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Kafka-esque, but not his best: Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘When We Were Orphans’

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It was both refreshing and a relief to read that even a great writer like Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize, did not think that highly of his strange detective novel “When We Were Orphans”.

“It’s not my best book,” Ishiguro said after it was shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize.

Having demolished Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in a single reading many years ago (as near perfect a novel as you will ever come to read, accompanied by a fine motion picture adaptation) it is not hard to see why he made this observation.

It’s a very odd, disjointed and at times completely baffling book, with periods of rather logical storytelling following by very strange Kafkaesque episodes where things seemingly simple and straightforward – like travelling a short distance from one place to another – take on these long, slow, nightmarish journeys that never seem to end.

Not that there are not a lot of very interesting and enjoyable aspects to When We Were Orphans, plus there is that wonderfully precise and elegant prose of Ishiguro to keep you reading during the bemusing bits.

To summarise the plot, the book tells the story of Christopher Banks, who after being orphaned in Shanghai as a young boy in the early 1930s (when both his mother and father disappear from the city’s International Settlement in sinister circumstances), returns to England where he is educated and becomes a famous crime-solving detective.

Determined not be to be “diverted by the more superficial priorities of London life” Banks nonetheless falls for the charms of enigmatic socialite Sarah Hemmings – an orphan like himself – whilst becoming something of a minor celebrity for his ability to unravel cases.

The book weaves between Banks’ case solving pursuits in the English countryside, his intermingling in the upper echelons of London society, and with memories and flashbacks of his adventurous Shanghai childhood in the sheltered International Settlement. Here he remembers the times spent playing with his Japanese friend and neighbour Akira, with whom he forms a deep almost brotherly bond.

Banks also returns to recollections of the grand colonial mansion he lived in as a young boy and the events that led to first his father’s sudden disappearance and then soon after that of his feisty mother – a beauty in an “older, Victorian tradition, “handsome” rather than pretty.

Christopher’s father worked for a European shipping company called Butterfield and Swire, which was (according to the author) secretly involved in the flourishing Opium trade. Butterfield and Swire was a real company that transformed into a global multinational. Swire unsuccessfully sued Ishiguro in an attempt to get him to change the book, which implied the company turned millions into addicts and made vast profits in the process.

Before Banks’s father disappeared on his way to work, his mother had become vocal and outspoken about the activities of the company he worked for.

“Are you not ashamed to be in service of such a company?” he remember hearing his mother yell at his father. “How can your conscience rest while you owe your existence to such ungodly wealth?”

Twenty years later, and after having adopted an orphaned child Jennifer as his own daughter, Banks decides to return to Shanghai in 1937 at the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (and as a great war looms across Europe) to solve the most important mystery of his life: his parents disappearance. He believes grandiosely that solving this crime will have far-reaching repercussions including averting the coming world war catastrophe.

In Shanghai, mingling among the snobbish expat community, at dinner parties, the war appears to be just over the horizon and drawing nearer. Ishiguro builds up an oppressive atmosphere as machine gun fire and explosions are heard not far away.

“Another thunderous explosion had rocked the room, provoking a few ironic cheers. I then noticed a little way in front of me, some French windows had opened and people had pushed out to the balcony.

“Don’t worry Mr Banks,” a young man said, grasping my elbow. “There’s no chance of any of that coming over here.”

A tram runs through Shanghai’s International Settlement.

Against the backdrop of the looming onset of war, Banks somehow believes that his parents are still locked up in a house in Shanghai by an opium warlord, despite 20 years having passed since their disappearance. He eventually locates the house he believes they are being held captive in and then the book descends into this Kafka-esque nightmare, where the house Banks believes his parents are in can be sighted through the bombed out ruins, but reaching it appears a never-ending hellish journey.

“Then I came upon a hole in a wall through which I could see only pitch blackness, but from which came the most overwhelming stink of excrement. I knew that to keep on course I should climb through into that room, but I could not bear the idea and kept walking. This fastidiousness cost me dear, for I did not another opening for some time, and thereafter, I had the impression of drifting further and further off my route.”

