Dislocation

More about The City & the City.

Dislocation
Miéville on the nature of the cities and the sense of dislocation that accompanies detective stories, for their holes — not flaws — in logic:



Epigraphitization
"Deep inside the town open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious, and delusive streets."
— from The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz.

(I read The Street of Crocodiles a couple years ago. It's rather surreal. And it's not surprising that it be referenced by Miéville.)

Machicolation
I have a special fondness for writers who use this word (and Miéville does) — machicolation — because it's a word I encountered and that stumped me in the spelling bee in grade 11, when I was asked at the last minute (well, with about 10 minutes to spare) to represent the school in a regional contest, and I don't think we even had rules regarding definitions and etymology, but I surmised the reader was mispronouncing "matriculation," which was the only word I knew that sounded remotely close to what I was hearing. Of course, I know exactly what it is now.

Linguisophistication
Miéville does some interesting tricks with vocabulary. Besźel and Ul Qoma each have their own language; words are also borrowed from English. At some point I half-expected this book to have a Clockwork Orange–like glossary of terms (which novel I read through without having realized there was a glossary, relying on my own sense of Polish to understand the Slavic-based argot), but the neologisms, however clever, were also very natural in context — no glossary required.

Spoliation
Some reviews and comments are up at Library Thing. I'm a bit concerned now that my own comments may spoil the discovery of the grand conceit for readers. Even though the condition of the cities, their relationship, is suggested in the descriptions and through word choice early on, it is only gradually revealed. But it is for the most part laid out within the "beginning" section of the book (although even at book's end, not entirely clear).

Separate and interminable suburbs

If all experience is more than the sum of its parts, is it in any way possible to reconstruct a semblance thereof by analyzing its constituents?

Of course there is.

Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone.

Pelletier made the first call, which lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. The second was made three days later by Espinoza and lasted two hours and fifteen minutes. After they'd been talking for an hour and half, Pelletier told Espinoza to hang up, the call would be expensive and he'd call right back, but Espinoza firmly refused.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

— from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.

Although I treated myself to a copy of 2666 at around Christmas, I'm only just now getting over the the Bolaño glut I experienced at that time and getting past the intimidation this book carries with it, and getting on with it. To this point, about 100 pages in, I'm loving it, and finding it a much smoother (more cohesive and coherent) read than The Savage Detectives.

I have the 3-volume paperback version, slipcased, chosen with commuting in mind. It's beautifully designed! The image is a detail from Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele, dark, brooding, and apocalyptic; the book title is a bold counterpoint (reminiscent of Wild West posters — Blackoak font?) in vulgar red.

From certain angles (well, most), the only visible writing is 666 (as pictured above).

I've been reading in the métro, and this book has garnered far more inquisitive glances from my fellow passengers than most, struck by its beauty or afeard of my satanic presence.

Elementary urban arithmetic

"Stick us to crowds," I told him. "And to crosshatching." More people, and where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

China Miéville is cool. His new book, The City & the City, also very cool. It's billed as an existential thriller. The thriller part I get; it's a police procedural with overtones of a political conspiracy. So far, so cool (even if not cool or thrilling, or heart-pumpingly horrifying, on the same level as the Bas-Lag books).

The existential part I'm still grappling with (in a good way). The cities, you see, Besźel and Ul Qoma, share the same physical space, grosstopically speaking. They're kind of quantum-state city-states.

The best I can wrap my head around it, it's like when you don't have cable TV and the reception is just plain shitty, and you get two pictures coming in on near the same frequency, and you can actually watch one or the other of the programs if you focus your attention just right.

There are physical, spatial difficulties associated with this set-up, for the cities' citizens, as well as for my own understanding of the concept. There are borders, checkpoints. And there is an independent authority, Breach, to keep breach of the rules to a minimum.

To complicate matters, throw in a mythical third city, the grail of the murder victim, and investigated online by Inspector Borlú in the forums at fracturedcity.org (which URL redirects users to the publisher's site).

"Orciny's the third city. It's between the the other two. It's in the dissensi, disputed zones, places that Besźel thinks are Ul Qoma's and Ul Qoma Besźel's. When the old commune split, it didn't split into two, it split into three. Orciny's the secret city. It runs things."

If split there was. That beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown — records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. All we know is nomads on the steppes, then these black-box centuries of urban instigation — certain events, and there have been films and stories and games based on speculation (all making the sensor at least a little twitchy) about that dual birth — then history comes back and there are Besźel and Ul Qoma. Was it schism or conjoining?

As if that were not mystery enough and as if two crosshatched countries were insufficient, bards invented that third, the pretend-existing Orciny. On top floors, in ignorable Roman-style townhouses, in the first wattle-and-daub dwellings, taking up the intricately conjoined and disjointed spaces allotted it in the split or coagulation of the tribes, the tiny third city Orciny ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states. A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making thins so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip. Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.

So. This idea of the double (or triple) city, this crosshatched interweaving — really cool.

It's implied that Besźel and Ul Qoma are divided along religious lines, Jewish and Muslim, though on rereading certain passages, I can't be certain that the example of the DöplirCaffé with its side-by-side kosher and halal counters wasn't thrown out as an example merely analogous of the kind of coexistence there once was or might be hoped for or is occasionally illicitly achieved.

