Harvest

Two twists of smoke at a time of year too warm for cottage fires surprise us at first light, or they at least surprise those of us who've not been up to mischief in the dark. Our land is topped and tailed with flames. Beyond the frontier ditches of our fields and in the shelter of our woods, on common ground, where yesterday there wasn't anyone who could give rise to smoke, some newcomers, by the luster of an obliging reapers' moon, have put up their hut - four rough and ready walls, a bit of roof - and lit the more outlying of these fires. Their fire is damp. They will have thrown on wet greenery in order to procure the blackest plume, and thereby not be missed by us. It rises in a column that hardly bends or thins until it clears the canopies. It says, New neighbors have arrived; they've built a place; they've laid a hearth; they know the custom and the law. This first smoke has given them the right to stay. We'll see.

So begins Harvest  and right from the start the language proves itself to be just odd enough to set the story in another place and time, not in a difficult way like trying to read Chaucer or Rabelais, but in a way that I found interesting and evocative -- several passages had me rereading to fully understand their meaning and several had me rereading just to enjoy their imagery. An example of such imagery:

I suppose their hats betray their standing. A workingman would never wear or even need to own a tall and heavy hat, or one with so deep a brim. Such hats belong to gentlemen who rarely need to bend their heads or swing a tool. A workingman could not afford to pass his day with so straight a back and so erect a head. It is as if these first two riders are suspended from their hats. All their wearers have to be is pendulous.

As a story, Harvest is a fascinating vignette of the life of a pre-Enclosure Acts English village and highlights the fact that although the hard-labouring villagers had lived in this spot for untold generations, their continuing presence relied on the goodwill of their master.  It was mind-boggling to me that all of the villagers could dare to escape into unknown futures, destined to arrive somewhere unfamiliar and no better off than the squatters whom they had treated so horribly, and that they made this daunting decision before they even realised that their commons was to be turned into sheep pasture by the new master. The fragility of their existence, beyond the hard labour that they put into raising their food, was well captured.

But Harvest wasn't just about this story. The plot seemed subordinate to the words; with each sentence deliberately and brilliantly constructed, the book was more about the how than the what; which is why I can forgive plot points I didn't like. What was the point of accusing the women of witchcraft if Master Jordan never believed it and the case is dropped? As the final authority, he and his men didn't need an excuse to behave violently. Since I'm not likely to believe that the accusations were reflexive and lazy out of the mouths of the friends and family of the women, it feels reflexive and lazy from the pen of the author.  Some passages I liked (even though on rereading them now, they may be less subtle, more heavy-handed and platitudinous, than I thought when I first encountered them):

Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.

          The mood has changed. It's heavier. We were liquid; now we're stones.


          The dead leaves fly. They're cropped and gathered to the rich barn of the earth.

And it seems I ought to scatter too. Perhaps at once. It's always better to turn your back on the gale than press your face against it.

           

The real harvest in this book is of the Biblical as you sow so shall you reap variety: If the villagers had not been so suspicious of the squatters and protective of their own citizens, their lies of omission and half-truths would not have snowballed into the various, avoidable, tragedies. Harvest also served to highlight a truth of British society at the time: It was near impossible to move out of one's own position. Even after twelve years of working and living amongst the villagers, the city-born narrator was rejected as a foreigner when the troubles began. So too was Master Kent's position in peril as a landowner by marriage only -- the squatters with their plume of smoke ultimately had more rights than a man who had lived in and genially administrated the village for a dozen harvests.

This is the second of the 2013 Man Booker Shortlist nominees that I've read. Although they are both slim volumes, I'll put Harvest in the lead against The Testament of Mary and look forward to reading some of the weightier books on the list.

