Kiss It Goodbye

Many Roads through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature

Collected and edited by Shyam Selvadurai

Three languages are spoken in contemporary Sri Lanka, and as far as I know this is the first serious attempt ever made to present an anthology of modern writing in all of them. Since few people can read with equal facility in English, Sinhala and Tamil, the anthologist has fixed on one language for his book and presented his chosen examples from the other two in translation. The language he has chosen is English, which is the most sensible choice as it is the anthologist’s own. Not that he is unfamiliar with the other two, since his father is Tamil and his mother Sinhalese – but they, like him, are members of the tiny post-colonial elite that dominated social, political and cultural life in my country until a generation or so ago, and whose preferred language was English.

       It is a pity that a choice had to be made, though, because when you present works in translation side by side with works in their original tongue, the former are likely to suffer by comparison. In this collection, there is a perceptible difference in quality and effect between the best of the selected English works and the best (as I judge them) of those translated from the other two languages.

       This, however, is not due merely to shortcomings in translation. In much of the Sinhala and Tamil prose collected here, the authors’ earnest efforts to internalize and successfully deploy the modes of a foreign, relatively unfamiliar art form are at times all too apparent. To put it bluntly, these stories and poems appear to be the work of apprentice writers who have not quite mastered their craft.

Lost in translation?

The struggle is exemplified in the selected excerpt from Uprooted, Lakshmi de Silva’s translation of Martin Wickramasinghe’s seminal Sinhala novel, Gamperaliya, which is set in the early twentieth century. Gamperaliya deals with the difficulties faced by Sinhalese villagers – more correctly, members of the rural Sinhalese middle class – whose relationship to their roots, and hence to one another, is being altered by modernity and citification. It’s meant to be compelling psychosocial drama, but I’m sorry to say it plods. The ‘action’ consists mainly of a series of conversations between people who can’t really express themselves to one another due to social taboos and their own confusion. Their oblique, laconic exchanges are filled with things unsaid – which, outside the quotation marks, the author tells us about in far too much detail.

       This, according to most Western notions, is bad writing: showing too little, telling too much. It miniaturizes the work, turning it into a puppet-theatre overshadowed by the looming shape of the string-pulling author. I suppose the model here was Dostoevsky, and particularly The Brothers Karamazov, but the result reads more like some Soviet propaganda-novel in which Marxist philosophy and Party policies are turned into simplistic, allegorical fables for the semiliterate.

       If that comparison seems rude to you, consider this one: Gamperaliya, in this translation at least, reminded me of one of those doleful old Sinhala movies in which the characters spend most of the time staring glumly into space, their silence broken by an occasional despairing expostulation, while ominous music plays in the background, slightly out of tune. Gamperaliya antedates those movies and was widely imitated, so it is hard to avoid the suspicion that they are examples of its influence.

       Admittedly it is unfair to apply, to a novel like Gamperaliya, the same criteria one would use to judge a literary novel published in Japanese, French, Russian or English. These are languages in which novels have been written for centuries. Martin Wickramasinghe was not the first successful Sinhala novelist but the first, perhaps, whose works aspired to the condition of literature. To compare him with Dostoevsky, as I have done, is unkind; to judge him in relation to some of his literary contemporaries, such as Joyce or Nabokov, would be downright cruel. This pioneer of the Sinhala novel was still working through the basics of fiction-writing at the time Gamperaliya was published. He had no local models to help him; as Mr Selvadurai would say, he was finding his own road through Paradise. No shame in that.

Going through Hell

There are a total of sixty items in this anthology and I certainly do not propose to review them all. In critical terms, what applies to Gamperaliya, the most distinguished work appearing here, applies to all the other translations from Sinhala and Tamil. Each has its aesthetic merits and shortcomings, but these are nearly always overshadowed by problems of a technical kind, translation itself being only the most common. It is hard to judge them as art because of this.

        Still, ‘Among the Hills’, A.M.S Ramiah’s insightful short story about a tea plantation worker, comes through as distressingly authentic – a glimpse into a world of people so humble and hopeless that even self-respect is a luxury beyond their means. Depressing authenticity is also the hallmark of Liyanage Amarakeerthi’s ‘The Hour When the Moon Weeps’, a story in which all the violence and viciousness of the 1980s seems to be distilled. But the narrative is confused and fragmented, the effect dissipates and all is lost.

       The poetry is better, I suppose; it’s hard to tell, because poetry suffers translation even less willingly than prose. You can judge the imagery, perhaps. There are some striking images to be found here, but as I found it impossible to respond to these works as poetry, I will say nothing about them except that I liked one, The Water Buffalo by Siri Gunasinghe, for its brutal interrogation-room humour.

       Whether poetry or prose, most of the Sinhala and Tamil works in this anthology deal with horrible things: war, violence, rape, torture and murder. Since most of them were written during a period when the country seemed bent on tearing itself to bits – that is to say, between 1956 and 2009 – this comes as no surprise. People write what they know, and what the people of Sri Lanka have mostly known for half a century are political, ethnic and religious violence, youth revolt, civil war, terrorism by the State and its opponents, and a parade of corrupt, inept rulers. It’s all here. By the time one has turned the last page on the twelfth or so account of abduction, rape, torture or death, one has had more than enough. Yet the hits – so to speak – just keep on coming. The people in these stories and poems aren’t finding ‘many roads through Paradise’; they’re going through Hell.

War, sex and cricket

What a relief, then, to find that the English selections are far more varied in subject-matter and tone, as well as somewhat higher in average quality. Of course, there’s still plenty of war-violence and war-woe around: Ayathurai Santhan describes the plight of Tamil refugees tossed back and forth like shuttlecocks between the LTTE and the Indian Peacekeeping Force, Amina Hussein’s ‘Guava Green and Mango Ripe’ captures a Colombo social worker’s numbed incomprehension as she travels through the blasted landscape of a former war zone, and even that gentlest of writers, Romesh Gunesekera, manages to come up with a story in which civil conflict and violence, from a distance, ruin a painstakingly-built refuge and spoil a friendship. Allusive and elegiacally written in the author’s characteristic style, the subtlety of ‘A House in the Country’ is somewhat lost amid the cries of agony and wails of grief rising from its companion pieces. That, sadly, seems to be the fate to which the self-effacing Mr Gunesekera is ever destined.

       Still, it’s not all gloom and doom. The joyous excerpt from Carl Muller’s The Jam Fruit Tree is far and away the best thing in this anthology. Here, for once, is an author in full control of his craft – Mr Muller’s prose is highly spiced but beautifully judged, and the polymorphous sex-obsession of his characters is truer to life than most of his readers will admit.

