Washington Black

My first master named me, as he named us all. I was christened George Washington Black – Wash, as I came to be known. With great ridicule, he said he'd glimpsed in me the birth of a nation and a warrior-president and a land of sweetness and freedom. All this was before my face was burnt, of course. Before I sailed a vessel into the night skies, fleeing Barbados, before I knew what it meant to be stalked for the bounty on one's head.

Before the white man died at my feet.

Before I met Titch.

Washington Black opens upon a Barbadian sugar plantation in 1830, as the title character recalls the circumstances that allowed him to escape his preordained life of miserable slavery. The opening bits – as the old master dies and a new one imposes fresh cruelties in order to establish control over his inheritance – is brutal and raw; I was breathless with horror. Soon enough we learn that Wash is telling this story as an eighteen-year-old Freeman – so this isn't really a story about slavery – but as he looks back on his barbarous upbringing, and as he attempts to reconcile what he was taught to believe he was with what he has become, the plot spans the globe – with an experimental “cloud-cutter” hot air balloon, deep sea diving with a copper-helmeted wetsuit, polar exploration among the Esquimaux – and as Victorian Age white men lead the way in scientific research, Wash finds himself in their shadows, carving out a place for himself. Like a mashup of Verne and Dickens and Twain, this book definitely didn't go where I expected it to, but as the story unspools into fabulist territory, the very real Washington Black himself demands to be seen and asks: Just where are the persons of colour in this heroic history of the world? I would have read this book whether or not it had been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year – I adored Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues when it came out – so while I will agree that this might not have the literary heft of the usual Booker nominee, it is exciting and thoughtful and I was enchanted with Washington Black from beginning to end.

I carried that nail like a shard of darkness in my fist. I carried it like a secret, like a crack through which some impossible future might be glimpsed. I carried it like a key.

Not long after Erasmus Wilde takes over Faith Plantation, eleven-year-old Washington Black and his protectress, Big Kit, are summoned to the manor house and asked to serve dinner. This is a terrifying prospect for a couple of dusty field slaves, and while there, Wash catches the eye of the visiting younger brother of the new master. When this Christopher “Titch” Wilde sends for Wash to relocate to his own quarters, Kit arms the boy with a stolen nail, and I was made breathless once again. Wash is named assistant to the gentleman scientist, and when the boy demonstrates intelligence and an innate talent for illustration, Titch also teaches the child to read and write (against Erasmus' wishes, for he knows the boy will eventually be returned to the cane fields). Wash knows better than to trust a white man, but as he struggles to determine whether he is respected by Titch for his own gifts – or whether he is simply a pawn in the secret abolitionist's cause – he finds that he has developed the self-respect that the overseer's cudgel endeavours to stamp out. Before Wash can ever get a proper read on Titch, the plot takes off.

It had happened so gradually, but all these months with Titch had schooled me to believe I could leave all misery behind, I could cast off all violence, outrun a vicious death. I had even begun thinking I'd been born for a higher purpose, to draw the earth's bounty, and to invent; I had imagined my existence a true and and rightful part of the natural order. How wrong-headed it had all been. I was a black boy, only – I had no future before me, and little grace or mercy behind me. I was nothing. I would die nothing, hunted hastily down and slaughtered.

As a Canadian, I loved that Wash finds himself up on Baffin Island, and with a father from the South Shore of Nova Scotia, I love that Wash spends time there, too. (And regarding Nova Scotia and what I've witnessed there, as also found in The Book of Negroes, I appreciate this historic nugget: “White men were everywhere aggrieved, and they would sometimes rise up against us black devils, the miserable black scourge who would destroy their livelihood by labouring at cheaper rates.”) It's appropriate to a Victorian “Age of Wonder” novel to have the action visit London and Amsterdam and Marrakesh, and I loved all the early tech instruments made of brass and hand-ground lenses and oiled furs and slate; it's not quite steam-punk, but it's innovative and real.

