Poetry reviews: Joy Harjo, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley and George Szirtes

This is a reprint of a review I wrote for Poetry Review earlier this year.

• Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
• Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, When the Wanderers Come Home
• George Szirtes, Mapping the Delta

Roots and belonging, journeys and homecoming, the fallout from conflict, the raging political self and the devastated personal self all feature in these three topical collections. Joy Harjo sings the long song of Native American history with bluesy devotion, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley returns to her native Liberia from America to scour the remains, collect war stories and find herself while George Szirtes watches with an ironical eye as people come and go, falling in love, travelling, experiencing bereavement and somehow moving on.

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is a fierce summoning, opening not so much with a dedication as an anointing: “Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries”. Joy Harjo’s elision of poetry, song, activism, physical movement, lament and prophecy imbues her collection with an exhilarating vitality. Harjo is a Creek Nation Native American, yet she does not write resigned elegies to a lost people or an erased culture. Instead, her identity gives her poetic voice a hearty survivalism, an earthy constancy and great humour. In ‘Calling The Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth in its Human Feet’ she counsels the reader in a magazine list of half ironic affirmations, rejecting self pity in favour of the larger story of group survival: “Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short./ Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.”

Harjo’s poems jazz-step from one to the next, with evocations of cool urban life interspersed with untitled, dry, best-friend jokes like “Do not feed the monsters./ Some are wandering thought forms, looking for a place to set up house” and stunning natural imagery in which a panther “is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart charged by four winds of four directions”, as in the long title poem at the heart of the collection.

In easily flowing conversational lines, Harjo fuses the mythic with the realist, the sentimental with the elemental. In ‘Talking With The Sun’ she comments casually, “I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square at dawn to find the sun.” Yet she is no idler; the walk is part of a ritual to present her fourth granddaughter “to the sun, as a relative, as one of us.” The poem closes with her, the sun and the baby joined in “this connection, this promise.”

Connection is the driving impulse behind this collection, which is full of images of singing and dancing and invitations to a collective celebration, where even sorrow is shared. In ‘Mother Field’ the narrator can’t resist “the music humping through the door” of a bar. Later, in a brilliant image, she writes that “Midnight is a horn player warmed up tight for the last set.” Like a consummate band leader the collection carries us through the darkness, just as Harjo instructed in that early poem. It ends, indeed, with a lovely tribute called ‘Sunrise’, in which we all “move with the lightness of being, and we will go/ Where there’s a place for us.”

In Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s powerful When The Wanderers Come Home, the search for a place of arrival, self-recognition and remembrance continues, but doesn’t find a resting place. Wesley was born in Liberia but settled in America; this pained and poignant collection focuses on her return to Liberia. She traces relatives, interviews women war survivors and figuratively and literally searches through the detritus of violence, poverty and natural decay to uncover the past. In ‘Erecting Stones’ the past is fragmented, “trash”, “debris”, “broken pieces” mixed up with “remnants of bombs…missile splinters, old pieces of shells.”

In ‘Coming Home’ Wesley describes “dust from the past,/ eating away the present” and indeed the whole collection carries a note of wariness, a fear of imminent violence, of impermanence and mistrust in which history is always threatening to repeat itself and “Liberia smells again of corpses” (‘Send Me Some Black Clothes’). In the aftermath of violence, the text crawls with images of decay, of consumption by scorpions, locusts and termites, “the eater of all life”. Wesley sees herself not as a noble witness or a returning countrywoman but “an outsider, at the doorpost” (‘So I Stand Here’) who is “standing among caskets” (‘Send Me Some Black Clothes’), “a lone traveller/ without a country” (‘In My Dream’).

The Liberia of Wesley’s childhood has been transformed into a place of numb, shell-shocked survivors – “death was more alive than us,” she writes, devastatingly, in ‘The Cities We Lost’. In ‘Becoming Ghost’ she conducts interviews with women who have survived unimaginable abuses and considers “how each one of us carries between our/ breasts, stories no one will believe.” Despite the brokenness of what she describes, Wesley’s poetic form is smooth and steady, the neat stanzas and non-rhyming couplets capably containing the most shocking revelations. The horror is belied, however, by the line breaks, which do not occur at the natural end of a thought or image but as a gasp of awful realisation – as when the sun falls “on the backs of children/ who may never grow up” (‘I Go Home’).

Wesley pays particular tribute to women’s resilience, from the South African protest singer Miriam Makeba whose band’s records sounded “as though its players were born playing” to an ode to Hurricane Sandy, in which she jokes that “A woman by herself is category 7 hurricane.” There are further works written on journeys to and from Colombia, Libya, America and Morocco, but at heart When the Wanderers Come Home is a grieving love letter to Liberia, a country that contains her story just as she tries to contain all its stories, woman and country intertwined like “branches and limbs of the same oak” (‘When Monrovia Rises’).

Both When the Wanderers Come Home and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings express the determination to pay testimony and bear witness, sorrow at the repetitiveness of human cruelty and the ferocious optimism of artists determined to resist, rebuild and revive. Joy Harjo collects us in a defiant party against the darkness while Patricia Jabbeh Wesley carefully pieces together the lost stories of the living dead. Meanwhile, George Szirtes offers an airily delicate and tender take on belonging. Mapping the Delta portrays human life as a precious daily struggle of small victories in which human encounters like love affairs, artistic anxiety, hotel stays and hospital visits are bright pinpricks compared to the inscrutable largesse of nature. Mapping the Delta is a subtle, panoramic work which starts with the distant but affectionate focus of the title poem, in which time and tide literally wait for no man:

The river was charted but now the tide rises

and presses on and moves between tongues

of land to emerge in a mouth that blazes

with its own ideas, its own flickering songs.

(Mapping the Delta)

The happy idea of the natural world singing, of the earth generating its own verses in its own language, flows through the collection, as does the appreciation for conversation generally. There are constant references to social groups, singing and lively banter : a crowd in a cinema queuing excitedly to watch an early talkie, a drunk man muttering in a bar. ‘The Voices’ is a daft riot in which the night streets reverberate with voices “shouting nonsense…reiterations, cries, endless repeats”, its easy rhymes – floor/door/more, stairs/bears/affairs – creating a riddling verse that is both a descriptive celebration and an expression of human exuberance.

Compared to messy humanity, nature is sober, eloquent and a good listener. In ‘Listening to the Weather’ the narrator imagines an entire landscape focused on the sound of itself as the rains break and “words poured/ out of drains into gardens”. The landscape is in dignified private conversation with itself: “when the winds spoke…the rain heard.” The earth is sentient, while seemingly still things are full of tension: “The lake strained to hear/ the utterances of light”.

Despite the impeccable, featherweight construction of the poems, their breathy rhythm and modish references to everyone from Elaine Feinstein and Auden to Bruno Schulz, Chet Baker, Bartók and Rembrandt, this is not a whimsical metropolitan amusement.  Mapping the Delta touches upon nearly every meaningful human experience, every ‘moment’ in a lifespan, from falling in love to losing a parent – as in the beautiful, long sequence The Yellow Room, Szirtes’s cautious and ambivalent rumination on his late father, “you mystery, father of diminishing returns”.

Mapping the Delta wears its emotionalism lightly and its beautiful images modestly. Best of all, it carries its sweet hope and garrulous humour with life-affirming pride; an important corrective when so much else in the world seems dark and devastated.

On Elle, Paul Verhoeven, rape and apologism

This is an extended version of my Guardian article from March 2017.

Rape apologists: do you like the cinema? Have you always suspected that women secretly want to be stalked, brutalised and raped? And that the biggest most callous womanhaters on the planet are not men, but women themselves? Then brace yourselves for a celluloid treat.

The film Elle opened in the UK earlier this year and has received rapturous praise,  trailing five star reviews and an Oscar nomination for its star, Isabelle Huppert, who is “utterly arresting” (Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian), “exhilarating…bottomlessly impressive” (Robbie Collin in the Telegraph) and has an “astonishing, almost terrifying talent” (A O Scott in the NY Times).

Huppert is all those things and Elle gives her a lot to do and say, alongside an excellent cast working with a full, dynamic script. But that is separate from the toxicity of the film’s gender politics. Indeed the praise, from an overwhelmingly male critical establishment, shows how entrenched and unquestioned rape culture is.  The film is described as controversial –  but there is nothing controversial about men turning rape into an ambiguous act in which women victims are portrayed as duplicitous, untrustworthy and perverse. All over the world, men rape. And all over the world, other men collude to misconstrue the attack in a way that minimises the rape, muddies the context, excuses the perpetrator and imputes shady motivations to the victim. It happens in court rooms and companies, house parties and political parties, corporate workplaces – and film companies. Elle is no different.

