The Birth of Love
by Joanna Kavenna
Faber & Faber; Paperback;
Price: £12.99; 309 pages;
ISBN 978 0 571 24517 8

Edward Randell

Joanna Kavenna’s second novel (after Inglorious, which won the Orange Award for New Writers) tells four loosely connected stories on the theme of childbirth and motherhood. Set centuries apart, in an array of styles and even of fonts, they collectively affirm the irreducible mystery of the act of giving birth and the strength of the connection it forges. ‘The Moon’, set in 1865, centres on Ignaz Semmelweis, the real-life Hungarian obstetrician who first made the link between doctors’ unwashed hands and childbed fever. ‘The Tower’ takes place in a nightmarish future where mothers are ‘egg donors’, babies are ‘progeny of the species’ and the maternal bond is strictly denied, only to be reawakened among a group of dissidents when a woman falls pregnant. The other two stories are set in the present day: ‘The Hermit’ follows reclusive novelist Michael Stone as his book about Semmelweis is launched and he learns of his mother’s dementia, while ‘The Empress’ takes the reader through the anxiety and labour pains of Brigid Hayes.

At first it is hard to see how Kavenna could possibly make these historically and stylistically disparate narratives cohere. Gradually, however, links emerge, and by the end of the novel the narratives have knitted together in a formally skilful, if rather arbitrary, fashion. They are united by a common theme of confinement or incarceration, from Vienna asylum to the imprisoned dissidents, via Michael’s self-imposed isolation and the ‘prison walls’ of Brigid’s womb. There is a shared, recurring dream of blood; a shared archetype of motherhood; a shared moon shining on all four stories. Most significantly, each strand shows how inflexible and yet how fallible is each successive dogma surrounding childbirth – and this becomes ‘a metaphor, for any system of belief’, formulated in terms of the struggle between ‘[t]he one and the confident many’.

Those last two quotes come from Michael Stone’s musings on his own novel The Moon (from which, we are given to understand, the Semmelweis passages are taken). It is tempting to read Stone’s writerly self-doubt as a mouthpiece for Kavenna, a gloss on her own work: Stone, after all, concedes that his narrator is ‘himself, or some aspect of himself’. The words ‘ancient’, ‘ritual’ and ‘mystery’ recur frequently – prompting the thought that Kavenna, in taking care to flag up the novel’s concerns, has perhaps let too much light in on its mysteries. For all the exegesis, none of the narratives really gets enough time to immerse the reader in its imaginative world.

The most effective sections are those dealing with Semmelweis and his final days as a tragic, asylum-bound Cassandra. Kavenna tells his story in epistolary form, through a series of encounters with a scholar-narrator who seeks to understand his ideas while offering his own proto-Freudian interpretation of the root of his mental breakdown. This strand is affecting and engrossing, constructed with the pace of a two-handed drama. Equally powerful is the contraction-by-contraction account of Brigid Hayes’s labour, which prompted this reviewer to thank his lucky chromosomes he will only ever have to read about it.

The book is let down, however, by the jarring ‘2153’ strand. This takes the form of a series of interrogation transcripts (in their own sans serif typeface) of dissidents who have been arrested after fleeing the authoritarian, dehumanising regime that has arisen. Kavenna’s vision of farmed ovaries, eugenics and mass-scale farms owes something to Stalinism and more than a little to Aldous Huxley. Her brave new world, a response to the ravages of climate change, has none of the dangerous attractiveness of Huxley’s, however – it is an altogether more pedantic and humourless dystopia. More gravely, it does not achieve the quality of a fully realised world, leaning too heavily on science fiction cliché. There was one particular point in particular at which Kavenna lost my trust as a reader, when one of the prisoners, supposedly brainwashed from birth but obeying her instinct, says:

Yet there was something cathartic about the process. We who had been bred in sterilised sparkling machines, in the pristine technocratic sanctuary of the Genetix, we who had lived our days in perfect towers coated in shining solar shields, so everything was always glittering in the dangerous sunshine, suddenly we were dirtied, reborn into viscera and filth.

The character opens her mouth; the voice that emerges is the author’s. And this, finally, is the problem with The Birth of Love. Though there is much to admire in the novel’s ambition and scope, it lacks the discipline to succeed as a coherent piece of storytelling.

Playing Days
by Benjamin Markovits
Faber & Faber; Paperback;
322 pages; Price: 12.99
ISBN: 9780571251810

Rachel Harris

Playing Days is a Sports Novel of sorts; though this should not deter the less athletic reader. For at every quiet turn of this unlikely bildungsroman – set against the basketball courts of a small German town – Benjamin Markovits frustrates generic convention. Postgame showers are an occasion for rumination more often than rat-tailing, and victories pass without fist-in-the-air ceremony: ‘[we] could have been under water’ recalls the novel’s first person narrator, detailing the moment of his team’s first big win. Indeed genre breaking is one of many ways Markovits questions received ideas about coming-of-age and the fallacies of adulthood – principally that we will achieve self-knowledge, and master our chosen destinies. “Is this it?” is a question that looms large.