Much is made of freedom and family obligations (more than one white character has the nerve to “envy” Wash's security and lack of hard choices as a slave), and even once Wash is technically emancipated, that doesn't free him from prejudice and lack of opportunity (with a female character, Tanna, along for the journey, this point is also made for a Victorian Age Englishwoman). There is plenty bubbling under the surface of what reads as an adventure tale, and while Washington Black can be read on a couple of levels, it may not be Booker deep; I'll still be rooting for the home team; this is my kind of story.

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? *

*****

09/09/18

Delighted to have met Esi Edugyan at a publishing event tonight. Let's hear it for the home team!

*****

The 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

Paige Cooper: Zolitude

Patrick DeWitt: French Exit

Eric Dupont: Songs for the Cold of Heart

Esi Edugyan: Washington Black

Rawi Hage: Beirut Hellfire Society

Sheila Heti: Motherhood

Emma Hooper: Our Homesick Songs

Thea Lim: An Ocean of Minutes

Lisa Moore: Something for Everyone

Tanya Tagaq: Split Tooth

Kim Thúy: Vi

Joshua Whitehead: Jonny Appleseed


*Won by Washington Black 

                                                                          *****

2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalists 

• Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage.
• Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page.
• Land Mammals and Sea Creatures by Jen Neale.
• The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson.
• Washington Black by Esi Edugyen.

*Won by Dear Evelyn

Mind Picker : Between the Stacks

I usually think of these "Between the Stacks" posts as hilarious "overheard in a bookstore" stories, but this exchange from yesterday was just disturbing and weird. I haven't worked in sales for months now - and that probably explains why I haven't had any of these stories for a while - but I was doing training yesterday for a mobile payment device, and out on the floor I went. One of the customers I offered my assistance to was a grey-haired man with a Slavic accent, and he was looking for a Spanish dictionary. I brought him over to the right area, pointed out the options, and I can't even remember how he started on his diatribe (I think it was related to his disbelief that the three car magazines in his hand were going to cost him $50), but he eventually had me cornered for about fifteen minutes, during which time he explained to me:

• He had left Czechoslovakia 33 years ago, and life in the Communist system wasn't so bad. They gave you an apartment that you could afford, gave you a job that you could work at, and everyone had enough of everything, weren't trained to want more than they could afford, and men could go to work and women could stay home and raise the kids like it's meant to be. Here in Canada, everyone wants more and more than they can afford, and we're all trained to go to work and pay our taxes, spend our money and get in debt. Even the Czechoslovakian government under the Communists had no debt - in fact, the Soviets owed them money - but after the fall of Communism in 1989, the Americans forced the Czech government to buy their weapons and now they're in debt for hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's Capitalism for you. Then he asked if I've ever seen Dumb & Dumber and I said yes, when it first came out, and he said, "Well, not our Jim Carrey, but the blonde-haired guy, he was in this show Newsroom and there's this clip that very clearly explains why we're not exceptional anymore and how there's a New World Order in charge of the governments and global finance..." I interrupted to say that I had seen that clip when it was going around facebook and I don't know if that's exactly what it...And he interrupted me to explain that these people are in charge of everything nonetheless, and no one knows their end game, and who knows if they're even human? Maybe they're aliens? And because he said this with a smile, I thought he was making a joke to lighten up and end the exchange, but then he said, "You only need to read Erich von Däniken," and I had to laugh and say, "Yeah, I've read him; Chariots of the Gods and all that." Then he went on to his next point:

• He asked if I had ever read the writings of (some sixteenth century explorer I couldn't catch the name of) and I said no, and he explained that this man (Italian born? Explored for the throne of Spain or Portugal?; it was all a fast and accented blur and he named all of these countries as he talked) went to India and discovered that they are the laziest, cheatingest people on earth; that if you go to buy a fish from an Indian man, you are likely to find it was stuffed with rocks to cheat the weight. "And now they're here, and they own every convenience store and gas station. And how did that happen? Where did they get the money? Who gave it to them? You just know that if society collapses, it's no coincidence that they will be in charge of what everyone actually needs; that they'll be able to control who gets what." And I'm sure that my face was aghast at this point, because he rushed on with:

• "You know, I wasn't racist when I lived in Czechoslovakia - probably because everyone was white anyway; except for the Gypsies, but they were dirty, and didn't work, and had the babies just for the money - but I don't mind telling you that I'm racist now. Have you seen that beheading video from Indonesia?" I said I hadn't, my eyes darting around, looking for a way to extricate myself. "Well, do yourself a favour and don't go looking for it. I watched it and I couldn't sleep that night. There is this group of young Muslim guys and they find a group of young Christian girls. They're the same country, same race, but because they have different religion, the guys cut the girls' heads right off on video. If that can happen there, that can happen here. And they are here. And here's the thing: World War III is coming, and there's no guarantee that the white people will win this time. This time it's going to be - what do you call it? - Planet of the Apes. Upside-down with the Muslims in charge." Now I know that he could see the shock and disapproval in my face, so he went onto a less contentious tangent:

• Next he asked if I had ever seen the movie Demolition Man and I said no, and he proceeded to explain the entire plot to me, ending by concluding that this future-world it portrays is the worst kind of dystopia - with the government watching and controlling the smallest of everyone's behaviours - and that he believes that we are on track to that world right now. (When I told this story to Mallory, she laughed and said that the movie takes place in a future where there is zero crime; she welcomes this level of control.) And then to round everything up together:

• He explained that he has a friend who is currently living in Indonesia with a hot young girlfriend, and he thinks that that's the way to go. "In Indonesia, people live on five or six hundred dollars a year. I am sixty-four and thinking about breaking up with my wife, so if I could move there with my half, with two hundred thousand Canadian dollars, just think how I could live there. Escape the Capitalism. Live somewhere that no one would hit with a nuclear bomb. That's freedom." (Of course, all I could think of was: what about your fear of Muslims - Indonesia is the most populous Muslim nation on earth - and that disturbing beheading video? How could you handle being the untrusted minority? I suppose the prospect of a hot young girlfriend eases a lot of worries.)

Now, this entire time, I felt cowardly for not speaking back against paranoia and racism, but I could tell from all of the book and movie and internet references that this man has a serious swirl of disinformation clouding his brain, and doubted that anything I said would influence him. I tried to end it lightly by saying, "Well, I guess I'm more optimistic than you are. I have more faith in the decency of people than that." To which he said, "All that tells me is that your husband makes enough money to keep you happy so you don't have to worry about any of this." Tight smile from me. Then some more nonsense from him about how men used to be able to work on their own cars and women used to be the physicians of the household - actually caring for their children and providing proper nutrition - and food manufacturers are making everyone fat by replacing real food with fake food ("There's a company in Italy that makes a replacement for yogurt out of starch and sugar; you should never buy yogurt if the label doesn't say 'yogurt'") and why can't you get the brands you want from the supermarket anymore? "If I don't see what I want, I walk out. But my wife, she can't get this she'll take that instead, and I say, 'But I don't want that.'" Fifteen minutes of all of this and I finally found a break in the monologue and said, "Well, it sure has been interesting talking to you. I should go and see if there's anyone in need of help." And he laughed slightly incredulously and replied, "If anyone needed you, they'd come find you." Okie dokie, artichokie.

Yes, even in retrospect, it was cowardly for me not to have spoken back to this nonsense or at least walked off earlier, but that's the devil of customer service: he could tell I wasn't agreeing with him - or even liking what he was saying - but he knew that I had some obligation to listen politely. Cowardly. How strange to have a customer who can drop both Erich von Däniken and Planet of the Apes in a single conversation; if that's the universe talking to me, what was it trying to say? And why did he want to look at Spanish dictionaries, yet decided not to buy one? It's never dull, between the stacks.

