Booker Longlist: The North Water

Booker Longlist: The North Water: Ian McGuire

My favourite so far of the books I’ve read on the longlist, Ian McGuire’s novel about a doomed C19 whaling expedition is a powerful, poetic and utterly compelling piece of work. McGuire’s undoubtedly extravagant appetite for gore is balanced brilliantly by the precision of his observations. There is nothing in this novel that seems lazy, or skimmed. Each insight is hard fought and worth having.

No-one on board this ‘unlucky’ ship is without flaw. From the corrupt and impotent Captain Brownlee through to the casual savagery of Henry Drax and the disgraced yet somehow decent Patrick Sumner, opium-addicted former surgeon in the British Army in Delhi, the characters are drawn into violence as if it were a climate. Violence is the flux of this novel, the medium in which it operates. And, if it is a climate, then it is aptly reflected in the scouring atmospheric layers of the novel’s environments: the harsh exactitude of being at sea is precisely matched by Arctic’s frozen indifference as the ship is stranded and its crew pitched onto the ice.

McGuire’s prose recalls Conrad, Melville, Hemingway and latterly Cormac McCarthy. This is a novel of masculinity, a novel of relentless action. There is no time for reflection, philosophy, nice consideration. Humanity is perforce as brutal and as harsh as the weather.

Among the many qualities that mark the novel out as original is the fact that the characters do not develop, and this is not perceived by the reader as a shortcoming, but rather an insight. There is no space for these men to develop. They remain resolutely themselves. However much we want to believe in the human capacity for change, for redemption, for forgiveness, in the end McGuire suggests, human beings have very little room for manoeuvre, either because of their character, their background, or their circumstances. And this is, at its heart, a merciful, quite tender observation. It seems Niezschean – indeed the novel begins: Behold the man - even melodramatic, but it emerges as a serious, subtle and even compassionate assessment of humanity. Drax and Sumner are pitched against each other, throughout the novel, but this is not a battle of good against evil, or the survival of the fittest. Their differences are as intransigent as their strangeness, as unique and particular as their histories. They are who they are: original, flawed, human.

The North Water is a book that had it merely been described to me, would have left me cold. But I loved it. It is a dark, sharp, beautiful novel, full of elemental potency. I recommend it to you with all my heart and deeply hope it makes the shortlist.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

The Booker Longlist: Eileen

Booker Longlist: Eileen: Otessa Moshfegh

It’s a dangerously risky strategy to make the eponymous protagonist of your novel someone deeply dislikeable, and in Moshfegh’s novel, Eileen doesn’t even like herself. The novel swivels between her interior and exterior life, daring us to find either of them appealing. Eileen lives with her father, an alcoholic sociopathic, paranoid ex-policeman, who carries a gun with him, even when he goes to the toilet. Externally, she is flat, wears a ‘death-mask’ works in a correction centre for boys, and observes herself and her co-workers with pitiless scrutiny. She constructs pointless yet curiously tender questionnaires for the mothers of these boys, stalks the most handsome of the guards, conducts a furtive sex life based on fantasy and reading her father’s pornography and seeks and finds a route out of her confinement.

The novel is told retrospectively, with Eileen reflecting on how she makes her escape. What does it take to release a woman in the 1960s from the torpor of a life of domesticity and secretarial work? asks Moshfegh. The answers are depressingly bleak: resistance – Eileen refuses to keep house for her father, they live in an antagonistic squalor exchanging only abuse, the possession of the gun and alcohol; violence – the moment for release comes 200 or so pages into this novel of 250 pages; and beauty – of a certain shiny variety that it seems almost impossible to place in this determinedly hostile novel.

Moshfegh creates a world that challenges our willingness to believe in it; a world so resolutely sordid that when glamour enters it in the form of Rebecca a psychologist at the centre, it enters in a form that seems cliched, disappointingly romantic, puzzlingly out of place. We keep expecting that Rebecca will be the catalyst for action, but in the end it is Eileen who navigates her own release, and Rebecca is no more potent than Randy the handsome guard (yes, really, Randy).

So what are its virtues? Whatever they are, I think they are slight and you have to be a very generous reader to find them. It’s a novel that seems, like its protagonist, addicted to its own repugnancy.  It is written with a sort of shimmering disgust similar to that Eileen feels at her own sexuality. Eileen’s relationship with her own body is violent: she fantasises rape (the 'soulful' kind) she starves herself, celebrates her ‘ugliness’ by wearing her dead mother’s clothing and is obsessed by her bowel. The trouble is, it all gets a bit boring, to be in the presence of someone who so consistently dislikes herself.