In this “rape revenge comedy” the central character Michele, played by Huppert, does not seek revenge against her rapist. Quite the opposite: she tries to escalate her connection to the rapist once she finds out who he is. And there is no comedy in watching a brilliant performer act out demeaning slanders created by men: Philippe Dijan, who wrote the original novel; Harold Manning, who did the French story adaptation ; Said Ben Said and Michel Merkt, who produced the film; David Birke, who wrote the screenplay; and Paul Verhoeven, who directed the film.  

Verhoeven has spoken about how hard it was getting the film made because no US actors would take on the lead role, as if they suffered from some kind of inner female cowardice. Perhaps they were, instead, galled and insulted to read a script bubbling over with facetious speculation about a rape survivor’s psyche. Perhaps they have disdain for a previous film of Verhoeven’s, Showgirls, where the camera lingers greedily over the brutal rape of a young costume designer by a celebrity who gets away with it.

With its beautiful interiors, great clothes and virtually all-white cast, Elle has the same Misogyny: The Lifestyle Edit vibe as Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, another highly praised piece of work in which all the women are mocked, stripped, raped, humiliated, betrayed or murdered. But Elle goes further, ascribing to women a masochistic pathology which somehow excuses the abuse that men choose to perpetrate. Despite Michele’s ex having beaten her, she tells him, “We should still be together.” 

In Elle, the ferocious hatred behind men’s sexual violence is nothing compared to women’s masochism, misogyny, venality and irrationality. Men’s brutality is presented as uncomplicated, even attractively virile, while women are apologists for it. Be warned – there are spoilers ahead.

The film opens with Michele being viciously beaten and raped in her Paris home. After a frown of surprise and a day of PTSD, it’s back to life as usual. Michele runs a video game company developing a product in which a woman is raped by a tentacled monster. The victim groans in pleasure but Michele is not happy: “The orgasmic convulsions are not strong enough.”

Michelle and her female friends repeatedly refer to her son’s girlfriend as a “slut”. The young woman is presented as a screaming nag and then shown to be, indeed, “a little slut” when she gives birth to a baby who is clearly mixed race; the dark-skinned baby is used as a racist sight-gag in a film where racial mixing is a greater outrage than rape. The son himself is a womanhater, both physically and verbally threatening towards his girlfriend and his mother, but this male violence is depicted and passed off as the passion of a man pushed to the brink by the women’s behaviour.

Michele is represented as a spiteful, sneaky woman-betrayer with an eye for her friends’ partners. She is disgusted by her mother, who is portrayed as a deluded grotesque who still has a soft spot for Michele’s father, who was a serial killer (yep). Meanwhile, Michele’s neighbour is a wholesome religious maniac who insists upon saying grace before dinner. But don’t worry, her naivety gets its comeuppance.

There are some moments of psychological truthfulness: Michele’s numbness in the immediate aftermath of the attack, which lead her friends to think she is “bravely soldiering on”; her aversion and cynicism about going to the police; the flashbacks and brief fantasy of having fought back; the impulse to buy mace and an axe and enrol at a gun range. And, most correct and chilling of all, the fact that the perpetrators are functional, outwardly nice guys – friends, colleagues, relatives, family men.  

But then it gets really gonzo, like full-on Rapist Polanski Brian de Palma Ken Russell sexploitation shtick. When the rapist attacks again, Michele fights back, unmasks him and it’s lust at first sight. Her terror turns to rapture, the fear in her eyes becomes a smoulder of interest. She pursues him with the raw zeal of an unhinged cougar in a ludicrous psychosexual potboiler dreamed up by a club of men who have clearly never listened to an actual rape survivor in all their lives.  The ultimate message, delivered with a smirking shrug, seems to be: men may be bastards, but ladies be crazy! Michele even refers to herself handily as a “psychopath” when recalling a childhood memory of colluding with her father before his arrest.

In Elle, abusive men are depicted as the real victims of women’s demented caprices, while women are portrayed as complicit in their own abuse, as wanting it, engineering it, deliberately provoking it. “The whole ridiculous situation is unbearable,” says Michele at some point, accurately. Soon after discovering the rapist’s identity, Michele has a car accident. She calls the rapist as if he's a friend of hers, and he tenderly bandages her leg while she talks to him in a baiting yet minxy way. Later, during a party, he invites her to the basement and attacks her for a third time, smashing her head against the wall, and she loves it. “Do it!” she cries, prostrating herself – but that turns him off, because he likes to really rape. She eventually induces him to find some inner strength and finish the job, and her orgasmic throes earn a telling look ofopen disgust from him. 

Indeed, rank, puzzled revulsion at women’s cravenness is the alpha and omega of the film. In Elle, the only person who enjoys rape more than the rapist is the victim and good old-fashioned male violence is more honest than base, twisted female psychology. 

In a punch in the face to all survivors of men’s endemic sexual violence, the filmmakers have recast the perpetrator and his victim as being in some kind of relationship or affair driven by her masochism, in which his abusiveness is simply a necessary fuel. “What’s between us, it’s sick,” she sighs as he, miraculously transformed from terrifying rapist to sullen lover, drives her home like they’re a couple. 

It’s a classic, malicious lie, invented by men: that rape awakens women’s sexuality.

Watching Elle, I wondered if Verhoeven or his male club know any women. Do they know that we are not like this, that this is not how we react, think, feel, behave? Do they know what it’s like to survive male abuse, even as a woman as cool and capable as Michele?

Why has the critical reception been so wholeheartedly approving? There was outrage when it was revealed that the actress Maria Schneider was abused onscreen when filming the rape scene in Last Tango In Paris and that the film’s director Bernardo Bertolucci and star Marlon Brando had colluded to set her up and violate and abuse her on camera and film her horror. Why not with Elle? Is it that Bertolucci and Brando are dead, reputations still intact, but misogynist critics don’t want to impede Verhoeven’s progress as a man in the world – because bros before hos? Is it that Elle is too ludicrous to take seriously? Or too confidently presented to be challenged? Surely critics aren’t afraid of speaking up, out of fear that they will look like an unfashionable prude who doesn’t get with Elle’s pacy, racy provocation?

Or perhaps it’s much simpler than that, and after centuries of patriarchy, endemic male sexual violence, victim-blaming, rape myths and male impunity on screen, in life and in court, viewers are genuinely 100% five star fine with unrestrainedly lauding a film in which a woman loves to be beaten and raped.

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

An Untamed State (2014) seems like a simple novel. The scenes are short, the language neat and supple, the cast and settings leanly described. It tells the story of Mireille Jameson, an American immigration lawyer of Haitian descent, who visits her parents’ Port au Prince mansion for a holiday. She is snatched from her car, kidnapped by a gang and held for nearly a fortnight while her father refuses to pay the ransom. During that fortnight she is gang raped, tortured, starved and tormented in countless ways both physical and psychological. When she is finally released, she must rejoin her family is what is now “the after”, the world of “the living”.

The descriptions of what Mireille is subjected to are unsparing and steady. While the perpetrators exult in the pain and horror of their own actions, the author does not. The true violence of the novel, a violence matched by its artistic sophistication and psychological depth, collects slowly and holistically around the details Roxane Gay gives of Mireille’s life before and afterwards. 

At the beginning of An Untamed State Mireille Jameson is, as she freely says, living out a “fairytale” of triumphantly conventional sexuality, race and class. Married to a handsome, sexy white man, she has taken his surname as her own, is bringing up their son and has nursed his ageing mother through cancer. Mireille’s own mother is a submissive whose chief pleasure and only role is supporting her husband. One generation on, despite her own career Mireille is also a female submissive, a Mrs Mansname devoted to her male partner and male child, unquestioningly caring for her own mother-in-law because that is what a good girl does to help her husband’s family. Mireille worships her father.

In terms of race Mireille is a black American success story with an adorably on-trend mixed race son. She is the well-educated, high-achieving daughter of immigrants from large families, who both survived painfully hardscrabble existences on the edges of the American working world, marginalised, underestimated and discriminated against. Mireille’s father’s great pride is that he has returned to Haiti to establish a lucrative building firm which makes him a wealthy and powerful man. As an immigration lawyer, Mireille does not serve individual men but goes one further and supports The Man – the capitalist American Dream in all its glory, assisting people of all colours and nations, who “build all their hopes on the promise of living in this country.”

Mireille and her husband Michael live a charmed existence “drunk on the happiness of too much money” in Miami. Gay has fun describing their painfully self-conscious dinner parties with friends, “some of whom we like and many of whom we hated”, eating food from recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines and enjoying “pretentious but interesting conversation.” But even in these early scenes of the novel, the paradise-like “before” bathed in the glow of a Miami sunset, Gay hints at the loneliness of being second-generation in a society where classic, crass American ignorance and American arrogance combine to make Mireille unplaceable, “not from the slums or the countryside”. The Haiti known to America is a place of natural disasters, male violence, political corruption and tragic inequality. Mireille rails against this stereotype, until she is kidnapped by it. 