Tunesday : Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

(Orzabal, R/ Hughes, C/ Stanley, I) Performed by Tears For Fears

Welcome to your life
There's no turning back
Even while we sleep
We will find you

Acting on your best behaviour
Turn your back on mother nature
Everybody wants to rule the world

It's my own design
It's my own remorse
Help me to decide
Help me make the most

Of freedom and of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world

There's a room where the light won't find you
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
When they do I'll be right behind you

So glad we've almost made it
So sad they had to fade it
Everybody wants to rule the world

I can't stand this indecision
Married with a lack of vision
Everybody wants to rule the world
Say that you'll never never never never need it
One headline why believe it ?
Everybody wants to rule the world

All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world

We saw Seana McKenna in Lear as a family back in January (the remarkable McKenna played the role as a woman; a queen; and she was leagues ahead of the last male we saw in the role) so when we realised that she would be playing the lead in Julius Caesar at Stratford this summer (this time, simply acting as a woman in a male role), we knew we'd want to see it, too. We attended the play this past weekend, and we weren't disappointed.

I understand the pressure that the Stratford Festival must be under to keep themselves relevant for new generations of theatre goers, but I haven't been thrilled about many of the productions over the past few years; bending genders and sexual orientations to serve diversity over story, and the story always seems to suffer for these choices. And yet, since all of the female parts in Shakespeare's days were played by male actors, there's actually something very organic about women playing in the male roles; playing them as men. Not only was Seana McKenna herself a totally believable and imperious Caesar, but the knockout performance was Irene Poole as Cassius: none of us could take our eyes off of her, and Kennedy reckoned it was probably due to the years Poole must have spent "knocking her head against the solid ceiling of shallow Shakespeare female roles"; as Cassius, Poole was compelling and believable and totally in control of the stage (making even the male actor playing Brutus pale in comparison).

This was directed by Scott Wentworth - an artist we're more familiar with as an actor than as a director - and maybe that's why the production felt so pared down (there was very minimal set and props and effects) and maybe that's also why this felt like an "actor's play": the writing and its delivery was the central offering, and especially in comparison to the strange choices we've seen in other plays over the past few years, and especially as the acting by the women in the production was so outstanding (I particularly liked that the frenzied mob that beats a bystander to death in the wake of Caesar's assassination was wholly comprised of women with clubs), we were all delighted by the effect. I hope to see more productions like this; after all, everybody wants to rule the world.

My Squirrel Days

 

There comes a time in every sitcom actress's life when she is faced with the prospect of writing a book. When my number was up, I told myself that I would not blink. I would fulfill my duty as an upbeat actress under contract on a television series and serve my country in the only way I knew how. I would cull from my life the very greatest and most memorable of anecdotes, I would draw on formative lessons learned both early on and also not too long ago, I would paint for the reader a portrait of the girl, the teenager, the woman I am today, and I would not falter. I would write a book.

Although this Author's intro is meant to be gently ironic, it feels like the most truthful passage in My Squirrel Days: Ellie Kemper was asked if she would like to write a book, so she did. What follows is a series of what Kemper calls “essays”, and what I would call “chapters”, in which she tells the story of her life in a tone of light self-deprecation. This reads less HAHAHAAAHAHAHH than an amusing conversation with a friend of a friend – nothing gets too personal and you don't feel any burning desire to probe deeper as you look at your watch and note that time is passing pleasantly enough – and for what it is, this book is fine. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

My voice has not been described as “warm” or “professional-sounding” as often as it has been described as “please speak more quietly”, so it is a testament to my skill as an actor that I successfully played a receptionist in an office for over four years on NBC. “How did you do it, Ellie?” a lot of people have not asked me. “Were the computers on set actually connected to the internet?” more people wanted to know.

