Book Review: Sequel

Nearly 140 years on, John Banville has revisited Henry James' A Portrait of a Lady, to take up the story from where James left off. I recall the reviews being mixed, at best, and didn't think to take it up, although Henry James remains one of my all-time favorite authors (The Golden Bowl, in particular). Banville's sequel is pretty damn good, as it turns out, although it churns a bit, here and there, rehashing points already sufficiently covered, and it is a bit languid in getting to its point, but that's o.k., too, in the end, as nobody could not accuse James himself similarly. I'd recommend it to other James enthusiasts, if only because seeing Isabel Archer/Osmond released into the future her uncle and cousin meant to watch her enjoy and excel in satisfies the sense we had of her as well, not to mention the exquisite revenge (too strong perhaps) on Gilbert Osmand and Madame Merle.

Comics I'm only disappointed that Dr. Hormone's super power isn't making teenagers break out.

American Novel I've heard it's been said that all of jazz is either a 12-bar blues or "I Got Rhythm", so maybe all of great American novels are either The Great Gatsby or ? Well, Donna Tartt's novel, The Goldfinch, I think, is Gatsby. It's a very entertaining novel, certainly, although the object referenced in the title is little more than a MacGuffin, one of the secondary characters is a highly improbable Russian, while the rest are nearly little more than backdrops, but all that's never mind. The story roughly parallels the vague backstory of Jay Gatsby, with the great love lost, the rise to a position in which to reclaim it, but then takes a different turn, with a redemption Gatsby never finds, but not the final resolution. The protagonist is agonizing at times and the prose let's him linger on his agonizing nearly beyond endurance, but you finish with a sense of how realistic that is and how the past drives his present. I haven't read any of Tartt's other novels, and I don't know that I'll go so far as to seek them out, but I'll be very interested in her next, I think, and can recommend this one.

Inscriptions Did I actually buy an inscribed (2nd edition) copy of "Sincerely, Willis Wayde"? Or is that someone else's signature? US$8.14 seems a little low for such a thing. Thanks, Strand Books!

New Traditions I first encountered Chinua Achebe when I was pursuing my Master's at the University of Michigan, under Lemuel Johnson, for whom my thesis was probably adequate but perhaps never as good as he'd hoped to see, in his first year directing the program of study he developed, devoted to African literature of the diaspora. We studied so many wonderful authors that, at the time, we had no idea of, those of us in the program, and I found that experience broadening in ways that Achebe's most famous character, Onkokwo, would have been bewildered by. But I guess that was part of what Achebe was after. Achebe's novels, those that I've read, are marvelous explorations of traditional society on the cusp of destruction. They see into the effects colonial policies would have years and decades after, with profound insights into the social and psychological damage the inherent and inherited loss of identity would cause, and included enough criticism of the post-colonial government, especially of Nigeria, that Achebe ended his days in exile, but no less revered and admired for all that. The politics of African nations are fraught with dangers for its artists, but they remain fearless, and many have produced works of great quality, deserving of even greater recognition than they have achieved. Achebe, though often criticized by some of those who followed him, was among the very best, whether others may be considered to have surpassed him or not. There are now highly skilled Nigerian writers, many producing world-class material. They owe a debt to Chinua Achebe. On a side note, I am very sorry to have learned of the passing of my professor at Michigan, Lem Johnson. Professor Johnson, as the link above will show anyone who reads it, was a brilliant and accomplished man and scholar. He taught me a lot. He was near-infinitely patient with me, and I'm sorry he's gone. I hope that some part of his program will survive, so that the literature he championed in my time with him and thereafter may continue to receive the attention it deserves.

Nobel Tipping
Ngugi wa Thiong'o is looking good for the Literature Prize this year, the first African since Wole Soyinka, but with Haruki Murakami and Cormac McCarthy as competitors, it's still hard to call. I guess the Nobel Committee's recent statements regarding American literature may leave McCarthy out. Ngugi would be the political choice, which seems in line with recent picks, and Murakami doesn't have as extensive a body of work. I'll go with the Kenyan. "Wizard of the Crow" was a good read.

Harold Potter
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, is like Harry Potter meets Narnia but for grownups. It's pretty obvious, all up, but doesn't pander nearly as much as J.K. Rowlings' books do, naturally enough, since she wrote deliberately for children and only accidentally caught an adult wave of interest, and dispenses with any religiosity such as imbues C.S. Lewis' books, in favor of the principle that if magic is real it must follow its own rules, like physics, an analogy made early on to express the unfathomability of either system ultimately: "turtles all the way down". But it's well done, for all that the ending, particularly the final two chapters, essentially cop out on what might have been a good metaphorical entertainment about real life relationships. You don't miss the point, but you do get excused from feeling it, which is too bad. A little too much set-up, a hell of a climax, and then a big let down. Maybe it's not so far off real life at that.