In his review of the novel, the Pulitizer Prize winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that ‘When We Were Orphans “has moments of enormous power, [but] it lacks the virtuosic control of language and tone that made ”Remains of the Day” such a tour de force.

“Indeed the reader is left with the impression that instead of envisioning – and rendering – a coherent new novel, Mr. Ishiguro simply ran the notion of a detective story through the word processing program of his earlier novels, then patched together the output into the ragged, if occasionally brilliant, story we hold in our hands.”

Certainly, I learnt a bit about life in Shanghai before the war, and the strange existence of the “International Settlement”. Also, I knew little about the Sino-Japanese War, which ran for eight years between 1937 and 1945 and was one of the most bloodiest in history.

But the novel itself, was a strange mishmash of a personal story set within historical events given an almost surrealist makeover that never really jelled for me (unlike the Remains of the Day, which so elegantly meshes the blind devotion of a loyal butler to an aristocratic employer wishing to promote Nazi appeasement.).

“When Banks goes back to Shanghai, we’re really not quite sure if it’s the real Shanghai or some mixture of memory and speculation,” said Ishiguro in an interview about the book.

It certainly baffled me.

Exquisite prose: reading ‘A Single Man’ and ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ by Christopher Isherwood

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If there was a poll of the finest writers of the 20th Century, surely Christopher Isherwood would be near the very top of that list.

Over the last few months I’ve had the pleasure of reading three of his novels, starting with the highly autobiographical Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired the hit movie Cabaret and which I have already reviewed on this blog,

After that I read Isherwood’s short novel ‘A Single Man’ (made into a successful 2009 movie by fashion designer Tom Ford) and another set in Berlin, ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’.

It’s been a delight to read such a lyrical and psychological writer, who with a few beautifully formed sentences can bring a scene to life in the reader’s mind and recreate the inner mental workings of his protagonists.

This ability to penetrate deep into the psyche of his characters is evident in A Single Man, a short novel that chronicles the final day in the life of George, a severely depressed gay college professor mourning the loss of his lover Jim.

It’s set in suburban Los Angeles in 1964. Isherwood, who was also gay, emigrated to the US and moved to California in 1939, to escape the more repressive society in his native England.

The extremely compact timeline for the book allows Isherwood to really focus on the inner workings of George’s depressed, but also buzzing mind as he navigates the challenges of the day and deals with his grief and the people and places that trigger memories of Jim.

The opening of the book is quite startling, and reveals another strength of Isherwood’s writing: his creativity. It begins with George waking up in a discombobulated state – an “it” trying to identify the “I” – as he looks at his tired and sad self in the mirror.

“What it sees there isn’t so much a face, as the expression of a predicament. Here’s what it has done to itself, here’s the mess it has somehow got itself into during its fifty-eight years, expressed in terms of a dull, harassed state, a coarsening nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkly folds.”

It’s just one example of Isherwood’s marvelous descriptive powers and the poetry of his writing.

By the the time the “it” has gotten dressed, spent some time on the toilet from where he observes the quiet suburban streets and some of his neighbours below and eaten some breakfast, George is himself again and ready to set off on the first challenge of the day: the commute to the work.

Throughout the novel, there is a sense that George is trying to swim back to the surface of the here and now, to reconnect with people and the world, even as memories of the past and what he has lost drag him back down.

On his way to teach an English class at a community college, George’s thoughts drift elsewhere as he drives along Los Angeles’s busy highways on auto-pilot.

“And now as he drives, it is as if some autohypnosis exerts itself. We see the face relax, the shoulders unhunch themselves, the body ease itself back into the seat. The reflexes are taking over…”

As he is now free to direct his attention elsewhere, George engages in a fantasy that involves unleashing a virus against homophobes, and then going on a killing spree. Then his vengeful daydream is ended by his arrival at the campus as he “rapidly puts on the psychological make-up for this role [of well-liked, suave English professor] he must play”.

Amid all the despair, and the sense of hopelessness, there is also fleeting pleasure and the meaningfulness it means to George.