Shake Hands With the Devil

Shake Hands With the Devil is a frustrating, horrifying and terribly important book, written by a reluctant eyewitness to the Rwandan Genocide: Lt Gen Roméo Dallaire, Force Commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). His account of the meager mandate and resources given to him by the UN to monitor a peaceful government transition in the unstable country, and the organization's refusal to respond to his pleas for more men and matériel as the situation began to spiral out of control, confirmed what I've long thought about the UN: it's a great idea that fails to live up to its promise, bogging swift action down by bloated processes and allowing the world's most despotic regimes an equal voice in humanity's collective response to injustice. I've spent years wondering why we keep ourselves committed to the charade that the UN is an impartial arbiter, not least of all when Cuba and China are allowed to wag their fingers at us in Canada as despicable human rights abusers. What I found most remarkable in this book is that Dallaire concludes that the UN is a vital instrument that simply requires a renaissance, a recommitment to its founding principles. As I hope to never experience the General's intimate knowledge of the UN's indifference and its barbaric consequences, I will defer to his analysis.

I sought out Shake Hands With the Devil after reading Running the Rift, a fictional account of the Rwandan Genocide. That book left me wondering about the root causes of the genocide, primarily because it failed to explain how neighbours could take up machetes against neighbours, slaughtering the people that they have lived amongst for years. Naturally the answer to that question is complicated and Dallaire offers some insight, beginning with his angry contemplation upon the withdrawal of Belgian troops after ten of their soldiers were murdered:

Images of my father and father-in-law wearing their Second World War battledress seemed to leap out of the darkening sky. They looked tired, muddy and haggard and were in the midst of fighting for the liberation of Belgium. As Canadian soldiers fought tooth and nail against the Germans, King Baudoin of Belgium and his ruthless lackeys kept millions of black Africans in Rwanda and all of the Great Lakes region of central Africa under subjugation, raping these countries of their natural resources…Fifty years after my mentors had fought in Europe, I had been left here with a ragtag force to witness a crime against humanity that the Belgians had unwittingly laid the spadework for.

So there are roots for the conflict that go back to colonialism but Dallaire also has a harsh analysis of the modern citizens of Rwanda:

I sometimes let myself think about the evil that men such as Bagosora wrought -- how the Hutu extremists, the young men of the Interhamwe, even ordinary mothers with babies on their backs, had become so drunk with the sight and smell of blood and the hysteria that they could murder their neighbours…I rejected the picture of the génocidaires as ordinary human beings who had performed evil acts. To my mind their crimes had made them inhuman, turned them into machines made of flesh that imitated the motions of being human. The perpetrators on both sides had their "justifications". For the Hutus, insecurity and racism had been artfully engineered into hate and violent reaction. In the RPF's case, it was willing to fight to win a homeland at all costs, and its soldiers' rage against the genocide transformed them into machines.

And although it was the Hutu extremists who committed the genocide, Dallaire knows that the RPF leader, Paul Kagame, intentionally allowed many thousands of his fellow Tutsis to be sacrificed during his slow advance, for his own political reasons:

I found myself thinking such dire thoughts as whether the campaign and the genocide had been orchestrated to clear the way for Rwanda's return to the pre-1959 status quo in which Tutsis had called all the shots. Had the Hutu extremists been bigger dupes than I? Ten years later, I still can't put these troubling questions to rest, especially in light of what has happened to the region since.

Despite losses on both sides of the conflict, Dallaire clearly states that there is no moral equivalence, saying: The myth of the "double genocide" was now in full swing -- some people actually bought the line that the racial war had cut both ways.In my further research I've found that there are people who believe it was the RPF, or other radical Tutsis, who shot down President Habyarimana's plane initially, provoking the massacre of their own people. I suppose there are conspiracy theorists tied to every tragedy (the American government orchestrated 9/11 and other such idiocies) but I will again defer to Dallaire's analysis of the situation, as an impartial witness on the ground, when he categorically states that this atrocity was genocide perpetrated upon the Tutsis by the Hutus. I will also accept his analysis of the failure of the UN to appropriately respond:

Ultimately, led by the United States, France and the United Kingdom, [the UN] aided and abetted genocide in Rwanda. No amount of cash and aid will ever wash its hands clean of Rwandan blood.

