

The crux of the story revolves around the potential development of a resort-like property near Kahuku by a billionaire Chinese casino mogul. Lee, who is racked by gambling debts, goes “all-in” with the project to cover his obligations and serve as his launching pad to the Governor’s office. The rest of the main cast provide varying outlooks of the support, opposition, backdoor politics and cutthroat competition involved in a potential billion-dollar real-estate deal and legislative gamble that could potentially change the face of Hawai‘i. Local gang leader forms an interesting counterpoint to Lee – equally opportunistic and ruthless in his own way; covering his actions with a veneer of Hawai-ian community credentials (just a Lee talks up the Chinese deal in terms of financial and cultural benefits to Hawai-i).

This is the kind of book that, despite its size, once picked up is difficult to put down. The story and all its complementary pieces are so enthralling—full of insider deals, backstabbing, and genuine local-boy moments that are described brilliantly by Panek. One of the things this book does really well, and in some ways sadistically so, is the scathing undressing of people living in and visiting Hawai‘i. Whether it’s the prissy Niu Valley religious girl with a kinky secret; the union-protected local-Japanese state-worker-lifer; or some trust-fund, Reyn Spooner Aloha shirt wearing California haole; the observations are plentiful, brutally honest, and viciously humorous in their meticulous portrayal. Maybe they are a bit stereotypical, and it’s all in the eye of the beholder, but they’re so accurate in the minute details that you can’t help but smirk, even if it’s describing you.

There is also a deep cast of well-fleshed supporting characters, and the book works extremely well when all of these people interact with one another, slowly discovering each others’ strengths, weaknesses and desires. Ambitious in scope, Hawai‘i takes on a wide-range of people, social structures and topics, either directly or through keen commentary. From the power of the Mormon influence in Hawai’i, to the mainland millionaires who raise property values on their second-or-third Hawai‘i homes, to the UH football obsession that blinds them from the sinister plots happening in their own backyard, to Hawaiian rights activists who forgo success and money to take principled yet doomed stands against developments, Panek skillfully brings the many troubled facets of New Hawai‘i together into a coherent and thrilling story.

Mark Panek has often been to compared to Tom Wolfe in his depiction of corporate a/immorality (note ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’) and indeed here Panek has truly crafted an epic tale painting Hawai‘i as a flawed Eden, a paradise with scars dug deep into the land. The book is unafraid to dig into the scabs, re-open the wounds, and show the colour of the blood inside. It’s a story encompassing power, revealing the racial tensions, socioeconomic disparity, outsider influences, and local-boy politics that control the land they live on.

As such, I am much more minded to compare his writing to James Elroy – in the way in which Elroy brings together seemingly impossibly complex plot arcs with characters who may or may not be fictional to show us the seedy side of the American Dream (note ‘American Tabloid’ and ‘The Cold Six Thousand’).

That said, this is not a novel without flaws. Panek sets himself up with a narrative of characters with wildly different agendas, leading to interspersed plot lines that keep pushing forward in a complex but never confusing power play. Yet, for a 580 page work the pay off is a little too flat: after a dramatic build up regarding the all-important passing of a contentious Gambling bill to allow a massive development occur and propel Lee to the Governorship, we are left with a handful of pages that tie up some loose ends, ignore others and leave some hanging – all narrated by a bit player in the rest of the novel. The final scene, against this too-convenient ending, loses what should have been the ultimate denouement of the novel – political, social, economic and personal.