There is the homo-erotic pleasure of watching two young men playing tennis in the heat, the “exhilarating” pleasure of watching the students in his class smile back at him with those “bright young eyes”, the pleasure of conversation with a young, male student called Kenny (with whom he is infatuated), the pleasure of revenge, when visits the dying Doris, with whom the late Jim had an affair, and the simple pleasure of companionship and getting drunk when George changes his mind and decides to accept a dinner invitation from his friend Charley, a single mother and fellow Brit.

In a sense then, George’s story is life-affirming: through the veil of immense grief we can still find space to enjoy those moments that give life a quite rich meaning.

“I am alive” George says to himself as he drives back from visiting Doris to a workout at the gym.

“And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight and appetite. How good to be in a body – even this old beat-up carcass – that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh.”

Mr Norris Changes Trains is a more traditional plot-driven suspense novel, but still showcases Isherwood’s ability to create fascinating characters that intrigue and beguile the reader.

Set mainly in Berlin, it tells story of the friendship between a young English tutor called William Bradshaw (the story’s narrator, and a kind of fictional alter ego for Isherwood whose full name was Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood) and Arthur Norris, a charming and rather posh older gent fond of using phrases like “My dear old boy”.

The pair meet on a train travelling from the Netherlands to Berlin when William encounters Arthur in a highly agitated state as they await the arrival of immigration officials and surmises that Arthur is mostly like a smuggler.

William soon learns that Arthur is entangled in all sorts of shady and clandestine activities amid the backdrop of a looming war in Europe

Like Isherwood’s ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ much of the action unfolds as Berlin finds itself at the crossroads of two great epochs: the end of its famous decadent, free-spirited and Golden era of music, art and cinema and the rise of brutal fascism under dictator Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement.

Bradshaw, who earns his living as a tutor, is drawn into Arthur’s exciting and dangerous world attending rowdy communist party gatherings, bearing witness to his strange business dealings (where Arthur is threatening by his evil business associate Schmidt) and joining Arthur’s bohemian entourage at Berlin’s rowdy bars and night clubs.

On one occasion Norris disappears from the party, and Bradshaw, goes in search for him only to find him engaged in a sado-masochist ritual, which he at first mistakes for Arthur (whom he can hear crying out “Nein, Nein! Mercy!”) being robbed.

“The first person I saw was Anni. She was standing in the middle of the room. Arthur cringed on the floor at her feet. He had removed several more of his garments, and was now dressed lightly, but with perfect decency, in a suite of mauve silk underwear, a rubber abdominal belt, and a pair of socks. In one hand he held a brush, and in the other a yellow shoe rag.

Olga towered behind him brandishing a leather whip. ‘You call that that clean, you swine,’ she called in a terrible voice. ‘Do them again this minute. And if I find a speck of dirt I’ll thrash you till you can’t sit down for a week. As she spoke she gave Arthur a smart cut across the buttocks. He uttered a squeal of pain and pleasure and began to brush and polish Anni’s boots with feverish haste.

Both comical and shocking, it’s one of the many delightfully entertaining episodes in the book that Bradshaw describes without judgement as he drawn deeper into Arthur’s intrigues, plots and plans.

Arthur Norris as I have since found out is based on Gerald Bernard Francis Hamilton, whose friends included Winston Churchill, the American actress Tallulah Bankhead and the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who was his landlord in London in the 1930s. Hamilton, who became known as “the wickedest man in Europe” – was a “fixer” for notorious communist Willi Munzenburg and someone who sold secrets for a living.

Hamilton was also imprisoned for bankruptcy and indecency. According to an article in The Spectator magazine, Hamilton lived a “long and disgraceful life” where everything he did was for money, rather than for political reasons.

Regardless of the nature of his clandestine activities, Hamilton clearly cast a spell over Isherwood who turned him into the more genial, but still Machiavellian wig-wearing conman Arthur Norris.

The novel was a critical and commercial success, but Isherwood later condemned it at making light of the suffering of the people he depicted in it.

Whether or not this is fair critique, is largely irrelevant in my mind as you can, like me, read ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ as if it were purely historical fiction and revel in the curiously fascinating character of Mr Norris and his affect on a young, naïve English tutor.

It reminded me of the British noir classic, The Third Man by Orson Welles. ‘No doubt Mr Norris Changes Trains’ would make a brilliant movie in the right hands.