There is something brave about being so consistently desolate perhaps. And Moshfegh’s voice is distinctly her own. She brings to her writing an occasional lyricism, that lifts the novel from being entirely awful. There are moments of tenderness, and clarity, even moments of stark beauty. But, if I'm honest, they didn’t really do it for me, in the end.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: All That Man Is

Booker Longlist: All That Man Is: David Szalay

David Szalay’s collection of short stories that announce themselves as depicting collectively all that man is, centres around the twin obsessions of sex and money, which would be merely tiresome and disappointing, were it not for the fact that Szalay is so bracingly fresh when it comes to social relationship. In each of these nine stories he manages to convey an impressively vivid array of shades of awkwardness. From a disgraced billionaire sharing a microwave TV dinner with his bodyguard to the cheerfully nuanced schadenfreude of the journalist charged with informing an eminent politician that news of his affair with a married woman is about to break, from the academic clumsily pressing his girlfriend to have an abortion, to the old man trying to reverse out of a one way street, Szalay suggests that if the Inuit have fifty words for snow, contemporary man must have at least that number for discomfiture. 

What Szalay’s men all share in common is a certain ennui, a lack of real agency. They are all dislocated, away from home, distanced from their own power, out in the uncertain world utterly exhausted by it. The men in these stories are European men in England, or English men in Europe, timely at this moment when we are trying to work out where we might belong and what masculinity and power look like, stripped back to the basics.

The title, taken from Yeats’s Byzantium, prompts us to look for themes like immortality, ‘death-in-life and life-in-death’, decadence, ambiguity, the artifice of eternity. And they are all here, lodged in the text like a kind of music. Roughed up with gratuitous violence, dulled through the filter of alcohol, but still recognisably here, sweetly offering a counterpoint to the futility of the present situation. They are here in the repeated conceits: the tarot cards, the linking of the first and last stories, stabs at suggesting repetition rather than unity between these lives. And they are here in the moments when the men take themselves out of their own stories and lose themselves, momentarily in insights gleaned from the world, or from beauty.

So in Szalay’s reckoning of all that man is, what are we invited to conclude? That he is lonely, in the sense that he is existentially alone. He cannot connect so he surrounds himself with the trappings of power, which even he sees as chimerical. He is deeply unspiritual, moved by instinct rather than genius. He is vulnerable, as surprised by his mercurial desires as by his misreadings. Here are men defined by the women they can bed, the drink they can take, the pain they can stand, the money they can make and lose. So far, so ho hum.

And yet the characters, for all their unsettling dispiritedness, are entirely believable. We know these men (we have endured their company too many times for it to be entirely pleasurable to meet them again) we recognise them, and yet in spite of their shortcomings, Szalay tactfully, gracefully, encourages in us a curious sympathy for them. They move through the present – the same indefinite days we must all pass through – apparently baffled by the endless possibilities that propose themselves to contemporary man.

We sympathise with them because, in spite of their jaded relationships, they are restless. In some simple, barely formulated way they all trying to understand their condition, and they understand it in distinctly cultural terms. They are variously reading Dante, JK Rowling, Henry James. The Russian oligarch’s bodyguard has a copy of Titian’s Allegory of Prudence upon his wall. Here they seek to supply for themselves what is missing in their lives: spiritual wisdom, a bit of magic, engagement, a past a present and a future.

All That Man Is is a book of scrupulous attention. The texture of experience, of the lives of these men is thoroughly and economically written. There is scarcely a word out of place. Its rhythms belie its energy. It seems lethargic, mired in disappointment, yet it is buoyant with its own sense of observation. Like Yeats’ poem, it looks haphazard, random, certainly not a novel, yet technically it is a feat to be admired. Would I recommend it? I’m not sure I liked it enough. Does it illuminate something larger than itself? It’s certainly clever, but in the end I think it might be more artifice than miracle.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist 2016: Hot Milk

Booker Longlist 2016: Hot Milk Deborah Levy

It’s that time of the year again, the Booker longlist is announced and bestows upon us a veritable sumptuary of novels to sink into, it’s enough to make one take to one’s bed. And the temptations of Hot Milk, Deborah Levy’s latest novel, are sufficient to keep me there. Sofia and her mother Rose, have come to Spain on a last ditch attempt to understand and relieve Rose’s incomprehensible and intermittent paralysis. Mythic, lyric, thoughtful, Hot Milk is a novel that asks what does it mean to be female? What does it mean to be well? What does it mean to be powerful?