Ultimately though a well written, thoughtful and affecting novel that, whilst focusing on the denigration of Hawai’s paradise and it’s indigenous people by global corporate forces, is a parable of a new form of colonisation happening across the globe – from aborigines, to native Americans, from Inuit to disenfranchised local communities everywhere…

In leaving arguably the most isolated state in the USA, I take the six-hour non-stop flight from Honolulu to Alaska – another contender for the most isolated state: also separated from the US (by land), but also from the global tourist developments plaguing Hawai’i. Having read the first few chapters of the book ‘The Wild Inside’ by Jamey Bradbury, one gets a sense of the Alaskan wilderness as the end of the world, untouched by the dubious attentions of globalisation…

Hollywood Flop: Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘Imperial Bedrooms’ fails to measure up…

9/25/2019

I wanted to like this book, I really did. As part of the 80s generation “Less Than Zero” by Bret Easton Ellis was required reading. If you didn’t like it, you were condemned as a cultural leper, or worse missing the irony – a fate worse than social death.

And it starts well enough, with an interesting metafictional twist: “They had made a movie about us,” Bret Easton Ellis’s new book begins, and of course, they did. The movie, it should go without saying, is the film version of “Less Than Zero,” Ellis’s headline-grabbing 1985 debut. Neither the book nor the movie is named, but titles aren’t necessary, for here are the old familiar names: Blair, Julian, Trent — and Clay, the narrator of that novel and this one, “Imperial Bedrooms,” which takes up their stories a quarter of a century on. So there’s a neat, postmodern, self-referential beginning, with Clay, the cool observer of his own actions and feelings — or lack of them — observing himself being observed, an acknowledgement that his version of the story may be only one of many.

So what happened to all these people? You could make a cynical argument that sequels are written for the most banal of reasons, to continue a franchise or revive interest in a flagging brand - the “Star Wars” effect. But when authors create memorable characters it’s usually because they can’t help themselves. Imaginary people become lodged in the creator’s consciousness; it can be hard to get them to leave. At any event, Ellis’s work has always been stitched with cross-reference and self-reference, threaded through with a sense that the boundary between fantasy and reality is disturbingly fragile. It’s what makes his work, at its best (e.g. “Lunar Park”}, so striking. I can well believe this nostalgic ‘whatever happened to…?’ fascination sparked off “Imperial Bedrooms.”

But tragically the resulting novel falls flat. For what starts off neat swiftly becomes pat, lazy and effortful all at once. There is a story here, of sorts. “The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the soundtrack. The real Julian Wells was murdered over 20 years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location.” So it’s quite a conventional story, really: Who killed Julian Wells? That’s the thin narrative path the novel wanders. As in “Less Than Zero,” Clay has come home at Christmastime. He is now a screenwriter, back in Los Angeles to oversee the casting of a movie he’s written. “This is the official reason why I’m in L.A. But, really, coming back to the city is an excuse to escape New York and whatever had happened to me there that fall.”

That “whatever” is an echo of the weirdly unexplained nothingness that made “Less Than Zero” such a startling, powerful book. Ellis’s first novel has that “Catcher in the Rye,” “Bell Jar” trick, the ability to make something from nothing, to let a willed lack of emotion stand in for emotion. It reveals the void at the heart of a culture obsessed by surface — a culture that in the intervening years has become the norm. It was Ellis’s gift, or curse, to know that it would. There are no mobile phones in “Less Than Zero,” and the Betamax machine is a thrilling new technology. But young Clay’s Christmas break back home in Los Angeles now seems like a premonition of the emptiness that is almost inescapable today: online, on television, on your iPhone. The violence at the end of “Less Than Zero” is shocking; and it shocks Clay, too, though the most he can muster is “I don’t think it’s right.”

Nothing can shock Clay 25 years later. Does that surprise you? Are you, indeed, surprised that Julian ends up dead? No, neither was I. Julian trying to wheedle money out of Clay to pay for an abortion in “Less Than Zero” becomes Julian who owes money to Blair (“Well, 70 grand, but for him that’s a lot of money”). Nobody changes, not really. Rip, Clay’s dealer, has had a lot of plastic surgery: “His face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it’s a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized. The lips are too thick. The skin’s orange. The hair is dyed yellow and carefully gelled. He looks like he’s been quickly dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed. It’s almost defiantly grotesque.” Like Martin Amis, Ellis still has a flair for such perfect, surreal description. But, again like Amis, he can struggle to set it in an effective context. The plot — the trajectory toward Julian’s death, Clay’s obsession with a girl who may or may not be called Rain Turner, the threatening texts he receives from blocked numbers that say things like “I’m watching you” — is a clunking plot, more distracting than engaging...