Regardless, it's clear that the two cities have very distinct cultures and political differences: separate languages, modes of dress, trade agreements. They are peopled by nationalists and unificationists, though mostly just by regular people.

Inspector Borlú once attended a conference on policing split cities. Budapest, Jerusalem, Berlin. To include Besźel and Ul Qoma in this class was an insult. The boundary between them is not a physical one described by our known spatial dimensions. This is not a matter of East and West. Besźel buildings occupy the same physical space as Ul Qoma buildings, each with their own architectural features. The separation is a state of mind, a citizen living in their own culture and simply refusing to see the other.

I've been thinking a lot about this as I walk the streets of my own city. While there are sections of Montreal that are distinctly French and distinctly English, I live and work in an in-between, and I live in that mixed city in a different way than do my francophone colleagues. We are so bound by our habits, if not our prejudices, to see the streets as having different cultural textures and colours. I've never noticed this café or that shop because they are not part of my English world; they are mere dark doorways I pass quickly by and pay no attention to. On other stretches of street, these dark patches may loom ominously. How you see your space is a trick of your mind as much as it is a function of your visual cortex.

Despite having cleverly used the laws of the two cities to his own advantage in terms of jurisdiction and played the natural tendencies and prejudices of their citizens, the murderer is found out eventually. Inspector Borlú achieves a unique status upon closing the case, a kind of promotion to working for a rather different authority. And I'd love to read about his further travails in topolganger policing.

The wild boys of Tozeur

For some reason, likely sparked by a passage in 2666, I find myself, as I'm treading the familiar path from the métro to my office, thinking about Touficq and Brahim, and trying to recall how to spell his name, maybe it's Toufiq without the "c" — I still have his name written in his own hand on a scrap of paper in my photo album — I never did write to him, though I thought about it — although admittedly I haven't thought about it for years now. But today I find myself wondering who were they really.

Toufiq cut hair, he cut my sister's hair; I don't know if Brahim did anything other than hang out at the hair "salon" and zip around on his moped. Everyone knew them, but they were their own gang of two, although maybe it only seems this way, maybe it was because of us, that they dissociated for our benefit, to devote themselves to caring for the foreigners. It's Toufiq who found us at the bus station while waiting for his sister to arrive. She wasn't on our bus. There was another bus later that day that Toufiq went to meet, but she wasn't on that one either. I heard about her return a day or two later; I'm not sure if she's one of the sisters I met.

I don't remember anything about Brahim except for his Fremen-like eyes. But it's Toufiq who tried to kiss me in the inky night of the oasis. I was terrified. I'd never known after dark could be so dark. We could hear the murmur of the crowd at the restaurant, Le Petit Prince, metres away, but the electric lighting was soaked up by the night and did not reach us.

I don't know why I'm thinking about it now. I've skimmed back through the pages of 2666, and I can't see what the memory trigger might be. Something to do with the mysterious Swabian and the lady, or Archimboldi's planned trip to North Africa.

I'm the age now that Toufiq's mother was then. Still a remarkable beauty, Ethiopian, head high and scarved, but considered old. Mother to a brood of 8 or 9, she would not travel to distant lands, she rarely left home. But thank Bourguiba, the sister was getting a university education; she would be a doctor.

They rode us out on mopeds late that last afternoon, those wild boys, Toufiq and Brahim, to watch the sun set over the Tunisian desert. That's when my sister and I were separated; somehow we couldn't catch up with each other. Toufiq and I looked out over the desert before the setting of the sun — we saw a caravan sailing along — and he took me home for supper. So I didn't see a full and proper desert sunset. Later we drove into the oasis, and he switched to English to declare his love.

My sister and I didn't find each other till midnight, just in time, at the station; we boarded the bus to return north, to the sea.

For some reason today I wonder who they really were. They belonged there, but didn't. Their minds were bigger than that town. They had hearts of adventurers. They were plotting an escape. Maybe it was just pretend.

Byatt, podcast

Eleanor Wachtel's interview with A.S. Byatt, recorded at the 11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, was broadcast yesterday on CBC's Writers and Company and is now available online (podcast page; MP3 file).

I haven't listened myself, but I trust it faithfully represents all I was witness to and includes the endlessly fascinating asides I neglected to write about.

My report of the interview.
My review of The Children's Book.
My early impressions.

What order actually looks like

When they were alone, Ironside said, "I never thought this would be easy."

"Sir, may I ask you a question?"

"I wish you would." He ran his hand along the schedule for today. The film of Trotsky next.

"What if that" — Pishkoff swept his scarred right hand to indicate everything outside the room — "what if that is what order actually looks like?"

"Pardon?"

"We're here to bring order. I know. But what if this mess is the natural state and what we're doing is ridiculous?"

"You can't believe that."

"I think people get tired of fighting, and for ten years, twenty years, they agree: let's stop. You have some silk, I have a cow, your daughter marries my nephew, we'll drink, it's good, happily ever after, the end. But it's not the end. It's always chaos and shouting and homicide in the end."

Ironside shook his head. "I don't think that's right."

