The last, long piece, “The Design,” has a characteristically inventive and unsettling subject, contrasting with the plain, clear, unhurried Stevensonian prose it’s told in and the repressed emotion of the teller that finds voice only once. But my favorite of all these tales is “The Rules,” two and a half pages long. Read it. You won’t regret it, or forget it.
David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks
2014
On the July day that I sat down to write a review of a novel due to be published in September, I learned that it had just been nominated for the Man Booker award. This rather took the wind out of my sails. I felt as if I should say “Bound for glory!” and leave it at that.
Certainly the book invites the prediction. In its almost six hundred pages of metafictional shenanigans in relentlessly brilliant prose, The Bone Clocks hits lots of hot buttons, from the horrors of the Iraq War to the Eternal Battle of Good and Evil to the near-future downfall of our civilization. It aims unerringly and from many directions at success. At one point it even reviews itself, and the temptation to quote is irresistible:
One: [the author] is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: the fantasy sub-plot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: what surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are running dry than a writer creating a writer-character?
The review is too nasty to be just, but its self-protective mockery does provide a good example of an outstanding quality of the book: self-consciousness. In its vast inventiveness, its exploitation of trendy pop-cult stereotypes (soul-sucking vampires, anyone?), its jaunty hops between holocausts, the novel reminded me of Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union; but where Chabon is genuinely freewheeling, Mitchell’s daring is somehow anxious. He watches his steps, always. Reading Chabon, I’m carefree; reading Mitchell, I feel cautious, uncertain. The story is narrated in the first person by five very different voices, at six different times from 1984 to 2043; among them a fifteen-year-old girl writing in the general tone of a Young Adult thriller, a consummately self-parodic prick (whose first novel was called Desiccated Embryos) writing in Anglo-Mandarin, and a semi-immortal body-shifter. I find these radical shifts of time and person difficult, and though willing to suspend disbelief, am uncertain when to do so. Am I to believe in the hocus-pocus of the secret cult of the Blind Cathar in the same way I am to believe in the realistic portrayal of the death agonies of Corporate Capitalism, or should I believe in them in different ways?
But what does it matter? It’s just a novel, innit?
Well, maybe. But how many novels is it?
Maybe it’s one and I just don’t see how it hangs together. Or maybe its not hanging together is the point and I don’t get it. There you are: anxiety in the writer makes the reader anxious too.
In its temporal leaps, and in that the narration is stream-of-consciousness (or stream-of-selfconsciousness), The Bone Clocks can be compared to Woolf’s The Years and The Waves. But The Years is told in the past tense, and the voices that tell The Waves are always framed by it: Jinny said, Louis said. In The Bone Clocks, a novel deeply concerned with Time, there is virtually no past tense.
Present-tense narration is now taken for granted by many fiction readers because everything they read, from internet news to texting, is in the present tense, but at this great length it can be hard going. Past-tense narration easily implies previous times and extends into the vast misty reaches of the subjunctive, the conditional, the future; but the pretense of a continuous eyewitness account admits little relativity of times, little connection between events. The present tense is a narow-beam flashlight in the dark, limiting the view to the next step—now, now, now. No past, no future. The world of the infant, of the animal, perhaps of the immortal.
While learning how it is that some of the characters are indeed more or less immortal, we get a glimpse of a scene that to me stands out in silence from the jangle of dazzle-language and the kaleidoscopic tumult of brilliant imagery and filmic cliché. We see it again just before an extended climactic orgy of violence. Nothing in the plot appears to depend directly on this vision or refer back to it; yet I came away from the book with the sense that it is the center, the still center, of all the frenetic action.
‘The Dusk,’ says Arkady, ‘between life and death. We see it from the High Ridge. It’s a beautiful, fearsome sight. All the souls, the pale lights, crossing over, blown by the Seaward Wind to the Last Sea. Which of course isn’t really a sea at all. . . .’
. . . a west window offers a view over one mile or a hundred miles of dunes, up to the High Ridge and the Light of Day. Holly follows me. ‘See up there?’ I tell her. ‘That’s where we’re from.’
‘Then all those little pale lights,’ whispers Holly, ‘crossing the sand, they’re souls?’
‘Yes. Thousands and thousands, at any given time.’ We walk over to the eastern window, where an inexact distance of dunes rolls down through darkening twilight to the Last Sea. ‘And that’s where they’re bound.’ We watch the little lights enter the starless extremity and go out, one by one by one.
Sketchy as it is, this has to me the quality of a true vision. For all the stuff and nonsense about escaping mortality by switching bodies and devouring souls, death is at the heart of this novel. And there lies its depth and darkness, bravely concealed by all the wit and sleight-of-word and ventriloquistic verbiage and tale-telling bravura of which David Mitchell is a master. Whatever prizes it wins or doesn’t, The Bone Clocks will be a great success, and it deserves to be, because a great many people will enjoy reading it very much. Even if I’m not quite sure what it’s all about, I know it’s a whopper of a story. And in it, under all the klaxons and saxophones and Irish fiddles, is that hidden, haunting silence at the center. Behind the dazzle of narrative fireworks and verbal Klieg lights is the shadow that maybe makes it true.
