“How do we say No? In the fullness of time, how can we say No?”

and

“To create is to resist, to resist is to create.”

.

*

Whenever I find myself in a situation where I realize my own stance, though heartfelt, is hypocritical, I know that’s a good place to look for a novel. Valerie Martin.

*

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.” Gore Vidal.

*

Guy on a mobile phone: And this guy wasn’t saying anything, I mean he had nothing to say, nothing… He didn’t say anything, he just kept talking, but he wasn’t saying anything… It was all just, talk-talk-talk but nothing, I couldn’t take it, talking and talking and talking and talking and nothing, nothing, nothing at all to say about anything, endless mindless talking and not saying a word. I mean, how could anyone just talk about nothing..

*

“My dear good creature, do you really picture me with a pot of paste and a pair of scissors eagerly sticking press cuttings into an album? I’m thirty-three & I’ve been writing for thirteen years – no, sixteen years!” Georgette Heyer.

*

Perhaps this is as good a place as any, as our heroes wend their way towards the future, to describe in some small detail the countryside through which they trudged. If I were to provide you with a simple-to-understand expression to describe where Lissoy was, then ‘in the middle of nowhere’ would be fairly accurate: somewhere dwindled into anywhere and the next thing you knew you were nowhere. The ‘nowhere’ consisted of bogs and moors with only a single road leading to the place and that road bounded by hedgerows along its full length as if to keep the inevitable at bay. The laws of scenery were not flouted but they were only paid lip service to. The landscape was one of emigration and emptiness, a thing trampled into the past. It did everything in its power to resist interpretation. It was as if anything that might have caught the eye had been eroded by time and this was all that it had left; that would vanish, too, one day but that day had not arrived. The mountain, Binn Moan, rose like a cry in the wilderness but, even so, did its level best to blend itself in with the sky and go unnoticed.

Jim Murdoch’s new novel, Milligan and Murphy, introduces us to two half-brothers, John Murphy and John Milligan, both of them forty years of age and still at home with their Ma. In the manner of Samuel Beckett we are introduced to a couple of accidental people living accidental lives. I mention Beckett in passing because Milligan and Murphy is inspired by Mercier and Camier, a Beckett novel in which two men repeatedly try to leave town without success

On the way to a local farm for a day’s work, the brothers decide to leave their lives behind and head for the coast. We, as loyal readers, are allowed to follow closely behind.

They arrive in Drumclaven, a shitehole according to Dervla Mahoney, the local barmaid. They have a brush with the local constable and take some refreshment in the form of half-pints of Guinness before moving on. There occurs, from time to time, a kind of merging of their identities which led me to see them as different aspects of the same being; perhaps the conscious and the unconscious mind:

‘Do you think we did the right thing?’
It was Milligan talking. For a second Murphy thought it was just one of the voices in his head.

The next town along the way was to be Rathnerth, but on the way they meet up with Aghamore Ahern, an artist, philosopher and dandy and, reluctantly, share a barbecued crow with him.

By the time Milligan and Murphy have reached Rathnerth and moved in with Mad Meg, their story seems to have come full-circle and moved to its end. The brothers soon fall for home comforts and begin to fade into the landscape. But it isn’t so; the end I mean.

Before long they find themselves in Portlow, a place colder and wetter than Lissoy. Milligan never imagined there ever could exist such a place. But he’d been wrong before.

In his novels and plays Samuel Beckett is keen to point out the double meaning of ‘enclosure’ for his characters. And Murdoch amplifies this theme in his novel. The box or room or place of confinement is at the same instant the loved home and the dark prison. Our characters’ need to escape from this prison/home is a constant desire.

What Beckett does over and over again is to take his characters and his audience from safe to unsafe places. And this is exactly what Jim Murdoch does with Milligan and Murphy. When we leave them they are on board a ferry to England:

Milligan stood clinging for dear life to the rail at the stern of the ship and looked back. He suspected that he was going to be physically sick before he stepped onto dry land again. He was neither here nor there and that was another feeling he didn’t like one bit. And alone. He had never felt so alone. The sea; the world; in fact all of eternity spread out before him from this point. He felt like old Noah or the Ancient Mariner must have looking out at limitless sea, unable to cope with the significance of what they saw.

The sea looks like nothing he has ever seen before. He and Murphy have escaped their confinement within the box of their Ma and Lissoy and and are in the process of leaving behind their cultural heritage. They are taking the journey from the surface of consciousness to the depths of the unconscious. And Jim Murdoch takes us along, too, down the same path, just as Beckett would have done. One part of us is kicking and screaming, wanting to stay in the safe place, but another part knows we will never be satisfied until we are properly born.

‘It was 1972 and I was eighteen years old. I had jumped ship and watched while she sailed away.’

The narrator’s account of his decade in Uruguay gets off to a running start. A young man in a remote country is a recipe for picaresque adventures, and Montevideo is seething with political violence and sweating with the tango. On his very first day young Frederick runs into Tupamaros member Julio, gets a job washing dishes, and accepts the name Ramon Bolio. ‘That day in 1972 I was up for change,’ he tells us.