That is a damning statement, for sure, but backed up with Dallaire's detailed account of his daily experiences -- his reports to the UN and their slow and indifferent responses -- it seems ultimately fair. After Somalia and Bosnia, the West had no stomach for intervention in Central Africa (and as the cynical said at the time, Rwanda has no oil or minerals or strategic position that makes the country important). Currently, after Iraq and Afghanistan, we have no stomach to intervene in Syria -- and what if we did? Would we be handing the country over to the jihadi extremists? This situation seems doomed to follow in Rwanda's footsteps -- if we had intervened early and overwhelmingly, there was a chance for the moderates to have assumed control, but it's too late for that now. With over 100 000 dead and 7 million Syrians displaced, at what point are we morally obligated to intervene despite the consequences? Why is Russia pulling all the strings at the UN over this? Isn't this more proof that the UN just isn't workable? 

The following two excerpts describe some of the horror of the Rwandan Genocide, reader beware:

From the memoir of Shaharyan Khan (who took over as force commander from Dallaire), The Shallow Graves of Rwanda: The Interhamwe made a habit of killing young Tutsi children, in front of their parents, by first cutting off one arm, then the other. They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child slowly to death but, while they were still alive, they would cut off the private parts and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents, who would then be murdered with greater dispatch.

For a long time I completely wiped the death masks of raped and sexually mutilated girls and women from my mind as if what had been done to them was the last thing that would send me over the edge. But if you looked, you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them...Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bent and knees wide apart. It was the expressions on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain and humiliation. For many years after I came home, I banished the memories of those faces from my mind, but they have come back, all too clearly.

Lt Gen Dallaire suffered from PTSD for many years after leaving Rwanda, even attempting suicide. One can only imagine the impact that the genocide had on the citizens of Rwanda, and especially upon the children, 90% of whom are said to have witnessed the murder of someone they knew. What this means for the future of Rwanda can't be imagined. Dallaire concludes:

Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.

This leads me back in a circle to where I began: root causes. I don't know if, despite all of the historical information, Shake Hands With the Devil fully explains to me how neighbours could massacre each other in such an inhuman fashion, and failing this understanding, how can such a horror show be prevented from happening again? I sincerely hope that Dallaire's faith in the UN and its ability to move forward into a "Century of Humanity" is well placed since at this point it's the only show in town. This is a book that left me shaken, feeling powerless, but I am not sorry to have read it.

The Cat's Table

The Cat's Table begins with an 11 year old boy being placed, unsupervised, on an immense ship going from Ceylon to England where he will meet his barely remembered mother and start a new life. Since Michael Ondaatje made this same trip at the same age, it begs the question: Just how autobiographical is this tale? From the book:

The three weeks of the sea journey, as I originally remembered it, were placid. It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life. A rite of passage.

And an explanation from an interview with the author:

Well, what happened was a few years ago I was talking to my children, who have now grown up, and I said I was put on this ship and there was no parental guidance, nothing. And they were appalled. 

And I said, actually, it is appalling.

So I thought, my God, there's a wonderful story here, and I will just invent this adventure that takes place on this ship during that time. So even though I'm using a kind of an element of memoir or seeming autobiography, all the characters in the story and all the adventures in fact are fictional.

Well, that's too bad, because even though the fictional memoirist says that he only sees the voyage as an adventure through his children's eyes in retrospect, The Cat's Table is packed with intrigue and hijinks and I enjoyed the idea of the boy and his two new companions -- bursting all over the place like freed mercury -- spying on the predawn Australian roller skater, aiding the robber Baron, solving the mystery of the prisoner in chains, and in my favourite scene, lashing themselves to the deck as a huge storm approaches:

With each wave it sounded as if the ship was breaking apart, and with each wave the wash covered us until we were tilted upright again. We were aware of a constant rhythm. Whenever the ship ploughed into the oncoming sea, we were swept around within the surf, unbreathing, while the stern rose in the air, the propellers out of their element screaming till they fell back down into the sea, and we on the bow leapt up again, unnaturally.

This is a placid journey? Even when the three boys weren't living up to their pledge (Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden), they were gaining an invaluable education from the Dickensian adults who shared their company in the dining room at the Cat's Table -- the table furthest from the Captain's, and therefore the one with the least prestige -- and by being nearly invisible to these adults, the boys had a front row seat to their mysterious grown up ways.

