Ian McEwan's "Nutshell": Book Review

I've only read two of this prolific talent's novels, the lesser-known Solar and The Cement Garden. McEwan tells stories in a dour but somehow spirited fashion, garnering a wide readership while appealing to the critics and academics, over many decades. Indeed, I found Cement remaindered when I was still in high school, shortly after its publication. I never forgot its chilly air, but it may have steered me away from following the disparate paths taken by him in other foreboding tales.

With a keen interest in Hamlet going back to high school too, I was eager to enjoy Nutshell. It flows well, and can be finished in a long sitting, as it's two-hundred pages that turn easily for the rapt reader. Suffice to say that as in the original source, you cheer on the revenge sought by the protagonist. But, attesting to the skill in creating Gertrude in 1603 or Trudy in 2016, I also wanted her flawed, brittle character to succeed. Her machinations with boorish Claude against his brother John Cairncross (not Hamish so-and-so, I suppose!) unfold with the same suspense Shakespeare sparked.

"The rustling sound is a plastic bag containing groceries or tools of death or both." So reports the fetus narrating the plots of his mother against his father and with his uncle's collusion. He gets a buzz of Trudy's wining and suffers the slings and arrows of her unsteady gait up and down the stairs, too.

McEwan's ingenuity in giving the first-person voice to one inside the womb limits its reports to what his senses pick up, enhancing the eerie nature of this account from the not-yet-born. "Now I live inside a story and fret about its outcome. Where's boredom or bliss in that?" The teller misses Dad.

His replacement fails to satisfy. As Claude accepts some chore Trudy metes out, we are told: "The man who obliterates my mother between the sheets obeys like a dog. Sex, I begin to understand, it its own mountain kingdom, secret and intact. In the valley below we know only rumours." These analogies are spare, but they speckle the story with McEwan's delicate prose, sharpening the plot, too.

Asides are bearable. Digressions, after all, enliven Shakespeare, McEwan discredits religion for the past millennium of "groundless certainty" and threatening under fanaticism today to sweep Europe. The dubious primacy afforded one's fluid feelings as the ultimate determiner of identity and selfhood looms in Trudy as indicative of the failure of the Enlightenment, as reason diminishes in us moderns.

And, climate change and global warming threaten our very existence. McEwan hovers via his hidden narrator here between hope and fear, like many of us who read this. In the end of this thoughtful thriller, as it turns out to be in its final section, we are left with a sudden burst into this chaos of life. (Amazon US 11/19/16)

David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks: Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

""I've seen the future, and it's hungry""

Would you consider the audio edition of The Bone Clocks to be better than the print version?

Yes, having read the novel first. The characters come alive and the prose sharpens. The plot is clearer to understand, too.

Who was your favorite character and why?

I liked Hugo Lamb. Not to spoil anything, but he bore a difficult role in the storyline. Harder to cheer him on, but his choices are understandable and add depth to the impact overall.

Which scene was your favorite?

Hard to pick, but the last chapter with the Irish encounters appealed. The accents were a nice change from the predominantly English ones and the setting deepens as it's set where the author has chosen to make his home, away from his own island.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The scenes between Hugo and Holly are very human. Despite their differences in class and outlook, their attraction softens the harsher edges of the story, and we need to see these characters in a vulnerable predicament. This also sets up some key themes later on.

Any additional comments?

This book is imperfect, but hearing it, after you read it, is recommended. David Mitchell is a great storyteller and the performances of all six readers keep you engaged. Not a book to be heard in the background. I listened to this late each night, and this enabled full attention...

(Audible 11/21/16)

Jorge Luis Borges' "Professor Borges": Book Review

These 25 lectures from 1966, editors Martin Arias and Martin Hadis confess in their introduction, defied easy transcription. For they were taken from tapes (now erased) by students in Jorge Luis Borges' fortieth term of teaching English literature at the University of Buenos Aires. The garbled nature of the names and verses set down, especially in the Old English dominating the first half of the course, must have challenged both the Spanish-speaking audiences and the scholars searching sources. Borges, nearly blind, knew these texts intimately. Amazing to think that he lectured mostly from memory, and that quality, so memorialized in his fiction as well as his criticism, informs this.

The talks themselves vary in length, perhaps due to whomever wrote them down. The classes appear oddly tilted. For after half a dozen sessions with very in-depth coverage of the Anglo-Saxon era, we jump from the eleventh to the eighteenth century.  You get a look at Samuel Johnson, then it's off for Blake, Coleridge, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning, Rossetti, lots of William Morris, and R.L. Stevenson.

Therefore, the Argentine audience must have come away with an intimate if skewed examination of key authors. The idiosyncratic nature of the course, as in the latter lessons when students recite portions of Morris' poetry, must have made the presentations come alive. One wishes the tapes were extant, but this anthology compiles what Borges was like in the classroom, an aspect we lack otherwise much record of. Despite some typos, this is a useful compilation. The footnotes are extensive and helpful. And even experienced students of the literature may pick up some factoids.

For me, I forgot that Beowulf comes from the typical Norse phrasing for "bee+wolf," or bear. A simple reminder, but one many professors never mention. Learning how Dr. Johnson hoisted and threw a folio volume at a bookseller, with Borges' wry aside that such a tome was indeed difficult to toss, makes the lexicographer's orneriness come alive. And realizing that such disparate texts as Morris' "The Earthly Paradise" and Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" have in common the silence of respectively Chaucer and Shakespeare due to their eminence reminds us of Borges' vast knowledge. (Amazon US 12/3/16)

Alan Moore's "Jerusalem": Book Review

Renowned for his graphic narratives, Alan Moore creates this massive work of prose fiction, rivaling War and Peace in length and Ulysses in ambition. While not his first novel, it continues themes begun two decades ago in Voice of the Fire. In twelve deft chapters, Fire dramatized the evolution, in dazzling linguistic and intricate historical terms, of Moore's native Northampton. Jerusalem inflates this setting even as it narrows it down to a few blocks of the once-bustling Boroughs, which exist in a "simultaneous eternity" as developers build and then tear down this English city's core. Its working class dwellers find not an afterlife so much as a recurring existence, within a "trans-temporal chess game."

Defying the span of a brief review or facile summation, Alan Moore's evocation of his hometown sustains the meticulous composition of his graphic excursions. Lacking the brevity of a speech bubble or the compact limits of a comic-book format, Jerusalem challenges any reader's attention. Heady passages unfurl, as many of those taken up into the elevated realm of Mansoul, towering over the Boroughs (yet less apparent to those below still living) enter under the influence of Bedlam Jennies or Puck's Hats, fungal concoctions inviting comparisons to "eating fairies," amid a paranormal panorama of undines, Salamanders, and an Ultraduct. Those in this vortex may travel, in one case surpassing H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, to witness beyond "the death of day." Moore's inventive powers accelerate here, but they might bewilder, especially in the middle sections of this triple-decker tale which is a Victorian trope renewed. Rather than faltering, pressing on unveils to one’s mind many wonders.

Facing this other-world, two intermarried families comprise the central characters which Mansoul invites or repels. The Warrens arrive first. Siblings artist Alma and laborer Mick introduce us, via the largely omniscient narrator's voice, to their scrappy surroundings, after demolition of its imperial-era landmarks. Jerusalem then ambles back a century and a half, when Ern worked on London's St. Paul's. Mick, Alma and Ern receive eerie revelations from angels and Builders. Moore gradually reveals the reason for these ancient architects, and he populates the story-line with more Warrens and Vernells, who also have their own close encounters with those who hover about Mansoul. Named after John Bunyan's {Pilgrim's Progress}, "it was the very seat of war." Here, clashes summon demons.

Mansoul, made of "congealed dreams and memories," stands for Moore's version of space-time itself. "Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line's already written while you're starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama." This scene's shifty teller boasts a lineage back to the apocryphal Book of Tobit. He tells Mick, swept up on a memorable "Sam O'Day ride" through the dark and the light as "an astral toddler," how "life and death" work, with admirable if surprising clarity. 