Let’s start with the title, which offers itself initially as perhaps the most off-putting thing about the novel. I dislike the title, and yet, I concede, it’s perfect: even the fact that it makes me feel a bit queasy is perfect. Like her previously Booker listed novel Swimming Home, this is a novel which works like a poem, layering up its meanings in indirect and powerful ways. The novel is certainly hot. Set largely in Spain, on an unshaded beach, bordered by a sea full of medusa jellyfish, it is saturated in sunshine. Its concerns with the body ensure that it is hot in two other senses of that term, both erotically charged, and stolen, as the scenes between Sophia and her two lovers are stolen from the timeline of the central narrative. And Sofia’s life is ‘stolen’ from her by her mother; Sofia must steal a fish; Rose complains that she has been ‘robbed’ (of her illness and her money) by the idiosyncratic and charismatic Doctor Gomez. And then there’s milk – the primary connection between mother and child, and a vigorous nod to the feminist literary critic Cixous (whose work The Laugh of the Medusa explores women’s writing, women’s bodies, women’s sexuality through, among other things, references to white ink or mother’s milk). Who knew Hot Milk could be so sexy? Helen Cixous did, and Deborah Levy does. And by the end of the novel, we are in no doubt that this apparently mild title packs a hypnotic, sweetly seductive charge.

The main themes of the novel are identity, savagery, malady, truth. It is hard for women, Levy suggests, to discern the difference between what is real and what is not. On the one hand this is a novel set in the recognisably real, a political and geographical landscape which is harsh, true and irreducible. On the other, everything has a dreamlike quality. Everything is symbolic. We are in the realm of the psychologically real: true in the sense that myth is true. We are dealing here, Levy proposes, not with the body, but with what the body is made to mean. Things look stable until they shatter: the laptop screen, the reproduction Greek vase, the man in the women’s toilet, who turns out to be a woman, Ingrid, who is a seamstress re-inventing cast-offs, embroidering them with words that seem to say one thing but might just as well be saying another. The fabric of Ingrid’s creations is slippery, sensual, kind to the body. But like the other acts of compassion in this novel, her gifts are shot through with a thread of menace. In order not to be disabled, Levy suggests, women have to be bold, to behave badly, to break the structures that seem to hold them steady.

It’s not a flawless novel. It seems to lose pace in the middle section when Sofia goes to Greece to reconnect with her absent father. Yet it is an important section, which prompts us to reflect on how the figure of the daughter is constructed not just in relation to the mother but also in relation to a stepmother only barely older than herself, and a baby half-sister who might be thought to supplant her, but actually is beloved by her. And in that space – Greece - we have cause to re-examine the word, beloved, and think again about what it means to be an object of affection.

But for all this, Hot Milk is a novel which wears its themes lightly. It is funny, intimate, bright. The relationships are drawn with a sureness of touch that makes even the dislikeable characters likeable. It draws on its mythic and intellectual inheritances with a good deal of grace, wears them well, repurposes them in ways that seem both chic and canny. Do I hope it makes the shortlist? For sure. Do I recommend it to you? absolutely.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Untouchable

Untouchable. In your badger-skin vest, I see you moving through a frozen landscape, surviving on roadkill, earthdirt and diesel. Your breath in the cold air still capable of melting my hot-wired heart. The bodies of moles sag from barbed wire. A crow bounces on the snow. Haemon, son of Eurydice, how very like a God you seem in this dark place. Humpty Dumpty, teetering on the brink, desperate for love but too weak to enjoy it. I think of myself kissing the hem of your garments, sucking out the car fumes, the dirty power of you. Illuminations flicker in my mind's eye. Music static mistakes my shaking chest for a heartbeat. Nevertheless, somewhere the truth  flashes on and off inside me.
You move along the edge of the wall like a dog on a carcass, getting to the place where I can meet you. It's high time, you tell me, and a warehouse falls apart in my head. Walls collapse into a slow rain of soot. Parked cars burst into flame. I can fix it, you say. Fix it so subtly no-one will notice. And here you are, singing love songs to me in the dark to the tune of Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. It is both creepy and erotic. I push my hands into the junction between your own ghost and your flesh, and long for it to be a day again, like any other. Like all the rest. Haemon at the mouth of the cave, my loyal retainer. Made of heart and bone; made of gloss and treebark. Let's make a new history, a new mythology. Just one more time. Take me down.

