'The poeticism of the prose is exquisite': a review of The Tilted World

By Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Published 1st October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

Husband and wife writers, poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Tom Franklin, have composed a poem of devotion to their land and to love in the form of lyrical novel The Tilted World. They weave a tender tale of lost souls in the Deep South and of discovered solace amidst the cataclysm of the great 1927 Mississippi flood.

The palpable threat of the flood is manifested through the prism of Dixie Clay – already emotionally drowned by her unhappy marriage to a bootlegger making whisky in defiance of prohibition law – and through Ingersoll, an emotionally stagnated prohibition agent, come to Mississippi as the flood waters threaten to burst the levees. When this strange, mud-caked man appears through the rain to leave a baby on Dixie’s doorstep, the world will tilt and warp the boundaries of law, friendship, community and love.

The Tilted World takes time to absorb the reader in its delicately rendered tale. The structure, which inhabits Dixie’s and Ingersoll’s thoughts episodically, does not immediately fully realise their psychologies, and boredom occasionally threatens in the opening chapters. The syntax can seem almost wilfully excluding – it is not clear from the start that the narrative voice has sprinklings of southern American phrasing, so the lack or direct and indirect objects and unnatural verb uses can be confusing. But slowly the lives of Dixie and Ingersoll become compelling, and representative of the lives of all those who lived through prohibition, who lived through the war, and through the upheavals of the Deep South at the turn of the century.

The poeticism of the prose is exquisite; metaphors are sprinkled through the book, giving you pause even as the plot surges on like the flood that propels it. Beautiful images that conjure a very specific time and place are simultaneously timeless: in the heavy wind of a low-flying navy plane ‘the corn [is] blown into italics all around’; when the Mississippi river is at breaking point Ingersoll can ‘feel the levee wavering like a struck tuning fork’; the sky is ‘gauzy and low, like a rafter cobweb Dixie Clay yearned to knock down with a broom’.

The Tilted World is a deeply-felt, elegiac homage to a particular time and to the endurance of love, unafraid to shy away from the mundane realities of life, rewarding the reader’s commitment to its tilted world.

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A universal tale of mystery and enlightenment: Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things

Published 1 October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

From the author of the multi-million bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, comes something quite its opposite. The Signature of All Things is an epic, universal tale traversing the 19th century on a voyage of mystery and enlightenment, taking in multiple continents, scientific theories on evolution and the entire spectrum of human experience – including birth, love, death, heartbreak, religious doubt and sexual turmoil.

The novel tells of the bold, brilliant Alma Whittaker, blessed not with beauty but with a formidable intellect and a voracious desire for knowledge. As she immerses herself in scientific pursuits, her botanical specialism in mosses leads her to revelatory ideas about time and evolution. These ideas are challenged by the man she falls in love with, and Alma’s all-encompassing need to seek answers impels her to investigate the enigmas of her own lover’s past.

Gilbert uses Alma’s science to enrich her human plight, rendering one person’s instinctive, evolutionary battle for survival into a compassionate, tender account of unerring fortitude. There is something of Jane Eyre in Gilbert’s heroine; Alma’s plainness is negated by her resilience and enduring faith in life.

Gilbert’s prose is not perfect – she occasionally labours a metaphor or employs a clunky turn of phrase that seems almost to complement Alma’s own unwieldy demeanour. And the plot is absorbing, but occasionally one can feel a little like Alma, adrift in a tempestuous sea of subtle narrative hints: ‘all she had ever wanted was to know things, yet […] all she did was ponder and wonder and guess’. That said, however, The Signature of All Things is an accomplished and irresistible novel. Expertly researched and exquisitely realised, it compels the reader to adopt Alma’s own unquenchable need to know everything, from the minutiae of her world to the grand narratives that inform it.

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Man Booker Prize shortlisted Eleanor Catton at Southbank Centre

Eleanor Catton at Southbank Centre
Tuesday 10 September
On The Luminaries, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize

‘The novel is the most expansive and supple form that exists. It is almost like a virus; it keeps adapting to remain resilient. It pushes the boundaries of what is possible.’ A resounding testimony of faith in fiction from one of the most talented writers of fiction today; Eleanor Catton’s talk on the night of the announcement for the Man Booker Prize shortlist proves her worthy of her place upon it. She spoke yesterday with eloquence and erudition on everything from the beauty of paradox to the mathematics of the Golden Ratio.