(Turns out, although I had never wondered: Yes, the computers on the set of The Office were connected to the internet and Kemper spent a lot of her time online shopping in the background.) Kemper seems to have been born under a lucky star, into a loving and well-off family. After what sounds like a trauma-free childhood, Kemper attended Princeton (where she fortuitously dropped out of field hockey to join the improv club) and then Oxford, and when she then still didn't know what to do with her life, Kemper's parents continued to support her so the budding comedienne could move to Chicago for an unpaid advertising internship (where her first attempt at writing copy was turned into a local McDonald's radio spot) and where she took intensive classes with various famous Chicago improv groups. After moving to NYC, Kemper continued to work on improv with her fellow Chicago alumni, appeared in a number of national TV commercials that allowed her to quit her one menial job, and after not being hired at SNL, she was offered the role on The Office. This bump-free career trajectory – and an acting CV that has two sitcoms, one theatrical movie release, and a turn as the cranky vet tech in a training video for vet techs – doesn't really feel dramatic enough or lengthy enough to merit a memoir at this stage in Kemper's life; but she was offered a book deal and she took it (and who could blame her?)

I know that a lot of women wish that they had just a fraction of my tendency to fart from being so nervous ease on the red carpet; I understand that many fashion houses are desperate to forbid me from wearing a dress with their name on it because I will irrefutably lower their cachet for my face. But I value my privacy and I really am a lazy homebody at heart, so for these reasons, it fills me with happiness* to let other ladies rule the red carpet.

*rage and envy

While on the one hand My Squirrel Days has this persistently chipper and self-deprecating tone, every now and then Kemper tells a story about losing her cool with underlings, confessing that now she channels her “inner Kimmy Schmidt” to remain positive in the face of setbacks (even her mother had to tell her once that yeah, her job sounds hard, but it's a job that plenty of people dream of having.) While reading this book, I got the sense that Kemper was channeling the kind of cheerful and wholesome character that she is known for playing – smiling on the outside while concealing something more interesting at the heart of her – and while a pleasant reading experience, there's nothing really truthy or fascinating or universal to be found here. Still, I am not unhappy to have spent this time with what Kemper put out.

Snap

The whole encounter seemed like something from a fairy story. Enchanted – but in a dark and scary way.

Belinda Bauer's Snap has something of a fairy story about it – with a main character who is a young boy named Jack (whose sisters are named Joy and Merry), and they with a mother dead too soon and a father not up to caring for them (like something right out of Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel) – and only by thinking that this plotline wasn't to be taken too literally could I get through this crime novel that isn't much of a crime novel (the Man Booker jury gush that it “undermines the tropes of its own genre ”, which I suppose is a way of agreeing that it doesn't live up to the expectations of its own genre). Because the fact is – there's nothing deep or creative or enchantingly written here; I have no idea how this credulity-stretching police procedural was chosen by the Booker jury to join a longlist that is meant to honour the best in English language literature; I'll still give it three stars because it's not Bauer's fault that this rather ordinary novel was set up to be compared against giants; this book is fine, but it ain't literature. Beware small but necessary spoilers ahead.

The opening is riveting: The three children (aged 11, 10, and 2) are left to wait in a hot car parked at the side of a motorway while their heavily pregnant mother waddles off to find an emergency phone to arrange a tow for the broken-down vehicle. Time drags out and the children eventually decide to find their Mom, and as the two older kids get worn out from carrying the baby and her diaper bag, and as the heat bears down and the dust swirls and as none of the cars that speed by stop to offer them help, the menace grows into something frightening and real: how could a mother just walk away from her kids like that and never come back? A week later, her murdered body is found, the father becomes inconsolable, and when the timeframe shifts to three years later, we discover that Dad has abandoned the children and Jack supports his sisters by breaking into houses while their owners are on holiday; becoming known as the Goldilocks burglar (there's that fairy story theme again) because he always sleeps in children's beds before taking what he wants and trashing the rest. Not only is Jack (at fourteen) overly stressed and angry at the world, but Joy has gone nutty (collecting newspapers and hoarding them throughout the house in teetering towers), and Merry is now a precocious five-year-old who spends her time mowing the grass for her pet tortoise and reading Stephen King novels. When Jack keeps saying that he's working so hard to keep his sisters out of care, I couldn't help but think, “Why? Everyone would be better off with some schooling and some regular meals, including Jack himself.” During one of his breakins, Jack thinks he discovers a clue to his mother's unsolved murder, and he sets off a chain of events that leads to the police getting involved and the crime investigation taking off. What starts as an admittedly interesting study of these children and their response to grief and loss becomes a coincidence-laden police investigation that satisfies on no level.

