The Buried Giant: some treasure here, but more spadework required

There’s a tendency among many writers of literary fiction to opt for emotional coolness and ironic detachment, as though fearing that any hint of excitement in their storytelling would undermine the serious intent of the work. I don’t know where this notion came from. You can’t see Maugham or Greene or Forster having any truck with it. But the question is not where it started but whether that is the kind of literary writer that Kazuo Ishiguro is.

Adam Mars-Jones seems to think so. In his LRB review of The Buried Giant, he particularly takes Ishiguro to task for throwing away what ought to be a Fairbanks-style set-piece in a burning tower by allowing “nothing as vulgar as direct narration to give it the vitality of something that might be happening in front of our eyes”.

I’m not so sure about that particular scene. It could be that Ishiguro is reaching, not for the drama of the events, but the drama of the telling of the events. In the way he deploys the scene, we’re left in the dark for a while as to the fate that has befallen a major character. It’s how Conrad, say, might have chosen to tell it. The point is, though those events are not told in a way that plays up the excitement of the action itself, they nonetheless have dramatic effect. It works – just not as Mars-Jones or I might have preferred.

But there are other bits of the story that do not work at all, and make me think that Ishiguro either scorns, or is not craftsman enough to manage, the control of the reader’s expectations that is needed for a novelist to hold and enthral.

An example – and from here on beware of spoilers: Wistan and Sir Gawain are both supposedly charged with killing a dragon whose breath is causing people’s memories to slip away. Finally, approaching the dragon’s lair, Sir Gawain reveals that he has actually been protecting it for all these years. The two warriors walk up to the lair, chatting away, and we have plenty of time to see how this has to play out. Wistan and Gawain must fight, and because the book has a good way to go yet and there’d be no story if the dragon isn’t killed, we can see that Wistan will beat Gawain, and then he’ll slay the dragon. Almost sheepishly, Ishiguro then goes through those exact motions, apparently sensing that something he has done has defanged what ought to be a thrilling peripety, but not knowing how to fix it.

Unlike the burning tower, this isn’t a case of a scene that Ishiguro has made to work differently. As he tells it, the scene simply does not work. No story can grip if it fails to make the reader wonder what’s going to happen next. Here’s how he could have fixed it. Wistan and Gawain walk up to the lair. Wistan is still injured from the fight in the tower, Gawain is an old man. We wonder if even together they’ll be able to overcome the dragon. Then, just as they’re about to descend into the crater where the dragon waits, Gawain steps in front of Wistan and admits that he is sworn to protect it. Now that would be a moment of pure anagnorisis to make Aristotle cheer – and the reader would be left reeling. What? Sir Gawain’s on the dragon’s side? He’s about to fight Wistan? What is going to happen now?

See? Told like that we wouldn’t have time to predict the consequences. We’d be in the moment, struggling to draw breath. It would be – gosh – exciting. And it would work.

There are other places where Ishiguro struggles with the storyteller’s craft like it’s a broken deckchair. Fleeing from enemy soldiers through an underground labyrinth, Gawain and his companions come to a portcullis, which they lower – barring their own escape route – simply so that they can discuss (ie tell us about) the hell-hound that is said to dwell in the tunnels. In a movie the hound would at least turn out to be on the same side of the portcullis, though the shock would be soured by knowing the characters had done something dumb just for the sake of getting the plot into its next mooring. As it is, the hound turns up on the other side and we have to go through a lot of tedious mechanics about how they will raise the portcullis while ensuring that the hound doesn’t attack the two old people who are tasked with doing that. Everything plays out exactly as Ishiguro has just had his characters describe it, and then to top it all off we have to go through yet more nuts-n-bolts prose about getting the portcullis up having cut the rope earlier.

This verges on “he crossed the room, putting one foot in front of the other, until he reached the other side,” and it’s surely the job of the editor to point out to the poor dumb author that he has befuddled himself with foolish details and really ought to take a stab at getting the story firing on all cylinders rather than wandering around the side alleys of his narrative in an obsessive-compulsive daze.

