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A memoir, and a book about writing a book, about the future of books, about women in books, about a movie of a book, about selling books – Tinderbox is all of these and is wonderful!  Dunn takes us through her experiences of trying to write a novel (based on Fahrenheit 451: “a searing feminist rewrite of Bradbury’s classic”) while living through a marriage breakup, and her time working for the Borders book chain, both in the UK and in New Zealand, which in turn is going down the economic gurgler.

Tinderbox is funny and sad – Dunn is in the doldrums most of the time, waiting for her marriage to end, for her job to disappear, for her novel to complete itself, for the end of the world as we know it: “Bradbury was prescient but not quite so prescient as to predict global warming, recycling and the imminent extinction of the bumble bee.”  She takes a job at Borders thinking it will help her writing, but the mass production and marketing of merchandise has the opposite effect: “I know what temperature books burn at. Half price.”

Dunn is well aware how much of a literary snob she is – she is happy watching Big Brother and America’s Next Top Model on TV, but when it comes to books she rails against the flooding of the book market with “cheap banality” – at one point sitting on the loo “She sighed, there were so many books in the world.  Too many” and used a page of Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper as toilet paper.  She has it in for poor Picoult: “Jodi writes books the way other people bake muffins.”

Tinderbox is full of references to heat and fire: Dunn describes her laptop as “my tinderbox”, after serving a customer: “Clearly the girl with the dragon tattoo was smoking”, “My anger erupted into flames” etc, etc.  Dunn must have been delighted that Amazon’s e-book reader is branded a Kindle!  And she puts the beginning of the literary apocalypse with the arrival of the Kindle: but the apocalypse isn’t the “easy to imagine you would resist” Bradbury book burning, it is “A future where books [are] mass marketed and turned into multi-million dollar films and merchandise.”

Writing to a NaNoWriMo word-count-per-day deadline, and under the threat of closure of the Borders stores, Dunn becomes obsessed with Truffaut’s movie version of Fahrenheit 451.  Truffaut was the proposer of the auteur theory of filmmaking – that the director is the author of the ‘work’ – and Dunn sympathises with the problems Truffaut encountered during the making of Fahrenheit 451, and also ponders his treatment of women characters, as she does Bradbury’s “The Mildred in my head just didn’t sound that stupid.”  She also thinks about the serendipity of creation – Truffaut not getting his ideal cast, Bradbury darting up to the stacks of the UCLA Library for random quotes, and Dunn trolling through websites and online fora for bits to put in her novel: “Anything to help my word count.”

The mass NaNoWriMo experience makes Dunn lazy, knowing she should be “providing unique salient details that would bring the world of my novel to life. Unfortunately I couldn’t be bothered.”  And Tinderbox has some pretty clunky puns in it, she almost longingly wonders if “Maybe in the future it was also illegal to write.”  And when copyright problems loom for her adaptation of Bradbury’s novel, she opts instead to tell the story of her attempts to write it – “‘Yes, it is a bit meta,’ I reached up and touched my face, cheek burning. Time for another apology. ‘That’s the last thing we need,’ I said.”

In Tinderbox, Dunn, as we all do, struggles a bit to find the positive – “Yet I like to think I stand for freedom of speech. At least I stand in line for it.”  At one point she admires a poem by Matthew Arnold, “The poem described the withdrawal of religious faith but I believed in the power of literature and the tide had gone out on that too.”  She applauds the flattening line on the sale of e-books “They are, after all, still a bit shit.”  And it was fitting that I read Tinderbox in a Kindle app – and it was a bit shit, with lots of typos and layout errors.  But I loved it, and don’t believe we have all been reduced to “… grazing the written word”.  Tinderbox may not have ended up “a searing feminist rewrite of Bradbury’s classic”, but it is a flaming good read!

A group of people in Paris in 2014/15, all literary, all quite objectionable, meander round each other, aloof from events around them.

Max Jackson is a Kiwi, although I doubt he would ever describe himself as such – the thought of his pairing with a New Zealand wife is the source of some amusement to him and his French wife, Louise.  Louise has banished Max to the lower floor of their house, while she and the children stay aloft – not surprising really, given his tendency to mansplain to women, and ponder that a woman’s breasts “… must be the broadly rounded kind, not pointy”.  She keeps in touch though – prowling around his floor when he’s not there, sniffing his sheets.  What is surprising is that Sylvie, a new colleague of Max’s at the Sorbonne Nouvelle where he lectures, would be attracted to him – he is particularly condescending towards her, but then Sylvie rather prefers him when “he recovers some of his authority”, just as what she likes most about her German lover, Bertholdt, is his “SS manner”.

