The Mars Room

Not having plans doesn't mean I don't have regrets.
If I had never worked at the Mars Room.
If I had never met Creep Kennedy.
If Creep Kennedy had not decided to stalk me.
But he did decide to, and then he did it relentlessly. If none of that had happened, I would not be on a bus heading for a life in a concrete slot.

I hadn't read Rachel Kushner before, and having finished The Mars Room, I can only conclude that she can write. And as it feels like this writing occurs on three levels, I'm prompted to evaluate each separately. At the micro-level, Kushner writes delightful and perceptive sentences; I was often struck by her uniquely apropos turns of phrase. At the mid-level, Kushner has assembled a group of stories of prison life and the life choices that led to characters' incarceration, and even before I realised they were based on real people's experiences (including Kushner's own delinquent teen years), they felt like an important act of witnessing and recording what is actually happening out there today. And yet at the macro, overall level, this didn't really add up to a satisfying novel for me; the disparate parts too contrived and agenda-driven. I would read Kushner again.

All the talk of regret. They make you form your life around one thing, the thing you did, and you have to grow yourself from what cannot be undone: they want you to make something from nothing. They make you hate them and yourself. They make it seem that they are the world, and you’ve betrayed it, them, but the world is so much bigger.

When the book opens, we meet Romy Hall on a prison bus; riding along as she travels towards the two life sentences (plus six years) that she will serve in the world's largest women's prison, located in Northern California. POV rotates to several other characters (prisoners and others, though Romy is the focus) and we learn what forces (poverty, racism, lack of education or parental guidance) seem to frogmarch some people into criminal behaviour, and then witness those forces (overworked public defenders, indifferent judges, uninformed juries) that weigh the justice system against those without the money or power to properly defend themselves. There's an honesty to the stories that are told – they don't quite travel as a point A to point B narrative – this is just the way it is, and these vignettes form a complete and open-ended picture. For the most part, this is a satisfying structure. I was interested to read this article about Kushner in The New Yorker and learn where these stories came from, and especially, how her own early years were used in The Mars Room:

Beatnik poverty, in Kushner’s telling, was a kind of gift, helping her develop taste and politics and irony, and leaving her with an open admiration for her parents that you rarely find in adult artists. She read Steinbeck and Nelson Algren and listened to the wacky stories told by her parents’ Prankster-adjacent friends. “I thought, Literature – you really have to know hobo livin’,” she says. “It was reproduced in the social environment I was in.” Interpreting the world, she understood, meant remaining alert to moments when someone does something poetic. “The more in the world you are, the higher your chances are of witnessing that,” she says. “It wasn’t so much about studying literature – it was about being.”

Much of Romy's teenage years are based on Kushner's own delinquent experiences, and it gives a real “There but for the grace of God” vibe to the story: Kushner's parents may have let her run wild as a teenager, but they were still there for her in a way that Romy's mother couldn't be; small differences lead to vastly different outcomes, and in real life, Kushner is the one who spends time visiting the women's prison and sharing books by Denis Johnson. (Which I assume is the reason for the references to Thoreau and the Unabomber: the recluse poet just might have started attacking people if they were tearing up the woods around Walden Pond with dirt bikes.) Visiting prisons allowed Kushner to make these connections, and for those who question the inclusion of Doc-the-crooked-cop's story, that article explains that he was a real person that Kushner met, too. It all feels true because it is true; and if the stories don't all perfectly relate to each other, that's like real life, too.

The lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails and it goes where it goes. It cuts its own path. My path took me here.

And while all of this might sound like I have no complaints about this read, which I don't really, Ron Charles more or less captured my experience of being “marched down a narrow hallway” in his review in The Washington Post: 

“The prosecutors all looked like rich, well-rested Republicans,” Romy notes in her immaculately conceived MFA voice, “while the public defenders were overworked do-gooders who arrived out of breath, late to court, dropping loose papers that already had the waffle marks of shoe prints on them from having been dropped before.”

That “waffle marks” bit was exactly the kind of turn of phrase that delighted me at the sentence level. The following might be the crux of the text, and being both true and preachy, captures my ambivalence about the overall effort:

The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

A lot of the characters in The Mars Room are like this Button Sanchez; like Romy Hall or Doc – characters who have killed others without remorse – and while I'd agree with the premise that the American criminal justice system can act as a huge machine chewing up the underprivileged, I can't mentally equate the “violence of depriving people of jobs or safe housing” and the violence of taking a life. Kushner has assembled all of these stories into a narrative that has the weight of truth – because it is the truth as she has discovered it – but it's not the whole picture, and that's something I felt deeply. Still, Kushner can write, and her art bumps this up to four stars for me.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *

Tunesday : Welcome to the Black Parade

Welcome to the Black Parade

(Toro/Iero/Bryar/G. Way/M. Way) Performed by My Chemical Romance

When I was a young boy
My father took me into the city
To see a marching band

He said, "Son when you grow up
Would you be the savior of the broken
The beaten and the damned?"
He said "Will you defeat them
Your demons, and all the non-believers
The plans that they have made?"
"Because one day I'll leave you
A phantom to lead you in the summer
To join The Black Parade"

When I was a young boy
My father took me into the city
To see a marching band
He said, "Son when you grow up
Would you be the saviour of the broken
The beaten and the damned?"