An Untamed State is excellent on place and on the precarious safety of home. A stable and secure sense of home is perilously achieved and cautiously maintained for Americans and Haitians alike. Mireille and Michael have taken their dual income lifestyle and carefully carved a winners’ tale out of the vastness, variety and rabid competitiveness of contemporary America. They live insulated behind high walls, their yards perpetually watered by sprinklers, their only child cared for by a Latina nanny. Their America is a far cry from that of Michael’s parents’ complacent white rural existence or Mireille’s parents’ early urban struggle. Equally, the family’s trips to Haiti do not constitute the easiest of homecomings. Mireille’s father has attained wealth, not been born to it, and he guards it zealously, with pride and arrogance as well as skill and self-control. On the other side of his own high walls, security gates and long driveway is staggering poverty; Mireille’s pleasure in her parents’ country is a source of disgust to Michael, who cannot forget its inequalities. Michael, for his part, behaves boorishly with his in-laws and patronisingly with poor locals, uncomprehending, unworldly and out of his depth in both scenarios. Michael’s unease at the inequality he sees, which Mireille and her family are in denial about, is vindicated by Mireille’s kidnapping and by the wound-up, wounded fury of the men who abuse her. Despite the men’s own extortion and profligacy and their abusive domination of the impoverished streets and people around them, they are obsessed and chagrined by the visible, exceptional wealth of men like Mireille’s father. 

The novel demonstrates that a person’s idea of home is never wholly safe, being dictated by emotional rather than physical factors. After the kidnapping, Mireille loses her sense of Haiti as being home, not because of the perpetrators’ actions but because of her own father’s callousness. With the death of her love for him comes the death of her love for his house, his city, his country. The culmination of Mireille’s experiences and reactions is externalised and expressed in a powerful compound image: that of an earthquake in Haiti. The body of the land has been “split open” just as Mireille has been and the general populace is “hungry, hungering”, just as  Mireille is described as being in the aftermath of the kidnapping. Mireille’s psychological and physical collapse, her family’s emotional collapse and her country’s literal collapse are all conflated into one definitive and catastrophic end of an era and identity, until “I saw no part of myself in the country I once called home.”

An Untamed State offers reality, not retribution, not natural justice, not a final balancing-out of karma. Survival, recovery and the inane language of ‘moving on’ and ‘making peace’ are exchanged for emotional honesty and graphic psychological, not physical, detail. The second half of the novel tolls with Mireille’s assertions of being dead, chained, leashed or caged, of being imprisoned in an underworld. It examines the time ‘afterwards’ without the irritations of romanticism and with its own dark ironies. It might take exceptional strength to survive what Mireille has, but survival doesn’t feel like any kind of triumph in comparison with what has been taken from her. Despite everything that has happened to her, she still lives in a conventional patriarchy in which she is required to be “calm” and “rational”, not “garish” in her anger; she is still required to behave like a good girl who has family duties and must perform as a wife and mother. Despite everything that has happened to her, in the immediate aftermath Michael’s ‘really nice egalitarian kind of guy’ act takes about three days to crumble and reveal a self-absorbed, self-pitying man who resents having to be selflessly considerate to his raped wife and thinks that he himself is the real victim, to whom something bad has been done.

I am not a survivor of kidnapping, torture or gang rape – this is what I did survive and it was subtler and more perverse than the ordeal Gay describes – but some of the trauma effects that Mireille undergoes are recognisable. There is the physical nausea, the crawling skin, the changed appearance, the feeling of being dirty, the sensation of life splitting into Before and After. There is the sizzling, implacable rage and impotence and confusion. There is the craven fear that dogs you night and day. There is the total and utter soul-scraping horror and humiliation and soul-theft that makes a joke of everything you achieve afterwards. An Untamed State shows how literal descriptions of sexual violation and mental and physical torture cannot get close to demonstrating what it does deep inside, how this kind of abuse destroys something which is so fundamental, so privately held and so necessary to the wholeness and dignity of the soul that its loss is a type of murder. There is an astounding scene just a few pages from the end of An Untamed State which reveals the falseness of recovery and self-reclamation, when a victim is so powerfully triggered that the years of the aftermath are instantly undone: “I remembered everything he did to me. The memories filled my body at once, threatened to spread through me like a malignancy, destroying everything I had done to become closer to alive again.” 

An Untamed State is brilliant at revealing the many layers of patriarchy which oppress women (sometimes subtly, sometimes openly and traumatically) by infiltrating every layer of society. Michael’s early courtship of Mireille involves him intruding frattishly on her personal space, cocky and full of sexual entitlement. Their first sexual encounter is crude, a laddish Hollywood director’s idea of an exciting scene. In his assumption of Mireille’s accessibility to him, Michael is not very different from her kidnappers. Then there is the shocking ease with which Mireille’s father allows her to be kept and tortured for days while he upholds some principle about refusing to capitulate to the kidnappers; his idea of himself is more important to him than the real existence of his daughter as a human being. There is the bullying of doctors who want to force Mireille to be examined after her kidnapping. 

The cocky dude who always gets what he wants, the withholding father whose ego and pride are worth more than his daughter’s safety, the sadistic torturer with a knife, the arrogant doctor with no human empathy, the self-pitying rapist who sees himself as a seducer: they all abuse, control, betray or exploit women. Mireille herself is not exempt from the misogyny of the society in which she has been brought up. In the half-light of the novel’s happyish ending she reveals that she and Michael have used a surrogate to have another child; the casual rental and targeted use of another woman’s body is presented without irony as a good solution for an upwardly mobile couple absorbed in their own suffering.

An Untamed State is a novel about Haiti which is a novel about everywhere; a novel about inequality and poverty in one place which is about angry men’s violence in all places; a novel about one family which is a novel about every patriarch who ever lived, from the 1st century to the 21st; a novel about one fortnight of male sexual violence which is about every instance of that endemic abuse which happens all day, every day, everywhere in the world, regardless of the wealth or language or religion or colour or class of the perpetrators. It is for this reason that the book is so powerful in its dedication to “women, the world over.”

Laugh ‘til you cry, cry ‘til you laugh: The Small Hours by Susie Boyt

No good deed goes unpunished. That is the dark conclusion of Boyt’s brilliant tragicomedy of charitable intentions and damaged histories. Heroine Harriet Mansfield is a blousy woman of big emotions and large scale, strong in intention, rich in feeling, emphatic in speech, full-bodied both literally and spiritually. She wants to open a nursery in a poncy part of town and conjure up a perfect girlsworld of harvest baskets, under-fives woodworking sessions and dress-up games, far from the twinge of WiFi and the smell of crisps. Her desire is to be Dream Proxy Mommy to a cohort of privileged little girls who’ll remember the institution for the rest of their (consequently) happy lives. It does not take the godfather of psychoanalysis to work out that this is because she herself had an unhappy childhood, but the forensic way in which Boyt explores Harriet’s karmically restitutional urge is sheer genius.

Using money from an inheritance and wordlessly encouraged by her enigmatic shrink – Boyt is brilliant on the agonies of successful psychotherapy in the early pages of the novel – Harriet opens the nursery. It’s a success: to break even you only need half a dozen pupils if they’re all rich. Then stuff happens.

Though providing much delight, in both sincerely heart-warming and satirically keen ways, the nursery is not the locus of the meaningful action. That occurs on the periphery and concerns Harriet’s parents and brother. The crucial, toxic events of Harriet’s life actually happened in the past and it’s an indication of Boyt’s excellence that the reader, so caught up in the jolly romp of Harriet-the-schoolmistress, does not notice the foreboding elements encroaching from the outskirts until it’s too late. 

The Small Hours, as the title indicates, is about what happens in the gaps between our survival strategies, the long nights when the nursery is not full of children, the weekends when Harriet’s professional acumen is unneeded, the intervals between lessons and the moments before and after grand endeavours. It explores the generational after-effects of abuse, the never-ending fractal of consequences, the way adults betray children – and, of course, the positive way in which damaged adults vow to nurture future generations.

And at the same time it’s really funny.

The psychological precision of this novel is breathtaking. Boyt’s greatest accomplishment is her creation of Harriet, an eccentric, humorous and perceptive adult who is humiliated by the cruelty of others yet whose own sincerity remains undiminished. Harriet understands her own pathology and sees herself as a wounded healer, a pained Pied Piper leading Holland Park’s children out of the darkness and into the light. Her striving nature, friendliness, energy, sensuality, emotional sensitivity and crushed yet accurate intelligence make her a heroine amongst children. Somehow, they can tell that she is benign. Yet her desire to give love overwhelms her more circumspect adult peers. She is not afraid of embarrassing herself and yet, funnily, this largeness of soul embarrasses others. And so it goes on in a never-ending loop of delicious comic irony.

