“What We Can Know“ by Ian McEwan - review

 “What We Can Know“ by Ian McEwan:

At the age of 77 McEwan has done it again!

What We Can Know is one of the best he has written lately, following his Lessons from 2022, which I found beautiful beyond measure, or before that, his Machines Like Us from 2019, which also left a lasting impression. 

His work consists of a high number of superbly and astonishingly well executed novels with fascinating topics. This is most sophisticated entertainment of a high order. His latest now surpasses even that. It gave me so much pleasure. 

What We Can Know teems with life and is full of ideas. 

There are passages on neurology, on A.I., on climate change, on nature, on biography, on memory, on literature, poetry and art. There is a love story, of course there is. 

There are beautiful executed character studies, there is violence, a murder, a neglected child, there are misunderstandings, misgivings and betrayals. 

There is a propulsive plot. 

There is abuse, misinterpretation and satirical class portrait.

There is dystopia, a world war, a deluge, a new world order, a derangement. There is melodrama.

What We Can Know divides into two parts, each covering the same events a century apart. In the first half, there is the search for a buried treasure, and in the second a shocking revelation.

Part One takes place in the future, the year is 2119. The narrator is Thomas Metcalf, a humanities professor, who teaches literature at an institution focused on science and maths. 

The planet has been decimated. A chain reaction set into motion by populist leaders let to resource wars, an A.I. run amok, nukes gone astray causing tsunamis and millions of dead. America has become a wasteland. The remains of the UK now is an archipelago of scattered small islands within a turbulent sea. What’s left of libraries and museums has been moved to higher ground. The human store of digital knowledge is maintained in Nigeria.

Thomas Metcalfe, his period of interest being 1990 to 2030, becomes interested in a 2014 dinner party in rural England, given in honor of Vivien Blundy’s 50th birthday. Her husband, the great poet Francis Blundy, a fictional iconical figure considered to be the best poet of his time and a fierce speaker of the climate change movement, reads aloud A Corona for Vivien, a complex masterful poem dedicated to her. He gives her the only copy, written on a piece of vellum and that copy disappears.

By studying all material available to him, including emails, journal entries and letters of the participants of that evening, Tom builds a portrait of the evening and the 21st Century. Guests arrive, drinks are drunk, fires lit, lively conversation and laughter is heard around the table, old enmities are dragged to the surface. 

This portrait is a speculative product of his attempt to imagine the past and leads to the question implied by the book’s title: What can we know? 

How do memory, perception and belief form our realities? What happens when certainty escapes? What do biographers owe their subjects. What and how much can we really know about the past. This tale, looking on our time from the future, encourages us to think about our present era historically. 

Over the decades, the missing poem’s reputation has grown and a myth and even a movement has formed around it. The poem, never seen by public eye, is considered to be the ultimate in poetry, the great lost poem of the climate crisis, a priceless treasure of art. It may be buried. Tom and his lover Rose decide to go on a search for it.

Part Two is a personal journal written in our time by the poet’s wife, Vivien Blundy, who was present throughout the events the researchers of Part One know of only by second-hand.

Vivien’s tale makes clear that the people of 2119 scraped only at the surface and were ignorant of the shocking details of an action that was the secret pivotal point for all that occurred next, including the composition of the poem. Many of the assumptions about the famous dinner were incorrect. 

Both approaches of these same events, one from the future, one from the present, show that an accurate, true account of what really happened, can only go so far. 

This is a very careful novel, not only driven by a propulsive plot. There is, a trademark of McEwan’s, complex characterization, where everyone has both positive and negative traits. There is beautiful prose, emotion and drama and a plethora of significant ideas to ponder.

One thing that What We Can Know does is make one nostalgic for the present.

And it is with regret one looks on the image the young of the future must have of us. For them we are morally corrupt idiots who ruined everything.

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“Old God's Time“ by Sebastian Barry - review

 “Old God's Time” by Sebastian Barry:

It is somewhere in the middle of the 1990s in Dalkey at the Irish sea and widower Tom Kettle, freshly retired from the Garda spends his days sitting in a wicker chair in a small flat annexed to a Victorian castle, smoking cigarillos and contemplating the Irish Sea, the bobbing fishing boats and a small island busy with cormorants. His life has lost force and momentum and, although he is not unhappy he is certainly lonely. He longs for a visit of his daughter and certainly welcomes the surprise visit of two former colleagues from Dublin who come for advise and help on a case they re-opened.