Sometimes I get the feeling she's watching over me
And other times I feel like I should go
And through it all, the rise and fall, the bodies in the streets
And when you're gone we want you all to know

We'll carry on
We'll carry on
And though you're dead and gone believe me
Your memory will carry on
We'll carry on
And in my heart I can't contain it
The anthem won't explain it

A world that sends you reeling from decimated dreams
Your misery and hate will kill us all
So paint it black and take it back
Let's shout it loud and clear
Defiant to the end we hear the call

To carry on
We'll carry on
And though you're dead and gone believe me
Your memory will carry on
We'll carry on
And though you're broken and defeated
Your weary widow marches

On and on we carry through the fears
Ooh oh ohhhh
Disappointed faces of your peers
Ooh oh ohhhh
Take a look at me cause I could not care at all

Do or die, you'll never make me
Because the world will never take my heart
Go and try, you'll never break me
We want it all, we wanna play this part
I won't explain or say I'm sorry
I'm unashamed, I'm gonna show my scar
Give a cheer for all the broken
Listen here, because it's who we are
I'm just a man, I'm not a hero
Just a boy, who had to sing this song
I'm just a man, I'm not a hero
I
Don't
Care!

We'll carry on
We'll carry on
And though you're dead and gone believe me
Your memory will carry on
You'll carry on
And though you're broken and defeated
Your weary widow marches on

Do or die, you'll never make me
Because the world will never take my heart
Go and try, you'll never break me
We want it all, we wanna play this part (We'll carry on)

Do or die, you'll never make me (We'll carry on)
Because the world will never take my heart (We'll carry on)
Go and try, you'll never break me
We want it all, we wanna play this part
(We'll carry on!)

Truly, this song belongs to a generation that came long after mine - I remember how affected Mallory was by it when it was first released - but even so, I've always thought of Welcome to the Black Parade as an awesome epic; in the belting along to the radio tradition of Queen or even the sartorial sense of Adam Ant, and probably since "true" MCR fans dismiss this song as poppy or commercial, then it can belong to me, too; it is certainly in line with other songs I've posted here. So, even though I chose this as very loosely related to what I wanted to write about this week, I completely enjoyed singing along with it just now.

The very loose connection: As the bookstore that I work at is in the process of moving, we have very limited stock, and knowing this, the regular customers have stopped coming in. So, even though it is summer break and we should be swarming with beach readers and families looking for activities, we're not presenting anything and it has been quiet and dull. The other day, it was so quiet overall, that some workers from the attached Starbucks brought over some summer refresher drinks and cakepop samples on a tray - bringing some up to cash for us, and walking around the store with the rest.

A short time later, a woman came up to me to purchase a kid's book, and when I asked if she had a rewards card with us, she replied, "To be honest, this is only the second time I've been in your store and I will not be coming back."

That certainly surprised me, I tried to explain about the low stock levels (which she said was not the problem), and I asked if she cared to share her experience with me. She said, "It is chaos in here! So noisy, and kids...just running around...and...and...(with a quivering finger pointing in the direction of the kid's department) they're giving out food in there. I just wanted to yell out - IS THIS A PARADE OR A BOOKSTORE?!" 

Now, I have no idea how chaotic it actually was in the kid's department, but I have seen it, heard it, when it was absolute bedlam, and this wasn't like that. I think this was just a lady who doesn't like kids, and if she has reached her fifties (by the looks of her) without coming to our local bookstore more than twice, then she probably doesn't care much about books either; leaving me without much I could say or do to improve the experience for her going forward. The biggest takeaway is: IS THIS A PARADE OR A BOOKSTORE?! This very quickly became a decent punchline with those people I told the story to (what does it even mean? It's not like we're a library), and it made me wonder how often people burst out with unintentional catchphrases like that?

It reminded me of a story from a couple of weeks ago: Kennedy was in her Fringe play (2018 A Sex Odyssey) - a play about a group of twenty-somethings travelling to Mars in order to repopulate the human race in the aftermath of climate disasters on Earth - and after it was over, a woman went outside (where people were waiting to go in to see a different play) and she started shouting in exasperated bewilderment, "IT'S JUST PEOPLE. HAVING SEX. ON A SPACESHIP." Now, not only could that plot synopsis have been gleaned from the play's title and description, but a fellow actor who knew that Kennedy's aunt and uncle were in attendance for that performance came to report the story to her, afraid that the crazy woman outside matched Kennedy's description of Lolo. Of course, that wasn't Lolo, but it was a great new catchphrase for the show.

Such tenuous connections (which don't do justice to the serious undertones of this song), but that's all I felt like sharing this week. And again, I totally enjoyed relistening to the song. To carry on! We'll carry onnnnnnn!

The Reservoir Tapes

Could you

could we

if we could just talk a little bit about Becky. If you could describe her for me. In your own words. What she was like when she was younger. How's she's changed from being a child to being a young teenager. What her – gifts are, if you like. Any challenges there have been. Anything she has found difficult. Anything that comes to mind.