The twenty-something narrator of Playing Days – Markovits’ fifth, semi-autobiographical novel – leaves his hometown in Texas to pursue a basketball career in provincial Landshut. Retracing the steps of his father, a once prodigious sportsman, he hopes to assemble enough material to take his first steps as a writer. Neither basketball nor writing strikes him as a natural vocation however – at least not in the soaring, Heleconian sense. Shooting hoops ‘seem[s] a pleasant way of not doing anything else’, whilst writing serves as recreation for his loneliness. By his own admission, he is ‘one of [life’s] drifters’ – impassive, sometimes melancholy, often removed.

At the club in Landshut he meets men similarly afflicted by feelings of disconnection and indirection: Olaf, a black player conspicuous amongst his white adoptive family; Charlie, a closet homosexual holed-up with his secret; and Bo Hadnot, an older American player whose chance of promotion to the major-league is slipping from reach. However it is the narrator’s relationship with Hadnot’s ex-wife, Anke, which forms the backbone of the novel and its insights. An affair motivated by repulsion and desire, Anke crystallises the narrator’s ‘suspicion’ that adults ‘[aren’t] particularly good at [adult life]’. Fond of the kind of ‘conversational games’ we attain with age – the art of saying one thing while meaning another for instance, or fishing for compliments – her amateur, “adult” dramatics leave him cold. Indeed Playing Days is a novel inhabited by unsuccessfully initiated men and women: Russell, the team assistant, sports a moustache that ‘suggest[s]…a mother’s anxiety’, whilst Olaf’s attire has ‘the sheepish…air of a boy introducing you to his parents’. The shadow of childhood flickers over its cast, hinting at the difficulty of becoming one’s own person.

Playing Days is a deceptively slight-seeming narrative, composed largely of ‘empty time’: the ‘non-hour[s]’ before a game starts, and the ‘margin’ of early evenings before practice. Overarching this listlessness however, is a profound desire for shape and structure – visually encapsulated by the arcs and dotted lines of the playing court. The everything-in-its-right-place behaviour of the narrator, for example, betrays his underlying desire for mastery (‘I [always] travelled light, just a duffel with a spare of everything…[which] I washed…by hand’), whilst the countless A-B journeys made by foot, bus and car in the course of the novel create a kind of taut, internal fretwork. In this way Markovits creates a subtle cartography – one that establishes the tension between his characters’ vague aimlessness and their will to be in control.

These are the kind of quiet pyrotechnics that make Playing Days a remarkable and surprising novel – one that reflects on our often ham-handed attempts to make sense of life and limitation. The view through Olaf’s apartment window, ‘ornate with silence’, would serve just as well to describe Markovits’ poised, Orwellian prose – the perfect showcase for his narrator’s inner revelations. This is a beautifully constructed, compassionate work.

Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett
Hélène Cixous, translated by Laurent Milesi
Polity, pp85;
ISBN-13:978-0-7456-4416-5
Publication date: May 2010RRP: £12.99

Phil Sidney

Ah, Samuel Beckett- still at the crease after all these years! Along with P.G. Wodehouse (the other literary genius of the 20^th century to merit an entry in Wisden), Beckett is still basking in the sunlight of readers’ attention (Nick Clegg among them), inspiring scores of publications; yet unlike his partner’s dashing, cavalier strokeplay, Beckett is an author of the Boycott mould (Samuel Boycott?), grinding out his bleak innings and giving nothing away to the probing inquiries of critics. For an author considered so widely to be focussed on lack and nothingness, Beckett’s work has produced an astonishing amount of criticism, none of which has quite managed to catch him out: Helene Cixous is the latest to bowl.

Perhaps a quick pair of caveats before calling ‘play’, however; I count among my many sins of omission an almost complete innocence/ignorance of Cixous’ work, which may mean I am unused to, and therefore unappreciative of, her style. I have tried to make allowances for this: ‘Render unto Cixous what is Cixous’’ etc. The second quibble is that to read Zero’s Neighbour in translation is to peer through a glass darkly. Laurent Milesi’s job is a tough one (he has not only to juggle Cixous’ text, but also the liberal amounts of Beckett that she scatters in her wake), and the sense is that the translation loses something of Cixous. (His translation of en met plein la vue as ‘one in the eye for you’, for instance, clunks a bit). If I could read French (or if I were French) this review would be better-informed, and perhaps substantially different; as it is, the situation brings to mind Don Paterson’s opinion that to translate a poem is to draw a picture of a girl and call it the Mona Lisa.

But what of Cixous’ own portrait of Beckett? Less a portrait, though, and more a piece of performance art. Like many others before her, she sees the virtue of Beckett’s aesthetic of exhaustion, his pairing down of language and characters to next to nothing, the eponymous ‘zero’s neighbour’. Cixous enacts this with the use of her own brand of ‘exhausting prose’: prose that exhausts phonemic possibility in the mushrooming series of puns that sprout across the text. Her pun-gal inflection is at times exhilarating, as are Milesi’s game attempts to follow her – ‘…world, alone, bone, o [monde, onde, os, o]’ Her exhaustively punning prose can be exhausting for the reader as well. This is perhaps intentional (she mentions Beckett ‘Gruelling the reader’, envisioning the reader as Lucky), but it isn’t wildly effective; while she has the forward impetus of Beckett’s speakers, Cixous lacks the relentlessness and laser accuracy of his language, too often throwing a series of words at Beckett in the hope that one will stick. Cixous ([sic]xous?) also has a tendency to fall into the ‘if it rhymes or puns, it must be true’ trap. The aesthetic of the ‘precious little’, which Cixous lauds in Beckett, becomes in her hands a little precious. What exacerbates this is the feeling that the performance is not really for anyone; in all the net of voices that she weaves in the text (including Derrida, who makes frequent interjections), Cixous never seems to be speaking to anyone but herself.

