 | A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume {Reviewed by STELLA} A young artist is retreating into herself. She finds comfort face-down on the grotty carpet of her small bedsit in Dublin, miserably curled around herself, thinking about the carpets of her childhood and the failure of her adult life. Realising that she must quit her unsatisfactory job at the art gallery, she calls her mother, packs up, eschewing her seemingly few friends, and leaves the city to return to her childhood home. After a week or so in what she refers to as the ‘famine hospital’ - her childhood bedroom, packed with memories and mementos that she has a love/hate relationship with, she asks to stay in her Nan’s rundown cottage. Her grandmother died three years previously and the house with its tired 'For Sale' sign is still vacant. Staying here gives Frankie a sense of being centred, but she is still at odds with herself, and depression is forever on her back. She observes all the decaying mess that is nature and humanity, noticing the rundown, the broken, and the left behind. The nick-nacks of her Nan’s life on the sills of the windows both represent the pointless and the holders of memory - odd talismans. Frankie can’t quite seem to work up enthusiasm for much, but she has the observant eye of an artist. When she spots a dead robin on the roadside, she starts a project: photographs of dead things. Each chapter is entitled a dead animal, representing her finds: mouse, rabbit, fox, hedgehog, badger. The novel is set in rural Ireland: it’s both beautiful and bleak. Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking is an intimate portrait of mental illness, anxiety and acute awareness. While it is sometimes gruelling to be inside Frankie’s mind it is also fascinating: a mix between what we all hang onto in our lives (memories and safety nets), what we think but don’t say (Frankie has a tendency to speak ‘reality’ - she doesn’t hold back her thoughts - making observations which are like puncture wounds), and what it means to suffer the anxiety of being or trying to become an artist. Frankie’s issues lie in her deep uncertainty about her life and her inability to produce anything as an artist. Baume cleverly shapes the novel - it is written in the first person with clusters of capsule-like considerations, musings and memories, fleeting thoughts which build to capture this complex person. Interspersed within these deliberations are references to visual artworks - over 70. Frankie is constantly testing herself, drawing on her knowledge, trying to make herself relevant: “Works about Being, I test myself: On Kawara, beginning 1966. A series of paintings showing nothing but the date upon which they were made. He also sent missives to acquaintances and friends which simply read: I AM STILL ALIVE, followed by his signature.” If you know the works it adds further layers to the texture of the writing; if you don’t it leads to further discoveries. The chapters also feature the photographs of the dead animals. Baume isn’t interested in plot, she is investigating what it means to think and feel deeper, what sadness looks like, particularly inside the head of Frankie, a young woman stymied by her inability to act on her desires and overwhelmed by depression. It’s not all gloom; it is lifted by some wry observations, the lack of sentiment, and Baume’s excellent writing - sharp, astute and lyrical. |
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The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison {Reviewed by STELLA}
A woman is dealing with a virus - she’s a nurse, a midwife, and works in a large American city hospital. But this isn’t just any virus, it’s a plague, one that is fatal to nearly all women and children. Babies are stillborn or die soon after birth, their mothers not far behind them. As the authorities shut down borders and quarantine the sick, the medical teams work frantically to find a cure as they fall to the fever. Men are dying too, and the airborne virus is unstoppable. Our heroine awakes from her fever to find the hospital deadly quiet, bodies surrounding her. She leaves and walks home. The electricity is out, the roads quiet, cars abandoned, stores ransacked, no water - chaos, no people. When she wakes to find a stranger in her room, she fights him off and takes flight. And so begins her journey across America - a journey of survival. She quickly realises that she is one of very few women, and to hide she must disguise herself as a man. Groups of marauding men, gang-like in their behaviour, are out to seek every advantage, and women are in demand. Conversely, there are women (queens of a hive) who have their own male harems. There are religious cults. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison is a disquieting post-apocalyptic novel about the aftermath of a catastrophic plague. It’s a sharp look at gender politics and at power structures, and the speed of collapse of a complex society is all too devastatingly convincing. The novel is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (not so bleak, but just as gritty), Naomi Alderman’s The Power and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and it is very good. Gripping, intriguing, with a compelling main character who will hook you immediately. Her encounters with others make perfect foils for Elison to explore the strengths and weaknesses of humans in crisis, but it is the months that the midwife spends alone that are the highlights of the novel. Her contemplation of what she had previously and her connection with this ruined world and with the increasingly new world in which she must learn to live are captivating. The series is called 'The Road to Nowhere', and the second, The Book of Etta, takes place 100 years on. Elison is working on the third and final title, The Book of Flora. |