       I wish I could say that the extract from Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman gave me as much pleasure, but I’m afraid it didn’t. I regard Chinaman – a story about cricket and about Sri Lanka – as the first or perhaps the second English novel of real literary merit ever to have been written by a Sri Lankan who actually lives here. But the chosen excerpt is more or a less a prologue and doesn’t give the full flavour of the book. Which I encourage you to buy and read.

       Speaking of residence and non-residence, Mr Selvadurai has chosen to include a few authors, like Michael Ondaatje and Michelle de Kretser, who don’t live here and have never had novels published in Sri Lanka. Mr Ondaatje is, of course, world-famous. The piece by him here, an episode from The Cat’s Table, is typical of his work. Ms de Kretser is represented by a chapter or so from her novel The Hamilton Case, which is just what you might expect – a neat, well-researched assemblage of conventional tropes. What was it about? I forget. Why are these people even in this book? They’re not Sri Lankan writers, they’re established international authors with Sri Lankan connexions, who made their reputations abroad before they were ever heard of by the reading public here.

       Far better than either of these efforts was ‘The Rag’ by Nihal de Silva. This ‘toxic portrait of class rage turned outward and inward’, as Mr Selvadurai introduces it, describes the ordeal that Sri Lankan university freshmen are subjected to by senior students during their induction period. It is no good-humoured rag they endure but a Cultural Revolution-style brainwashing in which both physical and psychological violence are employed to break the freshers’ confidence and resistance before re-educating them in the narrative of race and class oppression that informs the darker side of Sinhalese nationalism. De Silva’s story is true to life, compelling and at times revolting. It is also very well told, and it got under my skin.

       Two other prose works, both short stories, are worth a mention: ‘No State, No Dog’ by C. Velupillai describes the repatriation of a Tamil plantation worker to India (and the sad fate of his dog), while ‘The Mission’ by S.D.V. Perera is a story of Christian duty done amid the violence of war that encourages us believe that even when we are at our worst, our humanity need not desert us.

       Moving on to the English poetry in the anthology, we find the violence and woe once more in ample supply: trauma is trilingual. Ashley Halpe and Yasmine Gooneratne give it to us in high intellectual style, Vivimarie Vanderpoorten rubs it in while feigning dispassion and Kamala Wijeratne should have read a few (hundred) more poems before setting herself to write one. But there are also works by Jean Arasanayagam and Regi Siriwardene that say insightful, clever things about our colonial inheritance, and one poem of genuinely remarkable quality, At What Dark Point by Anne Ranasinghe. Ms Ranasinghe is an established poet, but only Sri Lankan by marriage; she brings her own darkness, the long shadow of the Holocaust, along with her.

What’s missing?
Anyone who reads Sri Lankan literature will have their own candidates for an anthology of this kind, so make up your own list. 
       I haven’t really thought about my own. I suppose I would have liked to see a bit of Mr Selvadurai’s own work in the book, but I applaud his modesty in not putting any in. The one really grievous lacuna is the hijack scene from David Blacker’s action novel A Cause Untrue. That should definitely have been in. Mr Blacker may not pretend to high art, but the way he builds and paces the tension in this scene could teach many more self-consciously literary writers a thing or two about technique.

★

A confession before I close. Although this is by some distance the longest book review I have ever written, I did not actually read the whole of Many Roads through Paradise. There were several pieces I could not finish because they were so depressing or unpleasant I could not bear to go on. A few I cast aside because they weren’t worth my while. To Shyam Selvadurai’s credit, there were relatively few of the latter: out of the thin unpromising gruel of modern Sri Lankan writing, he has managed to pick out the choicer morsels. They are not on the whole very tasty but that is not his fault, unless you think he should have chosen another country to anthologize.
       The same goes, I suppose, for the violence and woe. An anthologist must work with what is available. The sad truth is that, despite its balmy climate, heart-lifting beauty and cultural diversity, modern Sri Lanka is anything but a paradise. Things have got better since the war ended and the man who won it and then lost himself the peace was voted out of office, but for two whole generations this was, to be frank, a bloody miserable country to be a native of, and dangerous to boot. 

       Such seems to be the fate of so many of the world’s loveliest places. The history and literature of modern Sri Lanka amply bear out that old, cynical lyric from 'The Last Resort’: call someplace Paradise, kiss it goodbye.

Laughing and Biting Your Nails

Lionel Asbo
by Martin Amis

Martin Amis’s has been my favourite auctorial voice ever since I discovered it in my late teens. That was a very long time ago, and although I have read many great writers since then, his style has, for me, a unique appeal. In fact, I’ve had the devil’s own job to keep from unconsciously aping it in my own writing.

Lionel Asbo is very much in that style: a kind of Dead Babies for the Noughties, but much better. Its eponymous central character (no hero, he) is a kind of super-chav, in his early twenties at the beginning of the book, whose motto is Never Learn. He is an unsuccessful receiver of stolen goods and a debt-collector of the intimidatory kind, constantly in and out of prison, a place he likes to be because ‘in prison you know where you are.’ He prefers porn to real women, gives his pitbulls Tabasco-sauce-drenched steaks and Special Brew hangovers to make them even more ferocious, and enjoys beating the living shit out of people. He has a nephew, Desmond Pepperdine, who, unbeknownst to him, is having sex with his — Lionel's — mother Grace. Yes, that’s right: Desmond is having sex with his own grandmother (and writing to an agony aunt for advice about it).

In spite of this little peccadillo, Desmond is the actual hero of Lionel Asbo, a lad of mixed race and no prospects who is nevertheless trying to make the best of the terrible cards Fate has dealt him. He manages to get a place at university, earns his degree, falls in love with a girl of similar background and outlook, gets married and gets a job as a journalist, has a baby. None of this meets with the approval of Lionel, who has been taking care of Desmond (his method being a mixture of affectionate bullying and benign neglect) ever since his mother, Lionel’s sister Cilla, died, and who is disappointed at such genteel aspirations in a nephew.

Grace, incidentally, is thirty-nine years old, more or less wrecked and not long for this world. These people all live in a hideous tower-block town called Diston, which is a blighted vertical slum where girls get pregnant at age twelve and people rarely live to see their fiftieth year.

One day, while in jail, Lionel discovers that he has won a huge sum of money in a lottery. Over the next few years, he becomes a media celebrity, Lionel the Lotto Lout, living out the life of his proletarian, scopeless fantasies. Meanwhile, Desmond is making his way in the world with considerable struggle, terrified all the while that Lionel will find out about his fling with Grace and have his pitbulls tear him limb from limb.

Desmond survives to the end of the book, but not without all sorts of other horrifically, hysterically funny things happening: some to him, some to other people, but most to Lionel. Like certain other works in the oeuvre of Martin Amis, such as Money and Dead Babies, this is a book your read while simultaneously gasping with shock and howling with laughter. The ending is masterly — Amis generates almost unbearable tension out of the most mundane elements, an absolutely bravura performance. Literary novelists are often unreliable plotters, but the plot of Lionel Asbo is as brilliantly executed as the set-pieces. After a series of recent disappointments, this is the vintage Mart, uncorked yet again. Have a drink with me.