“Imperial Bedrooms” is more violent than “Less Than Zero.” It goes without saying, I suppose, that’s it’s not as violent as “American Psycho,” but it is infused with the same toxicity. Toward the end of the novel, Clay buys himself a boy and a girl: “The girl was impossibly beautiful — the Bible Belt, Memphis — and the boy was from Australia and had modelled for Abercrombie & Fitch.” He does terrible things to them, and makes them do terrible things to each other. Why? Maybe because, as Clay himself admits, “I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.” Didn’t we know that already? The reader has to wonder what Ellis is trying to prove. That people numbed by the poison of a society based solely on money, fame and beauty are capable of practically anything? If that’s not news to us it’s thanks, in large part, to Bret Easton Ellis. But what purpose can simple repetition serve?

We, the modern audience for novels like this, have gotten over being shocked. There’s nothing left. From “A Clockwork Orange” to “A Serbian Film,” and with “American Psycho” along the way, we’ve seen it all. We too have been poisoned, so that when we see pictures from Syria or from Manus Island, they appal us, perhaps, but not for long. They are part of the landscape: they are what we expect to see, and we blunt ourselves to their power in order to survive as feeling human beings. That’s not a call for a return to the past — but a skilled novelist, one who wants to examine the way we live and why, needs to move the conversation forward. The obligation is even greater if he’s returning to a world he’s depicted before.

“History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,” runs one of this novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out if he ventures into fiction again...

From a series of recent books involving moral, cultural and emotional isolation; I travel now to a location that is literally isolated – the 50th State of America, lying 2400km from the US mainland and spread over 1200km of islands, this is of course Hawaii. However, the next book on my travel – also called “Hawai’I” by Mark Panek – deals more with a sense of community, albeit an often corrupt and morally dubious one in terms of leadership – in the face of Japanese businessmen, Samoan gangs and haole (white) tourists… a large novel but one I am looking forward to, despite the 6 hour flight from Los Angeles to Kahului, on the island of Maui.

You Can't Go Home Again: a search for identity from the Paiute prairies to the harsh lights of Las Vegas

9/17/2019

Hector Hidalgo is a young Mexican boxer who wants to turn professional. Only “Hector Hidalgo” doesn’t exist – he’s the persona of Horace Hopper, a 21-year-old ranch hand born to a Paiute father and an Irish mother who is desperate to escape his own stifling sense of failure. The trouble with reinventing oneself is that it involves leaving other people behind, and US novelist and musician Willy Vlautin’s fifth novel, ‘Don’t Skip Out On Me’, is a meditation on loneliness, in both the outer landscapes and the inner self.

Horace lives in Nevada on the Reese ranch, having been taken in as a teenager by Mr Reese and his wife, now in their 70s. Mr Reese wants Horace to take over the ranch but Horace feels unworthy of such trust, gnawed at by his mother’s abandonment of him, aged 12, to his Irish grandmother, who is sketched with Vlautin’s typical blunt strokes as a woman who “drank Coors light on ice from 11am until she fell asleep on the couch at nine, who chain-smoked cigarettes, who ate only frozen dinners, and who was scared of Indians, blacks and Mexicans”.

Sensitive Horace winds up “lonely and different and lost”, and it is the damage loneliness can wreak that the novel delineates so well. He witnesses the squalor that men can descend into when they are robbed of intimacy, forgetting to care for themselves and others, in the form of one of the Reese shepherds. We also sense an emptiness in Horace, who remembers unhappy events and is aware of his own uncomfortable feelings but seems to lack the ability to fully articulate them. Intriguingly, he keeps a “Log of Bad Dreams”, but sadly we are never allowed into that inner world.