Tom has a great love in him, for his dead wife, June, for most of humanity, for nature, the butterflies hibernating in his bedroom and even for his furniture, he respects the “intimacy of inanimate things“.

Tom is a sympathetic person but not a reliable witness, his thoughts are full of grief, he survived more than one blow and disaster in his life and not everything he experiences or remembers, the reader slowly finds out, can really have taken place. His inner world is a mix of sorrow and sadness but also a great sense of humour. 

Tom, we slowly learn, clearly is the victim of the corroding effect, trauma can have on memory and thought. Trauma inflicted on him and his wife and a lot of other people in those dark times when the holy church had a fierce reign, power and authority in Ireland. The subject of the book is quite clearly the condemning retribution of priests and nuns who abused the power they had over the most innocent and fragile members of society which had been put into their care, the children. 

We accompany Tom Kettle on his way in life, how he was passed from one orphan institution to another, was abused by priests, how he served in the army and was forced to kill in Malaya, how he experienced more trauma in Dublin, now a cop, during the trouble, the time of the bombings, how he finally met his wife June who experienced similar abuse in her childhood, how they married and had, for a while, a very happy family life with two lovely protected children. Then disaster sets in and Tom is uprooted but does not loose his strong sense of justice and morality. 

The book is a powerful play on hazy unstable memories and the upholding of personal narrative as life slowly descends into oblivion.

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“Here We Are” by Graham Swift - review

 “Here We Are“ by Graham Swift:

Another brilliant story by Graham Swift, a tale straight out of life with just the right amount of magic and wonder. Not only is there magic on stage like the inexplicable appearing or vanishing of things and persons, there is the vanishing act of life itself, its mostly unwelcome but inevitable decline into old age and death, its highlights like love, friendship, devotion, mercy and forgiveness, but also its cruel disappointments and betrayals which are all too humanly comprehensible but nevertheless formative and life defining. 

All brilliantly and with great insight told by Swift who again, as in his last novel from 2016, Mothering Sunday, has achieved a remarkable piece of magical writing, a quiet novella full of palpable regret that eventually finds consolation. It is a short book but it contains a whole life. Or rather, the lives of three people whom fate chose to throw together.

It is the postwar summer of 1959, England and a new variety show is all the talk among the tourists and crowds on Brighton pier. It is here the fate of a love triangle is about to unfold. There is Ronnie Deane, later known as The Great Pablo, who, in World War II at the age of eight, is torn from his poor, fatherless and often miserable home in Blitz-tormented London and evacuated to a save home in the country. Here he is received by a childless couple with open arms and love. Ronnie soon accepts and even loves his new parents. Through his new foster father he learns the trade of a stage magician and excels in it.

Then there is Evie White, who became his assistant on stage and his fiancée. From early childhood on she was brought to every imaginable and available casting by her mother to perform as a dancer, singer or chorus-girl and when she finally met Ronnie she fell in love with him and the two were engaged to be married soon. 

But then Ronnie’s biological mother died and he had to leave for London and during his 2-day-absence Evie’s love for Ronnie sadly and inexplicably transformed into love for actor Jack Robbins, Ronnie’s best friend and compere of the show they all were part of. 

As Ronnie came back from London he immediately saw in Evie’s eyes what had happened and the next day he simply vanished, never to be seen again, never to be heard of.

50 years later, Evie, now 75 years old, on her husband Jack’s death anniversary, remembers and looks back on her life. Looking back together with Evie on more than half a century the reader is forced to re-evaluate the picture he formed of her, Jack and Ronnie.

This is a gentle and forgiving novella, a masterpiece in compressed story-telling, that transforms a commonplace love story into a complex narrative full of profound emotion that stays with the reader for a long time. 

As an epigraph Graham Swift used "It's life's illusions I recall" from Joni Mitchell‘s song “Both Sides Now”: The ending line is well remembered: “I really don't know life, at all."