Flying in His Underpants

Biggles Fails to Return

By Capt. W.E. Johns

It is 1942, and Biggles has vanished on a secret mission in Monaco. Algy, Ginger and Bertie set off to look for him, but without the boss to keep them in line they soon go off the rails, strumming guitars, swilling wine and dallying, believe it or not, with women. Ginger falls in love with a girl who gives him shelter, while Algy stalks a woman in a blue shawl for miles and miles. Bertie reveals unsuspected musical abilities as well as an entirely believable familiarity with pre-war Monegasque society. All seems lost, but then Biggles appears, all wet and hunky, reminds them of what they’ve been missing by doing some ace flying in his underpants, and they return to England firm friends again. Really, really firm friends.

Oh, all right. The four stars are contextual, of course, but this really is one of the best Biggles books. There are the usual implausible coincidences, impossibly lucky escapes and a positive Olympus of deorum ex machina, but it also contains affectionate and knowledgeable descriptions of Monaco and the surrounding Alpes Maritimes (Johns was always at his best as a writer when describing scenery, particularly desolate places) and yes, there are actually women participating in the story as characters. The French setting seems to have obliged Biggles and crew to deviate from their usual Muscular Christian code of conduct. I loved the Biggles books as a small boy and wanted to see how they held up when read as an adult. Mostly they don’t, but I actually enjoyed this one more than I did as a child.

Low-Water Mark

The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

I'm sorry to say I could not finish this. I got about a third of the way through.

I greatly enjoyed The Calcutta Chromosome and Sea of Poppies and have liked other books by this author, some more and others less, but this was unbearable. The setting is squalid and hellish, an island half-drowned in the mud of the Ganges delta. The characters did not interest me, and a developing romance between an Indian-American marine biologist and a Bengali fisherman seemed preposterously unlikely, although in fairness I didn't read far enough to see whether they actually got together. The author keeps harping on Bengali grievances, which are now becoming something of a pedal point in all his writing; frankly, I think it's time he took his foot off that particular pedal.

Oh, it has river-dolphins in it. I've just finished editing a book on Indian Ocean cetaceans, which means I'm in the throes of a fading but still-strong professional fascination with whales and dolphins. For all that, however, Ghosh still managed to bore me with his.

A Nasty Piece of Work

The Sense of an Ending

by Julian Barnes

Ah, the unreliable narrator. Almost de rigeur in highbrow contemporary fiction these days, it seems. Barnes’s narrator in The Sense of an Ending actually warns us on Page One that he’s unreliable. It turns out he’s right—not because he means to lie to us but, more interestingly, because he’s emotionally stunted, hopelessly self-centred, and blind to the characters and needs of people around him. Due to these (rather common) handicaps he perceives falsely, acts inappropriately, and reports inaccurately. He can’t help himself. He is also a rather dull person, of no great utility to anyone, and a nasty piece of work in a petty, unprofitable sort of way. The book is about him coming to realise all this, much too late in life to do anything about it.
     If reading about such a mediocrity sounds like an attractive proposition to you, you will like this book. But what if it doesn’t?
     It happens that this reviewer is a middle-aged man facing retirement with many hopes unrealised and ambitions unfulfilled. He was thus easily able to comprehend and appreciate the numerous insights appropriate to such a condition (which is also that of the narrator, Tony) that fill this book. They ring true—laceratingly so at times. Reading them was not exactly enjoyable, but there was a kind of satisfaction in it.
     Apart from the dubious pleasure of reading unpleasant home-truths, the other main diversion on offer in this book is the challenge of figuring out the truth of the tale Tony tells us. Not the literal details of the plot, but the emotional truth about the characters and their relationships to one another. It’s not really that hard. If (forewarned by Tony) one reads with care from the beginning and takes nothing for granted, one is likely to reach the end of the book with a pretty clear picture of what is going on, and the final revelation, even if not guessed beforehand, is hardly a great surprise.
     The Sense of an Ending is beautifully written, very readable and all too true to life. However, it is a nasty book about a foolish, cowardly, not-very-nice man whom Life punishes in a cursory but very effective way simply by happening to other people. Others may like this kind of thing, but I have to say it isn’t really my cup of tea.

High-Class Confectionery

Sweet Tooth

by Ian McEwan

I think this must be what the critics call a tour de force.
     Ian McEwan dines at the high table of contemporary English authorship. You expect his stuff to be good, and he rarely disappoints. He exhibits all the conventional auctorial virtues. His observant, insightful psychology is second to none. If he has a weakness, it is that his writing is so absorbing and instantly digestible that you devour it unreflectingly and may find it hard to remember anything about the plot or the characters afterwards. In other words, he’s the ultimate ‘good reads’ author – so good you may fail to notice his artistry.
     Sweet Tooth is a good read, to say the least. Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’)—Anglican bishop’s daughter, Cambridge maths graduate, MI5 employee and self-acknowledged beauty—is sent off to recruit T.H. Haley—redbrick university lecturer, writer of incisive essays and short fiction, reputedly hostile to Communism and the Soviets—into a small stable of authors it intends to support as a counterweight to the dominance of left-wing thought in Western cultural circles (the year is 1973). The support is extended through a dummy foundation and the authors don’t know they’re being used.
     Naturally, Serena falls in love with her target, and complications follow.
     Espionage, love, sex, betrayal, mystery, an artful intermingling of real life with fiction—Sweet Tooth has it all. But there is more to it than a mere rearrangement of well-loved fictional themes. McEwan, the master of the good read, has taken on the challenge of writing a novel that experiments in a postmodern way with the conventions of fiction. In other words, he has taken on the challenge of making a good read out of the kind of literary showing-off that usually results in a very bad read.
     And he has succeeded brilliantly. Sweet Tooth reads just like any other Ian McEwan novel—engaging, easy to swallow, so true to life that disbelief is not so much suspended as abandoned altogether on the very first page. The story is never compromised, never fails to entertain and make you want to read on to find out what happens next. There is not the faintest hint that anything highbrow and postmodern is happening.
     Oh, but it is. The literary experiment is hidden, as Americans say, in plain sight. McEwan leaves plenty of hints in the text to let suspicious readers know something is up. For example, when Serena and her lover are discussing books, we get this:

 Without leaving the chair he stretched forward and picked up John Fowles’s The Magus, and said he admired parts of that, as well as all of The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn’t possible to recreate life on the page without tricks.’