The writing in The Cat's Table is gorgeous and lyrical, making the quiet moments as interesting as the audacious ones:

There was darkness all around us but we knew how to walk through it. We slid silently into the swimming pool, relit our twigs, and floated on our backs. Silent as corpses we looked at the stars. We felt we were swimming in the sea, rather than a walled-in pool in the middle of the ocean .

And the scene describing going through the Suez Canal at night was beautiful and mysterious:

We were not active, but a constantly changing world slid past our ship, the darkness various and full of suggestion… I could not tell whether everything taking place was carefully legal or a frenzy of criminality, for only a few officials oversaw what was going on, and all the deck lights were out and all activity was hushed.

Beyond an adventure tale, however, The Cat's Table is justifiably called a rite of passage novel, too, by the narrator in later years as he looks back on how the events and relationships on board the ship affected the man that he became. In fact, his friendship with the two boys he met at the Cat's Table -- Ramadhin and Cassius -- along with the time he spent with his lovely but troubled cousin, Emily, might be the most important relationships he was to ever forge, despite losing touch with all of them. 

As a curious aside, although it's called "The Cat's Table", there are many, many dogs in this book (33 references). Much is also made of hearts:

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

I am someone who has a cold heart.

I once had a friend whose heart "moved" after a traumatic incident that he refused to recognize.

Ramadhin's heart…his unsafe heart…his tentative heart…the heart Ramadhin has protected all his life.

The knifing near to my left heart…I said left heart, for men have two. Two hearts. Two kidneys. Two ways of life.

I listened to an audiobook of this novel, which was narrated by the author. I see some people found his voice to be boring, complain that Ondaatje didn't put on obviously different voices for the different characters, but this to me was not a drawback: I found his level reading tone to be smooth and soothing, like listening to a seasoned storyteller at a campfire. His slight accent is also charming for this experience as it highlights the fact that he actually made this voyage.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

And as a last personal reflection tied to this last quote, this was a very interesting experience for me after having recently read The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold. In that semi-autobiographical book, an Englishman embarks on the reverse trip, from England to Ceylon, in the same time period and on a similar ship (also formerly used by the British Navy during WWII). The biggest difference was, however, that being a famous writer, Gilbert Pinfold is seated at the Captain's Table where he does engage in "familiar rhetoric" with his powerful tablemates. Although Pinfold is dismissive of who he deems to be the low class Indians on his ship, and even though he was definitely not trying to make friends on his voyage, he just may have had a more enjoyable experience if he, too, had found his way to the Cat's Table.

Running the Rift

Remember the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry gets in trouble with his parents because he and his girlfriend were spotted making out during a screening of Schindler's List? The inference being that the subject matter of the movie is too important to not be in reverent awe of the film itself? I feel like the chastened Jerry while I consider reviewing Running the Rift: The subject of the Rwandan Genocide feels too important for me to dismiss this book out of hand, but I didn't really love it. I'll admit I also didn't love Sarah's Key and The Cellist of Sarajevo: I didn't think any of these books was particularly well written but will concede that they are useful introductions to horrific acts -- whether the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, the Siege of Sarajevo or the Rwandan Genocide -- that more people should be aware of. To the extent that any book provokes empathy and a desire for further research into the Rwandan Genocide, and Running the Rift did accomplish both of these with me, I believe that it does have inherent value beyond its literary attributes.

I see a lot of readers are dismissing Running the Rift as a YA novel posing as literature, but that's a curious charge to me; I didn't find this book juvenile, just not great. It won the 2010 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction "awarded biennially to the author of a previously unpublished novel of high literary caliber that promotes fiction that addresses issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships". A jury decided that this is a work of "high literary caliber", so I suppose that validates the opinions of those who would give Running the Rift five star ratings, but I found this book to be flawed.

There were many clunky lines, as unsophisticated as something I may have been proud to have written in high school: "Jean Patrick gradually shook off his morning companion named Misery" or "…uneasiness crept from the mist to sit beside him in his rickety chair". And many times Jean Patrick would make a decision and then change his mind in the next paragraph -- this didn't read to me like the character's hopeless indecision, it was just annoying:

He had to flee…The thought sent a chill through his body, but from this day forward, the only way left to help those he loved was to save himself…He would leave in the morning…Better to run like a dog than die like a dog. But what if Bea was pregnant? He could not leave her, unmarried, carrying his child. He would give it another day. Maybe two or three.

