alysontheblog

The novella The Ted Dreams first appeared as an eBook and is now included in Weldon’s selection of her own short stories: Mischief.  The novella is about Phyllis, a woman with psychic abilities; a luridly tragic past and spooky identical twins. Her husband Ted has died in his sleep but Phyllis has quickly moved on and is married to an attractive American who works for the mysterious Portal Inc.  The ‘Ted dreams’ are her disturbing dreams of Ted stumbling through a dark wood where he is apparently ‘stuck’.  As the pace of the narration picks up it becomes apparent that many of the protagonists are on weird new pharmaceuticals produced by Portal Inc – and that the drugs are being developed as part of a NSA backed subjugation and interrogation programme, mixed in with the desires of a rich elite to live forever – either through medical intervention or through opening the doors of perception and breaking down the barrier between life and death.  Portal Inc is interested in Phyllis and her psychic powers – and her paranoia builds as she realises just how wide the plot might be to lure her into their programme.  Not only that: Ted seems to be about to fulfil the elites’ hopes and move back into the realm of the living.  All crazy stuff, but Weldon is not crazy – she writes about grief,  lack of power, the pull of the unknown and the insecurity of women and their sexuality.  And Phyllis, no matter how insightful and unusual, ends up just making the best of her life, lying when she feels it prudent to do so and living where: “It is one of the rules of modern society that one does not joke with officials”.  And yet she is the one who let Ted through the portal …

Catherine Lacey was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and has taught Creative Writing at Columbia University in New York.  I have reviewed Nobody is Ever Missing here because it is set in New Zealand, and also because it is extraordinary.

Elyria walks out on her seemingly comfortable New York existence and gets on a plane to New Zealand.  She has an address a lauded writer gave her once – along with an invitation to come and stay with him on his Golden Bay farm.  But it isn’t really towards Werner, the author, she is moving – and oddly she acknowledges there is not that much to be running away from – apart from an odd form of nightmare violence from her husband, and a marriage that has deflated after the passing of the blush of shared grief that first brought Elyria and her husband together.

Elyria’s sister Ruby, a Korean adoptee, has committed suicide: Undoubtedly a pivotal episode in Elyria’s disassociation from life, but not the only cause of her self-absorption.  There is a hint of instability about her – but this isn’t a book about mental illness.  It is a novel about what it is to exist – about what our basic needs are – other people? love? memory? Elyria hitch-hikes around New Zealand meeting people and echoing back what she suspects they want from her.  Her two attempts at fitting in with others in their living spaces, although satisfactory for her, end in her being rejected by the incumbents.  She spends nights in bushes and garden sheds; there is a series of her rising early and leaving quickly.    Lacey’s writing is meandering:

“The sky was brightening slowly as I walked into Taupo, past a parking lot full of boats, down a high-way just east of the lake, and though I can sometimes think back and romanticize this moment, the sheer morning glow, the cloudless sunrise, I know that all I was really thinking about in that objectively beautiful moment was whether I’d even had a choice when it came to leaving my husband, and whether we are, like Ruby once said we were, just making decisions based on inner systems we have little to no control in creating – and I thought of that professor who became my husband and  thought of the sensation that came after he put a hand on my shoulder, a sensation that had turned me more human, put me in contact with what I think I was supposed to be feeling, and how it allowed me to be destroyed by the leaving of Ruby because being occasionally destroyed is, I think, a necessary part of the human experience.”

Despite her discovering the title of the book – no matter where you go there you are – at the end Elyria has almost reached the ‘bliss’ of non-existence: “No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake …”  But at this point she says she has ‘nothing to say anymore, not yet …”  And so in a way the book is about what happens after it has finished.  For Elyria at some point later tells us her story.  A thought-provoking and powerful read.

The Chimes is a debut novel set in a dystopian London where society has fallen back into medieval struggle.  The ‘Order’ has wiped, and continues to wipe, memory from the general population under the guise of paternalistic caring – violence and hatred arise from memory – and they have created a population of totally conforming or totally unaware ‘memorylost’ citizens.  There is nothing new in these ideas – nor in the presence of a non-conforming rebellious few – but what is really novel and a joy to read is the musical basis of Anna Smaill’s storytelling:  The regular ‘memoryloss’ sessions are caused by The Chimes of a giant musical instrument, and the narrative is peppered with musical terms – people move ‘lento’ or  ‘presto’, quietness is ‘tacet’, and talking of the times before the ‘allbreaking’ is ‘blasphony’.  I wasn’t surprised to find that the author is a violinist.  We find out about this confusing world and go on the journey of rebellion with a young orphan called Simon – who has to struggle to remember enough to string his thoughts together as he goes along, his remembering is initially aided by his sack of ‘objectmemories’.  Simon falls in with a band of ‘pactrunners’ who survive by retrieving pieces of ‘mettle’ sunk in the Thames mud, which the Order require to maintain the controlling instrument.   And he partners up with the band’s leader, Lucien, to take their hope of overturning the regime to the very heart of the Order – in Oxford.  The treasuring of past grievances is a destructive force, but the message of The Chimes is that to forcibly remove the underlying memories of grievance means also removing the complexity, beauty and sadness of the mess of human relationships and experiences.  Smaill’s writing is quite haunting at times: “Where’s the basso profundo for a dead baby, darling? What’s the discant for the mess of loss?”  I was quite anxious a few times reading this book, wondering if the author manages to maintain the world she has created through to a satisfying conclusion – she does – a great debut novel.