Ramon is in the privileged position of being able to mingle at all levels of society. He teaches English to a Capitan of the military regime, yet frequents the bars where revolutionary politics is discussed. Those around him are more or less born into their situation, but he has the choice of whether or not to engage with this world. He walks up to the most beautiful girl among the tango dancers and tells her if she doesn’t come home with him he’ll spend the night howling at the moon. You wouldn’t have done that back home in York, the reader can’t help thinking.

There is something unsettling about this young Ramon – a man with no fixed beliefs who is so easily able to cast aside his English habits. He tells us he has wrestled to reconcile the need for a credo with the conviction that life is just a flash in the pan. Events proceed with an hallucinatory clarity. The reader can picture the action of each scene perfectly, but the emotive layer is often elusive. ‘I had embraced a new life and new friends and commitments and my emotions and feelings were not repressed in any obvious way. I was a dancer. I was not a camera,’ he assures us, though the reader is right not to take the narrator at face value.

This tale of an adventurous youth is being typed up by the Ramon of three decades later. He is back living in York, in the house where he grew up. But the events in Uruguay have defined who he now is: his name is still Ramon Bolio, and he teaches the tango with a passion. His sixteen-year-old niece has gone missing. A dual plot drives the novel forward. Questions are thrown up about how the past has made him what he is today.

Ramon’s brother Stephen is intellectually a little slow. It is up to Ramon to take the lead in dealings with the police as they investigate the young woman’s disappearance. He confronts them as they commence digging up Stephen’s lawn. ‘Stephen, Debbie, they don’t have the nous for this kind of thing. If they’d killed her they’d sit down and cry. They wouldn’t hide the body.’ It’s a rather odd thing to say of his brother, and betrays a familiarity with violence. This attention to detail runs through the story and only slowly becomes apparent.

The characters, and in particular the narrator, are created with perfect psychological coherence. For example Ramon mentions on the first page that a slim volume of Gurdjieff was in his backpack. Sure enough, a hundred pages later he borrows a technique from the wily thinker. And after his first encounter with violence, Ramon’s narrative proceeds with the same manifest confidence as before, yet the new relationships he forms come across as increasingly erratic and unsound.

Montevideo and its dance bars, checkpoints, and growing atmosphere of fear is conjured up with great immediacy. All the while tango features as a recurring metaphor. ‘Tango is about memory, abandonment, love, defeat, death, sorrow and it is about standing before a beloved object and remembering that object as a living presence.’

John Baker’s novel is suffused with existentialist concepts: attachment, nothingness, the instability of the human being. His style owes more perhaps to Camus’ essays on Algeria than it does to the classic English novel. His prose achieves the almost impossible task of being as plot-driven as a thriller yet steeped in philosophy; an adventure story yet a sustained reflection on how to live life more fully. It is beautifully written, a tango of thought and action, its true power not apparent at first sight. It is imbued with a deep sense of mystery: not just the mystery of where the disappeared have gone, but the mystery of what connects an individual to be one person through time.

When I read this novel I was in the enjoyable position of knowing nothing about the author or his previous work, and resolved to keep things that way until I finished. ‘One of Britain’s most talented crime writers,’ declares a blurb on the back. Delete the word ‘crime’ and it hits the mark. This novel deserves a place in every backpacker’s pocket and on every thinking man’s bookshelf.

Reviewed by Aiden O’Reilly in Dreamcatcher 24.

Will Self writes irony and challenges gender roles along the way with immaculately timed black humour. The lead character in each of these stories wakes up to something of an anatomical surprise. In the first story, Cock, a woman grows a penis; whereas in the second offering, Bull, a man grows a vagina behind his knee. Throughout, classical narrative expectations are undermined and destabilised. And we find ourselves always more interested in the emotional, rather than the physical metamorphosis of the protagonists

The two stories are unconnected, apart from the genitalia involved. Cock and Bull is absolutely filthy, the product of a depraved mind. Go and get yourself a copy. It is the funniest book I know of in the field of the hermaphrodite.

“When I speak of style, I mean the style Henry James spoke of when he wrote that in literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style, and in which everything is redeemed by style.” John Banville.

Not all the time, but often enough, he writes the kind of things you want to read:

I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?

But wait, no, that is not it. I am being disingenuous – for a change, says you, yes, yes. The truth is, we did not wish to know each other. More, what we wished was exactly that, not to know each other. I said somewhere already – no time to go back and look for it now, caught up all at once as I am in toils of this thought – that what I found in Anna from the first was a way of fulfilling the fantasy of myself. I did not know quite what I meant when I said it, but thinking now on it a little I suddenly see. Or do I? Let me try to tease it out, I have plenty of time, these Sunday evenings are endless.

This is a book about memory, or should I say, around memory, the ebb and flow of memory, and the breath of Proust and Beckett is seemingly ever present. Banville insists he is committed to language and to rhythm above plot, characterization, or pacing. And on the evidence of this hugely enjoyable book, that is certainly the case.