Apart from the nice staff members at the nursery many of the adults in the Small Hours are spiritually ugly, emotionally mean and morally poor, particularly those who’ve benefited from the greatest financial privilege and exhibit the most outward stylishness. Being two-faced themselves, they mistrust Harriet’s transparency. She in turn is acutely aware of the way her grand candour makes the timid feel awkward and the asinine feel superior. And their perverted and agonising misinterpretation of her successfully makes her self-conscious and therefore ungainly.

Part of the clever pain of The Small Hours is watching Harriet ask plainly honest questions, offer love and seek answers only to have her wholesomeness met with irritation, contempt and aversion by those who are just as damaged yet far more defensive than she is. As I read the novel I kept thinking, Harriet thinks of herself as huge and desperate and clumsy. I bet, if I were to meet her, she would be the opposite. Harriet’s brother, an uptight tightwad, has projected his own trauma onto her; everything she does riles him, because he is riled by his own past, of which she is a reminder. Because he never shows his emotions, when she shows a tiny bit of hers they seem elephantine by comparison. 

And I haven’t even started on the mother. Or the dad.

Finally, every sentence of this novel is at once a bitingly witty summation and a deadpan indictment of the brutality of life. If I quoted the sharpest bits I’d wind up reproducing the whole thing. I haven’t, deliberately. Go and buy it.

The Small Hours by Susie Boyt is published by Virago but why don't you go straight to Amazon instead?

Even the rich suffer: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

It’s wonderful watching the toxic posh get their comeuppance. Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize and is a masterwork of precision malice, a poisoned cocktail of high bourgeoisie, low motives, brittle manners and mean assumptions.

Swimming Home takes a series of cultural clichés and class, sex and national stereotypes and leaves them to fester in the summer sun until all the toxic matter oozes out. Nobody deserves this literary karma more than Levy’s cast of characters: an arrogant and sleazy poet, a desperately gauche pubescent daughter in a clangingly symbolic cherry print bikini, a bickering couple who own a boho antiques shop and a passive aggressive war reporter who’s traumatised from witnessing other people’s suffering. And there is no more apt place for them to confront their own and each other’s whiny demons than the kind of shabby chic villa you find littering the hills of Tuscany and the groves of Provence, full of braying British foodies.   

Swimming Home is set in a Mediterranean village of international crapsters, pretentious bohemians, uptight Eurochic and hateful and hate-filled locals. All are provincial and parochial clichés and the general plot of the novel is a cliché too: a group of frenemies renting a holiday home, whose dynamics are disrupted by the arrival of a beautiful young woman of mysterious motive. Anyone who’s watched Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty or Ozon’s Swimming Pool will recognise this set-up instantly. And anyone who’s been to a place like that, on a holiday like that, with people like that, will know that clichés are sometimes true.

Levy is brilliant at taking this much-used template and examining its self-conscious constructions and falsities. All of the older characters are quite deliberately enacting roles, both as individuals and as parts of the group. Privately, they chafe against these fake and thin identities, wondering how they have become trapped inside them. They are appalled at how their past, immense but unspeakable, has ossified around them. Publicly, they express their discomfort through vicious power-plays, mental battles, verbal barbs over the dinner table, insults disguised as jokes, egotistical bluster and brittle, small, symbolic acts of unwillingness or resistance.

This collection of unlikeables and insufferables thoroughly deserves to be drawn into some summertime mind-games. Enter Kitty Finch, who is also at the villa due to an apparent mix-up in rental dates. Kitty is every poor-little-lost-girl cliché you can think of: skinny, sexy, tough-but-vulnerable, dim yet scheming, crackers, manipulative, deceitful, hot but demonic. Even her name is revoltingly, self-consciously fake and minor: a little scratchy cat and a flighty little bird. Through her, the reader can see every damaged ingénue of page and screen, yet in Levy’s expert hands this interloper is shot through with terrible fragility and a sinister edge. Kitty Finch is a good old-fashioned man-worshipper, a grovelling groupie and a coquette who pretends not to be.

I won’t reveal how the poison plays out once everyone’s in place. That would blunt the cold sharp steel of Levy’s story and undercut the effect of its beautiful language. There is one more thing to point out, and it shows Levy’s brilliance at finding a false idea and stabbing it: the trope of a beautiful young woman arriving to disrupt the social and sexual dynamics of a bunch of villa-renting olive-eaters with her untrammelled foxy moxy voodoo lady-mojo is itself a literary delusion. In reality, gamine young women do not have any sexual power, do not wield decisive influence in psychological games, do not and cannot manipulate other people and do not have events centring around them. They are, instead, treated as bimbos and objects: leered at, harassed, exploited, groomed, pimped, used, abused, raped, objectified and then passed off as teases, liars, hysterics, attention-seekers or mad when they speak up. Beauty and sexiness in very young women seem powerful but are not; instead of being wily minxes, these girls are disempowered, isolated and insecure. They have no power to compel, and are victims. Levy smartly, lightly layers all of these images into her construction of Kitty, whose grovelling submissiveness towards the poet is matched only by his sleazy, pathetic susceptibility.

All these nasty people get exactly what they deserve and Levy delivers them to their fates in frozen, perfect, precise prose. Swimming Home is a brilliant novel about awful people; an absorbing narrative about the self-absorbed, whose pain never loses its tinge of pretension.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy is published by And Other Stories, a small and brilliant press producing gorgeous contemporary books by some of the world most gifted thinkers. And Other Stories, if you're reading this, I would love to make some gorgeous volume with you.

Reflecting badly on horror: Dolly by Susan Hill

Spoiler alert: contains plot hints.

Does anyone do it better than Susan Hill? Give her a remote house, a graveyard, an attic with an iron-framed bed, some bad weather, circling birds and a childless mother or a motherless child and she’ll give you three hundred pages of expert ghastliness. Dead or ghostlike children, live or lifelike dolls, mirrors that reveal a true face, unjustly buried things trying to get out, unfairly banished things trying to get in, cots and rocking chairs that rock themselves, dead people who’ve lost something returning to look for it… we know what world we’re in.

Hill’s versatility as a literary novelist is well-known but there is a special, chilly pocket of appreciation reserved for her ghost stories The Man in the Picture, The Small Hand, The Mist in the Mirror and perhaps the most famous of all, The Woman in Black, which is onstage and onscreen as well as on the page.

Here’s an indiscreet anecdote from a namedropping writer colleague: “I’m friends with Susan Hill. If you’re worried about money, get a play on. The Woman in Black’s been showing for ever and Susan was telling me it makes so much money she doesn’t know what to do with it.”

Dolly is a long short story, beautifully presented as a black and green pocket hardback by Profile books. It performs the same clever Halloween trick as Hill’s other works, taking all the staples of historic horror and ghost genres and delivering something that is completely predictable, symmetrical and seemingly obvious. Yet it is Hill’s storytelling skill itself that makes these stories seem like they’ve been around forever and are part of some deep national dread.  

Here’s a comment from another colleague, a brilliant writer to whom I was praising Dolly but wondering why we need an old house and no Net for a proper horror story: 
“We need to strip away the modern for true horror because technology isn’t frightening,” she said.

“A literary editor once said to me, ‘No-one wants to read about people texting,’” I said.

“Well – screens might be frightening, people climbing out of them or going into them.”

“Like that Japanese film, The Ring.” 

“But what’s really frightening is people.”

“Or things behaving like people, or bad people pretending to be good people and getting away with it. Or wearing a mask in full view. Have you read the Freud essay, The Truth of Masks? It’s about how disguises are real. We choose the disguise that we think hides us, but we subconsciously choose the thing that reveals our true face.”

“…Or people pretending to be people you know. I once received a lovely letter from a young reader – I write for children – and she told me one of her most horrible dreams. She told me there was someone in her room, and she thought it was her mother. It looked like her mother. And she got close to it and suddenly it said, ‘I’m not your mother.’ And then, the girl wrote, ‘She took me to her cold dark nest.’ Isn’t that the phrase? ‘Cold dark nest.’ She was a writer’s daughter of course, her mother’s a writer, it starts so young.”

In Dolly, two children go to stay at an old house inhabited by a sullen housekeeper and a well-meaning but distant aunt. One child is a diffident and uninteresting little boy, who narrates the story as a grown-up. The other is a fiery, spoilt, unhappy girl whose flighty, frivolous (etc) mother has abandoned her. This girl, Leonora, wants a doll for her birthday. She doesn’t get the one she wants, expresses her rage in a jarringly ugly and ungrateful manner, and then…. There are no thrills or spills with Dolly, merely a momentary act of crude brattishness which is quickly forgotten by the young perpetrator but punished cruelly for decades afterwards by …well… and revealed with implacable, predictable (but no less affecting) calmness.