This is a shame, because when she looks up from her intricate verbal arabesques, the book lifts; there are a number of excellent insights (on Beckett’s ‘skull, stick, sand, sky, grey, ray in the dark’ replacing Proust’s ‘cobblestone spoon plate napkin water-pipe, cup’, or on Not I as music) and one or two absolutely stunning ones (in particular Happy Days as ‘half expanse of scorched grass, half space of time held between clasped hands’). More references away from texts and texts and texts would have been welcome; Cixous’ one real gesture to the body is pretty desultory (‘Between you and me, the Earth is above all a feminine element. The earth is full and has holes. The feminine is the hole and what is full.’). The afterword, a relation of a dream of Cixous’ that sees her trapped in an act without words, unable to remove her clothes, gives a glimpse of what a full, mental emotional bodily engagement with Beckett might have been like.

Zen Cymru
by Peter Finch
Seren Press; Paperback;
72 pages; Price £7.99;

ISBN:978-1-85411-500-3

Rory Waterman

Cardiff does not have a Poet Laureate, but if it did Peter Finch would surely be a shoo-in. Few poets enjoy Finch’s popularity or ooze such a sense of place, and this has been reflected in countless commissioned poems for the city, several of which make their way into Zen Cymru. He is also a brash, innovative, prolific and furiously up-to-date performer of his work, and the back cover of this collection states that ‘his poems have the immediacy and the dramatic impact of pieces conceived for the stage’. But when found on a book cover this sort of comment begs the question: do they maintain their dramatic impact on the page?

At the bottom of one discursive poem, Finch refers to what he has written as ‘a gob / of verse’. This suggests impulsiveness more than introspection, recklessness rather than subtlety. And this is, for the most part, apposite. More often than not, Zen Cymru disappoints in the way the work of performance poets is wont to disappoint when presented in book form. So, for example, ‘The Bosoms You Have Brought from Outside’ begins:

We have taken out the contents of the

mini bar and are considering replacing it

with replicas from the supermarket

This is prose cut into verse; and it is all too immediate, devoid of nuance. And so the poem rolls on down the page until the speaker beds his woman, or she beds him, in their hotel room: ‘I am older now yet they [the eponymous bosoms] are still exciting. / Unfortunately, I am unable to move’. Similarly, ‘Foul Drainage’ might be a hoot in a hall, but it reads like a stand-up comedian’s notes for a would-be sketch abandoned at the draft stage:

[...] radio

with P16 strapped to outer-casing

using insulation tape eight hundred

plus tax decide to shit

in the woods

There are moderate successes in a similar vein, such as ‘N Wst Brdg’, a text message take-off of Wordsworth: ‘Deer GD! vry hses seem slp | | / + all tht BIG HRT lyng still!’. Funny, in its small way, as is another poem following the footsteps of Wordsworth in which we encounter an ‘unreadable notice shot to buggery’. This is modern Britain, right enough, but apart from the typically colourful use of the vernacular and a sort of cheeky Shane Meadows-style irreverence, it isn’t all that interesting. And when at the end of the poem the speaker stops to ‘take a leak in a mess / of bramble’ a reader might be inclined to sigh with him.

Some of the work in Zen Cymru tests the boundaries of what constitutes a poem – a courageous thing to attempt. So ‘Index to the Grand Holiday Club Timeshare Sellers Handbook’ is (yes) an index with wry entries. ‘Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen at Speed’ is ‘a translation from the Welsh original made by running past the original text much in the way that motorway drivers pass roadsigns’: ‘light and little proud ah / Lleucu heart broken / Merioneth’. ‘The Ballast Bank’ comprises a mainly alphabetical list of about one hundred and fifty words. A note claims that ‘The poem delineates the races, language groupings, trades and ideas which flowed in and out of the burgeoning industrial town [of Cardiff] as it exponentially developed’:

Norman

Northwalian

Orthodox

Norwegian

Potato

Raiders (Viking)

Russkii

Rhondda

The things Finch does well, he does very well. He has a keen ear for the strange and funny things people say, dropping punctuation to get the tone just right. In ‘Looking for the Southern Cross’ the guard outside a museum ‘said cross / boy you want Jesus. Maybe I did’. This poet also has a habit of writing in sentence fragments or little ungrammatical salvos, or of using self-consciously long sentences in his choppy verse. So, for example, in a typically zany poem called ‘The Trial of Phil Spector’:

The hair lacquer past where multiple percussionists drive

like motorbikes round a circular track is the place where it all

begins. Dance dance three-minute teenage angst.