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“Victory City” by Salman Rushdie - review

 “Victory City” by Salman Rushdie:

This is the enchanting tale, cleverly styled as the translation of an ancient epic, of Pampa Kampana who, as a nine-year-old girl in the India of the 15th Century, helplessly watches as her mother leaves her behind and walks into the flames. As a result of a war who killed all the men, the women all decided to end their lives. Young orphan Pampa Kampana then is miraculously inhabited by a goddess and decides that she “would laugh at death and turn her face toward light.”

She plants seeds in the ashes of the inferno and by magic a city, complete with inhabitants, imposing palaces and grandiose temples commences to sprout from the ashes. Pampa whispers life, complete with their individual histories into the people’s minds and when the creation ends, there stand “Victory City” and the Bisnaga Empire.

Pampa herself is, due to the goddesses powers, ageless and fated to outlive those around her for two hundred and fifty years. As time goes on, ever and ever more relentless, war and old age afflict her brothers and children and their children and then their children, but she sadly, cruelly is forced to live on. She watches political and religious powers rise and fall, intrigues being spun, succeed and then fail again, and in the end she herself gets caught up in the turmoils and becomes victim of her own creation. 

Victory City is many things: a myth, an Indian historical epic, a polemic parable, a meditation on the self-ruinous nature of power and right-wing religious fanaticism, the tale of the creator who in the end is consumed by his creation. But above all it is a story about the immortality of stories, the way a tale told will always outlive deeds. What remains are not empires, who one day must crumble to pieces, but the words that will tell of them. 

This is a delightful, fast-paced, enticing, humorous, beautiful saga of love, heartbreak, conceit, adventure and magic and a tremendously well crafted act of story-telling.

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“Lessons” by Ian McEwan - short review

 “Lessons” by Ian McEwan:

McEwan has always been a moralist, most of his novels engage in moral arguments and combine harsh reality with excursions into the strangest chambers of the mind. And so, too does this novel, another profound demonstration of his remarkable skill.

In fact it proved to be one of his best I have read so far and among his most engrossing. It certainly is one of his longest but that, too proved to be a great delight. It is almost old-fashioned in its talkative, discursive humane way, full of insight and intelligence. And it is, with the inclusion of autobiographical details, his most personal. The language, as so often with McEwan is beautiful. He delights in close observation and the resulting rumination on the observed. Not to forget the subtle, rather agreeable humor, very British. 

The book is an exploration of a lifetime and an era, a stretch of 70 years from the postwar decade to the present day and McEwan divinely constructs and lets us follow the life of a failed writer/ poet/ concert pianist, who is an ordinary man with once grand aspirations and a complicated past. We are drawn into this life, watch it unfold, connect and take part. The book thrives on the interplay between global events, the Cold War, Chernobyl, Brexit, COVID-19, and the private turmoils in the live of Roland Baines. 

Roland is born three years after the Second World War, watches the Iron Curtain go up and the Berlin Wall come down. He watches his country being maneuvered, not always successfully, through difficult times by the hands of Labour and the Tories, watches the fall of Margaret Thatcher and the rise of Blair, sees AIDS recede, there is 9/11 and then there is Brexit. There is the emergence of COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown. Against this backdrop of political happenings his own personal tragedies and triumphs play out over the course of almost eight decades. The novel moves back and forward in time, reflecting Roland’s memories of his experience.

Lessons begins with the memory of a remarkably harrowing piano lesson. At the age of 11 Roland had a disastrous encounter with Miriam Cornell, his piano-teacher, a woman of 22 years, who in an act of shocking intentional grope, pinches the boy’s thigh, strokes his crotch with a lingering finger, puts her hand under the elastic of his underpants and strikes his knee with the edge of a ruler. She pretends this abuse is a lesson and later on, when the boy is 14, draws him into a torrid sexual two-year affair, intoxicating and destructive, that leaves him marked, confused and the reader repulsed. Psychologically and sexually this will haunt the boy all his life.

Except that it doesn’t. Not really.

At this point the book could have easily become a moral tale, based on a single moral question. But McEwan has the skill to show us that no single incident is ever the whole story. For Roland, this means no single person defines who he is and shows him, through retrospective, the great gift of time: forgetting and overcoming. 

Long after the disastrous affair with his teacher Roland meets and marries another woman, Alissa, soon to be a world-famous novelist who achieves publication only at the cost of abandoning her baby boy and husband. Roland commits himself to the loving labour of raising his son alone. Here is another blow dealt by a woman and Roland still goes on. 