Dolly is about consequences, about the real monster not being the person or thing you thought it was, about the punishment being much greater than the crime and unfairly and disproportionately affecting many more people than just the perpetrator. It’s about the suffering of innocents and sometimes their revenge. The suffering comes out in twos: there are the two original children, each of whom has a daughter, and there are not one but two dolls, and there may be two or more perpetrators, and two of them might be the dolls – or maybe the dolls are merely reflecting the malice of Fate or the bitterness and pique of a grown adult who’s been hurt – or maybe it’s a very hard lesson that little girls shouldn’t misbehave….

At once frozen and hokey, underpowered yet overbaked, perverse yet obvious, smooth and inexorable, it’s also horribly satisfying. Yet the underlying (and I am sure, subconscious) politics of the story leave a bad impression. Though narrated by a male character, the story is about the nastiness, pettiness, malice and punishing of females, who are the perpetrators of most of the bad events in the book, but for one very significant act at the beginning; and the victims of this female malice are all very young girls themselves, almost babies. The flighty mother who abandons Leonora, the shrewd housekeeper who diagnoses Leonora on sight as evil – “She had looked into Leonora’s eyes when she had first arrived, and seen the devil there”, Leonora the malicious child herself, the childless aunt who seems kind but may not be, the changing female dolls who cause or mimic the suffering of the little girls and grow ugly in their boxes like “a wizened old woman, a crone” in one case and “no longer a beauty… a pariah” in another. The worst thing that is said of Leonora is that “she is too like her mother” – a bad girl taking after a bad woman – and the insult is delivered by another woman, the aunt, Leonora’s mother’s own sister. We are not only in an Edwardian physical setting but also its psychology: whether real or mannequins, young or old, absent or present, females are sad, mad, bad, petty, shrill, vicious, shrewish, irresponsible, occult, corrupt and corrupting.

If your desire to revel in the nastiness of Woman is satisfied and you want some racial and national stereotypes as a side dish then look no further than the Eastern European city the narrator visits as an adult. The medieval Old Town is in the middle, surrounded by hastily over-developed malls and motorways, the building work halted following a people’s revolution and the exile of the state leader. In the Old Town is… you can finish this sentence for me… a little old toy shop, and in the little old toy shop is a little old toy-restorer… “a very small old man” with an inscrutable manner and “a jeweller’s glass screwed into one eye”, from a Quality Street advert at Christmas, who seems to know exactly what the narrator is looking for.

If the Grimm climate of Eastern European cultural clichés is too chilly for you then let’s go to India – that palace of clichés! - with the narrator and his family, to a region which Hill does not even bother to give a name to, instead sketching it with a series of offhand, inexact, thrown-out and embarrassingly crude and ignorant pejoratives: “heat and humidity…extreme poverty” amongst “women and their children in a remote village, where there were no medical facilities and where clothes and people were washed in the great river that flowed through the area.” Tiny hint: there is no such thing as a remote village on the banks of a great river. If there’s a great river, it’s not a remote village but has the provision for irrigation for centuries of agriculture and therefore crops, food, flora and fauna; a prime position along an established transport route; a longstanding and probably classic trade route and the possibility of (to-be-purified) drinking water. Another hint: If you do not know a country, culture or people well, particularly one that was a former colony and subject to any number of racist clichés and Orientalist justifications, don’t patronise it with uneducated generalisations. Write about something you know and respect instead. Want more, reader? How about “terrible diseases… ravage this beautiful country. Poor sanitation, contaminated water, easy spread of infection…” easy and glib, just like that.

Dolly is a smoothly gut-churning story from one of England’s greatest living writers. From its lonely starting point it soon widens into an exploration of the depth and ineffability of curses. However, it leaves a bitter taste as much for its racial stereotypes and tinge of sexual slander as its sensational storytelling and core of fatalistic horror.

Dolly by Susan Hill is published by ProfileBooks.

The Liars’ Gospel by Naomi Alderman

I was compelled to write about this even after presenting the edition of Saturday Review where my guests Maeve Kennedy, Dreda Say Mitchell and Cahal Dallat raved about it. Then, I had to keep my neutrality as a presenter – but I give myself full licence here…

Jesus: what a crapster. Work-shy, arrogant, disrespectful and preening, he posed and sweet-talked his way around Roman-occupied Judea performing miracles that were nothing more than hustlers’ street tricks, recycling age-old advice from the Torah as his own words of wisdom and taking whatever free hospitality and perks he could get, egged on by gullible friends happy to warm themselves by his light, puffed up by the credulity of simple-minded locals desperate for relief, distraction and entertainment. When the rumours were put to him that he was the Messiah, the expected king, the one whom they all had been waiting for, in his pride he neither demurred nor denied, but silently maintained a smug face. Seeing this, his friend Judas lost faith and respect for him and betrayed him to Pontius Pilate, who executed him.

That is just one perspective on the short and ignominious life of Jesus – or Yehoshuah, to return to him his proper name and not the simplified moniker given by his Roman executors. Naomi Alderman’s stunningly accomplished and powerful third novel The Liars’ Gospel examines various interpretations of the figure whose legacy still has the power to inspire, to compel, to humble, to educate and to fascinate billions of people two thousand years after his execution alongside countless other Jews viewed by the Roman empire as threats, insurgents, pretenders, dangerous rebels, saboteurs or provocateurs. Alderman’s previous novels, Disobedience and The Lessons, are both excellent – but this third publication is of a totally different order, a novel of such intensity, meaning and depth that it must be destined to become a classic. It feels like the book Alderman knew she was meant to write – and indeed such an impulse is hinted at in the author’s afterword.

The novel begins a year after Yehoshuah’s execution and is told in four parts, each of which delivers an ever wider and deeper analysis of the consequences of his shiftless, bootless life; of the increasing brutality of the Roman occupiers; and of the mounting desperation, anger and confusion of the Jews themselves as a once thriving, civilised, proud and complex society is torn apart. The consequences begin closest to Yehoshuah, in his village of Nazareth and amongst his family and former neighbours, with the first part of the story narrated by his grieving mother, Miryam.

To Miryam, Yehoshuah is a beloved but distant son, intensely charismatic but difficult to understand, bristling and unsympathetic, hostile towards his father Yosef. Miryam’s voice is shrewd, a survivor’s voice, and she spares no pity for herself, nor does she spare any diplomacy on the story. Yehoshuah is not the product of a virgin birth, nor is he an immaculate conception (that is, uniquely born free from sin), but a chippy and careless wastrel who snubs his mother and goads and enrages his father. Well past the customary age to marry and establish his own house, he spends his time wandering about alone or with his friends, courting his increasing numbers of fans yet (as is written in the Gospel of Mark) turning his own mother away from a feast.

Miryam is not a believer or an unbeliever but a rugged individual who is struggling not only with the personal aftermath of the death of her son but also with the political aftermath of the occupying force’s suspicion of her, especially when she takes in a young man, Gidon, who had been one of the rebel rabble following Yehoshuah. When Gidon claims that Yehoshuah has “risen” – based on the fact that when various friends, vested interests and family go to claim the body, it has gone, and each party assumes it was stolen or taken by the other – it has no mystical meaning for her, or for anyone else. The detail about the missing body remains a logistical puzzle and a running joke, with no ethereal dimension.

Judas – or Iehuda, to give him his proper name – then takes up the story, which is largely one of his own jealousy and increasing cynicism, disbelief and ultimate loss of faith. Alderman’s representation of this famous backstabber and traitor is lean, flinty and melancholy. Iehuda is a serious and somewhat ascetic man, thoughtful and watchful but not malicious. As he tells it, with the slippery uneasiness of a man trying to convince himself he’s in the right, he genuinely or almost-genuinely believes that Yehoshuah is deceiving his followers and that his increasing popularity is based on false and exploitative showmanship and glib second-hand words. Initially enthralled, he steadily witnesses Yehoshuah’s increase in confidence until he sees him as unbearably pompous. He thinks that the Romans will merely flog Yehoshuah lightly to make an example of him to other sham prophets, then release him to demonstrate the ‘mercy’ of Rome.

When Yehoshuah is crucified, Iehuda’s guilt plays out with slow turmoil as he remembers the astonished faces of the other disciples when they realise who has summoned the Romans. Afterwards, Iehuda cannot summon up any defiance, only a lurking restlessness and darkness and a bleak telling of what happens next. Unable to live with himself peacefully in the same world as before, he humiliates himself by becoming the party-piece of a rich tourist who had followed Yehoshuah’s camp for his own amusement. At this rich man’s house he is patronised by and amuses the guests by telling the story how he betrayed Yehoshuah.