I always look for a book's title in the text while I'm reading, and “snap” occurs in three senses. The first time is in the aftermath of the police telling the father that his wife's body has been found and Jack goes to tell his sister:

Joy was in her bedroom playing Snap with her doll. She looked up at him and said, “What's all the shouting?”

He couldn't speak. He couldn't say. He just stood.

Next, when Merry is five and enjoying her daily freedom in the back garden but hears a menacing noise from the house next door:

Merry closed her eyes and stretched out her arms in the grass as if embracing the whole planet. She listened to the worms and the beetles with one ear, while the other filled with the soft chirping of birds and the drone of bumblebees coming and going like country-lane traffic.

There was a slow, throaty cough, then a snap and a clank.

A brief silence, then it happened again: prrrrr, snap, clank.

Merry raised her head and looked at the fence. Somebody next door was trying to start a lawnmower.

And finally, during a police interview with a witness:

“He always had a temper. He didn't snap often, but when he did, you knew about it.”

It could be argued that only the third quote really concerns the plot, but I have to assume that Bauer used all three instances deliberately (Joy could have been playing any card game with her doll; Merry could have been drawn to any noise from the new neighbour), so I'll just offer it all up as evidence of I-don't-know-what. I could complain here about all of the weird clues (like that knife that everyone but the cops understand the significance of) and curious plot choices (like the mother of a police officer not following up on suspected child neglect or her harbouring of a fugitive), but my biggest complaint about the investigation is how many times the cops themselves have to acknowledge the mounting coincidences: It was a coincidence, but he was not a man who scoffed at coincidence. He'd never worked a case where coincidence hadn't played a part...that might be the biggest and best coincidence...but there was that coincidence...the coincidence was too great...he picked nervously at the scab of horrible coincidence. Is that a book subverting the tropes of its own genre, or just bad plotting?

Snap kept me reading with interest (but I suspect it was really because I was waiting for whatever it was the Booker jury saw in it), and I think it would make a lovely and mindless summer beach read. I will be gobsmacked if it makes the cut for the Booker shortlist.

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? *

From a Low and Quiet Sea

Armoured they came from the east,
From a low and quiet sea.
We were a naked rabble, throwing stones;
They laughed, and slaughtered us.

The title of Donal Ryan's From a Low and Quiet Sea comes from the above poem (which a young character writes about the Norman invasion of Ireland for a school project), and something about this verse captures the vulnerability of men – that naked rabble – the pressures of masculinity and pain of the loss of love; for while it may essentially be true that, “Wives are easily found and daughters are easily made”, each of the three main characters in this book suffers the loss of their great loves, and are forced to soldier on. I was enchanted by Ryan's line-by-line writing, was deeply emotionally affected by the first two stories, but am left a bit ambivalent about the entire project; the fourth section and its effort to link everything together felt a bit forced and inorganic to me. I'm still left wanting to pick up Ryan's earlier books. (Beware unintended spoilers beyond; I've tried to be careful.)

The book begins with a father explaining to his daughter the interconnectedness of trees in a forest – how they communicate with each other through an underground fungal system, how they pass resources to one another – and concludes that the lessons we can learn from trees is to take a long view of history and be kind to one another. I suppose this justifies the ways in which Ryan connects the three parts of this book (in ways that take many years to play out) and it likely also explains why so many themes are repeated in each section: characters relating myths and fairytales and dreams; men and boys fronting a masculine persona when they're feeling emotionally vulnerable; and pulsing beside everything, the low and quiet sea and its promise of peace. In each section, it was writing about the sea that most delighted me, and which I'll quote in large chunks here.