Booze, sex and philosophy from the gutter: Reading Charles Bukowski’s ‘Women’

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“I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive on its own terms,” says Henry ‘Hank’ Chinaski the fictional alter-ego of legendary boozehound writer and  “laureate of American lowlife” (as Time magazine dubbed him) Charles Bukowski in his 1978 novel “Women”.

I’ve read many of Bukowski’s brilliantly irreverent novels – written in a parsed down, forthright and highly entertaining style – and Women is by far the most graphic, indeed almost pornographic in its depiction of Chinaski’s innumerable sexual encounters.

(“I got down there and began licking…the cl*t came out but it wasn’t exactly pink, it was a purplish pink,” is how he describes one of these episodes.)

The semi-autobiographical novel (one can only assume some of his sexual exploits are exaggerated, though perhaps not the prodigious drinking) begins with Chinaski, 50, telling the reader that he has not had sex for four years.

“I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the street or wherever I saw them, but I looked without yearning, with a sense of futility.”

This drought is then broken by a period of romping that would have made Don Juan proud. It begins with half-crazed divorced mother of two Lydia Vance (the fictional version of Bukowski’s real-life girlfriend, the sculptor and playwright Linda King), whom Chinaski meets at a poetry reading:

She put both hands on the edge of the table, bent over and looked at me. She had long brown hair, quite long, a prominent nose and one eye didn’t quite match the other. But she projected vitality – you knew that she was there. I could feel vibrations running between us.

Woman, Charles Bukowski

Their relationship is full of wild sex, described in intimate detail by Chinaski – “I heard her breathing heavily, then she moaned” – and violent breakups due to his excessive drinking, visits to the racetrack, and infidelities, none of which he apologises for. Chinaski is who he is and the world can go to hell if they don’t like it.

“I walked into the bedroom with just my shorts on. I was conscious of my white belly lolling out over the shorts. But I made no effort to suck in my gut…”

At face value, Women is simply a recollection of Chinaski’s (or Bukowski’s) various relationships with women. These include Lydia, but also brief encounters with star struck fans who are seemingly served up on a platter to the horniest 50-year-old in LA.

It’s also a daily tally of his prodigious alcohol consumption of mostly cheap wine and beer. In between all the boozing and bonking – “Fucking was the best cure for hangovers. It got all the parts ticking again” – we accompany Chinaski on his often hilarious trips to college campuses around the country where he gives readings.

But as with all his writing, Bukowski manages to convey something more profound and meaningful than the sum of his adventures across bedrooms, bars and college campuses.

It is to champion the other side of Los Angeles in the words of his biographer Barry Miles: “Not the LA of ranch homes in the Hollywood Hills with the breathtaking views…” but the LA of tarnished dreams, of dead end jobs, of hookers and workers in the sex industry, of beaten down, damaged and dysfunctional people”.

Miles adds: “Bukowski loved the corner bars, the tawdry fast-food outlets, the sex shops and brothels, the graffiti on the walls…”

Sure Chinaski is the hero of the story, but he is no superman in a cape. He is very much the Bukoswki you see in those grainy black and white poetry readings on YouTube. a disheveled anti-hero with a pockmarked face who says what he thinks, never holds back and for whom nothing is ever taboo.

Chinaski in Women is very much a mirror – if perhaps a distorted and exaggerated one – of Bukowski at the height of his powers and fame: when after decades of struggle, eking out a living and working dead end jobs, he had finally established himself as a figurehead in American literature: the dirty old man of American letters.

Chinaski is not searching for some deeper meaning to life, or for the woman of his dreams. Life is simply about the experiences that happen to him – whether its winning big at the track or walking away broke, having a raging hardon or being unable to perform in the sack because he drank too much, talking to prostitutes or college professors – everything finds its way, uncensored into the book.

And while Chinaski is vulgar, and driven by his baser urges, he can also be sweet and loving. He is not a manipulator, nor does he pretend to be anyone else. And he despises pretentious, fake people.