Her shortlisted novel The Luminaries is set in the New Zealand Gold Rush of the 1860s. A weighty tome of 832 pages, is has been hailed as an ‘ambitious’ work not because it is somehow deficiently aspirational, but because it interweaves through an immensely complex structure (based upon rigidly adhered-to astrological schema) a rollicking tale of murder, greed and revelation that defies the seeming arbitrariness of its composition.

Catton was captivated by the notion that ‘each aspect of the zodiac planets governs a part of the self that makes a whole’, and accordingly based each of her characters on a zodiac sign and determined their behaviour by its defining features. The chapters are also governed by the Golden Ratio, necessitating that each is half as long as the preceding chapter (hence the sizeable length of the novel).

This may seem an artificial construct that could impose a certain clinical flavour upon her writing, but the reverse is the case. She gives a typically unassuming caveat to the potential strangeness of her self-imposed structures: ‘my internal monologue is saying ‘don’t sound like too much of a crackpot’ at this point...’. But crackpot she certainly is not; Catton is clearly an author who thrives upon structure but who populates that structure with a world both vividly realised and compelling. Her desire to use the Golden Ratio stemmed from the sense that it is appreciated as beautiful in the visual arts, in mathematics and even in the simple shape of a door or a book, and that its beauty could be manifested in literature but has never been tested. The Luminaries seems both empirically and emotionally to prove the truth of her hypothesis.

The skill of Catton’s writing is in forming her characters fully, allowing their psyches to develop and absorb the reader while building them as ‘spheres within spheres’, each entwined with the next so they become parts of the whole. She cited the influence of Martin Buber’s philosophical tract I and Thou, which led her to investigate the notion that the zenith of life is found when souls truly comprehend each other, understanding themselves to be kindred spirits within humanity.

If this all sounds highly conceptualised and abstract, Catton’s flair is for combining such ideas with a characteristic down-to-earth quality in both her writing and her speech. In last night’s talk, she shrewdly compared the novel to TV box sets, acknowledging that the latter can now ‘give space for psychological complexity’ almost as holistically as the former. Similarly, she acknowledged the pressures on a New Zealand writer shortlisted for the Man Booker; as only the third nominated Kiwi and youngest ever shortlistee, she hopes that she can set the standard for a new generation of writers from her country to contribute to its relatively nascent canon.

She wears her virtuosity with a lightness of touch that turns her systematised, byzantine novel into a timeless human tale. Catton speaks of writing dialogue (one of her particular strengths) as ‘an orchestration, requiring the writer to be a composer, and to be invisible'. And The Luminaries truly is a structural, narrative and emotional symphony, worthy of the praise being heaped upon it.

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Seamus Heaney: we can be consoled that 'Death's edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming' of his words

Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest poets of our time - his is the death not only of a naturalist at one with the natural world, but of a lyricist, a balladeer of our times who was gifted with the grace of rendering our political, ecological and personal upheavals with a deft, melodic turn of phrase. His words were as the birds to whom St Francis preached: they 'Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played/ And sang, like images took flight [...] His argument true, his tone light.'

His poetic soul will endure and be remembered for its brilliance, but he will also be remembered as a great and good man. To use Heaney's own phrase, ‘in his presence, time rode easy’, anchored on his mild humility and generous embrace of all people. All who knew him have attested to this: 'a joy to be with and a warm and caring friend' Bill Clinton; ‘a very humble, modest man' Jimmy Deenihan, Irish Arts minister; 'a person of truly exceptional grace and intelligence' former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion; 'He wore his huge wisdom very lightly and he gave so generously of his time' Bishop of Derry Dr Edward Daly.

We can be consoled that Heaney's words will remain as a testament both to his virtuosic poetic skill and to his generosity of spirit. In The Folk Singers, he acknowledges that 'Death's edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming' - we can rest assured that people will be strumming to his tune for generations to come, and finding solace in the enduring quality of his ‘time-turned words’.

To read my Southbank Centre blog post on Heaney’s death, see here.

Theatre review: pulsing eroticism and galvanising hate in Mies Julie

Mies Julie
Saturday 17 August, Oxford Playhouse
World tour commences 2014

««««

An insistent drone pervades the still air. Red light seeps through the mist, casting elusive shadows amidst the sparse set. A slowly rotating ceiling fan catches the eye, slicing the air with ominous intent, presaging the unrelenting suspense to come. And thus the scene is set for one of the most formidably visceral, psychologically afflicting plays of the decade.

Director Yael Farber has taken August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie, a tale of power, lust and class limitations, and thrust into its melting pot the cataclysmic catalyst of post-apartheid racial tension. Julie is the white daughter of a South African farm owner; John is the black farm hand to whom she directs her quivering desire one hot night, with devastating consequences. What follows is a heady battle between man and woman, black and white, master and servant, colonial domination and native subjugation, intellect and physicality, love and lust, self and self-destruction.