What a lovely book about choices and relationships and art and deep sea diving.  Quinn is an artist worried that her best creative days might have passed but unwilling to compromise her lifestyle.  And did she knowingly wreck Marcus’ marriage, or was that just the way things turned out?  Marcus, a vet who is starting to regret losing his daughter in the difficult break-up, is second guessing his own actions and motives – once while out running he was jabbed by a spikey branch ‘and thought, bizarrely, that he had been attacked by a swordsman’  – he becomes so obsessed he is missing what is right in front of him.  And Callum is an itinerant saturation diver – happiest beneath the ocean in the dark – but getting to an age where that is not a viable career and realising he is lonely.

The novel counts down – but is that to the next exhibition, the birth of a child or the breakup of a relationship?  The episodes unfold framed by the natural world, but a world that is not alien: a rock pool “could vary in size from a handkerchief to a beach towel.  Today it was the size of a pillow”.  There is a lovely recurring image of the swaying kelp forest off the coast where the novel is set, but nature is being abused; the characters are constantly picking up rubbish from the beach.  And at one point Callum is upset by seeing a shag caught in fishing line in a rock crevice.

The characters are ageing – Callum looking at the end of his career, Quinn faced with the increasing protocol of mounting exhibitions – her latest requiring an OSH strategy, and Marcus aware that his young daughter is now a young woman.  It is an achievement that you believe in Quinn and Marcus’ relationship despite only witnessing its low point.

The novel is a subtle exploration of the relationship between art and life – Quinn can’t ‘explain’ her art, just as she doesn’t understand how Marcus perceives it.  Callum wants people to actually experience what he loves about being underwater – and is amazed when Quinn captures it in a piece without that experience.  The unfolding of the theme of Quinn’s exhibition is brilliant – as the way we imagine the works alters depending on what Quinn is going through.  Reach is altogether a satisfying novel.

I so wanted to like this book!  McNaughton’s debut novel New Hokkaido is set in a counterfactual New Zealand where there was no bombing of Pearl Harbour, the US did not enter the Second World War, and the Japanese invaded and colonised New Zealand and then formed the Red Sun Alliance with the USSR, which after its victory over Germany had colonised most of Europe.  The book is set forty-five years after the occupation – in 1987, and the Red Sun Alliance stands in opposition to ‘free’ countries such as England, Australia and the United States.  The main character is Chris Ipswitch, an English teacher at the Wellington Language Academy.  This is a job of privilege, as any Kiwis lucky enough to have jobs under the oppressive regime are more usually employed as manual labourers.  Chris’ position is probably due to the fame of his ex-Sumo wrestler brother, professional name “Night Train”.  But Night Train has fallen into disgrace by marrying Japanese Chiyo, and even worse having a mixed race child, Sarah.  Chris becomes embroiled in helping his brother whose situation goes from bad to worse, and who ends up accused of murder.  In a parallel story Chris’ rugby team mates join a Free New Zealand movement bid for freedom by high jacking the Lyttleton Ferry and heading out for Australia.  On his quest Chris receives encouraging messages from his hero Johnny Lennon, who came to New Zealand on a Compassion ship during the English famine of 1946, and became a revolutionary musician before dying in police custody in 1972.  And he is also accompanied by the mysterious Hitomi Kurosawa, one of Chris’ students who is a ‘Settler’; a Japanese sent to New Zealand as punishment for some sort of crime in Japan. It is all great fun and an opportunity to explore colonisation and national identity.  McNaughton at times cleverly describes a New Zealand culture which has unwittingly absorbed some Japanese elements, and has nice details like the Irish (who remained neutral in the war) playing a New Zealand produce trade facilitation role between the Japanese and the English.  But on the whole the caricatures of the Japanese and New Zealand culture are so coarse that the novel doesn’t really go beyond the original conceit, it is possible that McNaughton is trying to say that gumboot wearing rugby players and ladies a plate Sheilas are as much a ‘nostalgic’ stereotype as samurai and geisha, but if so that wasn’t developed.  The murder mystery Chris sets out to solve is unsatisfactorily concluded and the high jacking sequence not really integrated into the story.  It is a pity New Hokkaido was such a good idea but a missed opportunity.

“There is a form of idleness that is not relaxation, but the expression of malaise, a disenchantment with life.”  Sheff has become disenchanted with his newspaper job and resigns with vague plans of travelling overseas.  His father is dying of cancer and his sister persuades Sheff to travel with her to the family home in Central Otago to visit their father before he dies.  We find out there is a gentle but searing tragedy in Sheff’s recent past that has caused the breakup of his marriage.  Sheff is numb but angry, and prone to endless pathetic mishaps.  His trip ‘home’ becomes an observation on family relationships, on coming to terms with grief and on the situating of a person in his own life when that life has taken an unexpected and baffling turn.  In an extraordinarily gentle way we learn of Sheff’s tragedy, his childhood and of the independent lives of his parents, as Sheff finally realises they are their own people and not just adjuncts to his own life.  There are the quite stilted even formal conversations between Sheff and his sister, and the increasingly casual exchanges between him and one of the rural vets, an old school friend of his sisters’ and bridge mate of his mother’s, to whom he is attracted.  In a way it is a novel about growing up, about learning that you don’t always get what you want and that living a good life is only partly being able to chart your own course, it is also being open to what you are presented with.  None of Sheff’s tragedies are unique or ‘momentous’, not like those of a stranger he has a chance conversation with at one point, whose son is bipolar, or the young man at a supermarket afflicted with chronic vomiting.  But Sheff’s story makes you realise that all loss, no matter how commonly experienced, does have a uniqueness that is deserving of total observation and respect.  Carnival Sky is a beautiful book.