Horace travels to Tucson to train as a boxer, but his lack of faith in himself threatens to derail his plans. Later, it becomes clear that Horace may be in with a chance, but despite this, to his surprise if not ours, “it seemed the closer he was to what he wanted, the more lost he became. The sinking feeling that had plagued him his entire life wasn’t going away.”

Horace’s goal may sound unachievable but it doesn’t feel that way because Vlautin is writing about ordinary people in clean, spare language. He viscerally communicates the pain and damage to the body after a fight, although this matters less than it might because the book is about identity not boxing, and it is Mr Reese, with his shining, quiet decency, who has real emotional clout. Horace’s grandmother’s callous prediction for him – “Maybe he’ll end up the town drunk … You never can tell with Indians” – is met by Mr Reese with: “Well, hopefully we’ll be an asset to the boy.”

Vlautin is big on incidental surface detail: we are told what music Horace is listening to and given detailed shopping lists and relentless menus – plates are “heaped with shrimp, cilantro, cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, onion, avocado and hot sauce”. “His favourite food besides fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy was Italian food: spaghetti, lasagne, pizza and ravioli.” This barrage of information sits oddly with an important moment in which Horace’s trust is betrayed and all we are told is that he “couldn’t believe what he had seen”.

More surprising is Mr Reese’s sudden revelation that Horace has “taught me a lot of things” and “he can get you inspired”. We do not need force-feeding to grasp that food is taking the place of love and maybe a certain self-sabotage in gorging on junk food when he should be training; we require more evidence of this ethereal young man’s apparent ability to inspire, for the drawback of Mr Reese being so finely crafted is that Horace, unavoidably perhaps, seems underdeveloped. He is attached to a self-help book on how to be a champion, but while this device adds welcome humour to what is otherwise an unremittingly bleak tale, it does not make Horace inspirational; it simply makes us feel for him more.

‘Don’t Skip Out on Me’ shines a light on the broken-down and the drifters; it is a bruising yet surprisingly tender study of the need for human connection, and the way that urban landscapes can be more isolating than any wilderness. As Horace loses himself in the city, submerging his loneliness in a deluge of TV and mac and cheese, he becomes in real danger of disappearing from his own life. As the working ranches of the Reeses’ generation die out, as wells have to be dug ever deeper to find water, a question hovers in the background: if we cast ourselves adrift from the land and nature, what then will be our anchor?

Horace’s search for identity and meaning amid the white noise of urban life feels like a curiously relevant tale for us all. The grim conclusion to such questions, in the end, become a little too unrelenting to the reader, and I left the book with an equal mix of satisfaction at a good novel but relief at walking away from this grim world.

Next up I take the 4 hours flight from Tucson to California; where I meet – reacquaint? – with the author/narrator of a book published to great acclaim and controversy in the mid-1980s: ‘Less Than Zero’. This hedonistic tale of amoral college students in West Coast America by Bret Easton Ellis (later to write the notorious ‘American Psycho’) cemented the Generation X genre and, as young college student myself at the time, I loved it. This sequel, ‘Imperial Bedrooms,’ reacquaints us with these now middle-aged protagonists and, in a meta-fictional twist, with the older author himself. I have purposely stayed away from write-ups on this and am intrigued to see how time has cast its dice for my former acquaintances…

Private Idaho: a story of silence, secrets and solitude

9/14/2019

What seems at first to be an emotionally bleak novel by celebrated writer Ron Carlson (his first in 30 years) soon develops a strong, touching story of the bond among three male workers on an isolated building site in the Idaho mountains.

