Cozying up to Conrad: LORD JIM

One thing I love about a Joseph Conrad tale is that, at the outset, you have no idea where it's headed; every tale that I've read is structured differently than every other, and although each story has something to say about the darkness hidden and revealed in human nature, Conrad always comes at this from a different angle.

Marlow, the same man who narrates "Heart of Darkness," narrates Lord Jim. You thought he was voluble in Darkness? He goes on at such length in Lord Jim, Conrad must, in his introduction to the work, address the issue raised by the book's critics of whether someone could believably talk for so long or do so and still possess any listeners. (Conrad suggests—surely as a kind of "up yours" to his critics—that everyone likely stopped at various points for meal breaks.)

Though the novel begins with anonymous narration, it shifts, after introducing us to the somewhat vacuous Jim, to Marlow's account, jumping ahead in time, past some crucial event which Marlow slowly gets around to revealing. (His listeners must know how the event in question played out, at least at the larger level if not personally for Jim; as such, you can't see Marlow as actually withholding information from his true audience. We alone, the readers, are in the dark.) This shipboard crisis is the strongest section of the novel, with Marlow allowing us Jim's own account of his actions (and inactions). Conrad is always great when dealing with suspenseful marine situations, and there's nothing to match it in the rest of the novel, largely because the rest of the action occurs on land. A late event does involve a split in action between land and water, but we're inland, not in open ocean.

The plot, such as it is, involves the fallout from this early crisis of Jim's—where does he go and what does he do to redeem himself? Marlow helps him find work, but Jim's past always pursues him. Then, Kurtz-like, he takes charge in a jungle paradise (the politics of his position are confusing, as there are powers within powers at work) until, in ways that are shatteringly unfair, Jim's past returns, along with fellow whites who possess no honor at all. Jim, a "Romantic" soul, is undone and missteps. Marlow seems to take the position that Jim is wrong in his concluding actions, though, as he repeatedly says, Jim is "one of us."

The novel would have been helped by being tighter. Conrad is terribly repetitive at times, saying something three nearly identical ways when one or two would have done. Additionally, Marlow stops after nearly every moment of speech or action to draw our attention past the action to the seemingly cosmic aspect of human behavior against a chaotic backdrop. It becomes ridiculous quickly, with every minor act leading to overwrought, if often lovely, statements.

Nevertheless, Conrad has much to say here about our sense of fairness and honor, what we think the world owes us and what we might owe the world. Jim remains an unclear figure, a man who never becomes fully formed—unless it's in his final, hopeful gesture.

Still brilliant after all these years: Jacob Bronowski

"All those who imagine take parts of the universe which have no been connected hitherto and enlarge the total connectivity of the universe by showing them to be connected."—J. Bronowski

A note to a friend in which I quoted from Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, the book and TV series from the '70s, led me to look up more about the man himself, which took me to a series of Yale lectures from 1967 entitled The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. It's a library copy, but I may need to purchase the book so I can return to it, so packed is it with insight. In its relative directness yet density of ideas, it resembles Blake, a fitting comparison, since Bronowski was a Blake scholar and refers to him throughout this text.

Bronowski's aim, he announces, is to pursue what Kant started before, as he sees it, Kant was derailed; to wit, he wants to construct a philosophy that takes into account the limitation of human senses. Focusing (no pun intended) on human eyesight (and roping notions of imagination and "insight" into the equation), Bronowski examines how everything we perceive is, rather than directly experienced, interpreted. We know in part, and what partial data we receive, we form into something meaningful. Bronowski moves from there into examining how science itself is an interpretive, imaginative act. Contra the notion of a "theory of everything," Bronowski thinks we can only have theories of particular segments of the universe; in fact, there is no one equation nor one scientific idea that can encompass everything. In this, science is like art, always have limitations, a frame, into which some things, but not all things, can fit.

Bronowski also argues that science itself doesn't teach us how to be good humans, but the act of doing science in the way it's supposed to be done—always saying, "This is the truth as far as I can tell," being humble, sharing information, engaged in dialogue, knowing you can never have a final answer—is itself a model for an ethical existence.

I'd like to know how a scientist of today's generation would read this book. The situation Bronowski describes in the scientific community doesn't seem like what presently exists, though ideally it would. And have later developments in math or science undone any of his metaphors or arguments?

A wonderful book; a marvelous teacher. The text invites rereading.

Coming soon! September 2012 Asimov's Science Fiction!

The dino's not for me, but for Dale Bailey's story. Still, I love a good dino. The first time Asimov's ran a story of mine, the cover featured my name and the story's title ("You Will Go to the Moon") as well as an illustration to fit the story (a painting of an actual moon scenario by Apollo astronaut Alan Bean). Now, for this fifth story, my name and the story title are once again on the cover—and dinosaurs, along with all things astronomical, were fascinations of mine when I was a child (and still, in truth). So I'm pretty pleased to see this charging (non-feathered?!) beast.

