Another one from the Orange Prize shortlist...

Yesterday I read Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson. I guess it follows in the footsteps of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, in that it gives a voice (in the form of a narrator's inner-voice) to a character who cannot vocalise their thoughts and observations. The great strength of the novel is that allowing the reader access to Grace's inner voice is the only artifice or conceit employed by Henderson. This makes accepting the reality of Grace's voice relatively easy (and made easier still by the very distinctive authorial voice she conjures). Had we also to cope with, for example the 'unreliable narrator' it could easily have got too much.

The structure is almost entirely chronological, and structured like a memoir. There is plenty of narrative tension, without resort to any trickery beyond good, clever writing. In fact, the lack of sensationalism in the plotting allows the winning and unusual aspect of the novel - that unique, normally unheard authorial voice - to create and inhabit its own space, and ultimately leave a lasting impression.

This is an incredibly clever novel in that it does not leave you 'wow'-ing at bold narrative strokes, but instead creates a character and a voice which seem to add something to the experience of having encountered people like Grace, both problemmatising and enhancing their personhood. This is a wonderful example of the way in which a novel can alter, just slightly, the way in which you parse the world.

There is a town in North Ontario...

In my attempt to play catch up, I am going back to a novel I read a few weeks ago: Mary Lawson's The Other Side of the Bridge, which was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and it is not hard to see why. I wrote when I finished it that: "This is a good, satisfying novel [but]...it is not a great novel."

The link to the Random House site, above, includes a summary and some review quotes, so I won't re-cover that ground here. The novel seemed to me to be about the complexities of loving relationships: between parents and children; siblings; men and women; individuals and communities. It is also about how these kinds of love combine to form, or threaten contentment. Lawson is a very compact writer, in the sense that she conveys an awful lot in a few phrases, and this allows her to crank the tension towards the denoument in an enjoyable and believable way. She is also an extremely good storyteller - the structure and pace here are gripping. I would certainly recommend this novel, and look forward to reading more by her.

So why did I begin with the assertion that this is good but not great? It does everything right, but I just couldn't find the extraordinary, the small thing which sets this above other good novels. I guess that missing ingredient is necessarily intangible, or there could be no such thing as a great novel...

Drawers of other summers

I have now finished Great House by Nicole Krauss. The novels is in two parts, each dealing with four narrative strands one at a time. They are connected by a huge desk, which has many drawers of various sizes, and by a young Chilean poet, who possessed the desk for an amount of time. The poet had been kidnapped during the Pinochet revolution in Chile and killed. The hole left in the lives of several of the novel's protagonists by this character reminded me a bit of Archimboldi, but this is a novel, which although peopled by characters many of whom are writers, is about people, rather than literature. Or perhaps it would be more clear to say it is about the effect the creative process has on those characters, but has very little to say about the writing that they produce. I was reminded more of Small Island by Andrea Levy, both because of the way several interconnected narrative strands run concurrently, and because one strand of each novel shares a similarity. This book is not treated favourably by the comparison. The structured coincidences which tie the story together seen too forced: they lack either the natural realism of Small Island or the easy serendipity of Krauss' acclaimed first novel The History of Love. This is by no stretch a bad novel; of the four narratives one in particular is sharply realised and affecting. The problem is simply that it wears the nuts and bolts of its architecture like Paris' Pompidou Centre, which made the writers presence that bit too intrusive.

Relaunch

I lost my thread and got lost in a sea of literature. Time to start again. I am currently reading Great House by Nicole Krauss, so perhaps i will start there when i have finished, by I also want to come back to 1984, along with Ayn Rand's Anthem and Huxley's Brave New World, so I've got a bit of catching up to do.

Meanwhile, i was really struck by the last paragraphs of Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet On The Western Front' (Random House - Vintage (2005 (1994 [1929])):

"I am very calm. let the months come, and the years, they'll take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me. I am so alone and so devoid of any hope that I can confront them without fear. Life, which carried me through these years, is still there in my hands and in my eyes. Whether or not I have mastered it, I do not know. but as long as life is there it will make it's own way, whether my conscious self likes it or not."

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He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army despatches restricted themselves to the single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front.
He had sunk forwards and was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over, you could see that he could not have suffered long - his face wore an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he were almost happy that it had turned out that way."


This passage is all the more chilling for the fact that the whole novel has been narrated by the protaganist, and it is not difficult to distrust the conclusions drawn by the second narrator in the final paragraph. It is impossible to forget the earlier account of the impossibility of finding men who had fallen face down, since their comrades could not locate the source of the sounds they made, meaning they might lie moaning for days, heard but not found by their friends. In addition, after hope had seeped away throughout the novel, it returns to some extent in the penultimate paragraph.

The last page of this novel elevated it, in my mind, from a very good novel to an extraordinary one.