No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all.
I have recently been following a thread of personal interest, reading some books that give a voice to minor female characters from classic literature. In Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of Vergil's The Aeneid from the point of view of the hero's third wife; a character so minor in the poet's rendering – despite apparently being the matriarch of all Romans – that her own history warranted but a few lines and no dialogue at all. I don't blame Vergil for barely mentioning Lavinia – she might well have been lost to history if he never named her; if she even was an actual historical figure – but I do appreciate Le Guin's attempt to breathe some life into her narrative. I haven't read any Le Guin before, and I do understand that historical fiction is not her usual genre, but overall, this book is just all right: I enjoyed the domestic descriptions (the everyday stuff of how people lived back then), I found the battle scenes to be exciting, and I really liked the metafiction of Livinia meeting Vergil in a dream state, but I found much of the second half of this book (the narrative that Le Guin continues after the end of The Aeneid) to be fairly dull. An uneven reading experience, but one I'm glad I had for its addition to my understanding of classical myths.
My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate.
In a nutshell: Lavinia was the only surviving child of the King of Latium (the patriarch of the Latin line), and as such, she understood that her duty would be to enter into any marriage that her father found advantageous for their people. There's no anachronistic feminism in this tale: Lavinia knew her fate and her obligations and she accepted them (she only protests when her mother tries to undermine prophecy). As she grew up, Lavinia's main duties involved pagan rituals within the home, and in this role, she sometimes accompanied her father to an oracle in the woods. While sleeping at the sacred springs one night, Lavinia is visited by the spirit of Vergil – who lay dying, centuries in the future – and he explains to her that she is fated to marry a stranger who comes from far away, and together, they will have a son who founds an empire in the mudbound village of the seven hills. Although there are several local suitors jostling for Lavinia's hand, her father eventually interprets the same prophecy about the stranger from far away, and when Aeneas and the remnants of the Trojans come sailing up the Tiber, the king's pronouncement that his daughter is fated to marry their leader starts the war that makes the prophecy come true.
I was fated, it seems, to live among people who suffered beyond measure from grief, who were driven mad by it. Though I suffered grief, I was doomed to sanity. This was no doing of the poet's. I know that he gave me nothing but modest blushes, and no character at all. I know that he said I raved, and tore my golden tresses at my mother's death. He simply was not paying attention: I was silent then, tearless, and only intent on making her poor soiled body decent. And my hair has always been dark. In truth he gave me nothing but a name, and I have filled it with myself. And yet without him would I even have a name? I have never blamed him. Even a poet cannot get everything right.
Here's what I learned: The Trojan War was fought in the thirteenth century B.C., Rome was founded in (probably) the eighth century B.C., and Vergil died before finishing The Aeneid in nineteen B.C. (asking on his deathbed that his incomplete manuscript be destroyed). As Vergil was probably attempting to curry the favour of his emperor, Augustus, he took liberties with the history behind his epic masterpiece (although what details could really have been “known” to him from thirteen centuries before seems questionable) in order to marry the Trojans and Latins together and suggest that Augustus himself has the authority and prestige of that lineage – despite having been adopted into that lineage as Julius Caesar's heir – for the glory of Rome. Two millennia later, Ursula Le Guin was inspired to revisit the story, giving Lavinia a history of her own (although what details are really “known” from thirty-three centuries ago is improving, but still sketchy). In an afterword, Le Guin says that as she was writing, “Lavinia herself sometimes insisted that the poet was mistaken – about the color of her hair for instance”, and I found this to be the most compelling part of this book: I loved that when Vergil was dying, he might have been hallucinating his creations; that Lavinia would have been able to interact with him and learn her fate (and thus be self-consciously cursed with immortality). This idea is ratcheted up by Le Guin herself interacting with both Vergil and Lavinia, and in a way, this drew me, as the reader, further into the story. Again, I enjoyed the quotidian detail, the battles and history, but despite Vergil himself writing that Lavinia retreats to the forest to raise their son after Aeneas' death (Born in the covert of a shady wood: Him fair Lavinia, thy surviving wife, Shall breed in groves, to lead a solitary life), what Le Guin makes of these years was quite dull to me. Bottom line: Uneven, but not unenjoyable; three and a half stars if I could.
Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.
The Only Story is as much about tone as content, and while the actual plot rather broke my heart, it was Julian Barnes' genius at mood-crafting that overwhelmed me on every page. This book is sad and funny and frustrating and wise; a love story with a tragedy at its core that easily flips pity into contempt; and while that may be a common enough story, it's a lens on base humanity that can never be refocussed too often. This is everything I like in a book
Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can't imagine them having anything in common, or why they're still living together. But it's not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It's because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.
In a morally suffocating suburb of London in the 1960's, Paul is a nineteen-year-old university student, home for the summer term, and to get him out of the house and interacting with the better sorts, his mother signs him up for a temporary membership at the local tennis club. Random lots are drawn for a mixed doubles tournament and he is paired with Mrs. Susan Macleod: a forty-eight-year-old married mother of two daughters, who happen to both be older than Paul himself. Susan is snarky and brash, and burdened as she is with a dull and lumpy hothead of a husband, Paul finds himself equally attracted to and protective of the lady with the green-trimmed tennis outfit and the rabbity teeth. The love affair that begins is nothing like The Graduate (if, like me, that's what you'd be expecting from this set-up), and the plot that ensues involves enough surprises that I'll not say anything more about it.
