Month: June 2019

This novel opens with one of its twelve principal characters walking over Hungerford Bridge on her way to the National Theatre, and in one of those weird moments of synchronicity that happen more often than cold logic would give life credit for, that is exactly what I found myself doing the day I finished reading Girl, Woman, Other. How could I not think of Amma as I reached the bridge’s mid-point, stopping, as I so often do when making that particular transition, to gaze out at the lights of London, to meditate on where the city is headed, where I see myself now in relation to it?

This is a great symphony of a novel, one in which a number of story threads and character arcs are gradually woven together – or unravelled, if you prefer to see it that way – in a dense and skilfully designed tapestry of narrative. No character is random, no incident irrelevant. And though many of the book’s central characters live in London and the novel has a great deal to say about that city in particular this is far from being exclusively a London novel.

Reading Girl, Woman, Other is an experience not unlike wandering through the departure lounge of an international airport: you watch individuals, couples, families, hear snatches of their conversations, pick up intimations of their worries and dreams, experience fleeting visions of a hundred lives. All are different, yet all are connected. All, for those moments in which you encounter them, seem somehow intimately and uncannily connected with your own.

The way the book is written, the form it takes – an unstoppable river of words alternately close-packed and free-wheeling, skittish – is for me at least its greatest joy. In its disregard for conventional arrangements of paragraphs and cut-and-dried syntax, the novel offers an irresistible invitation to dive right in: to be with its people, to question your own choices, motivations and assumptions, to recognise the role you play in shaping the lives of others and of our body politic. The use of different Englishes and registers of English forms an inalienable part of the work”s innate musicality.

In its interest in the absolute now as the uppermost layer of the peculiar arrangement of time we know as history, Girl, Woman, Other is absolutely a Gordon Burn book. As an intense and vivid evocation of the lives of black British women, how they have always been here and have always mattered, this work is essential. I don’t mind admitting that I fell in love with it, and more than a little.

Literally minutes after finishing reading This Brutal House and while in the process of checking a reference I discovered Ryan Murphy’s HBO series Pose (currently available on BBC iPlayer and amazingly good). In the space of a week I have gone from knowing nothing about the background to Govinden’s novel to knowing at least something about it. I kind of wish I’d discovered Pose before reading This Brutal House but at the same time I’m glad I didn’t, firstly because I can now enter the world of the book again retrospectively and with added sumptuous visuals, and secondly because reading the book ‘blind’ delivers the kind of literary electric shock that reminds us of why we are readers and (especially) why we are writers.

I found this book difficult (a compliment), not in its subject matter so much as the way in which its content is delivered. I’m not a fan of the omniscient voice narrator – I tend to slide away from fabulism – and so I found the use of the first person plural for the Mothers’ narrative somewhat distancing even as it is perfectly appropriate for its context. The narrative is largely expository, the text so dense in places it feels as if you’re having to fight your way inside it. I found it most effective to read this novel in hour-long chunks, so as to immerse myself fully and not to lose the thread.

All these criticisms, in the end, act as plus points: This Brutal House is the kind of novel that stays with you forever, that, once having read it, you can pick up whenever you want and recapture its sense of itself in just a few splendid paragraphs.

I would have liked the book to deliver more of the atmosphere of the vogue balls themselves, the artistry, the coding, the furious competition. Unsurprisingly I enjoyed the formal invention of the vogue caller chapters and could have done with more of them. Stand-out sequences for me were Teddy’s experience in the Chanel store (everything about that chapter is genius) and his later dialogue with the refuse collectors.

At the heart of the book lies Teddy’s story with Sherry and the fleeting glimpses we are offered throughout the course of the novel prove effective as a uniting thread. To ask for more of Sherry and Teddy would seem too greedy.

I know already that This Brutal House will not be my favourite book from the Gordon Burn longlist – in a sense, it is not a novel that was written ‘for’ me and that is well and good – but I know also that it must be one of the contenders most worthy of winning. In entering new territory, both in terms of form and subject matter, in its willingness to take risks, in its superb level of literary achievement, in its opening of the reader’s eyes to social division and hidden oppression, in its reflection on a historical moment This Brutal House loudly embodies the spirit of the Gordon Burn Prize and I will long treasure what it has brought to me, not just as a reader but as a writer too.