Tea with Cordelia

In this seaside conservatory, running with rain, I sit with Cordelia and her sisters, smoking cigarettes and eating fruitcake and wondering what it would be like to be kissed by them.
Cordelia, who dresses like a man with good intentions, winks her one true eye at me. She has her reasons, I am sure. She blows smoke rings at me across the glass room, and beckons me to sit in her lap.
'Come here' she whispers, hoarsely, and hitches up her skirt. Her knees above her men's socks are white and scarred.
'I will feed you chili cup cakes so that your mouth will taste both sweet and hot.'
Awe flips into fear. Or is it the other way around? Cordelia's mouth is old and dry with crumbs sticking to it. She is nasty in the way all tainted things are. Even the breath of her is as sweet as a sucked pastille.
Once I am on her knee, she rocks us, and makes me fish down the front of her bodice for the photo she keeps there of her blind lover. They had, she tells me again and again, but one good eye between them. 'Kissing him' she says pursing her antique lips into the memory, 'was irresistibly bad.'
I look at the creases of him, try to puzzle out what is being erased.
He had begged leave to bring her flowers, roses perhaps or passion flowers. Chinese lanterns or crysanthemums.
'Flowers.' She spits into the fire 'I'd much rather he had pinned me against a rough wall and delivered me a big bunch of shuddering thrills.' And she pinches my leg.
It is an almost belligerent way of being happy. Think what you will, but when Cordelia and her sisters light each other's cigarettes, in this conservatory, overlooking the sea, I close my eyes and breathe it all in, and I think nothing could be sexier, more cheerfully wicked than this.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: The Moor's Account

Story and storytelling is at the heart of Laila Lalami's beautiful third novel The Moor's Account. The ability to tell a good story, she urges, is a life-saving skill.
The novel reimagines the first encounters between the Spanish Conquistadores and the Americas, and tells the story from the perspective of a Moroccan slave. It is a work of remarkable seductive persuasion. Lalami presents us with  one of the most compellingly wonderful characters of this year's Booker longlist, the vibrant, flawed, brave and resourceful: Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, sold into slavery and renamed as Estebanico. His account is satisfying on so many levels: it is lively  and direct, in the way of folk wisdom. It takes its rhythms from The Arabian Nights; it is laced with insight and compassion. His account is deeply concerned with morality. A slave to greed before he is made a slave, Mustafa's personal story includes him selling slaves for profit before in an act of humility and self sacrifice he sells himself so that his family might have the means of survival.
In Spain he is stripped of his identity and his dignity: 'the first of many erasures' but his ability with language makes him indispensible to Castilian explorers who depend on his skills to negotiate with the various tribes they encounter. Greed and betrayal underpin much of the narrative action, but Lalami suggests that storytelling is itself a moral act,  indeed, it surpasses that: it is act of faith. And as an act of faith it leads us to the truth, and to a life lived under the eye of God. The novel closes with the following:
"Maybe there is no true story, only imagined stories, vague reflections of what we saw and what we heard, what we felt and what we thought. Maybe if our experiences, in all their glorious, magnificent colours, were somehow added up, they would lead us to the blinding light of the truth. To God belong the east and the west: whichever way you turn, there is the face of God. God is great." Without the saving grace of story we are deeply imperilled and spiritually lost.
This is a novel which rings with all the pleasures of the profoundly familiar and the brilliantly imagined. To read it is to rediscover who we are, what shames us, and what redeems us.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: Did You Ever Have a Family?

Bill Clegg's novel Did You Ever Have a Family is a work of immense lyrical grace. Absolutely sure-footed, Clegg guides us through the parched landscapes of loss following the gas explosion that wipes out June Reid's family, the evening before her only daughter's wedding. The novel is articulated with great tenderness, unpacking the various ambivalences which surround human intimacy and social hierarchy. Belonging, desire, vulnerability, betrayal, isolation: each chapter brings a different voice to the chorus, sheds a new light on the tragedy. Relationships, Clegg suggests, are incendiary even without faulty appliances. It only takes a little fault, something you learn to live with, to trigger calamity. Even the people on the remotest reaches of this catastrophe reveal the ways in which the disasters they must live with are as much a result of their characters as of fate.
Beautifully paced, each chapter permits another piece of the story to drop into place, which makes for a pleasingly satisfying read. The base note is gentleness. This, the novel proposes, is the way to heal. This is hard-won intelligence. Each character's small, flawed life needs care. Those that give care elevate the novel to something elegiac. Those that withhold it, ground us in the unnecessary small meannesses of everyday life.
The premise of this novel presents Clegg with a technical problem. Because the main event wipes out the family of the title right at the beginning of the book, the action of the novel is almost all retrospective. June's odyssey across America to try and put some physical distance between her life and what remains of it, is numbed by grief. In effect she becomes a ghost in her own life. That Clegg is able to sustain our interest and our compassion for the characters through the rest of the novel, is testament to his skill in observing the detail of ordinary lives. The gap between who June is in this novel, and who she hoped she would be is at the heart of why we care for her. That gap is what motivates all the characters in one way or another. It is what underpins their relationships and enables them to be more fully real than even they feel themselves to be. And it is this, more than anything, that lifts Bill Clegg's novel beyond the ordinary, and makes it something really rather wonderful.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: The Illuminations