These three men of very different backgrounds end up working closely over a period of two months on a dubious stunt-ramp construction project out in the wilds of the West... Darwin Gallegos, a widower and 40-year foreman at the Rio Difficulto ranch, is the project manager, who decides perhaps too impetuously to hire two labourers loitering in Pocatello, Idaho, and bring them west to the canyon river site outside the ranch. Arthur Key is hugely built, has considerable experience constructing movie sets in L.A. and is fleeing tragedy back in California where his brother, Gary, a film stuntman, has been recently killed in an accident, leaving Key full of guilt for the affair he was conducting with Gary’s wife and eager to take on any work that allows him to forget the past. Ronnie Panelli is a hapless 19-year-old fresh out of juvenile jail for stealing cars, a former golf caddy who knows little about construction or roughing it and is constantly getting hurt through his inexperience on site.

Gradually, the men warm to the rigours of the work and each finds his speciality - Darwin is the chef, Ronnie the carpenter and Arthur the meticulous planner. Ronnie’s troubles include being punctured in the shoulder with a long splinter while they are setting telephone poles and embroiling himself romantically with a local girl.

The townies from Mercy get wind of the crew’s work and attempt to disrupt it, but this merely serves to bring the trio closer together. The increasing trust among the men engenders a heartfelt and healing friendship, especially for Arthur, whose filial protectiveness for Ronnie reflects the way he once cared for his younger brother. Flashbacks fill in Arthur's affair with Gary’s wife, and gradually each man opens up to the other - and themselves - inner turmoils long left unexpressed.

Despite past heartache there are moments of levity and camaraderie, especially in the older men's teasing of Ronnie over his attempts to woo a local girl; coupled with a sense of social freedom, or social isolation, that recalls Steinbeck's 'Tortilla Flat' mixed with a smattering of Hemingway's stoic machismo.

The conclusion, however, like the landscape and the relentless skies above, is harsh and grim and inevitable.
From Idaho and the Midwest, I take once again to the dusty highways and head across into the Mountain States area, and make the acquaintance of young farm hand Horace Hopper, part Paiute Indian, part Irish; whose inner demons lead him from a comfortable life on a ranch in Nevada to the city lights and brutal boxing rings of Tucson, Arizona.

Mind Games: Neurology and Neuroses in Nebraska

9/11/2019

A truck jackknifes off an "arrow straight country road" near Kearney, Nebraska, in Richard Powers' ninth novel, becoming the catalyst for a painstakingly rendered journey to self-awareness. The accident puts the truck's 27-year-old driver, Mark Schluter, into a 14-day coma. When he emerges, he is stricken with Capgras syndrome: he's unable to match his visual and intellectual identifications with his emotional ones. He thinks his sister, Karin, isn't actually his sister—she's an imposter (the same goes for Mark's house). A shattered and worried Karin turns to Gerald Weber, an Oliver Sacks–like figure who writes bestsellers about neurological cases, but Gerald's inability to help Mark, and bad reviews of his latest book, cause him to wonder if he has become a "neurological opportunist." Then there are the mysteries of Mark's nurse's aide, Barbara Gillespie, who is secretive about her past and seems to be much more intelligent than she's willing to let on, and the meaning of a cryptic note left on Mark's nightstand the night he was hospitalised.

Sounds like the basis for a thrilling and challenging novel doesn’t it? The reviewers and critics certainly thought so, even shortlisting Power’s book for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Me? I was engaged at first, but quickly started to become frustrated with the inarticulate, self-absorbed and fundamentally unsympathetic characters as we become gradually caught up their banal personal and existential crises. By the end I was equally frustrated with the author Powers himself, as the narrative descends into what is essentially a mid-life crisis by Weber interspersed with pseudo-psychological musings that go nowhere: “do I exist? What does it mean to exist?” that sort of thing, I may have found this engaging as a 14-year old, but these words are in the mouths of middle-aged adults, including so-called expert neurologists…

Much of The Echo Maker is driven by Karin's anxious but ineffectual investigation of Mark's extreme neural diagnosis but there are passages which meander as much as the nearby Platte River, whose instinct-driven migrant cranes give Powers an easy symbolic backdrop to the obscure workings of memory in the human brain. This concept-heavy narrative follows Gerald Weber, a celebrity neuroscientist fascinated by the spread of Mark's paranoia. His imploding career and marriage becomes a sub-plot that helps to saturate the fabric of The Echo Maker with reflections in neuroscience which spill beyond what might be needed to address Mark's plight. Karin's involvement with two old flames - one a developer and one an environmentalist, both locked in a bitter contest over the future of the migration grounds - further distracts from Mark's essentially linear progress.