Plot points I didn't like: There was no point in getting Jean Patrick a Hutu identity card if he is nearly immediately told not to use it and it never came in handy in the end. There was no resolution with the scar-faced Albert who torments Jean Patrick throughout the book and promises to kill him eventually. I did not believe that Jean Patrick would flee to save himself when Bea ran back into her parents' house. I did not believe that Coach would kill himself. I did not believe that Bea would apologise for allowing herself to be raped (especially after emphasising that she was from a modern family, not one burdened with misogynistic cultural views). And I did NOT believe or want the happy ending of the lovers finding each other against all odds.

But mostly, I didn't like the completely one-sided take on this horrific conflict. Like I said, Running the Rift prompted me to research what happened in Rwanda, and it seems very simplistic to paint the Hutus as a people who were riled up, to the point of mass murder, just by radical groups and media. In no way am I denying the genocide or saying they had legitimate reasons for trying to wipe out the Tutsis, but the history of Rwanda (the long subjugation of the majority Hutus by the Tutsi monarchy, the mishandling of everything by the departing Belgians, the 1972 Genocide of the Hutus, the fear that the Tutsis were set to rise again through their guerilla RFP and its prominence in neighbouring Burundi, etc.) meant that the Hutus were poised for radicalisation. In this book, Naomi Benaron paints every Tutsi as a peace-loving victim and most Hutus as vicious racists. In one particularly jarring example, Valerie, the young woman who had just days before carried a WE ARE ALL ONE PEOPLE banner at a rally protesting the persecution of the Tutsis, upon hearing of the death of Daniel, the young Hutu man she had been flirting with, says in a zombielike mantra, "He was icyitso (traitor). He deserved to die. As do you." I think it would have been more horrifying, and more honest, if there had been some insight into how formerly good Hutu neighbours could pick up a club or machete and start indiscriminately massacring their former Tutsi friends. As a last complaint, this book was missing heart somehow. Considering the nightmarish source material, I was never brought to the brink of tears, and when I am invested in characters, that's not particularly hard to do.

There were things that I did like about Running the Rift. I appreciated the use of words in the local dialect and the way that they were introduced and defined: It was one of those strange occurrences, the policeman said, that revealed Ikiganza cy'Imana, the Hand of God. This felt appropriate and much more reader friendly than footnotes or a glossary tucked in the back pages. In the same vein, I liked the descriptions of the everyday routines and customs of average people and what they eat and wear. I think that Benaron did a good job of describing the scenery of Rwanda, from the lakes to the hills to the sucking mud underfoot in the rainy season. And for the most part, I did enjoy the characters but wish that they showed more growth. I like the characters of Jonathan and Susanne in particular as representatives of the oblivious West -- especially when Susanne bemoans the poaching of Dian Fossey's mountain gorillas, completely unaware of how offensive this is to Bea who is concerned with the killing of actual people. 

This notion of the oblivious West is perhaps the most fascinating to me as we consider the civil war in Syria right now and whether this falls under the moral imperative of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine that was adopted by the UN in the wake of the Rwandan Genocide. It seems everywhere "we" intrude there are unintended consequences (i.e., the CIA training Bin Laden to get the USSR out of Afghanistan). Do we oust Assad from Syria now and let the Al-Qaeda tied rebels take over the government? How many civilians must be murdered or displaced before intervention is unavoidable? Because Running the Rift has prompted me to look further into these issues, and into the Rwandan Genocide itself, I can only conclude that it likely deserved its PEN/Bellwether Prize: it certainly shines a light on Social Justice, and that is always a worthwhile endeavor.

Dance Dance Dance

It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a root. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.

That's Dance Dance Dance: a root that needs pulling, asking to be examined in a highly personal and idiosyncratic way. I don't know if I could ever recommend this, or any Murakami, because I know what it is inside of me that's being stirred and I don't presume to know the deep darkness where other minds dwell. As a character says in 1Q84, "If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation." 