Every so often you come across what reads like an almost perfect novel. From the opening sentence of Andrew O'Hagan's fifth novel, The Illuminations, you know you are going to be taken somewhere thrilling. His central character, Anne Quirk, photographer of the mundane and overlooked moment, is capable of giving even the most despised kitchen utensil a compelling gleam, and so too does O'Hagan in this novel which is crafted so elegantly you forget there is a craft to it, and each page reveals something both recognisably familiar and brand new.
Illumination is at the heart of the novel which explores light in all its moods: dark-rooms and cross-fire, metaphor and truth, levity and gravity. What is revealed shifts according to the light we see it in. But O'Hagan guides us through the dazzle and glare with such tenderness, such candour about relationships, honour, betrayal and love that we emerge from the reading as transfigured as if we were ourselves in love.
The novel is structured around two counterposed narratives of identity: the story of Anne Quirk and that of her grandson, Luke (named for the light) who is serving in Afghanistan. Both stories are fully believable: the disintegrating, fragmented personal narrative of the old lady, dislocated by dementia and most thoroughly realised through what she has created and what is remembered by others; and the disintegrating fragmented political narrative of her grandson, whose interrogations of loyalty and glory most closely plot and unhook the national narratives of identity.
I loved this novel. I loved it for its simple beauty,  and for the fact that it focuses the attention on the smallest particular, and makes that detail reveal something large about us. I hope it makes the shortlist. Indeed I hope it wins the prize, for it would be a worthy winner. And I recommend it to you with all my heart, as a novel that you should read, because it is true and powerful and rich in both sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: A Brief History of Seven Killings

No wonder Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, looks fed up in his author photo. Perhaps the first thing I should tell you about this novel is how very misleading the title is. There is nothing brief about this history, a novel of over 700 pages in maybe 7pt type, and there are many many more than seven killings. Marlon James' account of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the 1970s and the cold war politics of the 1980s is a complex and ambitious interleaving of multiple narratives - indeed the cast of 76 characters extends over two pages.What is most remarkable is that there is hardly any plot to this assassination story, only the briefest character development (most notably Nina Burgess - whose story was the one I cared the most about) and barely any description. What there is, there is in abundance and that is Voice: this is a book that is all about the voice.
Its flaw is that hardly any of the voices are sufficiently differentiated - I could not tell at a 'blind' open-the-page-at-random testing whether I was in Papa-Lo's story, Alex Pierce's,  Bam-bam's or Josey Wales's. Everyone speaks with the same disaffected, edgy, interior voice. Their narratives are unrelentingly grim: brutal, ruthless, profane and angry. The rhythms of the book are insistent and rough, the relationships bitter, self-defeating.
I am a reader who likes books that challenge me, I like to read a book that leaves me feeling the world is larger and more imagined than I had believed possible. I am also a reader familiar with the post-modern, post-colonial steer to represent the world in all its conflicting, contradictory, sometimes harsh sometimes magical variety. I understand that a novel might be more than simply about the pleasures of the text, that it might be about life, about story itself. So I would have perhaps considered myself prime audience for a novel like this. But there was precious little pleasure in reading this novel, scant story for a novel so ostensibly taken with the themes of uprising, survival, redemption songs and ganga guns. It's big and baggy and it sags so low in the middle you think you are going to be permanently scarred by the ride.
It left me feeling exhausted, dejected and deeply unsatisfied in my soul. Now, let me go and listen to a bit of Bob and lively up myself before I can embark upon the next novel on this Booker Longlist

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: Lila

Back in the land of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's latest novel Lila revisits the story of the Preacher John Ames and turns its steady gaze upon his second wife, Lila.
Lila, whose name not only evokes the lily of the resurrection but also echoes Lilith and Lamia, is as soon as she is named, already marked contradictorily as full of grace, and both fallen and serpentine. She arrives in Ames' life with a knife in her garter and a past full of hardship and it seems she is put there as much as anything in order to question his faith. In Gilead, Ames blesses his good fortune in finding love at this late and unlikely stage in his life. In Lila, we are invited to consider this surprising blessing as it is experienced, no less powerfully, by his wife.
Like Robinson's previous novels, Lila is deeply philosophical, concerned with the nature of love, of redemption, of salvation. And the conclusions she draws here are just as pitiless. Love may not always represent salvation. The hand of intimacy, however longed for, might be as scalding as any hand laid in anger upon a body, suggests Robinson. And so, she urges, we must proceed in love with great gentleness, careful not to judge, just as careful of our own scar tissue as of the beloved's.
The novel is structured with two distinct narrative arcs, the story of Ames' and Lila's courtship and marriage, and the story of Lila's childhood and life before she stumbled into Gilead. Both narratives are shot through with deprivation, hardship, abandonment. But both are written with a kind of radiance and an elegant simplicity that elevates them beyond the merely sincere to something much more revelatory than that, something which marks Marilynne Robinson as a truly unique writer of contemporary fiction. Her novels are a meditation upon the nature of grace, which is to say, upon what it means to be human, at fault, disappointing to those who might nevertheless love us. And because Robinson is so faithfully preoccupied with the relationship between suffering and spirituality, her characters emerge as beloved: shown in a kind of infinite light, they shine with truth.
Regularly, in this novel we are taken by surprise. We experience, with Lila, and with Ames, the consolations of faith, we share in their spiritual insights, and we are brought, in the end to regard them with awe and joy, because they are so humanly, wretchedly lovely.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: The Green Road