Sweet Tooth features a manipulated reality like the one in The Magus and a readers’ choice of endings like The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It also has an unreliable narrator (whose identity, too, may not be the one we are given) and sundry other postmodern auctorial tricks. However, none of these are apparent to the reader until the end of the book. And when they are revealed, the result is not the usual disappointment – a breaking of what Serena, a voracious reader of novels herself, would call ‘the contract between the writer and the reader’. It actually redoubles the reader’s pleasure in the book, making it an even better read than it was before. And this, I think, is unique. I've never read an ‘experimental’ work that fully satisfied the terms of that contract before. In fact, it works so brilliantly that today, three days after I finished Sweet Tooth, I keep looking at it and wishing there was some of it still left to read.
     What an absolutely marvellous book this is.

A Devil’s Curate’s Egg

The Portable Atheist
by Christopher Hitchens

Notwithstanding the presence of Omar Khayyam, Boswell and Mark Twain, this anthology is not light reading. On the contrary, it is serious stuff, and at times very heavy going.

The tone is set in the Introduction, from which Hitchens’ admirably waspish humour is curiously absent. Serious, indeed grave, it takes thirteen pages to explain just why the anthologist believes religion is wicked and needs to be put down. There is little in it I did not agree with; but sadly, there is also little in it that Hitchens has not said before, and said better, in God is Not Great and some of his other writings. It was dull reading, I'm sorry to say, and entirely failed to whet my appetite for the selections to follow.

These selections seem to be arranged chronologically, or mostly so. Hitchens must have considered Epicurus’ famous summation of theodicy too well-known to warrant inclusion, so we begin with an excerpt from Lucretius, in plodding blank verse which this reader, at least, was unable to finish. Next we are treated – O blessed relief – to a few verses from the Rubaiyat; but immediately afterwards one is invited to plough through closely-argued excerpts from Hobbes, Spinoza, George Eliot and David Hume: all good stuff, but hardly what one would call plain sailing.

Boswell's account of the death of Hume (a sanguine unbeliever to the last) and a refutation of deism by Shelley leaven the transition from the Enlightenment to the modern era; but once arrived, we immediately stumble over a selection from Marx’s ‘Contributions to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right’ – mere word salad, effectively meaningless apart from that famous remark about the ‘opium of the people’. I suppose it was put in out of sentiment, because Hitchens was once a Marxist; there can be no other excuse for it in an otherwise intelligent book.

But at least things from then on get less intensely philosophical. There are reader-friendly contributions from the likes of Anatole France, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and H.L. Mencken. I liked especially the pieces by Freud, Bertrand Russell and Martin Gardner here included, as well as two poems by Philip Larkin: ‘Church Going’ and the familiar (though none the less blunt, brave and terrifying for that) ‘Aubade’.

Moving on to more contemporary writings, we have Carl Sagan’s famous ‘The Demon-Haunted World’, along with cogent and readable pieces by A.J. Ayer, Richard Dawkins, Elizabeth Anderson and Steven Weinberg. I particularly enjoyed the last, and was equally gratified to re-read a favourite piece of auctorial showing-off by John Updike, taken from his novel Roger's Version. However, the selections from Daniel Dennett (‘Thank Goodness’ and ‘A Working Definition of Religion’ from Breaking the Spell) are not the best examples of his writing that I have read; J.L. Mackie’s ‘Conclusions and Implications’ is impenetrable; Ian McEwan’s ‘End of the World Blues’ is rather affectless and dull; and Michael Shermer’s ‘Genesis Revisited’ is just plain silly.

Things really perk up, though, toward the end of the book. Salman Rushdie’s ‘Imagine There’s No Heaven’ is terrible – pontificatory and embarrassingly, dad-dancingly out of touch – but this is the only hurdle in the way of a brilliant gallop to the finish-line. Most of the horsepower is deployed in two essays by a Muslim ‘apostate’ going under the pen-name of Ibn Warraq: ‘The Koran’ and ‘The Totalitarian Nature of Islam’. The first makes mincemeat out of various arguments propounded in support of claims that the Koran is divinely inspired, ethical, or accurate either historically and scientifically; the second, which deals largely with Islamic law, its interpretation and enforcement, is chillingly described by its title. We then have a long piece by Sam Harris, a sardonic jewel by the heroically coiffeured Oxford don A.C. Grayling, and finally a short, affecting little autobiographical essay by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

For this reader, the selections from Ibn Warraq were the freshest and thus the most interesting works in this anthology. The fact that the author courted death by publishing them makes them still more impressive.

Summing up: there is plenty of intellectual meat in The Portable Atheist, as well as some superb writing, but it could have been improved by choosing a different sequencing plan, one that allowed for the more frequent alternation of deep philosophical argument and angry polemic with writing that offered more literary and aesthetic pleasure. A topic-based scheme would probably have done the trick. I also wish Hitchens had cast his net a lot wider; these selections are mostly quite conventional. And how come all we get of Primo Levi is a paragraph quoted in the Introduction?

Comfort Food for Imperial Nostalgists

Random Harvest
by James Hilton

Hilton was a mid-twentieth-century English writer of bestselling middlebrow tearjerkers, a bit like Nevil Shute. He is best known today for two books that became blockbuster movies: Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Lost Horizon, which gave the world Shangri-La. His works are now out of copyright, and you can download them as Kindle files from various sites (thank you, Sharmini Masilamani!)

Random Harvest is a typical example of Hilton’s work. The hero, a reluctant but successful between-the-wars business magnate and politician, is haunted by missing memories: he has lost three whole years. The lacuna commences with his being wounded in a failed decoy operation during the First World War and ends with him coming to himself on a park bench in Liverpool moments after having been knocked down by a car. The book is about those lost years, and the hero’s hunt for them. It is told by his (male) private secretary, a man who knows all his employer’s secrets save for those the latter cannot recall himself. All is finally revealed, of course, and there is a completely unexpected – to me, at least – twist at the ending, put there to ensure that the reader will close the book more or less satisfied, no matter what has gone before.

This is a well-plotted, well-written, gentle novel. Readers who wish to be intellectually or politically challenged will find nothing to engage them here; indeed, the anodyne prose and precision-tuned plotting contain little that will excite or challenge anybody. That is neither its function nor its virtue; Random Harvest is a book written to help middle-aged, middle-class, politically moderate readers pass the time on trains, or fall asleep at night. At this it succeeds wonderfully, if at the expense of a tendency to drag – a tendency that grows rather pronounced at times.

Writers like Hilton and Shute appealed mainly to the middle-class, more or less conservative English reader of their day. A large part of that appeal lay in their ability to evoke and champion a stable, well-ordered Anglocentric world that was crumbling even then; they offered (false) assurance that England would always endure, that the sons of the shires would ever, as in Housman’s poem, get them the sons their fathers got that God might save the Queen, and that there would be honey still for tea until the end of time. They chronicled the long afterglow of Victorian England, and their appeal was nostalgic even in their heyday; it is doubly so now, if only to the dwindling band for whom such things ever had an appeal in the first place.

