The latest edition of Heat may be the only piece of printed matter produced in the closing months of 2008 that makes no mention of the global financial crisis. Unlike fellow stalwart of the Oz literary scene, Meanjin, which has recently commissioned a series of essays on current affairs and politics, editor Ivor Indyk’s journal remains determinedly aesthetic in focus. Readers looking for feature stories can go to the broadsheets; if it’s thoughtful extended reflection on Kevin, the intervention, Israel and Obama you want, The Monthly, Quarterly Essay and Griffith Review will do the job; but for poetry, fiction and criticism, Heat is the place to go. The journal plays an important role in the maintenance of Australian literary culture by publishing challenging, sometimes experimental new work.
This issue takes its title from John Hughes’ “The Book of Libraries,” a not entirely successful attempt at Borgesian essay-fiction. Also borrowing heavily from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Hughes gives us a compendium of imaginary places, in this instance a catalogue of “lost libraries” supposedly found in the ruins of the Library of Babel (a direct reference to the Borges story of the same name). Our narrator, an anonymous literary scholar, claims to have rediscovered the mysterious list in a Saint Petersburg library and translated it into English. Character, plot and setting, are deliberately dispensed with here, replaced with dry but erudite reflection on the nature of reading, and the preservation of knowledge across time. There’s a static quality to the writing, brought on by the absence of dynamic verbs and the repeated construction, “I think.” Each of the 11 libraries is an opportunity for us to watch the narrator think. There is some striking image making: the Library of Translation, for example, stands beside a lake where its image is reflected upside down. The Incomplete Library also offers a moment’s illumination. The building’s completion, like an anxious Phd student’s thesis, is infinitely delayed “so that it’s destruction cannot begin” (57). Over the course of twenty plus pages, however, we tire of such conceits and long for some sign of human presence or passion. Borges had the good grace to keep his literary hoaxes to ten or fifteen pages. His best stories like “El Aleph,” and “El Sur” also had a self-ironising element that his Anglophone admirers seem to miss.
Sydney writer Felicity Castagna takes a less cerebral, but ultimately more affecting approach to experimental fiction. Her piece imaginatively recreates the inner life of Kathleen Folbigg, a Newcastle woman convicted of murdering her four children. “Kathy” demonstrates that breaking storytelling conventions doesn’t mean sacrificing narrative all together. There’s still plenty of literary sleight of hand going on here: present tense third person narration, iterative symbolism, prolepsis “none of her children have been born yet. None of them have died” (159). The difference is that we also have a real character, alive in her fleshy selfhood: “she kneads her thighs with her fingers hoping that the extra weight will just melt away like butter” (162). A keen sense of place also imbues the story as we see pregnant Kathy’s morbid fantasies overlap with industrial Newcastle. “She can feel the coldness of the iron against her skin as it thicken around her belly and pierces through her belly button. She is pumped full of iron ore” (161). In a handful of pages, Castagna evokes a troubled individual, a complex set of family relations, a cultural milieu, and a terrible tragedy. The piece could easily be expanded to novella length and marks its author as a talent to watch.
The editorial decision to include an essay about Brian Castro by his partner Jennifer Rutherford alongside an essay by Castro himself is an odd one. Rutherford begins her essay on The Garden Book by positioning the novel as a refutation of the anti-intellectual cultural climate of the Howard years. Fair enough, but one suspects that the inclusion of her essay would only reinforce the right-wing commentariat’s view of the so called cultural elite. Doubling up on Castro gives the collection an air of cliquishness and solipsism, a too-obvious sense it’s participating in the canonization of one of its contributors. There’s nothing wrong with the scholarship in the Rutherford essay – she gives an interesting account of echoes of Flaubert in Castro – but perhaps it would have been better held over for a later issue.
Despite this, Castro’s offering, “In Camera: Arrested Motion and Future Mourning,” is deeply impressive. One of our best respected novelists and now professor of Creative Writing at Adelaide University, Castro is also a gifted literary scholar. His essay considers how melancholy came to be associated with creativity in fourteenth century Italy. The modern notion of melancholy as a productive aspect of the artistic temperament, he argues, developed in this period, using Giovanni Bocaccio’s “The Decameron” as an illustrative work. He concludes memorably that for the contemporary creative writer melancholy is both medicine and poison: “We write because we love our symptom” (53).