Then there is Helen White, a young English student at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, who read an early poem of Max’s (who has long since stopped writing poetry) and liked it immensely – and who arrives at his office to say she is bipolar and she is going to get him to start writing poetry again: “Where was the youthful Max’s soul hiding? She would make it her project to find it, to bring it out”.  And Max, whilst enamoured of colleague Sylvie, seems to think it is quite acceptable to engage in a relationship with a vulnerable student, “He entertained himself by thinking of her as a muse.”  At the end of one of his lectures he does a bit of a rave about Nabokov, so maybe he thinks he is being faithful to the ‘literast’ tradition.

All the characters in this novel are bright and erudite, and quip away to each other.  Both Max and Louise are working on books, his is a small volume of literary criticism, hers a volume on Flaubert, the latter volume being destined for greatness: Louise is trying to spark a renaissance of word crafting and sculpting in literature, and a move away from the New Wave of authors who favour obscurity, thus leaving the reader room for creativity.  And this crafting of material is probably what this novel is about – how people’s lives can become overly constructed and lack spontaneity and engagement.  Helen is a devotee of Gurdjieff, who believed that ordinary lives were a ‘sleep’ and that one had to work at ‘wakefulness’, creating a soul along the way.  Sylvie meets another man towards the end of the novel, Lenny, and sees him as a project: “She was going to have to train him, teach him how to dress stylishly but less formally, and to stop perfuming himself.”  All the characters are using each other in some way for their own ends.  At one point, the ‘necessary angel’ of the title is used to describe both Helen and Sylvie in relation to Max, but also to describe the drugs that Helen relies on: “‘I like to be brilliant,’ she said, ‘but it’s better to be sane’.”

For the characters in The necessary angel, their world has become so removed behind words that French and world politics are just a backdrop.  Max scans the Guardian Weekly and the New Zealand Herald, “reads the world telling its own story, getting on with the ‘now’ of everything …”, reads of the growing gap between rich and poor, the heightening unrest around the globe, but: ”Nothing-to-be-Done, alas!”  The book is set in turbulent political times, there are scandals in French politics, right ascendancy, the Ebola crisis, ISIS public beheadings and the Charlie Hebdo attacks.  Max is separated from his world not only by his choice of work and social circle, he feels himself apart from his French associates, an unbridgeable language gap arising from his having learned French from written not heard words.  At the beginning of the novel there is an odd unnecessary note about most of the conversations being in French – when it is made very clear throughout the novel whether the characters are speaking French or English.  But maybe this note is to emphasise this additional barrier to engagement for Max?

Max and Sylvie are working together organising a small conference on World War One writers, as part of the centennial commemorations.  But even with this there is a feeling of fatigue, even before commemorations begin: “Let’s not be tired in advance”, advises Sylvie.  By the end of the novel, Max is calling the Great War Wobbly Wobbly One.  Sylvie puts this ennui and apathy down to our knowledge of the ‘Death of Everything’, the forecast end of the universe that was not a concept for previous artists and philosophers.  “In this society at this time almost everything was waste – works of art, music, reading and talking about novels and poems, and, perhaps especially, opera. Everything we do, she thought, was at the expense of the future and the poor.”  We do fleetingly glimpse ‘the poor’ in this novel – in the form of an “old harridan”, to whom Max thrusts 20 Euros to keep her off his property.

Much of the writing in The necessary angel is lovely. But some is quite flat: Louise. “Maybe the cat was just a cat – the one that in English ‘sat on the mat’” or odd: “He said it as if preparing her for the worse that was not to come.” And sometimes I don’t think Stead has quite captured the female voice:

“Her period had come and it was better that she did not have to tell him she was pregnant, which might have upset him. Pregnancy would have been an interesting experience – she had quite liked the idea; but they said it hurt a lot giving birth; and after that you would be stuck with a baby, like a big, noisy doll, getting bigger all the time, and before long walking and talking and probably telling you off – and perhaps even falling into the canal. No, she would be more careful from now on. Fucks for sure, but with care and a condom.”