"Why are we fighting now?" Pishkoff presented a well of intelligence behind eyes cobwebbed with despair.

"Honestly? For our lives," Ironside whispered. He missed Pishkoff.

Unexpectedly, Pishkoff snorted.

"There we are," Ironside said. "I was worried you'd lost your sense of humor."

"You know what the peasants believe? They think the devil gave man a sense of humor."

"Why would he do that?"

"So we laugh at our problems instead of solving them."

There's a hell of a lot going on in this book. It may be saying something profound about war, and America's involvement therein. As much about today's wars as yesterday's.

A very entertaining book, Sunnyside, a kind of comedy, but a tragedy too, but only if you think about it really hard. The novel starts on a day in 1916: Charlie Chaplin is sighted in 800 locations. Pretty absurd, really. But what do I know? Maybe it happened.

There's no way to sort out (for one as myself, ignorant of this time period) what bits of which characters and what events they face are based in fact. Doesn't matter.

We trudge through World War I, as seen from Hollywood, but also through France and Archangel (Archangel! My own family has connections to Archangel, during a later wartime.). I don't care much for war stories, or dogs, but there's a lot of both in this book and it turns out that they're very interesting.

This — this book — is what order looks like. Not that I'm any kind of expert. But the way the jokes are set up and the fact that they pay off are evidence of a fine bit of construction.

This is the dawn of celebrity culture. Some people don't see it happening at all, but those who do struggle with how to bend it to their advantage or for the American good, if they can be bothered to care. What you can get away with, and for how much money.

One of my favourite characters is Bill McAdoo, former Secretary of the Treasury, Chaplin's hero, the man who signs the dollar bills, who holds an almost perverse fascination with the Hollywood industry, at first it seems as a factory of potential propaganda, but overwhelmingly as the great experiment to help achieve and prove his grail of economic and social function: the pleasure equation.

It's about squirrels and pigeons.

It's about image versus reality, whether it be of war, of celebrities, or of how it all gets processed in our individual heads.

When they'd lived in Beaumont, there had been that day when Chaplin was seen everywhere. What if that happened all the time? What if people's images were suddenly all over the place, thousands at a time, and this had been going on for years? Maybe there were times a person was projected when there was no projector, and people we met on the street were just these strange modern ibburim invested with living souls, and that's why the movies were so compelling; it was part of our collective memory. Maybe that was why acting was so attractive: you got the chance to be everywhere at once, and you could pretend to be many different people, the way nature intended. No one would have known about these ibburim until now, because now certain people were famous. If, for instance, she, Rebecca, was everywhere, and there were thousands of Rebeccas in cities and villages and in the ocean an on mountaintops, who would know? No one except her, and only if she ran into herself.

Excerpt.
See also my first impressions, with a little clarification.

L'horreur de la richesse

Yesterday I forsook the company 5 à 7 for a book launch.

The book is about a frog, and the launch was at my daughter's school. Robert Soulières unveiled Le prince des marais:

Un prince et une princesse vivent dans la richesse et l'opulence, ce qui rend le prince très malheureux. Il a horreur de la richesse, des banquets et des nombreux serviteurs qui l'entourent. Il ne désire qu'une chose : un baiser de sa princesse. Un jour, ne supportant plus ce chagrin, celle-ci cède à la prière du prince et redevient crapaud. La princesse, seule et triste comme jamais, est soudain frappée par une idée. Elle téléphone à sa vieille marraine, son amie, sa confidente. Elle seule peut comprendre et apaiser son tourment...

Helena's quite pleased to have her own copy and personally inscribed. She tells me she particularly likes this book for how the pictures lend themselves to her being able to tell her own stories, which speaks more to the value of the illustrations than the narrative, but... whatever.

The school annually has a semaine littéraire, celebrating books of all shapes and sizes. Helena led me by the hand and proudly showed off her own handiwork: four books (or was it even more?) of her own devising, design, and binding. The class together had produced a yoga instruction manual, which they distributed to all the school's students.

Book production: so simple, a 6-year-old can master it!

(Last year's open house.)

Lovely Rosie

Last weekend, as my Facebook friends already know, I went out for groceries. But I came home with a kitten.

I dragged the family out of the house on a drizzly afternoon on a vain quest for specialty cheeses. Yet, the first shop we stepped into was a pet store.

On the walk home, we start throwing names at her, to see what would stick. Helena tried Rose (and, with a chuckle, the names of other of the Doctor's companions: Martha, Donna, Sarah Jane). Luna feels right for about 20 minutes. J-F and I don't offer many counter-suggestions (we like "Luna," and it seems right that the naming should fall to the girl). Within the hour, however, "Rosie" seems to be settled. (Never mind the doll and the 2 or 3 stuffed animals who already bear that name.)

She is now known variously, by Helena, as Rosie Benigni and Rosie the Pony. I call her Rosie Gattaca, for her genetically superior cuteness. J-F calls her Stapler, for the way you can casually swipe her up off the table and pass her to whoever asks for her. Today Helena called her Lollipop.

It's hard to gauge her size from this photo, but that bundle of cuteness can just about squeeze herself into my size 8 sneaker. She has a shoe fetish to rival my own.