Put down, picked up, written

I got 130 pages into Kim Stanley Robinson's latest, 2312, before resignedly setting it down. The story takes place across our solar system, with humans (and altered variants of humans) living on other planets, moons, and asteroids. A death in the family causes our protagonist to be drawn into a tale of interplanetary intrigue . . . which is pretty much all I learned about where the plot was headed. I think the focus was going to turn around the idea of somehow fixing globally warmed Earth. The book reads something like John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (which borrows stylistically from Dos Passos's U.S.A.) in its use of chapters that contain snippets of information that seem to be randomly gathered from various data sources. Other chapters hold straight-out explanations of future scientific achievements, such as terraforming and making livable asteroids. Even the narrative chapters that follow the story shift point of view every time, maintaining a third-person anonymous narrator but varying which character gets the interior attention. The writing was excellent—and I want to especially praise a chapter in which the main character returns to Earth; Robinson captures how that must feel to be an Earthling who has spent a great deal of time away, as there's something unique about being on this world, where humans can breathe and where water runs and the sun isn't too close or far off. Despite the fine writing, the constant interruptions in the narrative flow cost the novel, I think. Are they needed in order to understand the story? I don't know, but the book was going to take too long, it wasn't holding me, and a clumsy character introduction sank it for me.

I also set aside, though with less reluctance, Jess Walter's new novel, Beautiful Ruins. I hadn't read Walter, and the first chapter, taking place in a sad, imaginary town below the line of Italian coastal towns that form the Cinque Terre, was wonderful, introducing an interesting character and demonstrating a witty tone and clever phrasing. Unfortunately, the novel shifts, in its second chapter, from the humble town and protagonist in 1962 to some profoundly unlikable modern folk involved in Hollywood. The tone I'd liked now grated, and the writing felt forced. Why am I reading about these people? I wondered. Well, I would read about them no more.

Perhaps shamefully, I also stopped progress (arguably, the novel itself stopped its progress) on Malcolm Lowry's "classic" (so it is viewed), Under the Volcano. Its story of a besotted and bewildered and cuckolded ex–Mexican consul is minutely told in the style that has its origins in Proust, but the plot, such as it is, proceeds like a tired and meandering burro. One wanted to urge it to "Giddup," but it stuck to its pace—and actually seemed to slowing down the farther it went. I did not want to wait around for it to keel over where it stood. I read about a quarter of the novel, so at least now I know something of it, if not how it ends (though I suspect a sad conclusion for our "hero").

Under the Volcano put me in the mood for denser stuff than Walter's novel, and something more assuredly literary than Robinson's quite literate writing—and so I turned to Conrad's Lord Jim. I'm about a third of the way through and loving it. Conrad is just so much fun, full of marvelous phrasing and wild overstatement and grand moments of physical drama and human suffering. No, the plot doesn't fly along, but there's a sense of movement, and the voice is compelling. Plus, he's already fooled me twice about where the story is going.

I also read the first story in Fred Chappell's new collection, Ancestors and Others. Seeing the list of works by Chappell dismays me: How have I never heard of him? The first story, a five-pager entitled "The Overspill" (I have no idea why the first tale is italicized, both in the title and throughout, unless it's meant to serve as some kind of preface to everything that will follow), tells of a boy and father who build a garden and a bridge during the boy's mother's absence. It's exciting and emotional, and the ending is stunning. It reminds you, after my above disappointments, of what surprises are possible in fiction.

Lastly, as I await publication of and reaction to "Unearthed," forthcoming in the September Asimov's, out in a few weeks, I'm getting a fair amount done on "Absolute Zero," the next Old Man tale. There's a twin-streamed plot, and I'm writing very drafty sections first, mostly (there's one solid scene and much scattered dialogue), in order to make sure the structure is in order. Should be a fun one.

The past as present: Garner's THE OWL SERVICE

Alan Garner's Red Shift was so odd (see here), and the man possessed such a following overseas, I had to see what else he'd done, and so I ordered The Owl Service, a novel more clearly aimed at younger readers (or at least amenable to a younger reader). The book feels familiar, its structure and tropes now thoroughly dispersed into a hundred other fantasy tales in which young people unpack a mystery and find themselves to be the keys to its cause and solution.

I was never quite sure how young these young people were, which connects to my primary complaint about the book, so let's deal with that first. When he can, as evidenced in Red Shift, Garner likes to avoid narrative exposition (though his prose is dense, lovely, and full of unexpected choices). In Red Shift, this led to Garner dropping all transitions that might adequately address the passage of time or characters moving from one place to another, so dialogue chiefly carried one along. The Owl Service is much more accessible in this regard, though Garner does like to have someone react audibly to something before he tells us what it is. Nevertheless, the opening of the book introduces us to three youngish people without making clear their relationship to each other. Eventually, it gets sorted out, but I can't see a good cause for delaying such useful information, information that would provide a context for the conversations we hear.

In short, the novel, which I blew through in one day (not that I skimmed; it was an engaging story), concerns an English family staying at a place in the Welsh countryside, a house and grounds the daughter of the blended family has inherited from her late father. Her mother, often mentioned, is on the premises but does not appear in a single scene—a pleasant enough bit of narrative fun, though I waited in vain for this to figure into the larger plot. Something scratching about in the attic (which no one seems appropriately troubled by) leads the teens—the girl, her step-brother, and the housekeeper's son—to discover a "service," a set of plates decorated in a pattern that the girl traces and turns into owl stencils—which sets in motion a host of supernatural events.

The book strongly reminds me of Red Shift in its connection of landscape with plot. In Red Shift, three sets of characters are linked, across time, by geography; the landscape, one understands, is haunted both forward and backward in time. The Owl Service ties the present events to a tale from the Welsh myth cycle the Mabinogion; a set of mythic events has recurred over the centuries, and it's all happening again as a bound feminine power breaks its shackles. How this manifests itself is, in some moments, frightening and strange, though what exactly has transpired is not terribly clear (and a personal secret that seems to reveal necessary information ends up complicating things, I think).