Noel King’s interview with Brent Cunningham of Small Press Distributor’s in Berkeley, California, is an instructive if slightly overextended discussion of the poetry publishing environment in the US. It is part of a larger project on small and independent presses in the English speaking world. SPD’s philosophy is that although most poetry will never sell enough to interest a for-profit distributor, much of it is of cultural value and ought to be accessible to the public. “There’s plenty of historical evidence that some book of poems that sold ten copies in its first three years could well be by the person that we all read today from a particular era” (202). Even in the much larger US market, however, there are apparently only 50 to 75 bookstores that stock small press poetry. Perhaps the future of poetry is online.
Among the poet’s there’s an intriguing mix of the distinguished and the indecipherable. Part of the enduring value of a journal like Heat is its role in supporting new talent. It is always a pleasure to read unknown writers beside their more established peers and find that they measure up splendidly. Kate Llewellyn sends us postcards in verse from South America where she tells us “It is raining in Patagonia. And Bruce Chatwin is dead” (30). Michael Farell’s three poems create splendid sounding nonsense through repetition, puns and experimental punctuation. My favourite poem in this edition, however, was “The Bones” by the relatively little known Kay Rozynski. When we tire of raking through the dismal columns of the daily news, it is important we have a place to turn, somewhere to find writing that makes no concessions to the everyday grind, and where we can take comfort in the lines of an unknown poet:
We ride our bicycles down because it’s faster
And to feel the air move in shoals, to feel
That it’s alright that we speak of transcendence still (19).
Heat 18: The Library of Fire
(2008)
Ivor Indyk (ed.)
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-51-8
224pp AUD $30
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Spain by Jan Morris
The original 1964 edition of this classic of postwar travel writing was published by James Humphrey Morris. A successful journalist for the Times, Morris was at that time undergoing hormone therapy and would later undergo a sex change. By the time the book was republished in the late 1970s, there was a new name on the cover. Not a word of this is mentioned in the 2008 reissue, but with writing of this quality the author’s gender matters not.
Morris has a reputation as one of the finest British travel writers of her generation; before Winchester or Chatwin she was the epitome of the cosmopolitan traveler, someone who had been everywhere, seen everything and knew how to set it down in cracking prose. She came to prominence as a journalist, famously reporting on Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953, but later turned to travel writing.
Place is protagonist in Spain, there is no extended narrative, no chronological account of Morris’s journey, no talk of lining up for bus and train tickets, and very little explicit mention of the writer’s presence at all. The famous travel writer’s “I” is replaced by the inclusive first person plural: ‘We are in the Spanish south,’ and by the second person “you.” Morris often writes as though she were physically leading her reader by the hand, pointing out sights along the way. ‘There lies the first of her villages…with a fine old bridge to take you there…In you go, down the whitewash cobbled streets’ (68-69). But although the author is a peripheral physical presence, her intellectual interests are everywhere: architecture, painting, music, history, religion, contemporary politics, literature, bridge building. There is very little that Morris is not interested in, and she seems to command specialist language across all of these disciplines, whether it be the “turrets, conical towers and troubadour windows,” of medieval Spanish architecture or the “birretta,” “pederasts,” and “preceptors,” of Catholic ritual. She is particularly fond of musical metaphors, and the book itself is structured rather like a piece of music, broken into a series of movements with motifs that reoccur throughout, allowing for trills and flurries around familiar themes. Morris will observe some characteristic of the culture, say Spain’s ‘fatal weakness for the past’ and pursue its implications across a variety of field. In architecture: ‘When the French were building in the Gothic style, she was still building Romanesque. When they moved into the Renaissance, she was still building Gothic’ (26); in music ‘no Beethoven symphony was performed in Madrid until 1866; and in observation of social norms ‘a Victorian propriety and formality, too makes the stranger feel that his passage through the mountains has been a passage in time.’