The best poems in Zen Cymru are on weightier subjects, and there aren’t enough of them. ‘Chelsea Hotel’, about the famous hotel in New York, turns quickly to an analysis of that city’s – and America’s – post-9/11 culture of ‘fear’, and of jingoism: looking at the hotel from the street, he observes that ‘Little has changed other than America itself’. The speaker is stopped three times by ‘the cops’, who are hunting for ‘semtex’ and ‘dynamite’, and on the Fourth of July,

In the twilit mass, steaming along Roosevelt

the crowd swear endless allegiance,

sing the star-spangled, shout for victory,

sway in the dusk, sweating and certain.

This is readable, perhaps accurate, and has a subtle, sinister edge to it lacking in so many other poems here.

Throughout the book Finch often cuts an empathetic figure, and a few of these poems can move us for their humanity and clear-sightedness even if the poetry is not always what it might be. And every now and then, he just gets it right:

We walk in the garden where the plants no

longer have names and the birds are blurs.

You are holding onto me with that clutch of

yours that crushes bones. Who are we,

mother and son in a rain which keeps getting colder?

The mouth won’t answer, it doesn’t know,

but the body, that remembers.

But too often the poems in Zen Cymru attempt to be amusing, stylistically innovative or brash, and fall short – at least on the page.

Rory Waterman has written for the TLS, Dark Horse, Agenda, PN Review and various other publications. Carcanet will publish a selection of his poems in an anthology next year. He co-edits New Walk Magazine for poetry and the arts: www.tinyurl.com/newwalkmag

Seeing Stars
by Simon Armitage
Faber and Faber; Hardback;
88 pages; Price £12.99
ISBN 9780571249909

Alastair Beddow

Simon Armitage must be feeling productive. In the last five years alone he has published three volumes of poetry, edited a collection of poetry about birds, written Gig, a non-fiction prose work about his musical influences, and produced acclaimed translations of Homer’s Odyssey and the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Add to this his regular appearances on television and radio, an ongoing tour and a forthcoming ambitious project to walk and document the Pennine Way, and it’s not difficult to see why Armitage is regarded as one of Britain’s most popular contemporary poets. His broad Yorkshire accent – endearingly signifying his non-metropolitan, non-esoteric credentials – helps to sustain this perception. Yet despite his burgeoning schedule, Armitage has found time to write Seeing Stars, a work which is perhaps his most intriguing to date.

Seeing Stars revisits much familiar Armitage territory: ‘The War of the Roses’, for example, is a cheeky examination of the perils of crossing the Lancashire/Yorkshire border. Other pieces touch on many of the perennial subjects in Armitage’s work such as the continued legacy of Thatcherism in modern Britain or the complex relationship between parent and child. Armitage’s trademark humour – sometimes crude, and often tinged with latent violence – is present throughout Seeing Stars; the very first piece in the collection, ‘The Christening’, is narrated by a sperm whale who seems surprisingly aware of the ‘huge commercial value’ of his own bodily fluids, and ends with the line ‘Stuff comes blurting out’.

Despite its thematic and tonal familiarity, Seeing Stars marks a radical departure from Armitage’s earlier collections of poetry due to its formal experimentation. The assertion that ‘Stuff comes blurting out’ is not simply an indecorous pun, but can be read as an indication of the formal composition of both Seeing Stars as a whole and the individual pieces within the collection. Random fragments of images and ideas hang loosely together in a series of short vignettes, which the narrator of ‘Upon Opening the Chest Freezer’ handily refers to using the label ‘story-poem’. Perhaps deliberately eschewing the more rarefied term ‘prose-poem’, Armitage’s ‘story-poems’ combine the narrative instinct of the short story (often employing the twist or inversion ending) and the sensibility and language of poetry. Interestingly, the lineation of ‘15:30 by the Elephant House’, first published in poetic form in The Literateur last July, has been altered to accommodate the requirements of this hybrid form; whilst the reasons for this change are unclear, the effect is to shift the emphasis away from the linguistic to the narrative elements of the text.

The fluid or sometimes seemingly under-developed quality of many of Armitage’s story-poems arises from the demands of the form but also from the performative nature of the voice in the text, which makes the story-poems read like dramatic monologues or comic anecdotes. The blurb of Seeing Stars posits this storytelling technique as a modern reworking of the tradition of the trickster, a figure who can change shape and who rejects conventional morality and behaviour. However, these poetic narratives owe more to Surrealism than mythological archetypes; the stuff of Seeing Stars – a grave robbing Richard Dawkins in ‘The Experience’, or the hand of a dead child emerging out of a wall in ‘I’ll Be There to Love and Comfort You’ – derives more obviously from Armitage’s imagination than anywhere in his earlier writing.

Armitage’s work is often dismissed in academic circles as fodder for GCSE anthologies. Even a recent review by The Independent referred to Armitage as ‘one of our least “poetic” poets’, a comment as bizarre as it is misplaced. His broad Yorkshire accent belies subtle, learned points of reference that encompass science, classical literature and pop culture; the title of his latest volume, Seeing Stars, encapsulates these multiple discourses by connoting as it does a visual illusion, astronomy, and the cult of celebrity. Ultimately, Armitage is interested at the point where culture turns in on itself as demonstrated by one of his later story-poems, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’, where the poet recalls ‘Googling my own name’ and imagines participating in the Simon Armitage Trail, a guided-tour of the poet’s life where the turnout is ‘woundingly low’. It would be wrong to suggest that Armitage is sacrificing quality for sheer productivity, but it remains to be seen whether Seeing Stars represents a significant new direction in his poetic trajectory, or just an experimental flirtation with a new poetic form.

