Anna, far wealthier than Katri, keeps her parents’ house piously unchanged, and illustrates little books for which the publisher provides the text. Her paintings are marvelously truthful depictions of the forest floor, patterns of leaf, twig, moss, lichen . . . to which she adds the cute bunnies of the publisher’s texts. She spends much time answering letters from her child readers, and none in looking after her business interests. She sleeps, sleeps all winter until spring comes and she can see the living ground and paint it.
Wolfish young Katri, determined to provide security for her brother, and also the fishing boat that is his one heart’s desire, fakes a robbery of Anna’s house in order to make her afraid to live alone, and pushes her way into Anna’s service and confidence. Before long she appears to be in full control and has thrown out all the old furniture and the comfortable lies that let Anna sleep. But Anna, awake now, is not the bunny rabbit she seemed, any more than Katri is truly the wolf. The unfolding of their story through vivid contrast and interplay of truthfulness and deceit, purity and complexity, ice and thaw, winter and spring, makes the most beautiful and satisfying novel I have read this year.
Barbara Kingsolver: Flight Behavior
2012
Some of the finest American novels were written at least partly in the hope of effecting moral change. From Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin through The Grapes of Wrath and beyond runs a clear and brilliant arc of explicit concern with poverty and social injustice. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is a worthy new member of that company, its concerns embodied in the vivid characters of a novel written with passion and intelligence. What is new is that her scathingly accurate depictions of societal imbalance are closely interwoven with urgent concern about environmental imbalance—the ongoing catastrophe that no serious writer will be allowed to ignore much longer.
Many reviewers, predictably dismissing Kingsolver as earnest but naïve, or scolding her for not knowing where monarch butterflies winter, evidently don’t know how to read a writer so gifted at seeing and portraying both sides of a social dilemma and so adept at invention based firmly on knowledge. This scientifically trained novelist uses imagination to illuminate reality, and irony to transcend irony. The conventionally baroque and grotesque “Southern novel” in her hands gains the breadth and aplomb of South American magic realism.
Describing Flight Behavior for British readers is a problem. Particularly in its humor, it’s very American, regional, dialectical—an equivalent of those very British novels that Americans read while wishing they could catch the implications and nuances and knowing they don’t. To the ear that recognises them, the cadences are perfect. When the heroine’s friend says, “Here’s the thing. You looked bookoo hot. Can I borrow that sweater?” or when her mother-in-law says, “Lord Almighty, the girl is receiving grace!”—will the complex indications and references of the language carry across the Atlantic? I can only hope so, because the implications are fiercely revealing, and the nuances often very funny.
I had the opportunity to ask the author if there was an aspect of the book she felt critics had missed so far. She pondered briefly and said, “Class.” Another problem for me: American class definition is so much vaguer and less conscious than in England. All the same, poor is poor, and Kingsolver is right: reviewers have talked about the butterflies, not the characters, ignoring the stunning complexity of the novel’s achievement in showing how social factors—class, education, privilege, religion—control individual interaction with the processes we call Nature, the world we live in.
These days, many Americans proclaim that they “do not believe in” global warming, or evolution, or science. What has led to such foolish, perilous denial? To lay it to ignorance, stupidity, Republicanism, or Southern redneckism is to evade the question in a particularly arrogant and cowardly way. Kingsolver tackles it head on, because she knows and respects the people she writes about, the vivid, vulnerable, beleaguered, unconsidered hicks who have no credit in any sense of the word, and who get little help and a great deal of disinformation when they try to understand the world and their place in it.
The heroine and viewpoint character of the story has lived her twenty-some years in the “worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders,” as she calls it—not hungry but living on boxed mac and cheese, pinching every dollar yet never out of debt, secondhand car, secondhand clothes. Her mother named her Dellarobia in the hopeful notion that the name was biblical. It turned out to mean a wreath of acorns and such glued onto cardboard. When she finds it may refer to an Italian artist, Dellarobia feels better about it, but generally speaking, she doesn’t feel very good about herself. She doesn’t feel deserving or entitled. She feels inadequate and unworthy. She wanted to go to college, but got pregnant and had to marry Cub, who pretty much lives up to his name. She miscarried that baby but had two more, now six and two years old. Overwhelmed, seeing no way out, she has decided to run off with the handsome telephone man. In the first chapter of the book she’s on her way to meet him through a dark fir forest when the hillsides of trees around her catch fire, blazing up in orange flames, burning unconsumed. And she receives grace.
“Jesus,” she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else made sense. . . . The sparks spiralled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. . . .
Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of beauty to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising.
Films of monarch butterfly gathering-places in Mexico or California show us a shadow of that brightness. The scene of the miracle soon becomes exactly that, a place of pilgrimage—particularly after the nearest TV station sends elegantly coiffed and booted Tina out to interview bewildered Dellarobia. Posed for the photographer among the swirling clouds of thousands of butterflies, she confesses that she’d been about to throw her life away when she saw that “here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life.”