I listened to this book and I think that was a mistake as the narrator wasn't very good (a lot of Sam Spade/film noir, see? And don't get me started on the females…) But this was the first line of many that struck me just right:

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

And this notion of precipitation kept recurring: from Yuki (snow) and her mother Ame (rain), to "shovelling snow" (in both senses meant by the narrator -- writing and love-making). In fact, rain and snow figure throughout this book, even in a Kenny Rogers song on the radio. And, ah, the music! Murakami is always so precise about the music his characters are listening to, just as he's precise when describing what they're cooking or eating. But these are all just surface details -- the main character is never even named, presumably because it doesn't matter, it's just another detail, not even an interesting one. If I am rambling and seemingly disorganised, that's just the way this book is: there's an unextraordinary protagonist who eats and sleeps and hangs out with people, occasionally making an astute observation but more likely to be ambivalent about the events in his life; maybe just like the way my own life unfurls around me; maybe just like everyone.

Where Dance Dance Dance comes alive is in detailing what happens when the characters pass through the rabbit hole: whether climbing into a well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or descending a ladder from an elevated highway in 1Q84 or taking an elevator to an impossible floor in this book, Murakami always gives a glimpse at what is happening in the alternate universes that reside just above or below or beside our own. And I am always a little shaken by the characters who can jump between realities, like the Little People in 1Q84:

"Ho ho," called the keeper of the beat.
"Ho ho," the other six joined in.

Or the Sheep Man who acts as the "switchboard operator" in Dance Dance Dance:

"Dance," said the Sheep Man. "Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you'restuck. Sodon'tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou're tired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon'tletyourfeetstop."

This is the kind of book that abides in my subconscious mind; by which I mean without end or beginning. While I might recall bits of it from time to time over the years to come, this scene near the end might have been plucked from the swirling goo that was in there already:

I found myself passing through a transparent pocket of air. It was cool as water. Time wavered, sequentiality twisted, gravity lost its force. Memories, old memories, like vapor, wafted up.. The degeneration of my flesh accelerated. I passed through the huge, complex knot of my own DNA. The earth expanded, then chilled and contracted. Sheep were submerged in the cave. The sea was one enormous idea, rain falling silently over its vastness. Faceless people stood on the beachhead gazing out to the deep. An endless spool of time unraveled across the sky. A void enveloped the phantom figures and was encompassed by a yet greater void. Flesh melted to the bone and blew away like dust. Extremely, irrevocably, dead, said someone. Cuck-koo. My body decomposed, blew apart -- and was whole again. I emerged through this lair of chaos, naked, in bed.

To rate it, I'm  going to give it 4 stars, but on my own subjective and idiosyncratic scale, Dance Dance Dance should stand just below The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which needs to stand just below 1Q84. Maybe I shouldn't use the Goodreads 5 Star scale here so that I reflect these nuances...

"Ho ho," called the keeper of the beat.
Cuck-koo.

The first day I started listening to Dance Dance Dance, I was walking my dog, like I do, and when she stopped to do her business, I stepped off the sidewalk, waiting to scoop the poop, like I do. Over the narrator, I could hear someone approaching and I was bemused to notice that it was an older Japanese-looking fellow, a rare-ish sight around here, and as soon as he passed me he started a slow jog, reminding me immediately of Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Even stranger, as he approached a small park, he turned to look back at me, and for a second, he totally resembled the famous backward-glancing pose of a Bigfoot captured way back when.

Something about that initial experience told me I should be paying attention to this book, and the coincidences got stronger and stranger. That same day, I started reading Ragged Company, which begins with a group of homeless people who go into a movie theater to get out of the cold. The next day listening to Dance Dance Dance, the main character goes into a movie theater to get out of the cold and coincidentally discovers that his ex-girlfriend, someone he has been seeking, is in the movie. The coincidence is so profound that he concludes that it goes beyond mere chance and he should be investigating things further; this contemplation of coincidence, and what is beyond coincidence, was repeated and reinforced.

The next day, on the way home from driving Mal to school, the radio started playing "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", and I was singing along and thinking, "Ok, that's Elton John...and...um...Kiki...Kiki Dee." While listening to my book that day, the main character meets with someone he once knew a long time ago who happened to be in that movie with his ex-girlfriend. He didn't want to admit that he never knew the girl's name so was relieved when the actor mentioned her name was...Kiki.