I suppose I could do some real-life research – look for old postcards in the central library, or hunt out the very few photos I have from that time, and retrofit my story accordingly. But I'm remembering the past, not reconstructing it. So there won't be much set-dressing. You might prefer more. You might be used to more. But there's nothing I can do about that. I'm not trying to spin you a story; I'm trying to tell you the truth.
Barnes employs plenty of literary tricks: having the late-in-life Paul musing on the nature of history and memory, he concludes that we tend to remember the happy bits first. So, after relating all the happy bits of his love story with Susan, he then goes back and fills in some of the stresses and warning signs; moves on to the real life of ever after. The voice shifts between first, second, and third person points-of-view – but we are always aware that it is Paul talking, even when distancing himself from himself. And by going over and over the same formative scenes, Paul stresses how his relationship with Susan establishes the “prehistory” that he will bring to every subsequent relationship: there's nothing linear or straightforward in this story, but that's how memory works; that's how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves work. This is also a coming-of-age story: Paul is nineteen in the beginning, and Barnes does a wonderful job of capturing the emotions and motivations and impatience to grow up and get on with one's life that happens at this age (in this regard, I was reminded of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach). As Paul is looking at all of this in retrospect, he can pretty much pinpoint when it was he finally did make the leap to full adulthood, and from this far perspective, he can insert the pearls of wisdom he formed from his pain over the years:
Sad sex is when you feel you are losing all touch with her, and she with you, but this is a way of telling one another that the connection is still there, somehow; that neither of you is giving up on the other, even if part of you fears that you should. Then you discover that insisting on the connection is the same as prolonging the pain.
I really did like everything about this book – the format and the humanity, and most of all, the mood – and while I didn't always like the way it made me feel, I'm always a fan of a book that makes me feel anything at all.
My first name, Bảo Vi, showed my parents' determination to “protect the smallest one.” In a literal translation, I am “Tiny precious microscopic.” As is often the case in Vietnam, I did not match the image of my own name.
I loved Kim Thúy's words the first time I encountered them in Ru; her poetic and touching Canada Reads-winning novella about the Vietnamese refugee experience. And I admired Thúy's maturing voice in 2014's Mãn that sensually explored the expression of a woman's love through the food she prepares. Naturally, I was excited to pick up her new book Vi, but I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed in this one – it has neither the gorgeous writing of Thúy's first book or the clear plotting of her second; it feels rather pointless overall (but noting that the main character, Vi, is a “graduate in translation and law”, as is Thúy herself as noted in her author bio, she may have been reaching for something even more autobiographical here; perhaps making this less universal.) Still happy to have reconnected with Thúy here and will continue to pick up anything she writes.
Told from the first-person, Vi begins by sharing her ancestors stories – particularly focussing on the love stories of her grandparents and parents. A happy and well-off Vietnamese childhood is soon interrupted by war, and her mother is able to leave with her and her brothers on a smuggler's boat out of the country. Eventually landing in a Malaysian refugee camp (as did Thúy's own family), this slim book only briefly covers that refugee experience:
Quite soon, dragging one's empty pail for three hours to reach the well became as banal as the pains from chronic dysentery. The discomfort of physical and mental proximity diminished, to the rhythm of spontaneous laughter and miraculous reunions. In this isolated world, friendships were born of the simplest bond. Two classmates became two sisters, two natives of the same town helped each other out as if they were cousins, two orphans formed a family.
Vi's mother is fluent in French and her family is soon accepted by the Canadian government and settled in Montreal (as did Thúy's own family). Although Vi's oldest brother plans for her to become a surgeon, a puppy love compels Vi to follow a young man to Ottawa, where she has middling success studying translation; followed by law school and the social tutelage of her mother's old friend, Hà. It is this education, and the failed love affair, that launch Vi on some international NGO work, and she travels extensively through Asia and Europe to her mother's disapproval; and as always, Thúy is lush in her descriptions of exotic food and settings. The following long passage, from when she has finally found a settled love and place, is quoted in full because it seemed to me to be the heart of Vi's story:
Whispering Hà's words into the hollow of Vincent's collarbone, I realized that my mother had taught me above all to become as invisible as possible, or at least to transform myself into a shadow so that no one would attack me, to pass through walls and melt into my surroundings. She insisted that in the art of war, the first lesson consisted of mastering one's disappearance, which was at the same time the best attack and the best defence. Until I saw the light shining like crystals in Vincent's beads of perspiration, I had always thought that my mother preferred her boys out of habit, out of love for my father. My voice echoing in the circle of Vincent's arms finally led me to understand my mother's desire to have me grow up differently, to launch myself elsewhere, to offer myself a fate different from her own. It took me two continents and an ocean to grasp that she had had to go against her nature to entrust the education of her own daughter to Hà, another woman, far away from her, and her exact opposite.
Ah, but we can't so easily escape our fates, and Vi's echoes her mother's in many ways; ending on a similar note of uncertainty. And just because I liked the writing and the resonance of these passages, I'm including the description of when Vi's grandfather fell in love with her grandmother at first sight:
Some believed that he was in love with her long-lashed almond eyes, others, with her fleshy lips, while still others were convinced that he'd been seduced by her full hips. No one had noticed the slender fingers holding a notebook against her bosom except my grandfather, who went on describing them for decades. He continued to evoke them long after age had transformed those smooth, tapering fingers into a fabulous myth or, at the very most, a lovers' tale.
