Category: Other people’s books

What’s your favourite book?   It’s a meaningless question of course.  If you’ve read a lot of books, you can’t really have one favourite.  But if I’m asked the question I’ve been known to answer The Unconsoled. I first read this some 16 years ago when it first came out, having heard Ishiguro talking about it on the radio.   I have just re-read it to see if I still rated it as highly.  I did.  It’s a long book, but I could hardly bring myself to put it down.

I was drawn to the book in the first place when I heard Ishiguro say that he had decided to write the book using the narrative technique of human dreams.  In a dream, he explained, a person can go through a door in one town and emerge in a different town (saving the many pages of rationalisation and explanation you might need to get a person from one place to another in a realistic novel).   These jumps happen frequently in the novel, as do other dream-like devices, such as one  person doubling up as another, or of a person standing outside a building being able to see what is going on inside, or a person or thing from the past turning up in a completely different context without this causing anyone any surprise.  But the novel isn’t in any way ‘dreamy’.   The dream-technique is used for compression, not for random weirdness, the writing is in Ishiguro’s usual spare exact stiff-upper-lippy prose, the characters are precisely and poignantly drawn, and even though the situations are often bizarre, the human relationships are painfully real.

The story is about an eminent pianist, Ryder, arriving in an unnamed European town (the town is unnamed but the characters have German-sounding names: there is a definite debt to Kafka in this book, and in my opinion, if not a debt then a faint kinship with the work of another of my  favourite writers, Philip Dick).  The town expects great things of Ryder, and he is very taken with the idea of himself as a great and important man, but what unfolds (for I guess some 200,000 words) resembles  one of those anxiety dreams (I have them frequently) in which you are trying to get somewhere, but are constantly thwarted by endless complications and obstacles (for example by a brick wall built for no reason right across a street).  Or the ones in which you are never quite sure what part you are supposed to be playing.

In the course of this, a whole cast of characters appears, mostly rather lonely and tortured souls, many of them so driven by a need to redeem themselves in the eyes of their imagined superiors, or their parents, or their own eyes, that they neglect and forget about those they are supposed to love.  (Themes apparent also in his previous novel The Remains of the Day).   There are many truly heartrending moments, for example when parents simply fail to see how much their children need their approval, but the book is also often funny enough to make you laugh out loud.  The banality of everyday thoughts are wonderfully mocked by having the vain and self-centred Ryder expressing them in the same pompous language that he uses to talk about his big projects, and often the book is simultaneously funny and excruciatingly sad.  Here is Ryder, who has promised to spend an evening playing boardgames with his little boy, but is distracted by… the need to read every word in the local paper:

Returning to my sofa, I saw that, by putting my plate down on a cushion beside me,  I would be able to eat and continue to read my newspaper at the same time.  I had decided earlier to examine the newspaper very carefully, scrutinising even the adverts for local businesses, and I now continued with this project, reaching over occasionally to my plate without taking my eyes off the newsprint.

There’s no way of doing the book justice in a summary, and I’m sure that, even on two readings, I have only understood part of what is actually there, but it certainly remains one of my favourite books, unsurpassed I think by Ishiguro himself, and I’m surprised it isn’t more famous than it is.

I particularly love the idea of using the narrative devices of dreams because my own view is that dreams are the original archetypal stories.   When people say they don’t have the imagination to write stories, I often wonder how it is that people can say that, when every night they weave themselves complicated intricate stories without even trying, rich in layers and layers of meaning, and often full of truths which waking minds just don’t grasp.  Freud saw dreams as the disguised representations of desires, but that’s only a little part of what dreams do.  In my experience dreams tell me who I am, and often direct a sharp light onto my own self-deceptions, my own little acts of cowardice.  And it is exactly that kind of light that The Unconsoled enlists to shine into the lives of its characters.

 

I watched the film ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ recently.  I wasn’t expecting to be crazy about it, having not been that taken with the book by Audrey Niffenegger (there was something about the authorial voice that jarred, though I admired the idea of it, and admired the feat of plotting a relationship between two people for each of whom the same life events occur in a different order).  There were some irritating things in the film too, but overall I enjoyed it very much.  It seemed to follow the novel pretty closely, but this is perhaps a story that benefits from not having to have a narrator.

The Time Traveller has an affliction which means that from time to time, suddenly and without warning, he flips forward or backwards in time, leaving an empty pile of clothes, to return again after an hour, a minute, a week…  His wife first meets him, many times, when he is an adult man and she is a little girl.   Then, when she is an adult, she meets him again, a man she has known and loved most of her life, but he doesn’t know her at all, because he hasn’t yet reached the age at which he first flips back to her childhood.   Watching the film, I felt there was something rather wonderful about this notion.  It was one of those ideas that prod away at the mind.