What The Liars’ Gospel makes clear is that Yehoshuah was not a legend in his own lifetime nor even in the decades that followed, although “there may well indeed have been such a man, or several men whose sayings are united under that one name. Tales accreted to him, and theories grew up around and over him.” In his own time, he was a forgotten semi-nobody, swamped by the violence to come, just another bit of collateral damage recalled with regret and bitterness, even ambivalence, by his friends and family and former followers. What immediately followed his short life – vindicating a prediction Yehoshuah himself had made, although it was an easy and obvious one requiring no special insight – was years of increasing violence, Roman control, Jewish rebellion and brutal Roman oppression and the infiltration and then defilement of the Temple, resulting in catastrophe.

The final two narratives of the novel, those of the shrewd temple High Priest Caiaphas and of a later rebel named Bar-Avo (or Barrabas) who has risen to importance Mafioso-style through the criminal alleyways and hustling local politics of Jerusalem, demonstrate the drastic social, economic, religious, political and brutalising effects of the occupation. The atmosphere moved from the personal and mysterious to the military, the ethereal to the ruggedly tactical. Caiaphas treads an increasingly self-incriminating line between religious integrity, personal hypocrisy, respected social power amongst the local community and diplomatic control when dealing with Pontius Pilate. He represents the thinking, feeling, scheming worldly man who is stretched to his utmost by tyrannical demands from above and an increasingly desperate populace all around. Alderman is incredibly sharp when tracing the petty, patronising concessions of those in power towards those they are dominating, the sense of cultural superiority they bear towards those they feel they are rightfully subjugating. On the receiving end there is Caiaphas’s pitiful pride in small rituals preserved, even as everything is gradually destroyed in a wider sense and the Temple itself is under increasing threat. At the same time Alderman takes ripe, cynical comedy from the sleaziness, arrogance, pretension and sexual and class hypocrisy of the priestly class who sanctimoniously and tenderly sacrifice lambs while using women as pieces of meat, compare tributes of oil and wine from wealthy supporters and bargain in small disputes between rival traders in the town.

Throughout the novel images of blood and bloodshed, meat, sacrifice and the cutting and piercing of flesh abound. The sacrificial lambs slaughtered inside the Temple recall the Jews massacred by Pompey, Pilate, Tiberius, Caligula, Titus, all Romans of varying status, madness, pomp and arrogance. Rome is represented as diseased yet indomitable, decadent yet decisive, distant but unerring in its quashing of all rebellion. Incidentally, The Liars’ Gospel features some of the most unflinching, exciting, hardy and physical war writing I have ever read. She understands everything from broad tactics (“First, encircle the city with a great host of men….see that no man can leave or come into the city… guard the high mountain passes… allow no food in, no wagons delivering grain…then it is wise to build a high wall around the city…”) to group fights, ambushes, surveillance and even individual scuffles. She seems to know about everything: Temple rituals, military strategy, the distinctions of Greek, Roman and Jewish culture and habits, political history and the way geography, politics, economics, commerce and trade influence each other.

With every page the novel becomes wider, deeper, darker, more foreboding and more violent. Time speeds forward and violence runs swiftly outwards like blood in Jerusalem’s stone gutters. Bar-Avo is a new kind of Jerusalem man. Streetwise, selfish and without the class pride of Caiaphas, born into degradation, boredom and anger, careless of the pacifism and weightless words of Yehoshuah’s set and of the sanctity of the Temple, he is a gangland underlord and fixer who becomes a people’s leader, intent upon removing the new High Priest – not Caiaphas now, but a man placed there by Rome itself. Alderman writes:

Massacres and riots and rebellions and battles are nothing new now. ….For every Roman excess there is a rebellion. Every rebellion is put down with increasing brutality. Every brutality hardens the people a little further, making the next uprising more violent. Every act of violence justifies a more extreme show of force in suppressing it. There are fewer and fewer people amongst the Jews who trust Rome at all. …The thing has no end. Or no end but one.

There is a steady poisoning of civil society by violent rebels and violent Roman spies alike, a forcible turnover from thought to action and action to violence and a horrific and haunting end which has consequences, as we know, for many centuries to come.

By the resounding, huge-scale end of the book, the barely remembered Yehoshuah’s words and deeds have a desperate, poignant purity and simplicity. When it comes to him, The Liars’ Gospel is simultaneously the construction and deconstruction of a legend, a tribute and a takedown, written by an author who is both bedazzled and bemused. Yehoshuah appears and disappears with sudden consequence, irritating yet meaningful, underwhelming but unnerving. He buys his own hype, alternating between destructive volatility, nonsensical babbling and insufferable piety. Each manifestation brings with it the thrill of charisma, the tremor of social threat and political change, a charge of mystery, the toll of oncoming treachery. Yet this figure remains an enigma, even to his own mother, even to his betrayer, even to his enemies. He was one of many young men milling about, enraged by the occupation, unwilling to submit to the violating and oppressive presence of soldiers or the weight of Rome, in a society that was full to the fringes of fake prophets, misfits, schemers, fakes, failed rebels and conmen.

The question, Who was Jesus? has haunted millions, even those who like me are non-religious and do not believe in God, for thousands of years. Naomi Alderman has not answered that question, and I hope nobody does, because (as she hints), his meaning is in his mystery. And it probably doesn’t matter exactly who he was. It certainly didn’t matter to the Romans, who crucified many thousands alongside him. What Alderman has written instead of an easily digestible Jesus parable complete with prophecy, miracles, martyrdom, resurrection and return, is a visceral, beautifully structured, flawlessly written and totally devastating major novel about occupation, violence, brutality, ignorance, oppression, resistance – and ruin.


The Liars’ Gospel by Naomi Alderman is published by Penguin.

The death of Magical Democracy and the rise of A Card From Angela Carter

The novelist Angela Carter, who died twenty years ago at the age of only fifty-one, was a creative genius, a consummate entertainer, an ambitious artist, a highly sophisticated crafter and a great intellect. [UPDATE, as at 10th Feb 2012: I have just been contacted by BBC radio producer Sara Davies, who has produced a documentary about Carter's plays, which is going out on Radio 4 on Thursday 16th February at 11.30am. She writes:

I hadn’t known about the plays till an academic in Bristol told me about them, and I discovered they were all in the BBC archive. I’ve used excerpts from all five, with interviews with various people who were connected with her back then, including Susannah Clapp, Marina Warner and Carmen Callil, and I’ve tracked down the studio manager who worked on the plays who talks about what fun it was putting them together in studio.

I don’t think many people know this side of Angela’s work, and the plays are such a riot!

Please tune in and enjoy Carter's imagination and genius afresh.]

I have long wanted to write a book of accessible essays, one about each of Angela Carter's major fictions, expressing my fannish enthusiasm, which is effusive and profuse. I'd envisaged it coming out this year, fully embossed, emblazoned and engilded, illustrated and illuminating, a Christmas gift for the literate. I’d call it Magical Democracy, after a phrase used in the Carter obituary written by Lorna Sage, another genius who died too young... and who also edited a wonderful book of essays on Carter, called Flesh and the Mirror, which includes contributions from Ali Smith and Marina Warner. 

For now, Angela Carter’s life has been commemorated in a beautiful looking, precisely written, perfectly constructed yet melancholy-making volume, A Card from Angela Carter, written by the renowned theatre critic and biographer Susannah Clapp. The book is hand-sized and gifty, its chiselled sentences and glinting insights giving us a sharp and immediate portrait of an entire life.

This is achieved despite rather than because of its central conceit. Clapp and Carter were close friends for several decades. Carter sent Clapp a series of postcards, which Clapp describes with a crisp humour that far exceeds the interest of the cards themselves, which are reprinted in a drab monochrome and bear brief, sharp, dashed-off messages. So there’s an image of a pot of Texan chilli beef. It’s like a 1970s tea towel illustration, block-printed and painfully indelicate. This is Clapp’s brilliant description:

The picture shows a black cauldron trying to pass as a saucepan. Bubbling with beans and frighteningly red beef, it was sending off a swirl of blue smoke.

On the back – and how I wish Bloomsbury had just turned the card over in the photocopier and given us a glimpse of Carter’s handwriting – the novelist has written,

Carter’s reply to the critics! Texas chilli, it goes through you like a dose of salts. I would like to forcefeed it to that drivelling wimp…preferably through his back passage.