And when the ecologist-ornithologist Vincent fell in love with Vi, as she braided the hair of a street food hawker:
In the forest, amid dozens of animals of all sorts that appeared and disappeared around him, the colour of a feather, the length of a beak, the form of a nest, would catch his eye, and reveal to him the features of a species. As for what had captivated him about me, it was my ability to bend my legs, to curve my back, and to hunch my shoulders to match the fragility of the young merchant who was preparing portions of ant eggs with the help of small green leaves.
At 130 pages, Vi is a very quick read. Unfortunately, unlike Thúy's first two slim books, I found this one lacking depth and heft; I liked what there was, I just wanted more.
I promise you, the person isn't born that can harm a hair on your beautiful head. And old Bertha will roll again before anyone can push you out of office. Isn't that good enough for you, Macbeth?
I've not much enjoyed the Hogarth Shakespeare adaptations (my ratings for the seven books in the series, including this one, average out to 2.8 Goodreads stars), but the idea of Jo Nesbø – the undisputed king of Nordic noir – reimagining the Scottish play as a 1970s gritty crime thriller seemed such a natural fit that I happily picked up Macbeth as soon as I could. And the plot is perfectly clever: Macbeth is a young cop in a corrupt town, and as an orphan and reformed drug addict, he has little social clout – but high ideals about civic responsibility. After he is promoted to the plum position of the head of the Organized Crime taskforce, Macbeth's girlfriend Lady – a social climbing casino owner – starts to whisper in his ear that if the upperclass longtimers at the head of the police department were, ahem, removed, Macbeth himself would be made Commissioner and he'd have the power to fight entrenched crime and corruption; to usher in a renaissance that would benefit the entire town. One murder leads to another, as they do, motives become confused and ideals compromised, and as the police and the government and the competing local criminals all blackmail, doublecross, and dispatch one another, it almost seems like anything could happen – until you remember that eventually, Birnam Wood must come to Dunsinane; Macbeth's fate was sealed centuries ago through the ink of Shakespeare's quill. Ultimately, as in my least favourites of the Hogarth series, the creativity of this Macbeth was hobbled by a too-close adaptation of the source material, it dragged with far too many subplots and double-crosses, and worst of all, I simpy didn't like the writing at the sentence level. Mildly spoilerish beyond here.
The action takes place in an unnamed, depressingly rainy town – and I don't know why it's unnamed, but as its upperclass suburb is called Firth, I assume that it's in Scotland – and with local industry all closed down and corruption rampant in the Police Department and City Hall, the locals look for escape from their miserable lives in gambling and drugs. A biker gang imports cheap dope but they find it hard to compete with the local product – a powerful Methamphetamine cooked up by a couple of weird sisters called “the brew” (I loved this interpretation for the witches). And I also loved that when Lady talks Macbeth into committing the foul deeds, he turns back to the brew in order to screw his courage to the sticking place: tweaking on meth makes sense of Macbeth (and later, Lady herself) hallucinating and seeing ghosts and muttering in the night. But that's all I really liked – characters didn't have recognisable motivations, self-centered (but apparently ordinary) people betray and kill and suffer little remorse, women are mostly secondary to the storyline (Lady is given a bizarre but trite backstory that allows her to be dismissed as “nuts” and the only female cop is more important as a love object than a detective), and the story just goes on and on.
As for the writing: It's sometimes clunky in a way that made me wonder if it's a question of translation. I didn't like phrases like “show some political nous so as not to lose control at HQ” or “neighboring counties referred to the tunnel as a rectum with an anal orifice at each end”; something isn't translating and it happens all the time. And I didn't like the frequent improbable speechifying:
Perhaps we know the difference between right and wrong even without using this wonderful big brain of ours. But with it we can assemble some really sophisticated arguments which, individually, sound good and, as a whole, can lead us to exactly where we want to go, regardless of how steeped in insanity this all is.
Or:
Capitol is an elegant town, isn't she? It's difficult not to like her. To fall in love with her even – such a smiling blond beauty with sunshine in her eyes. But you and I can never love her, can we? For we've given our hearts to the foul, rotten city up on the west coast. I've disowned her, thought she didn't mean anything to me. Me and my career were more important than the town that has done nothing but darkened our moods, corrupted our hearts and shortened our lives. Absurd, wasted love, I thought. But that's how it is. Too late we realize who we really love.
And while I did like the winking self-awareness of a character who hates the capital city and the “expensive national theatre with its pompous plays, incomprehensible dialogue and megalomaniac kings who die in the third act”, I really didn't like the attempts at rephrasing famous monologues:
And what if death came now? It would of course be a meaningless end, but isn't that the case with all ends? We're interrupted in mid-sentence in the narrative about ourselves, and the end hangs in the air, with no meaning, no conclusion, no unraveling final act. A short echo of the last, semi-articulated word and you're forgotten. Forgotten, forgotten, not even the biggest statue can change that. The person you were, the person you really were, disappears faster than concentric rings in water. And what was the point of this short, interrupted guest appearance? Of playing along as best you can, seizing the pleasures and happiness life has to offer while it lasts? Or leaving a mark, changing the direction of things, making the world a slightly better place before you yourself have to leave it? Or perhaps the point is to reproduce, to put more suitable small creatures on the earth in the hope that humans will at some point become the demigods they imagine they are? Or is there simply no meaning? Perhaps we're just detached sentences in an eternal chaotic babble in which everyone talks and no one listens, and our worst premonition finally turns out to be correct: you are alone. All alone.
