This Is How – MJ Hyland (Canongate, 2009)

In This Is How, Australian novelist MJ Hyland introduces us to the inner workings of Patrick Oxtoby, a misfit whose excruciating self-awareness and lack of empathic ability ultimately lead to his downfall.

The plot is simple enough – a young mechanic, recently jilted by his fiancée, decides to move to a seaside town to escape from his old life and start afresh. Very quickly, however, he realises he’s unable to escape the dogged sense of failure which has overwhelmed him, and gradually his discomfort grows until he ends up committing murder.

With echoes of Camus’s L’Étranger, which also features a passive protagonist plagued with anomie, Hyland’s novel is interested in examining what happens to those who are unable to conform to social norms and adjust their behaviour accordingly. For Patrick, hell is not so much other people as the pressure to mould himself to their expectations. Small talk is all but impossible, and the easy, breezy manner of those more privileged than himself serves as a constant reproach to his own inadequacies. Like Meursault, he commits a murder approximately halfway through the novel, and like L’Étranger, the rest of the book is spent examining his reaction to the crime, and how he responds to the fascinatingly banal process of institutionalised justice.

The triumph of the novel is in the carefully honed simplicity of the narrative voice, and the ease with which we slip into Patrick’s cloyingly suffocating mindset. This first-person narration is fantastically well wrought, and the practically autistic depth of field so narrow that it takes a hundred pages for us to realise that the book is in fact a period piece (a couple of telltale clues place the story in the 1960s). Although by this point we’re aware that Patrick is far from normal, the novelist’s absolute immersion into his world and our assimilation of his viewpoint remind us how fragile and brittle such a concept really is – whilst Patrick’s family, in their inability to understand his oddities, all but consider him an evolutionary mistake, Hyland balances the swirling darkness of his pathology with delicate, light touches of humanity.

In the novel’s final image, an unexpected moment of reconciliation occurs that’s far less oppressive and existentially bleak than anything found in Camus. Although this is no happy ending, Patrick finally manages to achieve a temporary moment of escape from existential torpor; perhaps this is how the world ends, but it’s also how it begins – in the arms of a human being, in the hands of a wonderfully talented novelist, in the mind of an “other” who is no more terrifying than ourselves.

Sulaiman Addonia, Chika Unigwe & Brian Chikwava in conversation

Tucked away in a white-panelled room at the back of St John’s Church in Stratford, a group of 40 or so readers gathered on efficient navy-blue chairs on Friday evening for Newham Bookshop’s “African Writers In Conversation” event, where three very different writers read from their novels before engaging in a spirited discussion with the audience.

First to read was Eritrean-born Sulaiman Addonia, author of the romantic novel The Consequences of Love, set in Jeddah in the summer of 1989. Addonia spoke quietly and eloquently about the strictures of Saudi society, and the amusing ways in which people flout the system in order to connect with one another and fall in love, as depicted in his novel.

Next up was Chika Unigwe, born in Nigeria and now living in Belgium, who read from the moving On Black Sister’s Street, which chronicles the lives of four Nigerian women who spend their nights as sex-workers in Antwerp. When asked if she thought the real-life counterpart who inspired the book would ever read her book, she noted with a sad smile that she thought it unlikely; “not because I’m being judgmental,” she explained, “but because for girls like that, reading is something of a luxury”.

Finally, Zimbabwe-born Brixton resident Brian Chikwava grinned his way through the first chapter of Harare North, a first-person tale of immigration that captures with poignant humour the helplessness of newcomers to London.

These three talented novelists were all united under the banner of “African writing” and yet, as Chikwava noted with a twinkle in his eye, he hoped his book was more about being true to himself than it was about following in the footsteps of Chinua Achebe or Ben Okri.

I left Stratford encouraged by these authors and eager to read their novels, but I couldn’t help but wonder as I walked through London streets teeming with immigrants whether the billing was the product of a bygone era. In the age of Obama, of Zadie Smith’s Dream City, surely it’s time we stop reaching for the “A”-word every time we read something written by writers of colour? Sure, it’s an easy shorthand, but as these novelists all proved with their delicate linguistic skills, the ability to empathise with the people around us is crafted – like great novels – one word at a time. So let’s make sure they’re the right ones.