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Anne Enright's latest novel is the accomplishment of making the family the narrator. Greater than the sum of its parts: contradictory, secret, despairing, spiteful, forgiving, in The Green Road the family emerges as a thoroughly credible, absolutely reliable narrator. This is a very elegantly written novel, with a sure-footed sense of the competing loyalties and frustrations that power a family. At the heart of the novel is a reunion, but the intelligence that underpins this novel is that reunion is both unnecessary (for the connections are unbreakable) and impossible (for the slippages are great, the fragmentations inevitable, the hostilities unbreachable.) In a family, Enright claims, what connects us is precisely what holds us apart.
Through the circling narrations of the different family members at different historical moments Enright builds up a picture of the profound unknowability of those we love. We think we understand them, we think we belong to them, but ultimately who they are remains elusive, their motivations inscrutible, their aspirations unthinkable. Rosaleen, mother to this family, is theatrically selfish, begrudging her children's lives even as she desires them. Her children circle around her, leave her, refuse her and indulge her, but they do know know her and she does not, will not know them.
If this sounds bleak, then so be it. Enright's writing is sparse to the point of plain. Her characters are all in different ways spiritually and emotionally impoverished. They show each other no mercy. And yet as readers, again and again we are gently encouraged  by Enright to pity them and the landscapes they inhabit.
And landscape is something else Anne Enright understands and can represent in deft brushstrokes. From County Clare to Mali to New York, she quietly asserts her ability. Each location is thoroughly evoked, reminding us that Enright is not just capable of a bit of  your Auld Oirish but able to transport us beyond what we thought we could expect to something utterly other. The Green Road navigates the uncertain terrains of different identities, different lands, different mindsets but ultimately brings us home, to the family, with all its flaws, its rawness and its ups and downs.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: Satin Island

Reading Satin Island by Tom McCarthy is a bit like being on a waltzer or a switchback. It's simultaneously thrilling and migraine inducing. It's also over incredibly swiftly and leaves you feeling mildly unnerved, like you're sure there was a point to all that wizardry, but you're not sure whether the point was to leave you feeling defeated. The tropes of the novel are all about surface and depth, truth and falsehood, the raw and the cooked, all of which are suggested and then postponed by buffering. The novel itself keeps on buffering, calling for patience, calling for us to wait and see whether in time meaning will emerge, and the narrative will resume something approaching normal service. There is a sense of shimmering, of weightlessness. There is a sense of pattern, of burnishing something perfect and lovely. This novel, which is deliberately anti-real, nevertheless deals with the virtual shifting realities that we take for granted in our lives, our news-feeds, our online identities, even if we resist it in our contemporary fiction.
The narrator, U, (maybe you, ie us, maybe Ulysses) is a voyager, tasked with the great reveal: the story of our age, deciphering the deeply encrypted codes that make meaning for us. U works as a 'corporate anthropologist' for The Company. A nod to Kafka and to Saussure here. His task, which he never seems to start, which is endlessly deferred (pace Derrida) nonetheless succeeds in conferring upon him status, even applause. The deferrals, by which I mean the novel itself, constitute a series of disconnected observations, proposals, anecdotes, insights, and suppositions, leaving us feeling both overstimulated and under-served. Cleverly though, in spite of its many disparate and unfulfilling parts, the sum total does add up to a shifting yet piercing ethnographic account of our status-addicted tribe (mankind circa 2015).