I had only read one other book by Jo Nesbø before this (The Son, which didn't wow me), and I don't know if I'll pick him up again; at least in translation, I don't find this to be good writing. The bigger question is if I'll keep picking up books in the Hogarth Shakespeare series – I remain unconvinced that they're doing something worthwhile.
When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.
Naturally, I had heard of Circe from Odysseus' story – she was the island-bound witch who had turned some of his men into pigs, forcing Odysseus to employ his famous wit and wiles to save them – but, really, she was no more important to his story than the Cyclops or the Sirens or the Whirlpool; just one more impossible obstacle for Odysseus to overcome on his journey home. What Madeline Miller best accomplishes in Circe is to bring this lesser known figure forward and give her agency: Surely, an immortal deity schooled in pharmakeia and hostile to intruders couldn't be simply charmed into her bed by a silver-tongued human brute? By beginning from Circe's birth and giving her a history, a personality, and plenty of psychological scars, Miller brings a feminist slant to The Odyssey: Circe had her own motivations and desires, and by the time Odysseus showed up, nothing happened on her island without her consent. This is very similar to what Colm Tóibín did for Clytemnestra's story in House of Names (or, for that matter, what he did for the mother of Christ in The Testament of Mary), and what Margaret Atwood did for Penelope in The Penelopiad, and without descending into angry or pedantic smash-the-patriarchy-womyns-lit, these books right an historic wrong and add the female voices and experiences that have long been missing from the human record. And, on every level, Circe's is a great story, well told by Miller.
Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.
Because Circe was born the daughter of the sun god, Helios, and his beguiling naiad wife, Perse, she was raised as a goddess. But because she lacked both her father's powers and her mother's beauty, she was mocked and reviled, even by her own family – and it was from this lowly vantage that Circe was able to watch and evaluate both gods and mortals for their weaknesses; a mighty advantage for a budding witch. I've noted before that I don't have deep knowledge of Classical Mythology, and that proved both bane and boon while reading Circe: On the one hand, this powerless and unloved minor deity keeps crossing paths with major figures from the pantheon – Prometheus, the Minotaur, Jason and Medea – and I kept wondering, “Is this canonical? Would Circe have really had a place in all of these well known myths?” But on the other hand, when she met someone like Scylla or Daedalus – some vaguely familiar name that had me thinking, “I should really know who this is, shouldn't I?” – my basic ignorance allowed me to be surprised as the storyline unfolded, and that was totally satisfying. If I had a complaint it would be that Miller uses Circe as a peripheral figure in too many myths, which took some of the energy out of her own plot, but I can't deny that this book also serves as a useful overview of Greek Mythology.
Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, Prometheus had told me, the story they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.
Circe can't help but be moved by the fate of humans – despite her father teaching her that mortals “are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale”, and her mother sneering that humans look “like savage bags of rotten flesh” – and many times over her deathless life does Circe fall in love with a mortal man; always aware that they will grey and die; always aware that they will ultimately earn a place in the afterlife where they may make amends with those whom they have wronged in life; a final peace denied to her own kind. Circe might feel affection for the struggles of humans, and she might be repulsed by the vanities and cruel whims of her fellow Titans and Olympians, but she is also a goddess who spends generations honing her witchcraft: rapacious seafarers who might think to take rude advantage of Circe's hospitality would do better to refuse her golden cups of wine; this is a nymph who has learned to fight back.
Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting. The boy who sang it was unskilled, missing notes more often than he hit, yet the sweet music of the verses shone through his mangling. I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.
Circe's story starts centuries before Odysseus' birth and continues on long after he has died: as a response to The Odyssey, the Odysseus seen here is just one interesting figure among many in Circe's journey. They may not have had a name for what she was when she was born, but by the end, she could stand on the tallest peak of her island, cloaks billowing, yellow eyes glowing their fraction of the sun, and declare, Be witness now to the power of Circe, daughter of Helios, witch of Aiaia; and god and mortal alike were bound by her charms. That's who Circe was and Madeline Miller makes a honey-toned epic of it.
The silence that holds is easier now and London is pinkly waking. They've been through a lot together. The rattling of the bones; the squalls and the screeching; the occult shimmers; the lonely airs; the sudden madcap waltzes; the hollowed voices; the sibilant hiss; the asylum screams; the wretched moans; the violence, love, and tenderness – beatlebone. The first of the buses goes by at a sprightly chug.
Beatlebone was on my radar last year, but without ordering it from abroad, I couldn't get a copy of it for myself. I was able to read Kevin Barry's IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-winning The City of Bohane to get a taste of his style, and it honestly didn't knock my socks off. Lo and behold, Beatlebone appeared as a two dollar remainder at the bookshop, and despite the hype, and despite my own feverish teenaged Beatlemania, I remain unwowed. I love Irish writers, I am open to surrealism, I am primed for a John Lennon story, but despite my admiration for many of Barry's passages, this simply didn't add up to much for me.
He planned to live out on his island for a bit but he never did. He bought it when he was twenty-seven in the middle of a dream. But now it's the Maytime again and he's come over a bit strange and dippy again – the hatches to the underworld are opening – and he needs to sit on his island again just for a short while and alone and look out on the bay and the fat knuckle of the holy mountain across the bay and have a natter with the bunnies and get down with the starfish and lick the salt off his chops and waggle his head like a dog after rain and Scream and let nobody come find him.