Jan Morris: Hav
2006
When Last Letters from Hav was published (and nominated for the Booker Prize) in 1985, Jan Morris’s well-deserved fame as a travel writer, and the unfamiliarity of many modern readers with the nature of fiction, caused unexpected dismay among travel agents. Their clients demanded to know why they couldn’t book a cheap flight to Hav.
The problem, of course, was not the destination but the place of origin. You couldn’t get there from London or Moscow. But from Ruritania, or Orsinia, or the Invisible Cities, it was simply a matter of finding the right train.
Now, after twenty years, Jan Morris has returned to Hav, and enhanced, deepened, and marvelously perplexed her guidebook by the addition of a final section called “Hav of the Myrmidons.” To say that the result isn’t what the common reader expects of a novel is not to question its fictionality, which is absolute, or the author’s imagination, which is vivid and exact.
The story is episodic, entirely lacking in action or plot of the usual sort; but these supposed narrative necessities are fully replaced by the powerful and gathering direction or intention of the whole book. It lacks another supposed necessity of the novel—characters who, while they may represent an abstraction, also take on a memorable existence of their own. Like any good travel writer, Morris talks to interesting people and reports the conversations. And people we met in the first part of the book turn up in the second part to take us about and exhibit in person what has happened to their country, but I confess I barely remembered their names when I met them again. Morris’s gift is not portraiture, and her people are memorable not as individuals but as exemplary Havians.
This lack of plot and characters is common in the conventional Utopia, and academics and other pigeonholers may stick Hav in with Thomas More and Co. That is a respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying that in fact Hav is science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The sciences or areas of ex
pertise involved are social—ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. Hav, the place, exists as a mirror held up to several millennia of pan-Mediterranean history, customs, and politics. It is a focusing mirror; its intensified reflection sharply concentrates both observation and speculation. Where have we been, where are we going? Those are the questions the book asks. It poses the questions through the invention of a place not recognised in the atlas or the histories, but which, introduced plausibly and without violence into the existing world, gives us a distanced, ironic, and revelatory view of everything around it. The mode is not satiric fantasy, as with the islands Gulliver visited; it is exuberantly realistic, firmly observant, and genuinely knowledgeable about how things have been, and are now, in Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Downing Street. Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography. If, swayed by the silly snobbery of pundits as contemptuous of science fiction as they are ignorant of it, you should turn away from Hav, that’s a shame and a loss—very easily prevented and turned to pure gain by reading the book.
It’s not an easy book to describe. Hav itself is not easy to describe, as the author frequently laments. As she takes us about with her in her travels of discovery, we grow familiar with the delightful if somewhat incoherent Hav of 1985. We climb up to its charming castle from which the Armenian trumpeter plays at dawn the great lament of Katourian for the knights of the First Crusade, the “Chant de doleure pour li proz chevalers qui sunt morz.” We visit the Venetian Fondaco, the Casino, the Caliph, the mysterious British Agency, the Kretevs who inhabit caves up on the great Escarpment through which the train, Hav’s only land link to the rest of Europe, plunges daily down a zigzag tunnel. We see the Iron Dog, we watch the thrilling Roof Race. But the more we learn, the greater our need to learn more. A sense of things not understood, matters hidden under the surface, begins to loom, even, somehow, to menace. We have entered a maze, a labyrinth constructed through millennia, leading us back and back to the age of Achilles and the Spartans who built the canal and set up the Iron Dog at the harbor mouth, and before that to the measureless antiquity of the Kretevs, who are friends of the bear. And the maze stretches out and out too, half around the world, for it seems that Havian poetry was deeply influenced by the Welsh, and just up the coast is the westernmost of all ancient Chinese settlements, which Marco Polo found uninteresting. “There is nothing to be said about Yuan Wen Kuo,” he wrote. “Let us now move on to other places.”
Achilles and Marco Polo aren’t the half of it. Ibn Batuta came to Hav, of course, all the great travelers did, and left their comments, diligently quoted by the Havians and Morris. T. E. Lawrence may have discovered a secret mission there; Ernest Hemingway came to fish and to carry off six-toed cats. Hav’s glory days of tourism were before the First World War and again after it, when the train zigzagged through its tunnel laden with the cream of European society, millionaires, and right-wing politicians; but whether or not Hitler was actually there for one night is still a matter of dispute. The politics of Hav itself in 1985 were extremely disputable. Its religions were various, since so many great powers of the East and West had governed it over the centuries; mosques and churches coexisted amicably; and indeed the spiritual scene was so innocuous as to appear feeble—a small group of hermits, reputed to spend their days in holy meditation, proved to be cheerfully selfish hedonists who simply enjoyed asceticism. And yet, and yet, there were the Cathars. Late in her first visit, Morris was taken in darkness and great secrecy to witness a sitting of the Cathars of Hav, a strange ritual conclave of veiled women and cowled men. In some of them Morris thought she recognised friends, guides, the trumpeter, the tunnel pilot . . . but she could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything.