Most importantly – and perhaps a key reason why I enjoy his books so much – is the poetic nature of his writing: short, descriptive sentences that hit their mark without ever saying too little or too much (a style that would have impressed George Orwell).

If you are a fan of Bukowski other books, or a writer like Raymond Carver who though not as vulgar, employed a similar parsed down style of storytelling, you should definitely give Women a read. (Just don’t leave the book anywhere near young children!)

The Goldfinch by Donna Tart: a very long, but engrossing book about a lost boy and a small painting

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The Goldfinch is the third novel by American writer Donna Tartt, considered by many to be a literary genius.

Tartt’s two other books are The Secret History, an “inverted detective story” about a college murder, which was published to huge acclaim in 1992 when she was just 29.

This was followed by The Little Friend a mystery adventure novel set in Mississippi in the early 1970s that appeared in book stores in 2002.

The Goldfinch – an epic novel spanning 864 pages – was published in 2013.

By that you can tell that Tartt, who is now 58, painstakingly completed a book about once every 10 years (and we should expect no.4 soon!).

It also suggests an astonishing level of self-confidence and cerebral stamina – you really have to believe in what you are doing to keep going on with the same story and characters for a decade!

However, each monumental effort has paid off. Not only are Tartt’s books best sellers and generally admired by critics, but they have won numerous prizes: The Little Friend won the WH Smith Literary Award while The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

“A beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy’s entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart,” said the Pulitzer Prize judges of The Goldfinch.

It’s a pretty good summary of the novel, which begins in a hotel room in Amsterdam as 27-year-old Theodore Decker’s fever-ridden thoughts return to a fateful stormy morning in Manhattan 14 years ago and the last few hours he spent with is beloved mother.

When a storm descends on them, they seek shelter in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a terrorist bomb kills his mother a short while later.

Tartt’s description of the violent explosion and its aftermath are exquisite as she brings the terrible chaos and destruction to life on the page as if the reader is also there. Buried in the rubble, Theo finds himself in a “ragged white cave” with “swags and tatters dangling from the ceiling” and as the ground “tumbled and bucked up with heaps of a gray substance like moon rock”. It is descriptive writing at its finest.

Just as powerful and heart-wrenching are the scenes where Theo makes his way back to their empty, darkened apartment, to wait in vain for his mother, “her coffee cup, green glass from the flea market, with lipstick print on the rim” a reminder of her terrible absence.

Also a reminder of his mother, and a vital connection to his last moments with her is the The Goldfinch, a small painting by the 17th century Dutch painter Carel Fabritius that Theo has carried out of the wreckage with him.

The painting is of a “yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle”. Just before they were separated, Theo’s mother told him this little painting was “just about the first painting” she ever loved. There is also another parallel: Fabritius also died tragically young, caught in an explosion at the gunpowder magazine in Delft in Southern Holland.

I stepped back, to get a better look. It was a direct and matter-of-fact little creature, with nothing sentimental about it; and something about the neat, compact way it tucked down inside itself – its brightness, its alert watchful expression -made me think of pictures I’d seen of my mother when she was small: a dark-capped finch with steady eyes.

The Gold Finch

The intriguing little painting, which uses an art technique called “Trompe l’oeil” (French for ‘deceive the eye’) to create the illusion that depicted objects exist in three dimensions, becomes a kind of living and breathing character in the life of Theodore Decker as he navigates his way as a lost young boy through adolescence into adulthood.

The painting connects him to the last conversation he had with his mother, and so he holds onto it tight over the next 14 years, keeping it hidden as first he lives with the Barbours, the wealthy, dysfunctional family of his bullied school friend Andy, before his absent father – a failed actor who mistreated his mother – appears on the scene with his girlfriend Xanadu and whisks Theo away to a housing estate on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

Here he experiences the vast desert skies and becomes best friends with another of Tartt’s marvelous creations. a delinquent, enigmatic Ukrainian boy called Boris who entertains Theo with tales of his time in Humpty Doo in Australia’s Northern Territory and introduces him to alcohol and drugs.

The Goldfinch by Fabritius

Written in the first person, Tartt’s ability to get inside the head of a guilt-ridden 14-year-old boy dealing with the monumental loss of his mother and his bumpy journey towards adulthood is truly remarkable.