Talking of obsessive-compulsive, I feel compelled to dwell on some quibbles. Ishiguro has a curiously imprecise control of authorial viewpoint that may possibly be deliberate, but in light of some of the fumbled set-pieces I’m inclined to think it’s just a failure of craft. For instance, lapsing into a personal narrative voice as he is inclined to do every hundred pages or so, he says, “Many were roundhouses not so far removed from the kind in which some of you, or perhaps your parents, were brought up.” Ah, so I am supposed to be a reader familiar with this world; these are events that occurred just a generation or two back. But not so fast – just a few lines further on he describes “a tall fence of tethered timber poles, their points sharpened like giant pencils” and we’re back in a modern mindset. Why not, “and a duckpond the shape of an iPad,” while you’re at it, Kazuo?

Maybe that skittering viewpoint is deliberate, but how about the sinews from a hacked-off arm being described as “entrails”? A “hollowed-out trunk” – when he means just a hollow trunk. “Comprised of” occurs a couple of times; didn’t this book have an editor? And there are several instances of constructions like, “with my wife and I hanging together on the rope” – these from characters whose grammar is otherwise solid enough.

And then this: the narrator tells us, “This door – it would have been a ‘proper’ door on wooden hinges – ” What? That voice, that “it would have been”, is how I might relate an anecdote. Pyrrhus being hit by the roof tile, for instance; something I know about but have no first-hand knowledge of, so I have to intuit details like, “it would have been a flowerpot-shaped cylindrical tile.” But everything else in The Buried Giant is related as if the narrator is there to see breath steaming on a cold morning, clothing flapping in a high wind. So why that one lapse into a removed viewpoint? If it’s technique rather than carelessness, it’s a technique that fails to have any useful effect.

Tom Holland in The Guardian gives Ishiguro the benefit of the doubt. "The gaps and seams," he says, "[...] are designed to show." But I say, goddamn it, an author should do the bloody work. Nabokov wanted Laura burned, and it was in not greatly more ramshackle a state than The Buried Giant. 

And yet – the book has something. A world in which memory is unreliable, a fantasy told without the pomp-rock bombast that’s typical of the genre, events recombining in oddly shifted permutations as in a dream, a quasi-allegorical exploration of love and loss – those are all interesting ideas. And Ishiguro has moments of great inventiveness that are well-served by his flatly unadorned style, as he talks of the ogres that emerge out of the mist or describes an attack by pixies on a boat caught in reeds. It often reads (and this probably is deliberate) like a translation of a classic saga, in that its brilliantly arresting images are recounted in the voice of an academic whose striving for accuracy sacrifices any of the original’s lyrical power. Fine, that's what Ishiguro set out to do and that, at least, he achieved. But me, I like to luxuriate in the poetry of beautiful language, and I kept thinking that if my accountant rewrote Malory or Beowulf she might end up with something a lot like this.

Look, here's the thing. All this carping is because I can see the outline of something great here. I just wish Ishiguro had chipped away the stone until he found it. Written by somebody like Alan Garner, The Buried Giant would be fabulous. As it is, throughout the book we continually run smack into quagmires of clumsy prose and expository specifics , with the result that it all reads like the extensive notes an author prepares before he or she gets stuck into writing the novel itself. It really is half brilliant and half incompetent – both "fascinating and moving" and yet "aimless and atomized", as Laura Miller described it in Salon - and that alone makes it almost unique among modern novels. Well, I say that, but I have yet to read the rest of Mr Ishiguro’s oeuvre.

If I haven't put you off reading the book (and I hope I haven't) then you might be interested in hearing Kazuo Ishiguro talk about it on this Guardian podcast.

 

Five times five stars

Not wanting to plunge into the intercalary days with a snotty review headlining the blog (see how superstitious I am for a rationalist?) I am reposting my Goodreads 5-star reviews for the year. Have a happy Christmas, Yule, or whatever, and I'll see you on the other side.


Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon

I never quite know if I'm using the term antihero correctly, but I offer Frank Friedmaier for your consideration. Frank is 19 years old, but he's gone far beyond the moral event horizon where a character like Pinkie Brown, damaged angel that he is, still hovers. We're only a few pages in before Frank has committed a spur-of-the-moment murder for motives that not even he knows. He has no pity, especially not for himself, and doesn't even attempt to turn on the charm that makes us root for an utter devil like Humbert Humbert. Most people he knows are afraid of him, and even the few who love him don't really like him much (with one possible exception, but no spoilers here). According to save-the-cat writing doctrine we should have no interest in Frank's future, just as he has no interest in it, but in fact he's fascinating - like a young John Lennon on the loose in his Berlin days, with only slightly fewer scruples.

The writing style is true hardboiled: spare but brilliantly evocative. The atmosphere of the setting (which I took to be Nazi-occupied France, but might be Allied-occupied Germany) is corrosive, bleak, and relentless. Brandon Robshaw's review in The Independent concluded: "Simenon ought to be spoken of in the same breath as Camus, Beckett and Kafka." On the strength of this, I agree.



Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

How did it take me so long to discover Capote? I'm going to blame the movie. The novella is an unrecognisably different animal - a snapshot of an intriguing character told in prose that ought to be sold at Tiffany's alongside the diamonds.



Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

It took me more than 30 years to read this book. After originally abandoning it a few chapters in, I nearly gave up at the same point. There's a whole world and a lot of characters to introduce, and Peake wasn't writing for an audience of TV-weaned YA goldfish. He takes his time but suddenly it pays off. You really know these characters because he has put care into making them individuals. His prose is beautiful and he has the most vivid visual imagination of any author I've come across.

It is, in short, a masterpiece. Normally I reserve 5 stars for books that I feel affect me profoundly and permanently - that "change my life", as all great art should on some level. I regret not coming to Gormenghast a lot sooner. If I'd read it 32 years ago it would have stretched me to create more interesting fantasy worlds in my own books.



Death is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury

A magic realist whodunit in which the young Bradbury is himself the protagonist. Only, being Bradbury, it's never as simple as that. The murderer seems to be more existential than physical, the familiar landscape of LA suddenly far more fantastical than Mordor. The one flaw is that Bradbury, as a writer who notoriously disdained plotting, allows an important character to slip out of the story while two others, introduced later and in whom we are consequently less invested, become more prominent than they really should. But imagine it as a sixtysomething author getting up and just improvising a prose-poem of dread, beauty, loneliness and the desire to connect with others and you can't help but applaud.



Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

They say write what you know, and after six years in the Communist Party and being a prisoner of Franco, Koestler knew all about the horrific absurdities of logic bent to serve fanaticism. This is one of the most powerful novels I've ever read, taking you through the whole spectrum of human emotion, politics and philosophy, but that's not the only reason for the full five stars. It's full of the little inventive touches of a master artist, and the lean writing style (my translation was by Daphne Hardy) gives it all extra impact.

Those academics and their literature

My upcoming Frankenstein interactive book now has its own Facebook page. In case you've missed the posts on this, or have been frozen in the Arctic for the last two centuries, Frankenstein is a digital book that allows you to befriend Victor Frankenstein and offer him advice. If you've given him reason to trust you, he might even take it. Actually, that's not the whole story - you also get to play the part of... but no, that'd be a spoiler too far.

Frankenstein isn't much like the gamebooks of old, but there's no denying that the structure is basically the same, and coincidentally the BBC this week had a very brief item about gamebooks (the 1980s UK variety, anyway) on their World at One programme. "Will there ever be a literary gamebook?" wondered the BBC reporter, deciding in the end that, no, "gamebooks aren't seen as academic enough".

If you too feel that literature is something that academics read, then you will surely want to know that Fifty Shades of Grey has just sold to Universal Pictures. Otherwise, pop over to Inkle Studios (who built the app) and read all about this "impossible" book, due out on April 26. And, of course, be sure to follow us on Facebook.

Reader, I married her

It comes as a bit of a shock to find your wife has written the best novel of 2011.

Traditionally, fiction has divided into two camps. On the one hand we have literary or "contemporary" fiction, characterized by beautiful writing but often said to have no story. And then there's genre fiction, with a hot high concept to hook your interest and a series of reversals to keep you on the edge of your seat - but typically written with all the charm and elegance of a Haynes manual.