It's funny that Garner has one of his characters complain about the "elliptical" statements of the mysterious Welsh gardener (the typical fool-who's-truly-wise, though he's portrayed well), since the novel ends up relying for much of its mystery on just such elliptical pronouncements as well as half-explained events. The story comes together quite nicely in its climactic moments, but the absolutely final scene, the true climax, falls flat, as if the narrative were simply switched off; additionally, Garner leaves no aftermath to the tale, so when the storm has passed, as it were, the book abruptly ends.

I have to read such books with an eye and ear toward what a middle-school-aged American reader might take from them. Assuming someone gets past the frustrating elisions of the opening section, the story should pull them along. Better readers, especially those who've read other English novels (The Secret Garden will utterly prepare them, given its reliance on the relationship between social class and dialect, a theme foregrounded here as well), should be able to navigate the non-American elements and language, but plenty of other readers will find themselves at a loss long before the somewhat unsatisfying end.

ADDENDUM: A friend's comment that I missed the clash of cultures and class—which I didn't—leads me to think I need to say more along those lines than that anyone who's read The Secret Garden (or Lady Chatterly's Lover) will recognize the particularly English social-sexual tensions. Once Garner makes it clear that the household contains the working-class housekeeper and her son, both of whom are Welsh, he foregrounds those issues of social division, and I think those elements are the most coherent and successful elements of the novel. The relationship between the family's daughter, Alison, and the housekeeper's son, Gwyn, which is meant to parallel the Mabinogion tale (though I thought that fit awkwardly), generates much of the book's tension. No one wants these two to be together, and it's implied that the concerns are sexual as well as social. Gwyn is trying to rescue Alison from the kind of powers he knows reside in this myth-laden landscape, but he's often prevented from doing her any good. As it turns out, the sexual history of the region is itself complicated and a source of all these unchecked (female) energies. Language, too, is a major concern, loaded as it is with social weight, and it's another check against Gwyn, who aims to speak like a non-Welsh. These elements of the narrative are so strong, the supernatural aspects get underplayed for a fair portion of the novel, but Garner does well when he makes the landscape and people conspire to keep young Gwyn from forsaking his culture and destiny.

The Avengers and Shakespeare: The screen as stage

Anyone following Avengers star Tom Hiddleston's remarks on comic-book movies knows the respect he has for these films as a genre as well as his deep immersion in Shakespeare. Hiddleston has played Hal/Henry V in Shakespeare's sequence of Henry plays, which is fitting, because the summoning to an imaginary experience that Shakespeare implicitly—and, in one case, explicitly—engages in can be found again in modern movie-making.

Henry V famously opens with a "chorus"—a single actor who provides occasional narration—asking the audience to overlook the limitations of the Elizabethan stage: there will be no armies, no horses, nor any set to indicate whether one is in England or France. Rather, the audience itself must summon the various imaginary elements necessary to make the tale convincing. It's a clever device, with Shakespeare simultaneously acknowledging the labors of the actors, encouraging the audience to be engaged in the entertainment, and providing, through the narration, a vivid, thrilling description of the images he wants the viewer to have in mind.

How distant this is, seemingly, from the (most) popular entertainments of our day, the increasingly realistic dramas in video games and the CGI-dominated action movies such as The Avengers. Nothing, now, can be left to the imagination. Whereas a few decades ago, films still had to rely on an audience's forgiveness and willingness to accept what was clearly not real, now realism dominates, and so we've reached an age of cinematic literalism, in which fiction on film requires less and less of the viewer.

And yet. What of what's required of the actors? I recently saw, online, stills from various Avengers scenes, and what struck me is how little of what I saw on the film captured what the actors experienced. New York itself was digitally added to the film (as no actual filming took place there), and action scenes that appeared to be outdoors were instead shot on a huge sound stage, green screens backing every shot. I hadn't grasped the extent of what had been added post-production to the filming, and it made me realize that the actors, like the performers of the Elizabethan age, largely had to construct from their imaginations the scenes that audience would, later, directly behold. I think Scarlett Johansson was most effective in this, which is why director Whedon often went to her face for reaction shots: she excelled at looking completely undone by whatever she viewed, be it Banner's first transformation into the Hulk or hordes of aliens roaring from a hole in the sky. Despite the ingenuity of the people constructing a believable digital reality, were it not for the actors behaving as if they truly were these characters within these situations, the audience would not have fallen for the cinematic deceit. All the actors had to go on was what Shakespeare's troupe possessed: elaborate costumes, an entertaining script, and each other's shared imaginative enthusiasm.

The audience may no longer deserve exhortation and credit, as in Shakespeare's time, but we still rely on that "muse of fire" to enflame the actors, who must "ascend the brightest heaven of invention" to provide us with our play.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, Gourevitch and Morris

In his brief and strange Nobel acceptance speech, William Faulkner said that humans would "endure" not simply because they wouldn't shut up (his image of a "puny inexhaustible voice" going on and on even as daylight sets forever on this world) but because they have "a soul," by which he meant something that suffered and struggled and showed compassion. Those "eternal verities," said Faulkner, gave meaning to what was otherwise a formless babble. Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris have accomplished, in Standard Operating Procedure, a virtuous act that emphasizes those same verities, by taking more than 200 hours of human talk—the interviews that form the basis of this book and the spine of Morris's film of the same name—and locating within them something like a human soul, a flawed and temporary beast that labors to know itself through its speaking.