There is reference in the novel to the power of the written word, not just the ability to trouble the “Christian–atheist mind”, but an accidental and dangerous power – a line is drawn between Houellebecq’s Submission and the Charlie Hebdo attack, and Houellebecq is described as having ‘taken refuge somewhere in rural France” after the attacks.  But, despite the characters’ vast knowledge in The necessary angel, there is a vacuum of commitment on all fronts, e.g. when Sylvie is asked about her religion: “‘Oh yes, I’m Catholic’, she said. And then, ‘Regrettably’.”  There is a piece of art central to the story, interestingly having familial not official proof of provenance, and the fate of this work, purposely kept private and not for public display, is how the novel ends.  It is a clever ending and oddly satisfying, but is of the ‘obscure, leaving the reader room for creativity’ type.  As a reader, I was not sure what ideas this novel left me with: That the Parisian literary world has become totally removed from the ‘real’ world?  That the postmodernist West is ill equipped to face current threats?  That reading might encourage empathy but literary criticism does the opposite?  Perhaps all of these.  Read The necessary angel and see what you think.

Gabriel’s Bay is full of stories, and stories within stories, with everything beautifully woven together.  Gabriel’s Bay is a small New Zealand coastal town with difficult access, economic problems and a small, varied population.  As we read, we get to know many of the inhabitants of the town, as well as new-comer Kerry (who has arrived from the UK to take up a job he secured via the Internet), and an overweight dog, King.  We are rewarded with a classic romance (featuring Kerry and solo Mum, Sidney); descriptions of many relationships, both marital and familial, some happy, some unhappy, and some disastrous; we enjoy the story of an ageing GP who is facing retirement, but who will be hard to replace, and his staunch receptionist who is on the case; and read a heart-breaking tale of child neglect; and worry about a group of friends who have grown up together, but who are starting to drift apart; and, we recognise small town politics and group dynamics when Kerry gets an idea of how to solve the lack of tourist trade in Gabriel’s Bay.  The narrative point of view moves between the characters, and the many voices are nuanced, convincing and often very funny.  Poor Bernard’s “to be fair”, “to be fair” – a bookish man who lives inside his head and fails to appreciate the world around him. The voice of little Madison: “… so Madison packed the book in her bag, and headed outside, being sure to close the front door quietly.  She walked towards the trees, looking forward to sitting down and reading about a world where everything worked out right.”  And the voice of Mac, the doctor’s receptionist who worries about her husband’s health and her own future.  And many, many more. The plotting is great, along with the stories there is a mystery unfolding, which is neatly resolved.  The only disappointing thing for me was that it finished – I had become so involved with the characters and their concerns that I was sad to leave Gabriel’s Bay.  Highly recommended.

Painted is a creepy slow burn piece of horror writing, putting scenarios in your head that play out long after you have finished reading. 

At the start of the novel, you find out an artist has passed away and left specific instructions as to the disposal of his vast art collection – instructions which his lawyer has no intention of following. So, when an appraisal company is engaged and a young art appraiser, Anita, is the first of a team to arrive at the remote country pile, the reader already has amorphous concerns for her well-being.

Anita is haunted by a traumatic incident in her past, and is hyper-sensitive to male intentions. When the estate’s lawyer arrives to oversee her work, Anita is more concerned with his presence than with the odd happenings of which the reader is slowly becoming aware.  For the characters, the Gothic setting and winter storms make strange noises and moving objects easy to explain away.  And when they become aware of peculiar things happening to some of the paintings in the house, their first reaction is to accuse each other.

When more appraisers arrive, and people start to go missing, the action and the suspicions of the characters start to ramp up.  Meanwhile, the reader is trying to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, including the little they learn of past goings on in the house, information given by a neighbouring farmer.  Added to this are some disturbing developments in the house that are far from supernatural.

McKenzie plays with three familiar tropes: belief that an image of a person captures something of their essence, that the eyes are the windows to the soul – and the common rituals of ‘opening of the eyes’ of statuary, and the thought that some personal items can hold power over the owner.  These familiar elements make the supernatural plot of Painted feel graspable.  And as the reader has access to the goings on of both the natural and supernatural characters, the story is nicely filled in.  And the ending not expected at all.  A good spooky read.