Living Souls
by Dmitry Bykov
Alma Books; Hardback;
439 pages; Price £17.99
ISBN 9781846880988

Gordon Weetman

The writer Dmitry Bykov is something of a media sensation in his native Russia, where he has published, according to his cover profile, ‘five novels … two collections of short stories, two volumes of essays and eight collections of poetry’ as well as an acclaimed biography of Pasternak. In addition to his literary output, Bykov straddles the third estate with Murdoch-like versatility, writing for various print publications as well as hosting a weekly radio show and appearing regularly on Russian television.

In view of this, it seems surprising that Bykov’s amiable, moustached face should remain virtually unknown abroad (though one wonders how many Muscovites have heard of Stephen Fry). His latest novel Living Souls goes some way towards illustrating the reasons for this disparity.

Living Souls is a 400-plus page ’state of the nation’ epic set in a dystopian near-future. The English title, which nods to Gogol, was a publisher’s addition: Bykov originally called his novel Zh.D, which translates roughly as ‘The Yds’. Bykov himself has Jewish roots, so the slur may be more complex than it seems, but it is not hard to see why his UK publishers felt the need to change it to something more PC. Nevertheless, the original title retains a certain thematic resonance, since Bykov’s is a Russia riven by ethnic strife.

The country has split into warring halves. The north, including Moscow, is controlled by the Varangians – an extreme right-wing cult whose members worship Odin and claim to be descended from early Nordic settlers of Russia. The south, on the other hand, is populated by Jewish exiles who have resurrected the ancient Khazar Khaganate – an empire centred on the Caucasus.

Bykov uses these two factions to represent conflicting impulses in the cultural life of modern Russia. The Khazars are classic metropolitan liberals, whilst it is hard not to see in the Varangians’ obsessive power-worship a not-so-distant echo of Putinism. If approached with a certain lightness of touch, this material could have easily been the basis for a successful political farce. However, Bykov often seems gifted with a sort of reverse Midas faculty, turning potential gold into lead.

To be fair, some of the humour bases itself on cultural in-jokes which do not easily make sense to the casual Western reader. But Bykov also has failings as a novelist. Too much of Living Souls is dominated by long passages of exposition, and certain sections of the book generate loudly clunking mechanical noises. For example, the line ‘By the way, Everstein, I keep meaning to ask you to tell me about the Yds’ triggers a turgid and disposable ten-page lecture on the history of Russian Jewry. This novel could have benefited from intensive cutting.

This is the central problem with Living Souls: the author has allowed himself to become overly attached to the minutiae of the world he has created. Bykov’s dystopia feels intricately, even lovingly imagined. The downside to all this attention to detail, however, is that the author can’t bear to leave anything out. It is the sci-fi equivalent of that old chestnut which plagues historical novelists – the impulse to over-use one’s research. At one point a character declares that ‘there were four main versions of the origins of the Russian state – the Khazar, the Russian, the Norse (or Varangian) versions, and the true native one.’ Bykov then goes on to explore each of these foundation myths in depth. Again, this is the kind of place where editors come in handy.

There are some nice lines in Living Souls, and some sharp political observations. For example, Bykov remarks about halfway through that ‘the main purpose of every Russian government, whatever its character or duration, had been to crush its citizens’. Unfortunately, such sardonic gems are few and far between. All too often, Bykov’s carefully weighted ironies descend into a rant, and his use of free indirect narration coupled with a cynical, jaded tone makes it difficult to tell the numerous characters apart. Occasionally the author exhibits a promising ability to shock – for example when the thoughts of his poet Volokhov begin to dwell increasingly on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – but ultimately the satire fails to deliver.

Living Souls is a sprawling, shapeless book – much like the nation it aims to chronicle. Again, like the new Russia, there does not seem to be much holding it together. Bykov’s novel may engage readers with an established interest in Russia as a country. However, as a literary artefact, Living Souls could easily have benefited from a more Stalinist, top-down approach to form.

STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS
Tracy Kidder
Profile Books, Paperback, pp.304, ISBN 978 1 86197 857 8, March 2010.
Price: £15.00

Mardi Stewart

Strength in What Remains is the true story of Deogratis, a young African medical student from Burundi, who survived the genocides of 1993/4 in Burundi and Rwanda and escaped to New York. The hardship of Deo’s story does not simply end with his escape from Africa. When he arrived in New York, he spoke only French and learned to speak English by haunting bookshops and libraries. His refugee status led to difficulties which differed from that of his war-torn homeland but were nonetheless full of fear, poverty and danger. His life seemed without hope, comfort or reason which led to a contemplation of the peace of death.

The narrative flows backwards and forwards from childhood to exile, from life as a medical student in Burundi to delivery boy in the USA. The end of the book recounts his journey, in the company of the author, as he revisits Burundi and remembers the happiness of childhood and, later, the barbarism of killing and constant fear. This book is a study of one young man’s philosophy in the changing perspectives of his life from childhood to his return to Burundi early in the twenty-first century.