I came to the book because of a short story I'm working on, part of my "Old Man" sequence, and the book did give me material to use (as well as a better understanding of how the terrorist prison in my fiction will not resemble the prison at Abu Ghraib). The bookflap oversells the text: "In a tradition of moral and political reckoning, and all-powerful storytelling, that runs from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor to Normal Mailer's Executioner's Song . . . " Setting aside that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor scene, part of The Brother's Karamazov, is largely about the failure of institutional Christianity, I don't think you can compare what Gourevitch has done, in distilling Morris's interviews, to the work of Conrad and Dostoevsky. But it's instructive that the publisher makes that comparison, because while the Mailer work is based on real events, the other two are fictional narratives, using broad social contexts as canvasses for imaginary tales. Gourevitch isn't building an imaginary narrative, but each person interviewed provides a different interpretive slant on what was popularly understood to be a set of incontrovertible facts. Not Gourevitch, but each soldier who entered Abu Ghraib is Marlow, the distorting witness, and our unnamed narrator, who sets the darkening scene for Marlow's account, and Conrad, a witness to a chaotic reality that he's attempting to shape into something meaningful.

Gourevitch and Morris provide the context in which these events occur, a horror for prisoner and soldier alike. Everyone is displaced from what they know, reliant on strangers, and living in unfit conditions. Even those who have power know that, in the words of Jesus, that power is given to them from above—yet what exactly that power consists of, they are uncertain, even as they wield it. It's a universe of competing moral systems, the fragile ones the soldiers have brought with them from their former lives, the supposedly rigid one the military gave them but that seems to have been voided, and the new one built of desperation and circumstance and the constant presence of death. Then the writers take us into the events themselves, the events within—and outside the frame of—the infamous photographs; they use the interviews to unpack multiple significant events, giving us, Rashomon-like, different angles from which to understand the meaning of what we've seen. No one has uncomplicated motives; no one is simply doing the wrong thing or the right thing. The soldiers know they've crossed lines, but no one corrects them, and often they're urged by military intelligence to continue or even amplify their questionable actions.

As has been often commented on, the people in the photographs, the people we can see in contact with the prisoners, were prosecuted, but higher-ups largely avoided consequence, and, most horribly, for me, the architects of the Iraq invasion—Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, many others—have gone not only unpunished for the unnecessary and ill-prosecuted war that created these scenarios, they remain, near as I can tell, unrepentant.

The book is an outstanding account of an individual, collective, and national descent into hell. Read it and be enlightened about what it really means to "endure."

Rereading Ray Bradbury (Pt. 1)

It had been too long. Once a year, at most, I read a Bradbury story aloud to a class of students. Aside  from that, I rarely read him, the later story collections being comprised of uncollected tales left uncollected for good reason and thin sketches that didn't pass muster as full stories. Setting aside Bradbury was one of the steps that moved me from childhood to adulthood: partly because I moved on to the "serious" writers Bradbury himself admired, partly because I gained that adult sense that the things we loved in our youth no longer sustain us. I could look back fondly on the stories that had made me buy everything the man wrote (as some early Marvel comics led me to collect nearly everything Marvel published), and what he did well had a lasting effect on me—but I could no longer pick up a new book by him in the sure and certain hope of recapturing that excitement. (The last solid collection was 1976's Long After Midnight, though it's a mix of good and bad, and contains some stories that were decades old at the time.)

When Bradbury died, my unacted-on dream of someday contacting him dying too, I wanted to return to his stories to identify just what was so fine about the best of them.

In reading Bradbury's obituary, I came across mention of "Homecoming," which I hadn't read for more than 30 years. The story is notable for being Bradbury's first sale to a "mainstream" magazine; before this, everything had run in the various genre mags, and, in fact, "Homecoming" had been rejected by a pulp mag that wanted something more horrific than what he'd produced. The story additionally appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection of that year. I had the story in two collections, the large Stories of Ray Bradbury that came out in 1980 and the collection October Country, which contained revised versions of some very early work from his first and eeriest collection, Dark Carnival, along with some newer stories from the early 1950s.

Drawing heavily on the work of Charles Addams (who provided the story's illustration for Mademoiselle), "Homecoming" involves a family of vampires and ghouls who would reappear in a handful of other Bradbury stories. (All of the stories would be collected years later into a fix-up novel entitled From the Dust Returned.) In this tale, the extended family is gathering for Hallowe'en, a favored Bradbury holiday; waiting anxiously throughout the tale is our point of view character, Timothy, who is decidedly unvampiric, a normal human boy in a family of supernaturally powerful people. Timothy is an outsider, unable to fly or transform himself; he's aware of his limitations, and the story ends with him unchanged, reminded of his differences. The one bright moment for Timothy comes with the arrival of his favorite relative, Uncle Einar (the title figure in another story in the collection), who loves the boy—as do all the relatives—despite his  . . . disability. (Even as Bradbury draws on Addams, the normal child who is viewed as a freak is the model for another ghoulish family, the Munsters, with their one disturbingly blond-haired daughter.)