Thankfully though at 864 pages The Goldfinch is not just the story about a boy and his obsession with a painting that reminds him of his mother.

It also focuses in on relationships, and how we need people to get us through trauma, be it the muddled advice of Boris, or Hobbie, the quiet and patient Greenwich Village antique furniture dealer and restorer who becomes a pseudo father figure and mentor to Theo, when he makes it back to New York, after yet more traumatic events.

The Goldfinch may be long, but like Hanya Yanagihara’s epic, “A Little Life” it’s never dull. Each adventure is part of Theo’s journey towards lifting himself out of despair and to the realisation that “maybe even if we are not always glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway”.

The Sense of Ending: in praise of the concise novel

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51hhJ8IdqyLDisappearing into Julian Barnes’s 2011 Booker prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending was so pleasurable an experience that I read his short 163 page novella twice.

This is rare for me. I don’t read many books more than once. They have to really intrigue and beguile me to encourage a second reading.

So I can add The Sense of An Ending to a narrow list of twice or even thrice-read books that includes JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the George Orwell novels Coming up for Air, 1984 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

In each book, I found a central character whose view of the world I identified with, or with whom I made a connection in some meaningful way, or whose life I wanted to step into, even for just a little while: a chance to be angst-ridden teenage rebel and narrator of Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield wondering the streets of Manhattan, having conversations with nuns and prostitutes, or rotund London insurance salesman George Bowling in Coming up for Air who escapes to the country town of his youth, before the bombs of WW2 fall, or idealistic, starving and self-destructive poet, Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

In The Sense of an Ending I instantly liked and identified with Tony Webster, the 60-year-old divorced former arts administrator who has succeeded in living a life of little bother or regret, who does not fantasise “a markedly different life from the one that has been mine”.

Webster has accepted a modestly successful and peacable existence in a small London flat with his affairs neatly in order. He’s even on good terms with his ex-wife Margaret.

I’ve made my will; and my dealings with daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and ex-wife, are, if less than perfect, at least settled. Or as I have persuaded myself. I’ve achieved a state of peaceableness or peacefulness. Because I get on with things. I don’t like mess and I don’t like leaving a mess.

But then he is forced to re-evaluate things – love, friendship, memory, the decisions he made and their consequences – when he receives an unexpected bequest from a woman he’d met only once, 40 years earlier.

She is Sarah Ford, the recently deceased mother of his college girlfriend, Veronica, who has bequeathed him £500 as well as the diary of his erudite, brilliant school friend, Adrian Finn, who committed suicide while at college and whose passing was described in the Cambridge Evening News under the headline: “Tragic Death of Promising Young Man”.

Adrian dated Veronica soon after Tony’s relationship with her ended. Having parted ways angrily via a dreadful, hurtful letter Tony, went travelling and in the days before email and mobile phones, only found out about his friends death many weeks later, when he returned home.

Tony’s mother wonders if Adrian killed himself “because he was too clever”. Tony comes to the conclusion that Adrian, who had great powers of reason and an amazing intellect, had come to the logical conclusion that he should end his life.

But then comes the promise of the diary, a way into his deceased friend’s mind and for Tony, who doesn’t like loose ends, the prospect of a definitive answer: a way to make sense of Adrian’s ending.

The only problem is his still very angry ex-girlfriend Veronica: she has the diary and won’t give it to him.

Instead she feeds him an extract with a complex maths equation that Tony must unravel.

In doing so he confronts his own decision to accept the path of an uneventful, non-confrontational life with no loose ends or complications, he begins to unravel the mystery of himself.

If this doesn’t quite explain why I like Tony so much (people who know me might say he and I have a lot in common)  then I think this observation in a review of the book in the New York Times explains it rather well:

Barnes’s unreliable narrator is a mystery to himself, which makes the novel one unbroken, sizzling, satisfying fuse. Its puzzle of past causes is decoded by a man who is himself a puzzle.

Travels through literature, alcohol and America: A review of ‘The Trip to Echo Spring’ by Olivia Laing

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The trip to echo springErnst Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver had at least two things in common: they are all giants of 20th Century American literature and…they were all confirmed, raging alcoholics.