The old-fashionedness of Spain is particularly appealing to Morris because, with her courtly British manners and enthusiasms, she’s an anachronistic figure herself. For the most part she is quick to acknowledge diversity and complexity. Spain, we are told, is ‘the kingdom of exceptions.’ Occasionally, however, she falls back into the objectionable imperial custom of making generalizations in the singular: ‘The Spaniard likes to be sure,’ ‘The Spaniard revels in the minutiae’ (48). If this mode of travel writing has a weakness, it is that we encounter a limited spread of local voices. Cervantes, Phillip II and Franco speak to us from beyond the grave, but the “simple people of the thatched huts” are never heard. Specific conversations or encounters never make it into the text, perhaps because Morris is so concerned with minimising her own presence. This determination means she privileges habitual detail, (what Spain is usually like), over dynamic detail (what Spain was like the day I was there) and, while this makes for stylish prose the price is a certain aloofness, a sense that she writes of human beings in the same way she might describe a canvass by Goya.
This isn’t to say Morris has no interest in the Spanish people or their politics. As the new introduction points out, this is a book about “a particular Spanish time,” the transition to democracy after Franco. If Morris is particularly drawn to pre-modern Spain: the country’s old sayings and folk traditions, its cathedrals and relics, the traces of Paganism in many of its religious practices, it is only because she realises that it is all going to disappear. Morris was writing at the end of Spain’s long isolation from the rest of Europe and was acutely aware that rapid change was at hand, not all of it positive. ‘Already as pastoral Spain retreats before the assaults of our material civilization, you may see the corrosion set in.’ Given that the original text has been supplemented several times, perhaps Faber and Faber, should have dated the new introduction, the prologue and afterword in this version, to make the chronology clear.
A great deal has changed in Spain since this book was written, with the nation now a stable democracy and a member of the European Union. Morris’s misgivings about the future of Spanish civilian government have proved unfounded. These doubts never dampened Morris’s enthusiasm for the country much. She writes of its idiosyncrasies with clear-sightedness and compression, noting ‘the small humped bridges of Spain,’ and its many ‘huge and awful figures of Christ.’ She has a taste for precise enumeration of people and things, the ‘84 benedictine monks of the establishment,’ and the ‘seven arrows in a yoke that formed the crest of Isabel and Ferdinand’ (38). She also has a gift for illustrative anecdote, for finding the perfect case to back up a general observation. The prologue is virtuoso stuff, a whirlwind tour through Spanish history that could have sounded like a textbook, but in Morris’ hands is utterly compelling. Spanish cathedrals, we learn, are built around a coro, ‘a dark, carved boxlike structure that…provides an intellectual focus for the whole building.’ If the nation’s fortune were mapped on an elevation graph, she tells us, they would form an upside down U shape: a long ascent until the 16th century and then a steady decline. At the peak of the curve would be the Escorial; for Morris, this church and palace, built by Phillip II in the Guadarrama Mountains at the height of Spain’s imperial power, is the coro in ‘the great cathedral that is Spain herself’ (9). The building stands for the nation’s ‘taste for the grandiose’ its ‘tragedy’ and ‘lack of fulfillment.’ This intricate opening maneuver, superbly executed, provides us with an image and an atmosphere, so that we do not realise until afterwards that we have just had a history lesson.
Jan Morris teaches as she entertains, giving a masterclass not just on Spain, but on travelling and writing well. Nearly all travel writers espouse the virtues of learning languages, reading voraciously while travelling, and of sharp but sympathetic observation; few are able to focus on the character of a place without ultimately writing about their own ego and idiosyncracies. James/Jan Morris can. We emerge from her book competely unenlightened about the author's sexually ambiguity, but we learn a great deal about Spain.
Morris has a reputation as one of the finest British travel writers of her generation; before Winchester or Chatwin she was the epitome of the cosmopolitan traveler, someone who had been everywhere, seen everything and knew how to set it down in cracking prose. She came to prominence as a journalist, famously reporting on Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953, but later turned to travel writing.