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: A Little Life

And here I am, tear-stained and exhausted at the end of only the first of this year's Booker Longlist.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a novel of brutal beauty and desperate ugliness. Its surfaces are scarred and flawed with trauma: self harming, sexual abuse, betrayal, but peel these away (and that in itself is painful work) and you get to something real and rare: a book rigorously concerned with the deep philosophical questions of love, beauty, goodness.
There is much to admire in this novel which assembles and then rubs down the structures of our lives: art, law, commerce, morality, but, perhaps, not a great deal to like. Except that we do like, in spite of their flaws, its characters: the beautiful and the damned, the gifted and the blessed, the sordid and the good. The central relationships between the four friends: Jude, JB, Willem and Malcolm primarily and then around Jude, other clusters of important friendships: Julia, Harold, Andy and Richard, form architectures of light and strength in which to hold the themes of the novel. Excruciatingly and patiently Yanagihara suggests again and again that the world is one which must be endured before it can be loved.
The time structure of the novel is equally elegant, foreclosing the future, bringing forward the past, collapsing time into the eternal present of the traumatised and because Yanagihara pays such close attention to structures, it works. What persists is story: the stories we tell ourselves and each other about who we are. If friendship is to mean anything, Yanagihara insists, it must be candid. Indeed the moral universe that the novel creates is one delicately, painstakingly formed through the flimsy assemblages of human love: friendship, filial, paternal, sexual. At the heart of the novel is the single devastating question: Can we be saved by love? and around the stone of that single question ripple out others, equally tough: do we owe it to those who love us to stay alive? is it possible to love unselfishly? where are we doomed? and where might we be saved? And because these are the central questions the book becomes more than just an account of suffering. It is a deeply spiritual book, as equally concerned with redemption as it is with damnation.
It is a raw deal this book: it's rare for a book to make me cry, and this one did, quite a lot. But it's also a wise book, and a book that unfolds for us great tenderness, incomparable beauty and the certain knowledge that at the end of it you have experienced something true about art, and something true about love.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

My Heart's Old Malady

I have my heart's old malady. It's a bloody muscle the heart, and I am lost in the foundry of flesh. Love's scum rises to the top. We are making a forgery. Or else we are forging something utterly new.
What can I give you? I give you the summer, salt on the rim of two half-saucer glasses, sleeping beside ourselves under a scribble of stars. Elsewhere in the universe the tsars are ordering the beheading of the clowns. Here, let us step into the light. We open the door onto the carpark under the fumed blue of a bombay sapphire sky. Laughter rises from us, easy as birdsong in this new day. I am lost in love. Am lost.
I give you the earth. Read its maps as relics: Islamabad, Jakarta, Hartshead Moor. I give you the fullest moon the heavens can roll out. Voluptuous as a pearl. Be morning to my pillow,  I say. Multiply my joy. Make me crest. Keep me there.
You offer me your dictaphone, press the play button to let me hear myself arriving in love's unbreakable heart. And there is nothing new. Nothing. Not cabbage, not soul, not a man in black feathers. There is simply me, in only my own skin, behaving just like myself, making it all up out of nothing.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Desiderata

I am here to learn about patience. When I put my head to your chest to hear your heart beating and there is no sound, is that because I am deaf on the side of your heart or have you indeed no heart, my infidel?
You bring to me your songs of the desert, of redemption and revisitation, and I feel the flimsy but sure desire to be in another place, a shatter of sun above us, the presence of the self: yours and mine.
If I am still, I fancy I can still hear it. My name in your mouth as you brought me into being. Something bloody on the tongue: fluvial, elemental. You unfolded your desiderata and laid it in oils upon my skin so that the words would always belong to me. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Go placidly in it. Strive to be happy.
An apple drops between us, entirely itself before itself becomes known. I hear a crow lift its wings and beat the air into submission. I hear a lark ascend on the notes of its boundaries into the sky. I walk barefoot through the garden of your stories.  You put a finger to my lips, reminding me that I am here to learn about patience. Your mouth smashes into mine, promising me a sudden change of heart, and even as I am falling I wonder if your kiss is just another way of telling me to be quiet and remember what peace there may be in silence.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Your Illicit Self

Let a wand of feather guide me, as the sun fastens long shadows to the side of the motorway. I am making my way towards you. A wren flies across my path, her low zigzag making light of the situation. If you can call adultery a situation. If you can call rapture a situation. The way is lit by the shine of you, the evening's glow elongating the day. I'm restless, as I'm meant to be, anticipating the exchange of small incendiary sparks between us. Imagining the gloss of your smooth planes, the subtle scent of you, bugle maybe. Foxglove in the rain. Did I tell you I am a pluviophile? I want to wear you on my pulse points, the base of my spine, my wrists, my throat.
Let's blow it all, all this evening's gold until we can lie together, full spent, light and airy, as the breeze moves the curtains in this rented room and the day blesses us for her darlings once again. Who knew as I set out the day would shift from brave to brazen, to offer us something so unexpectedly tender, so  poignant. Who knew the wand of feather would guide me to a nest as sweet and purposeless as this?