“In settled expansive mood Roland occasionally reflected on the events and accidents, personal and global, minuscule and momentous that had formed and determined his existence.” 

As Roland is attempting to make sense of his life as lessons, stories of cause and effect, long-ago catastrophes slowly transform into soft tremors and the woman who was bound to leave the biggest impact on his psyche becomes, in the end, one who is hardly remembered.

Roland, in the end, knows what he always wanted and needed, which are very simple needs: Kids around the table, a cat in the garden, a garden, good wine and friends to spend an evening with. He wants a hearth to warm him. And luckily he is given one, even though tragedy has its play with him more than once, too. This is life, after all. 

Roland is an everyday unheroic hero, one who has been given a life which he must now lead, regardless of the difficulties, to its end. His acceptance and determination keep him going. And in the end it dawns on him that these lessons given to him were really gifts. 

This is a wide-angle, epic and engrossing family history, a book about life, about who we are, about how we live. It raises many moral questions and covers many topics and my pleasure in reading this novel was immense. Lessons is a wise book and beautifully, compassionately crafted great fiction.

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“The Singularities" by John Banville - review

 “The Singularities” by John Banville:

Reading Booker winner John Banville is like watching a magician at work. Banville is such a talented master in his craft, such a highly intelligent, sophisticated, artful, poetic, philosophical narrator and perceiver of the world which he seemingly effortless describes in such luscious elegance of prose and style that reading him is pure joy and bliss, sentence for captivating sentence, paragraph for aesthetic paragraph. Not often do I come upon a writer or a novel which gives me such pleasure. 

The book is difficult to summarize. Banville revisits characters and themes from his past works like The Book of Evidence or The Infinities and crafts an artful, witty and mesmerizingly atmospheric philosophical narrative. 

If you know John Banville then you know not to expect much in the way of a plot, story as such plays mostly only second part. What is very prominent, though is style. And what style that is!

 

Banville is more interested in the time and space between events, in insight rather than action. His idea of representation is a portrait of the world as is, of the things and their essence. He achieves this by rumination on or around these things, these ideas, the world, with a descriptive power rarely encountered, Henry James comes to mind and Thomas Mann. He is as much in search of the truth about things as he is concerned in the multiple ways we deliberately bend the truth to our wish and will. 

Banville’s shapely sentences give enormous, almost painterly pleasure when, for example a full paragraph gets devoted to the description of a fly, the surface of a table or a chair, he excels in atmospheric depictions of plays of light, shadows and reflections. Here is a man in sophisticated command of the language, a true artist of his craft who breathes life into inanimate objects, thus making their thingness transcendentally meaningful. Even chairs, tables or mountains have a heart that beats and a soul that remembers, so illustrating Adam Godley the elder’s Brahma Theory, that a great world spirit moves through all things. 

His metaphors are exquisite and surprising. When for example, he compares an old woman’s memory, Ursula, Adam’s dottering widow in this case, as a crate of Meissen figurines someone clumsily dropped and they are all now smashed to pieces and the pieces in a hopeless jumble on the floor. 

The pace of the book is leisurely at times, but it’s always pleasurable to follow the winding path of this sophisticated narration which sometimes meanders off into fields of science, physics, metaphysics, art, literature, philosophy, history and mythology. As in The Infinities the main narrator is the godlet Hermes, the messenger god of the ancient Greeks, and with a wink, could be just a representation of Banville himself. 

Much of the action occurs at an Irish country home known as Arden House where we meet Freddie Montgomery again who, under the newly adopted name of Felix Mordaunt, returns to this house he believes is the place where he grew up. Freddie is a convicted murderer who has been paroled after serving 25 years of a life sentence and was first introduced in Banville’s 1989 novel, The Book Of  Evidence. 

The inhabitants of Arden House include Adam, head of household and his wife, Helen, who is still haunted by the death of an infant son, there is the senior Godley’s second wife, Ursula, who passes her days slowly dying alone in an attic room, and then there is William Jaybey who, on the request and invitation of Adam Godley, has agreed to take on the project of producing a biography of Godley’s father.