Place is protagonist in Spain, there is no extended narrative, no chronological account of Morris’s journey, no talk of lining up for bus and train tickets, and very little explicit mention of the writer’s presence at all. The famous travel writer’s “I” is replaced by the inclusive first person plural: ‘We are in the Spanish south,’ and by the second person “you.” Morris often writes as though she were physically leading her reader by the hand, pointing out sights along the way. ‘There lies the first of her villages…with a fine old bridge to take you there…In you go, down the whitewash cobbled streets’ (68-69). But although the author is a peripheral physical presence, her intellectual interests are everywhere: architecture, painting, music, history, religion, contemporary politics, literature, bridge building. There is very little that Morris is not interested in, and she seems to command specialist language across all of these disciplines, whether it be the “turrets, conical towers and troubadour windows,” of medieval Spanish architecture or the “birretta,” “pederasts,” and “preceptors,” of Catholic ritual. She is particularly fond of musical metaphors, and the book itself is structured rather like a piece of music, broken into a series of movements with motifs that reoccur throughout, allowing for trills and flurries around familiar themes. Morris will observe some characteristic of the culture, say Spain’s ‘fatal weakness for the past’ and pursue its implications across a variety of field. In architecture: ‘When the French were building in the Gothic style, she was still building Romanesque. When they moved into the Renaissance, she was still building Gothic’ (26); in music ‘no Beethoven symphony was performed in Madrid until 1866; and in observation of social norms ‘a Victorian propriety and formality, too makes the stranger feel that his passage through the mountains has been a passage in time.’
The old-fashionedness of Spain is particularly appealing to Morris because, with her courtly British manners and enthusiasms, she’s an anachronistic figure herself. For the most part she is quick to acknowledge diversity and complexity. Spain, we are told, is ‘the kingdom of exceptions.’ Occasionally, however, she falls back into the objectionable imperial custom of making generalizations in the singular: ‘The Spaniard likes to be sure,’ ‘The Spaniard revels in the minutiae’ (48). If this mode of travel writing has a weakness, it is that we encounter a limited spread of local voices. Cervantes, Phillip II and Franco speak to us from beyond the grave, but the “simple people of the thatched huts” are never heard. Specific conversations or encounters never make it into the text, perhaps because Morris is so concerned with minimising her own presence. This determination means she privileges habitual detail, (what Spain is usually like), over dynamic detail (what Spain was like the day I was there) and, while this makes for stylish prose the price is a certain aloofness, a sense that she writes of human beings in the same way she might describe a canvass by Goya.
This isn’t to say Morris has no interest in the Spanish people or their politics. As the new introduction points out, this is a book about “a particular Spanish time,” the transition to democracy after Franco. If Morris is particularly drawn to pre-modern Spain: the country’s old sayings and folk traditions, its cathedrals and relics, the traces of Paganism in many of its religious practices, it is only because she realises that it is all going to disappear. Morris was writing at the end of Spain’s long isolation from the rest of Europe and was acutely aware that rapid change was at hand, not all of it positive. ‘Already as pastoral Spain retreats before the assaults of our material civilization, you may see the corrosion set in.’ Given that the original text has been supplemented several times, perhaps Faber and Faber, should have dated the new introduction, the prologue and afterword in this version, to make the chronology clear.
A great deal has changed in Spain since this book was written, with the nation now a stable democracy and a member of the European Union. Morris’s misgivings about the future of Spanish civilian government have proved unfounded. These doubts never dampened Morris’s enthusiasm for the country much. She writes of its idiosyncrasies with clear-sightedness and compression, noting ‘the small humped bridges of Spain,’ and its many ‘huge and awful figures of Christ.’ She has a taste for precise enumeration of people and things, the ‘84 benedictine monks of the establishment,’ and the ‘seven arrows in a yoke that formed the crest of Isabel and Ferdinand’ (38). She also has a gift for illustrative anecdote, for finding the perfect case to back up a general observation. The prologue is virtuoso stuff, a whirlwind tour through Spanish history that could have sounded like a textbook, but in Morris’ hands is utterly compelling. Spanish cathedrals, we learn, are built around a coro, ‘a dark, carved boxlike structure that…provides an intellectual focus for the whole building.’ If the nation’s fortune were mapped on an elevation graph, she tells us, they would form an upside down U shape: a long ascent until the 16th century and then a steady decline. At the peak of the curve would be the Escorial; for Morris, this church and palace, built by Phillip II in the Guadarrama Mountains at the height of Spain’s imperial power, is the coro in ‘the great cathedral that is Spain herself’ (9). The building stands for the nation’s ‘taste for the grandiose’ its ‘tragedy’ and ‘lack of fulfillment.’ This intricate opening maneuver, superbly executed, provides us with an image and an atmosphere, so that we do not realise until afterwards that we have just had a history lesson.