There were a couple of less significant events (Dave seeing a car and saying, "I don't recognise that logo, what kind of car is that?" and Mal replying, "It's a Subaru" -- just like the main character's car), but I was surprised when one evening Kennedy agreed to come on a walk with me. I was listening to my book and trying to go over the coincidences in my mind, with a view to sharing them with her, when I looked up and saw a Residential Snow Removal ad on a lamp post. This may be Canada but it's hot and sunny here in September and I don't remember seeing that sign there before (and the main character refers to his writing as "shovelling snow"). I eventually decided to tell Kennedy about the odd synchronicity around this book, and I started with the jogger and the movie theater and the song and I started to talk about how the character "shovels snow" and she said, "Just like the snow removal sign?" So she saw it too -- that felt highly odd, that we both noticed and remembered a small sign that had no significance for either of us personally. I got to end with the mind blower, though:

"Remember when we were passing in front of the school and that Japanese-looking man jogged past us?" 

"Uh huh," she said. "I wondered if he was the same guy you saw before when you were talking about him."

"Totally different guy than I saw before. I would have noticed that big white stripe down the back of his hair if that had been the same guy."

So I knew the universe was telling me to pay attention (yes! I know how stupid and self-important that sounds), and I kept listening and kept listening, waiting for the big message, and I think it's the passage I ended the book review with:

I found myself passing through a transparent pocket of air. It was cool as water. Time wavered, sequentiality twisted, gravity lost its force. Memories, old memories, like vapor, wafted up. The degeneration of my flesh accelerated. I passed through the huge, complex knot of my own DNA. The earth expanded, then chilled and contracted. Sheep were submerged in the cave. The sea was one enormous idea, rain falling silently over its vastness. Faceless people stood on the beachhead gazing out to the deep. An endless spool of time unraveled across the sky. A void enveloped the phantom figures and was encompassed by a yet greater void. Flesh melted to the bone and blew away like dust. Extremely, irrevocably,dead, said someone. Cuck-koo. My body decomposed, blew apart -- and was whole again. I emerged through this lair of chaos, naked, in bed.

That really did shake me and I think it's a warning about these parallel universes, whether mystical or a natural result of quantum mechanics, that so fascinate me: Just as early explorers put Here Be Monsters on the edges of their maps beyond the known world, perhaps I should be wary of going down my own rabbit hole again (and one day I will take the time to detail what freaked me out so much when I started looking into this notion of parallel worlds, not certain whether I should only look kind of flaky now or risk putting it all down and remove all doubt). So many books I've read lately have characters that commune with "the other side" (The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The Golem and the Jinni, Ragged Company, Dance Dance Dance), and these aren't storylines that I'm consciously seeking, so it feels like Murakami is warning me: Here Be Monsters.

Something to think about anyway.

The Testament of Mary

The entire story of  The Testament of Mary is contained in this quote: 

I was there. I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it.

As Mary suffers her own old age, she bitterly reflects on her son's life and death. Her protectors are attempting to write the first of the gospels and try to bully her into giving them the narrative they're looking for; one with patterns of divinity. She holds firm, remembering the happy and quiet -- thoroughly normal -- family life they had enjoyed before Jesus was lured to Jerusalem to seek his fortune, as were all the young men of his age. She blamed reports of Jesus' growing narcissism on the crowd of "misfits" he travelled with, and by the time she saw him at the wedding of Cana, he was already lost to her, a stranger. Although she fled from Cana when she realised how dangerous it was to be around Jesus, Mary did go to Jerusalem when she learned her son was to be crucified. She watched the mock trial in horror and was present as Jesus carried his cross, was nailed to it, and was hoisted into the sky. Again she was afraid of being captured, so Mary escaped with her companions and was not present at Jesus' death or burial, doomed to live out her days with anger and regret. Although Mary asserts to her protectors that "it was not worth it", they have already decided on the "official" version of events:

"You were there," my guide said. "You held his body when it was taken down from the cross."