Some bits of this story are apparently real – John Lennon did buy the isle of Dorinish off Ireland's west coast, and in the Seventies, he may have made some trips there. In our fictional version, John is thirty-seven, happily married to Yoko and retired from show business; yet he continues to be haunted by the loss of his mother when he was a teenager. Scream Therapy has brought some relief, and he reckons that if he could get to his island for three days of solitary screaming into the wind, he might be able to exorcise himself of her ghost for good. But getting to Dorinish proves tricky: saddled, somehow, with the local “fixer” Cornelius O'Grady – a buffoon who spies the press around every corner and insists on putting John in disguises and never taking the straight path from A to B – John despairs he'll never make it to Dorinish. Most of the plot involves this struggle – O'Grady wanting to hide out and accidentally-on-purpose introducing John to his own circle, while John becomes increasingly impatient – and the plot isn't really the point, I suppose. There was plenty of humour in the struggle, John flees to beachy nature and rediscovers his muse, and 80% of the way through, the author himself intrudes to explain why he's writing this book:
I took out a pad and began to make a sketch of the scene. The building itself is a Gotham folly, with dark stones, sombre turrets and an air of bespooked Victoriana, and as I drew I tried to imagine within its occult dreams, and the view across the trees, say on the night of a spring gale, in the soak of an insomniac sweat, as the trees shake out their fearful limbs, and the green shimmers of the treetop faeries move like gasses through the dark. The fact that I am myself tuned to occult frequencies – and frankly I have come to a point in my life where this is no longer deniable – felt like half the battle, but still I had a nagging worry at the edges of my thought, and it was this:
If I was going to make beatlebone everything it should be, I needed to get to the island.
I don't need a paint-by-numbers story arc, but I do need something more than this to happen. As for the small scale writing, there were many perfectly savoury bits that I enjoyed immensely:
• He lies back in his seat, pale and wakeful, chalk-white comedian; his sore bones and age. No peace, no sleep, no meaning. And the sea is out there and moving. He hears it drag on its cables – a slow, rusted swooning. Which is poetical, to a man in the dark hours, in his denim, and lonely – it moves him.
• The sphere of the night turns by its tiny increments. The last of the night swings across its arches and greys. He can do anything he wants to do. He can live in a Spanish castle; he can run with the tides of the moon. He turns his face to settle his cheek on the dirt. He rests for a while. Mars is a dull fire in the eastern sky. He lies for a long calm while until the hills are woken and the birds come to flirt and call and he feels clairvoyant now and newly made. John lies saddled on the warm earth and he listens to its bones.
Beatlebone won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize (awarded to fiction that "opens up new possibilities for the novel form"), so if one wanted to make the claim that this book's genius simply went over my head, I'd accept that. Still wasn't my cuppa, but I'm happy to have finally read it.
Follow, follow, follow, follow, Annie and Michael sang arm in arm along Hill Top Road. June 1978. Two weeks before the wedding. Michael had organized the stag and hen and had merged them into one. Travel light, he'd said. Flip-flops, shorts, that type of thing. Ellis watched them up ahead. The doors to Mabel's van were open and Michael had unfolded a large map that the breeze was lifting. He heard Annie ask, So where are we going, Mikey?
Tin Man has huge ratings and comes with a warning to keep tissues nearby, but it made me feel very little; I don't get the hype. A slight book – it only takes about three hours to read – I admire how author Sarah Winman was able to pack a whole life between its pages; but because so little actually happens (just a few big things) there's not much I can write in a review without giving it all away. Bottom line: I don't regret reading this, but it didn't knock my socks off.
There's something about first love, isn't there? It's untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it's the measure of all that follows.
After a brief introductory scene – in which we meet the main character's parents in the throes of an unhappy marriage – the narrative fast-forwards to 1996, where Ellis is a grieving widower going through the motions of living. He's in his mid-forties, works at removing slight imperfections in the bodies of new vehicles at the local Car Plant, and although everyone around him is desperate to get Ellis to re-engage with life, it seems he will never get over losing his beloved wife. This setup – with its intriguing mysteries, grief-drenched atmosphere, and sympathetic protagonist – was a beautiful opening. The story introduces Ellis' memories in an organic manner, and not only does the reader learn how he met (and lost) Annie, but it also presents another important character: Michael, the orphan who moved to town when Ellis was twelve, the two of them becoming the best of friends. We learn that the three of them – Ellis, Annie, and Michael – became an inseparable threesome, until some falling out caused Michael to move away. So many mysteries left to solve, not least of which is: where is Michael, now that Ellis needs him most?
I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.
We eventually learn where Michael is, and when Ellis discovers his friend's diary (which makes up the second half of the book), we learn where he has been. I didn't much care for this device, and although Michael's story was intriguing on its own, it didn't have as much emotional fallout over Ellis' story as I think it might have; I got the impression that Ellis was happy with his choices. That's all I can say about that.
Ellis goes to the shutters. He pulls them open and the frame fills with sunflowers, a yellow world of beauty stretching as far as the eye can see. He lights a cigarette and leans against the ledge. Swallows soar with heat on their wings.
So, a short review for a short book – Sarah Winman can definitely write some lovely sentences, but all together, this book was just okay.
Benvolio. I pray thee, good Mercutio, let's retire:
The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,
And, if we meet, we shall not 'scape a brawl;
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.
