Harvest

How did I find this book? Did I download it or did I copy it from somewhere (I'll explain this criminal activity later)? Was it in my Amazon-generated list of recommendations? This is how it feels to read Harvest by Jim Crace. It feels a bit like reading Oryx and Crake (or have you forgotten this quickly?!). It lingers, like overpowering aftershave that wafts into a thin note of something cool and shadowy. Obviously shadowy does not mean happy tralala handstand here, because you know how I feel about happy. Suspicious.

I also don't know why I didn't blog about it when I finished it. I read it a few months ago, in that bleak period when I was too tired even to read. Yet I read Harvest. I couldn't not read Harvest.

Am I the only one whose relationships with books sometimes don't have words? Or is it just the nature of tapping away at a keyword (the 'j' button of which is stuck, I think with something sugary) without human contact? I mean, if it's just me, I don't have to use words, do I? And if I do, well, that's a new problem that requires me leaving my apartment.

Apart from Oryx and Crake, it also characterised my reading of People's Act of Love and Mara and Dann. Which if you read back (although I don't think I used labels back them so you'll just have to stumble blindly through 400 and something posts. Good luck), gutted me. Not only because I missed the characters and narrative style, but because my friends had just kicked me out of their snowy or verdant or dusty lives and I must have hit my head because when I woke up I was here. But here doesn't fit like there did.

Make sense? No, I didn't think so. I'm not sure I understood that. But then I did hit my head so I have an excuse.

Most of Harvest is almost unbearably creepy. It reminded me of The Village, except after a little while, you don't have time to worry about the Others - one eye is watching your neighbours in case they set fire to your house and the other is watching the gentlemen of the farm because people are going missing (well, not missing, you know where some of them are: inside the house), your brain is thinking about this idyllic but harsh life on the farm and in the village (where your neighbours are so welcoming) and your heart is bleeding for the trespassers who are now undergoing a punishment that seems like a hanging except you live and people throw squishy tomatoes at you.

Sorry, is that a bit much in one gulp? Well, that's the point, although I'm sure you realised that. Right?

Okay, now, spoilers exiled. Within the first few pages, you meet the narrator, a villager on a late 19th century farm, as he tries to convince us the villagers live autonomously. Feudal system aside, he was not born in the village, but married into it. (No one seems worried about interbreeding and the rather stupid children they seem to be producing.) So his neighbours are wary of him. Who knows what he could do?! Set fire to his own house?

Rather than being wary of him right now, they become wary of a camp of trespassers. Apparently setting a fire in that part of never never land means you are settling there, like a smoke signal (har!). The villagers and gentleman of the farm traipse towards the smoking fire to dissuade its lighters. No one appears to be home so they destroy everything like children unmaking a fort into a mess their mother has to tidy up. But no, there is a beautiful woman. Now the men stand around and gulp.

Then, like the trespassing rats they are, two men step in to help her. Her family, we can assume. One threatens the gentleman on his horse, the woman spits at him and the men are captured but the woman runs away. Some of the men go after her and you know enough to rock on your heels thinking she best run and hide like a deer. One that survives.

There is another gentleman on the farm, not propertied but an artist slash surveyor. Although he may just be an artist wishing he were surveyor because he needs the money. He goes after her too, but instead of feeling relief, you hope he runs and hides like a blerry rabbit.

Some feeling you can't name because it's hiding in the shadows is now tumbling around and making you dizzy. You don't like this situation, which is solved by everyone leaving the forest. Trespassers (minus one) in tow. No wait! There is a gallows-type structure set in some ruins of something, someone pulls out two nooses (neese?), they point the men's heads through until their chins are resting on the ropes and they are forced to stand on tiptoes. Then the villagers walk away. They intend to come back later and throw things at the men but then there is a violent storm and they snuggle up next to fires.

The narrator, not being a real villager, does come out to help them - and there I have to stop recounting that plot line because I almost spoiled it. I can tell you the woman is narry to be found, which is either a good or a bad thing. Obviously. But you don't know which to hope for. The artist is also missing. And all the men are missing the woman and all the women are furrowing their brows.

Plot line B involves the gentleman of the farm's deceased wife having relatives who suddenly decide to become farmers. The farm is technically theirs, but they are complete jerks who act like bouncers at a club where the club is anything that touches the same earth as them. They have now arrived to assess the property, because they would like to evict the villagers and turn the land to grazing. Basically replacing the villagers with cows. Bad joke. It's a metaphor for industrialisation and the disregard for the wellbeing of other humans - well, not a metaphor, it's an example.