Sam continues: "In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order." In the mind of their reader, progress occurs, but this remains an illusion. Instead, the book of life can be read over and over. So, every day "and every deed's eternal." Sam urges on his transported charge a motto Moore shares: "Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally."  Jerusalem, for Moore, represents more than his fantastic plot. It stands for a credo, one that in our world refusing conventional belief may survive past piety or doubt.

For, as an eighth-century monk learns, when he tries to center Northampton at the exact crossroads of England, hauling a stone from the real Jerusalem all the way to St. Gregory's Church, mysticism can tempt earthly calculations and thwart clerical confidences. The uncanny interactions the Warrens and the Vernells endure closer to the present (having taken ten years for Moore to write, most of this action stops in 2006) echo. A freed slave from America, the son of immigrants from post-war Sierra Leone, Ern's demented son, Buffalo Bill, Oliver Cromwell, the author of "Amazing Grace" and the members of the band Bauhaus fill the parade of figures who pass through or set up home as mortals in Northampton. What connects them, surmises Moore, is a gothic, altered, visionary sense. 

Their exchanges upend conventions. Moore favors his own detached telling more than the chronologically faithful linguistic ventriloquism of dialects and vocabularies that kindled Voice of the Fire, but some chapters in this one-volume trilogy adapt their own styles. Notably, a play starring Bunyan, the mad poet of nature John Clare, James Joyce's daughter and psychiatric patient Lucia, her friend Samuel Beckett, St. Thomas Becket, a "half-caste woman" elsewhere appearing as Marla Stiles and a married couple stirring up the Warren-Vernell mix demonstrates Moore's knack. He creates a Beckettian drama even as he satirizes its content, improving on its form as he links it to local history. 

And, as with the analogy that other Sam shows, characters repeat and return throughout this unvarying book's order. It's not all gloom. Humor surfaces, whether poking fun at Alma's scarecrow appearance, the simply wrong name of Newlife granted a hideous corporate block, or an everyday night down the pub. Hapless Ben Parritt "looked round appraisingly at the establishment's half-dozen other clients, motionless upon their stools like ugly novelty-set chessmen, sidelined and morose."

Moore varies approaches, when he lets one character late on burst into rhyme, or earlier when Lucia's monologue descends into a verbal morass of Finnegans Wake, fifty daunting pages mirroring the opening of Fire, when Moore reduced the consciousness of a Neolithic boy to 4000 stunted words. Here, Moore opens up rather than contracts his expressions; that contrast will weary some while exciting many. A reader may wish to pause, and let this epic find its rhythms within oneself. 

Moore never seems to flag in this telling. One part begins with Bob Goldman's gumshoe parody before settling into a more Moore-ish pace. But this may be an inevitable capitulation to the weight of the imaginative universe built here that threatens to crush any single inhabitant's utterances or ego. 

In this gigantic production, Moore avoids cliché, he regales us with a local chronicle demanding immersion into its erudition and he plays fairly with expectations. How this new Jerusalem ends will be discovered by the dogged, but the conclusion, circling back to the invitation offered Mick by Alma, satisfies and stuns. Having announced retirement from the graphic arena, in this printed spectacle, Moore dazzles. (Amazon US 9-13-16)

"Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature": Book Review

While cross-cultural studies of the transmission and reception of Buddhism within historical and sociological contexts multiply, those examining literary aspects remain less common. These eleven essays examine American and British authors during the past century who have taken up Buddhist themes; some of them have taken refuge in Buddhism. Aimed at an academic audience, these entries generally remain accessible to a broad readership. This collection, despite its high price as sold by an academic press, may appeal to many inquirers intrigued by its wide coverage.

Introducing this book’s range, co-editor Lawrence Normand surveys the reception and adaptation of Buddhism in the West. He cites Donald S. Lopez and David McMahan. He supports their responses to the ways in which Buddhism has been reshaped for twentieth-century concerns. Lopez and McMahon have analyzed how meditation and modernism influence recent cultural trends. Normand notes more of an emphasis on the needs of the body. The contemporary insistence of concentrating on the breath focuses on the mental flow of images. This shift engages more than one of the authors investigated by Normand’s international colleagues.

Erin Louttit in “Reincarnation and Selfhood in Olive Schreiner’s The Buddhist Priest’s Wife and Undine” reminds readers that this South African writer, despite her late-Victorian period of production, looks forward in time. Both the story of the priest’s wife and Schreiner’s novella Undine humanize and normalize Buddhism. Death is blurred. The self survives the body in her post-Christian perspective. Schreiner considers and acknowledges possibilities of reincarnation.

 
Normand’s “Shangri-La and Buddhism in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6” contrasts two treatments of this earthly paradise. Thanks to its film adaptation, Hilton’s 1933 novel endures as certainly more popular than Auden and Isherwood’s ambitious if flawed drama. Incorporating historical crises and struggles of personal alienation, both channel the appeal of the late-Victorian romances which J. Jeffrey Franklin in The Lotus and the Lion (2008) investigated in imperial and colonial British literature. Hilton’s quest entices the reader as if possible; Auden and Isherwood’s satire demolishes the dream as futile. However, the limits of the duo’s Buddhist sources (including Alexandra David-Neél’s With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet) blunt the dramatic impact of their barbed points.

Via readings of D.T. Suzuki, Erin Lafford and Emma Mason take up another poet’s mid-century approach to Buddhist content. In “‘ears of my ears’: e. e. cummings’ Buddhist prosody,” the pair (sticking to that author’s conventionally unconventional spelling), looks at Cummings by way of Martin Heidegger. This philosopher’s challenge to the ego atomizes the sense of self. Similarly, Cummings’ poems, grounded in the breath’s rhythms, aspire not to human voice but to birdsong, in Lafford and Mason’s report on this poet’s craft. It rewards listening, meditation, and silence.

The center of this anthology finds many names repeating, as Cummings and Suzuki begin to sway other writers and thinkers. “Zen Buddhism as Radical Conviviality in the Works of Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and Thomas Merton” features three leading advocates during the period during and especially after WWII who begin to react against conformity. Manuel Yang applies Ivan Illich’s “radical conviviality” as akin to the “creative spontaneity and non-attachment” connecting these three countercultural creators. (p. 72) Promoting “spontaneous convergence,” the trio shares a commitment to a “non-action, non-institutional” form of “spiritual assonance,” their non-conformity appealing to dissidents. Yet, many then conformed.

They conformed as the Beats. The appeal of Buddhism for 1950s seekers rebounded off of two other poets based in the Bay Area during this restive postwar period. “Radical Occidentalism: The Zen Anarchism of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen” offers James Patrick Brown’s analysis. He shows how the Beats adapted Suzuki’s teachings into a nascent counter-cultural milieu. Brown avers: “Suzuki translated Zen into an American idiom that hit some of the keynotes of American anarchism: a rejection of cultural conditioning, institutionalism, and traditionalism; an affirmation of individualism and radical self-reliance in the Thoreauvian vein; and a language of revolutionary aspiration.” (pp. 94-95) For more about these anarchist roots within American Transcendentalism, a translation of the Slovenian professor Ziga Vodovnik’s The Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism (Berkeley CA: PM Press, 2013) is recommended.

Unsurprisingly, “Buddhism, Madness and Movement: Triangulating Jack Kerouac’s Belief System” follows. Any analysis of American Buddhist literature should include Kerouac. What has been less examined, as it lacks pop culture appeal, is his retreat back to boyhood Catholicism after his 1950s immersion into Buddhism. Bent Sørensen explains the breakdown of his “hybrid system of faith,” triggered by a 1960 visit to those whom Kerouac called the “Mexican Fellaheen” or poor peasants. (p. 106) He pivoted from a romanticized fatalism to “a complete lack of compassion” for those who refused to better their condition. Kerouac, fueled by drink, flirted with madness as his guilt persisted and his sense of sin returned. His characters by the 1960s often entered silence, before death. Kerouac accounted for their dire straits by resorting to Christian rationales “as a punishment for sin.” (p. 118) Like their author, his protagonists try to move on, but samsara catches up with them and thwarts their doomed quests to escape justice.