Many thanks to Jonathan Cape for tickets to the event.

Newsnight Review vs. Book Club Boutique

Whatever you think of BBC2’s Newsnight Review (was ever a TV programme more ripe for parody?), it’s interesting to note that it remains the primary outlet on mainstream television for the discussion of literature.

On seeing the programme, a Martian (let’s called him Pete) might well assume that those strange human items known as “books” are for opinionated people who like to wave their hands a lot, shake their heads violently, disagree with what everyone else says and use the word extraordinary as often as possible. Reading books, Pete might think, does not result in leaps of empathy but instead provokes dissent. Books drive wedges between people, Pete reports back to base; they make men swell up with the sanctity of their own opinions and women shuffle in their seats. Books, Pete might well conclude, are a Very Bad Thing.

Although the Newsnight Review team do an admirable job of stimulating discussion and debate week after week, the chattering-classes vibe of hyper-intellectualised discourse is understandably off-putting to a lot of people, not least to Pete, who’s concluded that artists should have no place in the Martian-Earth Post-Human Republic. Inevitably, the show ends up more focused on the commentators than the object they’re discussing; more worryingly, it runs the risk of sending out the message that books, art, and literature are a rarefied commodity for a notional “literati”, and of no interest or appeal to anybody else.

In stark contrast with the polysyllabic spree of Newnight Review is the uber-relaxed, totally relaxed atmosphere of Salena Godden’s Book Club Boutique which takes place every Monday night in London.

Now, it may be unfair to compare a television literary review panel show with a subterranean Soho slam poetry event, but it’s still intriguing to to contrast their differing approaches to the challenging task of bringing literature off the page.

In the Newsnight studios, a group of media-friendly, well-heeled journalists, writers, and columnists are assembled. We, the audience, are briefly schooled in the biology of the carrion around which the vultures swoop – and then, with tooth and claw and gnashing of participles, they tear it into shreds.

The Book Club Boutique, on the other hand, has no room for criticism. Instead, upon arrival in the back streets of Soho, after heading to the bar and rubbing shoulders with performers-to-be and their entourages, you sit back as a random assortment of slam poets, musicians and people who’ve walked in from off the street do their thing – some good, some bad, all effortlessly themselves. There’s no discussion, no prevarication, no arm-waving or extraordinarys. Just a bunch of storytellers telling stories. This crowd isn’t interested in “art”, not really – instead of shooting for profundity, the management just want you to have fun.

Somewhere between the two, perhaps, there lies a middle ground where performance and discussion happily co-exist; where ideas flow freely and pretension is quashed at birth; where the insular  reader, lost at home with the universe in his lap, is given a heart-stopping instant of empathic understanding that makes him feel less alone. But I’m not sure if the real world is so good at such things. Arguments, yes – and people with guitars. Those we can pull off in TV studios or Soho basements. But emotion recollected in tranquility? Mankind’s unacknowledged legislators? They work best in quiet rooms, on quiet pages. It turns out the best tool we have is also the simplest. For it’s in books where clocks are stopped. Where writers become readers. Where you turns into me. *

* On the other hand, if you ever feel like getting outside and actually interacting with other humans, the Book Club Boutique is a great night out.

Jhumpa Lahiri & Mavis Gallant – Granta Q&A

Check out this fascinating Granta Q&A of Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant at the Village Voice Bookshop.

Literary Q&As are fascinating events, not only because it’s a rare opportunity to experience a brief interaction with someone we feel we know, an almost-friend, but also because we find ourselves surrounded by strangers with their own claims to intimacy. However many hours these strange, eccentric interlopers have notched up crinkling fingers in the bathtub or squinting under late-night sheets, we remain certain that they could not possibly be the insightful, elegant readers we are. Surely we have a greater claim, a greater understanding, than they?