Rather than enriching the novel, these sub-plots are a too convenient, too disengaging and generally dissipate tension from what could be a shorter, sharper book.

By the end of the book, when the denouement finally comes (which is largely signposted a mile away) - like the Nebraskan winter, it left me cold.

Next up is Idaho in the Rocky Mountains; representing the northwest region of the USA. I take to the air with 'Five Skies' - author Ron Carlson's first novel in 30 years - hoping for a more down to earth novel...

American Gothic: Spirits and Seduction in the Southern Swamps

9/6/2019

For my next destination, I travel across America’s Southern region, a mysterious land and water scape of swamps, bayous and dark marshlands, all hinting darkly at mysterious secrets held, just out of sight…

Here, a veil between the living and the dead is lifted to chilling effect in Cauchemar, the eerie debut novel by Toronto writer Alexandra Grigorescu. Set at the edge of a swamp in present-day Louisiana, the book dramatizes the effects of both small-town hate and supernatural forces on the life of a young pregnant woman not completely certain of what may be growing inside her. Grigorescu applies just the right tonal touch to her macabre subject matter, while exploring themes of illness and health, fatherhood and gender, and the limits of sanity.

Hannah’s mother is the notorious Christobelle, leader of a reclusive, heretical sect otherwise comprised exclusively of men, whose physical health deteriorates steadily under her sway. Shunned by the locals, Hannah is raised by a low-key spiritualist named Mae in an isolated old house deep in the swampland. Mae has used her own occult powers to protect Hannah from danger, but the elder woman’s death triggers a series of events that place Hannah squarely within harm’s way.

Grigorescu is a noted freelance journalist, and her descriptions of interactions between people and the world around them draw the reader in with their realism and detail. This makes the sudden forays into the absurd and surreal – teeming swarms of insects and amphibians, or evil entities that cause men to break women’s wrists – all the more striking and unnerving. Cauchemar is French for “nightmare,” and Grigorescu uses what can sometimes be an annoying device – dream sequences – very effectively to blur the boundaries between the imagined, the real, and the unimaginable.

Cauchemar suffers from a small number of distracting flaws: occasional overuse of adjectives, a few unconvincing plot developments, the unnecessary invocation of Halloween night as a plot device.

But ultimately, the book is full of riveting prose about complex, fallible characters. I rushed through the final chapter impatient to see how it would all end – and the ambiguous final plot twist cries out for a sequel...

Next I travel to Nebraska, where the protagonist - hovering between life and death in a hospital bed - is trapped inside his own nightmare; a semi-conscious but fragmented replaying of the suspicious car crash that put him there, with only his sister to ask questions in the outside world...The Echo Maker is by author Richard Powers, and was a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. So I rent a battered truck in New Orleans and prepare myself for the gruelling 15 hour drive up north up the highway to Kearney, Nebraska in the heart of America's Great Plains and the Good Samaritan Hospital....

One More for the Road: Desperate Times in the Mississippi Delta

9/3/2019

More than just the story of a cage fighter, in his new novel Michael Farris Smith has created a dark and poetic story of the American South, charting the build-up to the final fight of ageing cage fighter Jack Boucher. Set in a depressed Mississippi Delta, from the opening Smith perfectly captures an air of desperation tinged with hope that somehow always seems to go awry, because life just does not work like that.