Deo’s story is powerful and absorbing, shifting from happiness to heartbreak but always returning to hope. Deo leaves us as he fulfils his lifelong ambition to run a clinic in Burundi. This significant achievement echoes the determination, tenacity and strength which Deo shows throughout. As the facts of his life unfold, Deo’s story pinpoints and examines important issues surrounding the human condition. The author himself, as he retraces Deo’s steps with him twelve years after his escape, brings his own thoughts to bear on the memories which are revisited on Deo’s retrospective journey.

One of the issues which engage Deo and later, the author, is the presence of God and sustaining faith throughout barbaric and mindless killing. How could God condone the cruelty and violence which haunts this book? From Deo’s point of view, his survival renders his belief credible but is it credible for those who did not survive?

The genocides in Burundi were centred on the conflict between the Tutsis and the Hutus. The Tutsis were considered socially superior, which suggests that the killing was rooted in class difference and prejudice. In childhood Deo, a Tutsi, remembers his father’s anger as he tried to find out more. His father responded by telling Deo to. ‘Shut up,’ saying ‘This is prejudice! Shut up! Who is teaching you this?’ It is implied that a lack of knowledge about the situation and refusal to discuss the roots of the problem contributed to the escalation of the Tutsi/Hutu divide. Lack of communication, which haunted Deo in New York, because he could not communicate, seems to have been crucial in the Tutsi/Hutu divide.

Ignorance of wider global issues is shown when Deo, on his flight from Burundi, thinks that Dublin, where the plane makes a stop, is New York. This incident accentuates how helpless Deo really was when removed from his own environment. An intelligent young man was reduced so much in status in America that he said, ‘And here I am, being treated as someone who has a primate brain. God, take my life.’

But Deo did survive and although he slept in Central Park with vagrants and drug addicts, he gradually met people who helped him on his way. The turning point came when he was taken in by a childless couple who remained his friends and benefactors as he set out to attain his goal: becoming a doctor and belonging. The struggle was long and hard but Deo’s story is not one of hopelessness but of courage nd an overwhelming ambition to succeed.

Strength in What Remains is not a simple documentary. It is written in an engaging and perceptive style and, while not given to excessive descriptive passages, the atmosphere of both Burundi and the USA is movingly captured. The author describes his first impressions of Burundi thus., ‘ The road climbed through deeply folded countryside’ and ’ I could look down on narrow valleys of cultivated fields and up at steep hillsides, some covered with grass, others quilted with groves of eucalyptus and banana trees.’ This peaceful image, reminiscent of a primitivist painting is uncomfortably at odds with the hatred that once dominated the society.

The strength of this work is in the analysis of human emotions which pervade it, lifting Deo’s story from a factual documentary to an in-depth analysis of the human condition as experienced by Deo, commented on, and observed by Kidder.

THE PREGNANT WIDOW
by Martin Amis
Random House; Hardback; 470 pages; Price £18.99; ISBN 9780224076128

Annie McDermott

On the terrace of the Italian castle where they’re spending the summer, the characters of Martin Amis’ new novel are discussing a problem. If, on the ideal woman, ‘the tits and the arse should be on the same side’, which side should it be? The front, ‘to get the face’? Or the back, so she could still walk forwards?

Martin Amis is back where he belongs. The Pregnant Widow stages the sexual revolution as a time when new words are as exciting as new acts; when sex is everywhere though not necessarily everyone’s; when conversations are games of brashness; when the surface is what counts – and this world is the natural home of his prose.

Keith Nearing, another from the Charles Highway stable of bookish twenty-year-olds who don’t think they’re tall enough, is spending the summer in Italy with his sisterly girlfriend Lily, her beautiful friend Scheherazade and a disparate cast of acquaintances that includes a silver-tongued four foot ten Italian, a tweed-wearing aristocrat and his Muslim boyfriend, Amen (pronounced Ahmun). It is 1970, the sexual revolution is upon them, and everywhere girls are ‘acting like boys’.

Afraid of becoming an anachronism, Keith embarks on a project of ‘character management’ which will make him better at acting like a boy himself. In the spirit of this ‘willed reptilianisation’, he spends much of the summer (and much of the novel) psyching himself up to a betrayal of Lily which is to launch the trajectory of ‘chronic sexual failure’ that lasts into his middle-age.

So far, so Amis. And yet, this is no typical tale of irreversible descent. Compassion is successfully banished, as we would expect, but what happens next is much more of a shock: it returns. When Keith tells his third wife ‘I’m kind now,’ thirty years after he first decides not to be, one suspects that Martin Amis might be saying the same.

Keith can become kind again because Amis has chosen a different villain for this novel, and that is old age. This is a villain feared by narrator, reader and characters alike, and this shared horror allows an empathy into this novel that is absent in some of Amis’ crueller and more bullying work. We may laugh when Keith decides that ‘Old age wasn’t for old people. To cope with old age, you really needed to be young – young, strong, and in peak condition’; we may recoil from his ‘trembling, haddocky fingers’. But we cannot feel superior and we cannot feel safe: we’re all in this together.

Amis’ sentences have always swarmed greedily around the body, and The Pregnant Widow’s holy trinity of youth, age and sex allows them to show off their powers to the fullest. We are told early on in the novel that sex is indescribable, and Amis does not try to prove this wrong. Instead, his prose largely remains on the other side of sex, trapped in the fantasies of the twenty-year-old Keith, describing the sex he isn’t having but feels like he ought to be.

This is done brilliantly: prose that would no doubt gain a Bad Sex Award nomination if it was describing real sex becomes the perfect vehicle for describing its absence. ‘And he had read that men were beginning to see women as objects. Objects? No. Girls were teemingly alive. Scheherazade: the inseparable sisters who were her breasts, the creatures that dwelt behind her eyes, the great warm beings of her thighs.’

We learn the colours of briefly-glimpsed underwear and the shapes that remain in recently-discarded towels. We count the ‘fucks per novel’ as Keith works his way through his holiday reading list, returning to Northanger Abbey ‘to check whether Frederick Tilney did, in point of fact, fuck Isabella Thorpe. The novel became partly epistolary, and it was hard to be exactly sure.’ Nothing is safe: ‘Even the fountain in the centre of the courtyard had its own vital statistics, approximately 7’6’’, 44-18-48.’

Amis’ prose is always most comfortable in uncomfortable situations, and the narcissistic world of the seventies as he paints it is the ideal home for his flamboyantly self-aware style. His art does not lie in hiding the art: on the contrary, this is art that stands in the spotlight and takes a bow hand in hand with its artist. When Scheherazade is ‘decanting herself downwards’ towards the pool, when Keith ‘insomniated’ by Lily’s side in Italy or ‘impended over the basin in the bathroom,’ horrified by his middle-aged reflection, we consciously applaud the choice of word, feeling ourselves in the presence of a performer.

And The Pregnant Widow is a virtuoso performance. Martin Amis may be kind now – or at least a little bit kinder – but his writing has lost none of its force.

The Flanders Road
by Claude Simon
Oneworld Classics; Paperback;
224 pages; Price £7.99;
ISBN 9781847491510

Chris Woolfrey

Not one for those scoping a quick and easy read, The Flanders Road is a book concerning the death of one aristocratic and thoroughly idiosyncratic World War II cavalry captain named de Reixach (pronounced, central character Georges informs his counterparts on more than one occasion, as ‘Reishach x like sch, ch like k’), and looks to piece together an account of the mysterious captain through the shared and personal memories of his war-time subordinates.

It’s a difficult process. Readers encounter the muddled accounts and interpretations of various acquaintances of the dead captain, as filtered through the impressions of those who served under him, from the emotional and poetic Georges (a member of de Reixach’s company and a distant cousin), to a former jockey in his employment – a man, incidentally, who has made the captain a cuckold – named Iglésia, plus the cynical and straight talking Blum, with whom Georges enters into long and complicated meditations when the two of them are held in captivity following de Reixach’s death.

Simple, you might think? Fortunately not. For in distancing his narrative from the very event which the narrative is looking to explore and define, Claude Simon is able to subvert and distort the centre of his own story quite dramatically, mixing memories and stories, entering into and leaving the thought patterns of his core characters, and playing with punctuation in a way that makes the novel incredibly difficult to follow but brilliantly multifarious.

An example: see the opening of the novel.

He was holding a letter in his hand, he raised his eyes looked at me then the letter again then once more at me, behind him I could see the red mahogany ochre blurs of the horses being led to the watering trough, the mud was so deep you sank into it up to your ankles but I remember that during the night it had frozen suddenly and Wack came into the bedroom with the coffee saying The dogs ate up the mud, I had never heard the expression, I could almost see the dogs, some kind of infernal, legendary creatures their mouths pink-rimmed their wolf fangs cold and white chewing up the black mud In the night’s gloom, perhaps a recollection, the devouring dogs cleaning, clearing away: now the mud was grey and we twisted our ankles running, late as usual for morning call, almost tripping in the deep tracks left by the hoofs and frozen hard as stone, and a moment later he said Your mother’s written me.

Seeming to contain several locations and memories – plus a garbling of time frames – at once, this opening encapsulates what Simon looks to do with the idea of the thought process, of memory and recollection, and of storytelling. It is incredibly disorientating: you’re never quite sure who is speaking, or thinking, and whose memories or utterances belong to whom.

Though tough to handle, this disorientation is an important part of the charm of The Flanders Road: a dramatisation of the difficulty inherent in creating meaning (should that be accuracy?) from recollections, memories and narrations, the incredible complexity and confusion of voice disorientates the reader as much as it does the novel’s characters. Slipping from first person to the narratorial voice as it wishes, the whole book reads like something in the middle of Ulysses‘ Molly Bloom monologue and a volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

The novel practices stylistically what it preaches thematically: through this device the book subtly sets up its own foundations and then aims to crumble them. Gradually introducing Georges’ odd fascination with the symbolic history of his distant family the de Reichax’s, Iglésia’s fraught relationship with his employer, and the strange reverence of his orderly for his boss’ aristocracy, the novel, in several complex conversations between Blum and Georges, undermines each and every detail of the story it perpetuates, angrily questions the value of memory, and de-constructs the value of narrative and storytelling as a means to understanding. For, from the story of de Reixach’s insistence on riding a race horse in defiance of Iglésia’s possession of his wife, to Georges’ vivid memory of the captain gallantly and ridiculously drawing his sabre before being gunned down on the aforementioned Flanders Road, the book seems to hold at its crux Blum’s angry denunciation of Georges’ story-spinning and memory games:

You’re always sifting, supposing, embroidering, inventing fairy tales where I bet no one except you has never seen anything but an everyday piece of sex between a whore and two fools…

Certainly, for this reason alone The Flanders Road should not be considered a novel for the faint of heart. Sometimes needlessly complex, often nihilistic in its approach to human endeavour and the search for meaning in the events that shape our lives, it takes concentration, guile and a bundle of willpower.

Luckily, though, it’s not all doom and gloom: the novel is permeated with a strange rhythm and an odd cadence that, combined with Simon’s beautiful poetic imagination, gives the book a genuine poignancy and linguistic beauty that makes the arduous task of fact hunting, and the frequently depressing deconstruction of our human capacities, thoroughly worthwhile.

THE BREAKFAST ROOM
Stewart Conn
Bloodaxe Books, Paperback, 24th February 2010, pp64;
ISBN 978-1-85224-856-7
Price £8.95

Phil Sidney

The geniality and generosity of Stewart Conn as a narrator is established right from the beginning. ‘Invitation’ welcomes the reader into The Breakfast Room where, proffering an umbrella, he solicitously advises her to keep ‘a lookout // for tripwires or briers that might snag your hair’ and to ‘Reassure yourself regarding small carnivores.’ Although appreciated, these warnings are unnecessary, for The Breakfast Room is more well-tended garden than wild wood. Flowers proliferate, from the eponymous blooms in ‘The Camellia House’ to the ‘lavender and thyme ladling the air’ in ‘The Life Ahead’; while the collection is well-cultivated in other ways, abounding in responses to art and music (not least in the title-poem, inspired by the Bonnard painting of the same name that features on the cover).

Conn has a gardener’s eye and a gardener’s sense, simultaneously practical (‘I see you’ve chosen sensible footwear’, he remarks approvingly in ‘Invitation’) and alive to the microcosmic wonder of life and growth underfoot, what he calls ‘the unregarded epiphanies of the everyday’ (‘The Life Ahead’). Unregarded, that is, but for Conn, who does an awful lot of regarding, both in the sense of gaze and of esteem. His eyes are particularly acute to the shifting relationship between the real and imagined, his perspective morphing in ‘Mull of Oa’ between what he sees and what is there as ‘seal turns to rock’. ‘On the Lagoon’ lauds a painting that ‘strives to please both eye and spirit’ if the book’s second section repeatedly describes poetry as ‘illusion’, it’s an illusion to the eye but not to the spirit.

The poet’s freedom with perspective gives him generosity, as he shifts between the points of view of spectator, subject and painter in ‘The Breakfast Room’. It’s this ability to identify, to see others with a wry tenderness, that makes The Breakfast Room such a charming read, especially in the love poems that comprise the book’s third and final section. Conn provides intimate portraits of the particular filled with the universal, like ‘the twin-lugged loving cup with our initials/ intertwined, unbreakable because imagined, / Brimful of memories that can never spill’ (‘The Loving Cup’). These love-lyrics are some of the best and most touching poems in the collection, whether portraying the conjuring of intimacy out of absence in ‘Anchorage’ or in ‘Carpe Diem’s evoking the preciousness of time and each other.

Conn’s powers of sympathy often stretch beyond his intimate ties, however: the collection is replete with benevolent, good-humoured acts of the imagination, whether towards his window-cleaner’s golfing (‘I like to think he shows prowess’- ‘Let There Be Light’) or a hulking Texan’s new-found Scottish roots:

I eagerly await the sight
of those massive hands serving the full Scottish breakfast,
or cradling a clutch of speckled eggs in the soft dawn light.

(‘Homecoming Scotland’)

This is not to say that The Breakfast Room is exclusively cosy and untroubled. The book is scattered with threat, the sight of a beautiful woodpecker triggering thoughts of ‘the sparrowhawk’s return’ (‘Just How It Was’), while a pastoral scene on a plate prompts the fear that ‘our Arcadia could topple/ and shatter to shards on the kitchen floor’ (‘Arcadia’). Yet the chill of death, tragedy, sadness, never quite overpowers the poems: acknowledged and incorporated, it adds depth and tone to the assured tranquillity to the collection as a whole.

Indeed, the few stumbles that Conn makes in The Breakfast Room seem to be due to the poet knowing what he’s doing almost too well. Occasionally he reaches too assuredly for the hackneyed epiphany (‘Gondola’ ends with the identification of the titular barque with ‘ourselves, too, as we steer/ into the wind, bearing life’s freight’ joining the slow-moving flotilla of poets who’ve made exactly the same metaphor), and there are times when his grip on language loosens a little. However, these occasional missteps do not detract from how good, and full of goodness, The Breakfast Room is: Conn is droll, wise, and illuminating company.