Another gloomy fiction from the early 1960s depicts this “cyclical nature of suffering.” (p. 136) “Biology, the Buddha and the Beasts: The Influence of Ernst Haeckel and Arthur Schopenhauer on Samuel Beckett’s How It Is” displays Andy Wimbush’s recovery of Haeckel’s A Visit to Ceylon (1882). Beckett mentions this author in his grim 1964 novel (translated from Comment C’est (1961). Both versions plunge into an unsparing reduction of existence through an agonizing series of reincarnations. These enable torture of lower life-forms by the Sinhalese, witnessed by Haeckel. While the natives do not kill beasts and creatures, the Sinhalese justify treating them badly. For, they reason, if they had not merited life in such debased versions, they would not be such. This application of Buddhist concepts to real-world dukkha sobers the reader.

A return to Isherwood, now living in a more congenial incarnation in Southern California, finds him thriving. In “‘That Other Ocean’: Buddhism, Vedanta, and The Perennial Philosophy in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man,” Bidhan Roy shows how not only the author’s well-known immersion into Vedanta but his exposure to Buddhism and fellow British expatriate Aldous Huxley enters the 1964 novel, based on Isherwood’s own sojourn. Filtered through popular reinterpretations of Buddhism in vogue by then, Isherwood’s novel reveals his sympathy with Buddhism, contrasted with the arch satire he and Auden had deployed for The Ascent of F6.

For writers closer to our time, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as Mahayana Meditation” finds Sarah Gardam examining Pure Land sutras and Mahāyāna emptiness doctrines. Gardam uses these to explicate Kingston’s Chinese “talk-story” in her 1986 memoir.

Elena Spandri’s “The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea” affirms another doctrine, that of the Middle Way, as a compliment to Murdoch’s philosophical career. This champions humanism rather than a Kantian or utilitarian ethics in her 1986 novel. A compassionate ethics wins out, in Spandri’s articulation of Murdoch’s plot and character choices.

The final entry tackles one more formidable topic, arguably more arcane than any philosophy. “Strange Entanglements: Buddhism and Quantum Theory in Contemporary Nonfiction” unravels the tangle of two popular if recondite genres. Anglo-American popularizations of physics and debates or attempts to reconcile debate between science and religion both, in Sean Miller’s energetic chapter, seek to posit parallels between physics formulae and Buddhist or Taoist descriptions of phenomena. Fritjof Capra, B. Alan Wallace, Matthieu Ricard, and Trinh Xuan Thuan typify decontextualized efforts. Miller doubts their truth-claims for dharma as science.

He finds futile their attempts to reconcile Sanskrit texts full of “imaginative parataxes.” (p. 205) Contemporary exegetes wind up at dead-ends. They wriggle in fudge factors and they refuse to admit their results, which tally only as logical incoherence. Miller pinpoints irony in the Vietnamese-born, American-educated astrophysicist Thuan’s deferral to the “ecclesiastical authority of a French-born Buddhist monk who resides in Nepal.” (p. 214) On the other hand, according to the French-language version of his eponymous website, Ricard earned a Ph.D. in cellular genetics in 1972, after which he entered monasticism.  Miller could have delved deeper into Ricard’s scientific training, as how much Ricard has kept up with his past field and that of astrophysics alongside his Tibetan adaptation and practice, granted, remains a relevant topic to debate. All the same, Miller relishes the chance to tackle a topic which diverges drastically in tone and approach from his predecessors, and this intriguing chapter deserves attention for that.

Miller concludes by summing up the current position of Buddhism in the West. “Stripped of its literary and cultural contingencies, in its mildest form, Buddhism becomes a form of self-help therapy contained by a consumerist market-logic, a happy face put on a liberal humanism purified of reductive materialism. And at its most stringent, Buddhism becomes a form of submission to a hierophantic theocracy, however benign.” (p. 213) This collection needed this voice calling out what some of these writers treated tended to sidestep or gloss over: the manner in which messages of Buddhism warp through our capitalist mindset into globalized commodity.
 

Normand in his introduction noted how pre-1945, the textual approach of T.S. Eliot and Hermann Hesse’s Buddhist “engagements” dominated Western reactions. (p. 15) But, neither Normand nor subsequent contributors elaborate sufficiently as to how these “engagements” entered texts during the last century. The earlier impact of Edwin Arnold’s bestselling life of the Buddha as The Light of Asia (1879), J. Jeffrey Franklin has begun to show, reverberated into the next century. This issue, likewise, does not earn any mention beyond Normand’s few references.

All the same, this book’s emphasis on the Beats, more than its scattered coverage of writers after the 1960s, should encourage more research by scholars. Additionally, Sean Miller’s divergent if necessary exploration of a dimension of Buddhism in non-fictional literature may encourage scholars to pursue the portrayals of Buddhism in other scientific and philosophical contexts, a subject needing as much if not more attention than, say, Kerouac’s appropriations of the dharma. For now, this anthology serves readers as a portal, opening up into a display of texts which have integrated Buddhist characters, settings, debates, and insights, gathered during the past century.

"The Machine Stops" ed. Erik Wysocan: Book Review

 

This anthology reprints the well-known 1909 novella by E.M. Forster along with ten contemporary contributions from writers pursuing what Donna Haraway coins as "cyber politics". This concerns the struggle for language against a perfect articulation of its communication. Noise and pollution, as Haraway explains in the preface, represent a joy in the "illegitimate fusions of animal and machine".

Forster's "The Machine Stops" follows Vashti and her son, Kuno, in a future anticipating instant messaging and the Internet. Living underground, humans rely on master machine to meet their needs. Kuno confesses to his mother that he has glimpsed a world above the surface where people live free. But, threatened by the penalty of homelessness, Kuno must accept the omnipotence of the Machine, now worshiped as a deity. Its Mending Apparatus, however, begins to break down, and global chaos ensues. The final sentence of the 12,300 word tale illustrates Forster's command of his prose: "For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky."
 
Unfortunately. the modern entries placed after the novella cannot compare to Forster's eloquence. This Halmos edition lacks any introduction or rationale, other than reprinting a few pages from Haraway's 1991 article "A Cyber Manifesto". The contents from today's authors prove uneven.

One promising section is the story "Letters to the Machine" (2014) by Julieta Arenda, Fia Backstrom and R. Lyon. This experiments with typefaces and self-references to document how humans try to evade, with decreasing success, an omniscient surveillance system. One thinks of the increasing monitoring of electronic and personal communication by employers, governments, spy devices, social media and corporations to apply to this fiction, and it is not far from Panopticon fact at all.

Pedro Neves Marquez applies another emerging technology, 3-D printing, to recyclable gun production. "The Liberator" (2014) invents "assassination markets" for those using these weapons, and extrapolates from open-source codes a realm where primitivism, anarcho-libertarianism and the deep Net fight back against multinationals and the security state. Virtual arenas get sabotaged along with real ones. Ecosystems emerge and the Cargills and Monsantos find themselves outwitted.

"#NoHorizon: We Have Never Been How We Became: A Manifesto" (2012-2014) takes up another rebellion, post-Occupy. Jeff Nagy's rambling speculations roam back into the revolutionary Levellers of England's mid-seventeenth century. He links this dissenting movement to Haraway's methodology. Nagy tries to connect John Milton, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Norbert Wiener and Katherine Hayles along a timeline of how humans confront a mechanical power, and how cybernetics through its challengers may resist this apocalyptic or milennarian takeover. But a postscript, after what Nagy perceives as Occupy's failure, cautions. "Occupy made visible the bars of a certain grid of control even if it did not shake them. That grid has now closed around us again, even more tightly." He reasons: "It never opened but it closed again. That is its logic precisely. There's nothing to see here but everything is visible." Nagy's pronouncements may strike some as gnomic, others as tautological.

These three contributions represent the highlights. Seven other entries failed to match their insights. The placement of an editor's name only at the back of the book appears a half-hearted attempt to convince the reader that these transmissions exist as if clandestine or samidzat missives, needing no mediator's intrusion. But their purpose would have better succeeded if the audience were guided to find connections or ruptures between Forster's fiction and the facts and fiction following it here. (Spectrum Culture 1-12-16)

David Mitchell's "Slade House": Book Review

The title gives it away. A narrow alley near the Fox and Hounds pub opens into Slade House. Here, the last Saturday of October, every nine years, a visitor is beckoned in. What a young violinist, a police inspector, a pudgy college student, and her journalist sister will find comprises a companion piece to the mysterious forces swirling around the humans gathered up into David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks.

Published a year ago, that ambitious novel set in the recent past and near future tracked supernatural entries into everyday British life. Desperate to sustain immortality, a cabal lured a few chosen mortals into what this sequel of sorts explains as "their life-support machine, but it's powered by souls". Akin to a bearers of a rare blood type, those selected enter a "Theatre of the Mind" where their "birth-bodies" encounter in Slade House their dreams come true.

Avoiding spoilers makes an extended review difficult. However, as I have read all of Mitchell's novels, I assure you that familiar elements return. In easygoing style, Mitchell catches the rhythms and diction of his English narrators engagingly. Drawn from 1979 to 2015, tellers speckle pop song titles, then-current events, and trends into their respective chapters. As with all of his fiction, Mitchell sprinkles references to his past work. Here, nearly all of them point to The Bone Clocks, logically.

That novel, as my PopMatters review "I've Seen the Future and It's Hungry"noted, constructed a complicated realm of spectral intervention. Familiarity, therefore, with the Shaded Way, Dusk and the Blank Sea, the Engifted, the Operandi, and Horologists will be necessary to fully follow action here. Additionally, Mitchell expands his concepts of the Lacuna and orisons in Slade House.

The orison, as defined, gives readers a notion of the mechanism Mitchell inserts into the tales. It is a "live, 3D, stage set, projected by the Lacuna in time". This makes more sense in context, but for readers of some of Mitchell's earlier novels, however spatially and chronologically sprawling they may be, the liminal goings-on in The Bone Clocks paled slightly compared to the intricate, apocalyptic adventures of Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, and Cloud Atlas. Rather than taking on a new genre, refining the matter-of-fact coming-of-age semi-autobiographical chronicle of Black Swan Green, or the historical epic of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell for the first time in his oeuvre gives us a story that connects directly, with allowance for a few tangents and loose ends, to its previous text.

Rumor has it that Mitchell began this novel as a series of tweets. By far the briefest of his novels, this takes only five chapters, building upon each other in his typical format, to build a narrative. The first-person narrators, in reliable fashion, speak to us in confidential terms, common to Mitchell’s strategy. They prove engaging, and their intimacy encourages readers to trust in them.

Their congenial voices, furthermore, gain their power over us as readers puzzle out the construction of their common situation. Some readers, like myself, may be slower to catch on, but this only enhances the enjoyment, and the emotional impact, of their paranormal predicaments. All the same, Mitchell here falls into his own small trap. He captures well the voices of his characters, but the stage upon which they are placed can overshadow their actions. 

That is, as with the predecessor to Slade House, the creaky construction of a novel that enters the well-trodden territory of the Gothic, the spirit-plagued, and the occult mystery can loom so high that the human fates become subsumed into a secondary world that requires its own explanations. As with much speculative fiction, the added effort Mitchell must take on as he tries to explain his blueprints beyond also blurs the sharpness of those he draws from among us, everyday people. He downplays why his narrators are chosen to enter the haunted House, and this disappoints. As the novel builds to its climax, the same slight letdown common now to audiences of many entertainments returns. We realize that this is part of a longer series to come.

Slade House races along, but on Bone Clocks' familiar ground. Mitchell grants more space to ghosts. This fits into that niche best. The author likes this genre, and his tone—as always in his previous fiction-- can win us over. There remains a steady delight in letting Mitchell’s imagination carry one along over hundreds of pages without us even noticing the time. I read Slade House with the same pleasure. Still, I ended it with the same frustration.

For it all stops too suddenly, with to me an obvious nod to its own sequel. While I enjoy Mitchell's novels, I keep having the nagging sense that, with his talent, he could do more with it to dazzle us than he has already. I feel this more strongly, after finishing Slade House. (Amazon US 10-27-15)

[Expanded for my PopMatters 10-28-15 review.]

George Eliot's "Middlemarch": Audiobook review

I am reviewing Juliet Stevenson's reading of the entire book, over thirty hours. She captures the nuances of expression in George Eliot's ruminating, satiric, painful, and idealistic visions as filtered through an omniscient narrator who creates a chronicle of this small English town's families. You get, this being a high-Victorian novel about the years just before the Queen ascended her throne, an immersion into the gentry. The poor tend to be backdrops, and the goings on of a doctor, a banker, a scholar, and their wives comprise the stories.

My favorite character is Causabon, who attracts Dorothea early on. Their relationship is fraught with sadness as well as dreams. Eliot pins down the lure of learned lore in an unforgettable way, even as she lets us see the folly of the grand scheme the couple follow.

This is one of the most famous novels in English, so the summaries of the plotlines and interspersed chapters examining the protagonists can be found easily. Stevenson captures the varied accents, male and female, deftly. A woman's voice open to emotion but steeled by intellect fits Eliot's own outlook well. This novel, true to triple-decker form does go on, and modern readers may need more patience than that of audiences long ago for such steady attention to the intricate observations Eliot conveys.

Hearing this, one gets caught up in the flow. The immense detail may or may not be lost on a listener rather than a reader. The various languages of the quotes opening each chapter are communicated faithfully and Stevenson and Eliot match each other in terms of the tone this novel takes, sometimes arch, sometimes sensitive, sometimes impassioned. It's a lot to follow.

Having studied this novel decades ago in college and then always meaning to return to it, I found this on audio a pleasant experience. No spoilers, but highlights are three deaths that play crucial roles here. All captured with wheezes, faltering voices, and growing weightiness well by Stevenson. Now, it is her voice I will hear in these pages if I see them again. (Amazon US 6-20-15 + Audible)

What's a Professor to Do?

A former doctoral classmate, a few years ahead of me at our alma mater, now teaches at Emory. He was one of the stars of the English Ph.D. program then, and it's no wonder he has continued as a commentator as well as critic of the system that has shifted, as younger generations seek cash back rather than wisdom accrued. His essay in Sunday's New York Times ranks #1 for "most e-mailed." He looks back to when students emulated professors, and they held them in awe. He was one of them, as was I. He reflects: "I saw the same thing in my time at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, when you couldn’t walk down the row of faculty offices without stepping over the outstretched legs of English majors lining up for consultations. First-year classes could be as large as 400, but by junior year you settled into a field and got to know a few professors well enough to chat with them regularly, and at length. We knew, and they knew, that these moments were the heart of liberal education."

His op-ed piece asks: "What's the Point of Being a Professor?" As face-time shrinks, the utilitarian function of professors grows. That's all we're good for, and in an era where not 18% as in 1960 but 43% of students earn an "A," why complain? Only 8% of students frequently hear “negative feedback about their academic work;" 61% report in a national survey he cites that their profs treat them as colleagues or as peers. I think of my older son's new alma mater, where all are on first-name basis.

I find it odd that the writer does not mention the related shift away from the four courses, two in Shakespeare, one Milton, one Chaucer, that distinguished English majors there until recently. In the Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald asked if UCLA's humanities had forgotten their humanity. My former classmate at my M.A. program in Claremont told me that only four out of 52 colleges surveyed now require Shakespeare, which at my undergrad program was required for all in English. What replaced them at UCLA are courses in gender, race, and theory. I have no objection to these. But they fail to ground undergrads in literary tradition, which they can then challenge all they like.

He continues: "I returned to U.C.L.A. on a mild afternoon in February and found the hallways quiet and dim. Dozens of 20-year-olds strolled and chattered on the quad outside, but in the English department, only one in eight doors was open, and barely a half dozen of the department’s 1,400 majors waited for a chance to speak." When I was in Rolfe Hall, I don't recall the hordes my colleague did, but I did wait slumped on the linoleum outside an office, waiting my turn, in a time when we all carried enormous backpacks full of texts and notebooks, and kept slumped, reading on. I never developed a close relationship with any of my professors, keeping them at a distance in college and since, but I did get to house-sit a week for one of my diss. advisers when he went on vacation. I never addressed him or others on my committee as other than "Professor"-X, out of respect and habit.

I assume at my both my sons' colleges, that has changed. Perhaps as when children call parents of their friends by their first names, a lurch into informality that missed me, as discipline gave way to permissiveness outside my own circle. Now, in a career-driven mindset, the liberal arts, for the few still taking it. UCLA continues to have a very large English department compared to many of its sister institutions, as a proud "public Ivy." My fellow graduate avers: "When college is more about career than ideas, when paycheck matters more than wisdom, the role of professors changes. We may be 50-year-olds at the front of the room with decades of reading, writing, travel, archives or labs under our belts, with 80 courses taught, but students don’t lie in bed mulling over what we said. They have no urge to become disciples." I assume he's closer to 60 than 50 by now, but the truth holds here.

With a bit of an emendation. I don't lord my august presence over my charges. Unlike those at elite institutions such as UCLA and Emory, my students are often vets, single moms, middle-aged folks downsized or out of a job, immigrants and first-generation strivers not attending college on the largess of well-off relatives or families abroad. I work with them, and I struggle--teaching a snippet of Greek culture or Impressionist art in one course, the Industrial Revolution and Neolithic progress in another. They sit, at night, tired out from days that may begin before dawn. I try my best, again. 

Often in this blog I remark if in somewhat occluded fashion about my own career. I've taught, thanks to adjunct and grad school work, far more than 80 courses. My full-time gig of nearly twenty years went from three 15-week terms of five courses each to eight-week terms averaging three courses, so I quail at doing the math. All I know is I've had some courses dozens and dozens of times by now. But I tinker with them, they get updated, and I update. One on technological culture from a humanities perspective has warped and woofed myriad ways since I started it in '97, while I teach Shakespeare somehow in less dramatic changes as I sneak a bit of the Bard into two weeks of an intro to lit class. 

My students are different from those my near-peer teaches. They can enter with a GED. They enroll for practical reasons rather than philosophical ones. A new marketing campaign addresses those who aren't trying to "find" themselves, but who already know what they want and how to get it is a degree. Still, last term, on a printout for submission online of a student's teaching evaluation, by whose scores we are rated in turn by deans, I did see "Best Proffesor Ever!" in ballpoint on a verification form.

Corporate as avant-garde?

 

While I figured Tom McCarthy's new novel, Satin Island (reviewed in the L.A. Times) might be too much to take on given my busy life and backlog of other books to read for now, I found, thanks to FB friend, the author's Guardian article insightful. It elaborates the anthropological applications that the LAT review and the novel itself document. "The death of writing--if James Joyce were alive today, he'd be working for Google" features this insight among many, near its conclusion:

As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed.

His final words remind me of a fact that has intrigued me. Many of my students are computer majors and even more are gamers. But they will work in cubicles, they tap away on laptops, they stare at a screen enchanted for far longer than a book may entice most of them. I doubt they'll fall for "metaphors and metonymies" in pagebound fashion. Music fades, films recede unless tied into a reliable superhero or graphic novel franchise, and culture revolves around gadgets.

 While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it.

I live among this. I study languages, I pore over medieval lore and obscure writers, I dream of the past even if my place within it would likely have been a nearly blind boy, falling off a dark cliff not too long into his appointed span of years, one moonless night, hopelessly myopic and too thin to live. I like how Game of Thrones fascinates many. My older son shared this ingenious attempt at HuffPo to reason its fantasy world's workings into the increasingly complex series about to unveil season five.

Contrary to McCarthy, I'd mention from my vantage point among those who seek corporate jobs that this world of work cannot enchant as many. I read Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End one vacation while my workplace underwent a series of "reductions in force" that are still ongoing. I liked it but I was downcast at the same time. Ed Park's Personal Days tried to tie the keyboard-driven class to a rather post-modern conceit, and the unfinished The Pale King by David Foster Wallace to my surprise drew me into its accountant's vision, working for the IRS at a Midwestern "office park," of the connection between the government's attempts to change the tax code and corporate hegemony.

All these do sound bleak. Few movies take place mostly at work, and few want to escape this setting by finding entertainment about it. Parks + Recreation or the two versions of The Office, of course, can be cited to the contrary, but compared to the vast subject matter audiences prefer, they're rare.

Meanwhile, I integrate the satirical series Silicon Valley into my Technology, Society and Culture course, and my students sit up. They may even put down their phones. For, they see their ambition.

Keith Roberts' "Pavane": Book Review

Having listened to this in the Neil Gaiman Presents audiobook read by Steven Crossley, I liked the narrator's ability to convey the Dorset voices--Gaiman notes that the speaker himself hails from this corner of England. The regional focus of this around Purbeck heightens the intimacy of the stories, as they unfold in an alternative realm ca. 1968 to 1985, where the Reformation was defeated, and the Catholic Church holds sway in heavy-handed rule over a largely unchanged population still riding horses, but having rail, and limited electrical experiments, hidden from the masses.

The first story "Lady Margaret" depicts the rail, with details of the machinery, a steam-punk predecessor perhaps, this having been written in 1966. Keith Roberts integrates a tale of unrequited love, and then hooks this into later installments in the "stately dance" of the "pavane" as it unfolds leisurely over a few generations of the Strange family. I liked "The Signaller" the most, as this cohered, more or less, about the career of a boy who becomes a semaphore transmitter, the way that coded messages are sent all over the papal lands. A novel take on how without radio or telegraph, information might have been relayed from afar. That story includes a dreamlike sequence, and we start to learn about the sign of the crab. This is hinted at in "The White Boat," a girl's fascination with that vessel, and a enigmatic tale at least as heard in the audio. I found it mysterious, having only the spoken words to go on. If I had read it in print, it might have been clearer, but I favor the ambiguity.

Impending dangers clarify with "Brother John." This shows an inquisition, under "The Office of Spiritual Welfare," suppressing witches, pagans, and all who resist Rome. It starts off well, with appropriately sinister tones as the tortures crush many innocents. But this part ends as the cruelty drives that monk to revolt against this cruelty. This chapter takes a long time to evolve into what becomes a rebellion against Catholicism by the local nobility and peasants. It's a rousing martial set-up, but the narrative starts to ramble, and this tendency increases with "Lords and Ladies" and "Corfe Gate" where more machinations entangle the Purbeck Stranges and the anti-papists. I found myself drifting from these scenarios. Yet Lady Eleanor's peevishness and bravery complicate her and Crossley expresses this well. Also, battle scenes are well described and Roberts seems to relish them. The in-between revelations, on the other hand, began to move slower, making it gruff and moody.

Some critique the inclusion of pagan elements, and the replacement of Baldur and the old gods by Christ is frequently discussed by characters, if away from the ears of the clerics. But these underlying cultural foundations for me enriched the agrarian and sustained context. They add to "The Signallers" a haunting magical passage. So did one aspect I have not found many readers notice: Aqua Sulis is used for Bath, and old names like Londinium and Durnovaria. This conservatism slows progress too, even as I wondered how if Gaelic and Welsh survived on the island, (along with Latin, Norman French, Middle and Modern English) what "Celtic" was and where that persisted post-1500 or so. Roberts as in any alternative history needs not explain every bit to the nth degree, on the other hand.

The "Coda" as many observe is tacked on too rapidly, and it either needed more elaboration, or another way the information could have been conveyed, as a lot is packed into a few sentences about what happens in the aftermath of the revolts. It is lyrical and passionate, if briefly. Overall, this remains a memorable book. If I may come up with my own take, a "steam-monk" novel of invention. (1-10-15 to Amazon US)

The British Library's "London: A Literary Anthology": Book Review

Although the handsome cover and many familiar authors may tempt browsers to judge this compilation as a pleasant holiday gift or congenial night-table companion, the contents reveal a complex presentation. Some treat London as did Daniel Defoe, as "the greatest, the finest, the richest city in the world" but as many talented writers and artists gathered within concur, this megapolis has long stood for poverty, congestion, pollution, and degradation. From medieval poets John Lydgate and William Dunbar to current observers Benjamin Zephaniah and Zadie Smith, Londoners whether native or newcomers regard its vast crowds and tall towers with dread, dreariness, and delight.

Arranged thematically by Richard Fairman, thirteen chapters begin at dawn, moving into the reactions of those entering its sprawl for the first time, then exploring its mews and squares. "In dim-lit streets, war-tired people moved slowly/ like dark-coated bears in a snowy region." So recalls James Berry, as he views"Beginning in a City, 1948" from a Caribbean immigrant's perspective.

Although the weather requires both rich and poor to bundle up, beneath this comparison, differences endure. Contrasts between the high and low life have long fascinated visitors. Consider Charlotte Brontë's protagonist from her novel Villette: "I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and forever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?" This lure draws millions, over centuries, from all over. Amazing diversity endures, noted by William Blake as by Hanif Kureishi. London's narrow streets never seem to empty.

The febrile tension from crowds connects Hugh Walpole's story set on The Strand, Katherine Mansfield's depiction of "The Tiredness of Rosabel" as she comes home from work to climb four flights up to a humdrum night out of the rain, and Doris Lessing's excerpt from The Four-Gated City. This finds Martha out after dark, fearing exposure she risks passing through a red-light district on her way from Oxford Street to Bayswater Road, along Queensway towards Notting Hill. The drama of a pedestrian's passage from one district to another, subtle or dramatic, and the warren of diversions or temptations in dim side streets, recur in many of these sixty-six entries from nearly as many writers.

On first perusal, the lack of an introduction or any editorial context for the selections or authors puzzled me. It seemed a shortcoming. A small flaw is the near-absence of those who live away from the historic core of The City or the few miles near the north side of the Thames. Only Angela Carter's Wise Children speaks up for those beyond the south bank. But, the presentation of period illustrations and literary reflections, if attentively read, invites audiences to study dozens of reactions in pen and pastel to the domination of The City over one's own mental landscape. For those who have visited or who live in London, it will remind them of why many want to return there, or why some never will.

As Evelyn Waugh's satire sums it up: "all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...Those vile bodies..." A bitterness clouds many sights seen by those who record them honestly. Charles Dickens' Bleak House dramatizes a tale from a mother so poor she wishes her son had never survived his birth. Virginia Woolf's far-better off Mrs. Ambrose, in The Voyage Out, observes from Waterloo Bridge: "When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath."

Clad in rags or cradled in finery, people never stop arriving. Jewish, Australian, Scots, and Pakistani immigrants all find their voices in these pages. Israel Zangwill and Zadie Smith may have lived a century apart. But they agree in their stories that chaotic city streets spark tension. Classes must mix, and their failure to cope with relentless demands strains relationships, in passing or permanently.

Overcrowding and inequality, worsened by the weather and the conditions which made this city for many centuries one of the world's largest also generate disease and decay. Juxtaposed chapters on disgust, plagues and fires, wartime devastation, and apocalyptic depictions of the city's downfall remind readers of the reactions writers amass to London's perpetual pride, and how it tempts fate.

Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor brutally conveys how the plague dissolved family ties. Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Poison Belt" and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, as to doom, join Richard Jeffries' stoic description in his suitably titled portion from After London. Even less cataclysmic scenarios in The City show its force exacted upon nature. Dickens' Dombey and Son charts the immense digs that built the railroads, and if the holdouts of Stagg's Garden defy the iron horse, they may not last long.

On a thoroughfare half a century or more later, Amy Lowell at two in the morning imagines the results of a transformed London. "I stand in the window and watch the moon./ She is thin and lustreless,/ But I love her./ I know the moon,/ And this is an alien city." What has changed is constant light. Juxtaposed memorably, in the last chapter documenting London after dark, the photos and illustrations, many chosen well from the British Library's holdings, suggest a nuanced reaction to the coming of electricity. This transformed London from a few candlelit circles within foggy shadows.

"Electric lighting in the City" from The Graphic, April 1881, may cause you to beg to differ with Lowell from 1914. It shows walkers halted by the wonder of seeing what had long evaded sight. Complementing these engravings, another from the same publication evokes a supremely detailed "Bird's-eye view from a balloon" in May 1884. The attention to precision, over Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament next to the sweep of the Thames, astonishes the careful eye. The people and cabs are so far away they appear as dots, and this elevation, after all, removes one from the jostle, the smells, the unpredictability of whatever the streets bring the rich and the poor. Above, one sees only a city made beautiful, from so high up that clouds float down below, over the serpentine river.

The fact that these clouds emanate from factories does not detract, somehow, from their wonder. That too, may be what makes London a place that impels immigrants to remain as residents, and which fills those same streets and attractions as it has for hundreds of years, as a destination that compels.
(PopMatters + Amazon US 12-19-14)

John Gross (ed.) "The Oxford Book of Essays": Review

The range of these 140 inclusions by 120 authors is considerable, but the quality varies. Many precede the 19th century, so as a representation of the duration of this form, this is a useful compilation. John Gross confesses in his brief preface how he tried to keep this to complete selections, but the length of this format, especially for earlier writers, demanded some cutting. This editorial constraint also appears to have taken its toll on more recent essays, for many here are short, and one feels the potential of a particular essayist is not shown best by the essay chosen here.

That being said, a few hours browsing these contents reveals entertainment and instruction. William James' accurate fear of "The Ph.D. Octopus" in 1903 taking over higher education, Mark Twain's caustic challenge to divine providence in "Thoughts of God," Robert Graves' uneven and curiously assembled "The Case for Xanthippe," George Orwell's measured judgement as "Reflections on Gandhi," and H.L. Mencken's takedown of a Pennsylvania steel town in "The Libido for the Ugly" all kept my attention. There is a tilt against the mercies of the Almighty which can be discerned, but this appears within the context of modern critiques of God, if in the background. As some compensation, G.K. Chesterton gets two essays and Hilaire Belloc one, although none of these are on religion. Jeremy Taylor weighs in on God's charity, James Froude on Christianity, and Charles Dickens on the sad state of churches in the City of London, too, so any claims that these contents are biased against Christianity can be balanced accordingly.

Entries such as "Bad Poets" by Randall Jarrell, Jacques Barzun on English vs. German and French, and Maurice Richardson on pen nibs, indicative of the variety in this anthology, seem too brief to matter much. A musty air permeates much of this volume,  and more context on each author and the time the essay was written could have enlightened readers likely to be unfamiliar with many of the earlier writers. This is all rather Anglocentric, and as Gross is a literary historian specializing on the early modern period of British literature, this may be a natural bias. More Americans pop up later on, but one wonders if more international authors might have survived translation and merited inclusion. But ending this 1991 compilation with the Australian poet Clive James' review of Judith Krantz' "Princess Daisy" is a sly and surprising delight, easily one of the best in this collection. (Amazon US 12-18-14)

Patrick O'Donnell's "A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell": Review

While often classified as a postmodernist, David Mitchell's novels fit better into other categories. Patrick O'Donnell, in the first full-length study of all six of this English writer's innovative works to date, begins by considering cosmopolitan and anthropological contexts as better suited to this protean storyteller. His books tackle the complexity of how people approach mortality. These tales blur genres, leap across time and space, and dramatize disruption, individually and communally, as threat nears.

Mo Muntervary, an Irish nuclear engineer, observes in Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999): "Memories are their own descendants, masquerading as the ancestors of the present." Her comment reveals her creator's interest in quantum physics and relativity theory. Mitchell applies what O'Donnell labels as the tense of the "future anterior" as past events are linked to a possible future, "on which the past event depends for its significance".