When the book opens Boucher has just had a big win at the casino and is finally heading to pay off a debt to local loanshark Big Mama Sweet. But that is not his only problem. He also needs to find a much larger amount to pay off the bank and stop his foster mother’s house being sold. But he never gets to Big Mama Sweet and the money goes missing. So Jack has to contemplate going back into the cage. Through all this Jack is self-medicating his constant pain and using a notebook to try and keep track of his life, as his brain is addled by multiple concussions:

“He felt the pain in his head from concussion after concussion after concussion and he lived in the blurred world of a rocked mind. He felt the streaks of pain through his eyes and down his spine and he felt the burst of bright lights and the sharp, unexpected noises of the modern world that screamed through his brain. Broken fingers and dislocated kneecaps and sprained neck and gashed skull and again and again and again the fists and knuckles and knees and elbows and he felt it all as if every blow he had absorbed and every blow he had delivered still existed somewhere in an invisible cloud of pain that draped and held him like some migrant soul in search of a home. The years’ passions and his body rusting and his mind like some great wide open space with howling and twisting winds and swirls of memory that could not differentiate between now and then and he felt it all”.

Brought slowly into Jack’s orbit is Annette, a young woman covered in tattoos who has found refuge with a ramshackle travelling carnival:

“All her extra money went to the tattoos. She added more butterflies, a string reaching from her wrist up her forearm in the pattern of a lazy S and she could never decide if it looked like they were coming or going … A crown of thorns circling her elbow. Up and down her calves and around her knees wrapped serpents and vines and then she chose clouds and crosses and birds on her thighs as if to offer escape from the venom and thorns twisting below … Then she added the wings to her shoulder blades and to the tops of her feet, believing the symbols of flight and movement may give him the notion that she wasn’t going to be there much longer.”

The carnival itself is illegal, run mainly by ex-convicts and people trying to escape their pasts. Constantly on the move, the carnival sets up on the fringes of small towns, operating until it is moved on by the authorities, usually setting up in ‘empty asphalt in a forgotten part of town’:

“… erected around the piles of debris. The concession stand right in the middle. The tents for the rigged games in a staggered line over to the right. The rides going up where they could find enough consistent space. The Tilt-A-Whirl and Tornado and Slingshot. A maze of cracked mirrors and a carousel with missing horses. Bumper cars and a tiny racetrack where toddlers sat on stumpy elephants and zebras and held on as they motored in a clunky circle.”

Intercut with the present-day narrative are flashbacks to Jack’s history. Jack was literally left on the doorstep of an orphanage as a baby and then moved from foster home to foster home until, at 12 and half-wild he is taken in by Maryanne. Maryanne gives him a home and a life but he still has fight his way through school and as a teenager naturally gravitates towards cage fighting as an outlet for his fists and his rage.

Smith demonstrates a deep understanding of the milieu in which his story takes place. All the characters, not just Jack and Annette, have a solidity and a reality to them. The descriptions of the Mississippi Delta are haunting. More telling are Smith’s descriptions of the fading urban landscape that these characters inhabit, from the crumbling house in which Jack grew up, surrounded by farmland that has now been sold off, to the local towns struggling with a faltering economy:

“ … Annette unhitched the camping trailer from the pickup as she drove into town … Passing sale lots lined with tractors and farm equipment … Car repair and tire repair and a pawnshop with a motorcycle sitting out by the road with the front wheel missing and propped on a stack of bricks, the sign across the handlebars reading AS IS … Annette drove slowly past empty banks. Empty department stores. Shells of yesterday. But she found life at the coffee shop on the corner.”

The Fighter is a poetic and often dark look at the American South. Smith takes readers deep into the physical and spiritual heart of the landscape, building inexorably to a brutal, no-holds-barred finale. While many here accept their lot, Jack and Annette become emblematic of a population that will not allow setbacks and hardships to define them. And in this way The Fighter is also a very personal story. Both characters are trying to find or retain the human connections that will sustain them in an increasingly hostile world…

