The Prodigal: Electra Considers the Queer Idea of Family

It is so because it is written. Five hearts tattooed in blue upon his wrist: one for each of us. Mother sits beneath the open sky embroidering children onto the soiled household linen. The day drenches her in a sudden light. I watch her pulling threads, quiet as breath, as she fastens another smile to an infant's face. Rex traces his hearts with a calloused finger and leans back against the trunk of the apple tree regarding his wife.  Rex, the husband of hearts. He has married a woman utterly addicted to the quality of light in his shadow. He stands just five breaths away from her. His heart beats to a distant drum,. His spheres turn to a darker music. Mother unspools another twist of thread and murmurs her prayers, calling him in. One breath for love, two for an open heart, three for each child, four for an angel's effigy. Five is the magic breath, the breath that will close the space between them in an embrace, as Rex falls towards her, helpless. I watch as he leans in for her kiss, momentarily extinguishing the light in her face. And I think: they have chosen to be lost.

The King Pays a Surprise Visit

She wears the mourning jewel, black loops of jet about her throat, its indistinct lights purling between hope and sleep. She unhooks her wings, shakes down her shoulders. He watches her reflection in the long mirror. Her spine is a string of pearls as she bends to her task and his jealous ghost leans in stupidly to get a better look. Is it his imagination or does she glance up at him now, facing the wild? A prickle of joy knits one purls one cable across his back. They are the pearly king and queen turning over the odd reliquaries of the world between them. He comes to her now, in the odd months of the year, those months when the wind blows him backwards, inverting all his desires. To kiss is sick. He longs to eat but all she can offer him is tea. Come to me she whispers, smiling a smile full of bright necklace, a smile full of crumbling opulence. Come to me. And he has no idea of his desire to punish her until he hears the soft snip of recognition as she takes out her pearl-handled knife and cuts the heart out of the possible.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: The Luminaries: Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton's second novel is as suggestive, diverting and mesmerising as its title would have us hope. Set in Victorian New Zealand, it is a masterpiece of plotting and revelation. Conspiracy, secrecy, purloined letters (there is more than a nod to Poe here) revelation and fortune circle each other in the stories of the cast of twelve characters which intersect and interrupt each other for the unpacking of the central mystery.
For sheer reading pleasure Catton's novel is an out and out success. We are reminded throughout the novel that we are being told a story, and we are as captivated as children by the telling of it. The headers for each chapter which begin by dropping little clues, and end by usurping the content of the chapter are themselves beguiling. The evocation of place is compelling, the language precisely of its period. Her sense for the vernacular is spot on, her characters vivid and endearing.
Even if one were to appraise the novel simply in terms of its architecture, it is a thing of beauty, wondrously structured so that the form fully underpins the content. Catton's decision to use astrology as the frame for her story is a stroke of genius: astrology, the ever-changing patterns of the stars which men use to find purpose and pattern in their lives and motivations. The novel is structured in twelves, so it has a mathematical as well as literary pleasure to it.
Fortune is the currency of the novel, both in terms of chance and in terms of gold. We are asked to consider what is of value and then shown what desire costs.  There is an alchemical beauty in Catton's novel. Everyone is transformed, some are transfigured. Paulo Coelho says that alchemy exists so that the world becomes a better place, so that we can transform our leaden lives into gold. Catton has done something even more luminous: she has turned the world of words into something fine and precious, rare and valuable. If this isn't a contender for the prize I don't know what is.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

The Prodigal: Electra takes a Walk

Electra walks in the shadow, her face smudged with black light-out. Tonight she is walking with uncommon purpose. She is walking to heal her broken heart. Love for Rafael has dragged her through the graveyards and eelhouses of her ordinary life and brought her finally to this walking world, defined by vast, unboundaried ways. The moon slips out from a veil of cloud and illumines Electra making her cautious way down the broken street. She feels the chill of Rafael breathing down her neck, but when she turns there is no-one, only a cat which slinks behind a dustbin and disappears, like a magician's coin, into a sleeve of darkness.
Because he has vanished, she believes she will find her way by following her handedness. She tends towards the left. It is not much to go on, but it is something.
She follows the cracked map of her hand to find her way through the city and stands back against a nightclub wall as a gaggle of girls, clinging to each other, tip themselves into the street. It is the night of the breakneck bodice and high-heels. Somewhere a clock tolls and a neon light above her flickers on and off in red. Look out, there she goes, walking through the rat's nest of the city, still trying to find her way back to him.