The Singularities delves into exploring the complex relationships among these characters, along with a strange woman, Anna Behrens, who once was a lover of both Godley the elder and Mordaunt and now reunites with the latter for the purpose of presenting him with a request.

Godley the elder once formulated the “Brahma theory”, which has overturned physics both classical and quantum and left us in a world where the very fabric of reality has been rent apart. The Brahma theory “showed that every increase in our knowledge of the nature of reality acts directly upon that reality, and that each glowing new discovery we make brings about an equal and opposite darkening.” Mankind became too smart for its own good. 

The mind creates the universe and when the mind is altered so is the universe. In this it is much like writing, the act that creates the already-created world, making the writer a god, of sorts. Banville no doubt, is such a god.

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”Harlem Shuffle” by Colson Whitehead - short review

 “Harlem Shuffle” by Colson Whitehead:

Apart from being a social novel and a morality play about race and power Harlem Shuffle is also a crime novel, at least it follows the laws of crime novels. While the book failed to win me over I understand that for some the pleasure of the plot lies in discovering what kind of trouble an ordinary man can get into, and how or whether he’ll get out. 

Harlem Shuffle is set in the 1960s where we follow ordinary furniture salesman Ray Carney, basically a good guy who gets sucked into schemes and heists through his cousin, boyhood companion and best friend, Freddie.

The novel is structured in three sections. 

The first Act shows how easily a man can step downward into crime. 

In Act 2 we follow Carney’s climb up the echelons of criminal activity. For Carney it might feel like an advancement but it is just an illusion.

In Act 3 Carney is faced with questions of family ties and social responsibility and whether a man should step up to help others. Will Carney get his cousin Freddie out of trouble this time and will he do it regardless of what the costs will be for him. 

The prose is good, entertaining, the painting of New York accurate and atmospheric and a love-letter to a Harlem long gone-bye. The novel gains force through accumulation and acceleration all heavy with criminal activity. And yet it failed to convince me and that is not Whitehead’s fault but boils down to a matter of taste. 

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”Guapa” by Saleem Haddad - review

 “Guapa” by Saleem Haddad:

This is a is fluent, passionate and emotionally honest coming-of-age tale of a young gay Arab man named Rasa in the Middle East and his struggle for self-definition, mirroring the complex battles for self-determination being fought out in Arab societies. The political landscape is just post Arab-spring revolution with an overall feeling of despair and resignation.

it is set over the course of one day and we follow Rasa on his way through an unnamed Arab city in search of his identity, his lost love of his life, his family, his mother who has left when he was a young boy, his father who died some years ago of cancer. Rasa lives alone with his only remaining relative, his grandmother. Their flat is a shrine to Rasa’s dead father and a way of dismissing his vanished mother. The grandmother, Teta is an oppressing strong force, ruling the household, dominating the family life even when the father of Rasa was still living and the mother was still present. With her stubborn mind, rooted in the old ways, her head full of misgivings, prejudices, rules, restrictions, all founded on shame and the fear of what people will say. Even if to her she acts only in the interest of the family, she thereby drives the family apart. She is a personification of the old mind-set that rules the Arab world with its tight rules regarding family and conduct.

Rasa has lost his true love because his lover, Taymour who, even though he truly loves Rasa back, is also too weak to not bend to society’s rules and marries a woman for appearance sake, so betraying their love. Everyone is performing, in one way or other, everyone is putting on a mask and not showing their face. 

Rasa is torn between many conflics. He is queer in more than one way. He is gay in a male dominated society who disapproves of homosexuality. He is Arab, but a young Arab who fights the old ways because there is no future to be seen for the younger generation. He studies in the USA and there meets a girl who accuses him of being so Arab and and an American-Arab who accuses him of being too westernized. 

Family, identity, and politics collide in this honest, insightful novel. This is in many parts a very political novel and in some parts it feels like a young-adult coming-of-age novel. The main characters are approaching thirty, yet often acting like thirteen-year-old teenagers. Maybe this is a hint that until self-acceptance occurs and sexually based discrimination ends, development is arrested.

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“Babysitter “ by Joyce Carol Oates

 “Babysitter“ by Joyce Carol Oates:

This novel is a tale of violence and abuse of the most vulnerable, children and women, committed by cruel, dominating men. 