I know

                               I know this is difficult

                               this must be very hard for


                               of course.

I must have been pretty effusive in my Goodreads review for Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 because his American publisher contacted me privately to see if I'd be interested in reading a related novel before its release in the States; um, yes please. What a delight, therefore, to have discovered The Reservoir Tapes in my mailbox this week; and what a further delight to have been so captivated by this read. I understand that these fifteen short pieces were originally commissioned by and performed on BBC Radio 4, and while I can see the appealling tension of listening to one per week over the course of a few months, I'm sure I much preferred the experience of reading them on the page, close together, and recognising where one person's story chimes with another's. (I especially enjoyed Ginny's chapter – spaced into stanzas with poetic line breaks – that I can't imagine was apparent to the ear.) 

Essentially, this book records the recollections of residents of the village where a thirteen-year-old girl has gone missing – some stories occuring in the aftermath, some just before, some recalled from long before – collected by some unnamed “interviewer”. The first chapter (quoted from above) is solely from the interviewer's POV, without the corresponding answers, and I wasn't sure if I'd like the format. But every chapter after that is from a third person POV; each focussing on one character, and serving to fill in the people who were so sketchy in Reservoir 13. This is a totally different kind of book from the one that came before, and I don't know how satisfying it would be as a standalone read, but as a companion piece, I was deeply interested and found myself to be ultimately satisfied. This book is more about the people than the landscape (the nature writing and progression of the seasons was outstanding in the earlier work), but the setting still plays its part:

The flat heather moorland was featureless to the untrained eye, but in fact was teeming with detail: the bilberries and bog grasses, the mosses and moths and butterflies, the birds nesting in scoops and scrapes, the bogwater shining in the late-afternoon sun. The warmth was rising from the ground already, the sky a rich blue above the reservoirs in the distance. A hundred yards away, a mountain hare broke from cover and thundered across the heather.

Just as the flat moorland might seem “featureless to the untrained eye”, so too were the lurking dangers of this village (and of the villagers themselves) underplayed in the first book. In one chapter, the story of a Girl Guide who once fell into a sinkhole (in the same area where Becky later disappeared) is recounted:

It seemed the prolonged dry spell, following months of rain, had caused a sort of rupture between different layers of peat, those layers shifting and opening up a deep crevasse, hidden by the tussocks of bog grass.

The summer before her disappearance, Becky went swimming with a group of local kids; sneaking through a safety fence (and perhaps provoking a young man to later seek revenge against her):

People talked about how deep the water was, and how cold. People said it would be impossible to find your body if you drowned. People said a lot of things.

In one character's story of a long ago quarry accident, we not only see the obvious physical danger but learn more about some of the relationships between the villagers:

There's always a pressure to get the job done. And then some small thing goes wrong. Something geological. The temperature changes, the ground shifts, and all of a sudden you're a man lying in the dirt with a ton of rocks stacked up upon him.

Not only is the setting fraught with these hidden dangers, but one would do well to be wary of the villagers themselves: We meet a man with a shotgun who acts creepy around children; a squatter in the woods who makes grown men quake with fear; a woman who knows all too well that sometimes children simply walk away. In one section, a developmentally challenged young man assures his mother that Becky was fine, “He knew a few things and he knew she'd come to no harm”. And in the final, moving, chapter we meet Becky's mother and father; finally learning their names and why they were on this holiday. 

I remain delighted to have had this opportunity to revisit McGregor's world, and while I would reiterate that this slim volume (it only takes a couple of hours to read) might not make complete sense on its own, it was an intriguing companion piece to Reservoir 13.

Happily Ever Esther: Two Men, a Wonder Pig, and Their Life-Changing Mission to Give Animals a Home

 

Learning to live with a 650-pound pig in our 1000-square-foot home nearly drove us to our breaking point. There were sleepless nights, heated conversations, and many, many tears. But we soldiered on and challenged ourselves in ways we had never dreamed of before. We thought we had been through the worst until we started an Esther the Wonder Pig Facebook page that would take things to a whole new level of crazy. Within weeks her page went viral, amassing over one hundred thousand likes in under eighty days. Unfortunately, we lived in a town whose bylaws prohibited us from keeping Esther. Facing the risk of losing her to town officials, we had a serious decision to make: shut down the page and quietly fade away...or get serious about realizing our new dream of opening a farm sanctuary. We knew we could rescue many more “Esthers”, along with other abused and abandoned farm animals that needed a safe-forever home. Five months after the page began – and less than two years after we met Esther for the very first time – we launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $440, 000 to buy the farm in just sixty days.

We had somehow done what everyone told us was impossible. This was our Happily Ever Esther.