~ Romeo and Juliet
Mad Blood Stirring didn't turn out to be the book I was expecting – in a surprisingly satisfying way. Subtitled “The Inner Lives of Violent Men”, and written by a journalist with a Master's Degree in neuroscience, I thought this would be a mix of hard science and philosophy (in the vein of Steven Pinker or James Gleick). But right from the book's Introduction, author Daemon Fairless proves himself a captivating storyteller, and by focussing on the stories of real people – those he interviews and himself – he is able to illustrate male violence without getting bogged down in studies and stats (although plenty of science is cited here as well). Fairless may have gone looking for explanations for his own violent impulses, and he may have written a memoir here more than anything else, but I found it all fascinating and relatable and a worthwhile read.
Yes, I have White Hat Syndrome. Yes, I want to make the world a better place by confronting – no, let's be honest – by vanquishing the people I find threatening, domineering, manipulative and sadistic. But that white hat sits atop an angry head. And beneath that anger is a twitchy and hyper-vigilant person who is overattuned to threatening sounds in the underbrush.
Right from the Introduction, Fairless explains that he's the kind of man who is always spoiling for a fight – intervening with belligerent customers in stores, chasing down purse-snatchers, responding to cries in the night. He's a big man, and over the years, he has trained with weights and martial arts – when Fairless walks into a room sizing up the other men, imagining who he could take down in a fight, this seems to go beyond the average fantasy; he's hoping someone gets in his face. Fairless also explains that his parents were hippies – he was raised with limited television and no toy guns; he was awash in feminist and pacifist theory; he marched and rallied and considers himself a “post-patriarchal man”. And yet, the fighting; the genuine bloodlust. In seeking explanations for his own darkest urges, Fairless shares stories that illustrate the whole range of violent behaviour.
People who live in violent places, particularly kids raised in violent subcultures, have higher levels of chronic anger. They tend to view relationships in a hostile, mistrustful way. They perceive the world and the people in it as dangerous and threatening. And if they also happen to be carrying one of the environmentally sensitive genes, fear and anger are amplified – all the more so if they're carrying more than one of these alleles.
In each section in Mad Blood Stirring, Fairless tells a big story about a sanctioned form of male violence and contrasts it with both the criminal extremes and his own personal urges. In the first, Fairless tells the story of a MMA fighter – his training, his history, his experiences – and adds smaller stories here and there from the male culture of honour – from schoolyard bullies to frontier justice – and begins to share his own history; from his childhood as both the bullied and the bully, to his own fight training. As the book progresses, the sections deal with increasingly violent activities: contrasting an inner city high school football team with the kind of petty criminal their coach hopes to prevent his players from becoming; a willing participant in BDSM activity is contrasted against a serial rapist; the story of a cruelly manipulative parent is set off against a psychopathic serial killer; the tribalism of sports fans is compared to warmongers and the higher purpose of a professional soldier. Throughout, Fairless adds stories from his own life and cites fascinating stats (75% of men have had specific homicidal fantasies? Up to 50% of men would commit rape if they knew they'd get away with it? Chimps routinely organise war raids against neighbouring troops?), and it all works together to shine a light on what seems natural and ubiquitous; the constant suppression of male violence that allows for human civilisation.
Now, having said that, I have no idea if most men actually walk around with Fairless' constant fantasies of violence and sex – the women he sees are all evaluated for their own uses – but his openness and relatable voice made this a fascinating examination of his own experience. More a memoir than I had been expecting, it was the personal focus of Mad Blood Stirring that I most engaged with.
Hey, where did we go Days when the rains came? Down in the hollow Playin' a new game
Laughin' and a-runnin', hey hey Skippin' and a-jumpin' In the misty mornin' fog With our, our hearts a-thumpin'
And you, my brown eyed girl You my brown eyed girl
And whatever happened To Tuesday and so slow Going down the old mine With a transistor radio
Standin' in the sunlight laughin' Hidin' behind a rainbow's wall Slippin' and a-slidin' All along the waterfall
With you, my brown eyed girl You my brown eyed girl
Do you remember when We used to sing? Sha la la, la la, la la, la la, l-la te da Just like that Sha la la, la la, la la, la la, l-la te da La te da
So hard to find my way Now that I'm all on my own I saw you just the other day My, how you have grown
Cast my memory back there Lord Sometimes I'm overcome thinkin' 'bout it Hangin' out in the green grass Behind the stadium With you, my brown eyed girl You my brown eyed girl
Do you remember when We used to sing? Sha la la, la la, la la, la la, l-la te da (Lyin' in the green grass!) Sha la la, la la, la la, la la, l-la te da (Bit by bit by bit by bit by bit by bit) Sha la la, la la, la la, la la, l-la te da (Sha la la la la, la la la la, la te da, la te da, la te da, da da da) Sha la la, la la, la la, la la, l-la te da
I remember my Mum telling me once that although I did have blue eyes when I was first born, they seemed very dark and she could kind of tell by looking at my irises sideways that they would eventually turn brown. And so it was with my own daughter Mallory - her eyes were this very dark blue that seemed to be camouflaging the brown behind them. Looking at her as a newborn, my mother-in-law said, "Such pretty blue eyes, they look just like David's." After having Kennedy, whose eyes are the same as her father's, I was eager to point out that maybe Mallory's would eventually be brown like mine. My mother-in-law squinted and considered and declared, "Nope. Just exactly like David's." Even so, I could still see the darker undertones behind the blue and was delighted (and vindicated) when the brown eventually came through - and that was only fair: Dave had his minime in Kennedy and now I had one of my own. Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl was released the same year that I was born, so it was there in the background of my life from the start and I always took it as my own special song; as a young girl I thought it would be so romantic for some handsome guy to sing it in my ear as we slow danced some day. That never happened (or at least, not to my romantic satisfaction) but this did become a theme song for me and Mallory - we would sing it together whenever it came on the oldies radio station, and we'd sing it to each other for no reason at all; Mallory belting out, "You're my brown eyed Mom" to me before we'd break into the sha la la's; and that's so much better, in the end, than some random guy claiming me for his own on the dance floor. As I anticipated last week, this Tunesday will be about Mallory's birth; the arrival of my brown eyed girl.