It is 1977, Detroit and the city is still recovering from the race riots a decade earlier but experiencing the first signs of urban gentrification. A series of brutal child murders by a perpetrator known as Babysitter hits, shocks and terrorizes the citizens. Babysitter leaves his victims lying naked, washed and groomed, on the ground, their clothes neatly folded beside them. 

In stark contrast and in a parallel story-line but serving as the main engine of the plot is the story of Hannah, a Dior-clad 39-year-old housewife, rich, with two little kids and a husband who is not aware of her anymore, living a secluded, boring life in which every day is a white blank that needs to be filled with activity, any activity. She is profoundly doubting herself, is deeply uncertain, despite her arresting beauty, about the reality of her social being. She embarks on a dangerous, devastating affair with a mysterious man known only by the initials YK. Even after YK rapes her in the most cruel and demeaning fashion, almost killing her in the event, Hannah, starved for love as she is, keeps thinking of him as her lover with tenderness. Hannah is victimized but, quite bafflingly also cooperates in her own victimization. “Only the weak fall in love, they see no way of living otherwise”. This is a fair summarization of the desires that drive Hannah in this disturbing novel. 

The narrative timeline twists back and forth and for much of the novel Hannah’s daydreams keep returning again and again to the sensation of YK touching her wrist at their initial meeting or her first ascent in the glass capsule of a hotel elevator which took her towards their first meeting. 

Interwoven throughout the narrative are simmering racial and class tensions. The wealthy white class citizens feeling threatened by the black populace of poorer Detroit, the Filipina household help who is constantly there, caring for the family, but never registered as part of it. 

This is a compelling, unsettling study of the most ugly aspects of human desire. It is dark, violent and a tense examination of gender and power. 

In the end, even though Oates is, as she is so often, brilliant in her writing, it proved to be unsatisfactory for me, I just couldn’t go the way Oates wanted me to go and believe that a woman like Hannah would be so foolish to not see the risk that lies in such a reckless, dangerous affair, with all the signs of “turn back” on glaringly red, and still go on, risk her and her family’s existence just because she was restless and sexually unfulfilled. 

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“The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” by Taylor Jenkins Reid - review

 “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” by Taylor Jenkins Reid:

Despite the hype and rave this book got in the past (2017) I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. 

Renowned Hollywood actress Evelyn Hugo, aged 79, enlists little-known, young but ambitious journalist Monique Grant for an exclusive interview. Monique doesn’t understand why she's been chosen to write and sell Evelyn’s memoir but jumps of course at the opportunity and one-time chance to advance her career. 

In a truly and undeniably visceral and addictive style, soapy, juicy, glamorous and complex, in a mix of historical and psychological fiction, Evelyn’s life unfolds from the 1950’s all the way to present time, documenting the entirety of her acting career, including the stories behind the titular seven husbands, Hollywood, the film industry, fame, glamour, scandal, sordid secrets and lies. The characters, complicated and realistically flawed, are well laid out in all their machinations, relationship dynamics and complexities. 

Especially Evelyn’s character is immaculately developed, with very human feelings and thoughts. Issues like sexual exploitation women face both generally and within the context of Hollywood stardom, are discussed in depth, lending an emotional perspective to the story.

An asset of the book is, that it is also a touching queer romance. It is a story of scandal and ambition, as well as identity, love, and the difficulty of wanting to be true to yourself in a difficult world. 

This was a fast and highly enjoyable read.

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“Appliance” by J. O. Morgan - review

 “Appliance“ by J. O. Morgan:

J. O. Morgan has earned himself recognition as a poet, this is his first novel. 

In this very compelling, highly entertaining, often tender and philosophical fable we are, in eleven chapters, confronted with the impact, the disturbances, the repercussions and ramifications of the dramatic changes a new clever invention, the Machine, brings onto mankind. 

In eleven snapshots or vignettes different protagonists, different voices, highlight another aspect of the machine’s impact on society. In this regard the novel is similar to, say, the famous poem by Steven Wallace 13 Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird. Eleven different perspectives on one central theme and they all form a chorus that tells of how this new technology is changing, morphing and growing and on its way changing, morphing and relentlessly and inevitably distorting everything on our planet and us with it.