This is not, for instance, a book that will appeal to Americans; the sort of comic, exaggerated P.G. Wodehouse caricature of Englishness they love so much is not in evidence here. Some elderly Canadians (fans of Robertson Davies in his lighter moments, perhaps) will enjoy it; and wherever nostalgia for the days when Britain ordered and set standards for the world still persist – for example, in former British colonies now reverting pell-mell to barbarism – a few ageing readers will rediscover a seduction here to which it does no harm, now and again, to yield.

Quantum Lysergy

Roadmarks
by Roger Zelazny

I devoured this book in an evening, relishing every last morsel. I think the correct adjective to describe it is ‘lysergic’. Hallucinogenic drugs are never mentioned, but every page is like acid-impregnated blotting paper. The flashbacks commence on page three and never let up.

The plot, which is mostly just an excuse for the settings and set pieces, is a road movie played out along a highway that runs between the Jurassic and the thirtieth century. Specially gifted people and machines can travel this highway in both directions. The protagonist is an especially gifted man who travels the road in a blue Dodge pickup, trying to change the past in order to find his way home. Other people, not unreasonably, are trying to prevent him from doing this. One of them wants – or seems to want – to kill him, sending various hirelings in pursuit. Other people (and machines) want to help him. The action climaxes at a place called Last Exit to Babylon, where all is revealed. Attentive readers will have foreseen the revelation some chapters earlier, but this does not matter. The dénouement loses nothing from having been telegraphed long distance.

It may read like an acid-inspired fantasy novel, but Roadmarks is science fiction, and pretty hard science fiction at that. Not much is explained in the book, but if you have some knowledge of  quantum mechanics you will see the road as a worldline connecting ‘histories’, or values of the wavefunction of the universe, that have the highest probability. It is possible to visit alternative histories as well as create them – this results in new bends, forks and feeder lanes along the road – but such changes are rarely permanent. The topography of the road is changing all the time in response to the actions of those who travel it. There is also a race of sentient beings, called dragons, who are able to view the landscape of probabilities as a whole and move freely from point to point in it without being confined to the road. The dragons’ actions can also affect history by altering the relative probability of events.

The more I think about this quantum underpinning, the more impressed and charmed I am by it. It is presented almost entirely through metaphor and imagery. There are no lectures or info-dumps in the text. If you don't know a little about the quantum mechanics, some of the features and conceits of the book will seem a little more arbitrary than they really are – but arbitrariness, as any seasoned head will happily explain, is among the salient features of any really good, properly mind-bending trip.

A final note, especially for lovers of Iain M. Banks: there is a lot in this book that you will like. In fact, I enjoyed it rather more than I did Banks's own excursion on the same theme.

Shallow Deepness

A Deepness in the Sky

by Vernor Vinge

An interesting variation on a science fiction theme I am especially fond of, the first-contact story. In this case, the monstrous alien invaders are the humans, conspiring to foment nuclear war among a race of unsuspecting intelligent arachnoids. To make things more interesting (and give us some anthropomorphs to cheer for), the humans are also divided up into good guys and bad guys.

Of course, the above variation has already been explored in SF. Frederik Pohl's Jem springs to mind; indeed, Pohl seems to be a strong influence on Vinge, and I was reminded of the former many times while reading this book. Pohl is, however, by far the better writer.

Vinge, a professor of mathematics by day, doesn't seem to be able to write convincing characters. Out of a cast of dozens, he manages to make us care about just one: an old soldier named Hrunker Unnerby – who happens to be one of the arachnoids. The real humans are all cardboard.

Of course, cardboard characters are pretty much to be expected in hard SF. The virtues of the genre lie elsewhere, and its aficionados (rightly) don't give a toss for the traditional literary ones. But Vinge has problems that go beyond the usual. For one thing, he aims higher. However, he reveals an amateur's clumsiness in deploying his characters, clearly finding it hard to move them around and make them interact convincingly. Nearly all the scenes involving human interaction are cartoonish and unconvincing. This includes scenes featuring the aliens, who are presented to us by the author as human in all respects but the physical.

This, incidentally, is one of many places in the text where the reader's willing suspension of disbelief falters, for the aliens are utterly different from us in terms of their physical structure, sensory perceptions, instinctive tropisms and reproductive behaviour. Even given the excuse that we see them, for most of the book, through the mediating lens of human perception, they shouldn't be quite so like us. Surely these physical differences must make for mental ones as well? But Vernor Vinge appears to be immune to the fascinations of speculative xenopsychology, and we are left with creatures that look like giant spiders but act just like people.

Other aspects of the plot also beggar belief. The regularly interrupted social evolution of the arachnoids nevertheless proceeds incredibly fast – they go from early experiments with internal-combustion engines to intercontinental ballistic missiles within a single generation. The turning of the human Ezr Vinh, a critical plot element, is based on an impossible chain of extrapolations from an obscure hint dropped by another character. A starship explicitly not designed for operating within a planetary atmosphere, last seen falling at one hundred metres per second, wreathed in flames and starting to break up, somehow manages to land without killing its crew. Civilizations rise and fall within the timeframe of a mere thousand years, yet humans undertake trading voyages between the stars that last for centuries. The whole thing is confused and rather nonsensical.

The author is so uninvolved with his characters that he casually dumps the two most sympathetic ones for good in a scene that takes place offstage. Indeed, many vital scenes are pushed offstage. Among them is the action climax of the novel, the aforementioned starship crash. Perhaps it's just as well; the only big action scene in the book, which takes place inside the chief bad guy's artificial water-garden, is a clumsy, sodden mess. The chief villain's comeuppance is also unsatisfyingly quick and merciful, while that of his sadistic lieutenant takes place – again, and frustratingly – offstage. This is a scene we are dying to see through his eyes, but he's long gone by the time we hear what's happened to him. Equally incompetent are the handling of an early, mandatory scene in which the bad guys are revealed to be sadistic perverts, and various other scenes of violence, cruelty or complex action – frankly, the author is too squeamish to write them properly, and he shouldn't even have tried.

So, with all these complaints, why am I giving this book three stars? Well, it kept me reading. Some of the technical ideas were interesting, though nothing was actually new or even very freshly rendered. And first-contact stories are my favourite kind of hard SF story.

Yes, there were times when I grew bored with the endless backstory expositions, the cartoon characters, the long, long gaps between important scenes – Vinge captures the tedium of deep-space exile only too well – but for all that, I kept reading. Of course, I'm a genre slut – I always have round heels for SF – so for me it was a three-star book despite its decidedly two-star qualities.

I shall now go and re-read one of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels to remind myself that hard SF doesn't always have to be lousy literature.