The American Nightmare: Down and Out in Ohio and Iraq

9/1/2019

In this novel written from a US prison, an army veteran powerfully evokes the horrors of heroin addiction and the Iraq conflict. In Nico Walker’s debut novel, “cherry” is army slang for a green soldier newly arrived in a combat zone, but it also refers to the narrator, a very young man completely out of his depth in every situation in his life. He starts as an ordinary college loser. “I sold drugs but it wasn’t like I was bad or anything. I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat.” He gets wasted every day and has recreational fistfights with equally wasted friends; he can’t make his girlfriends happy and isn’t surprised when they continually cheat on him. The language itself can be a little aimless. Why did he fall in love with his wife? “I could say some dumb shit, but I really don’t know.” Why did she want to be with him, when he’s such a disaster? “[It] was a matter of fate, or something to that effect, what would bring us together, regardless if I ever deserved her.” What sells this is the naked sincerity, as when he describes meeting his wife for the first time and ending up in her dorm room crying his eyes out for no particular reason. “And she was really sweet to me. I don’t think there was ever anyone who felt more compassion for weak motherfuckers.”

Walker’s clear-sighted assessments of the army cut effortlessly through propaganda stretching back decades. The novel rises to a different level after he joins the army in the declining years of the Iraq war. The prose remains simple, but now it’s clearly skating over enormous depths, and Walker’s clear-sighted assessments of the army and the war cut effortlessly through generations of propaganda. On soldiers: “The thing is your average infantryman is no worse than your garden-variety sonofabitch. But he talks in dick jokes and aspires to murder and it doesn’t come off as a very saintly mode of being.” On the Iraq conflict: “I’d kicked a hundred doors in. More like two hundred doors. Nothing ever came of it … Just IEDs. Just kicking doors. More IEDs. More doors.” In Iraq, the narrator is a barely trained medic who isn’t even supplied with antibiotics, but is routinely asked to treat Iraqis as if he were a doctor. So he gives everyone ibuprofen and tells them to go to the hospital, knowing that sometimes he’s leaving them to die:

In one anecdote about arriving at boot camp, he coolly sums up the senselessness of war:

The group I came in with was B1, as in bravo one. That night another group came in, B2. We thought the B2s were decadent children … The B2s thought we were weird losers. The mutual enmity between B1s and B2s lasted three days; then we were redistributed at random into three platoons … and no one could remember who anyone was. The universal baldness made it difficult to recognise people. They packed us into cattle cars and we rode up the hill to boot camp.

And, inevitably, he has to deal with the aftermath of IEDs:

Caves and Rodgers have no faces. All faces burned off. No faces any more. Rodgers is in the body bag. A shook-up sergeant named Edwards tells me he thinks there’s some more of him still in the truck. He points to a string of fat running along what’s left of the driver seat, the frame of it. I don’t know what to do. I skim it off with my fingers, roll a ball of it, and throw it in the water. Then I walk down the road, gory as fuck, not making sense.

Like his protagonist, Walker is a veteran who developed a heroin habit after returning home; he wrote the book in prison, where he is serving 11 years for bank robbery. It’s true that Cherry often feels more like an improbably perfect series of war stories told in a bar than a novel. There are no real character arcs, and the relationships have no ultimate meaning; they last or fall apart for reasons the narrator doesn’t even try to understand. The plot refuses to yield significance. Throughout, the most exalted prose is devoted to drug experiences: “Big motherfucking shots we did. And our hearts were beating their wings slowly. We were saved. We felt like angels must feel like.” This all means that, despite the author’s remarkable storytelling ability, the novel can feel static. The peril is so constant it threatens to be boring. Nothing can happen but more of the same.

But that is also part of what makes the book exceptional and what makes it true. Its feeling of running on the spot is the experience of heroin addiction, of the Iraq war, of living with untreated PTSD. And if there are patches where the anecdotes all feel similar, they nonetheless have a cumulative effect, like a lesson repeated and repeated to someone who understands it but cannot change. This is a book that feels casually hilarious if you read a couple of pages; if you read a chapter it becomes impressive; and by the time you’ve finished, it’s devastating.