She is the family cat. (Calvino, on the other hand, was my cat, long before I considered family.) And yet — naming aside, with whatever rights of ownership that go along with it — she feels like mine. I picked her, out of the dozen behind glass. She sleeps on my pillow. She jumps over my stacks of books, and stretches out across whatever novel I may have open in front of me. (Maybe I want her to be mine more than I care to admit; maybe I need her to be mine.)

She is adorable.

She chases her tail and plays with her shadow. She somersaults. She carries her toy mouse in her mouth, gingerly and proudly. We have yet to determine if she is the sort of cat who prefers toilet paper rolls over crumpled-up wads of paper (I think she is).

We are overdosing on cuteness. She is seriously, too, too cute. I mean, even her poo is cute. It's all just so disgustingly cute.

That first night, I feared that her purr was broken. But then suddenly it came, deep and constant. Rosie is here to stay.

Chicken soup

Today I was up at the crack of dawn making chicken soup from scratch.

The smell of it followed me all day. My fingers like boiled carrots. Like I'd bathed in broth this morning. I splashed this fragrance through every corridor I walked.

It smelled not like my mother or grandmother — like me, in a place. Not the home of my childhood. Not my grandmother's house (certainly not in her later years). I can't quite place it.

Good for the soul nonetheless.

Maybe the smell is the smell of my house. Maybe my daughter will someday try to place a smell in her childhood, to pin it to the day her mother made chicken soup from scratch.

How it made her feel

"It's a secret."

Washington Irving's old Dutch-style house: Sunnyside.

She had spoken like a girl — it was impossible to keep Sunnyside secret; everyone knew they were going to Sunnyside, everyone knew Sunnyside was there. She wanted to keep secret how it made her feel.

— from Sunnyside, by Glen David Gold.

About intimacy, not spectacle

When it was back down to seven dogs, Chaplin took them everywhere he went on the lot. When the payroll girl came to approve the raise for Carlyle Robinson ("What raise?"). Chaplin interrupted her to tell each dog to sit.

They worshipped him, and he lectured them about how that would never do, this was America, there were no kings here, one had to find one's own way, this demonstration that he was their hero was entirely embarrassing, he wasn't a martinet, he wasn't D. W. Griffith, they weren't making Intolerance, after all, to be a part of his crew was to be about intimacy, not spectacle, and because all were so rapt, he fed them biscuits.

[...]

"This was a good day's work," Chaplin announced to his crew that afternoon. "Carry on," he said, and since it was four o'clock, his touring car arrived. The cry "He's leaving!" went up, and Kono, the chauffeur, opened the door for him, and the whole Chaplin Studios team — seamstresses, prop master, stagehands, carpenters, lighting crew, Rollie the cameraman, the payroll girl, the assistant director, the whole art department, the portrait painter, the several men whom Chaplin had rescued from disaster and whose jobs were now ill-defined except to be of good spirits all day long, and the entire company of actors, and Vincent Bryan and Maverick Terrell, men whom no one looked in the eye, men whose jobs were mysterious (they wrote ideas for factions on slips of paper and put them into a drawer in Chaplin's desk, where they were never seen again), and Edna — lined up on either side of the gate and waved goodbye to him, and waved back with excitement, and his car pulled out of the studio. The elderly woman in the floral-print dress who closed the gate behind him — once, she had sung in the dance halls with his father and mother — waved goodbye, sadly.

Only when the car was block down Sunset did he realize he had just spent two weeks playing with dogs. They had shot a few thousand feet of film, not really that much, but little of it relating to dogs. Instead, he had a faction of the Tramp trying to get a job at an employment office and being muscled out of the way by larger, rougher workers. He'd done it to a metronome. It was adequate.

— from Sunnyside, by Glen David Gold.

I loved Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil, and for years I've been checking to see if he might have something more in him.

Chaplin, of course, is at the heart of this story. He's a man I know very little about, apart from what I learned watching Robert Downey Jr's portrayal of him (and even that is kind of blurry).

He's portrayed here as a man with a vast ego but incredibly insecure about it, obsessed with his public image, plotting his every social move, to the point of preparing notes for parties.

We follow another young man, whose path crosses Chaplin's. He's worked in a lighthouse all his life, but his ego is devastatingly larger than that. He knows himself to be handsome, believes himself to be talented, and aspires to Hollywood.

This novel may be about the "dawn of the modern age," but it is also (at least, from where I sit, at about half way) very much about the making of America: The War Machine.

(I don't yet know what the title means. )

This book is funny. The set-ups are subtle and intricate, and there are sometimes pages to go before the punchline, but it's worth every word. An intimate — and genuinely clever — spectacle of a book.

"From unexpiated sins poems are born"

Last week, this poem arrived in my inbox:

Written Late at Night

Almost all day I sat at the table
And, swapping two pens, wrote letters.
One of them, as a joke, was in gothic script.
I tried to be honest, avoid untruth
As far as the truth about myself and events
In their general contour was accessible to me.
Then a few longer phone conversations
And a short break to read eight poems by Cavafy.
How great! Superb! Who can write like that about desire and love,
Admitting that when they burn out
And the bitter tasting of the body is taken away,
They guide the poet's hand. In them and only in them
All future incantations.