The Prodigal: Rafael Dreams of Being Free

I insert myself into a landscape stitched in semi-precious stones: this edge of Rombald's Moor. It was so, it is so and it will always be so. The rocks glitter. Crows nest in the beacons of the firs, as the late sun sets a match to a sky crossed with vapour trails. I stand on the precipice, like Rombald, like something grand raised out of the rubble. In the valley a car stitches a red thread to Low Holden. Here is the place where the heart's cold bird rises up in an ugly imitation of flight. Here is the place where the shrew disappears into the skeletal heath.  I am among them, I am among this family of wild things. The nervous gorse releases its kissing perfume. I open my eyes and it is all gone in the beat of a lash. The walls here are the same splotchy white as an owl's egg. Carefully I come back to this room.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Booker Longlist: Unexploded: Alison MacLeod

Set in Brighton in 1940, Alison MacLeod's novel Unexploded has a pleasingly persuasive period cadence. The style is oddly formal, point of view shunts between characters, an omniscient narrator drops us into different character's heads and experiences without warning, and MacLeod has an unfashionable fondness for adverbs, all of which combine to situate the novel precisely in its time. MacLeod is at her best deftly undermining our expectations of the characters. No-one is quite as they seem and the novel's title, suggestive of the combustible energies between the characters, suggests the care with which they have to conduct their relationships.

The novel is not simply a period piece though. It deals with themes that are absolutely contemporary: allegiance, race, cultural misunderstanding, and terror. It suggests that what remained unexploded after the second world war, remains a persistent threat. And it achieves this with rather more grace and elegance than the tale it uses as a vehicle, for the story itself suffers at times from a curious ennui, notably during the Virginia Woolf lecture. It is a shame that this moment didn't quite come off as the character of Evelyn owes much to Woolf's writing, and it was a nice acknowledgement of that to have Woolf make a cameo appearance.

Notwithstanding minor quibbles, MacLeod has a distinct and original voice. She writes with powerful intensity about relationships and desire, most vividly of all the tragic desire to be loved which so often in this novel goes awry, with devastating consequences.

Unexploded is a novel to be admired for its intricate plotting, its psychological acuity and above all for the elegance with which MacLeod intersplices the devastating into the mundane, such that neither lose their impact.

Booker Longlist: The Marrying of Chani Kaufman: Eve Harris

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is Eve Harris's debut novel, set in the Charedi Jewish community of North London. Harris's sympathy for her characters is clear and compelling, but their voices are all very similar, which means that we never fully engage with any of them. The novel shifts perspective and time periods, and sometimes  these shifts are clunky and disrupt the narrative flow. The structure of the novel intertwines the story-lines of three separate relationships: the central one between Chani and Baruch, that between Rabbi Chaim Zilberman and his wife Rivka, and the brief and thwarted relationship between their son Avromi and his fellow law-student Shola. Of these the most interesting relationship is that between Chaim and Rivka. This relationship is the one which most powerfully ignites our sympathy and interest, so it is a shame that this storyline was not given more presence and moment in the novel. It is here that we see most fully how life in a religious community informs the life of the individual.

Underpinning all the relationships is the question of how far faith can sustain us or restrict us in the ways in which we explore what it means to love. Harris is disappointingly one-sided in her examination of this, which makes the novel seem slighter than it need have been. The themes of the novel could be thrillingly pertinent in a society which is struggling to define the role of religion, but the treatment of the themes was too often frustratingly facile.

I was surprised to find this long-listed for the Booker. I shall be even more surprised if it makes it to the shortlist.