I hadn't read Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter's first book, Esther the Wonder Pig, but the above passage from this book's intro brought me up to speed: After having been shocked to discover that the “micro pig” they had adopted grew into a full-sized 650-pound commercial sow, the two city boys grew so attached to their “pig-daughter” Esther that they became vegan, bought a run-down farm, and decided to dedicate their lives to providing forever homes to abused and abandoned farm animals. Happily Ever Esther picks up the story – describing the steep learning curve the pair faced with everything from researching and providing for the needs of diverse rescue animals (from goats to sheep to bunnies to cows) to also learning how to run a charity and organise volunteers; all while mending fences and shivering inside their drafty farmhouse – and while this story doesn't quite have the exotic narrative of We Bought a Zoo or the emotional pull of Born Free, it did grow on me as a charming and gentle tale of a sweet piggy and her two Dads; a family that decided to open their hearts and their home and found a more meaningful life along the way. 

The entire book is told from Steve's first person POV, and despite he and his partner Derek having the help of a professional author (Caprice Crane) to fashion their story, I didn't find it to be terribly well-written; narratively scattershot and inexpertly told. This early paragraph about the fish-out-of-water experience of moving to the country is fairly typical and made me wonder if the book would hold my interest: 

You don't realize what a difference city living makes until you're no longer there. We can't even have pizza delivered here. If that isn't one of the saddest things you've read today, you don't have enough appreciation for pizza. We're used to not having delivery now, but at first it really sucked.

Just...amateurish. Steve is a little catty in talking about his mother-in-law (who had warned him after the first book not to mention her name in public again) and he tells the story of being unfriended on Facebook by his best friend after he forgot to go to her housewarming party (which I found irrelevant), and when Steve tells the stories of overzealous volunteers who have since been severed from the sanctuary, I had to hope that he changed their names for the sake of privacy. And somewhere along the process of publishing this book, someone should have advised these men against referring to “Esther's monthly 'lady days'” as “Shark Week”. Even so, the story of this family grew on me, and when I then went online to check out Esther's Facebook page and the website for the Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary, I have to admit that there's a kindness and a gentleness to this project that absolves a lot of literary sins. 

If Esther has taught us anything, it's that being kind to everyone you meet can have a bigger effect on your life than you could ever imagine. It sounds so lame, but every time someone asks how we made all this happen, the first thing we say is, “Be kind to people.” It's easy to get frustrated with any number of situations over the course of a day. Often the first thing people do it take to Facebook to air grievances. We've been the subject of many vent posts from various activists, sometimes even sanctuary founders, who were upset about one thing or another we did or said. We learned very quickly that you can't please everyone, and complaining about it just drives a wedge between people. There's enough negativity in the world, so make it your mission to be nothing but positive. Give people a break from the everyday downer news stories; make someone smile for a change. Stay focused on your goals, and believe that even when your closest friends think you're insane, anything is possible.

If Esther really does have two million followers on social media, then this update and behind-the-scenes look at life on the farm is probably exactly what her audience was looking for (especially since the farm itself was crowdfunded). And if the sales of this book can somehow provide for more barns and fencing that will allow Steve and Derek to expand their rescue operation, then that spreads more kindness in the world; and who wouldn't get behind that? This is a short read, probably of most interest to those who were already following Esther and her story, but in the end, I found it valuable, too. (I was intrigued enough to look at the upcoming tour dates for the sanctuary – which is only a half hour from my house – but discovered they're all sold out for the foreseeable future. Good for them!)

There There

The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.

While Gertrude Stein may have been speaking ironically with her famous quote about her hometown of Oakland, CA (“There is no there there”), author Tommy Orange is writing more literally when he references Stein for the title of his novel about Oakland-based “Urban Indians”, There There; what once existed for the Indigenous peoples of the Oakland area has been paved over and colonised by others; there is no longer anything of theirs there. But that's not to say that the Indigenous peoples themselves are gone: By telling the stories of twelve area Urban Indians, and having them converge at the Big Oakland Powwow, Orange blends the modern with the traditional, with storytelling playing a huge role in helping these people to understand themselves and where they came from. There's plenty of grit and unhappiness in these stories, but there's also the love of family and the rediscovery of traditions that offer a type of tentative redemption; until everything careens towards a tense and inevitable conclusion. This isn't perfect storytelling, but it feels important and necessary; Tommy Orange has written an engaging book that adds an oft neglected voice to the American experience.

Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred year genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours. We didn't get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. We found one another, started up Indian Centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork. We bought and rented homes, slept on the streets, under freeways; we went to school, joined the armed forces, populated Indian bars in the Fruitland in Oakland and in the Mission in San Francisco. We lived in boxcar villages in Richmond. We made art and we made babies and we made way for our people to go back and forth between reservation and city. We did not move to cities to die.