As I had mentioned last week, I picked an OB-GYN out of the yellow pages at random when I discovered I was pregnant - I didn't know anyone in town who could recommend a doctor to me, so after the first two doctors I called were too booked up to take me on, I was relieved to have been accepted by Dr Harvey. I didn't much care for him at our first appointment - he was old and had zero personality - but I felt stuck with him. For the most part, this was a routine pregnancy and I could ignore a flat bedside manner at our monthly checkups, but once something went wrong, I realised what a dud this doctor really was.
Strange, but exactly one day after a completely routine seven month checkup, I woke up in excruciating pain. My tummy was clenched up, my back was seized, and I could barely move. I called into Dr Harvey's office, and after describing my symptoms to the doctor himself, he noted that everything had been fine the day before - I was simply pregnant, and some aches and pain was to be expected. I knew that there was nothing normal about this, having been pregnant before, but there was nothing I could do about it. And the pain hung around - every day for a month, I woke up with my tummy and my back in spasms, and what I found worse of all, I couldn't force myself to eat anything; it was like my throat had been closed over and it was all I could do to force down a daily maternity vitamin - and this made me so worried for the little one growing inside me. I still had two-and-a-half-year-old Kennedy to take care of, and for a month, I'd spend my day putting video after video on the TV, rolling painfully off the couch to make her sandwiches and change her diaper, and spend the rest of my time suppressing tears and moans, shifting my body desperately for relief.
Dave, of course, was working hard to build a career and couldn't stay home to take care of us, and when he asked my mother if she could take Kennedy for me, she said sure - and kept her for onenight. I couldn't believe it when Ma showed up with Kennedy the next day, with my visiting Aunt Shirley in tow, and asked me if I wanted to go out for lunch with them. I couldn't even sit up - I have no idea how my mother didn't know how bad this was for me - so they left Kennedy with me and tootled off on their merry way. I was utterly alone - no friends I could call on, a husband who prioritised his job, and no family support - and I was not just worried about Kennedy's care and safety, but I was certain something awful must be happening to my unborn baby. One day, the pain grew and grew throughout the day, and I finally called Dave and begged him to come home from work. Dave came speeding home and insisted on taking me to the hospital - if my own doctor wasn't interested in my symptoms, we ought to get a second opinion.
We got to the Emerg, a doctor looked me over, and he was concerned enough to send me upstairs to the Maternity Clinic for a specialist opinion. My poor luck was that the "specialist" on duty that day was my own Dr Harvey, and he again determined that I was suffering the routine aches and pains of pregnancy. I again insisted that this was something worse - I pointed out that I couldn't even eat and he shrugged and responded that I didn't need to worry about that, "The baby will always eat first. So long as you have any fat stores at all, the baby will eat." I told him that the pain was keeping me from sleeping, that I couldn't even take care of my other child, and he said that there was a slim chance that I had kidney stones - but that since the only way to look for them was with an x-ray, and as I obviously didn't want my unborn baby exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, I would need to wait to investigate that possibility after she arrived. There was nothing he would do, and I was sent on my way.
Again strange, but the first day in a month that I woke up pain-free was the morning of my next routine checkup. As per his usual line of questioning, the first thing Dr Harvey asked me at the exam was, "So, how have things been going this month?" I looked at him slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, "You mean since I saw you at the hospital the other night?" He had to really jog his memory to place what I was talking about - he looked at his notes, where he had obviously not thought to add anything - and he just nodded and grunted and proceeded with his usual exam; no followup to my distress. He weighed me (I had lost something like fifteen pounds over the course of that month) and he measured my belly and asked me how big my last baby had been - and when I replied that she had been nine pounds thirteen ounces, he chuckled and said that this baby wouldn't be nearly that big. And since this was my eight month check up, he told me I could make another appointment in four weeks' time, but he assumed I would go into labour before then. I told Dr Harvey, yet again, that Kennedy had had to be induced, that that's why she had been so big, but he didn't think that would be the case this time. Turns out, he was wrong about everything.
Dave and I went to the nine month appointment, and that's when Dr Harvey scheduled an induction for the following week if I hadn't gone into labour by then. Dave wasn't happy about the date chosen because his boss had offered to let him come along to a job fair the day after that to sit in on some job interviews, and that made me unhappy because I couldn't believe that Dave thought that "opportunity" would be more important than helping me with his own newborn; he was planning to take his holidays when the baby arrived, but not if the timing wasn't convenient for him. My mother, on the other hand, was very happy because the induction date, May 13th, is her own birthday. Turns out, Mallory waited to be induced.