Bush Walking with the Ex
Ex-Father-in-law, that is, and only virtually. Russell Atkinson has finally published a sequel (of sorts) to Diary of a Drop-Out: Gone Bush. This is the story of the period during which Russell was well and truly a drop-out, not just an "alternative", but living off the grid up in Bellingen, NSW, and making one good decision after every bad one (if not quite to such an equivalence). The chapters are short and not entirely sequential in time, but each rely on the characteristic Australian dry, ironic sense of humor, although it is a vein of humor that has a fairly universal appeal. I could wish for more - no, really, I do wish for more, as I know there is more to come. When you're ready, Russell, but don't wait so long this time.

Library Card
I really need to get it together to get myself a library card. I’ve never even visited my local public library, and while the little time I’ve spent in other branches hasn’t impressed me, Glebe’s looks like it might be big enough to be worth visiting. I say this with a few unread volumes of one thing or another sitting on a shelf waiting for me to get to, but books are among the most expensive consumer item in this country, and I consume a fair few. Despite a recent move towards opening Australia to cheap imports, there’s a hue and cry, as there often is in these protectionist matters, of opposition. Australian publishers, particularly in regard to Australian authors, can’t compete against the prodigious output of America, or even the U.K., for that matter. And Australian authors can’t compete if they can’t even get published in their own country, and they won’t be if the local publishers can’t afford to stay open. Theoretically, I suppose, there would still be some demand for local product, forcing the number of publishers to shrink and specialize, but more likely it would simply send Australian writers overseas and to abandon writing, if only writing about Australia. Sure, we’ve got a Nobel Prize winner, and sure, screenplays have been adapted from our stories, but nobody much reads Patrick White anymore, no matter how good he was, and those movies didn’t do particularly well at home or abroad, so where’s the worth? I’m not a fan overall of protectionist trade practices, but I’d hate to think Tim Winton would have to give up or move to California, or that we’d lose out on the next Miles Franklin ever having a brilliant career. The small Australian houses have, over the years, been eaten up by multinational publishing and media conglomerates, and that trend would only be exacerbated by the end of import restrictions. It’s bad enough that television, movies, and Microsoft dictionary settings are undermining Australia’s authentic voice. Not our writers, too.

Genre Nostalgia
It's funny that I never got into The X-Files, but I didn't, and watching the movies confirmed it. I rented both yesterday and watched them back-to-back. I guess I already knew that that wasn't going to offer much continuity, but it seemed the best way to address the second, to provide context. Now, this was a show that essentially pioneered the techniques used in Heroes, Lost, etc., that sense of dislocation as the different plot lines within and between episodes swirled around, touching, almost but not quite converging, and it was all going to be the aliens all along, of the secret world government, or maybe just some mad scientists operating all on their own, so even if you weren't going to get a straight answer, it'd be a fun ride. It just wasn't. Largely, David Duchovney goes around blank-faced, beaten up, and carrying on through, like the good hard-boiled detective he's modeled on, but without the force of personality to make you care, and Gillian Anderson wanders through every scene she's in looking like a startled squirrel, which is the full range of her acting ability from what I've seen elsewhere. So even when you get any kind of plot, there's not a lot of it - which may be a movie-length translation problem - leaving the majority of what's on screen mere atmosphere.

As we're now in the summer television doldrums (not that we aren't usually, there being nothing much to watch on free-to-air to begin with - and even if I had digital, the broadcast options don't vary), I've been reading a little more after dinner than usual (and just to keep adding parentheticals, since most of what I watch are the hot shows out of the U.S. and these are usually played at or through past what time I go to bed, I usually knock over at least the NY'er in short order), which has led me to the Smiley series of John LeCarre's spy novels. I remember when these were the hottest spy novels going, and the third of them was made into a BBC show with Alec Guinness, but the novels aren't holding up particularly well. Is it post-Cold War malaise? Is it just that they're too British, too English, really? Is it just the narrative voice, one that seems to go off into an aren't we clever tone, speaking suddenly quite directly to the reader as if regaling its audience with an amusing story? Big, overwritten, these books are nothing like LeCarre's recent stuff, books where he's found an anger not expressed in these. Maybe that's the key, finding the anger, because there must be some, repressed, stiff-upper-lipped into a gruelling slog through minutia.

Perhaps instead of renting a movie tonight, I'll focus on finding Smiley's edge.

Into the Infinite
David Foster Wallace, an author whose novels I've enjoyed immensely - including the immense "Infinite Jest" - hanged himself. I can't say how sorry I am to hear that. Other authors of his generation have pointed to him as the "smartest guy in the room", but I guess there are sometimes just demons beyond endurance even for such as Mr. Wallace.