The narrator has some suspicions about these men, but it doesn't really matter because the villagers can see the writing on the wall and they are hightailing it anywhere else but there. Well, obviously not anywhere else, but somewhere within a couple of hundred kilometres where they can make a living without being beaten by these specific men.

To recap, my dear readers, we are in the village from The Village, but the red people are hiding in the hearts of the villagers and the nooses and the entire bodies of the men who repossess the farm. Some more red things are hiding in the spaces left by the woman and the artist, who allegedly has led the exodus from the farm, but without taking his stuff.

On the bright side, you learn a lot about subsistence farming. Because the narrator is relatively new to the area (having parents who aren't cousins), he relates the learning curve of trying to fit in among these people who don't trust him (because his parents weren't cousins).

Jokes aside, this part of the story balances (and maybe draws) out the unsettled feelings that do handstands in the corner of your vision. The way the narrator describes the world around him helps you to understand why he lives among these people. There is also his sense of loyalty - he grew up with the gentleman and has never left his side. He is honest about his guilt and failure to stand up for the trespassers, his concern, and his sense of self-preservation - and his lust and jealousy.

Harvest is more than a horror story. It is more than an example: it is a metaphor for the changing times, from the pastoral to the industrial, the sense that no one explains what is going one, but someone keeps switching the signposts around. And just removes some of them. As a result, you too are wary, looking into every shadow of the story, hoping to see the young woman or a matchstick you can use to halt the wrecking ball on the horizon.

Some of the mysteries have answers and others don't - not in the way detective series have led us to understand 'answer'. I suppose even the alleged answers are mysterious. I'll bet that you feel a little unsettled and a little curious based on only a few paragraphs that are mostly facetious jokes, right? What did it for me are the tortures inflicted on those men for silly infringements. You're a vagrant, just like these people are about to become, and these people attack your shelter and wife. What are you, especially as a man in that time, going to do? Threaten their stick-thin and therefore breakable fibula is what.

These jokes are a way of dealing with what I don't understand, which is almost everything in this novel. The extent to which I am trying to deal with it is a verification of how little can be understood (which is tautological, but this seems fitting). Harvest is a beautifully told novel in which the narrator and his voice fit as perfectly as a novelist can write them. You know as much as he does - what he knows is what he has learnt and what he feels he needs to explain, and what he doesn't he still feels he needs to uncover. (And here we are at the beginning again.)

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.

Stranger and Stranger: Post 2 of 2

"Stranger and stranger," cried Camilla (she was so much surprised that for the moment she forgot to think up a better title).'

I didn't write this - I typed it. Har! Ok, it isn't original nor is it a decent appropriation of Alice's surprise in Wonderland. In the original (and funny) version, this prim little miss is so surprised she has forgotten 'her grammar', saying 'curiouser and curiouser' when the correct superlative is 'more curious'. (I have just unfunnied it. But wait, there is more funny to come.) She is surprised because her neck is growing longer - nothing else, just her neck - and all she can think about are her shoes and who will tie them. Granted, she is 10 years old or something and has probably just learnt to tie her shoes.

Now my title is not grammatically incorrect or funny. I am not surprised and my neck is still the same length as this morning, I think (I don't measure it regularly or at all so if I really wanted to be sure I'd have to compare photos, but I'm pretty sure it's still the same length). My title should tell you I am confuzzled. Again, this is not a word I am coining. It is a type of confusion, I suppose (I have never had to define it before), where you understand all the factors and reasoning, but that doesn't help you grasp it any better.

Like (sorry, folks), smoking. I don't understand it. I mean, I understand that it's addictive and that people often start out as teenagers due to peer pressure or because they think they look cool (update: not even James Dean in a leather biker jacket leaning on a fast car looks cool smoking) or because it reduces stress or because it smothers food cravings. But come on, we're a smart generation. We know better. You know better.

What confuzzles me is why someone would voluntarily imbibe tar, knowing they are imbibing tar (and bleach and rat poison), which a) is tested on animals (look that one up, you; I have nightmares about that rat) and b) destroys entire forests when factories are built (nevermind the oceans and lakes when the stuff spills). To look like James Dean on a bad day. Voluntarily. There is a link I am missing.

Anyway, that is confuzzlement. Perhaps this post is confuzzlement.