The first section is Farouk's story: He is a Syrian doctor who makes the painful decision to flee across the sea with his wife and daughter as Islamist rebels capture his city. As he waits in a refugee camp to reunite with his family, Farouk is drawn to the sea:

And late one evening he walked from the camp to the water's edge and he stood beneath the smirking moon and looked out across the sea, and he wondered at the stillness of it, as though its breath were held, as though it were too ashamed to reveal anything of itself to him, to admit to the violence latent in it, to the things it held, and he stripped himself naked and he walked out into it, and when he was a good way out, past, it seemed, the twin promonitories that flanked the camp, the water still was only as far as his chest, and he lifted himself onto the surface of it and he struck out face-down for the empty horizon, and when he was sure he was far beyond his depth he flipped onto his back and looked at the long ragged tear of the galaxy, like a wound in the sky, weeping, and he exhaled and let his limbs fall still and he waited for the water to carry him down, and fill him, and slough his flesh and salt his guilty bones.

In the next section, we meet Lampy: A shiftless young man who lives with his Mam and his hilariously acid-tongued grandfather in small town Ireland. A minibus driver for a local seniors home, Lampy feels constrained by his family's attempts to keep treating him like a boy, but he knows he isn't man enough to break out on his own. Suffering a broken heart, Lampy has juvenile fantasies of driving his car into a bridge abutment (that'll show them all), and the sea plays a role in these fantasies as well:

He remembered a dream he'd had. About standing on Thomond Bridge, watching the water flowing black and fast and high, up from the city towards Thormondgate, the wrong way. He was looking at it, marvelling at the speed of it, the height of it, touching the ramparts of the bridge almost, and he was telling someone whom he couldn't see that this was normal, that the river was tidal as far as Curragower, that it was just a fast tide coming in, not to worry, and the bridge groaned and shook and collapsed into the water and the water was warm around him, and it carried him upstream past King's Island and over the salmon weirs, and the river rushed inland against itself, away from the sea, and he was laughing when he woke, and as the dream faded he thought how easy it would be to let himself be carried to his end. To close his eyes and fall.

The final story is that of John: We meet him as an old man, attempting to make a final confession. We learn that after losing his beloved older brother as a child, John became his parents' biggest disappointment and this turned him into a bully (he beat up the kid in school who wrote the title poem), and as an adult, he used these bullying skills to become a crooked lobbyist (of the sort who doomed Ireland to its 2008 financial crisis). As he recalls his long life, John remembers his one great love:

And that Saturday she came for a drive in my Jaguar and we walked along the beach in Lahinch and the breeze off the ocean was steady and cool, and she wore my jacket over her pink cardigan, and the jeans she was wearing were tight and they were frayed a little at her ankles and she'd taken off her shoes and was carrying them dangled by their straps and there was a thin gold chain on her left ankle and a tattoo of a silhouetted bird in flight, and the sun was low to the horizon and the sky was red and the ebbing tide was drawing out along the sand and lines of breakers stretched away to the curvature of the earth and there was no one on the beach but us, and I put my arm around her and drew her into me and kissed her, and there was salt on her lips from the breeze, and I drew her down onto the sand, and she kissed me hard back, then soft, and her sweet salty lips barely moved and I wished I could have died there on the sand.

I think I would have liked this slim book better if the fourth section hadn't attempted to show the connections between these characters – if Ryan had presented this as three short stories and left the reader to figure out if there were any connections – but I was happy to have spent a couple of hours in Ryan's world. I'd give 3.5 stars if I could, and am rounding down against the other Man Booker Prize nominees that I've read for 2018.

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? *