Bradbury's work here is masterful. The story is full of images freshly described, and the whole tale, in which rather little happens, is propelled forward by metaphor and a restrained power in the writing. It's Bradbury at his peak.

"The Lake" is the first story in my collected Bradbury tales; it's also in The October Country. This is one of Bradbury's pared-down stories that uses simple language and a few haunting scenes to achieve its aims. A boy loses the female companion of his youth to the lake where they both played. He revisits the scene as an adult, and we're given an inexplicable yet beautiful repetition of that loss. Bradbury could easily have ended the story with a ghostly conclusion, but he adds a physical element that makes the story more disturbing, then adds depth to the story by allowing how the power of this childhood attachment diminishes his current (married) relationship. Bradbury's using different effects here than in "Homecoming," but suffusing both stories is a sense of nostalgia and loss and how childhood necessarily involves suffering from which we never recover, another Bradbury theme that would surface throughout his work.

I'm not sure I previously read "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," the final story in October Country. A vanished author is located, and our protagonist seeks him out to learn why he stopped writing. It's a story you can see someone imagining after the events surrounding J.D. Salinger's depature from the public eye, but Bradbury wrote this story in the '50s. It's something of a mystery, but has the tone of a tall tale, as our raconteur author regales the protagonist with the story of his non-demise, and as such, it feels less credible than the supernatural stories. The piece is further hurt by what had by then become Bradbury's standard character voice: over-excited, wordy, full of itself. It's Bradbury's own voice, and it grates, as it does when Bradbury gives it to several characters in Fahrenheit 451. That permanent-exclamation-point tone is something that drove me away from Bradbury eventually, that and the way the intelligent prose was replaced by rococo writing and a rushed approach to storytelling. I've long said, and this story reinforced, that Bradbury took the wrong lessons from his own work, that he misidentified some of its strengths, undercutting exactly what led to his best early work earning such strong accolades.

"Old Man" stories now for B&N's Nook as well!

Yeah, I used an exclamation point.

"Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" and "Clockworks," now formatted for the Nook (I hope), are available via the link below; any buyers (or samplers), let me know if the text looks right, because there were some funky things in the process:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/helping-them-take-the-old-man-down-and-clockworks-william-preston/1111697193?ean=2940014722285

And both stories are still available at Amazon for Kindle and the Kindle app:

http://www.amazon.com/Helping-Them-Take-Clockworks-ebook/dp/B008BC4EME

Such a deal!

"Unearthed," the next chapter, will appear in September's Asimov's, which comes out in about a month.

I see you . . .

Whoever you are, trying to find a free copy of "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" . . . you can stop searching my website. Just buy the story (along with "Clockworks"!) at Amazon.

Sheesh. Like a buck-fifty for each story is just soooo much money.

My stories on Amazon

If you're looking for "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" or "Clockworks," you can now get them bundled together for one low low price ($2.99) at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Helping-Them-Take-Clockworks-ebook/dp/B008BC4EME

I made a few (inevitable) minor changes—a word here and there—as I went through the formatting process, but with those exceptions, the stories are identical to how they appeared when they ran in Asimov's. If you've already read the stories and opt to not purchase them, please say a few words of review at the link.

I don't have a Kindle, but I do have the Kindle app for Mac, which I recommend. On a fully keyboarded computer, the Kindle app allows for great ease in annotation (the kind of thing an English teacher appreciates).

"Clockworks" gets an honorable mention

"Clockworks" (Asimov's, April/May 2011) earned an honorable mention in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection. Yeah, a few hundred other stories also received honorable mentions. Still, it's nice.

As the new story, "Unearthed," is about to come out (Asimov's, September 2012), I probably should prepare to make the other stories available as a package through Amazon. That'd be good, right? I welcome suggestions.

All Bad Things Must Come to An End: Alan Garner's RED SHIFT

Alan Garner's oeuvre, according to various sources, is young adult literature (though he doesn't especially target such readers, he says), and Red Shift seems to be lumped, by these sources, with his other works of fantasy for younger readers. This is baffling. Given the sexual themes, which are quite adult, even if dealt with elliptically most of the time, the book seems more for mature readers. Additionally, there isn't a clear fantastic element in this novel. One set of murders is unexplained, but I'm not sure Garner wants us to provide a supernatural explanation; also, the faint connection between the novel's three timelines is arguably a fantastic or science fictional element, but it plays, rather, as a tying together of motifs rather than some actual connection.

The book seems to earn the appellation tour de force; like anything that gets called a tour de force, it is single-minded, single-toned, sustained . . . and, if it's like the author's other novels, not really a tour de force but just "the way this writer does things." Since I haven't read Garner's other works, I can't judge whether he's achieved something unique here or whether I'm just seeing a slice of his much larger pie. I have ordered another book of his from the library, so I'll have a better sense of where this fits in Garner's corpus later. For now, I'm also ignorant of the novel's historical placement; there's probably something online about the novel's timelines, but I'm going to review it while still steeped in ignorance.