If you decide to read this one: you will need a dictionary.

The main thing in life is to fill one’s belly. Peer Gynt.

With Peer Gynt things are progressing very slowly and finishing in the autumn is out of the question. It is a terribly intractable subject, except in some places, such as where Solveig sings, which I have already completed. And then I have produced something for the “Hall of the mountain king“, which I literally cannot stand to listen to, it rings so of cow dung, of Norwegian-Norwegian-ness, and to thyself be enough-ness! Edvard Grieg.

Henrik Ibsen left Norway, for what he thought would be permanent exile, in the spring of 1864. In or near Rome he wrote Brand and published it in 1866. He then wandered south to Ischia and Sorrento where he worked on Peer Gynt, which was finally published in Copenhagen in 1867. He was thirty-eight years old and would not return to Norway for twenty-seven years.

Ibsen’s Norway consists mainly of a stuffy, provincial middle-class, redeemed by a smattering of upright, sometimes fiery individuals of real initiative and courage. But Peer Gynt is something else. Derived from Norwegian folk-lore, he is a single typical national type; all the defects Ibsen saw in his fellow countrymen are to be found in Peer. He is at most half-hearted about life, egotistical and characterless. He finds it impossible to commit himself to anything and seemingly drifts from one situation to another without rhyme or reason. He is a man without principle; he is mediocre and morally shabby.

But at the same time Peer Gynt is also a representative of mankind. Like King Lear, he carries within himself something of all of us. He has that anarchic trait which allows us to spin out of control, to become one with our imagination, to let go of all the constraints that imprison our spirit.

Edvard Munch's design for the Peer Gynt Playbill

Slate poetry editor, Robert Pinsky, considers what happened to John Keats and the review which, allegedly, killed him.

You catch yourself thinking, well, we could always put it off to another time – it’s not as if we’re going anywhere. That moment of wanting gets more . . . fragile, I think. You’re watching a TV programme, half thinking about going to bed, then you change channels, watch some rubbish and within twenty minutes you’re both yawning and the moment’s gone. Or one of you wants to read and the other one doesn’t and he/she lies there in the half-dark waiting for the light to be put out, and then the waiting, the hope, turns to mild resentment, and the moment goes, and that’s it. Or, a few days go past – more than usual, anyway – and you find that time works both ways simultaneously. On the one hand you miss sex and on the other you begin to forget about it. When we were kids we used to think that monks and nuns must be secretly randy all the time. Now I think: I bet they don’t worry about it at all, most of them, I bet it just goes away.

Don’t get me wrong. I like sex; so does Oliver. And I still like sex with Oliver. He knows what I like and what I want. Orgasm is not a problem. We know the best way to get there, for both of us. You could say that was almost part of the problem. If there is one. I mean, we almost always make love in the same way – same amount of time, same length of (horrid word) foreplay, same position, or positions. And we do it like that because that’s what works best – that’s what experience has told us we like best. So it becomes a tyranny, or obligation, or something. In any case, impossible to get out of. The rule about married sex, if you’re interested – and you may not be -is that after a few years you aren’t allowed to do anything you haven’t done before. Yes, I know, I’ve read all those article and advice columns about how to spice up your sex life, about getting him to buy you special underwear, and sometimes just having a romantic candlelit dinner for two, and setting aside quality time to be together, and I just laugh because life isn’t like that. My life, anyway. Quality time? There’s always another load of washing.

Our sex life is . . . friendly. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I can see that you do. Perhaps all too well. We’re partners in the act. We enjoy one another’s company in the act. We do our best for one another, we look after one another in the act. Our sex life is . . . friendly. I’m sure there are worse things. Much worse.

Have I put you off? He or she beside you has had their light out for some time now. They’re doing that breathing which is meant to sound like sleep but doesn’t really. You probably said, “I’ll just finish this bit,” and got a friendly grunt in reply, but then you read on a bit longer than you thought. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Because I’ve put you off. You don’t feel like sex any more. Do you?

In a previous novel (Talking It Over, 1991), Gillian and Stuart were married. Feckless Oliver was Stuart’s best friend and he seduced Gillian and stole her away.

Now they are ten years older, and only a little wiser. Stuart has become a businessman and regards himself as a success. Pretentious Oliver has fallen on hard times and seems unable to get his life together. And Gillian, the sensible but pedestrian one, is still in the middle.

Each character, in turn, tries to seduce us with a personal version of the truth. But in the end we are left with the suspicion that there is no truth, that the truth does not exist as an objective entity. I was left with the same feeling I get from exposure to a Beckett script; that we wait for something that happens or doesn’t happen and then we die. We don’t connect, not really.

Having said that, one should not under estimate Julian Barnes’ wry humour. He has the capacity to hear and communicate the despair which underlays laughter and is always ready to give the nod of recognition to our absurdities.

Intelligent and moving, this is a book to seek out.