He dies quite young, but after he is dead , he comes back again a couple of times  – not a ghost, not an apparition, but completely alive and well, younger than he had been when he died, and able to tell his wife, the precise time in their mutual past from which he’s just flipped.   The first time he meets his daughter is when he has flipped forward from a time before she was born to a time in the future when he has already died.

And these dislocations too, prodded away at my mind all the next day.   Rather in the way of the bold, simple central idea of the novel Inverted World which I wrote about here recently, this simple device of a woman having a relationship with a time traveller was one of those ideas which I find satisfying because they are rich in metaphorical possibilities, but can’t simply be translated into a single ‘meaning’.

It made me wonder, for instance, whether all relationships are really relationships between time travellers, since we all travel back and forth between our present and our past, and are in some moments grownups and in others adolescents or children, so that ever day the relationship between two people presents endless possible combinations…

It made me think of Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, for whom time is essentially the same as space, so that the idea of a person not being alive for ever is no more distressing than the fact that a person does not exist at every point in space…

It made me think of the way that I am myself a time traveller, sometimes dealing with the world in front of me, but again and again sliding back to struggles from my past, or slipping sideways into imaginary or faraway places where I don’t  exist at all.

PS  And incidentally, to return to the theme of my previous post, the fact that time travel is impossible (let alone a genetic condition that causes time travel!) is entirely irrelevant to the question of the worth of this book.  Being possible or plausible in a literal sense, is not the only way in which a story can connect with real life.

It can be disappointing rereading a book that impressed you years ago.   When I attempted to reread Kerouac’s On the Road, which at 19 I thought was wonderful, I couldn’t get more than a few pages into it.  It was sentimental, baggy, misogynistic, and I couldn’t get past that to see the energy that had first impressed me.

But, though I must have read The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth at at even earlier age, I was just as impressed with it on recently rereading it as I was first time round the better part of four decades ago.

Like all SF of its era, it depicts a ‘future’ that falls very wide of the mark technologically (daily passenger shuttles to the moon, but no computers or mobile phones), but considering it was written in 1952, it is impressively relevant.   The global struggle between Capitalism and Communism that was occurring at that the time the book was written, has long since passed.   The adversary of rampant global capitalism is not communism but conservationism.   Consies not commies, are the pariahs.  Advertising agencies, and their huge networks of interlocking sales campaigns, rule.

I’d forgotten (or more likely did not notice aged 16) how funny the book is.  Told from the viewpoint of Mitchell Courtenay who as a star class copysmith with the Fowler Schocken advertising agency (vastly superior in his eyes to the sleazy Taunton agency), is a member of the elite who (for much of the book) accepts the rules of his own society without question, a society in which sales are everything and even to mention a concern about the environment is to mark oneself out as a consie sympathiser.

“She’d been bought up in a deeply moral, sales-fearing home…”

“…the basic drive of the human race is sex.  And what is, essentially, more important in life than to mould and channel the deepest torrential flow of human emotion into its proper directions?   (I am not apologizing for those renegades who talk fancifully about some imagined ‘Death-Wish’ to hook their sales appeals to.  I leave that sort of thing to the Tauntons of our profession: it’s dirty, it’s immoral, I want nothing to do with it.  Besides, it leads to fewer consumers in the long run, if only they’d think the thing through.)”

“The Crunchies kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could be quelled only by another two squirts of Popsie from the fountain.  And Popsie kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could only be quelled by smoking Starr cigarettes, which made you hungry for Crunchies…  ”

You have to read the book and read these things in context to get the full effect.  It’s brilliant satire.  Still sharp after almost half a century.

As a child I loved the Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson.  She created (both in words and in pictures) an utterly absorbing and intricate world that was comforting, yet mysterious and not without sadness.  They were like nothing else and I found them completely enchanting.

It’s nice to have one’s childhood judgements confirmed.  I recently read one of her adult novels – published in English as The True Deceiver – and I found it just as absorbing and fascinating as I had found her children’s books, and just as original (I have never read anything like it).

The main protagonist, Katri, is a strange solitary woman with yellow eyes who despises friendliness and the ordinary pleasantries of life as being fake and dishonest.  She doesn’t even give a name to her dog.  The book deals with Katri’s relationship with an elderly and wealthy writer of children’s books who likes to be seen as likeable and nice.   Slowly they change one another.

It is much darker than the children’s books, and yet has a lot in common with them too:  its creation of an absorbing world, evoked in a wonderfully concrete and quite sensual way, its evocation of a Nordic spring, emerging from under ice and snow, its interest in solitude and integrity…  (The Moomin books include many proud and solitary characters too).

Quite brilliant!   The Summer Book is great too.