To recap, Stranger in a Strange Land is about Mike the Martian. He is physically human but a sociological 'stranger' and that 'strange land' is Earth. The Martians are a highly evolved civilisation who leave their young to survive or not before welcoming them back into the fold. (That way they weed out the weak ones.) They believe in ghosts. They also can 'discorporate' at will (die) (my favourite bit) and then their friends eat the body  (anyone catch that pun? Probably my best).

There doesn't seem to be a hint of irony in the judgement that human behaviour is largely an arbitrary set of rules designed to prevent human beings from achieving... I have no idea what noun to ascribe to the Martian ideal. Nirvana?

I'm being sarcastic here because I'm all riled up over the animal testing, so find some salt and throw it over your preferred shoulder.

Literature that was revolutionary at the time seems dated a few decades later. I have said this before, in defence of EM Foster (back off, you, that's sacred ground you're about to trample on, literally). Free love was revolutionary in the 60s (a bit like Google will seem in 50 years, after the second Silicon Valley crash). It was Mike's solution to human problems, not the Martians', because by all accounts they are as ugly as salmon and have the mating patterns of.

Mike doesn't have any of the cynicism that I and probably you (else you're in the wrong place, bud) have (I scoffed and rolled my eyes more the further I read). He can set up a telepathic and empathic link between his followers (yes, what happens next is exactly what you think happens next) so that they can access his superhero powers (lifting things and making policemen disappear and, well...) and his Martian bond between his body and let's-just-go-with mind. Ta da, emotions like jealousy discorporate.

I dunno. I can't imagine feeling less jealous because I'm in my partner's brain, and I really, really don't want him in mine.

Maybe my resistance to Mike's spirituality is only proof of how constrained I am by human mores. Well, of course! I yell. Followed by, no, I don't think so. Both. Because human beings need a framework, whether political, familial, social or religious. It's the details of the framework that can be awful and constraining, not the framework (unless your framework is cannibalism. Like Mike's).

Look, no one's stopping me from setting up a hovel... in a hovel, but then I must accept that no one's going to come to my aid when it falls down. I'm sure Mike could have constructed a lovely hovel in no time and without twitching a finger joint, and then rebuilt it, and filled it with followers. But he would just be replacing one framework with another (are you really asking me to choose between democracy and free love? The former has health care and builders to rebuild my hovel, and the latter has the power of the mind, and my mind is a scary place without entrusting my life to it).

Let us sidewind back onto the path. A path. I wrote in the last post that Stranger in a Strange Land can be divided into two distinct books, but that perhaps I was being unfair in judging the second when I hadn't finished. I have finished it, I have let a few days pass, and I stand by my judgement. (Always trust your instinct.) You may be out of salt by now, so you guessed this, I'm sure. No review can end well when it begins with smoking.

Now I think the second book is even worse than I first suspected, especially when compared with the first. Which had a plot. And character consistency. I am confuzzled about how one author can write both books - and in one book! - how it won a Hugo Award and how this book finds itself squished up with 1984, We and A Brave New World on 'best of' lists. I am confuzzled about the editor and publisher who let the book end like that (I won't spoil it - but I will warn you). I am confuzzled about why I read past that 46% (don't).

A common excuse for sci-fi writers is that they were tripping or psychotic at the time, maybe both. According to his Wikipaedia bio, he embraced that stereotype and wandered into Wonderland every once in a while. That might explain the monologues about how awful the modern world is. But Philip K Dick used to write a novel in two days while high on LSD and he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Perhaps I am judging Heinlein harshly, based on one bad experience. But I don't think so because that's how I got into this post.

Now I am irritated and need a good book to read.

The Year of the Flood

On a shelf in Borges's library is a box. (Ok, there are many shelves and many boxes maybe even many libraries). This shelf and box is the one on your right. The other right. No, no, his left. Three-hundred-and-sixty degrees from her right. Dammit, you lost it. Nevermind; we'll get another box and label it in permanent marker. Underneath I will write: "You, the reader, lost the first box" and I will tie it to you with rope that scratches the inside of your wrist.

So I write (stop crowding me) "Literary Science-Fiction". But the letters are small and there is a space to the right and below as if something should follow. This isn't necessarily significant: writing in permanent marker on an object is as difficult as writing in a straight line with chalk. Into this box we tip Margaret Atwood, followed by the world and her husband because nerds are the cool kids right now. Which is, in its own way, a blip in the multi-verse.