We follow a modern couple, separated by distance for weeks at a time and, when not, given some hassles by his caravan-dwelling parents; in the distant past, maybe the fifth or sixth century, in the same English location, we come upon Roman soldiers trying to survive in the hostile country; a third narrative takes place somewhen in between—Irish invaders are approaching the church where our protagonists wait in fear. Aside from location—and geography is central to the book's structure, as well as an ancient ax-head binding the three timelines—what holds the three tales together is a focus on male-female couples. In the ancient past, the former soldiers slaughter a village but keep a woman who is some sort of goddess-conduit. Or something. In the, um, middle past, one of our hapless English folk is deeply in love with a woman who previously had a relationship with one of the invading Irish rogues. I think. Each relationship (the goddess-woman ends up connecting with the soldier who tends to flip out into a psychotic rage) takes an unexpected turn. And a graffito reminds us that this too shall pass and most of our protagonists are long dead. Despite one (and-a-half?) not-completely-tragic tale-endings, the book is pretty grim, making one feel as positive about human love  as if one had instead read Chesil Beach.

However, some of the book's effectiveness is undercut by the very style that makes it compelling. There's little description, and the writer collapses the space between events, as if, until someone speaks again, nothing has happened. Dialogue drives the narrative, but it's often unattributed dialogue. This is fine on occasion, but quite often the same person speaks twice in a row in two disconnected paragraphs, and you haven't been warned; more often, more than two people are speaking, and it's impossible to tell who is who (especially, I felt, in that confounding middle time period, when a scene gets repeated and there's even less context than in the other times). The style gives the novel a propulsive quality, but it also means you miss a fair amount of what you likely aren't supposed to miss.

I enjoyed much of the novel. It largely achieved that aim that Poe pushed for, the "single effect"; additionally, while I couldn't follow events as well as I'd have liked, the emotional turn of each story was effective. I can't quite recommend the book, since I'm not sure who would enjoy it, but the novel certainly possesses power and, since it's fairly short, might be worth a look by someone who appreciates a challenging text.

Thank you, Ray Bradbury

His stories, the ones I first encountered in middle school, the ones that made me read more and then read everything of his over the next few years, more than any stories I read before or after, made me want to write. Later, I would find other writers who affected my sensibilities about fiction more and who stretched my ideas about what fiction could achieve, but the intensity, joyous and horrifying, with which Bradbury infused his best stories, formed the foundation for my understanding of how fiction could both capture the attention of a reader and express the personality of the writer.

It's those first writers we discover, those early encounters, that provide the primary sense of what fiction can and must do, just as our families provide the template for how we think human interactions function and what they can mean. For being a part of the family that formed me, thank you, Ray. You marked me.

A Sex-Singer Chokes: John Hawkes's THE BLOOD ORANGES

Having abandoned books on which I was getting no traction, I turned to John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges—which may seem like a perverse choice, given Hawkes's famous insistence that plot, character, setting, and theme are elements he'd like to eradicate. Setting, in fact, is central for every Hawkes novel I've read, as is character, as is theme; plots tend to be pointillistically constructed, but they're still plots. (So much for relying on the writer to describe his own work, a problem I point out in my AP Literature class.)

In the mythical (Mediterranean?) town of Ilyria, Cyril, our "sex-singer" narrator, and wife Fiona construct an erotic eight-hander with another couple (who, somewhat inconveniently, have three daughters). The novel begins after everything has collapsed: the other man, Hugh, is dead, Fiona has run off with the other couple's daughters, and Cyril lives platonically with a native woman while trying to win back the affections of the traumatized Catherine, Hugh's wife. Though little happens—and, a problem for the climax, when things do happen, Hawkes has a way of writing around them, a kind of Stealth Bomber form of writing that bends light around the very object on which you're trying to focus—the prose does have a propulsive energy, partly because that's how Hawkes always writes, but partly because Cyril is so fully of positive (and broadly directed) sexual energy. Over the course of the book, we see how the couples navigate the complicated relationship, and, towards the end, we're shown, the one scene hard upon the other, the crucial moment when Hugh finally commits himself to a relationship with Fiona and the moment when Hugh's body is discovered.

Hawkes causes problems for himself, though I wasn't aware fully of the interpretive problems until I read "Who Put the Blood in the Oranges," an essay by Bertrand Gervais and Anick Bergeron. First, my own thinking prior to reading that essay: Hawkes's description of how Hugh dies is awkwardly done, though that's in large measure to, again, the standard Hawkes approach to anything you'd like to see more clearly. However, I felt clear about what Hawkes meant to say about the character's death. However, Hawkes undercuts the elements of the plot that seem pretty clear because of how he's structured the novel and because the narrator is Cyril. Though Cyril disclaims responsibility for Hugh's death, Hawkes's placement of the scene in which Cyril convinces Hugh to commit sexually to Cyril's wife makes that a hard argument to swallow. Also, given Cyril's evident narcissism and his need to see everything as part of some "tapestry" of sexual joy forces the reader to question Cyril's insistence that Hugh's death is an accident, the result of Hugh's masturbatory practices.

Still, I'm okay with that tension. The novel's seeming ambiguity as to how the events should be interpreted is no more surprising or problematic than the ambiguity we often run into when having to push past the insistences of a first-person narrator. I think that Hawkes wants us to trust Cyril and, too, wants us to find Cyril's moral code meaningful and coherent, even if it runs utterly counter to our own. But it's also easy to see that Cyril is imposing his code on others, and that the novel's disastrous setting and dark imagery indicate that, in fact, Cyril's way of life is ultimately destructive and self-serving.