Teleportation, the instant breaking apart, sending and reassembling of matter across immense distances in almost no-time is fairly well known in the genre of science fiction. But this is not a Science Fiction novel. It uses the idea of teleportation to show how a society, always on the move for more, always progressively expanding and advancing, might be made dependent and irretrievably transformed by it. It raises the question of the necessity of dubious progress. 

The novel does not focus on the techology but focuses on the dangers, frustrations and bewilderment it causes to those who live with it. The System, as it is called, advances the infrastructure around everyone, creeps into every aspect of human life, transforms houses, decors, fashion and work, attitudes and values and changes society to the point of utter dependency. 

In one chapter an old woman is forced to transport an old oil painting via the new technology and ponders on the concept of the Original. Not a new thought, one which Walter Benjamin explored in his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1935. Seen in this new context it offers surprising new aspects, though. What is an original, what is a mere copy. Must an original  be linked to a bodily manifestation? Is the body sent the same as the body received or a mere copy?

And what about personality, consciousness and individuality? In another chapter a woman’s husband returns after a transportation slightly altered, a much nicer, more pleasing individual as the one she had to endure and live with before the event. So, might there be something that is not attached to matter, like a soul or spirit?

Innovative, full of questions, philosophical and infused with humanity, this fable forces us to re-examine our faith in technology, take new measure of our greed for new things and urges us to reflect on the future we really want and on what really matters. 

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“The Melody“ by Jim Crace - review

 “The Melody” by Jim Crace:

This is Jim Crace’s latest novel after his Booker Prize finalist Harvest. It is a a meditation on grief and poverty, an ecological fable, a lyrical and tender rumination on marital love and loss. 

The aging concert singer Alfred Busi, much cherished in his hometown for his music and songs, in the early hours hears foragers rattling the bins in the backyard of his seaside villa which has been his and his wife’s home for decades and, while investigating, is attacked, scratched and bitten by a mysterious nocturnal scavenger, he thinks it was a feral boy, neither man nor animal. Busi recently lost his beloved wife Alicia, and now feels the weight, the maladies and ailments of old age setting in and his lifelong career as a celebrated singer seems to draw to a close. He is a man taking stock of his life and looking into an uncertain future. 

His only living close relatives are the sister of his wife, Terina whom he, despite her haughty, cool aloofness, still desires and her son Joseph, a repugnant timber tycoon and housing developer. A few days after the attack, Busi discovers that his nephew has arranged for the villa to be demolished and replaced with modern apartments for enormous profit. These machinations set into motion a troubling transformation of the town. 

We don’t really get a precise sense of where and when all this is happening, this seems to be intentional. Events unfold in a coastal town that feels vaguely Mediterranean. The town itself is surrounded by an impenetrable tangle of trees, scrubs, shrubs and underwood, called the Bosk, inhabited by an assortment of wild animals. 

One of the novel’s themes is the conflict between profit and justice. Busi’s attachment to his home is set against the poverty of the town’s homeless population, whom the wealthy class call “neanderthals” and in the name of order, civilization, and decency, not to forget the monetary gain, wish to drive from their dwellings.  Busi‘s fate is personal as well as political.

In the end the house developers succeed, razing the Bosk, driving out all the animals and erecting the seaside apartments as planned, thus changing the atmosphere and spirit of the town considerably. 

Busi, as we are told by the narrator, some six years after the events, gave up his villa and moved into one of the newly erected apartments. 

In a final scene he visits the forests once more with two newfound younger friends, one being the narrator, and his now infirm sister-in-law Terina, to scatter his wife‘s ashes and say a last good-bye. Then they go back to their homes in a changed town, devoid of wildlife. As they contemplate the wilderness a last time the narrator muses: 

“I have the sense… that something other than ourselves persists.  Something wilder and more animated but still resembling us.  Something that must scavenge on its naked haunches for roots and berries, nuts and leaves, roaches, maggots, frogs and carrion, stolen eggs and honey.”

He might have Alfred’s wild boy in mind, but might also reach out to our planet that man wants to bring under control, destructively if necessary.

Sometimes it is better to not look for explanations, sometimes it is even embarrassing to want to convert all what one has read into meaning. Sometimes it might just be enough to appreciate the mood a book induced. In this case I appreciated the sense and mood very much, it stayed with me for quite a while.

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