His companion nodded.

"You watched us as we covered his body in spices and wound his body in linen cloths and buried him in a sepulchre near the place where he was crucified. But you were not with us, you were in a place where you were protected when he came among us three days after his death and spoke to us before he rose to be with his father."

I decided to read The Testament of Mary when it was shortlisted for the Man Booker, and at 104 pages, I wonder how this slim volume will stack up against the other finalists. This was certainly well written, much of the language lovely and lyrical (and nicely contrasted with quotes from Jesus, straight from the Bible, which sound stiff and formal by comparison: "Woman, what have I to do with thee?") And while there may be those who find the manipulation of facts by the early chroniclers to be subversive or heretical, I didn't find this to be any more offensive than Jesus Christ Superstar (by which I mean not offensive at all). Whether it's Judas trying to prevent Jesus from believing his own hype in the musical or Mary wondering how she can save her son from the fatal path he's on in this book, it's interesting to imagine the New Testament from the perspective of the entirely human characters who people the Bible. And who in the Passion story, next to Jesus himself, has a more compelling narrative than the mother who watched her son die? 


As a mother myself, Mary's experience of watching her son tried and crucified was the most poignant part of this book for me, and although I understand that Mary fleeing before Jesus actually died (but the chroniclers putting her at the scene anyway) is the key fact of this story's plotline, that felt like a literary manipulation to me, and therefore a bit of a cheat. That might be because I was overwhelmed when I saw the Pieta at the Vatican when I was 18; that the image of the dead, adult Jesus cradled in his mother's arms made such an emotional impression upon my psyche that I can't imagine a world in which that did not happen. I know that that speaks more to the artistry of Michelangelo than the literal truthfulness of the Bible, but such religious art is as much a part of our Western cultural history as the books and laws and sciences. As an aside, I read today that Richard Dawkins believes that Bible study is important even to atheists, and this is something I have always thought, myself -- whether a person is Christian or not, an understanding of the Bible is an important key to understanding the history and culture of Europe and the countries they colonised. 



I liked that the question of Jesus' divinity was left unanswered. Witnesses reported miracles to Mary, her own cousin swearing that she had seen Lazarus dead and buried for four days before Jesus raised him. (I also liked that Lazarus is a kind of Monkey's-Paw-zombie-careful-what-you-wish-for character.) This questioning keeps Mary human and relatable.

I lived mostly in silence, but somehow the wildness that was in the very air, the air in which the dead had been brought back to life and water changed into wine and the very waves of the sea made calm by a man walking on water, this great disturbance in the world made its way like creeping mist or dampness into the two or three rooms I inhabited.

And I found it interesting that in her exile in Ephesus, Mary begins to worship the ancient mother goddess, Artemis. Looking into who this goddess was I see that her temple was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and perhaps not surprisingly as a literary device, worship of Artemis was not unlike the Marian Cult that arose in the Catholic church.

Overall this was a quick and thought-provoking read, leading me to look up some further facts (like when did Joseph die? Why don't I know this?) It was well-written and interesting, but as for its place on the Man Booker shortlist, I'll need to read some of the other titles before I can make any comparative judgement.

One other thing this book made me think of is: I remember being at the old folks' home where I delivered papers as a kid (at maybe 11 years old) and one old man confronted me, asking if I was a Catholic. I answered yes and he pulled out a Bible, showing me where it states that Jesus had brothers and sisters, proving that the Virgin Mary was a lie, therefore Catholicism is all hooey.

I was defenseless against this attack, having never heard this before, and when I told my mother about it later, she was livid. (As she worked at the Home as the Recreation Director, she saw it as an attack on her, through me.) Reading The Testament of Mary, I found it interesting that Mary was all alone, as though she had no other children to take care of her in her old age, and remembering this childhood trauma, it prompted me, for the first time, to look into the controversy. The differing interpretations of the Greek word adelphos, whether it always means "brothers" or if it can mean simply "kinsmen", was some interesting knowledge for me, and in the end, the most satisfying part of this book happened off the page, in my wandering over the internet, trying to fill in the blanks of what I don't know.

For this reason, if no other, I would recommend this book.