The essay by Gervais and Bergeron takes the view that Hawkes has contaminated readers' and reviewers' understanding of the novel; evidently (if their facts are right), reviewers and readers missed the accidental nature of Hugh's death and thought it was a suicide, a suicide in response to Hugh's having to live like Cyril—missed, that is, until Hawkes, in interviews, explained the death scene, after which everyone saw the novel differently. Whether everyone really misread the novel initially, I don't know; I certainly can't be the first person who understood what Hawkes was getting at. However, Hawkes's approach to the death is vague as well as flawed in its details, and given that the method of death would be, for many readers, obscure, it's easy to see how people would end up concluding that Hugh's death is intentional. The essay's argument regarding how the author's "non-death" and actual interference in the reading of his text has led people to rethink the novel is, I think, not the crucial problem; rather, it's that the novel is flawed, and the writer's mistakes make it difficult for any reader to get even the literal events right.

I enjoyed the novel, but Cyril does wear out his welcome, and Hawkes's refusal to let the character slip into doubt gives us a guy with whom it's hard to sympathize. The novel could certainly be tighter, and many scenes feel redundant, especially since the back-and-forth chronology resists narrative momentum.

Ungripped: Eco's PRAGUE CEMETERY and Groff's ARCADIA

I've set down two books that failed to grab me.

Umberto Eco's latest, The Prague Cemetery, drew me in via the jacket description, though its tale of conspiracy theories made real rang of his earlier Foucault's Pendulum (which I loved). I never had the chance to find out whether this novel followed much of the other's approach, as the endless listing of materials, a drawn-out mise-en-scène (similar to his equally unapproachable The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana), kept me at arm's length. Glancing ahead in the novel, I saw what appeared to be a narrative that would not easily admit me, and so I gave up. Really, I gave it very little chance.

I don't know why I picked up Lauren Groff's new novel, Arcadia; perhaps the praise on the jacket and its placement on the new book shelf at the library. (So many other things—that I own—that I should be reading . . . ) Told via anonymous narration through the perspective of "Bit," a little kid (early in the novel) growing up in a commune, the novel certainly contains lovely writing, even if every scent the child detects is broken down into multiple constituent parts (heck of an olfactory set on that wee one). It's an evocative style, and Groff captures the scene (and "the scene") well but, 60 pages in, that's all I'm getting from the novel, a lovely style. The story isn't gaining traction, and I feel, instead, that much of what I've read could be trimmed away with little loss. Evidently, I'd like to see more story than this novel wants to provide (at least in the early going). I will move on to something else.

I'm still reading, slowly, day-by-day, Jeffrey Cramer's annotated edition of Thoreau's Walden. I'll likely start two things, one of which will be John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges.

North Korea in fiction and fact

Just after I'd signed out The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson, I heard a piece on NPR about Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14; I signed that out as well, thinking the two books might complement each other, and the fictions of the one might be given grounding in the facts of the other.

The Orphan Master's Son feels like a combination of 1984 and Kafka's The Trial . . . and maybe some George Saunders and Jim Shepard thrown in for good measure. As a result of this reliance on absurdity-tinged satire, the kind of seriousness of purpose and historical horrors that ground a satire like 1984 get pushed to the background. Though Johnson uses real places and realistic actions, everything seems unreal, and even the utterly fact-based events—such as the random abductions of Japanese citizens—seem unbelievable. (In his non-fiction work, Harden mentions, in passing, these abductions, but so flatly that the air of absurdity which likely should accompany such actions is lost.)

This reader operated with the assumption that even the strangest things described were likely based in some reality, but Johnson provides no notes at the end to reinforce (or undo) such assumptions. I see that the reviewer for the NYTimes felt the absurdity undercut the book's horrors, but I understood that I'm seeing all events through the eyes of our poor maybe-not-an-orphan protagonist, who lives in a world in which he's pushed from one task to another without being consulted, and whose identity is the result of immediate external circumstances rather than an internally formed sense of oneself. Ironically, once he takes on the identity of a man he's murdered (it's like The Return of Martin Guerre, except it's clear that no one believes he's actually someone else), he begins to function with greater personal agency and find more ways to take control of his life.

The novel's structure is odd, in part because some of the novel is built of independently published shorter fiction. The seams show, but that works: the character doesn't have a traditional arc of development, but nevertheless, by the end, he has imposed a kind of continuity on his experiences and become more than the sum of what's befallen him. The sections in which the story seems to be narrated by the state radio network are the most awkward fit, as they turn the tale metafictional, but they're useful in giving the reader the sense that anyone's personal story in North Korea is merely fodder for whatever story the government wants to tell.

Toward the end—as the novel's linearity is turned inside out, the metanarrative becomes insistent, coincidences abound, and we meet a new protagonist—the story's drive becomes diffuse, and my interest lessened. But the book is quite successful, and I recommend it.

Escape from Camp 14, on the other hand, isn't terribly interesting. It's not the fault of the raw material—we're talking about a man born in a labor camp, knowing nothing of the outside world, and trained to betray everyone to the authorities, who manages to, through luck and perseverance, make an escape—but the writing, which is flat and unenergetic. Perhaps that's a consequence of dealing with the mundane, tedious nature of human evil, but the craziness of North Korean society and the Kim family in particular should have shaped this into a stranger tale than it allows itself to be. Partly it's a result of the prison-born Shin's constraints: he knows only his narrow world, which forces Harden to constantly step away from Shin's story to provide context and history. The book is pretty thin, and would have been better as a long piece in the New Yorker or The Atlantic, though the prose would have been ill-suited to either of those publications.