Jan Morris teaches as she entertains, giving a masterclass not just on Spain, but on travelling and writing well. Nearly all travel writers espouse the virtues of learning languages, reading voraciously while travelling, and of sharp but sympathetic observation; few are able to focus on the character of a place without ultimately writing about their own ego and idiosyncracies. James/Jan Morris can. We emerge from her book competely unenlightened about the author's sexually ambiguity, but we learn a great deal about Spain.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Song For Night by Chris Abani
Nigerian-born novelist Chris Abani’s fifth work, Song For Night, is one of several recent novels dealing with child soldiers in Africa. Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Dave Egger’s What is the What? and Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone all tackle the topic with varying degrees of subtlety and success. Clearly an appetite exists for these stories in the west. With press reports of genocide in Sudan, systematic sexual abuse of women in Congo hyperinflation and cholera in Zimbabwe, many in the rich world continue to see Africa, like Conrad, as a place of darkness. Can socially engaged literature, then, help us understand the human dimension of this troubled continent without reinforcing stereotypes, or becoming voyeuristic?
Abani argues emphatically that it can. In an impressive address at the 2008 Brisbane Writer’s festival entitled “Ethics and Narrative: The Human and the Other,” he called on novelists “to conjure all of our darkness and all of our light simultaneously” and to recognise “we all stand on the edge of the same abyss.” Words that might sound trite coming from the mouth of a lesser figure carry real weight from Abani. The writer was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured in his home country both for publishing work that was not to the tastes of the ruling dictatorship and for his political activism. He speaks at human rights functions and was recently awarded the PEN/Beyond Margins award. In this novel, however, some of his creative decisions make it difficult for us to fully connect with his protagonist.
The novel’s central figure is My Luck, a fifteen-year-old minesweeper in the Nigerian civil war whose vocal chords have been cut. The same grisly treatment has been meted out to his entire platoon in order to prevent them crying out and disturbing others from their work. Song For Night explore the problem of voicelessness, a nightmarish prose-fiction exploration of the same topic of “Can the Subaltern speak?” Cultural critic Gayatri Spivak’s 1983 essay famously problematised the position of post colonial intellectuals, arguing that their “priviledge is their loss” and that they quickly shift from speaking of the oppressed to speaking for them. Abani, who now lives in the US and teaches creative writing at the University of California is only too aware of this danger. “What you hear is not my voice,” the novel begins self-consciously and then ties itself in knots trying to justify the narrative voice. “You will say I sound too old for my age,’ My Luck tells us, then tries to persuade us otherwise. “ The interiority of the head, he says, “makes you deep beyond your years.” But we never quite believe him and this mars our ability to connect with him for the entire novel. A close third person narrator may have resolved some of these issues, but would have detracted from the novel’s immediacy and visceral punch.
What then of style? The novella, Abani has said in interviews, was written in just three months of feverish late night toil. It reads like it was written quickly, and, at its best this lends the prose a relentlessness and rhythmic intensity:
“I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in the words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it [sic], and I hide and am grateful for my smell, crouched like an animal in that dark hot space (25).” Here the run on sentences conveys the intensity of the experience and the protagonist’s heightened sensory impressions. It is marred by sloppy editing, unfortunately, as are many passages in the book. At one point we find three similes with “like” on a single page: “like a field of cut corn,” “like a loose cotton shift,” “guts like sausages.” In a book of only a little over 150 pages there are 35 very short chapters and all too often section endings are rushed and perfunctory: “I climb a tree and doze,” or “A mosquito bites me. It is getting dark.” The fragmented effect caused by the brief episodes is deliberate, but does it reflect the character’s exhaustion or that of the author, keen to move on to the next chapter while short of ideas on how to conclude this one?