There There has a prologue and a midpoint Interlude which afford Tommy Orange opportunities to address the readers directly and remind us of the colonisers' crimes against the original inhabitants of the Americas. But while this history is undeniably inexcusable to the modern reader, Orange doesn't overtly blame the White Man for where his characters find themselves in the present – these aren't helpless or agentless less-than-citizens, but a community of individuals struggling to define themselves in modern day America; and like other “racialised” people, these characters have the opportunity to seek pride from their traditions in the face of entrenched societal discrimination. But that's not to say that life is easy for the characters that Orange introduces us to: one is a young adult who was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, more than one other is a struggling or recovering alcoholic; families are broken, with missing or murdered fathers/grandmothers raising their grandkids/mothers succumbing to disease or suicide or simply walking away; poor kids from the wrong side of town who become gangsters; more than one biracial character who struggles with the oppressor/oppressed warring within himself; more than one character who can only discover what it means to be “Indian” from the Internet. Each of the characters has been formed by unique pressures and circumstances – underlining the fact that there is no monolith of American Indian experience – and some have found meaning and some have found heartache and some have found nihilism; just like in every other community. Even so, the author never lets us forget that these characters have been formed by pressures unique to their own community – there's no blame, really, but the effects of colonisation can never be ignored.

I'm here to collect stories in order to have them available online for people from our community and communities like ours to hear and see. When you hear stories from people like you, you feel less alone. When you feel less alone, and like you have a community of people behind you, alongside you, I believe you can live a better life.

In a way, Dene Oxendene feels like the center of the whole novel: Having inherited a movie camera from his dead uncle, Dene applies for, and receives, a grant to film a documentary of Urban Indian stories. As the novel rotates between its twelve points-of-view, not only do Dene's sections show the young man asking people for their stories, but whenever the POV shifted to someone else's narrative, it felt in my mind like we were witnessing the completed stories that Dene might have collected. (In the Acknowledgments at the end, Orange thanks the “Oakland Cultural Arts Fund, for funding a storytelling project that never came to fruition except for in fiction”, which makes me wonder if Orange had once thought to film the stories of Urban Indians; which makes me wonder if the Dene character is closest to an avatar of Orange himself.) Storytelling is the heart of this book: One character has a Masters in comparative literature with an emphasis on Native American Literature; grandmothers tell the old stories, mothers sing traditional lullabies, men beat the drums and chant in the old ways; a dying woman says, “We shouldn't ever not tell our stories”, that “the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories”; those disconnected from traditional storytellers can find them online; participants at an AA meeting are encouraged to share their stories. 

The problem with Indigenous art in general is that it's stuck in the past. The catch, or the double bind, about the whole thing is this: If it isn't pulling from tradition, how is it Indigenous? And if it is stuck in tradition, in the past, how can it be relevant to other Indigenous people living now, how can it be modern?

Tommy Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma (as are some of his characters), and he also has an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts (where he studied under Sherman Alexie); with these influences, Orange seems to have found the perfect balance between the traditional and the modern in There There: characters might end up at a powwow, but they use 3-D printers, drones, and cell phones to get there; those who put on borrowed regalia to participate in the dancing find it doesn't fit quite right, but they still appreciate the power it gives them. Twelve points-of-view might be too many to keep straight in the reader's mind, and I'm undecided whether or not the ending was earned – which is why I don't think this is perfect storytelling – but I completely appreciate what Orange has achieved here and am pleased to see that this book has found a wide audience.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.

As Yuval Noah Hurari states in his introduction, his book Sapiens was about the deep past of human history, Homo Deus was about our deep future, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a reflection on our present; where we are in the today of 2018 and where he sees us up to about the year 2050. Considering categories such as Work, Nationalism, War, and God, Hurari's primary point is that it's all fiction: Liberalism, Capitalism, Religion, National Borders; these are all simply stories that we tell ourselves and the biggest hurdle we are about to face is sleepwalking into a greater interface with “Big Data algorithms” and allowing them to shape our reality; allowing them to provide the new fictions by which we organise our thoughts about how the world works, enriching the few and enslaving the rest. Seemingly out of nowhere, the final chapter in this book is on the benefits of meditation – of recognising that the only reality is the fact of one's own body – and while I have long understood that meditation is an integral part of Harari's writing process, it's primacy here surprised me (not in a bad way, it just pushed the whole premise out of History and into a New Agey category in my mind). If John Lennon sang, “Imagine no possessions, no countries, no religion, too”, what Hurari is saying is, “We need to stop imagining that there are possessions, or countries, or religion”; and that won't be easy for our post-truth species without acknowledging that our brains are constantly creating these fictions. 

I received an ARC of 21 Lessons, and although I am not actually supposed to quote from it, all I want to do in this review is allow Hurari to speak for himself, so be advised: these passages may not be in their final forms.

If somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it doesn't sound like science fiction – it is certainly false.

As Hurari begins with, we Sapiens found ourselves in the 20th century being asked to choose between three organising stories – Fascism, Communism, and Liberalism – and after the fall of the Soviet Union, we in the West believed that we had arrived at the “end of history”; that the spread of liberal democracy (even if it was achieved with the threat or fact of violence) was inevitable; we were marching towards one global community with freedom and liberty for all. But we suddenly find ourselves facing the resurgence of strongmen on the other side of the world, and to the liberals' horror, the rise of nationalism/populism in our own countries. From this opening, all of the rest follows:

• In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail; in 2018 we are down to zero. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, have entered a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Everything is perfectly clear. To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying.

• Any story that seeks to gain humanity's allegiance will be tested above all in its ability to deal with the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech. If liberalism, nationalism, Islam or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms and bioengineering – it will also need to incorporate them into a new meaningful narrative.