Every movement in this play is exquisitely choreographed to feel at once naturalistic and aesthetically sublime. The physicalisation of John and Julie’s conflicting impulses forms a sparring dance that leaps across the stage and draws you into its gravitational pull. The capitulation of their coupling is an erotic, animalistic union that seems at once inevitable and catastrophic, epitomising the irresistibility of John and Julie’s subconscious need to play out the impossible, irrefutable differences between them.

Hilda Cronjé as Julie exudes sexuality and uses her commanding, almost metallic voice to augment the purposeful thrusts of her physical and emotional needs. But there is something about her that is not only unlikable but also slightly irritating – it makes her initial maltreatment of John hard to endure, and her interactions with her beloved nanny and John’s mother Christine (a stoic, spiritual performance from Zoleka Helesi) feel insincere. But as John, Bongile Mantsai is truly transfixing. His vocal control and bodily power belie a man who at once knows what he wants and has no idea how to achieve it. His instinctive reactions to Julie are brilliantly conditioned not by, as William Golding puts it, ‘a civilisation that knew nothing of him but was in ruins’, but by his own natural moral compass and his proud self-control. He resists Julie’s brazen advances with impressive rigour, relenting only after he has warned her she goes too far: ‘I am only a man’.

Farber’s consummate production perfectly complements the actors’ power. The portentous music, performed live on laptop and saxophone by Mark Fransman and Brydon Bolton, creates an atmosphere taut with reluctant, unresolved cadences and dissonant chords. This is occasionally punctuated by the eerie interjections of renowned Xhosa musician Tandiwe Lungisa as one of John’s spectral ancestors, added to Strindberg’s original cast by Farber to prowl the stage with guttural murmurings that shake the soul. And Patrick Curtis’s set design, a sparsely populated kitchen in which all the action takes place, provides the obstacles around which John and Julie can perform their mating dance and destruction.

Farber’s crowning achievement is successfully, agonizingly to cleave the timeless concerns of Strindberg’s story to the very specific concerns of post-apartheid South Africa. She slowly strips away the layers of grime, sweat and skin that cloak John and Julie in social convention and ancestral history, until they are laid bare with just their passions to speak for them. Farber then builds up the layers again, excruciatingly, one by one, until there is no way they can overcome the impenetrable barriers between them. Mistress and servant dream of escape and equality, but they only prove to themselves and to the shellshocked audience that they cannot undo the binding reality of ‘the new South Africa, where miracles leave us exactly where we began’.

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Book review: Man Booker Prize longlisted novel The Lowland

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Publishes 26 September
Review first appeared on We Love This Book

'at once blisteringly specific and edifyingly universal'

Jhumpa Lahiri’s masterful account of two boys growing up in 1970s Calcutta,The Lowland, has been nominated for this year's Man Booker Prize. It tackles the nature of memory, the mutability of time and the impossibility of true communication, while examining how the boys' tragic experiences echo through generations to come.

Amid the growing allure of Naxalite Marxism, inseparable brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra mature to lead very different lives, with different ideals. As Udayan becomes embroiled in communist politics and Subhash forsakes his roots to move to America, their bond undergoes a partition that begins an ineluctable series of partitions – physical, emotional, political and psychological – which punctuate Lahiri’s intricate exploration of what it means to feel isolated, to feel whole and to feel loved.

To read the rest of the review, see here.

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Guardian Witness, A Book That Changed Me: T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems

In praise of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems
On Guardian Witness

Every dreary day that I walk over London Bridge with hoardes of city workers streaming towards me in their grey suits, against a grey sky, I think of T.S. Eliot’s crowd who ‘flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many’.

In this he encapsulates a sense of banal futility that still pervades our world now, and yet when I think of his Selected Poems I do not think of them negatively. To me they are full of necessary realism, of perfectly articulated truth and, ultimately, of hope.

I once read 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' aloud to myself, sitting at my kitchen table at the age of 21, panicking about what to do with my life. It made me feel so calm, so accepting of the fact that we cannot squeeze the universe into a ball and know what to do with it, that my panic receded into unexpected contentment. The commonplace elegance of his words, the utter joy in linguistic play and the profound, enduring resonance of his words turns even the most depressing of thoughts into beauty. It makes the things that sadden me in this world seem but fragments within a more positive whole.

To read on Guardian Witness, see here.
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