For a story set in a war zone there is a curious lack of urgency to Song For Night. It sounds like a quest narrative: My Luck wanders the bombed out landscape in search of his lost platoon, but because this is literary fiction, the novel is more interested in showing us its character thinking than showing him acting. Thus sensory perception in the present, the smell of food cooking, the sound of gulls and the taste of fish, invariably lead to remembrance of things past. “Every time I eat fish, I remember grandfather’s story of the lake in the middle of the world and the fish that live there.” Every time? Or just this time because the story requires it? It is the choice of first person present tense narration, perhaps, that makes these frequent slippages in time rather awkward.
It is unfortunate that the transitions into the past jar this way because the story of My Luck’s life before the war is vital and interesting. Indeed, it is when Abani leaves the generic post-apocalyptic landscape of the war behind that he begins to teach us something about Nigeria. My Luck’s family, like the country is divided along religious lines, however it is not with his Muslim father or Catholic mother that the boy feels most deeply connected, but with his grandfather whose mythological tales put him in contact with a spiritual tradition that predates either of the imported religions. This is significant given that the civil war springs from a north/south Muslim/Christian conflict. The grandfather’s traditional African values are privileged over those of My Luck’s parent’s generation, and this is as close as the novel comes to a political solution to the bitter religious and ethnic division behind the war.
At least within the context of his family we begin to see the protagonist as someone recognisably human. Abani, however, is determined not to give us any false redemption; rather he wants to show how the human disintegrates in extreme situations. “My art demands a complete ruthlessness from me,” he said in Ethics and Narrative, “and I have to destroy every character that I make.’ In the final third of the novel, as this disintegration takes place, we move from the concrete world of political conflict to a dreamscape: ghosts on the battlefield, a cloud of flies in the shape of a black-winged angel. The suggestion that My Luck is dead or dying allows a lot of hoary old narrative archetypes to be trotted out. He must cross a river, with the help of a guide named Peter and meet a mysterious mother figure.
Does Song for Night succeed, finally, in giving voice to the subaltern? Only in a deeply ambiguous and evasive way. But if we are not fully persuaded by his ventriloquism here, Abani remains a forthright and persuasive spokesman for human rights. This may be a minor work by a major talent, but its ambition and intensity are to be applauded. It makes most contemporary fiction look limp.
Abani argues emphatically that it can. In an impressive address at the 2008 Brisbane Writer’s festival entitled “Ethics and Narrative: The Human and the Other,” he called on novelists “to conjure all of our darkness and all of our light simultaneously” and to recognise “we all stand on the edge of the same abyss.” Words that might sound trite coming from the mouth of a lesser figure carry real weight from Abani. The writer was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured in his home country both for publishing work that was not to the tastes of the ruling dictatorship and for his political activism. He speaks at human rights functions and was recently awarded the PEN/Beyond Margins award. In this novel, however, some of his creative decisions make it difficult for us to fully connect with his protagonist.
The novel’s central figure is My Luck, a fifteen-year-old minesweeper in the Nigerian civil war whose vocal chords have been cut. The same grisly treatment has been meted out to his entire platoon in order to prevent them crying out and disturbing others from their work. Song For Night explore the problem of voicelessness, a nightmarish prose-fiction exploration of the same topic of “Can the Subaltern speak?” Cultural critic Gayatri Spivak’s 1983 essay famously problematised the position of post colonial intellectuals, arguing that their “priviledge is their loss” and that they quickly shift from speaking of the oppressed to speaking for them. Abani, who now lives in the US and teaches creative writing at the University of California is only too aware of this danger. “What you hear is not my voice,” the novel begins self-consciously and then ties itself in knots trying to justify the narrative voice. “You will say I sound too old for my age,’ My Luck tells us, then tries to persuade us otherwise. “ The interiority of the head, he says, “makes you deep beyond your years.” But we never quite believe him and this mars our ability to connect with him for the entire novel. A close third person narrator may have resolved some of these issues, but would have detracted from the novel’s immediacy and visceral punch.