Fantasy and Reality
I heard a lot about the Philip Pullman trilogy, mainly via the internet-as-word-of-mouth, and at the height of the Harry Potter phenomena. They were often touted as a kind of next-Narnia, both for their controversial theological content and for their alternative universe settings. My sister, something of a connoisseur of the fantasy genre, didn’t seem overly impressed with them, and I had no particular interest myself, although, eventually, I did get around to reading them. Well, the first one, anyway. It wasn’t until the middle of this year that I finally read the other two volumes. The first, which is soon to be released in the cinemas, The Golden Compass, put me off with its “daemons” and “steampunk” technology and mannered dialog. But I’m something of a completist, and couldn’t leave it alone. The second volume, The Subtle Knife was better, but not by much, but it’s the third, climactic book, The Amber Spyglass, where all the present controversy should really be focussed. All the hoopla is really pretty much just anticipatory. Pullman is stabbing viciously at the heart of organized religion, European, Christian religion, and how it’s poisoned our lives, particularly as children and how children are raised, and he’s got a point. The concept of “original sin” is pretty pernicious, and I can’t say that child baptism strikes me as anything more than a medieval hold-over from the days of much higher infant mortality and an organisational, cultic perspective on building up the believer base. The books, and, I’m sure, the movies – and it seems pretty certain the other two will have their time and ticket sales – will mute some of this, focussing instead, as much as possible, on the fantasy and adventure elements. I expect the armored polar bear fights to be pretty cool, and the flights of witches, etc., etc., but the books, the movies, are no Last Temptation or Passion, let alone “Piss Christ” or any of the other usual pop culture stuff that gets up the noses of believers. At least no one will go to jail or be beaten or threatened with death, no matter how ugly the rhetoric gets.

Dead Pool: Literary Edition
1. Norman Mailer
2. Ira Levin
3. ? (Maybe Philip Roth should be careful crossing the street? Or Judith Krantz?

Graduation
Christopher Hitchens is right about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but, as he also is, with tedious frequency, he’s wrong, although it’s largely a matter of his inability to simply enjoy something without reference to himself. I’ll give him make-up points, though, for not introducing any major spoilers.

The final volume was a lot of fun, although the camping did get dull. J. K. Rowling has considerable skill in weaving a compelling plot across 759 pages. I was up until 2 a.m. finishing the book, simply because, having reached a point where I felt I might put the book down, there was enough impetus to read on that I gave in at every turn.

Yes, much of the resolutions to difficult problems did end up being a little too Star Wars, Return of the Jedi for me, and I never did think much of Harry as a wizard per se, and Ron and Hermione are never much more than secondary characters at best, but none of it matters. The books did, in the end, what they always promised to do. It would have been easy enough for Rowling to have wrapped the whole thing up in one book, to move on to other literary efforts, but the conception of the 7-book series, to see HP through High School, essentially, puts a close to the adventures no other method could have achieved. Harry would not stand up in adult fiction, and we’ve seen every inch of his maturation. These may not be books I’ll ever go back to, but they’re vivid enough in detail to stick around anyway.

Ousmane Sembene
Sembene, who died today at age 84, was one of the great figures of modern African literature, although he abandoned novels in favor of movies, from the belief that film was a medium better suited to African literary sensibilities. I still re-read God’s Bits of Wood, his novel centered on the railroad strike in pre-independence Senegal, every now and then, but have only ever seen Black Girl, his first movie. His influence, however, in African arts, is undoubted.

Library Notes
Last night I stayed up a little longer than I’d originally planned, because I had only twenty pages or so left in the book I was reading and I wanted to finish it. This is only the second book by David Malouf I’ve read, the first being Johnno, which is probably the traditional starting place. I wasn’t a fan, but when I was desperately pawing through the office stack of shared books, setting aside the James North Patterson and such, picked up Remembering Babylon based on simply the awareness that Malouf is highly regarded and the blurbs on the cover indicating he’d been shortlisted once for the Booker and this particular book had been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the local prestige award.

The story centers on a small community’s collective and individual encounter with a kind of “wild child,” or, as it was expressed in the American Old West, a renegade; that is, a white man raised by the aborigines. His presence brings to mind the white community’s alienation from its surroundings, at least for some, and allows Malouf to explore the themes still plaguing Australian consciousness, land rights, the “Sorry” campaign, the denialist, revisionist history of colonization being perpetrated by certain academics. Nothing too explicit, nothing too deeply written into, but well-managed just the same, although the renegade’s portrayal is a little on the overly magical side, which is why, ultimately, it isn’t a major work. That, and the rather abrupt forward jump in time across fifty years and only a romantic reminiscence to tie things together.

This is, however, the first Australian novel I’ve read to address the pre-Federation period, so I’m not aware of anything better out there. Still, if what you’re interested in is Australians’ relationship to their past and the place of the aborigines, my preference at this point is Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth, even though there isn’t an aborigine anywhere in it.