The photograph goes viral on the internet: the Madonna of the Butterflies. And her father-in-law, who can’t understand who the hell has the right to stop him from logging his fir trees to help cover his debts, finds himself the villain of a lurid environmental drama.
TV Tina returns to interview Dr. Byron, the lepidopterist who has come to study this unprecedented (and in fact highly ominous) phenomenon of monarchs wintering so far from their ancestral migratory routes. Dellarobia is understandably smitten with the scientist, the first man who ever noticed she has a mind. He respects her, teaches her, gives her a job, and is kind to her kids. But under the relentless obtuseness of Tina’s questions, he loses his careful detachment. It’s a fine confrontation: Tina blinking and asking, “Are we talking about global warming here?” and cutting the camera off as soon as the scientist says, “Yes, we are”—her repeated glib rephrasings that trivialize whatever he says—his increasingly fierce refusals to evade or concede. It’s what we never see on TV because, if it happens, it isn’t aired. Tina and the cameraman storm out to destroy the film, the scientist tears his hair in shame at blowing his one great chance to present his side of the story, and Dellarobia’s friend Dovey holds up her smartphone. “Yo, guys,” she says. “Don’t worry. I got it all. Posting it now. YouTube.”
It’s a fine moment of simple dramatic satisfaction. The book is full of such unpretentious pleasures. But the deep and lasting satisfaction of it is in the quiet, implacable unfolding of its great theme: our need, our desperate need as human beings, to begin to live a different life.
Chang-Rae Lee: On Such A Full Sea
Published in the Guardian, February 2014
Dystopia is by its nature a dreary, inhospitable country. To its early explorers it held all the excitement of discovery, and that still fills their descriptions, keeping them fresh and powerful—E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. But for the
last thirty years or more, Dystopia has been a major tourist attraction. Everybody goes there and writes a book about it. And the books tend to be alike, because the terrain is limited and its nature is monotonous.
The most familiar view of it is a wild landscape, more or less catastrophically ruined or neglected, in which human settlements exist widely separated from each other and cut off from nature, other species, sometimes even the outer atmosphere. These enclaves—underground or in domes or behind walls—are human hives, controlled by government and routine, living a regimented, sheltered, safe, highly unnatural, often luxurious “utopian” life. Those inside the enclaves consider those living outside them primitive, lawless, and dangerous, which they are, though they also often hold the promise of freedom. So Dystopia has a hero: an insider who goes outside.
Chang-Rae Lee’s guidebook to the country is, as one would expect from a professor of creative writing, full of ingenious variations on predictable themes, and written with such complex subtlety of point of view as to give it at least the appearance of a new understanding of the place. It follows the usual inside/outside pattern. A vague entity called the Directorate maintains two kinds of enclave: crowded and industrious worker-class colonies produce the necessities for upper-class colonies called Charters, where people live in lavish and competitive luxury. Outside these (somehow) protected zones is anarchic wilderness, called the counties. The narrator-guide is a first-person-plural voice that represents and speaks for the people of B-Mor (Baltimore), a colony of Asian-ancestry workers who grow food for the Charters. This “we” voice is also inexplicably able to know and relate the journey and the emotions of the hero who goes outside.
A good many things in the novel were inexplicable to me, such as how and when North America came to be like this, what happened to nation and religion, how raw materials are produced, and how, without trains or good highways, they manage to have coffee, gasoline, electronic devices, food in plastic pouches, neoprene suits, plastic throwaway dishes and implements—unsustainably high-tech luxuries that we of 2014 enjoy thanks to our immense global network of industrial production. But in a broken, sporadic civilization, where does all this stuff come from?
Neglect of such literal, rational questions in imaginative fiction is often excused, even legitimated, as literary license. Because the author is known as a literary writer, he will probably be granted the license he takes. But social science fiction is granted no such irresponsibility, and a novel about a future society under intense political control is social science fiction. Like Cormac McCarthy and others, Lee uses essential elements of a serious genre irresponsibly, superficially. As a result, his imagined world carries little weight of reality. The whole system is too self-contradictory to serve as warning or satire, even if towards the end of the book the narrator begins to suspect its insubstantiality.
The hero is a young woman named Fan, pregnant by a young man named Reg. Uniquely immune to the one scourge of the Charter colonies and the wild counties alike—a group of fatal diseases known as C—Reg is taken away by the Charters so they can study him and find the secret of his immunity. Fan then leaves her home colony and sets out to find Reg, with no idea where he is and no plan of how to get there or how to survive in the savagely unsafe and incoherent outside world. She trusts to her amazing physical prowess and her amazingly sharp wits. Maybe she just relies on being a superhero—a quality that will indeed get you safely through anything. Her superheroism is colored by a tinge of saintliness ascribed to her by the elusive first-person-plural narrator, the voice of the industrious, modest, patient workers of her home hive. Perhaps she represents their virtues. I could believe in those virtues, but I could not believe in Fan.
Lee’s prose is suave and canny; his story flows; events are vividly described, particularly as they verge into grotesque folktale violence and exaggeration; there are pleasant contemplative moments. Readers who find anachronism and implausibility easy to swallow will enjoy the story and perhaps find in it the fresh vision, the new take on dreary old Dystopia, that I could not.