This – Clapp’s description and Carter’s message, both - is pure Carter fiction territory: vehement, salty, violent yet camp, the image of beef and chilli turned to one of gore and guts, nutritive turned into purgative, a recipe for the rectum, the domestic made demonic. But the brevity and sharpness of the message is typical Carter too. She was as much a honer and an architect as she was an impresario or conjurer of literary circus tricks. The stories may happen in the lurid glare of a carnival tent – but the tent’s held up with iron pegs and metal rigging. There is method to the madness, deftness to the dazzle.

It has always bothered me that Carter’s work is often described in terms of stylistic effect, symbolic resonance and folkloric influence rather than mental effort or thematic craft. She is depicted (as Clapp acknowledges) as a literary aerialist exulting in costume, a dazzler magicking up a false yet apposite paradox-world of masquerade and bewitchment, of things pretending to be other things in an infinite hall of mirrors, references refracting off references. It is as though, if one were to smash the mirrors, there would be nothing behind them but stage lights and severed puppet strings. Carter’s fiction is presented by critics as one of high theatricality and loosely picaresque plotting, wild abandon held together with the strands of an unravelling devorée  shawl and a spot of false eyelash glue. The books and their characters seem to survive on sheer guts and willpower.

This is a false impression, peddled as much by her lovers as her detractors. Angela Carter wrote with an iron fist in a sequined, fringed, marabou-trimmed lamé glove, holding a scalpel quill. She was a consummate artisan as well as an inspired artist, a romantic as well as an intellectual, a sensualist and a stylist. She may have presided over the revels, but she organised them well in advance and made sure the schedule ran to time. That, in life as well as art, is one of the secrets of great creation: one labours meticulously, tightening those symmetries, buffing those commas, to make it look as though one wrote it (and compel readers to consume it) in a single exuberant swoop.

There is a satisfying tension between the baroque fantasy of what happens in Carter’s fiction and the austere precision with which it is planned; between the lavish indulgences of her characters and their speech and the stern control of Carter’s own ideas. Her characters - whether they are the mercurial, curious, stubborn and inquisitive protagonists of her famous collection The Bloody Chamber or the loquacious giant swan-heroine Fevvers in Nights at the Circus - do not merely enact mechanistic reversals of traditional fairytale martyrdom, overturn overdone gender clichés or blather on pointlessly for page after page of earthy ventriloquism. They are fully imagined lovers, fighters, thinkers, adventurers, charismatic beings. They have heart and soul; they are not just strung up in Carter’s sequence of symbolic events. Readers love Carter because Carter is fun to read: a fantasy novelist who writes ripping yarns that make you feel anything is possible.

A Card from Angela Carter restores the idea of Carter as a constructor of tremendous skill as well as a creator of wild genius. The postcards are merely a device to pay tribute, to illuminate, to analyse, to commemorate and to critique. On their few hasty lines, Susannah Clapp has managed (like a Carter character herself) to spin and hang a tight, light and glittering biography, beginning to end, with teaching jaunts, prize-judging and prize-winning, family, career, lifelong love and mortal illness in between. I am not quoting much from the book because I want you to buy it. But I had to put in this wonderful line:

Her card was a photograph of an armadillo, a curved creature picking its way, like an elderly millionairess, through prickly undergrowth.

Days after having read it I am still wondering how Clapp did it. In barely a hundred pages she has performed an origami trick of stunning expertise, folding an entire life into a half-inch width of book, summarising a life and a body of work, conveying a steely awareness of time’s passing, a sense of history and a complex depiction of Carter’s character and contribution. With her icy, smooth humour and beautiful spare prose, Clapp strips out the tinny taint of campness that surrounds Carter. She does away with the standard critical soundbites – of the macabre, the kitsch, the playful, the carnivalesque, of masquerades and harlequins, dolls and hybrids, fairy lives and horror tales – that obscure Angela Carter under a thick white greasepaint of cliché.

There is not one great mind here, there are two, and both have been undersold. Susannah Clapp’s previous book, With Chatwin, is a superlative personal memorography of the travel writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin, whom she was close to. It was praised fulsomely by all the major papers when it came out some years ago. These lines of praise are to be found, rightly, on the back of A Card From Angela Carter. But Clapp has not produced a major full-length work since, despite her tremendous talent and huge fanbase, obvious from her popular theatre reviews for the Observer, her erudite wit as a theatre critic for Night Waves on Radio 3, her pedigree as a co-founder of the London Review of Books (for whom Angela Carter was a longtime writer) and the support and joy which has greeted the publication of  A Card from Angela Carter. It has only been out a week and it’s been covered with great positivity in The Observer (who gave it their Review section cover) and The Guardian, flagged up as a must-buy in ES magazine, reviewed well in The Independent and made a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

I want more from Susannah Clapp. I want a big book. Two thousand word reviews and one hundred page books are too meagre for a magnificent mind and a wide wit. Write a satire about a Biba-chic theatre critic, why don’t you? Just keep a diary and change the names at the end.

A Card From Angela Carter has been created with obvious devotion. Its controlled yet luxurious cream, black, gold and red cover was designed by the brilliant Holly Macdonald and the lovely red-inked endpapers were drawn by Carter’s longtime collaborator Corinna Sargood. There is a twist in the plot to do with these endpapers, which I won’t reveal except to say that it brings tears to the eyes and fully establishes this book as a serious eulogy for a dazzling talent too briefly explored…

…and too thinly praised. Carter was always loved by readers, much admired by other writers and reviewed thoroughly and respectfully. She was a prolific journalist whose great insight turned even casual reviews into weighty and important cultural essays with wide relevance. She was adapted very successfully for film (notably by Neil Jordan for The Company of Wolves) and was an acclaimed dramatist for radio, as well as working speculatively in theatre. However, none of Carter’s novels had ever been Booker nominated. Her last novel, Wise Children, was published with great fanfare but ignored by that year’s Booker jury, leading directly to the establishment of the Orange Prize, now in its 17^th year.  Clapp writes, “Her early death sent her reputation soaring.” She adds, however, that

[Carter] was not acclaimed in the way that the number of obituaries might suggest. She was ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the ‘alternative pantheon’ of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the forties...

Twenty years after Angela Carter’s death, there is still no major biography of her and no major mainstream critical volume about her work. Could I propose here a small reconsideration of a speculative amateur scholar’s enquiry entitled… Magical Democracy?

Until I complete that magnum opus of trenchant literary criticism and squealing sycophantic hagiography, A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp can be purchased everywhere, published by Bloomsbury.

All That I Am by Anna Funder

All That I Am is one of the most impressive, frightening studies of the approach and aftermath of war that I’ve ever read. It is about precursors and consequences, clues and fallout, foreboding and legacy, assembled with the single-minded intelligence of a detective sifting through other people’s lies, regrets, self-justifications, denials, hidden heroism and memory.

The book is, as Anna Funder says in her afterword, an act of imagining and recreating the skin, sinew and muscle that once connected the bones of real events. It features a wide cast of refreshingly intelligent and articulate people from the German playwright Ernst Toller to Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein and W H Auden – men honoured by history for their creative gifts, pioneering discoveries, genius for self-expression, depth, political engagement and principles. It covers Hitler’s emergence as a leader in the long aftermath of World War I, focusing on the six years of his increasing suppression of intellectual, critical, political and democratic activities before the outbreak of World War II. We observe the ruthlessness with which he implemented new law after new law, steadily breaking all conventions of justice, equality, democratic protection and freedom, in a stunningly audacious campaign of Nazi double-think. Funder’s genius – so obvious in her award winning non-fiction book Stasiland – is for uncovering vital, devastating truths about power and the ease with which those who want it get it, by lies and force.

Many things are known about Hitler and the Holocaust but that ridiculous, terrifying man did not come out of nowhere. All That I Am is the riveting story of the pre-events, the violent crushing of opposition and the sabotage and betrayal of the resistance. Its hero is not any of the Great Men I’ve namedropped above but two real women, Ruth and Dora, political activists who were instrumental in fighting Hitler every step of the way, assisting refugees leaving Germany, trying to preserve the intellectual and political life of the soon-to-be-disenfranchised and writing frantically from America, London and elsewhere in Europe to convince the rest of the world that Hitler was a threat. It is a novel about great unseen acts of heroism and resistance and a tribute to the impressive personalities of ‘ordinary’ women and men who did not see themselves in a heroic light and whose political beliefs went against the notion of individual heroism.

The novel presents us with a completely new method of looking at events. The only way to depict a shattered world is through a shattered story. The people, the locations and the times are disparate. Friends are separated; the present and memories of the past contrast sharply; methods of depiction splinter and fail, leaving gaps, contradictions and overlaps; there are different takes on the same events.