Eventually, the curtain lifts and empathy wafts across the room. All right, we say, taking a sniff. Perhaps these strangers have some right to be here. Perhaps they have suffered, wept, giggled as we have. But this disconnect, this shift from the private to the public as the curtain lifts, forces our expectations to change. Gone is the illusion of privacy, the serenity of minds meeting. We are no longer nestled under sheets or lolling in bathwater. We are bemused wallflowers at a well-attended orgy – naked, abandoned, reaching for our towels.

You might argue that Q&As and their accompanying readings really have nothing to do with writing or reading or literature or books, but are mostly acts of curiosity. “What does this writer look like naked?” we ask ourselves, which is to say, “who are they without their words?” More often than not, it’s hard to reconcile the fleshy form before us with the confident lover who’s whispered in our ear. However witty, self-assured, insightful a writer may be at a reading, they’re far more themselves on the page than in person.

Jhumpa Lahiri is fabulously self-composed, intelligent and insightful in this video, just as you might expect from the author of The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. In many ways authors – the real, actual people – are just like their books. But in the end, when the Q&A is over and we’re at home slipping back into our sheets, it’s the books we curl up with, for in most cases Q&As, like love affairs, are swiftly forgotten.

Jerusalem – Patrick Neate

JERUSALEM – Patrick Neate
(July 2009, £12.99)

Whitbread-winning novelist Patrick Neate concludes his loose trilogy of “Musungu Jim” novels with Jerusalem, a satirical, expansive cri du coeur which explores the legacy of colonialism in a tri-partite story that leads us from the aftermath of the Boer War to a hyper-cynical depiction of the brand-stultified early 21st century (with occasional interludes in the fictional republic of Zambawi).

Where Musungu Jim painted a gently ironic portrait of the foibles of a young Englishman stumbling up against his limitations in foreign climes, Jerusalem seems more interested in satire than characterisation, more motivated by ideas than people, and the novel lacks the genial warmth of its predecessors. Although Neate’s writing is sharp and his observations always astute, there’s the sense that he’s suffering from the same affliction as central figure Preston Pinner, a hyper-aware spin merchant crippled by post-modernity and the impossibility of authenticity in a world where all meaning is commodified, often signalled by the presence of a trademark symbol. This affliction is archness, or perhaps post-post-hyper-archness™. Throughout the novel, Neate’s (or perhaps Neate’s™) authorial voice always feels at a slight remove, with one tongue artfully placed in his cheek, and however genuine his frustrations (regarding politics, Africa, and the cyclical farce of history and its discontents), we’re prevented from investing in the novel’s characters and their fate for the simple reason that our storyteller seems to care little for them either.

Whereas Musungu Jim celebrated the foibles of callow youth and Twelve Bar Blues was propelled by an infectious love for jazz coupled with a reverence for the mysterious and unknowable workings of history, Jerusalem, fuelled by bad vibes – disappointment, cynicism, angst, and guilt – rings hollow. The only respite comes from the character of Musa Musa, the ever-opaque witchdoctor who retains some of his affable glow from the earlier books, and in the brief passages that resume the earlier novels’ narrative of the great chief Tuloko, in which Neate effortlessly achieves a level of mythic resonance that’s in stark contrast to the needling tinniness of what lies elsewhere.

Most startling is the novel’s coda. This envoi, delivered in Zulu with accompanying English translation, is a heartfelt plea for a language of “honesty, unity and revolution”. It’s the most honest moment in the book, and for a brief, twinkling instant, Neate’s self-consciousness disappears. In just a few lines, the cynic’s instinct to reduce, belittle, and besmirch is inverted, and these bittersweet lines reveal, after so much wry distancing, a novelist capable of plain-speaking, painful truth. Perhaps it’s too much to hope for (I know what Preston Pinner would say), but if he’s able to follow his own advice, perhaps in his next book it might be possible for the real Patrick Neate – no-longer crippled by self-awareness and the need to keep his characters at arm’s length – to write an honest, unifying, revolutionary book. Jerusalem is not that novel, but as Musa might tell us, it’s only a matter of time.