• Twentieth-century communism assumed that the working class was vital for the economy, and communist thinkers tried to teach the proletariat how to translate its immense economic power into political clout. The communist political plan called for a working-class revolution. How relevant will these teachings be if the masses lose their economic value, and therefore need to struggle against irrelevance rather than against exploitation? How do you start a working-class revolution without a working class?

• We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximise the human potential. Indeed, we have no idea what the full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind. And yet we hardly invest much in exploring the human mind, and instead focus on increasing the speed of our Internet connections and the efficiency of our Big Data algorithms. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

• Radical Islamists have been influenced by Marx and Foucault as much as by Muhammad, and they inherit the legacy of nineteenth-century European anarchists as much as of the Umayyad and Abbisid caliphs. It is therefore more accurate to see even the Islamic State as an errant offshoot of the global culture we all share, rather than as a branch of some mysterious alien tree.

• At present, it is far from clear whether Europe can find a middle path that would enable it to keep its gates open to strangers without being destabilised by people who don't share its values. If Europe succeeds in finding such a path, perhaps its formula could be copied on a global level. If the European project fails, however, it would indicate that belief in the liberal values of freedom and tolerance is not enough to resolve the cultural conflicts of the world and to unite humankind in the face of nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption. If Greeks and Germans cannot agree on a common destiny, and if 500 million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished refugees, what chances do humans have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts that have beset our global civilisation?

• When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; and when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realise that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks...In truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind.

• There is no divine script, and nothing outside me can give meaning to my life. It is I who imbue everything with meaning through my free choices and through my own feelings...In itself, the universe is only a meaningless hodge-podge of atoms. Nothing is beautiful, sexy or sacred – but human feelings make it so. It is only human feelings that make a red apple seductive and a turd disgusting. Take away human feelings, and you are left with a bunch of molecules.

Always an interesting thinker, I really enjoy Hurari as a writer. As in his other two books, Hurari is able to find spots in 21 Lessons to promote his most personal causes – gay rights, the immorality of the meat industry, the Agricultural Revolution as the worst thing that ever happened to Sapiens – and for the first time, he is overt about the solution to what ails us as a species: the practise of daily meditation as a way to see past the fictions our minds create; those stories that create all the pain and suffering in the world. I have no doubt that humanity is marching towards a revolution in the ways we live our lives, and while I'm not sure that I agree with everything Hurari writes about here, it was fascinating to see what he had to say about our immediate future.

Song of Batoche

 

Old Joseph Ouellette – who had ridden with the legendary buffalo hunter Cuthbert Grant at the Battle of Seven Oaks – began a song about the hunts, acting out the parts with tossing horns and pawing hoofs. He finished the last verse with arms raised and the crowd clapping him on.

“Now old men and wives come out with the carts
There's meat against hunger and fur against cold
Gather full store for the pemmican bags
Garner the booty of warriors bold!”

As with the passage quoted above, author Maia Caron has preserved a slice of history in Song of Batoche – bringing to life legendary characters, adding the quotidian detail that breathes humanity into stodgy documentary – and not only has she fleshed out a significant event that most of us Canadians remember studying in school, but as per her stated purpose, Caron has imagined the women's stories to add to those of the men that history books tend to solely recount. I admire the intention and the effort that this book represents – I might even call it an essential addition to the canon of Canadian historical fiction – but purely as a reading experience, it's a mixed bag. 

In my memory, I better recall Louis Riel as the young rebel hero of the Red River Uprising than the deluded Messiah who shows up in Batoche fifteen years later, at the request of the local Métis, to lead a second rebellion:

Riel was a conundrum. One moment she had dismissed him as a religious fanatic and in the next he had moved her with his compassion and demand for justice. She wanted her lands as much as anyone. And none other than Gabriel Dumont was on his side. But how could she follow a man who believed the Métis were the children of Israel? It was an impossible dream. Creating a sovereign nation ruled by Métis and Indians with his church at its head. Macdonald would no sooner agree to a separate state than the Métis would leave their beloved Catholic Church.

I don't know this Riel; had never heard that he spent two years in an asylum during his exile. When he arrives in Batoche (what he refers to as his “City of God”), he believes himself the new “David”, there to lead his “Israelites” in the “Promised Land”. Riel delivers on his promise to draft a compelling petition to the government of Canada – insisting that Parliament, led by John A. Macdonald, recognise and confirm treaty rights in (what was then known as) the Northwest Territories – and while Riel is able to assemble a large coalition of Native peoples to sign his petition, he never reveals to them his true plan: to create a sovereign nation on the Prairies, run by his own Métis people, and to establish a new church with himself as its leader. After proving himself to be an indecisive and double-dealing strategist – it is Riel's own decisions that draw an armed response from the government – when the Battle of Batoche brings war to the dooryards of his most devoted followers, Riel is seen swooning from fasting, hoisting the large crucifix (which he liberated from the local church) through the skirmishes, believing that his own prayers will break the cannons of his enemies and deliver victory to his side. 