Virginia Woolf was vexed by ungainly prose styles. "Something tore," she said of such a book; "something scratched. A single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes." Well, quite. But recently, reading a book where every phrase sparkled, I realized that the (very famous) author had given me no reason to turn the page. There was no problem facing the characters, no impending disaster that they would either triumph over or succumb to. If the craft of words was all I wanted, I would do better to read poetry.

Why should style matter? Try this:

Few things have been more beautiful than my note book on the Deist Controversy as it fell downward through the waters of the Mediterranean. It dived, like a piece of black slate, but opened soon, disclosing leaves of pale green, which quivered into blue. Now it had vanished, now it was a piece of magical india rubber stretching out to infinity, now it was a book again, but bigger than the book of all knowledge. It grew more fantastic as it reached the bottom, where a puff of sand welcomed it and obscured it from view. But it reappeared, quite sane though a little tremulous, lying decently open on its back, while unseen fingers fidgeted among its leaves.

That's E M Forster. Or this:

I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years, until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its lazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.

Mark Twain. Now contrast with:

The speeding vehicle clung to the road, squeezed down by the slip-stream of its speed over the flat-dish shape of its outlines.

Enough, already! Because if the writer cares so little for language - or at least, cares so little for his story that he didn't trouble over telling it well - then why should it be worth my time to read it? And I think it kinder to leave the writer in question anonymous, except to say you are unlikely to hear him mentioned in the same breath as Forster or Twain.

Read the first page of Lolita, or A Clockwork Orange, or To Have and Have Not, and you know you are in the hands of an author whose intelligence and insight will take you somewhere new. The journey will be worth your attention and it may change you. But over the last half of the twentieth century, good prose became a peacock's tail that grew so big as to obscure the beast itself. This allowed a new strain of style-only authors to evolve, with no story to tell but all the trappings of style necessary to pass themselves off as good writers, the way a hoverfly masquerades as a wasp.

Yet there's an interesting trend in modern literary fiction. There are definite signs that story is starting to matter again. Borrowing a little from genre writing, novels such as The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler's Wife have blazed the trail. Between the extremes of geeky high concept and ethereal but aimless prose, we now have a hybrid: the compelling page-turner that is also beautifully written. Which, after all, is only what good fiction is supposed to be.

And so, back to Roz and that "best novel of the year". Of course, I'm partial. But not so much that I can't tell great writing when I see it. Hence the shock. I've been hearing about this book over the dinner table for the last five years. First the core concept: if (double underline that if) hypnosis can reveal past lives, what about future lives? Suppose you could be shown glimpses of an incarnation of yourself - your soul, whatever - in the future. What would that mean to the way you lived your life now?

Publishers loved the concept, but they wanted to Roz to take it off into the realms of genre. Murder, clues, a race against time: Dead Again in reverse. Crass? Of course, but I was right there adding my voice to theirs. A thriller with a reincarnation hook - sorry, preincarnation; what a gift to the bestseller racks. A career vista opened up of a new Roz Morris high concept genre title every year. It was the obvious way to take the idea, and exactly what Roz didn't want. She's already had that career, as a million-selling ghost writer. Now she's honed her craft and she wants to write fiction of genuine quality. Commendably, and in spite of the chorus of editors, agent and husband, she stuck to her guns. And My Memories Of A Future Life turns out be a work far more astonishingly original and more exquisitely written than anybody imagined - certainly including yours truly.

Roz released My Memories Of A Future Life originally on Kindle in several parts for 99 cents an episode, arguing that literary fiction can and should be compelling enough to bring readers back for more. After all, it worked for Dickens. Reviewers have talked about the surprise-&-delight factor - something that all novels ought to have, but which is rare enough nowadays to be worth remarking on. Even the readers who normally stick to genre have seen that Roz's literary treatment of the idea allows her to take it in unpredictable directions - because, wherever you think that preincarnation concept might go, I can guarantee you won't anticipate what Roz does with it.

Now, naturally you should take all that I say with a pinch of salt. But you don't have to take my word for it. The book is available in episodic ebook form for another month, and in paperback, and you can also hear Roz read the first four chapters in a podcast. All the details are on the book's website. It's not as a husband that you can trust me, but as an author and fellow reader.