Ms Atwood hates the label on the box, and not just because of the handwriting. I don't know her personally, but in a way I do, because I follow her on Twitter. I know she hates the label because I would too (as confirmed by a Gargoyle search). It's not because the label suggests that science fiction is lowbrow. It's because writers don't like boxes. We imagine that we live around the box, spending our days decorating it with warning signs, like the Borrowers in The Borrowers but more cynical.

I bet the marketing department adore that label. I bet they invented it. I also bet (I'm going to be rich) that they adore that she hates the label. They hand her buttons and glue to make pretty patterns on the wall of the nearest box, and she looks at them and paces the length of said box dropping buttons along the way. And they cheer. Because, you see, we're all in boxes with boxes stacked on our heads and around our arms like bangles. We need boxes because otherwise we would suffocate in the chaos of the universe. Trust me on this.

Why am I taking Ms Atwood in and out of the box and giving her buttons to drop like breadcrumbs? You guessed it! I just finished The Year of the Flood. Now, you know reading about books is only worthwhile if we meander down hillocks and over rivers, because otherwise, you could just spend the time reading the book. You have also guessed the Ms Atwood and I have 'a history', albeit one she knows nothing about even though I follow her on Twitter.

The first book of hers that I read was Oryx and Crake, which is part of a set of three (not a trilogy, no; more like a puzzle but not all the pieces match) including The Year of the Flood. I was a bookseller and I bought it on sale because I had heard the surname Atwood whispered among my learned friends but mostly because it is a deckle-edged, first-edition hardcover.

I disliked the book at the time. Her writing style is precise, almost minimalistic, and so much is left buried under the rubble of disaster, because it is easier than digging it out and discovering that what you have your hand is a child's shoe. Or so I thought. I was quick to believe the worst because I needed some boxes. Or shoes. Anything to hold in my hands. This easy disdain festered until I wasn't sure how I felt about the book. Or the author.

Next I read The Blind Assassin and the The Handmaid's Tale. Neither of which I can remember. Here she buried me with boxes, took them away, put them back the wrong way up and dowsed them in water. I'd had it! By now, you and I know that protest is a sure sign that you have trampled on something you care about. Still, Oryx and Crake festered. By now, I thought the book was ok, maybe even good, perhaps by some fluke. Sometimes authors write things by accident. Although I have not experienced this.

Now we get to the actual topic. Eight paragraphs later. Honestly, you have travelled further in search of My Point before, so no whinging.

The Year of the Flood, as I mentioned is part of a set, with Oryx and Crake and Maddadam. Like Oryx and Crake, the book is narrated from just after the apocalypse, although most of the book is a reflection on events before it. Yes, this is a dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel and I said I would give you a break from this, but this is what's cool. Yo. Now button up your plaid and appreciate.

The first third (and I am being kind here) is no less confusing than Oryx and Crake, because both jump from person to place to time without always being specific. But the narrative of The Year of the Flood does even out. Characters begin to reappear consistently, as do places, and mostly in chronological order. It is almost as though the author is teasing us with the character Ren, withholding so much and then releasing it like the wall of a dam. (Get it? Dam... Flood. Har!)

This worked for me better than the unceasing teasing of Oryx and Crake. I was pulled along by the main characters, sympathising and even empathising with them, even when things got damn right weird and the characters seemed to have switched personalities with people not even in the novel. Even now I have soft spots for Ren and Toby, although the spots for Amanda and the boys are small. They have to balance on the sole of one foot.

But The Year of the Flood is not festering like Oryx and Crake did. It has found its place on my shelf and I would loan it out because it is a good book and you should read it. The narrative and characters are fixed, while those of Oryx and Crake swirl around like milk that never turns into cheese, not even blue cheese. Then again, perhaps I am judging it too soon. Perhaps it will sizzle rather than swirl or fester. Perhaps it will only be complete when I read Maddadam.

So, it's on my shelf - they're on my shelf, because it fits into a bunch of different boxes. I didn't intend this (I swear), even though I started off on a rant about genre, but none of my comments have anything to do with the label. What sold me on The Year of the Flood were the characters and what haunts me about Oryx and Crake is the discontinuity of the narrative. No mention of rubble or shoes or carnivorous pigs. Until now. Surprise!

Now I dare you to pick up all the boxes (use the muscles in your legs - yes, like that) and distribute them around the library. I won't yell at you this time or chain you to anything. I only did that the first time to see if you'd let me, oh passive reader you.