On her return twenty years later, some things appear to be all too certain. The old Hav is gone, destroyed in an obscure event called the Intervention. The train is gone, a huge airport is under construction. Ships come in to a destination resort called Lazaretto! (the punctuation is part of the name) of the most luxuriously banal kind, where, as a middle-aged lady tourist remarks, one feels so safe. The strange old House of the Chinese Master is a burnt ruin; the new landmark is a huge skyscraper called the Myrmidon Tower, “a virtuoso display of unashamed, unrestricted, technically unexampled vulgarity.” The English Legate is at least as sinister and much slimier than his predecessor the English Agent. Most of the city has been rebuilt in concrete. The troglodytic Kretev are housed in hygienic villas, and the bears are extinct. The age of postmodernism has arrived, with its characteristically brutal yet insidious architecture and propaganda, its reductionist culture of advertisement and imitation, its market capitalism, its factionalism and religiosity forever threatening terror. Yet we find pretty soon that Hav is still Hav: the maze, the labyrinth, is still there. Even the elevator of the Myrmidon Tower is indirect. Who in fact is running the country—the Cathars? But who are the Cathars? What does the M on the Myrmidon Tower stand for?
Jan Morris says in the epilogue that if Hav is an allegory, she’s not sure what it is about. I don’t take it as an allegory at all. I read it as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the West and East in two recent eras, seen by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us. Its enigmas are part of its accuracy. It is a very good guidebook, I think, to the early twenty-first century.
Julie Otsuka: The Buddha in the Attic
2011
Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore we could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers’ daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine.
This passage may give a clue as to how Julie Otsuka’s book is to be read. She calls it a novel. It is closely and carefully based on factual histories. There are novelistically vivid faces, scenes, glimpses, voices, each for a moment only, so you cannot linger anywhere or with anyone. Information is given, a good deal of it, in the most gracefully invisible manner, and history is told. Yet the book has neither a novel’s immediacy of individual experience, nor the broad overview of history. The tone is often incantatory, and though the language is direct, unconvoluted, almost without metaphor, its true and very unusual merit lies, I think, in that indefinable quality we call poetry.
Writing a long narative in the first person plural is a risky business. It brings up questions that don’t come to mind with the familiar first or third person singular. For one thing, the reader identifies easily with an “I” narrator or a “he/she” protagonist, and though some critics sneer at sympathetic identification and some novelists delight in frustrating it, it remains a fundamental element of the pleasure of story. But it’s hard to identify strongly with a whole group, even if one is interested in it as a group, and even if its members are individually sympathetic.
And “we” sets up two groups: We and They/You. Some languages make the distinction between the inclusive “we” meaning “I and all of you” and the restrictive “I and others not including you.” The “we” of The Buddha in the Attic is an artificial literary construct that does not include an “I.” The group supposed to be speaking are Japanese “picture brides” of the early twentieth century. Women married by proxy to Japanese men working in the United States were shipped across the Pacific to husbands whom they had seen, and who had seen them, only in a photograph. The arrangement was made for men who had no other way to get a wife, and for women, mostly young and very poor, who hoped for a better life in golden California. The practice was continued for some decades; the group in the novel appears to have come over shortly after the First World War.
The picture brides had no way to know that American racial prejudice would isolate them with their husbands and that for the res
t of their lives they would be “we” only to one another, we the Japanese in America. To white Americans they would always be Them.
That is Otsuka’s justification for telling the story in an unusual and difficult way, and it is a powerful one. And effective: it makes the point without stating the point.
On the ship, traveling in steerage, the women really do form a group, however disparate. When they get to the promised land, they are scattered, each to her husband, and the husbands are emphatically “they,” not “we.”
That night our new husbands took us quickly. They took us calmly. They took us gently, but firmly, and without saying a word. . . . They took us flat on our backs on the bare floor of the Minute Motel. . . . They took us before we were ready and the bleeding did not stop for three days.
Later, as they go on with their hard, poor lives, slaving at “stoop labor” in the fields of California, working in the kitchens of the labor camps or of middle-class employers, the absolute otherness of the whites still doesn’t join them with their husbands. Even when their children are born, though at first they are very close, always, heartbreakingly, they too are not “us.”
In early summer, in Stockton, we left them in nearby gullies while we dug up and sacked onions and began picking the first plums. We gave them sticks to play with in our absence and called out to them from time to time to let them know we were still there. Don’t bother the dogs. Don’t touch the bees. . . . And at the end of the day when there was no more light in the sky we woke them up from wherever it was they lay sleeping and brushed the dirt from their hair. It’s time to go home.
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