View all my reviews

Woman of the World

The Bolter

by Frances Osborne 

My interest in the white colony that sprang up in the Kenyan highlands  between the world wars was first triggered by reading Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, and grew stronger after I discovered, many years later, the photography of a later resident of the locale, Peter Beard. However, it wasn’t till I read about the hijinks of Happy Valley as recounted in Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Millennium that I grew fascinated with the place. It was a purely literary fascination, but none the weaker for that.

Since then I've read James Fox’s White Mischief and quite a few other things written about the place. They all contained glancing references to the wicked Idina. Her exploits were only ever hinted at in these accounts, which suggested that they were too outrageous to recount in full. This, of course, only served to inflame my curiosity. As you may imagine, I snapped The Bolter up as soon as I saw it.

It kept me reading, certainly. But although I did stay up until the wee hours yesterday finishing it, the reading was sometimes an effort. Considering the story it has to tell, this is a book that should never be boring, yet parts of it are. The first half, which deals with Idina’s early life and her marriage to Euan Wallace, the first of her five husbands, is a farrago of parties and adulteries among the British aristocracy and plutocracy of the Edwardian era – booze and bed-hopping against a background of balls, race-meetings, country-house parties and neglected, almost forgotten children shunted about from one stately home to another while their parents cavorted in London and the fashionable capitals of Europe. The Bright Young Things seem utterly superficial and tedious, and the lives they led make one want to turn Socialist out of sheer revulsion. The second part of the book, which covers the Happy Valley portion of Idina’s story, is much better, with more depth to the narrative and more detail in the portrait of Idina herself.

Frances Osborne’s writing is adequate but frequently marred by personal sentiment, hackneyed pop psychology and cliché turns of phrase. However, the subject matter overcomes the author’s inadequacies, and some of the latter half of the book is genuinely affecting.

Osborne’s personal relationship to Idina (who was purportedly the model for the Bolter in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love) is both a strength and a weakness of this book; on the one hand, it has given the author access to much material that is unavailable to others, and created an emotional connexion that adds intimacy and immediacy to her portrait of her great-grandmother; yet it also places the book in a funny generic location, halfway between history and memoir. The balance between the two is repeatedly upset in the final chapters, not always with the most convincing of results.

As for my prurient curiosity regarding Idina's exploits, it was partly satisfied, though I have a feeling that the full story of the goings-on in Happy Valley will never now emerge.

Man of the World

The Travels of Ibn Battutah
Edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Most Ceylonese have heard of Ibn Battutah, a Moroccan Arab traveller of the fourteenth century who visited our island around the year 1344 and climbed Adam’s Peak under the protection of the Tamil ruler of Puttalam. Ibn Battutah made Marco Polo look like a stay-at home; he not only visited China and East Asia, as Marco did, but also took in the Levant, India, the Maldives, Indonesia, the Sahara, Mali and the Niger basin, the coast of East Africa and Arab-occupied Spain. Unlike Marco, he tended to travel first-class – more often than not as an honoured guest and counsellor to the various rulers, mostly Muslim, he met along the way.

Ibn Battutah had this advantage over Marco Polo: the world he travelled was a largely Muslim one, and he was more or less at home in it. Even on the few occasions when he went beyond the borders of Dar-ul-Islam (such as his visit to Serendib), it was to places where Muslim power was recognized, Muslims were treated with respect, and a speaker of Arabic or Farsi could nearly always be found to act as translator. As a specialist in Islamic jurisprudence, his abilities were everywhere in demand, and he was often given positions of high authority (as Marco also was, in China). Indeed, he often had trouble detaching himself from the retinues of the various sultans and amirs who befriended him.

He was not, by our standards, a nice man. A sexual hypocrite who condemned the ‘debaucheries’ of others but himself travelled with sex slaves whom he acquired and dispensed with at will, he also frequently contracted marriages with women whom he would ruthlessly divorce when it was time to move on. He was a staunch Islamic conservative who delighted in applying the strictures of religious sanction to others. He boasts of humiliating a respected Jewish doctor at the court of a minor Turkish potentate, calling the man a ‘god-damned son of a god-damned father’, and speaks of trying (without success) to force the women of the Maldives to cover up their bosoms; he observes disapprovingly that when he ordered the hand of a thief in that country to be cut off, ‘many of those present fainted.’ There is also a faint odour of cowardice arising from the text from time to time, particular with regard to sea voyages and shipwrecks, though our narrator always conducts himself worthily in the end.

In other words, he was a man of his time, that time being the late Islamic Middle Ages. This mediaeval world had little of the crudity, filth and squalor of contemporary Europe. The light and intelligence of a refined, world-spanning high civilization – Islamic civilization – illuminated daily life in places as far apart as Granada and Sumatra, and Ibn Battutah himself is one of its brightest flowers. Though not ill-read in these matters, I was repeatedly surprised by how ‘modern’ and civilized were the ways of this great, pan-Islamic culture – more so than its European contemporaries and most of the ‘infidel’ cultures the narrator encounters in Asia and Africa. Only China presents Ibn Battutah with a cultural challenge beyond his ability to surmount, and he recoils from it as from an alien environment in which life is not long sustainable.

Of course, not everything is enlightened and refined in Ibn Battutah’s world. He tells of much cruelty, to animals as well as people and particularly towards women. At one point he recounts, as a fact worthy of remark but not, apparently, of disapproval, that the punishment meted out to adulterous women among the Arrakanese is that ‘the sultan orders all his household attendants to copulate with her, one after another till she dies, in his presence. Then they throw her into the sea.’ There is also a great deal of superstitious nonsense in his account, and in this regard he shows himself an eagerly credulous witness, especially when it comes to the spurious or fortuitous ‘miracles’ of various shaikhs (Muslim holy men) he encounters on his journeys. Still, modern travellers (especially travellers of the internet) are often as gullible as he in such matters, with far less excuse.

Though certain chapters and specific details of chronology or place are questionable, Ibn Battutah’s account of his journeys appears largely accurate. Most of the places he visited can be identified, even though they no longer have the same names. In this he is again superior to Marco Polo, whose adventures contain a large admixture of fantasy.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s redaction, which condenses a very long and much worked-over original, has been widely praised; it is sensitive to nuance and very readable. The end-notes are not copious, but they are informative and add a valuable extra dimension of perspective to the text (although I disagree with his tentative identification of ‘the seat of the principal sultan’ of Serendib; this, at the time, was probably Kurunegala, though Battutah’s description fits Ratnapura better).

Best of all, Mackintosh-Smith lets Ibn Battutah’s attitudes and personality shine through. This is a brilliant book, a modern, readable version of one of the prime sources for the geography of the mediaeval world, and particularly of that great empire of Islam which was even then in decline, but whose greatness was still acknowledged wherever it was known. It is also a wonderful read, and I recommend it highly.