But while Riel is an important historical figure, he's not really the main character in Song of Batoche. The true story revolves around Gabriel Dumont – the “best man with a horse and with a gun”, legendary Métis captain of the long gone buffalo hunts, and Riel's war chief – and a character that Caron invented, Josette Lavoie: a young Métis wife and mother, a woman of “impossible” and “tragic” beauty, whom Riel christens his own Mary Magdelene, and whom Dumont (who lives on the neighbouring farm) doesn't really notice until the events of this book, at which time he finds her both intelligent and bewitching: 

He could see that she was crying and he reached to her, his hand careful, detached, brushing the coarse wool of the shawl over her thin shoulder. He had not bargained for the feel of her, and his heart beat wildly in his chest. Lifting his hand, he let it drop, fingers hesitating at the fringes of her shawl. It was quiet among the trees, only the sound of digging out on the meadow, the men talking among themselves. He should have pulled his hand away, but let it slip beneath the fringe, a quiver at the tips of his fingers as they traced the line of her back, followed the curve of her waist. The top of her head was only inches away. She had become very still, almost not breathing, a slight resistance then turning into him, the smell of her, like woodsmoke and the river when the ice broke up in spring. She looked up at him, a strand of her black hair caught in a sudden lift of wind. The moon had come out and rained light through the bare branches, onto those eyes, dark and unfathomable. He touched her cheek, still wet with tears.

In her Acknowledgments, Caron cites the sources she found through the Gabriel Dumont Institute, so I am happy to accept that Dumont's story is represented more or less accurately; his is a remarkable tale that deserves to be more widely known. Also in the Acknowledgments, Caron states that Josette and her family are products of her imagination – included to give the women's perspective and to flesh out some of the writings from Riel's diaries – and while this is certainly a novelist's prerogative, it was the character of Josette that I found most frustrating. The “impossible beauty” – understandably sparking jealousy from both Riel's and Dumont's wives – who reads Spinoza and quotes the classics to confound the local priest (at a time when the Catholic Church controlled every aspect of the devout Métis peoples' lives and Riel's illiterate wife is forced to explain that “women don't read”); the granddaughter (but not by blood, for whatever reason) of the chief Big Bear and who is sent to him as Riel's emissary; a woman who guards the healing knowledge of her people as shown to her by her mother and grandmother, but who resents not being made a voting member of Riel's council and provisional government – everything from Josette's romantic urges to her domestic melodramas, her perfect beauty and intellect and clear thinking, make her not the “everywoman” whose story demands to be included in the historical narrative, but a “superwoman” that the reader doesn't quite believe in. And that's what I found frustrating and why this is a mixed bag: Caron does a wonderful job of reintroducing us to the Riel we might not know; she presents Gabriel Dumont as the true hero of Batoche (and the final battle is as well written as any such scene); but Josette's story really didn't work for me. And yet, I do appreciate what Song of Batoche adds to the story of the Métis people and think people ought to read it.

How Hard Can It Be?

If I have to save everyone else, I need to start by saving myself first. How hard can it be?

I hadn't read Allison Pearson's first book about the fictional Kate Reddy – I Don't Know How She Does It – and while it turns out that it isn't really necessary in order to understand what's happening in the sequel How Hard Can It Be?, maybe I should have read that earlier novel in order to have created some kind of empathy for the character – because even though this book was sold to me as the hilarious account of a woman of a certain age that I would no doubt identify with and cheer for, I found Kate to be vain, shallow, self-centered, and a crap wife and parent who doesn't understand why she's losing control on the domestic front, even if it's obvious to the reader. After sighing and plodding my way through this unentertaining mess, I do know this for sure: I won't be going back to read the earlier book.

I worry all the time about my children, my daughter especially; I worry about my mum, my sister, my husband's parents, my best friend who's basically a functioning alcoholic, my dog, my work. My health – which frankly is a bit of a landslide. And I know it sounds pathetic, but it's all too much. I can't break free, I just can't.

Where Kate finds herself at the beginning of this book (and I have no idea how much of this was set up in the earlier book): After going through his own “manopause”, Kate's husband, Rich, quit his job as an architect and resettled the family in the South of England (away from all the grandparents in the North) in order to attend college to become a therapist. Not only is he too busy to work, but Rich is required to take expensive counseling twice a week, he is in constant training for bicycle marathons, and his gluten-free/vegan/mindfulness lifestyle turns him into a condescending scold towards the family he's too occupied to engage with. When they first moved to this village, they could have bought a home in a brand new development, but having looked at a falling-down historic heap of a house and falling in love with it, Kate insisted on the fixer-upper, and the family's savings are disappearing fast into the money pit. Kate – a former high powered money manager who took a multi-year pause to focus on her family – must go back to work, but as she's approaching fifty, the only head-hunter she meets with tells her she's “beyond the cohort” of the employable. Shaving seven years off her age, Kate is able to land a temp position covering a maternity leave at the London firm where she used to work, and between trying to remember the lies on her resume and not letting anyone know that she actually started the fund she's now a junior exec on, Kate repeatedly saves the day with those clients (the Russian millionaire gangster; the rock star's flakey widow) that the office's hotshot young metrosexual overlords don't have the life experience to deal with. Meanwhile, Kate's two children have become lazy, backtalking teenagers (the daughter is obsessed with her social standing, the son with online gaming; both expect their mom to be a cash machine/sock finder/uber driver), Kate's own mother and her inlaws need attention that only she can give (despite other family members living closer to them), and with the onset of perimenopause, Kate is experiencing mental and physical changes that threaten not only her self-image but her overall competence. Whew. I don't know how she does it, but, how hard can it be?