My parents took Kennedy for us the day before the appointment, so Dave and I woke up and went straight to the hospital. It was the middle of May, and incredibly, something like thirty degrees outside - the sun as hot and radiant as a beautiful midsummer's day. The birthing room was large and open with a wall of windows looking out onto the adjacent golf course, filled with comfy furniture throughout. I was put on a pitocin drip, and things proceeded much the same as they did when Kennedy was born. I don't remember anyone offering me an epidural, and although I had my mind open to the possibility, I think the first time anyone even used the word "epidural" was in the phrase, "You've progressed past the point when we could have given you an epidural." And that was fine, but as I said about Kennedy's birth, there's nothing heroic about taking the birthing pain when drugs have been developed to help a Mom through it; both times, I feel like pain blocking was never really offered to me. Dr Harvey showed up after things had progressed to the pushing stage, and I'll never forget the image of him during the birth - sitting on a stool between my legs, watching stoney-faced as I pushed and the nurses told me what to do, him hanging his head down and staring at his clasped hands between his knees in between my contractions; I don't remember if he said a word to me. The pains were intense, of course, but really, the worst part of childbirth is the loss of control; the feeling like something dangerous was happening to me, from within my own body, that I had no agency over. And again, as with Kennedy, the very worst moment came when Mallory was partways out and I was asked to pause in the pushing - I felt like an impaled fish, pinned helpless to the ground through my vagina, my mouth gaping for air, my whole body shuddering and quaking and rending asunder, and then whoosh - she was out and I experienced perfect relief; every muscle in my body trembling uncontrollably, but utterly pain free.
We didn't know that we were having a girl until she was handed up to me, perfect and beautiful and everything we needed to complete our family. Dave and I took one look at her, and then looked at each other and said, "It's Mallory Kye."
Not long after I was cleaned and stitched, but still on that bed in the birthing room, my brother Ken showed up, his wife Lolo not far behind him in her own car. (It was weird but lovely for them to have come racing to the hospital as soon as they heard the baby had arrived; yet, they didn't realise at first that this was the birthing room and they both looked uncomfortable when they clued in.) Dave left with them to go home and shower and get his stuff while I was showered and tucked into my own room in the maternity ward. And that's where my Dad found me: he looked at the baby curled beside me and asked, "So this is Marley?" And I said, "It's Mallory, actually." And he said, "Good job" and left not long after.
Dave came back and slept in the unoccupied bed beside me (which the nurses sure didn't like), and just like he planned, he was gone early the next morning to watch Greg interview some potential new employees. I was unimpressed. And especially because the "treat" on the maternity ward involved the new Moms being able to self-serve the breakfast of their choice from a buffet in the hallway. I was sore, not exactly starving, and looking at my new and helpless baby, was not willing to leave her alone in the room while I shuffled out in search of food. I went hungry instead. Just after noon, my parents came and Mum got her first look at Mallory - and I got my first look at Kennedy, who had the bridge of her nose all skinned from apparently tripping down the front step in her excitement to come see the baby. Now that she was here, Kennedy refused to be impressed by her new baby sister. I was shocked when Mum and Dad soon left, leaving Kennedy at the hospital for me to take care of. Eventually, Dave came back, Kyler came by for a look at his new niece (and namesake), and then Dave's parents showed up; it got pretty cramped really fast and I just wanted to go home.
Because Mallory was over ten pounds when she was born (ten pounds, eight ounces; Dr Harvey had gotten nothing right), the hospital staff had to keep testing her for gestational diabetes; giving her a bottle of formula (which, as a breastfeeding mother, I had been conditioned to resent) and then taking her blood. They couldn't get any clear results over the twenty-four plus hours that we were there, and as Thursday slowly ticked away, I started asking when I was going to be allowed to go home - Dave and I joked that we were anxious to get home in time to watch the series finale of Seinfeld, and while that was a joke, it was no joke that I found this hospital room dirty and cramped, and with a shared washroom with the room on the other side (with no locking doors and a constant flushing of the toilet as though a nonstop stream of visitors on the other side was going in and out, so I had timidly demurred from using it all day), I just wanted out. Despite my impatience to go, a nurse explained that no one had ever told me I could leave that day, and then she started talking like there may not be a doctor who could discharge me for a couple of days because of the long weekend, and I lost it and insisted that I be allowed to go (or, I whined and pouted until they couldn't stand me anymore). So they let me go.
We didn't get to watch Seinfeld that night (but we did tape it; found it stupid when we did watch it), and Dave went in to work again the next day - leaving me to take care of Kennedy and Mallory and his parents, who stayed over in our tiny townhouse; soon to be joined by his sister Rudy when the weekend arrived. Still, it was good to be home. Home with our finally complete little family - one blue-eyed girl for Dave, one (soon to be) brown-eyed girl for me - and we wouldn't have had it any other way.
Well, la tee da.
Postscript: It turned out that I had gallstones and some of them must have lodged in my bile ducts while I was pregnant. The first time I was sent for an ultrasound after a painful attack, the technician said that my gall bladder was "virtually full of stones" and he was surprised they hadn't given me trouble before. When I explained what happened to me when I was pregnant, and how my doctor suggested kidney stones as an explanation that could only be proved by a dangerous x-ray, this tech frowned and said, "Surely Dr Harvey would have known he could send you for an ultrasound - it would have been perfectly safe and the better investigative tool." What a terrible experience I had with this know-nothing quack; I feel lucky to have survived him.
