The Human Stain

I have a problem with Philip Roth.  It’s not that he’s humourless and his books are dry, although both are true.  I don’t enjoy reading him because I don’t think for a second he is writing for anyone remotely like me.  Roth’s books are about old successful American men who are largely unable to understand how privileged they are.  It doesn’t make for sympathetic characters and it doesn’t make for a fun read.  The Human Stain would be so much a better book if its main character were even remotely likeable.  I might of care about his moral quandary if that were the case instead of spending a couple of hundred pages wishing he’d shut up. 

The Human Stain is about Coleman Silk; a fair-skinned black man who decides to pretend to be Jewish for the rest of his life to avoid discrimination.  Despite Silk’s fairly poor grasp of history, there are no consequences to this.  One day he is black, the next he is white; all he loses is a family he doesn’t seem that keen on anyway.  He gains a wife and kids, a successful career (ironically ended by accusations of racism) and a frankly sickening sense of entitlement.  He seems to spend a good deal of his time lying to his wife; then scapegoating his former employers for her death.  She dies of a stroke.  It is no-one’s fault.  He is only able to get over this by sleeping with Faunia Farley, a woman 37 years younger than him.  Naturally, when his kids find out he doesn’t understand why it’s a big deal.  Almost all of this is forgivable, but near the beginning of the book he is speaking about Faunia (who was sexually abused as a teenager) and describes her sexual prowess as, “a gift of the molestation.”  I kind of can’t give a fuck about the problems of anyone who uses that phrase.

Okay, so the book biased me against its main character twenty-odd pages in.  That doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.  I’m the first to admit that I’m reading it from a feminist slant and Silk, if not Roth, is anything but a feminist.  But all the female characters are just terrible.  The only one with any spine or agency of her own is Delphine Roux; a young academic who teaches at the college Silk is fired from.  She actively dislikes Silk and scores points with me already for this alone.  And then it turns out that she’s so anti-Silk because he’s her perfect man.  Him!  It’s not believable.  Fine, I’ll accept that no-one questions his race, but why does no-one notice that Silk’s an utter twat-bag?  Well, no-one except his clever (and all but absent) brother.  Any ill-will his former colleagues hold for him is over ridden by his death and yes, if they dislike him it is for the wrong reason, but he doesn’t ask or earn their forgiveness.  His great secret is not revealed.  His death doesn’t prove he was not a racist, and yet he is atoned.

I’m also not that keen on the book’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman.  Roth uses him in a couple of his other books only one of which (American Pastoral) I’ve read.  Zuckerman is an author with an unfortunate tendency for hero worship.  Despite my earlier criticism of Roth, I remember quite liking American Pastoral, but parts of it are so similar to this book that I want to scream.  Roth needs to write something that doesn’t involve being a Jewish man from Newark.  I mean, he’s really taken that write what you know concept and just run with it.  Even The Plot Against America is essentially about the same thing.  I don’t think Roth has any concept of how privileged he or his characters are or any idea about women at all.  And it is infuriating to read. 

I’ve just started on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch.

Dead Air

It’s a strange time to be reading  book about 9/11.  Revealing just how backlogged I am with the blog; at the time I’m writing this, it has just been revealed that Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed a plane full of people into the side of a mountain.  Of course, it’s far too early for rational judgement or comment on the events, so naturally the internet’s full of ill-informed opinions and comparisons of the two events.  As fun as it is interacting with the news and minor celebrities on Twitter, 140 characters probably aren’t enough to give a well balanced view on such a delicate issue.  This is relevant.  I am getting to the point.  Dead Air, with its grimly punning title is more about the reaction to the World Trade Center attacks than it is the event itself.  And naturally, the response is shock- and then business as usual. 

I’m not going to pretend that the terrorist attacks of September 11^th didn’t have some pretty far reaching political and cultural ramifications and, although I was still quite young, I do remember the immediate aftermath.  In the UK, at least, it seemed to be the case of being bombarded with that footage (you know the stuff I mean, the moment the planes fly into the towers) while going about our daily lives.  Accordingly, Iain Banks’s protagonist is more concerned with starting a punch up with a Holocaust denier on national television and carrying on an affair with a gangster’s beautiful wife than he is with Osama bin Laden.  This makes it a better book.  Yes, Ken Nott has the political awareness but his day to day life is ruled by more practical concerns.  It’s kind of hard to care about Islamism when getting kneecapped because of who you’re shagging is a very real possibility (preaching to the choir, I know).  This makes him all the more honest and believable as a person.  It also allows the book to be hilarious.  There’s an entire chapter dedicated to Ken breaking into the gangster’s house which is just brilliant.  Banks had this fantastic knack for balancing farce with thriller and it’s wonderfully exercised here.  There’s a similar moment in The Wasp Factory after the main character becomes convinced his father is a woman, which is as laugh out loud shocking as it is funny.

Dead Air is also an interesting read as it’s a satire of our recent past.  There are jokes made that, in light of today’s culture seem almost prophetic.  At one point, just after the Towers fall, people start asking, “’Where’s Superman?  Where’s Batman?  Where’s Spiderman?’ ‘Where’s Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise, or Arnie, or Stallone?’”  The answer, we now know to all of these questions is that they are back on our cinema screens.  I studied a bit of contemporary film theory at university, and one of the main contributing factors to the re-immergence of the superhero and the muscle-clad action hero is generally thought to be America’s need to know that someone is in control.  There is an all American hero and he will protect you.  Banks, it seems, pegged this is around 2002. 

The differences in culture too are shocking.  This is a pre-social media novel and the press seem antiquated.  Things are so close to being similar that the differences are all the more apparent.  I half expected Ken Nott (as a popular DJ) to start Tweeting his views.  There is only one reference to the internet in the entire book (that I noticed at least) and this sounds like the conversations I have with my mum about her tablet.  She always seems torn between being shocked about just what technology can do and amused by the shear novelty of it all.  It’s not even a good tablet.  (Although that is a step up from the dis-trustful glare her mother levelled at the thing).

This is another book that I don’t want to say too much about plot wide because I want people to read it.  The boook’s cover quotes describe it as a thriller but I disagree.  The story’s too involved with cultura satire to be proper edge of the seat stuff and referring to any books that blurb is so concerned with 9/11 as a thriller invites those unfortunate Bruce Willis comparisons.  I found it a touch jarring.  It is about the landscape and time in which I became socially and politically aware and yet so much has changed that it’s mostly a dim recollection.  It’s almost a comfort when the characters start debating our position in Europe; that I recognise.

I’ve just started on Philip Roth’s The Human Stain.  It’s shaping up to be as serious as his other works.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

After a stack of short books it was kind of a shock to read a 500-odd page one.  The Ground Beneath Her Feet was a great choice of long book to get back into long books with, though.  Salman Rushdie tells epic tales that twist and wind along unexpected paths and, despite the book’s length, barely a word is wasted.  Even the philosophic ruminations are necessary, light on plot as they are.  The book tells the tale of the two leads of super group VTO through the eyes of their childhood friend-cum-devotee, Rai.  It’s essentially a story of love and loss and it’s wonderful.  I haven’t read any Rushdie in ages, and I’ve missed him quite a bit.

The plot is a relatively simple one.  Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama are the two parts of bigger-than- The-Beatles rock band VTO and the book plots their lives from birth to their deaths.  It charts their love for one another which remains undimmed despites years of separation and (on Vina’s part) infidelity as well as their musical success and the lives and loves of their families.  Of course being by Salman Rushdie, it’s not actually that simple.  Ormus is a musical prophet who, until his career actually begins, is read songs of the future by his still born twin brother Gayo.  After a car accident, his brother escapes him and is replaced by views of another world that inspire his song writing and lead him to madness.  There are serial killers and abandonment issues for both going running through the novel too, of course.  I’m pretty sure all musicians have some kind of family issues.  Oh and the entire book’s pretty much an extended re-telling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Other than all that, pretty simple.

The world the book takes place in is odd as well.  It is so close to being the same as ours, that the differences seem arbitrary for the majority of the tale.  It is a world in which JFK is not assassinated and in Dallas and the Watergate scandal is just a film.  The rest of the world is easy to recognise and few other events that are not directly linked to the plot itself are changed.  Songs are sung by the wrong artist, but the world is recognisable.  And then, near the end it makes sense.  I want to go on about this part of the book so much more, but I’m worried about spoiling it.  There’s one of those moments, later on, that make you re-evaluate everything you’ve read up until that point and I don’t want to ruin it for people.  It’ like how knowing Bruce Willis is a ghost from the start of The Sixth Sense made it more difficult to enjoy.  I can’t imagine having seen that film without knowing the twist, but I imagine it would have been better.

As I said before, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a tale of love and of loss.  The love/ hate relationship Rushdie’s characters have for their past and for India is incredible.  Rushdie acknowledges that as the characters change, their way back to whom and here they were before is blocked even though they are mostly insistent on always moving forwards.  Character growth is irreparable.  Or, as Rushdie says (far more eloquently), “we’re not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape… It’s like when coal becomes a diamond.  It doesn’t afterwards retain the possibility of change.”  This creates the odd heart-breaking whack of nostalgia in a story full of characters that refuse to look back.

This blog is impossible to write.  Looking back through the book I keep finding more thing I loved and I just can’t work them all in; I haven’t even started on Rai, the book’s narrator.  The Ground Beneath Her Feet is extraordinary and it’s not even Rushdie’s best book.  I find it so difficult to write about how much I love Salman Rushdie.  His style is so dense.  It overflows with ideas and connections that I can’t imagine that anyone else could make work.  So few people would think to link Greek mythology, rock music and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  Even fewer could make it work.

Next time is Dead Air by Iain Banks.

The Midwich Cuckoos

So, we’re on to the final book from the London trip.  This time it’s John Wynham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, read on my way back to the sticks from the big city.  It’s one of those books that make me think I should really prefer the city.  Messed up things happen in the country.  There are fucking alien children in the country (spoiler).  Even the one that does escape to London ends being drawn back to the village of Midwich.  The country is clearly a dangerous place.  The book itself is another sci-fi/ horror classic that I knew a bit about.  I haven’t seen the Village of the Damned, but I’ve seen The Simpsons parody of it and other things influenced by the book.

The entire population of the sleepy village Midwich mysterious fall unconscious for around 36 hours over a couple of days one September.  Upon waking they not only discover that they’ve miss their favourite TV shows (and with nary an iPlayer or even a VCR have no way to catch up) but that also all the women are pregnant.  Considering this is 1957 and many of the women are unwed, this causes complications.  Of course, the alien foetus story does sound a lot more convincing when it’s happened to all the women within a two mile radius, so the village moves on and in nine months develops an alien baby problem instead.  Fast forward nine years and due to their accelerated aging this has developed into a fully-fledged alien teenager problem.  They do all the things normal teenagers do, stay out late, disobey their parents, murder locals with psychic powers and hive mind.  After a fair amount of bloodshed, order is resolved.  There’s also some background nonsense going on with the shadowy Grange and its researchers, but that can pretty much be ignored.

Reading this book, one of the weirdest things for me was the pregnancies themselves.  As I mentioned earlier it was released in 1957 and back then IVF wasn’t a thing.  After some panic, the explanation that the scientists come up with (using delightful terms like “host mother”) is basically IVF.  It’s mad to think that of all the things that sci-fi gets so appallingly wrong, this is one of the things that became true.  To me however, the unsettling part of the pregnancies is the complete lack of consent by the women who are impregnated.  Rather than being mystified or amazed that such a thing could happen, I am appalled on behalf of the women whose autonomy has been violated.  The men don’t really seem to care about this point.  There’s one point in the novel in which Wyndham mentions that the men have never seen the children as their own, but the women accept them much more freely as they nurtured them in the womb.  This is such bullshit.  There’s only one woman who chooses to abandon her baby (rightly stating she is not responsible for it) and get the hell out of dodge and there’s definitely a feeling that she’s judged for this decision. 

Like The Day of theTriffids, this is a classic of British sci-fi, but it’s very much of its time.  The attitudes to women in places are simply disgraceful and the Midwich killings only start after a parallel Russian village is destroyed.  Although it’s not as famous as The Day of the Triffids, I get the feeling that this book is more important because of its influence on culture rather than the book itself.  Wynham was not the first to realise children are creepy as hell, but he used that fact so effectively.  The influence of it is clear in things like Hot Fuzz, The Omen and almost anything with creepy children in, really.  There are also some nice little parallels with its contemporary works The Minority Report (the original short story) near the end, which I quite enjoyed.

I’ve now moved on to The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie.  At the time of writing, I haven’t even started it, but doubtless by the time this has been posted it’ll be long finished.

Hideous Kinky

Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky is what I suspect to be a deceptively simple book.  It’s a simple story told very well.  It’s one of those books in which quite a lot happens, but not much of any importance.  That’s not quite true.  What I mean is, it’s a very episodic told tale from the point of view of a child and as such, the real story’s party obscured from our view.  It’s also interesting as it’s a story set in Morocco in the 1960s and has a wicked feminist slant to it.  I might speak from a place of ignorance here but Morocco isn’t really what springs to mind when one thinks of 1960s feminism.  So it’s a new take on a fairly old subject.

The plot is straightforward.  A terrible mother takes her two daughters to live in Morocco in search of freedom.  Naturally, this awful plan goes just awfully.  From the moment they arrive in Marrakech the mother, Julia, fritters away money in a completely irresponsible manner.  From the get go her two daughters are in search of structure, both are intent on attending school and obtaining a father figure.  The schooling doesn’t really take off but they do pick Bilal, a sometime acrobat who is pretty good with kids and is happy to shack up with their mum.  As the money dwindles Bilal comes and goes from the family’s lives and Julia continuously refuses to take enough responsibility to actually do the right thing and go back to England.  Julia continues to pursue her dreams while her children are suffering.  Even after she almost loses one of them, it still takes a lot to convince her to leave Africa.

As I said before, Hideous Kinky is told from the point of view of a child, the young of Julia’s two daughters, in fact, and Freud is extraordinary at capturing a child’s views in a way that is interesting for adults to read.  Due to the angle that the story is told from, crucial plot points are missed and the reader is left to surmise what has happened.  Julia is a pretty frank mother and so the bits where this becomes really evident are reasons Bilal leaves and returns.  Or, I mean, the lack of reasons.  Aside from one comment about how he could have reached her if he wanted to, we never really find out why he goes.  As adult readers we know it’s because the money’s run out, but our child narrator doesn’t.  Similarly, we discover his return as she searches her mother out in the night, only to find a naked man sleeping in Julia’s bed.  It’s nice way to tell the story, because it allows Julia off the hook.  She is an awful parent, but her children are happy and full of wonder at the delights of Morocco.  They treat what is pretty much neglect as a wonderful adventure, lightening up what would otherwise be an incredibly dark tale.

The setting of Morocco is a part of the child like wonder that the girls feel.  There’s a real sense of travelogue writing and the food described, even the stuff that the family are getting by on when they are terribly poor sounds just delicious.  It’s just loads of fresh fruit and vegetables.  Other than that, it’s an odd choice for a feminist getaway.  There’s one point in which Bilal’s fourteen year-old sister is beaten by her family because she has brought shame to them by removing her veil briefly during a festival.  The only way to rectify this heinous act and ensure she is still marriageable is to beat the crap out of her.  Julia has the decency to be incensed, but it’s all for nothing. It feels like there’s potential there that goes untapped.  Earlier I said that the book’s set in the 1960s, but I know that because of the blurb, not because of the content of the book itself.  Freud may not have included much in the way of politics as Hideous Kinky is told from the view point of a six year-old, but I still expected more.

As I said at the outset of this blog, Freud tells a relatively simply story incredibly well.  In the hands of someone who didn’t know how to make the voice of a child appeal to an adult this could easily be a book for children.  I don’t know exactly what it is that pushes over the line from a kids book to a book about childhood but there’s something.  It’s certainly not in the subject matter, appalling as she is Julia is mother of the year compared to some of Jacqueline Wilson’s creations.  There’s a subtle tone of innocence with only the implications of anything darker that Freud utterly nails and it makes a good old read.

The final of my London coach marathon reads is John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos and should be up soon.