Last and First Men

by Olaf Stapledon

This is famously one of the classics of science fiction. At the time of its emergence in 1930, its scope and audacity were without precedent. However, it has been thoroughly pillaged by other writers since then, and its themes and tropes are now the everyday stuff of SF. Stapledon was a prophet and perhaps a kind of genius, but Last & First Men is a victim of its own success.

Also, it is very much a product of its time. Its physics and cosmology appear naive to us today. This at times works against the suspension of disbelief, to the detriment of the reader's pleasure.

In social and political terms, too, the book is largely concerned with issues that were prominent in between the World Wars but which today seem of little import.

Most tellingly of all, we, whom Stapledon calls the First Men, the primitives of humanity, have already achieved nearly all the great feats of science, technology and exploration that in his book take eighteen successive species of humanity some hundreds of millions of years to accomplish. Apart, that is, from the colonization of Venus and Neptune, which we now know to be impossible.

I don't usually object to anachronisms. One should always keep in mind the historical and social context in which a work was written, accepting these in order to appreciate the work more fully. But you can't do that with Last & First Men; its plot and subtext depend far too heavily on the outdated science and political thought of its time. Even the obsession with flight (by means of aeroplanes, genetically engineered wings or the direct control of gravity) is one that was at its peak in the bomber-obsessed 1930s.

The novel is also repetitive in terms of the cycles of human civilization and achievement. This is, of course, part of the Hegelian lesson the author is trying to teach us, but it makes for a boring read.

On the positive side, the author's resonantly academic style of writing is often elegant and eloquent, and its ponderousness is actually well suited to the material.

A great book, certainly, but a deeply outdated one.

ABOUT THE SF MASTERWORKS EDITION

This edition contains an appreciative but chauvinistic introduction by the physicist and SF author Gregory Benford, which urges American readers of the book to skip perhaps the first third of it. This is the part which deals with what Stapledon calls the 'Americanized' future world of the First Men.

Stapledon was a socialist who despised capitalism, and he was suspicious of America and Americans. Benford seems to feel that American readers should be spared his criticisms and jibes. That would be a pity – because what Stapledon points to as the follies and faults of American culture are very much the same ones the rest of the world sees in America, now as then. Some of his comments are remarkably percipient and I think it would do many American readers good to learn how others tend to see them.

Stapledon's criticisms are not the fruit of bigotry and ignorance but the considered and reasoned comments of a brilliant and morally engaged mind. Any American who is offended by them probably doesn't have the moral and intellectual equipment to appreciate this book anyway.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

I just put this book down, and as I did, I said to myself, ‘what a load of rubbish.' I was a little surprised at my own reaction.

Some of my favourite writing is by Vladimir Nabokov. Much of it is in his short stories. Of his novels, I loved Pale Fire and enjoyed its tricksiness. I read Lolita and was entertained, seduced and appalled. Other books, like Laughter in the Dark, were less captivating, but throughout it all the brilliance of the author’s style was there to compensate me when my interest in the content flagged.

Maybe I have grown old and cynical, and also perhaps a bit too much of a hack, to appreciate the art in this novel. Unfortunately, the art is all there is to appreciate – the plot is haphazard and the characters repellent or uninteresting. Sebastian Knight, the object of his own half-brother’s biographical quest, is a pretentious, neurotic snob. I found it difficult to take an interest in such a character when it is presented by the narrator as wholly admirable.

Mind you, the narrator – ‘V.’, Knight‘s half-brother – shares at least two of the above qualities. No surprise, since it is Nabokov’s humour to make us wonder whether the two are actually the same man, and if so, whether the man is Sebastian or his semi-sibling, or some monstrous literary Siamese twin. Doubtless it was also the author’s humour to portray a lonely, sick, mostly unhappy auctorial also-ran of unpleasant character as someone admirable, worthy of a biography. But that doesn’t really make me want to read any more about Sebastian Knight, and besides, I object to authors who entertain themselves at my expense unless they are able to entertain me at the same time.

All the other ‘postmodernist’ (really?) tricks – the way the plot of the novel takes on aspects of the plots of Sebastian’s handful of novels, so that fiction holds a mirror up to fiction, and the frequent chess references whose point, I am sorry to say, entirely escapes me – did not add interest or charm to a novel I found significantly lacking in both qualities.

And then, that famous Nabokovian prose... Apparently this was the first novel he wrote in English, so one shouldn’t be too harsh. But Nabokov was always an extreme stylist, one who liked to stretch an image or metaphor till it was on the verge of overbalancing and falling flat. Most of the time he got away with it – this was a man who could describe horse-dung in the act of production in breathtakingly beautiful prose – but for some reason his writing in this book strikes me as often no better than clumsily arch. Perhaps this was his way of portraying the untutored style of his narrator, V. The effect, sadly, is not always that of a bad writer rising above himself; too often it is that of a good writer – indeed, a great writer – missing the mark.

Which, I think, just about sums up this unfortunate novel.

Thank you, Mr. Hitchens

Letters to a Young Contrarian

Though no longer young, I remain at heart a contrarian, someone who is driven to question conventional wisdom and popular attitudes. Indeed, I feel this is something of a duty – one in which I am far more lax than I have any excuse to be, and clearly far more lax than Mr. Hitchens is. Living as I do in a country that has fallen victim to creeping ethno-religious totalitarianism, my conscience was not simply pricked, but speared, when I read this:

The two worst things, as one can work out without leaving home, are racism and religion. When allied, these two approximate to what I imagine fascism must have felt like.

As we Sri Lankans know all too well, he is right. As we also know, fascism is hard to stand against. Amazingly, Hitchens offers a recommendation for living conscientiously with all kinds of oppression, one he calls living ‘as if’ – living as if one were a citizen of a free society, truly able to exercise all one’s rights and duties, so that one’s way of life becomes itself a form of protest.

In order to survive those years of stalemate and realpolitik... a number of important dissidents evolved a strategy for survival. In a phrase, they decided to live ‘as if’... Vaclav Havel, then working as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that truly merited the title of Absurd... proposed living ‘as if’ he were a citizen of a free society, ‘as if’ lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, ‘as if’ his government had actually signed... the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights. He called this tactic 'The Power of the Powerless’ because, even when disagreement can be almost forbidden, a state that insists on actually compelling assent can be relatively easily made to look stupid.

I found this book put heart into me, reinforcing my belief that disagreement and argument are vital to the pursuit of happiness. I am no political activist, but I believe in certain values and know certain things to be true, and I try to live by these truths and values. The struggle is hard and often seems futile, especially when one’s friends and colleagues turn away to embrace the lie. At times like this, it is good to learn that the effort is not necessarily wasted. It is rarely one feels grateful to an author for writing a book. Thank you, Mr. Hitchens.

Two Novels by David Mitchell

David Mitchell has been swarming up my totem-pole of favourite writers with remarkable agility of late. Years ago, I read Ghostwritten and loved it. A few weeks ago I finished number9dream and was mightily impressed. Now here’s Black Swan Green, another five-star read in my book.