Doris Lessing: The Cleft
2007
A Roman scholar of the age of Nero has a mysterious manuscript from ancient times—times that he considers ancestral to his world, though they differ strangely from Roman, or even human, history and myth. The Cleft is his translation of this document, with his comments and occasionally a modest bit of autobiography.
Somewhere, sometime, creatures like a cross between women and walruses, called Clefts, heaved about on a seashore and had babies. They conceived by an unspecified mechanism of parthenogenesis, since there were no males. They did nothing but wallow, give birth, suckle, and occasionally sacrifice a young female by pushing her off a high rock, also called the Cleft. It was an idyllic life.
But suddenly, somehow, one of the females had a baby with a spigot rather than a cleft. Ruled by unthinking instinct as they were, the walrus-women were upset. As more of them bore such monsters, they dimly perceived that trouble lay ahead—change, progress, even perhaps the dawn of something like (although not awfully like) intelligence. They tried discarding their male infants, and mutilating them, and so on; but they kept having them, and large eagles kept carrying the babies off and depositing them safely in a valley just over the hill. There some eventually survived, nourished by a single, extremely patient, and highly lactiferous doe.
After a while these males grew up, and a female who went over the hill found them and discovered sex. Just sex. Nothing in the story so far has indicated that these creatures know love, affection, or friendship, or have any community feeling more developed than that of a school of fish. And, as in other speculative fiction by Doris Lessing, free will is not an option. People do not choose or decide anything, but are driven by imperative, ineluctable orders from Nature or God or some people from another planet. Thus impelled, and having become slenderer and more terrestrial, the young Cleft women desert the hideous fat old walrus-women and start keeping house for the men. Of course they go on having babies. The men neither keep house nor have babies, but do brave and adventurous things.
Eventually—the passage of time is deliberately vague—some men, led by a man named Horsa, set off by raft and coracle to explore beyond their world-island. Since the unruly mob of little boys that tag after them is on foot, the men of the fleet hug the shore, landing every night to be with the boys and some young women who have also come along for sex. Why they use boats at all is unclear, but at last they sight a farther shore, and Horsa sets sail for it with a single companion, and is thrown back by a storm. The whole exploring party then blunders its way overland back to the original colony. There some of the young men, for no particular reason, destroy the great rock called the Cleft, and Horsa and the leader of the women, Maronna, move the colony up the coast. And so the story ends.
There are a few other names—Maire, Astre, and Maeve (as puzzlingly Celtic as Horsa is puzzlingly Anglo-Saxon)—but there are no characters: the author scrupulously refrains from anything characteristic at all. Description is in the most resolutely general terms. The climate is warm. The landscape has trees, caves. There are wild animals. Nothing vivid, no details.
Perhaps Doris Lessing believes inexactness is typical of myth, or that lack of local color gives a parable more universal applicability. I can only disagree, as I find the power of myth often lies in its startling immediacy, and follow Blake in believing that “All Sublimity is founded on Minute Discrimination.”
I call the tale a parable, but hesitantly, because I can’t believe it says what I think it says. It appears to be as prescriptive as Desmond Morris and more essentialist than Freud himself. Anatomy is destiny. Gender is an absolute binary. Women are passive, incurious, timid, and instinctively nurturant; without men they scarcely rise above animal mindlessness. Men are intellectual, inventive, daring, rash, independent, and need women only to relieve libido and breed more men. Men achieve; women nag. Much of the presentation of this is familiar from the litera
ture of misogyny. The “Old Shes” are described (vividly, for once) with loathing and disgust. The escapades of boys are made much of, the doings of girl-children are ignored.
Now this, of course, may be supposed to be the voice of the Roman scholar, who seems a decent fellow in his autobiographical musings, but who is, after all, retelling the story from a man’s viewpoint. He’s aware of that, and often speaks of it. Yet where does that leave us? It merely makes it impossible to read the text either as irony or as satire.
There are some strange omissions. Our Roman would wonder at men who never fought, showed no signs of being warriors, and kept no discipline over their sons—all very unmanly by Roman standards. Living in the days of Greek influence, he might also have wondered why homosexuality is mentioned only as a temporary expedient for boys without access to women.
If we are offered the story as an origin myth of human sexuality and gender, it is unacceptable. It is incomplete; it is deeply arbitrary. I’d be happy to be shown that I misunderstood it, for as it is, I see in it little but a reworking of a tiresome science-fiction cliché: a hive of mindless females is awakened and elevated (to the low degree of which the female is capable) by the wondrous shock of masculinity. A tale of Sleeping Beauties—only they aren’t beautiful. They’re a lot of slobbering walruses till the Prince comes along.
Donna Leon: Suffer the Little Children
2007
Before I started to write this review of the sixteenth mystery in Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti series, I reread the first, Death at La Fenice, curious to see if there was a great difference. I was happy to find the first not at all tentative, and the latest in no way stale or perfunctory. Leon started out with offhand, elegant excellence, and has simply kept it up.
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