The poem is by Janusz Szuber (translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough), a collection of whose poetry makes its first appearance in English later this month. They Carry a Promise.

And like that, I think I'm in love. It speaks to me! Why? I don't know!

A few of Szuber's poems are available online.

Books in Canada
Three Poems:
— Crowing of Roosters ("Beneath bluish cloud the bluish pith of plums/With ash-grey coating and sticky slit — /There the sweet crusts of dirty amber.")
— A Short Treatise On Analogies
— Six Forty-Five A.M.

Ploughshares
Between Ice and Water
Entelechy
Everything Here ("That wet summer abounding in frogs")

Words without Borders
Tiresias's Lesson
Tiresias's Farewell (which opening I've borrowed)

The Goldstein report

Last weekend, J-F and I crowded into the hotel space where Jian Ghomeshi interviewed Jonathan Goldstein as part of the 11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. The event drew an audience almost as large as A.S. Byatt had earlier that day in the same room.

I don't have anything earth-shatteringly insightful to say about the evening. I started taking notes but stopped before the interview started. The evening, certainly insofar as that it was a date, was meant for entertainment, not analysis.

Entertaining it was, and a little bit more besides.

Ghomeshi spent a lot of time emptying his pockets before taking a seat on stage. Wallet. Lots of loose cards and half-folded paper scraps. Looks like a phone, or ipod, or... Keys? There must've been keys. Pack of gum. He can't decide whether to hang on to the gum.

Goldstein looked nervous. There's foot-tapping and head-shaking. Earlobe-pulling.

Ghomeshi's introduction was long, rambling, and self-indulgent, but somehow just right. He promised to ask Goldstein only questions that he would ask Tom Petty.

I felt pretty connected to the two people on stage. We're all about the same age, with the same pop-cultural references. I guess that's a pretty lame explanation of why these public personalities are likable, but they are relatively smart and articulate to boot, and the situation is so very pleasant and Canadian.

Ghomeshi asked Goldstein about his writing process — the difference between writing a finite column or for radio and writing something like the stories that make up this book, something more open-ended and indeterminate (at least at the outset). The first is work, but sounds relatively routine, fueled with a cup of coffee. The latter, the uncertainty of how to grow these kernels of ideas as well as the uncertainty of their reception, is more likely to require a cup of whiskey.

They talked about Bible stories, God, sense of mortality, childhood, parents (Goldstein's were present), memory, the essence of comedy, the value of comedy, where in the hierarchy of traits being the funny one fits amid being the smart one, the pretty one, etc.

In addition to having read a few excerpts throughout the evening, Goldstein treated us to a slide presentation: an illustrated reading of a story about being Lois Lane's girlfriend after she'd broken up with Superman. Very poignant.

Goldstein: There's you in the moment and there's you outside of that moment (watching yourself in the moment). The gulf between is where comedy lies.

Byatt, face to face: a report

A.S. Byatt and Eleanor Wachtel take their seats on stage. Wachtel explains that she was asked to chat before they begin proper, to ask something inconsequential so that the sound engineers can test their settings. So, what did A.S. Byatt have for lunch? A turkey sandwich and some "possibly indigestible onion soup."

Although I've spent days thinking, thinking really hard, what I should ask A.S. Byatt — Is there something I really wanted to know, or would it be merely for the sake of asking a question? What of it? What an opportunity! Of course I should ask her a question! But what? — and then, closer to the event, mustering up my courage, fine tuning the wording, rehearsing in my head, and then reworking the question as the interview progressed to account for what she'd just told us and so as not to seem redundant, ultimately I was spared the embarrassment: There was no question period.

My question, finally, would've been this: You touch on the issue throughout, but there a couple points in The Children's Book at which you address directly the writer–reader relationship. Frank on meeting Herbert Methley decides that readers are meant not to meet writers. Olive similarly reflects that, while writers and readers need each other, it is understood that the relationship be mediated through the page. Without meaning to put you on the spot and asking whether you yourself believe that, I wonder if you might comment generally on this human urge to meet the maker of things, to discover the man behind the curtain (why should people want to meet potter Benjamin Fludd, reputedly (and proven to be) a nasty person? why does Dorothy seek out her biological father?). Why do we feel compelled to? And in what circumstances do you think it might be better left alone?

I didn't ask the question, but in mulling it over for myself for days, and from A.S Byatt's remarks yesterday afternoon. I think I have some answers.

Her childhood reading consisted of the usual fairy tales and stories, but she went through their personal store of them so quickly, she early on turned to the likes of Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. She has a particular fondness for Kipling.

It's when she saw a stage production of Peter Pan, as a child during wartime, that she found herself identifying with the writer, and thinking, "I've got to make something."

What she learned from her mother, observing a brief happy (working) time amid her general unhappiness: if you want to work, you must work.

Immersing herself in books was not to escape or replace; it was to complete the real world. "The real world was intensely boring."

Everything she liked — Dickens, Austen, Eliot — had nothing to do with the author, had nothing to do with self-expression. Writing was a matter of looking out, outside of oneself. Art shouldn't be to critique the world, but to understand the world. You cannot change the world by writing, but you can help someone understand the world so that they may go change it. Writing must give pleasure.

