John Lanchester "Capital"

What a strangely likeable book this is.  Not really a novel - you’d have to think that if Lanchester didn’t already have a name his publishers might have said, “Nice ideas, but it doesn’t really hang together”.  And it’s formulaic:  a sweep through the lives of people living or working in Pepys Road, one of those London streets once home to poor immigrants and now sought after by the nouveau-riche, right on the edge of the great financial crash. The characters play out the formula: Roger, the markets man and his wife Arabella, close to caricatures; Mark, Roger’s narcissistic deputy who believes he can outplay the markets; Smitty, a kind of Banksy figure who has made pots of money from his challenging and illegal urban installations; Parker, Smitty’s wannabe assistant, with all the aspiration but none of the talent; Quentina, the rejected asylum seeker from Zimbabwe working illegally as a traffic warden; Freddie, the phenomenally gifted Senegalese footballer breaking into the bigtime; Zbigniew and Matya, Polish and Hungarian seekers after a better life in unfriendly London;  the  Kamal family who run the corner shop and have an uneasy relationship with militant Islam; and Petunia, the elderly widow who has lived all her uneventful life in Pepys Road. Interesting things happen to all these people, and there is a plot device that should tie them together and drive the story but just doesn’t.  Someone is harassing the occupants of Pepys Road, starting with postcards saying “We want what you have”, progressing to silent videotapes moving up and down the road and zooming in randomly on their properties and then an abusive website and dead birds posted through letterboxes. Unfortunately, a lot of the time you just forget about all that because you’re more interested in what’s happening to the characters in their individual lives.  It’s a pity that Lanchester tried to do too much, because he is a wonderful writer (The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips).  He deals with dark themes but swerves away in the end from the full consequences.  Quentina, for instance, will be deported to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, “but Quentina had a secret weapon.  She knew things would not be like this forever.”  Things go horribly wrong for Freddie, but there is still a happy ending for him. But with all that, it’s a book that makes you like the writer. It makes you feel we’re all in this together.

On memory and imagining

Reading Perlmann’s Silence and, coincidentally, a recent LRB review* by Jenny Diski of Alison Winter’s “Memory: Fragments of a Modern History” makes us muse about the reins writers do or do not keep on their personal memories as they ride the beasts into the territory of imagination.  It’s a truism that many a first book is autobiographical, and we have experienced the difficulty of wrenching a memory away from the anchorings of “what really happened” to set it free in imagination to become a short story or a novel.  How do you take the “me”, with all its attachments and special pleading, out of such memories? Assuming that there is an autobiographic element in Anita Brookner’s many novels about introverted young women often involved in the art world, as Brookner is, it is a marvel that she keeps us interested, but she does.  So does Jean Rhys. Maybe it’s just a question of technique, of keeping at writing long enough to develop that second skin that lets you look quite coldly at your own experiences and at the same time still feel the surge, the bite, that tells you there’s a story in it. 

* vol 34 no 3 9 Feb 2012)

Penguin Books

It's on again, the Penguin call for submissions on the first week of the month. They are willing to receive whole manuscripts and say they will read them. (That's if the first page appeals.) I guess it's better than the slush pile.

http://www.penguin.com.au/getting-published

Vale John Fairfax

One of the models for our character John Brow has left this life at the age of 74. His life was extraordinary, not everyone would want to row from England to Australia, but still  I think John Brow's exploits of dragging tyres across deserts, his waterless vegetable diet, and his policy of always standing give him the edge. And his mission is to change lives (for a while anyway) until he finds his protegees are too weak to live up to his rigorous standards. See Writing is Easy our second book.
http://www.theage.com.au/world/you-couldnt-script-it-world-loses-one-of-its-most-interesting-men-20120221-1tkfb.html

Pascal Mercier

Don’t be put off by the less-than-enthusiastic comments by Amazon readers on Pascal Mercier’s Perlmann’s Silence.  It’s wonderful. For reasons of our own, we have also been reading a lot of A. S. Byatt recently – far too much A.S. Byatt.  What a difference there is between the self-regarding imagination of Byatt and the subtle, agile, humane imagination of Mercier.  We’re tempted to launch into wild generalisations about the difference between the British sensibility and the European – no, no let’s leave it at that.

Reflecting on the work of his unfashionable Russian colleague Leskov early in the book, Perlmann, a renowned authority on linguistics, thinks, “What was impressive was how good Leskov was at describing things, much better than most of the other people working in the field. It made one realise the extent to which, before any kind of theory, the important thing was to describe our experiences very precisely with language” (p. 51). Sounds simple, even simple-minded? Now the book takes you on a hair-raising plummet into the depths of that apparently simple thought. Perlmann is experiencing, to his terror, a dreadful emptiness at the heart of his being. The catalyst is the sudden death of his wife, but he sees that the emptiness, the absence, was there even before she died. He has, he finds, literally nothing to say, not on his work in linguistics, not to his daughter, not even to himself.  He has the impression that his memories of the past, even of his wife, cannot be relied on. Instead of preparing a paper for the linguistics conference at which he’s the star turn, he spends his time translating Leskov’s work, pursuing Leskov’s argument that our memory of the lived past is based around a self-image that is linguistically-created, by the telling and retelling of stories.  He pursues that self-image for himself by obsessively reading a “chronicle of the twentieth century” with pictures of the famous events of the century, through which, he thinks, he might “reappropriate his own life by imagining what had happened in the world outside while he was still alive.” (68) All this time, the deadline for his presentation is looming over him and the reader in a cloud of sick panic. Things get worse and worse. He plagiarizes Leskov’s work and then plans to murder Leskov when he turns up unexpectedly at the conference. There is a terrible black comedy in the description of his laborious planning of the murder and the banal twists of bad luck and coincidence that hinder him. From here on the book is a genuine thriller, the reader horribly engaged in the tortuous processes of Perlmann’s thought, his fears and his transient reliefs.

Music is a constant theme in the book, Perlmann having been a gifted pianist who abandoned his studies in a period of “irrevocable clarity about the boundaries of his talent” (86). Perhaps the best analogy for the book is that of a Beethoven symphony, full of anguish, tension and sorrow, but also of a rich and consoling humanity.

 

We have been commenting on the Guardian Books page on a rather patronising article by a handsome young man. As usual we had information  at our fingertips that showed him not to be as au courant as he supposed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/14/claude-cahun-finding-great#start-of-comments

To read the story of how we came to be Gert Loveday

http://www.linenpressbooks.com/blog/writing-together/1070/