What then of style? The novella, Abani has said in interviews, was written in just three months of feverish late night toil. It reads like it was written quickly, and, at its best this lends the prose a relentlessness and rhythmic intensity:
“I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in the words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it [sic], and I hide and am grateful for my smell, crouched like an animal in that dark hot space (25).” Here the run on sentences conveys the intensity of the experience and the protagonist’s heightened sensory impressions. It is marred by sloppy editing, unfortunately, as are many passages in the book. At one point we find three similes with “like” on a single page: “like a field of cut corn,” “like a loose cotton shift,” “guts like sausages.” In a book of only a little over 150 pages there are 35 very short chapters and all too often section endings are rushed and perfunctory: “I climb a tree and doze,” or “A mosquito bites me. It is getting dark.” The fragmented effect caused by the brief episodes is deliberate, but does it reflect the character’s exhaustion or that of the author, keen to move on to the next chapter while short of ideas on how to conclude this one?
For a story set in a war zone there is a curious lack of urgency to Song For Night. It sounds like a quest narrative: My Luck wanders the bombed out landscape in search of his lost platoon, but because this is literary fiction, the novel is more interested in showing us its character thinking than showing him acting. Thus sensory perception in the present, the smell of food cooking, the sound of gulls and the taste of fish, invariably lead to remembrance of things past. “Every time I eat fish, I remember grandfather’s story of the lake in the middle of the world and the fish that live there.” Every time? Or just this time because the story requires it? It is the choice of first person present tense narration, perhaps, that makes these frequent slippages in time rather awkward.
It is unfortunate that the transitions into the past jar this way because the story of My Luck’s life before the war is vital and interesting. Indeed, it is when Abani leaves the generic post-apocalyptic landscape of the war behind that he begins to teach us something about Nigeria. My Luck’s family, like the country is divided along religious lines, however it is not with his Muslim father or Catholic mother that the boy feels most deeply connected, but with his grandfather whose mythological tales put him in contact with a spiritual tradition that predates either of the imported religions. This is significant given that the civil war springs from a north/south Muslim/Christian conflict. The grandfather’s traditional African values are privileged over those of My Luck’s parent’s generation, and this is as close as the novel comes to a political solution to the bitter religious and ethnic division behind the war.
At least within the context of his family we begin to see the protagonist as someone recognisably human. Abani, however, is determined not to give us any false redemption; rather he wants to show how the human disintegrates in extreme situations. “My art demands a complete ruthlessness from me,” he said in Ethics and Narrative, “and I have to destroy every character that I make.’ In the final third of the novel, as this disintegration takes place, we move from the concrete world of political conflict to a dreamscape: ghosts on the battlefield, a cloud of flies in the shape of a black-winged angel. The suggestion that My Luck is dead or dying allows a lot of hoary old narrative archetypes to be trotted out. He must cross a river, with the help of a guide named Peter and meet a mysterious mother figure.
Does Song for Night succeed, finally, in giving voice to the subaltern? Only in a deeply ambiguous and evasive way. But if we are not fully persuaded by his ventriloquism here, Abani remains a forthright and persuasive spokesman for human rights. This may be a minor work by a major talent, but its ambition and intensity are to be applauded. It makes most contemporary fiction look limp.
The what and the why
In 2009 I'm going to write a short report on everything I read (road signs, newspapers and banner ads excluded). This is essentially what undergraduate arts courses do at university, the difference is I get to choose the set texts. It won't necessarily be a complete review, and may simply pick up on one important or interesting characteristic of each reading. It's about noticing, more than anything, forced attentiveness.
Why do this? 1. To force myself to read selectively and hopefully more systematically (by grouping texts for review by theme), 2. To force myself to pay attention to what is happening in texts at sentence level, 3. To force me to formulate an opinion on what constitutes good writing, 4. To share and compare ideas with others online who might be interested.
That may sound like a lot of forcing, but the process actually ought to be enjoyable. There is no obligation to read a lot of books, or even to read anything particularly intellectual. Reading thoroughly and well is the aim of the exercise, and since reading and writing are closely interrelated skills, also to learn something about writing.
James
Why do this? 1. To force myself to read selectively and hopefully more systematically (by grouping texts for review by theme), 2. To force myself to pay attention to what is happening in texts at sentence level, 3. To force me to formulate an opinion on what constitutes good writing, 4. To share and compare ideas with others online who might be interested.
That may sound like a lot of forcing, but the process actually ought to be enjoyable. There is no obligation to read a lot of books, or even to read anything particularly intellectual. Reading thoroughly and well is the aim of the exercise, and since reading and writing are closely interrelated skills, also to learn something about writing.
James
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