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Then I'll Begin

I was conceived on a dustbin, while old ha'pennies rolled in the dark arcades, horses came in for betting men, and a woman with her eye on the main chance opened a book for how long the whole affair would last.
It was the night of the eclipse. The full moon hid her face behind a fan of brushed silk and out I fell from him into her. It was something like chasm, something like fulfilment. Sequins popped in the sky,  rude streamers unfurled from the mouths of the angels,  and the music-hall pageantry of the stars winked and made slow applause at my soiled beginnings.
It is of no matter. There are in this world blind babies wrapped in banana leaves, and odd man-shaped things dropped on forest floors. Where the child lies hid changes from one moment to the next. Here she is crawling under a patchwork quilt. Here she is creeping under the lid of a grand piano stranded on the stony beach. Temperament may play a part, but so too do circumstance and company. A dustbin lid rolled, like a cymbal, crashing out the news of my arrival.
I was born to a child-hearted woman, enamored of old 78 vinyl records and men in fedoras with knives in their socks. With delectable symmetry, once again there was a lunar eclipse. A coin flipped in the sky's palm and myself was unleashed. A thumb brushed away a tear, memories blurred, like some sort of colouring-in porn. The blushing moon rented us for her darlings, a spire glowed gold on a country church, Godmothers counted their blessings. There. That is all there was to it.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

In Case of Fire Break the Glass

Complete me I beg of you. Fill my dark spaces, cram me so full of you I can barely breathe. I was born to kiss your feet, to run my tongue the length of the sole of your foot. Kiss me long enough to make time forget herself, and stand sucking her thumb in a daydream. Take me down the wet steps of your imagination. Obliterate me, cover me in the shine of you. Outside the sun is a pewter disc blackmailing the afternoon's sister into parting with her wealth. Bring me your hopes, cross my heart with your fingers.
I offer you myself unhinged, open, my doors splintered and wrecked. Enter me at your own risk. Welcome to the dark side. Let me light the lamp made of the minotaur's hoof. Don't flinch. If I give you a dangerous wink, kiss me immediately. I must not be allowed to speak.
Smelt me in your fire, melt me in the fluxy lusty salt sweet waters of you. Make me burst with light.
Come, let us enter your tomorrows and just for now make ourselves a temporary camp there.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

The Road

Take something precious, the road whines. Take something overflowing, something pouring from a broken urn, something beyond the realm of the ordinary.
I put my ear to the hot asphalt and listen to the buzz and whine of this traffic of words. Fantasy empties out into language. The road buckles beneath my ear. My body, always living in the fast lane, responds with its own minute vibrations. My hopes are like a still life, petals falling next to pewter spoons; the ghost of a pheasant connects my mind's eye with my body's. On the reality of the road's surface I see a dancing woman on a fully laden table; the tinfoil disc of a fish-eye in a mackerel's head; a stargazer pie for the guests.
You drag your disabled nightmares before me on parade. Here they come, the lamenting eunuchs, Beatrice beating her copper drum, the king's god-cub dressed int he tattered furs of his crimes. You place your mouth against the curb and whisper to me: are you bereft or replete? But your words no longer make sense. I am all spirit now. I am staring into the bright lights of the night riders, juggernauts, moons, bikers. I am doped up to the eyeballs and all I can hear are the road's whined imprecations: take something precious if you go, if you go, take everything.
I see the decapitated body of the stag at the road's verge. I see a thousand black caterpillars unpicking the road's white running stitch, and I hoist myself upright, buckle up my silken kimono, my dreamcoat of cash and crimson, lined with all its photos, its memories of lost loves and orphans. I spit on the jewels and gems on each of my fingers and polish them. They withhold their lights, sulking on my fingers.
You reach for me, about to complain again that he has stolen my life from you. About to beg me to come now, come home, come again. But I am the Queen of Chaos, given to embracing the hectic, given to embracing the emergent. I care no more for you laments than I do for your pleas. I set my unsteady foot upon this shrieking road. I see the musicians with their broken strings give each other the nod to recommence their performance. My head is wrapped in the colours of their music, wreathed in the lemons and greys of G sharps and A minors. I am groping in the dark, shambolic, careening out beyond the empire.
The eunuchs, who have pierced the cloth of unknowing, gather up the black silk of the road and follow me to my funeral. There are books I can never read cairned in tottering piles upon ghost shelves. I see the letters burning in the grate. The words curl and char. I am going. Stepping out onto the highwire. Who knew the road could be this narrow? Who knew it would swing this wild?

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele