Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming

Reading a celebrity’s memoir isn’t usually my sort of thing. But this book actually has very little to do with being a celebrity. Alan Cumming’s extraordinarily complex and difficult family story is reason enough to read this memoir without the need for salacious Hollywood gossip (of which there is very little in this book). “Not My Father’s Son” is primarily about Cumming’s incredibly problematic relationship with his estranged father and overcoming the horrendous abuse he and his brother experienced as children. However, it is because of his fame that he was able to participate in the program Who do you think you are? where celebrities get to trace their heritage and uncover hidden facts about their family. In this book we’re given his personal take on discovering more information about his mysterious maternal grandfather who was a war hero and whose life came to a shocking end. What was going on between his immediate family while this was being filmed is even more extraordinary than what happened in this television program. There are events and revelations in Cumming’s life happening simultaneously while the show is made with bizarre connections linking the past and present.

This memoir turns into a kind of thriller as it progresses because of the anticipation of what family details will be revealed. It moves back and forth in time from Cumming’s childhood and budding acting career to the time of filming the TV show. Interspersed are family photographs which become particularly poignant as more of the story is revealed. Cumming’s complex story naturally raises questions about the meaning of family and how much genetics determines who we are. It also meaningfully conveys strategies for dealing with the aftermath of abuse. I found the story in “Not My Father’s Son” extremely moving. It’s about survival, identity and what really makes people family.

The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray

I’ve been really looking forward to reading “The Mark and the Void.” There’s been what I think of as “rumblings” about it for some time including mentions on Twitter and in the press (both very positive and very negative reviews). Now that Booker predictions are already being made it’s tipped by some as a strong contender. References to it have made blips on my radar and, after receiving enough blips, I was sufficiently intrigued to put it at the top of my TBR pile. At one point I was chatting with two authors I really respect and both enthusiastically praised Murray and this new novel so I became determined to read it. Now I wonder if it’s one of those tragic cases of a book receiving too much hype because my overall response to this novel is something of a shrug.

It’s a fun idea which Murray self-consciously outlines at the start. A banker with hidden depths of spirit meets a writer who turns out to be a shallow charlatan. This combo yields thoughtful passages about the banking crisis in Ireland and observations about the interplay of art and life. French banker Claude uses his background in philosophy to assess the meaning of value for things and people in the modern world. It’s observed that “Life and the living of it have, for the first time in history, become separate. In recording our own reality – that is, in simultaneously experiencing and deferring experience – we pass from the actual into the virtual.” At the same time, the writer Paul makes a foil to Claude’s search for meaning in the modern malaise by seeking to exploit these foibles with his schemes to get rich. So he seeks to use our desire for intimate personal connections in real life filtered through the safety of virtual arenas to create a website Hotwaitress.com where you can be served by actual waitresses while knowing a profuse amount of personal details about their lives.

This is ridiculous and funny – the dark humour being that such sleazy disgusting websites do exist. Unfortunately, much of the humour in this novel feels quite broad and not all that haha. So periphery characters like Paul’s immigrant stripper wife who is also a well-educated literary theorist, protestors that dress like zombies and an artistic gay couple who slyly confess to adoring the musical Mamma Mia came across as a bit clunky to me because they’ve been inserted into scenes that read like situational comedy. It was difficult to feel much for them. There were some exceptions that show more of the shady reality of the world. For instance, Claude’s female co-worker Ish is put in the extremely uncomfortable situation where potential investors demand she get a lap dance at a gentlemen’s club (a situation she thankfully escapes). Her gradual disillusionment with her profession is effective, but she has a lovesickness for Claude which felt cloying. Probably the character I found most endearing was Paul’s young son Remington whose absurdist interjections provide a light relief.

All this might be okay if protagonists Claude and Paul succeeded as characters. Their relationship reminded me strongly of Stefan Zweig and his biography of Balzac. Like Claude, Zweig was devoted to the way art can elevate us out of the mire and pettiness of daily life. Yet he’s continuously frustrated because, like the character Paul, Balzac’s primary motivation was to get rich through ridiculous ploys which fail miserably and he only goes back to writing out of necessity to pay off debts. This tension makes for amusing interactions in “The Mark and the Void” but it’s a relationship so strained it comes across as unbelievable. If it weren’t for the author’s controlling hand Claude would certainly block Paul out of his life. Because their connection is the impetus for the story, they can’t be separated so the charade continues. Maybe that’s the point and, as the novel progresses, we’re made more and more self consciously aware of the limitations of novels. It’s stated that “The stories we read in books, what’s presented to us as being interesting – they have very little to do with real life as it’s lived today… People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that’s the big thing.” This condemnation of literature would seem to make the pursuit of reading fiction pointless because all the little insights we find within don’t offer any succour in reality. But if you take away the story there is little left to appreciate but clever artifice and I would have preferred to read a non-fiction book about the banking crisis in Ireland.

The trouble is that highlighting the characters and situation as a sort of post-modern construct means they never get much beyond that. It’s difficult to feel any heart. To be honest, there were long passages of this novel I found boring. This too is self consciously pointed out in the novel: “He’s boring, his life is boring, isn’t that the point? Isn’t that what makes his story true? He’s the modern man, he lives in his cocoon of numbers, he has everything anyone could want – or rather, he has enough money to buy anything anyone could want – yet his life is empty.” So the novel moves along giving details of the inner-workings of banking while the protagonists engage in a game of cat and mouse. I wanted more than that because I could feel real anger and frustration from the author about the financial crisis in Ireland. In one passage, seemingly out of nowhere, there is an extended searing critique of “the Irish, with their demon priests, their cellulite, their bus queues and beer bellies…” and later it’s remarked “the fact is that the Irish are at root a slave race.” This chastisement a man has for his own countrymen in relation to the economic disaster of his time is what I would be thrilled to read about – not a novel as an intellectual postmodern game-play. Anne Enright’s recent novel “The Green Road” did much more to capture the Irish in all their complexity and say something meaningful in the lead up to the housing bubble.

I don’t mean to condemn this novel because there are a lot of interesting things in it. The title itself takes on multiple meanings throughout the book. People target each other to exploit and use one another for empty monetary pursuits in a way that drains life of meaning so we’re left “swimming around in this void together.” An accusatory finger points from character to character to author to reader. “The Mark and the Void” made me wonder about the way we’re lulled into absenting ourselves from taking responsibility for participating in all of this. It has force and something to say; for me it just didn’t find the right framework to express it in or give me the fully immersive experience I want from a novel.

Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt

It may feel sometimes like WWII is a subject that has been so well documented and fictionalized we don’t want to hear about it anymore. However, in the last year I’ve read some gripping novels that give a surprisingly different perspective on the war by focusing on the struggles of individuals on the periphery. Some of these include Lissa Evan’s “Crooked Heart” about con-artists on the home front, Ben Fergusson’s “The Spring of Kasper Meier” about the plight of German citizens in post-war occupied Berlin and Audrey Magee’s “The Undertaking” about a wartime marriage of convenience which turns into a harrowing tale of loss. Jason Hewitt takes an even more radically new view of the war showing the days leading up to its end and the immediate aftermath. However, “Devastation Road” doesn’t simply recount the complicated historical details of this significant time. Instead we travel on a journey down an anonymous road that has been ravaged by the war. Owen wakes to find himself bedraggled and disorientated near a river that is awash with bodies and without any clear recollection of the past five years. During his travels through a devastated Eastern Europe he slowly regains an understanding of who he is and what led him to this critical moment. His odyssey illuminates the way war is above-all made up of individual struggle and the terrible choices people must make to survive.

The trauma of war and a head injury have caused Owen to lose his short-term memory. At first this is a real struggle and he must write down what’s happening in order to remind himself what he experiences day by day and the fragmented memories which flash through his mind. He soon encounters a passionate Czech refugee named Janek who doesn’t speak English and a mysterious Polish woman named Irena who desperately wants to get rid of her baby. They accompany him on his journey trying to find people they have lost. Owen’s experiences and the way his life story gradually slots together cause him to entirely re-evaluate his identity. At one point Owen realises that “He was beginning to feel like a fugitive; or as if he had two lives running in parallel – the one he remembered and the one here and now.” This shows how our sense of self can become very thin and flexible, especially when challenged by something as traumatic as war. It causes people to both completely lose themselves or reinvent themselves as a necessary method of endurance.

Owen is a draughtsman helping to design planes for the war.

The story becomes both a thrilling and horrifying adventure as the truth is gradually revealed about the protagonists and the plight of people in the aftermath of war. With so many people displaced and communities’ infrastructure so broken, Owen wanders through a land of virtual chaos. We see how the war’s ending didn’t simply mean peace. The repercussions of the damage and continuing struggles of looting, fighting and rape persisted. A welfare officer remarks that “The war might as well still be raging for all the good the peace is doing us.” The way forward is uncertain. It’s compelling seeing how Hewitt’s characters adjust to this new environment by either triumphing or breaking down. Betrayal is a consistent theme in this novel where lovers, family and country are deceived out of necessity. The author explores the consequences of this in ways which are subtle and surprising. In particular, I found Irena’s character be extremely compelling as she is someone who felt thinly-drawn at first but her complicated story proves to be one of the most heart breaking.

It feels as if Jason Hewitt has taken the concept of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” and placed it in a historically specific time and place. Only through encounters and glimpses of the ravaged landscape do we piece together what has happened. While the physical and emotional damage of the war is real and painfully-felt, what’s in some ways equally disturbing is the way people’s sense of humanity has been so violently shaken. There are beautiful small acts of good will and terrifying scenes of vicious cruelty. “Devastation Road” takes you on a journey where you experience the extremes of war; you ultimately arrive somewhere that makes you very grateful for the gracious comfort of home.

Here is an article written by the author about displaced person's after WWII and the formation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency which feature in this novel: http://www.historiamag.com/?page_id=1494

Your Father Sends His Love by Stuart Evers

Usually I take my time with books of short stories. I’ll maybe read one a day in the morning before work or read one aloud to my boyfriend in the evening to help him get to sleep (my voice is quiet & soothing: I could charm an angry lion to sleep) or pick up a book of stories on a restless afternoon to read only one and not go back to the book for a month. But the stories in “Your Father Sends His Love” made me greedy. I started with the first and I wanted another, then another and another like a bag of sweets. Stuart Evers has an uncanny ability for placing you right into a subtly dramatic situation so it feels so immediately real and entrancing. Many involve initially simple scenes such as a woman getting a tattoo, a father caring for his infant son during the weekend, a man consuming a bag of oranges. But you are quickly made aware there is more at stake here. Someone has a longstanding feud with his son, someone’s hope of a simple happy home has been shattered by larger circumstances, someone is channelling all their energy into an imaginary life. These diverse stories drew me in to challenge and entertain me so that I wanted to read them all immediately.

Family plays a crucial role in most of these stories. There is resentment which is dramatically played out as a self-destructive son extracts revenge on his egotistical father; a woman chides her husband’s occasional snack indulgences despite carrying on a hidden intense affair; a man develops a close friendship with his granddaughter where he gets her on his side against his son/her father. However, many of the stories also bravely feature the intensely tender and caring feelings between families which aren’t easily portrayed in fiction without giving me a toothache. A father defends his son from homophobic abuse; a mother seeks to honour the memory of her long-deceased sister; a man tries desperately to show how much he feels for his grieving best friend. These are meaningful and skilfully realized situations which made me care about these characters. It felt like their lives and relations expanded out far beyond the short space of a mere twenty odd pages.

One of the things that Evers does to make these stories feel so real is to capture the awkwardness of social interactions – sometimes with excruciating accuracy. In ‘Live From the Palladium’a boy tries to impress a girl he has a crush on with a joke he inherits from his mother only to bungle the thing up horribly. In ‘Charter Year, 1972’ while visiting a new family a man makes ominous suggestions that he’ll take prizes away from them unless they make public appearances. The story ‘Something Else to Say’ is structured in a way where mental lists of things to talk about are continuously made and nervously reshaped as a man meets his friend in a pub. Our social lives are filled with a clutter of trivialities which distract from larger and more crucial issues happening between us. These stories inventively portray how these interactions are played out while subtly hinting at the bigger emotions stirring beneath the surface.

An outstanding thing about the range of characters in these stories is how Evers represents diversity in way which is subtly woven into their very fabric. So there are characters across a range of races, nationalities and sexualities presented where identities are varied but they are first and foremost individuals. It’s a talent to do this in a way which doesn’t make difference into an issue, but includes it because it is simply the reality of the world. It’s something which should be happening more in fiction and Evers shows in these stories the right way it can be handled.  

Many of the stories have a Raymond Carver feel to them because of their realism and delicately balanced interactions between characters in poignant locations. For instance, a time-worn affair is played out between couples in a disused nuclear war bunker turned tourist attraction in ‘This Is Not a Test.’ However, Evers also shows a range of styles with the title story ‘Your Father Sends His Love’ feeling at times like a Samuel Beckett play or his story ‘Swarm’ which takes us into a world of virtual reality where people “link” for a price. Reading the stories all together, I could see the way each story adjusts the tone of voice and rhythm to more suitably match the differing subject matter. Evers does this in a way which makes each story feel unique while also giving the collection overall a satisfying cohesion.

This is simply excellent story telling. Eat them up in one greedy feast or, if you have more restraint than I do, enjoy reading them at a civilized pace.

The House in Smyrna by Tatiana Salem Levy (translated by Alison Entrekin)

How do you reconcile the national identity of your ancestors with the person you are today? The children of recent immigrants will most likely have a stronger sense of duality because they are exposed to their parents’ culture which was brought from somewhere else and that of the society which they’ve been raised in. The main characters in “The House in Smyrna” have an even more blended sense of self because their family has strong roots in Portugal, recent ties with Turkey and eventually moved to settle in Brazil. Rather than tell the story of how a child of immigrants embraces or rejects her various cultural influences, Tatiana Salem Levy does something radically new with her narrative by moving between characters and periods of time in brief image-driven sections. This creates an emotionally-charged story which blends disparate elements together to show how there can be no true cohesive sense of self.

The primary drive of this tale is a key left to a character whose grandfather tells her it is for the house he left in Smyrna, Turkey. Alongside her journey (which might be real or imagined) to seek out this ancestral home there are the stories of a man caring for his dying mother, a heated and tempestuous lovers’ relationship, the incarceration and abuse of a political dissident and a writer whose body is breaking down. This may sound like a lot to include in such a short novel. At first it can prove a bit confusing between these strands of narrative because few names are used. However, they quickly take on the characteristic of a unified voice searching and seeking out a place to call home. The narrator declares: “I was born in exile, and that’s why I am the way I am, without a homeland, without a name… I was born away from myself, away from my land – but, when it comes down to it, who am I? What land is mine?” This narrative embodies this sense of anonymity as a strategy for contemplating these insolvable dilemmas. Imagery is repeated throughout different sections making the experiences of the characters feel unified. Strong sensations of pleasure or pain are carried between one part and the next fusing them together. The line of time is subverted through these methods to suggest subtleties not available in traditional ways of storytelling.

Inevitably, this sometimes gave the disappointing effect of making me want to know more about the specifics of certain characters and their dilemmas. In particular, the sections about the brutality of the Brazilian military during the dictatorship feel like they deserve a wider space to deal with the complexities of the situation. However, the pointedly strong imagery which appears in some sections makes up for this consciously shortened style of storytelling. Scenes of grief, isolation, discovery, pleasure are rendered with impeccably-crafted prose making them strongly resonant. There are instances of sexual power play, the sense of exploration in a foreign country and the bitter sting of mourning which are depicted in a way that really transported me. The novel also includes some plot twists which give these tales a strikingly charged quality making the piles of detail you’d get in more traditional narratives feel superfluous.

“The House in Smyrna” is an emotional, startling novel that makes every sentence earn its place. As a narrator in the novel passionately declares: “If my writing doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t exist.” The intensity of writing here does feel as if the writer has shed her life into it. This is a book written by someone who is deeply concerned about the meaning of identity and finding a way to express the full complexity of it. It’s what makes this such a noble and intense novel.

Read an excellent interview with the author here: https://scribepublications.co.uk/explore/insights/tatiana-salem-levy-q-a/

Best Reads of 2015 so far & Competition Winner

Wow, I now have a list of books that have all topped your lists so far this year! Thank you for all the suggestions and everyone who entered my competition to win a signed copy of “Mrs Engels” by Gavin McCrea. I put all your names in a box and pulled out the winner Poppy who suggested I read Jennifer Tseng’s “Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness” from Europa Editions. I have to say, it sounds like an excellent novel as it is all about a bookish librarian who has an affair with a younger man. Nice! I really look forward to reading it. Many other suggestions have perked my interest as well so don’t be surprised if I end up blogging about a book you tipped as your favourite of the year.

Reflecting back over the year so far since we're halfway through, here are ten books which have really stuck with me. Click on the covers below to read my reviews. Some upcoming books I can't wait to get stuck into are Hanya Yanagihara's "A Little Life", Paul Murray's "The Mark and the Void" and an upcoming childhood memoir from Joyce Carol Oates! Not to mention the flood of Green Carnation Prize entries which I'll be reading and discussing with my fellow judges soon.
What books are you hoping to read before the end of this year?
Any titles coming out in the later half of 2015 that you’re really anticipating?

The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood

Being an artist isn’t like other professions. It’s not a livelihood where the primary motivation for devoting one’s labour to it is for money or status or the simple satisfaction of a job well done or even making the world a better place. Certainly these factors influence artists during their careers, but the act of creating art is about realizing a vision and making something meaningful. The path to inspiration is elusive. Benjamin Wood’s novel “The Ecliptic” questions what drives, galvanizes and motivates artists. The narrator Elspeth Conroy is stuck. She’s a painter who has received acclaim for her work, but the majority of her output feels like it falls short of saying anything profound. On a small island off the coast of Turkey there is an artists’ retreat for those who have lost their way in whatever discipline they pursue. It has a rigid code and rules designed to support them in finding their way back to inspiration. Elspeth has spent many years here, but does retreating from the world encourage the creation of real art or only drive her irretrievably further into herself?

At the retreat, Elspeth has become part of a tight-knit group of other artists who are architects, novelists and playwrights. They have daily comfortable routines while waiting for the muse to visit them again. One day a very young man arrives to join the colony and their ordered world is disrupted. What follows is an engrossing complex tale of artistic aspirations, tangled passion and the quest for meaning. Elspeth is one of those rare female protagonists who isn’t motivated by a desire for romance or success, but wants to create art in the purest sense. Her journey questions whether this is even possible. It deals with all the complicated factors which drive us to create and experience art, shedding light on the reasons why art can be the one thing which makes our difficult lives bearable.

The ecliptic is the apparent path of the Sun on the celestial sphere - something invisible Elspeth tries to realize in her art.

The author is good at wrong-footing you in this novel and avoiding cliché. A situation where a painter is eclipsed by his assistant could prompt scenes of deception and jealousy. Instead a gentle ceding to recognized talent is allowed and a surprising new camaraderie forms later on. A fast-talking art agent who would be presented as nothing but a caricature in many novels is presented in this story as having a surprisingly intuitive sensitive side. This is the kind of writing that sees the everyday humanity in people and that everyone is just stumbling along, trying to do their best and make something meaningful.

There are many compelling different perspectives given throughout the novel on the impact of art both for the artist and the public who consume it. At one point the playwright MacKinney reflects: “that’s the problem, isn’t it? Once your best story’s told, it can’t be told again. It makes you, then it ruins you.” Some speculate that everyone has one great story in them, but once this is realized in an artistic form does this mean the artist is defined and trapped by it? Once you know the story you want to tell in art it can be devastatingly complicated finding the right form to communicate it through. Can it be found through sheer persistence? At one point it’s posited that “doggedness in art is no substitute for inspiration.” But at another point it’s observed that “real inspiration turns up only when your invitation has expired.” There is no straightforward way of finding the muse which artists wax on about so poetically. With occasional asides from Elspeth that tell us the things that no art college teaches you, this novel considers the multifaceted ways in which art finds ways of expressing the inexpressible.

Benjamin Wood constructs his story carefully so that the past reflects meaningfully upon the present in Elspeth’s journey as an artist. All the while it has tremendous momentum and drive making it compulsively readable. The closest comparison I can make for Wood’s novel is Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” for the way in which it deals with high concepts about art in a way which is utterly unpretentious and tells a cracking good story at the same time. The ending has left me thinking hard about how we create and commune with art. “The Ecliptic” is a passionate, invigorating and expertly conceived novel.