This can be a difficult subject to explain. O'Donnell's study, aimed at an academic audience, focuses on temporal conditions to highlight Mitchell's contribution to current fiction. This critique, as with its sources, challenges easy explication.. Multiple perspectives and genres across the globe mix, while "both human connections and the brutal intransigency of events sporadically collide and conspire in time streaming toward what will have been". While the novels demand close attention, and while they often nonetheless prove more fluid and compelling than a scholarly representation of their contents may express, O'Donnell and Mitchell agree that the events they dramatize matter, far more than as entertainment. They articulate human predicaments, and they confront our planet's danger.

In the unpredictable island nation of monster quakes, sudden death, and mob reprisals, Number 9 Dream (2001) pays tribute to the Japan where Mitchell taught English for eight years in Hiroshima, and where he met his Japanese wife. He also pays homage to Haruki Murakami, for this unstable narrative layers disruptions across Tokyo, as encountered by a young man who may be at different moments or chapters in a James Bond-type of caper, an avatar's fantasy world, a manuscript, or a video game, to name only a few possibilities. As its title indicates, it floats about and jumps around.

Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell's best-known novel to date, wraps five dispersed stories, at first partially completed, around the core of a post-apocalyptic adventure set on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Then, Mitchell continues each interrupted account, concluding them in reverse order. O'Donnell relates the "character chains" which not only enrich the novel's formal innovation, but the 2012 film adaptation's own casting choices which tinker further, if fittingly, with Mitchell's fluid representations of characters who repeat in different guises over the centuries. Mitchell's subtexts of reincarnation and shape-shifting reoccur in nearly all of his novels. Pasts and futures shuffle. Narratives progress and regress. His human and post-human figures confront the depravities of capitalism, the constraints of conformity, and the notions of one's own society as the most civilized of all possible worlds.

While Black Swan Green (2006) certainly proves the most streamlined of his narrative models, it shares his scrutiny into the situations which oppress everyday people, nearer our own time. It is based loosely on some elements from Mitchell's own upbringing, for he and the protagonist were both aged thirteen in 1982, in suburban Worcestershire. Both stammer, both face divorce as their parents separate, both seek to fit into what appears an alien atmosphere, and both share a fascination with the onslaught of popular culture as experienced by ordinary men and women. Yet, this novel nonetheless resists any reduction to a straightforward coming-of-age saga or thinly disguised roman à clef.

Contrary to the treatment many give Mitchell's most accessible and apparently most ordinary novel, taking its events as a satisfying, straightforward recounting of a boy's jitters, O'Donnell finds elements recalling Austen, Dickens, and Joyce. Beneath a chronological depiction of thirteen months in a boy's maturation, the fairy-tale, initiation story, and the novel or manners appear. So do historical chronicle, fantasy touches, and hundreds of brand names, song titles, pop song lyrical snippets, books, and television programs from the early 1980s. O'Donnell places the adolescent narrator into this milieu, as his commodified and oppressive reality. Set as the Falklands War and late-Cold War NATO-Warsaw Pact tensions clouded even a lonely English schoolboy's perspective, this novel continues the pattern Mitchell has woven, one in which everyday people get tangled up in history.

As well as mystery, for as one young man had viewed "a row of screaming Russian dolls" in Tokyo, so another visitor to Japan finds himself, too, in another labyrinth, where possibilities overlap and crush. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Van Zoet (2010) enlivens another familiar genre, that of the historical epic. O'Donnell moves beyond the critical reactions which place this long tale, set in 1799 in Nagasaki harbor as a Dutch trader tries to open up the mainland to trade, within a "stereoscopic" overlay of Asian and Western meetings, or as a post-feminist take on the Orientalist trope of an eager white man falling in love with a, coy, exotic woman. Instead, the personal and the political trip up progress. Translation garbles commercial and intimate exchanges. The lust for profit and the rush for conquest play off against confounding Japanese attempts to manipulate European delegations. Road trips, melodrama, gothic, science fiction, and romance all merge and drift apart in this vast story.

The same ingredients in The Bone Clocks (2014; see my review for PopMatters 16 Sept. 2014) swirl across six decades in the life of another English narrator from the 1980s on, as Holly Sykes finds surprises within mundane circumstances. O'Donnell again shows how Mitchell makes time elastic. In his latest novel, he dramatizes the difficulty of translating concepts, emotions, and points-of-view from one person's perspective into another. Mitchell adds a supernatural dimension. Here, he takes up religious debates, depictions of the sociology of power, late twentieth-century pop culture as trends come and go. He predicts how (a minor but relevant aspect which merited more detail in O'Donnell's critical analysis) reading audiences and literary recognition shift attentions in our own near-future.

Other critics, not cited by O'Donnell in his positive appraisal of Mitchell's fiction, regard some of the writer's efforts as not paying off in their conclusions. His novels all keep a reader turning their pages, they remain honest in their narrative sleight-of-hand, and they offer convincingly drawn protagonists. Yet, some readers and critics shut Mitchell's novels with a sensation of let-down, as if after all the dazzling legerdemain, the magical tricks fail to linger after the performance has ended. O'Donnell diligently finds in each novel the connections which link characters and events across them all (one of the best reasons to read them all in order, I advise) in subtle and playful ways. But if O'Donnell had addressed reader reception by those of us in Mitchell's audience who continue to open each of his works with hope but close them with a nagging feeling that an added effort could be made by their author, this consideration would have strengthened what is an understandable if telling weakness in this work of literary criticism. O'Donnell offers only praise for David Mitchell's diverse set of novels.

Granted, this is not to detract from a considerable achievement. Given he is only forty-five, Mitchell may likely better his present success as an author respected by critics and welcomed on the bestseller lists by readers worldwide. He continues as one of the most talented storytellers and most rewarding fabulists in contemporary fiction. The Bone Clocks handles a very intricate narrative with verve. Mitchell enlivens Holly, telling her life's story, one which for the first time in a Mitchell novel takes precedence throughout the narrative as a female presence. (Typically, this novel's cast of characters and settings overlaps, as we see Mo Muntervary reappear in her Irish home turf, fifteen years after her debut in Mitchell's fiction.) Colliding with what begins the novel (shortly after Black Swan Green) as Holly's daily routine, the clash of the Horologists and Anchorites as they wrestle over "decanting" immortality sharpens Mitchell's depiction of what may be our species' inability to match a utopian concept to a human set of weaknesses, given doubt, lust, temptation, and the profit motive.

Mitchell regards impermanence as the condition in which men and women must endure. He can present this with detachment, another reason some critics and readers get uneasy with his stance. Time, topography, and plot accumulate. They force readers to realize their implicated guilt along with that of characters like us, but as if a few decades later. The plight of the planet, weakened by ecological decay and predatory commercial, political, and social practices we encourage, implicates audiences into Mitchell's dire warnings. Crucial characters cannot be written off as escapist or as alarmist. They face an evil era. While it is close in time to ours, it is one we wish to fend off forever.

Summing up Mitchell's ambitions, O'Donnell charts patterns in six novels which may serve as models of how we can adapt to globalizing circumstances. Individually and collectively, the vexing question of how our lives may continue impels the risks Mitchell takes in each protean narrative. These demonstrate the "clearest sign of his imaginative investment in having a future" we want to create. 
(PopMatters 1-6-15; 1-8-15 Amazon US)

David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks": Book Review

Gaining front-page coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and the feature review in The New Yorker, this much-anticipated novel delivers a sprawling, exciting, otherworldly epic. However, to keep my own reactions fresh, I have not read any of these reviews before writing mine. I preferred to savor this novel myself, for over the past year I've enjoyed each of David Mitchell's five fictional tales to date. But immensely satisfying as they are, most nag me a little.