This book is set very much in the now – I learned what a belfie is (a bum selfie), and what a MAMIL is (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra [with or without genitals dangling like low-hanging fruit]); Kate is a member of a Women Returners group (a self-help group of those women reentering the workforce after a domestic pause) and she is pointed out as the ultimate example of a modern day Sandwich Woman. The narrative is filled with texts and emails and Kate's kids live their true lives online. There is quite a bit about the unique present day pressures of the British education system (obsessing about league tables and A*'s; trying to compete for university spots against hard-working Asians, the upper classes who have their tutors do all the work, and the palm-greasing Russians) that was new to me. And while all of this is spelled out for the reader (more or less helpfully), I was annoyed when Kate writes her daughter Emily's essay on Twelfth Night in order to draw painfully obvious parallels between Shakespeare's tale of women using disguises in order to participate in a man's world and what she and her daughter were going through in the present:

What will future historians make of the fact that, at the start of the twenty-first century, when feminism seemed to have won the argument, girls like Emily tried their hardest to look like the courtesans of a previous age when women had almost no power except their looks and their ability to attract a man of status? Let's not even mention her menopausal mother, who, for the sake of a job, in new and hostile territory, must disguise her age as if it were her sex, in an effort to become, if not a man, at least one of the boys, and a forty-two-year-old boy to boot? Forsooth.

So, speaking of what is painfully obvious: In an overused and ultimately annoying device, Kate's failing memory prompts her to imagine that she has an elderly librarian named Roy in her mind that she is always sending to the archives to look up information for her: Roy, what was that song? Who is this woman? What should I be noticing about my family's behaviour? Kate is so busy between work, renovating her house, obsessing about her appearance, and caring for both her children and the older generation, that while she notices some major signs of trouble regarding her husband, her daughter, and her son, she constantly tells Roy to file these warnings away for later. So when what I suppose is the climax of the plot occurs – when Kate suddenly puts together all of these clues (or they are put together for her) – there are no surprises for the reader and I felt zero connection with Kate's sudden crises. Pearson's narrative choices baffle me; I am the ideal audience for this book and I connected with none of it.

Luckily, Kate is still gorgeous – after some boot camp and liposuction, she's a knockout at her college reunion – but after Kate reconnects with a rich and sexy American businessman she used to have a crush on, am I really supposed to be cheering her on to have a steamy fling with him? Am I supposed to be happy if, after proving herself to still be a smart and independent woman of varied and inexhaustible skills, this man offers to make all of her problems go away? Am I to think that Kate's indulgent parenting – laughing off her son ruining her credit rating with unauthorised gaming purchases, sighing over the kids at her daughter's Christmas party tearing up her Jane Austen for rolling papers and walking in on sixteen year olds having sex in her ensuite (at least Emily was going to be more popular when the photos hit Instagram!) – am I to think that this is the best that Kate could do? It's all so shallow and selfish, and it was interesting when Kate's sister (a working class single mother of a learning-disabled/gambling-addicted adult son and the primary caregiver for their ageing mother) called her on it:

“If that lad of yours can't find a bloody sock it's because you've spoiled him rotten and fetched and carried and –”

“Julie, please – ”

“Please nothing, you take them on fancy holidays, where was it this year? And oh, Mummy, can I have a new PlayStation, please, Mum, the old one's out of date. And Mummy, I'm worried about how many A bloody stars I'm going to get in my exams, please can I have a special tutor to help, like all the other rich tossers' kids? And meanwhile, poor Auntie Julie, proper poor, who lives up North in a house the size of your kitchen, oh, she's fine, she can take care of Grandma, right? I mean, it's not like she's got anything better to do.”

“That's not – ”

“And oh, Mummy would love to help Auntie Julie out, but she's ever so busy helping people with too much money make some more money, you know, just in case they run out of helicopters, 'cos you never know, do you? Like, you want to go to Abi bloody Dhabi in a rush, and money can buy you everything, right, especially with Mummy on your case. I mean, money really can buy you love, can't it, Kath?”

This exchange does properly chasten Kate and it serves to underline that even the author understands that Kate's biggest problems are shallow and self-imposed. There ought to be more stories about women going through menopause – it'll happen to a large portion of the reading population eventually – and with some percentage of these women finding themselves in Kate's position as a working mother and elder caregiver, there's likely a receptive audience for just this type of story. Ultimately, I think that Kate's sister Julie might have had the more interesting and relatable tale to explore, but either way, How Hard Can It Be was a total miss for me.