Johnson's novel, unlike Harden's book, manages to give one a richer sense of the madness of the Kims while also letting us enter more fully the mental processes of someone who is a victim of that madness—but then, that's in the nature of fiction, to give us access to what is otherwise inaccessible.

Posted fiction

I've restored "A Crisis for Mr. Lion," the corrected version of my award-winning story from Zoetrope: All-Story, to the links at right. For now, I'm keeping my published science fiction offline.

If you enjoy "Mr. Lion," a story that's done well for me, let me know.

Strangeness: Erpenbeck's VISITATION; Barrie's stage directions

First things first: I received today, from Asimov's, the galleys for "Unearthed." Good to see. I've got a week to return them.

Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck (trans. from the German by Bernofsky)
I picked this up from the library due to (I think) a recommendation in the Guardian. It has some stunning moments, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The novel, in short chapters alternating between tales of individual (typically unnamed) characters and a mysterious "gardener" who tends a lakeside German property, centers around a house and grounds; while the sections on the gardener don't advance a larger narrative, are sometimes bluntly repetitive, and become increasingly fanciful, the chapters on the people who live on the property are mostly tragic or just deeply sad, the sadness heightened by the arms-length narrative, the relative absence of dialogue, the lack of names, and the blurry, run-on writing style which, at moments, is evocative and elevating but which often sets up a kind of droning noise, producing a sameness of tone. I enjoyed some sections, appreciated the idea behind the novel's structure, and was impressed by the audacity of approach, but the overall effect left me disappointed and weary.

Mary Rose, J.M. Barrie 
I looked into this play while on a trope-finding mission: I'm investigating stories in which people vanish. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, tells a circular story about a young woman who, twice, mysteriously disappears while on a small island in the Hebrides. Unhelpfully (for my purposes), the story gives no explanation, though clearly some supernatural forces are at work in all this (and a ghost appears in order to emphasize this element). Much of the play is taken up with pleasant dialogue between characters who have little of consequence to say, and the drama lacks both tension and satisfying resolution. Oddest are the stage directions, which provide most of the narrative content regarding the character's interior lives (the dialogue doing little work in this regard); I can't imagine how this play looked when it was staged.

Some sample stage directions/commentary:

The room is in a tremble of desire to gt started upon that nightly travail which can never be completed till this man is here to provide the end

Followed immediately by:

The figure of Harry becomes indistinct and fades from sight. 

This is good:

These sounds increase rapidly until the mere loudness of them is horrible. They are not without an opponent. Struggling through them, and also calling her name, is to be heard music of an unearthly sweetness that is seeking perhaps to beat them back and put a girdle of safety round her.

How did anyone direct this play? 'Tis a puzzlement. There's also the expectation that an actor will demonstrate some accomplished knife-throwing at one point. Good luck with that.

Faulkner's humane masterpiece

At least, that's how Faulkner saw it, believing that The Sound and Fury, the first in his sequence of novels that took him far beyond what he'd previously achieved, was his greatest work. It's possible. Absalom! Absalom! is more dense and far-reaching, dredging even deeper pools of Southern misery; As I Lay Dying is the more sustained (albeit briefer) performance, the breathless work that has you in a chokehold from start to finish.

The Sound and the Fury, if it is stronger, is so because it's more humane. Much as I love As I Lay Dying, it's populated by grotesqueries, with only a few folks passed along the way emerging as humans we might care to know. Though Benjamin is "an idiot," Faulkner gives him a voice that's sensitive to human activity, and when we see him from the outside, the drooling child hunched at the table, we hardly recognize in his outward form the being we've come to know from within. Quentin's journey to suicide is broken up by scenes of foolishness, humor, decency, and confusion. Faulkner doesn't simply let darkness claim Quentin; rather, we see him choose his path, despite the liveliness of the world around him, a world in which he, to the last, participates. Jason is greedy and selfish, but Faulkner lets us see how difficult such a life is for Jason. He's never at peace, but constantly at odds with everyone; his vices give him no pleasure, leading him, I think, to mistake them for virtues. Lastly, there's Dilsey, who, though the focus of the final section, is never given a point of view position, and is even allowed to step offstage while the narrator waits for her to, say, retrieve an umbrella. It's clear that there's something of Faulkner's "race problem" in this: he can't get into the head of this character. His awareness of this, though, also makes him protective of her, moving him to elevate her. In the character descriptions in the appendix, written years later, she alone is given no textual comment. (I believe the sentence "They endured" does not refer to Dilsey but to all of the black characters—or, possibly, all of the characters. Dilsey is not a "they," and the way the text is set, below her name rather than beside it, indicates further that the descriptor is not meant for her alone. Why have no commentators mentioned this?)

The story's very end (prior to the appendix) felt a bit flat; something more needed to happen there, especially given how gloriously the prose takes off in Quentin's section. Otherwise, this is an astonishing work. I failed to read it in high school and had looked at sections of it over the years, but I'd never fully attempted it. Teaching Faulkner—and successfully taking on Absalom! Absalom! last summer—prepared me, so that I didn't find the novel difficult at all. (My one confusion, straightened out by a glance at a discussion of the novel, involved the presence of two characters named Quentin. I'm not sure Faulkner needed to do that.)