Category is: writing realness. Walk.

It’s interesting how greatly our reaction to books is defined not always by the book as it stands, but by the book we are looking to find.

Of all the novels on this year’s Gordon Burn longlist, Lanny is probably the most beloved by readers and I can see why. Max Porter has a poet’s ear for language. In spite of the bleakness of certain sections, the book as a whole is big-hearted and ultimately positive in its outlook. The action takes place within an enclosed rural community we feel we come to know – as readers, we are drawn into this community, we feel ourselves become a part of it, for better or worse.

All of the above could equally be said of another novel, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. Perhaps because of the similarity of their conceit, I found myself constantly comparing the two and for me at least, Lanny loses out – definitively – at every juncture.

The wonder of Reservoir 13 lies in the depth it accrues – the multi-layered, undramatic reconstruction of lived reality, the genuine ambiguousness of many of the characters – characters we come to know only gradually, characters who might easily be us. Lanny is too brief an exercise – too studied – for its ecosystem to properly evolve. Even as the language of their thoughts is beautifully evoked, its characters shade towards stereotype. I hate to say it, but Lanny the golden child feels as if he belongs in another novel – Harry Potter, for example. The book might have worked better – and again, this probably says more about me as a writer than it does about the novel – if Lanny had been some more typical little toerag, ruining his neighbours’ vegetable patches playing Bravo Two Zero or spraying obscene graffiti on the village hall.

As it was, I didn’t believe in him. God preserve me from whimsy.

Part 3 of the novel, that too-tidy resolution, feels altogether too swiftly arrived at, and entirely unearned. Part 2 was much more satisfying. If anything, the novel needed to be longer. It needed to dig in more. It needed to have the courage of its original convictions. Max Porter has spoken eloquently of how Lanny began life as a long poem and I think the bones of that original conception – more abstract, more lyrical (and yes, the Lanny of the poem – when it’s just him and Pete – is entirely conceivable as a character and as a poetic being) – show through too starkly, without ever showing through enough to deliver the rigour this project demanded.

Has ambition, lacks depth, too woolly. It’s not him, it’s me.

When I graduate from the partial hospitalization program, I’ll receive a medallion. The people in group will adorn me with compliments and kind wishes. Then I will get on a plane and perform the persona of a successful author—a feature, interviews, a book tour. The medallion will be inside of my jacket pocket, between my fingertips. My hands will smell like a coin, and my nervous laughter will be amplified by a microphone, and women will line up to adorn me with kind wishes, and they’ll tell me they’ve been hurt too, and I’m scared I’ll reach out to hold them and the coin will fall out of my pocket like the secrets I don’t tell. The coin will fall out and I’ll have to admit that I’m a dumb Indian—and maybe that’s what they need to hear. You can’t obscure the truth with the mundane. You can’t illustrate pain for tourists.

Maybe I’ll wear the coin like a talisman, or be in the hospital again.

(‘I Used to Give Men Mercy’, Terese Marie Mailhot, Guernica magazine Feb 2018)

One writer’s journey, and so much more. It would be interesting to place this book in dialogue with Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table, Anna Kavan’s Asylum Dance, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I find myself remembering especially Meena Kandasamy’s When You Hit Me, which similarly makes the quality of its own sentences the theme of the work as well as the means through which that theme is explored, the proof of its own pudding.

In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure their dichotomies apply to me.

Of central importance also is Mailhot’s identity as a Native woman. The passages examining the difficulties she experienced as an MFA student – the internal opposition she felt to particular assumptions and demands – are marvellous and striking. The book’s genesis – as a series of individual essays – does not in the least affect its overall cohesion and resonance. A short work, but so resolute, with a quality of expression that frequently approaches poetry.

As if its words were hewn from rock. Heart Berries is the kind of book that makes you want to write, immediately, to capture moments and memories and arguments as they thrash and burn.