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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Album review: in praise of Laura Marling's Once I Was An Eagle

Laura Marling, Once I Was An Eagle

Released 27 May 2013, Virgin

Experiencing Once I Was An Eagle is less like listening to an album and more like walking before an epic tableaux, tracing its narrative and absorbing yourself in its intricate threads. The tracks are not individuated, autonomous entities but run into each other in an inexorable story that the teller is fated to tell and the listener is compelled to hear. From the wilderness of the lurking beast and the eagle and dove's eternal fight, through the fierce cry of the master hunter, to the gentle damsel by the shore and the hoped for contentment of a happy ending, the album tells its epic with heartfelt truthfulness and musical virtuosity.

Marling’s vocal control is phenomenal. Her vibrato on the title track ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ undulates like lush hills, trailing off into a valley of silence with the held note of the violin running through it like a stream, while each perfect vocal glissando of her chorus is a trickle of water spilling over the rocks into little pools of exquisite sound. And the themes of her album are similarly metaphorised in the beauty of the natural landscape and the elusive complexity of the humans who inhabit it. With every meticulous nuance of her voice she captures this complexity, expressing overwhelming power, consuming compassion and every emotion in between.

The music itself is a genre-defying mixture of country, folk, bluegrass, classical guitar that borders on flamenco and Fantasia-esque film music. She employs unusual tunings and instruments including organs, lap steels and pipes to enhance her skilful guitar riffs. Those riffs become motifs that transmute and tie together the threads of the life she weaves, perfectly marrying with the progress of the narrative. In ‘When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)’ she sings ‘The more I think the harder I breathe’ – that may be true, but the unique sounds and ingeniously expressed thoughts of this album are a breath of fresh air for the listener.

Marling dazzled with her entrance onto the music scene at the age of 18 with the delicate debut album Alas I Cannot Swim (2008). She has since turned that precocious youth into a self-possessed maturity, accepting that it is impossible to ‘know what it is you don’t know’. Her most recent album, A Creature I Don’t Know (2011), is full of her characteristic innovation and ingenuity but the power of her emotional, musical and lyrical hooks was slightly lost in complex obscurity. Now, she has combined the lot to produce a unique musical perspective on the world that is at once virtuosic and eminently accessible.

Marling has always had great literary sensibilities – her prevalent bird metaphors allude to Shelley’s skylark whose ‘sweetest songs sing of saddest thought’. But for Marling, birdsong is a reminder of the transience and pain of life not because the birds are unaware of this but because the birds, as in ‘Love Be Brave’, ‘suffer so; do they sing because they know this life don’t go slow?’ Marling’s music does something similar – it doesn’t shy away from the pain of life but makes it into something beautiful. It is a music in which you can dissolve yourself, fade far away and quite forget the world around you while sharing Marling’s ‘pleasure pain’ as if it is, exquisitely, your own.

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Hush, listen... Exploring the power of sound at the National Theatre

The Hush

The Shed, National Theatre, until 3 August

What is the true power of sound? What can it make you feel, remember, believe or hope for? This is the question asked by pioneering electronic music producer Matthew Herbert in his first foray into the theatrical world. We all know that a particular smell or a particular song can immediately transport you to a previous time or place, but if you isolate ambient noise and focus in on that, what kind of sonic journey can that take you on? And how can this help us appreciate the world we live in?

Herbert, together with NT associate director Ben Power, has created an avant-garde piece of theatre in which sound becomes a character, engaging with the actors, eliciting emotion and responding to and shaping the dialogue. Two foley artists stand on a balcony above the set, creating a variety of subtle sounds with which the performers, Tobias Menzies and Susannah Wise, interact below. From purposeful footsteps falling on a tray of gravel to a lapping lake conjured by hands splashing in a glass tank, they provide a soundtrack to Tobias and Susannah’s past and potentially future lives. This aural illusion is conjured within an apparent sound studio, that may also be a kind of therapy centre, or perhaps a futuristic facility to which people can come to recreate happy memories from a bank of sounds that has been preserved in an otherwise dystopian world. Herbert lets you come to your own conclusions.

The beauty of having the foley live on stage is that you are torn between watching the passions of the actors and the actions of the sound-makers. Its presence makes every moment feel enhanced and vividly realised, yet somehow also artificial, laden with the irony that none of what the characters experience is real. There is a distinct sense of pathos throughout the whole piece, precisely because of this dialectic between the invocation of desired memories and the production of actual sounds. Because these are made with the most mundane of objects, they simultaneously create and confound the fantasy.

Herbert seems to be examining the future of our fractured world – these soundbites, however accurately crafted, can never come together to be an enduring, meaningful, tangible whole. Are we destined to remember our perceived halcyon days by trying vainly to record, sample, index and replay every single decibel of sound, every byte of data? In these days of virtual realities and cyber socialising, should we instead be trying to experience life in reality and not expect every sense to be at our fingertips whenever we click our fingers, or a button? You can go and see The Hush and ask yourself these questions. And you can also experience it on a purely sensory level, appreciating the technical prowess of those who manipulate sound and valuing the sonic experience in a way you may never have before. It’s worth going along with open ears just for that.

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