Ruth is a survivor – and, in real life, a friend of Funder’s – living out an ignominious but witty old age in present-day Sydney, satirising her own physical failings with the confidence of a woman who has earned her sarcasm. She is a former activist who has travelled the world and served time in Hitler’s prisons, but is patronised and treated as a child – or simply ignored – by the people around her. She is treated as though she is a stupid, useless female with no story. In truth she has been an active participant at the heart of world events. One day she receives an old edition of Ernst Toller’s (real) autobiography, I Was A German, found in storage in the New York hotel he lived in briefly as an exiled intellectual in 1939, using a young émigré, Clara, as a secretary. The edition is full of interpolated sheets of paper, Toller’s own act of restitution, dictated to Clara. The extra pages tell a (true) story from the early 1930s that Toller had omitted out of ego and guilt – that of Dora, his lover, comrade and secretary (and also Ruth’s cousin), who was caught and imprisoned by Hitler’s police in her attempts to smuggle Toller’s papers out of the country.

By the time Ruth receives the package Toller is long dead, Dora is also dead, most of the friends are dead and history has seen what Hitler did. As Ruth reads Toller’s telling of Dora’s story she reflects on her own friendship with Dora during the same period. Ruth tells the story herself in parallel, bringing their international circle of friends, comrades and colleagues back to life. Together, skilfully, perfectly, Funder assembles a portrait of an entire society of richness, culture, bravery and fervent political participation, which has been written out of history or overshadowed by what came next. Toller is an author writing with apparent honesty, although we realise just how much he has left out and just how enormous his ego is. Ruth is herself a gifted photographer – her first camera was given to her by Dora – who works for hours to frame, take and develop a shot. Both art forms are created not just by the addition of words of visuals but by subtraction, editing, erasing, the deliberate and precise construction of images or narrative. Both creators are fallible; as Ruth says, “it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.”

Throughout, Funder excavates the negative spaces of the stories, dramas and pain that happened before, between, around, and the anguish of those whose considerable power had been defused through forcible exile. She makes stunning and tragic revelations about the intensity of anti-Semitism and racism in England and of the Nazi German presence in London, something I had not known about. She writes movingly about the cultural, linguistic, intellectual and social devastation of all displaced people, whether they are refugees, objectors, exiles, asylum seekers, migrants or prisoners. What she has to say will resonate far beyond those touched by the specific  consequences of Nazism.

One observes with growing alarm the negative transformation of German society in its steady and (for Hitler, deliberate, concerted and systematic) plunge into hellish destruction. The novel begins with a disturbing mixture of  tragedy and hope. Dora and Ruth are “completely German” secular Jews, wealthy, clever, stylish, successful, highly cultured, from homes which are not just good but lavish. It is a depiction of existence before subjugation. The ending of World War 1 creates a brief desire for a pacifist revolution and a far longer legacy of damage to its mentally and physically wounded former soldiers, many of whom are German Jews. There are half-gruesome, half-amusing scenes amongst the horribly injured inmates of an army sanatorium. Funder’s excellently crisp descriptions of fighting and carnage have a shocking immediacy, as do her revelations about German’s secret war hospitals for those so wounded that they would be unfit for civilian life and unsuitable for public visibility lest they lower morale and “frighten women on trams.”

The way power- and violence-hungry governments lie to their people to justify war is one of the main themes of novel, and is just as relevant now as then (Hi, Tony Blair, if you’re reading this). Hitler rises with a powerful conviction that Germany’s loss in WW1 is a humiliation which must be avenged, first by making it strong, pure and infallible from the inside. For all his outward bombast and his easily caricatured manner, he is a far from hot-heated politician. He begins with ragged demonstrations by callow Swastika-wearing youths but in the six short years covered by the novel he has developed multiple vicarious/proxy bodies of brutality – the SA, the SS, the Gestapo. Ruth, Dora and their friends go from being on the inside – prized as Berlin intellectuals, smug, secretive and sexy – to being on the outside, in fear of their lives.

If you were reading this in a speculative fiction novel, the coming dystopia would be so clichéd as to be unbelievable. But it was all real. Dora finds “a list of thirty-three people Berlin is making stateless by decree. Because of political opposition or…for having ‘violated the duty of loyalty to the realm and the people, as well as damaging German interests’…They’re taking everything – houses, flats, cars – stripping people of their qualifications, impounding their bank accounts, cancelling passports. They are making us legally cease to exist.” Well before the Holocaust Hitler’s goons set up, follow, hunt down, drive out or kill all dissidents, journalists, political critics, challenging political parties, intellectuals and other opponents: “When they found eight Communists hiding in a cellar in Mitte they simply boarded it up. People walking to work heard their calls from the vent at pavement level but no one dared help.”

At the same time, Dora and Ruth and their comrades discover that youth soldier training camps have sprung up all over the country, that production of weaponry and air and road transportation vehicles has begun in regional factories and that the development of electricity and wirelesses for all homes has been mobilised to enable the Nazi propaganda campaign (the radio should be renamed a “Hitler Hearer”, one character quips).  Hitler introduces laws which suspend all prior notions of justice, democratic process and political engagement and – to put very simplistically – imprisons or kills anyone who is not for him. The Holocaust grows out of this fervent act of mass ridding: “thousands of anti-Hitler activists were being held in ‘protective custody in makeshift SA barracks – empty factories, a water tower… even a disused brewery. Soon there was not enough room. That was when they set about building the concentration camps.”

All That I Am is a fully-formed novel as well as a devastating depiction of real events. Its artistry can be found in the unity and cohesion of all of its images. Every phrase or observation is related to the linked themes of ageing, memory and narratives of the past; of survivors’ guilt hidden or revealed; of covert political activity and covert emotional dynamics; the revelation and withholding of political and personal truths; breakages in narrative, distinctive narrative forms and interrupted narratives like rebels’ coded messages, censored reports and lists of the condemned. This is not fine writing for fineness’s sake but a way of striking allusions against each other to reinforce the whole. Seemingly innocuous comments – like the ageing Ruth observing that a hospital gown is designed to “remind one of the fragility of human dignity, to ensure obedience to instruction, and as a guarantee against last-minute flight” – are devastating in the context of the wider narrative. The young Ruth discovers her talent for photography – “The camera’s shutter was a lever at the side of the box. It made a long, soft, metal sound, the sound of capture and theft” – which is exactly what is to happen.

The novel is also a work of gendered justice for which I am grateful. Ruth and Dora’s milieu had many women participants who were just as gifted, just as fearless and worked just as hard as their male comrades. The women were instrumental in assisting people of both sexes and all classes trying to flee Germany, and of alerting the wider world to Hitler’s threat. They were, additionally, prominent spokeswomen in the fight against the oppression of women before and during Hitler’s time. However, despite what they say, they suffered themselves from this oppression during their own lifetimes and have suffered from the erasure of women from history in the many decades since.

Toller and the others are Names, great men, great artists. As Toller ruefully says in the novel, Auden leaves lunch to write a poem that will still be read in two hundred years’ time (hey, but not by me). Thomas Mann and Einstein show up to speak for Toller’s release from prison. The men are in a boys’ club supported by the world and by history. They know each other and help each other; and history knows and has helped them. It ignores the women. Despite the women’s deluded proclamations of equality (and the men’s patronising ones), they are voluntary subordinates – Dora is Toller’s little assistant, safeguarding his genius while he marries someone else. His guilt, when it comes, is too late and too self-indulgent to prompt anything but contempt. Ruth is the girlfriend of (real) star journalist Hans Wesemann and sees herself, with typical self-abasement, as “an anchor for his high-flying.” 

Funder exposes these contradictions with sly satire and the fineness of a true artist. The men’s torments are funnelled into masterful works of art, heroic reputations, connections, cultural power, international fame and worship, which they are given by everyone and take full advantage of even when in the depths of existential pain. Toller, dictating in New York in 1939, writes sleazily and objectifyingly about his new secretary Clara, and just as sleazily and self-justifyingly about the old secretary, Dora. Ruth writes about Dora with a very different emphasis – she has human respect and understanding for her energy and intelligence. This is what makes All That I Am a work of art and not merely a factual fiction: its flawless differentiation of voice and viewpoint, its subtle calibrations of psychology and subtle revelation of people’s individuality, nobility and hypocrisy. The women are left with no name or legacy or reputation for genius or heroism while the men – Toller, Spender, Isherwood, Einstein, Auden, Mann – have everything gifted to them for free by history. On this point I thought of how much has changed since Hitler’s terrible triumphs (as he saw them) ….and yet, how little has changed, that it has taken until 2011 for just two or three of the heroines of the 1930s to be shown proper respect, given credit and a place in official history.

Funder’s book is  an impeccable act of cultural restitution, a beautifully written novel, a strong countermove against the neglect that official history has perpetrated against her heroines and a true horror story about the incremental development of fascism, dictatorship, autocracy and genocide.

All That I Am is published by Penguin.