The novel has excerpts from the books written by Olive, the children's author. Byatt plays with the idea of self and the notion of having a shadow self.

"Tales are tales." She's worked as a literary critic, but she's very quick to qualify the statement: not a biographical critic. She acknowledges the irony: that she sits here telling us about her childhood and little things about her mother. But not big things. "There's a border between fact and fiction that you shouldn't step over."

Byatt didn't know much about the Edwardians when she set out writing about this time period, chosen because it was a golden age of children's literature. She liked the high Victorians and the gloomy modernists, having skipped over what came in between. (She's done an incredible amount of research to make the period so vivid.)

There's much about growing up in this novel, and the "success" of the authors of that golden age relied heavily on not wanting to grow up. Wachtel asks Byatt if there's ever a point when we are completely adult, with no child left in us. Byatt says, in a sense, when you have a child of your own. It is your duty to be an adult.

She sets Kipling apart from other writers of the era: in his writing it's clear he understood the adult world as much as that of the child.

The talk moves through Ibsen, suffragists, Evelyn Sharp, "porcelain socialists" (a term coined by Dostoevsky), and British–German relations.

(Byatt sits sedately, speaks engagingly matter-of-factly, but comes more to life when talking about bloody matters. She tells of the murder committed by the revolutionary Stepniak; she holds an imaginary knife, driving and twisting into the victim's heart. Twice, later, her arm comes down like an executioner's blade to punctuate her point.)

The Children's Book is in part about the art of pottery. Why pottery? Byatt has a fascination with glass: it's something you can look at and look through, and in this way it is a kind of metaphor for writing. But it formed the focus of a previous novel; she "can't do glass again," so pottery was a next best thing, combined with the affinity she feels for it, being descended from potters.

Byatt "can't remember how the puppets got in." The talks about her research and the esteem with which puppetry was regarded as an artform.

(Unfortunately, the interview was disrupted on several occasions because of cellphones and the feedback caused by someone's hearing aid. A.S. Byatt very kindly made light of the situation. The high-pitched squeals were "like a fairy kind of piping." During the book-signing that followed she expressed sympathy for the poor woman, who, once she'd turned down her hearing aid, couldn't hear what was being said on stage.)

The first world war changed children's stories. Many stories of that period were boys' war-related adventure stories. I understand that there is a dearth of children's literature during the interwar period, and perhaps this is why we hold onto those stories of the period before even more tightly.

Oddly, she notes, while the children of today are very different from those of a century ago, the stories now are essentially the same. The thread was picked up by C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling. They share qualities with their predecessors that appeal to children, that suit childhood, even while childhoods now open on much vaster (and grimmer) knowledge of life and the world.

Byatt's novel is not a children's book, but it does have many of the traditional themes. It is the children who are in the best position to save the other children. They are often forced to grow up because of the predatory actions of the adults around them. But her children, on the whole, want to grow up.

The war hits her characters like a knife, indeed, hits the world like a knife.

Children want happy endings. "An adolescent thinks a story isn't grown up if it doesn't have a bad ending." Byatt has moved beyond that stage.

"Readers and human beings have a right to a happy ending." (She hates books that offer two alternative endings.)

The Children's Book can't be said to have a fairy-tale ending, although it does end with a happy tableau. Because it has no central plot, no main character, there are as many endings as there are characters, some happy, some markedly less so. (Much like life, I say; it ends as it should.)

Note, this is a fairly superficial retelling of the event. The interview will be broadcast on CBC's Writers and Company in a few weeks' time.

I did have a couple copies of The Children's Book signed, one for a dear friend as well as my own already well-worn copy. I was tongue-tied, and I commented on the awkwardness, referencing what she'd written about readers meeting writers. It's true. It's weird. After all, with a glint and a smile, she says, "It's really only the book that matters."

My review of The Children's Book.
My early impressions.

Some recent coverage: Byatt, civilized.

More
Review:
A fantastic fable of utopian folly (The Globe and Mail):

Byatt is very good at depicting the subtleties of how hypocrisy can co-exist with a genuine desire to do good, hinting that the Fabians' obsession with fantasy childhood and an English utopia is more for themselves than anyone else, their children included.

Interview:
Writing in terms of pleasure (The Guardian)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Jonathan Goldstein!

Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! author Jonathan Goldstein (WireTap) is interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi at the 11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival.

See the profile in the Montreal Gazette: Blue Met: Goldstein's turn on the wiretap.

The struggles of the children's writer

(Via The Book Mine Set.)

Byatt, civilized

Profile:
AS Byatt interview: Nothing like the Dame.

Interview:
A.S. Byatt: On the nature of writing.

"I love Montreal and I love the French language, so the thought of the Grand Prix is peculiarly pleasing. I am looking forward to speaking both languages in a civilized way."

Comment:
For Griselda, in The Children's Book, "civilized" was a high form of praise.

Review:
Childproof myths.

Aside:
The more I mull it over, the more The Children's Book, of the more than half-dozen Byatt books I've read, is by far my favourite (overtaking Babel Tower, because it's more accessible, easier, I totally get it!, or maybe I'm just smarter now).

Children, blessed children

Baby steps.

The Children's Book, by A.S. Byatt, starts off at a luxuriously leisurely pace. Time, to start, is measured in parties, social gatherings, lasting interminable hours, days. Byatt comments directly on the passing of time, midway through the novel — how time passes at different speeds for different people, how its passing is measured, how for the two-year-old a year is half a lifetime.

Well, this novel moves like that, like life. It doesn't pick up speed exactly, it just goes more quickly; the summers of childhood are languorous and eternal, but the years begin to flit by, you wonder what happened to youth, and suddenly there is war and it's a blur, and you find yourself middle-aged wondering how you got here so soon.

Particularly in the latter half (and this is a hefty book: more than 600 pages), there are bits that read like pages out of almanac: the death of so-and-so, some landmark publication, news items, political happenings. I came to be grateful for this context of a very particular time and place, and it took on increasing significance for how Byatt's characters evolve.

When I first picked up this novel, I thought it was about a woman, a children's author, who kept private notebooks for each of her children, in which she told their stories. I anticipated being led through these stories, being enchanted. But it's not like that at all. I mean, it is, but it's much, much grimmer (read: Grimm-er) and so very vast and clever.

The novel begins in a fairy tale setting; subterranean and exotic; surrounded by treasures enameled and encrusted with jewels. The secret passageways of a museum. From there we move by train to a sprawling, modernized farmhouse called Todefright. What better place to meet the cast than at a midsummer party.

Everything is under keen observation, but imbued with awe. It is a magical and enchanted veil through which reality seeps. It is gentle and natural, pastoral and reverent of nature. All are berobed as gods and goddesses, artists and witches.

Dorothy tires of the whimsy; her respect for nature is more scientific; yet she belongs here:

Dorothy was waiting for Cousin Griselda. Cousin Griselda came into her mind when she had to use the word "love" which she tended to be careful with. Griselda was the same age as Dorothy, and was closer to Dorothy than her sister Phyllis. Dorothy, a realist, rather thought she did not love Phyllis, though she knew she ought to. Perhaps because of this she loved Griselda — whom she did not see very often — a little more emphatically. Dorothy was sometimes afraid that she had started out with a smaller capability for love than most people. Phyllis loved everything — Mother, Father, Auntie Violet, Hedda, Florian and Robin, Ada and Cathy, the ponies, the fluffy kitten, dead Rosy in the orchard, the Todefright toads. Dorothy had varying feelings for most of these people, some of them loving. But she did love Griselda, she had fixed on Griselda to love.

For the most part, the novel's inhabitants are intellectuals, and as I remarked early and often, to anyone who would listen, they are very ineresting people. They are impassioned. They have esoteric knowledge. They have opinions. They have political and social agendas.

They are flesh and blood.

Olive is a writer and mother, but she is a woman too:

Olive Wellwood was thirty-eight. She came from a class where many, perhaps most, women did not live much beyond that age, where what was in women's minds was diminishing strength and the looming of real death. Yet here she was in the magical Garden of England, with a good body, and a face that was, she thought, more interesting, more defined, yes indeed, more beautiful, than when she had been a green girl. And spider-webs of sexual attraction floated everywhere, and touched their skins, like dandelion seeds on white spiralling parasols, like ozone wafting in from the sea. It was still her time, she thought, looking out at the Channel and the children — and Toby who was leaping with them, and Violet camped with nanny and pram — and Prosper who was striding towards them in a smart panama hat. The children were children, blessed children, not yet formed. Though she saw that Herbert Methley had detached his attention from her, and was staring with a pleased expression at the gaggle of girls, pale, fine Griselda, brisk dark Dorothy, dreamy Pomona and inhibited Imogen, pretty Phyllis and composed Florence, the only one in whom could be seen a shadow of the woman she would be. "Aren't they lovely?" she said to Methley, who gave her a sharp look, smiled conspiratorially, and agreed.

They are, for the most part, Fabians.

They mean to advance socialism and change the world incrementally. They mean for the tortoise to win the race.

The plot for a time follows Art and Crafts, specifically pottery. Byatt may be saying this is modernity: interesting oneself in the real-world application of something pure.

We see the meetings of minds. We follow a party to the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris (which I mentioned previously). We go to puppet theatres, in Germany.

Throughout, the likes of Oscar Wilde, Rupert Brooke, and others, make cameo appearances.

In 1901, Queen Victoria dies:

There was a sense that fun was now permitted, was perhaps obligatory. The stiff black flounces, the jet necklaces, the pristine caps, the euphemisms and deference, the high seriousness also, the sense of duty and the questioning of the deep meanings of things were there to be mocked, to be turned into scarecrows and Hallowe'en masks. People talked, and thought, earnestly and frivolously, about sex. At the same time they showed a paradoxical propensity to retreat into childhood to read and write adventure stories, tales about furry animals, dramas about pre-pubertal children.

So the modern age is marked by a refusal to grow up. No, that's too harsh. A disinclination to let go of childhood. Perhaps while recognizing a value in childhood that had long been neglected (or sent off to boarding school).

The children of this novel make decisions (or not), make their own way in their very different worlds, more often than not in spite of their parents.

One family disintegrates, but a new family center is forged. It's the Fabian family, the free thinkers dabbling in free love, freedom of all kinds, who fail to thrive.

I wonder if Byatt isn't commenting that the Fabian way was a perpetuation of childhood, that sometimes the best way to social progress isn't in gradual increments but in one fell swoop. The tortoise is losing.

Too, there is the women's question. While these Fabians support, of course, women's rights, for education, for lives, the vote is tangential to this. In and of itself the vote is not so important as establishing an intellectual or moral equality.

A hundred years on, women vote, but we still struggle for rooms of our own, and always (evidenced to an extreme in Olive) at a cost:

"The truth is," said Florence, "that the women we are — have become — are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if we change, and they don't, there will be no help for us. We shall be poor monsters, like Viola in Twelfth Night, or Miss Harrison's harpies and gorgons. Do you not think it might be harmful to ignore the sex instinct? Don't you think that after twenty years of studying Cinderella you might be seized by the idea of the children you never had?"

"Quite probably," said Griselda, lifting a dripping oar and suspending is, so that the boat swung in the current. "But after twenty years of childbearing and fever and confinement and being shut in a house I might be seized by the idea of Cinderella."

Poor Olive, early on so sympathetic, breadwinner and of independent mind, but ultimately to the detriment of her children.

The tortoise has a long way to go.

Most everyone grows up in the end, or dies. The Great War did that, made the world grow up.

**********

On readers and writers

Olive, the writer of children's books:

She thought about the relation between readers and writers. A writer made an incantation, calling the reader into the magic circle of the world of the book. With subtle words, a writer enticed a reader to feel his or her skin prickle, his of her lips open, his or her blood race. But a writer did this on condition that the reader was alone with printed paper and painted cover. What were you meant to feel — what was she meant to feel — when the originals of the evanescent paper persons were only too solidly present in flesh and bone and prosaic clothing? A gingery tweed jacket, a faded cotton skirt with lupins on it, and an elastic waist that clumped oddly?

Olive is not the only writer in this crowd. Herbert Methley writes many lives onto courses they themselves never imagined:

[...] Frank withdrew into his own mind for a moment, wondering whether to thank Methley for Marsh Lights, or at least to tell him how it had moved him. He decided against this. He found he was annoyed that this robed person, with his electric black hair, was more the owner, so to speak, of the imagined rocks and stones and elder bushes than he, the reader. Readers ought not to meet writers, he thought. They are meant not to.

Do you think she means it?

A.S. Byatt, writer, launches her new book, The Children's Book, April 22 at the 11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, and is scheduled to appear before readers at various other events throughout the festival.

The object of my lust

Since first I ever laid eyes on it, weeks ago, I can't get it out of my mind.

The Sony VAIO P Series Pocket-Style PC is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

I almost preordered one. I don't know what I'm waiting for. I want to see one in the flesh, so to speak. I want to touch it.

I've been dropping into the Sony store downstairs from the office, on break, or on my way home, to see if I could lay my hands on one.

They were to be available Friday. Imagine my dismay when I navigated to the website that morning (as I do most days lately, just to look at it) and saw they were out of stock.

I've spent far too much time examining the specs, trying to justify this indulgent expense. Compared to other available netbooks, the price tag is exorbitant. Technically, though, it's a subnotebook, so it's not a fair comparison. Most netbooks would satisfy my basic needs. The Pocket PC appeals to something altogether different — shallower maybe, but more deeply felt. It's most attractive asset, according to many reviews, is the comfort of its keyboard — not a minor factor when the point is to have a (highly!) portable writing device.

They're no longer out of stock, but still I hesitate to take the plunge. Can I trust the strength of this virtual attraction as the basis for a real-life relationship?

I'm still considering and rationalizing. And lusting.

(If anyone wants to buy me one, just to show me they care, leave me comment and I'll oblige with my mailing address.)

Byatt's book

The Children's Book, by A.S. Byatt.



Isn't it beautiful?

The cover depicts a brooch by René Lalique, depicted in the novel at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris:

[...] a large ornament, in the form of a turquoise woman's bust rising out of the mouth of a long, long dragonfly, its narrowing gold body studded with shimmering blue and green jewels at regular intervals, diminishing to a tiny sharp gilt fork at the base. The woman's head was crowned with an ornament which was helm, or a split scarab, or the insect eyes of the metamorphosing being. From her shoulders hung what were at once stiff, spreading sleeves, and the realistic wings of the dragonfly, made in the new, transparent, unbacked enamel, veined in gold, studded with roundels of turquoise and crystals. The beast had huge dragon-like claws, stretching either side of the womanhead, on gold muscular arms.

I'm lucky enough both to have a review a copy and to be seeing A.S. Byatt next week at the 11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival.

I've passed the novel's halfway mark, and I can't tell you how badly I've wished this week that I didn't have a day job so as to have been able to make more progress. Sigh. The book, thus far, is amazing.

If anyone has any ideas regarding intelligent questions I might ask the author, assuming the opportunity presents itself at next week's event, please leave a comment to that effect. I anticipate being at a loss for (my own) words.

The Children's Book is available April 21, 2009. A reader's guide is available now.