The Luminaries

I finished Madaddam. I don't want to talk about it for a while. Which probably means, at the most, four days. Since then, predictably, I have been in a book rut, with reading block and written wordititis (official diagnosis - look it up, after I have created the Wikipedia entry). Granted, this may or may not have something to do with the books themselves. Spoiler alert (post-alert, but you should know better when reading this blog).

Particularly The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. It isn't a trilogy but it feels like one.

It is beautifully written. So beautiful that it may have been written during the late-ish 19th century. Which is the point, because it is set in the 19th century in a gold mining town in New Zealand, which is arbitrary, unless you're a Post-modernist adopting a vintage voice for effect. The effect being full blown reading block.

As I write this, I am conscious that Mr Murakami sits on my dresser, carving a space for itself in the wood using gravity and its density. That's less a block than terror.

In varsity, my least favourite courses were on Romantic and Victorian literature. (Predictably though, I enjoyed Gothic literature - Wuthering Heights and Turn of the Screw. Ghosts as the projections of psychological neuroses and social dysfunctions, notably patriarchy? Strangely, I am iffy about Jane Eyre for the same reasons, but passionate about Wide Sargasso Sea which was a Post-modernist feminist 'prequel' to Jane Eyre. Basically the wife is victimised which is a prerequisite for moral indignation. Go feminism.)

Back my Point, which is a winding, perhaps circular path, and perhaps just me plowing through bush until I hit my toe on something. I am barefoot. Yes, ok, carry on. The prose of The Luminaries is as winding as my posts. I am 17% through my Kindle version. So far:

A man wanders into a hotel bar in a town with one main road and a jail. The men already in the room have gone to great lengths to keep everyone out of the room and they're not very good at disguising this. (When you fake-read a paper, move your eyes. Amateurs.)

Said man is interrogated and brought into their confidence.

So they embark on a story in a story (we're on 12% at this point and I think, thank goodness, the narrator is finally going to introduce the conflict).

But NO! We learn about everyone's business in this town and very little about the important stuff. Or what I presume to be important, because it could turn out the missing dress case is the important stuff. I don't care. Mislead me. Just mislead me with something.

See, what I disliked about Pope, Coleridge and Wordsworth (I never even touched Swift because I could feel it was boring from a distance. Wish I had had the same premonition about Heart of Darkness) was that they padded. Seriously, that's a cloud. Your poetry, like a cloud, drifts over and above the poem without actually having a relationship with the poem, except to the extent that it blocks out the sun sometimes. The sun also being tangential to your existence fyi.

My argument is tenuous, I see that. But equally tenuous is the link between my attention and the author's waffling.

You obviously noticed I said books earlier (take the credit for being observant, you). I never finished V. I never finished it because it was too soon after The Goldfinch; if I didn't read it for one day I forgot what had happened and had to reread the fifty pages before it, and because, I confess, when I reread the synopses, I realised I had no idea what was going on. That disappointment was like thinking you understood a sentence in Ulysses and realising you had transposed two words in your head and it makes no sense now, but with less street cred.

On the up side, I realised I don't just read for themes and characters - insofar as they relate to themes - as I have always believed. I do care about plot. I want an introduction, conflict, exposition, climax and resolution. I want to be tossed around by the tide in addition to being conscious of the chill of the waves, the foam in my nostrils and that I can't feel my toes or fingers.

The Luminaries was nominated for the Mann Booker Prize and V is a classic. So, the books themselves are not bad. I assume. Book people aren't easily bribed, because there's no benefit for the briber. I can see the value of Pope, Coleridge and Wordsworth (not Swift or Conrad - the cartoon version of Gulliver's Travels is creepy (why do people not see this?) and Conrad cannot write (why does no one see this?)), but I just don't value them.

I have always said it's dangerous to review a book before you have read it. Or made it past 20%. But then I wouldn't have anything to blog about. Look forward to my retraction. Or the repetition of certain metaphors, because as a writer, I believe extended metaphors are important. Not more important than plot but more important than spelling (Word can fix that).

Here is my conundrum (not my Point): my novel is almost entirely observations and walking to and from places. Various characters never reappear and others merely haunt the novel. I don't pad, because there is nothing to pad, except my own interests. Is that daring or uninspired? Exposition or just conclusion? Meh, as long as no one finds this blogpost, they will never know and hopefully some misguided professor will assign my novel and pretend she understands it for street cred. I won't believe her unless she compares me with Swift (not Conrad, never Conrad)).

PS. The cover pics won't load so you will have to do without.

MaddAddam: Part 1 of 2

My introduction to the works of Margaret Atwood was Oryx and Crake. I used to work at a bookshop which hosts a huge sale every quarter. It is a good place to pick up hardcover first editions. (Sorry, peeps, but if you can't find anything good on sale, it's because the staff nabbed them while they unpacked boxes.) Deckle edges (when the page edges are rough and uneven) are a red flag. This habit is mostly for novelty value than for any misplaced hope that this one book of thousands will become valuable. Anyway, I have this book and I have read it.

Let's retreat even further in time and test your patience. Because it is entertaining to imagine anyone is reading this and that you are on tenterhooks to see where I am going with this.