Given Mitchell's knack for inventive plots, appealing characters, engrossing lore, and fantastic adventures, at the end of all but one of his six novels so far, I wanted more. Is this a sign of satisfaction, then? Or a hint that a bit more push was needed by Mitchell --rather than me-- to break through from the ranks of a series of impressive tales told with abundant energy and delight, to get to that higher level, where we can agree that his novels will endure as dazzling classics, decades hence?

To begin with, how does The Bone Clocks compare with what's gone before? Eerie machinations of a global conspiracy that stretches past time and place from Ghostwritten (1999) return. So does Mo Muntervary, an MIT-trained physicist. Roughly fifteen years after her appearance in that novel, she lives in County Cork, where The Bone Clocks concludes. Similar to Ghostwritten and Mitchell's next work, Number 9 Dream (2001), shape-shifting scenarios entangle logic and reality, if not those novels' Asian settings. Some of best moments in The Bone Clocks come in exotic locations, but it settles down for most of its six-hundred-plus pages in England, North America, and finally, Ireland.

In Mitchell's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in the early 1980s, Black Swan Green (2006), Jason Lamb told how he grew up in the shadow of the Falklands War and his parents' divorce in suburban Worcestershire. In The Bone Clocks, we meet his cousin, Hugo Lamb. This callow yet likeable "scholarship boy" studies at Cambridge. He learns of a magical offer. He finds out about the "psychosoterica of the Shaded Way". This quest comprises the backbone of this novel. The details of confrontations and "decanting" demand attention, but a careful reader will find that Mitchell embeds much of this key material early on, even if makes more sense many pages and many decades later. Atemporals seek to outwit mortality. These beings drain "psychovoltaic" charges from mortal souls. Humans live merely as "bone clocks". Our hearts tick away a few years in decaying bodies.  Anchorites disdain humans as Normals, who unwillingly and suddenly may feed the "syndicate of soul-thieves", the few who "under terms and conditions" strive to sustain a provisional immortality.

These sinister forces are countered by the league of even fewer immortals, Horologists who unselfishly seek to protect Normals. As Returnees or as Sojourners, these entities transmigrate into human bodies to continue "metalives". This faction fends off the Atemporals, who as Carnivores feed off of the living. The novel begins with teenaged runaway Holly Sykes. Leaving Gravesend on the Thames estuary, she crosses paths with this cosmic conspiracy one memorable "time-slip" day in 1984. Her predicament brings her into the company of Dr. Marinus, who featured in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (2010). Nearly two centuries after that saga of a Dutch trade mission at Nagasaki set around 1800, the doctor's back. He "returns" as an African Canadian psychologist.

Marinus seeks to penetrate the Swiss fastness where the Atemporals congregate to energize their "twisted version of resurrection" as the Shaded Way. They "consume the psychovoltaic souls of innocent people in order to fuel their own immortality". The battle between this company of Anchorites and the secret society of Horologists who for four centuries have sought to counter these soul-killing "animacides" leads to spirited displays of unpredictable alliances, betrayals, and mind-games at which Mitchell excels. As in episodes of Japanese combat, secret societies, natural wonders, dystopian breakdown, harried idealists, and teenaged desire in earlier novels, so here: Mitchell merges set-scenes of imaginative showdowns with intellectual reflection which will reward the keen and alert reader. Some exposition may seem slow at the time, but varied pace and tone build up suspense gradually. While arguably a few sections might have been trimmed, the experience Mitchell creates for the reader, to revel in the immediacy of unexpected events, benefits from leisure.

I have left out much of an extremely dense plot, so as to avoid spoilers. Much of what may seem baffling when first seen through Holly's teenaged perspective in part one begins to clarify, if gradually. Meanwhile, we learn through Hugo's tutelage in part two what the psychic campaign conducted on a different plane than the mundane means to those in this world who as "Engifted" during a period of their own psychological vulnerability find themselves open to suggestion by the Atemporals. They are lured to a Swiss fortress at Sidelhorn, rich in Templar tradition. "I'm looking through time's telescope at myself." So Hugo reflects as he visits an old pensioner, for frustrated Hugo seeks meaning in life. Shown by a Carnivore how to press "the pause button of time", he faces temptation. An Anchorite promises: "The impossible is negotiable. What is possible is malleable."

Part three, set a decade ago, shows a more mundane if more deadly conflict for millions. Mitchell portrays the Iraqi chaos from the perspective of Holly's partner, a driven journalist who calls himself a "war-zone junkie". This section introduces a Script followed by the Horologists. Later, we learn how "The Script loves foreshadowing." Most what Mitchell scatters will coalesce, if much delayed.

Part four, with my favorite character, the writer Crispin Hershey, delights. In Cloud Atlas (2004), the foibles of hapless author Timothy Cavendish regaled many as they showed Mitchell's satirical send-ups of literary self-promotion engagingly and imaginatively. Similarly, we view a reading at the book festival at Hay-on-Wye through Crispin's jaundiced narration. Doomed to rouse sales for his books, he must face "a contingent of securely pensioned metropolitans stuffed with artisanal fudge and organic cider". Using the conceit of successive literary conferences, junkets, or a professorship from 2015-2020, Hershey's progress and his grumbling maturation reveal Mitchell's sympathy for a middle-aged mid-list writer's plight. "Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest x-ray gizmos." Plagued by divorce and driven by ego, through his journeys all over the world, we learn how redemption can be sought, even by a figure of fun. In this section, Mitchell's talent shines.

Marinus in part five deepens the confrontations as the Horologists square off against the Anchorites. We learn through Holly how this strife has continued for centuries. We get a glimpse of what Mitchell has promised in a 2010 interview. He intends Marinus to be the central figure (rather than one of five protagonists here) of yet his next novel. Still, this nimble glimpse late in The Bone Clocks of possible fates for him in other "metalives" makes his present fate less satisfying. Presumably Marinus'  temporal status and immortal shapes, vaguely hinted in Thousand Autumns, elucidated in The Bone Clocks, will gain from the clarity of Mitchell's novel to come. Meanwhile, one leaves this section, for all of its energy and excitement, with a sense that an escape clause has been left open for Marinus.

As lively and thought-provoking as the final chapter proves, there remains a further letdown. This comes amidst a very dramatic scenario. As a major character confesses: "I've seen the future and it's hungry." She speaks for us. In her mid-seventies, in 2043, she attests to our present folly: "my feckless generation trusted our memories to the Net, so the '39 Crash was a collective stroke". The costs of convenience, as skills were left to tablets and mental powers of recall to a Cloud, result in an apocalyptic payback. What we fuel every time we fill up our tank --the hastening of economic collapse and planetary chaos as the "law of the jungle" returns to plague the survivors on Earth-- shows how greed today leads to plagues tomorrow. As Mitchell shows for those struggling in the Irish West in a neo-colonial system where the yuan gives way to barter and banditry, not even the Chinese capitalists can keep the world together. At last, nature pays back humans for the greed we earlier in the century have indulged in. We're selling off our descendents' future, for present pleasure.

A deus-ex-machina arrives, clunkily. A novel of speculative fiction could be defended as saving such contrivances for retrieval by an author. Yet, I felt it was too facile. Still, many may welcome it, as it eases a harrowing chapter. This arrival promises faint hope, if for very few. For, the final section depicts a dismal dystopia of post-Endarkenment. By 2043, we watch in rural Ireland the breakdown of Western society without electricity, the Net, or transport as we know it. "Civilization's like the economy, or Tinkerbell: if people stop believing it's real, it dies." Global warming triggers a lapse into the first stages of Earth's collapsing culture in Cloud Atlas, three centuries on. Overall, despite those two places where I felt disappointed, Mitchell succeeds in spinning out his complex plot. In retrospect, The Bone Clocks fits together neatly. I anticipate its ambitious storyline may open up nicely into future novels. Then, more past characters, along with Marinus, may return to surprise us.

(In shorter fashion at Amazon US 9-13-14; revised as above to PopMatters 9-17-14. I recommend  Jill Owens' interview at the Powell's website with Mitchell about how and why he constructed this novel such; I did not read this or any other discussions of the new novel before I wrote my review.)