 Black Swan Green

If you’re only a sophomore reader (meaning: if what a book’s ‘about’ is still the main criterion of whether or not you will pick it up and read it), a synopsis of the plot of Black Swan Green may well put you right off. The subject isn’t new, and it isn’t exactly heart-thumping stuff either. An English boy comes of age in a Worcestershire village west of the Malvern Hills. It’s not a particularly remarkable location, neither is it a dump. It’s middle-class Middle England.

The boy, Jason Taylor, is likewise unremarkable. The only unusual things about him are that he stutters, and can apparently write poetry. He is the narrator of his own story, telling us about his life at school, games and fights with other kids his age, efforts to be accepted by his peers, and early adolescent experiments with sex and love. He tells us about his family life even as his home is breaking up around him. Finally, he tells us about a moral decision he made, and we realize that it will determine for good the kind of man he will grow up to be. That’s pretty much the whole story.

But what David Mitchell is good at is making things matter, the way they matter to us in real life. Although the elements of Jason’s story are everyday occurrences, what Mitchell wants is to show us how questions and decisions of vast, life-changing importance can turn on just such trivial events, how our responses to them are shaped by who we are, and how they in turn shape us. Jason, in the book, often uses the word ‘epic’ as a term of enthusiastic approval (as other teenagers might use brilliant, cool or excellent), and one is tempted to read this as an ironic pedal point used to highlight the book’s key conceit. The things that happen to Jason Taylor and those around him in the village of Black Swan Green are small, as things go, yet their implications are epic. This is a book about the heroic character of ordinary life, and as such is is an unqualified success. We tremble for Jason Taylor as we might tremble for Jason of Iolcos. Indeed, we may tremble harder, since it is easier for most of us to relate to a modern schoolboy than to an ancient Attic hero.

This is, above all, a moral tale. There’s not a word of preaching in it, but we are made aware from the outset that is the hero’s integrity that is at stake. The moral issues are presented imaginatively, as well as clearly and comprehensively; it speaks volumes of Mitchell’s technique as a writer that he achieves this in the authentic narrative voice of a middle-class English schoolboy of the 1980s. Even though the reported speech of other, older characters is often pressed into service to help, making this work without ever dragging Jason out of character cannot have been easy.

One is obliged to salute an author capable of such technical virtuosity. Yet technique and virtuosity are not the visible hallmarks of Black Swan Green. Lovers of Italo Calvino will probably find little to titillate them here. This is a book about feeling: about the emotional bases of our shared humanity and how we become the people we are. I have rarely felt so warmly towards a book I’ve just finished as I do toward this one.

number9dream

I’m not sure if Mitchell‘s premise in this novel – namely, that Japan is a society run by and for the yakuza, who manipulate politicians and bureaucrats like puppets – is true, but the fact that he can actually make a sceptic like me wonder about it is sufficient testament to his skill as a writer. Happily, it is the least of such evidences here presented. This is literature disguised as a thriller, but unlike most literary fiction it has a satisfactory plot and a proper ending. That the proper ending is actually a false one makes it even better.

Indeed, I don’t see how this book could be more perfect.


Like Black Swan Green, number9dream is a coming-of-age novel. Eiji Miyake is considerably older than Jason Taylor; he is emerging from the long, dark tunnel of adolescence, into which Jason is just entering. Jason is a city boy, more or less, who happens to live in a village; Eiji is a village boy finding his feet in the high-tech anthill of metropolitan Tokyo. He is there partly because there is nothing left for young people in his dying, depopulated home village, but mostly he is there to find his father. Eiji and his sister are the children of a rich and successful Japanese businessman, a man of very high status, and a mistress with a drinking problem whom the businessman later rejects. The mistress returns in shame to her home village to bear her bastards (twins, a boy and a girl), whom she then abandons. Eiji and his sister are brought up by their grandmother.

Eiji’s quest for his father forms the backbone of the plot of number9dream. His search takes him on a tour of Tokyo, from the fortresslike office buildings of the rich and powerful to the tacky pachinko pleasure-domes of the masses, taking in along the way such varied scenery as a top-rank geisha club, a sleazy love-hotel, abandoned pork-barrel building-sites and ‘bridges to nowhere’, a central railway station and a street directory’s worth of video parlours, capsule hotels, coffee shops and noodle stalls. Mitchell, who lived and taught in Tokyo for years, is strong on local colour. He has an amazing gift for felicitous description (at one point, he even manages to make the struggles of a cockroach in a sticky trap fascinate us), and generally manages to bring the place to frenetic, neon-dazzle life.

But the real pleasure of number9dream, as with all Mitchell’s novels, is not the setting but the characters. His gift for character-drawing seems to be based on a preternatural ear for dialogue and a clear-eyed empathy that enables him effectively to be his characters. This was apparent in his first novel, Ghostwritten, which was also excellent, but here it is on display in a fuller flowering. Every character in number9dream (and there are many) has his or her unique voice, easily distinguished from all the rest. This is a marvellous gift, one many great novelists lack: male characters in Nabokov or Hemingway, for example, all speak with their author’s voice, or else in some tin-eared simulacrum of vernacular speech. Mitchell has a better ear for individual turns of speech than either of these masters. Best of all, he makes his characters distinct from one another without turning them into caricatures as Dickens was obliged, for his market, to do.

Eiji Miyake’s search for his father is complicated by his father’s unwillingness to be found, as well as by the other imperatives of Eiji’s life, such as falling in love with a coffee-shop waitress who dreams of being, against her family’s will, a concert pianist. The biggest obstacle, however, turns out to be the yakuza, Japan’s equivalent of the mafia, into whose toils he unwittingly falls in the course of his search. Slowly, Eiji comes to learn – and we learn it too, sharing the discovery and his astonishment at it – that Japanese society is run by and for the yakuza, who have all the bureaucrats and politicians in their pockets and who allow the Emperor to continue as a figurehead, just as the shoguns did in the bad old days. In fact, we are brought to believe that the yakuza are simply the modern-day successors of the shoguns, and that Japanese society has changed little in this respect since pre-Meiji times.

Whether this is true or not I cannot tell; I have never been to Japan and have few Japanese acquaintances. However, it would seem to explain a lot of what foreigners find mysterious about Japan: the paralysis of its government, the power of its bureacrats, the silent, cowed conformity of the masses and the country’s apparent helplessness to extricate itself from the mire of stagnation and decrepitude in which it now seems trapped. However that may be, Mitchell makes us believe it, at least for the duration of the novel – another testimonial to his powers as a writer.

But all this is peripheral stuff: at the core of number9dream is Eiji’s story – one that feels, not just real and true, but also important and satisfying. This novel ranks among the best I’ve read.