 | Companions by Christina Hesselholdt {Reviewed by THOMAS} Identity is valent only in the eye of the beholder. Unseen we are lost. Any idea we have of ourselves is less stable than the idea others have of us, and we cannot even, in compensation for this instability, be confident that it has any greater accuracy. What we think of as personality is continually contested between the bearer and the perceiver of that identity, which makes the identity game both useful and fraught, ambivalent and ultimately irresolvable. To think of yourself is to be at once both inside and outside yourself, to experience the disjunction between description and the indescribable to which it has been attached, a project that leads, ultimately, past many useful discoveries, to self-destruction. To think of others, however, is to remain securely on the surface, the only place where footing may be firm (for what that’s worth). To describe another is to inscribe, prescribe or circumscribe a hypothetical space in which a postulated self, with postulated ‘depth’, postulated ‘personality’ and so forth, persists (there is no reason to think this actually to be so but reassurance (the best reason)). We can only ever be certain of a surface, if we can be certain of anything (and if we can’t, we must give certainty another meaning, one that resembles what we take it to mean). Fiction provides the possibility (or the illusion of possibility (which is quite sufficient (and, in any case, will do for possibility if there is otherwise no such thing as possibility))) of transgressing the surfaces that act as borders between the postulated persons that they describe (or prescribe or circumscribe), and to experience viewpoints from beyond, if there is a beyond, those surfaces, or, in any case, to catch in those surfaces the play of reflection that we take for evidence of something beyond those surfaces. Christina Hesselholdt, in her novel Companions, provides narratives and monologues from six viewpoints, those of six old friends now entering middle age, who are finding that the ideas the others have of them are becoming insufficient to contain the momentum of their frustrations and desires, but, at the same time, drawing comfort from their intimacy with those others of whom they have ideas. Although they each speak convincingly in the first person (though some, like Alwilda, exist primarily in the third person in her friends’ accounts of her), it becomes apparent that one voice, Alma, is the (fictional (if this is a work of fiction)) authorial voice, conjuring and postulating the voices of her friends (if our identity belongs to others, can they also use our voice?). Although there are some memorable passages in Alma’s voice, especially those in which she splices her experiences of place with those of (actual) writers, the main focus of the book is her friend Camilla, or, rather, a Camilla-as-postulated-by-Alma-as-postulated-by-the-author, whose habitual relationship with her husband Charles withstands his illness but is shown ultimately to be impermanent (is this, though, a projection by Alma, whose own relationship with Kristian disintegrates in the course of the book, and who seeks to understand the evanescence of feeling in others?). No detail or thought is too mundane or too personal or too uncomfortable to be acknowledged in these monologues (projected on these characters by their friend and creating an ambivalent tension through the intimacy of this transgression of identity). At the end of the book, Alma’s ‘Camilla’ asks: “If I were to ask Alma if a person can take the liberty to write anything at all about another person, what would she say? “‘I would say yes,’ Alma said, ‘it is only a matter of tactfulness. You have to be tactful - and put yourself on the line too, place yourself in exposed positions, pass judgement on yourself (Ibsen believed a person did that automatically when writing).’” |
 | Finnegans Wake by James Joyce {Reviewed by THOMAS} Occasionally, usually when suffering from a fever, my mind takes words and phrases and pulls them apart and recombines them and distorts them and relates them to other words and phrases and hybridises them and separates them from their sense and plays around with their pronunciation. This is distressing. I used to think that this was caused by the neurotoxic side-effect of a pathogen or the delirium of fever, but soon came to believe that this is the nature of language: without our constant yet relatively feeble and fleeting attempts to coagulate it into meaning, language is a heaving sea of chaotic association and permutation, endlessly fertile but ultimately not compatible with sanity. We expend a lot of effort resisting language’s inherent tendency towards chaos, generally with good reason: we seek clarity and sanity. In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce pulls down all the dykes and lets the sea wash over the land. Herein lie all the linguistic symptoms it usually takes illness to induce. Joyce spent seventeen years compulsively holding the idea of the novel underwater, holding it in that moment of uncertainty when drowning and developing gills seem about equally likely. Having prescription for roxithromycin filled before reading this book is probably a good idea.  (Aside: my own copy of Finnegans Wake is of an edition that has 28 pages of ‘Corrections of Misprints’, which make enjoyable Joycean reading in themselves (too bad the misprints were corrected in later editions and this addendum not reproduced)). |