I read Dorothy Lessing's The Golden Notebook in high school (y'know, as normal learners spend their free time) and adored it. It opened up a new world of politicised literature for me, as a natural and nurtured feminist, although I didn't know where to find more of the same or how to exercise it.

Later I would read AS Byatt and fall in love for the same reason - together with her representation of the post-Modern psyche: by definition ultimately and completely apathetic. The last few pages of Possession sealed the deal.

Around this time, a friend was surprised that I hadn't yet read any Margaret Atwood. 'As a feminist of your own devising, I would think you would have devoured her work.' (Or something as cultured.) I am otherwise like that, as you know (as above), so I didn't read any just because he said I should (a reflection on our friendship, too). Until, while rooting around in my collection of books, I found the book and couldn't resist those deckle edges (they get me every time).

I was ambivalent. I was also confused. I was ambivalent because I was confused. The ideas of Oryx and Crake rooted around in the recesses of my brain and unravelled things I did not want to see in the dark of an alley or in the light of day. (An older me is more comfortable in alleys than sunlight.) So I ravelled those things up again while Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy weren't looking, and packed those three characters along with them.

Burying them didn't help. They kept popping up in my mind, while I was thinking about genetically modified anything (not often), overgrown grass (more often than you'd think), apocalypse (very often), the destructiveness of the human species (very, very often) and things that have little to do with the book, like apples. Each time, I would wander down one of the many paths in that greenhouse and whisk myself out when I realised what half of me was doing while the other half wasn't looking.

Excuse the pun but it grew on me (actually, don't excuse me - that's a pretty good one). One day I realised that other half have shoved my dislike over onto the 'like' side and closer to 'craving'. Muttering under my breath, I read others, like The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale. To be honest, I can't remember what any of them are about. They weren't Oryx and Crake. They were too packed with ideas and my brain kept overheating (it does that. Even a bibliophile has limits).

Lucky me, Oryx and Crake was about to become... wait for it... a trilogy. Even an author needs to make money. Thank you, JRR Tolkien. Again, I was ambivalent. I don't like being coerced into spending my money (although, let's be honest, that's how capitalism works). But I craved more.

I caved and read The Year of the Flood, fairly recently, although it had been out for several years. Hammer - nail - head. Down to the squirming ambivalence. Except, as I mentioned, the older me is far more comfortable with squirming and finds it more comforting than the safety of ignorance. Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy didn't play as crucial a role, appearing mostly as backstory. While Oryx and Crake was set after the pandemic that wipes out a very destructive human race, The Year of the Flood is set around it.

Now came MaddAddam! I waited and waited for the Kindle version but eventually couldn't handle the suspense and went with the hardcopy. Which poses a problem because I have two of the three in hardcopy and other as .mobi. Hmmm I also object to the waste of paying for something twice. Hmmm

Conundrum aside, I am halfway through. This book knits together the two stories, in a different narrative style: one character takes centre stage. His story is told as a story to his lover who turns it into a (almost Biblical) story for a species of not-but-almost-human beings, who are depicted as childlike in their ignorance but are probably better suited to the world, honestly.

All of these stories tell the story of how pre-pandemic society became further divided than ours (pre-pre-pandemic) into haves and have-nots, both brainwashed (sometimes violently) into maintaining the status quo. Except, as we all know, sometimes wolves make their way into the herd and these wolves were called the MaddAddamites, and named themselves after animals we have made extinct. Whatever, because the pandemic happened and now they're telling stories in the aftermath.

No spoilers there, I promise.

I haven't finished the book so cart - horse, y'know, but based on The Year of the Flood, there is none of the same crypticness and magic of Oryx and Crake. That book punched me in my stomach, because Snowman-the-Jimmy's story was impossible to fully untangle. It also ended with another punch that physically made me blink and try to block the memory out. Although there have been moments of unveiling, where clues have fitted together, there hasn't been the same kind of (almost Biblical) revelation.

That said, I can't get enough of Zeb's story in MaddAddam, where he (so far) plays an incidental role in the pandemic, although we already know he is critical after it. (It's always the people prepared to hit under the belt that survive in a pandemic. Remember this, peeps, when you play guns and crossbows in your minds.) This is exactly the reason I am slowplaying my reading. (No, not to learn how to use a crossbow, because I am comfortable with the under-the-belt people doing it for me.) Because, based on my experience of Oryx and Crake, I will have to manage the craving after I have put it down.

Forget the apocalypse, this is a far more important (and imminent) problem.

All of the books are narratives within narratives: told first by the character (almost self-consciously because they are pretty much telling their stories to themselves, old loud, which is not considered crazy in an apocalypse), and then revised for an audience, even if we aren't always privy to the telling. Although AS Byatt hits - nail - head with Possession about post-Modern society, universally people enjoy stories. In a story, you are the maker of your own destiny.

Stories lead you into the garage of your mind, to topple the piles of things you prefer to ignore. That may be as damaging in the lead-up to a pandemic than how it is executed. With stories, and in the toppling, we imagine the means of our destruction into being.