These two commonalities are the basis for ‘The Trip to Echo Spring’ by English author Olivia Laing, a writer and book reviewer for The Guardian and The Observer newspapers.

The title of the book refers a line said by the sexually conflicted character Brick in Tennessee Williams’ great Southern play ‘Cat on a Hat Tin Roof‘.  He says it to indicate he is going to get a drink of whiskey: to numb the pain of his “mendacity”.

Laing sets out to explore how these six writers – whom she admired greatly and who shaped the course of American fiction – experienced, thought about, wrote about and dealt with their addiction to alcohol.

She does so by undertaking a physical trip across America in the Spring of 2011 starting in New York and staying in the Elysee, a hotel in Manhattan’s theatre district where Tennessee Williams spent his last days, and finishing in Port Angeles on the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the upper north corner of Washington State, where Raymond Carver lived the last years of his life  and wrote some of his best short stories while living with the poet Tess Gallagher.

In between, Laing heads down to New Orleans to sit at the hotel bar where Tennessee Williams came in for a drink and to pick up young men and to attend the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, flies south-east to balmy Key West, Florida to visit Hemingway haunts, takes a train west to Baltimore and North Carolina to follow Fitzgerald’s own journey and then chugs out west to Illinois and Minneapolis, tracing the fatal path of the poet, John Berryman.

Amongst all this travel, are Laing’s reflections and contemplations of the alcoholic lives of these writers interwoven with meditative observations of the vast, constantly changing American landscape, mostly from her train window. She writes:

“In Alabama the earth was red and their was Wisteria in the trees. Somewhere deep in the country the train stopped in a pine forest. It was very quiet. A needle dropped lazily through the warm air. The woman beside me was on the phone…”

“Between Tuscaloosa [Alabama] and Meridian [Mississippi] we ran through uninterrupted miles of forest. The hills were covered in bone-grey timber, split and weather-worn into fantastic shapes. Then open country with cows grazing…

I awoke again at dawn. This time the world outside was white. North Dakota, flat as an ironed sheet.

The constant travel not only gives the book it’s part travel-guide feel, but also it’s momentum. Laing is not only on a journey to discover more about her literary heroes and their afflictions, but is also on a journey of self-discovery; making sense of a disjointed, dysfunctional upbringing and one washed through with alcohol. Her mother’s partner was a violent alcoholic.

One of the great strength of ‘The Trip to Echo Spring” and a sign of its success is that makes you want to go out and read (or re-read) the works of Williams, Hemingway, Cheever, Fitzgerald, Berryman and Carver, reminded as you are of their massive contribution to the world of literature despite the booze, blackouts, collapses, rehabilitations and relapses.

Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver

Just off the top of my head I could reel off a dozen books, plays and poetry collections I’ve now added to my “must read” list:

– The Glass Menagerie (Williams)
– Sweet Bird of Youth (Williams)
– For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
– Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway)
– Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald)
– The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald – AGAIN!)
– Cathedral (Carver)
– Dream Songs (Berryman)
– Recovery (Berrryman)

Already, a copy of Cheever’s novel “Falconer” about a jailed heroin addict is waiting beside my bed and I’ve begun to read the opening scene of “A Streetcar Named Desire” from an old paperback that was tucked into the book shelf. And I am waiting for the opportunity to watch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman as Maggie and Brick.

Laing has great empathy for her heroes because of the writing they produced,  but she does not sentamentalise them, brush aside their faults or criticise their weaker efforts. Nor is their any glamorization of alcoholism:

[On Cheever’s drinking in 1966]: “…his drinking had passed well beyond normal measures now, even bearing in mind the norms of the time. When he wasn’t on location [filming his short story ‘The Swimmer’] he wrote in the early hours of the morning and by half past ten could be found twitching in the kitchen waiting for his family to disperse so he could administer the first self-soothing scoop of scotch or gin. If they didn’t leave quick enough he’d drive himself to the liquor store, where he’d buy a bottle, motor on to some pretty back street and sit there suckling, inevitably spilling a good slug down his chin.

All six writers were at times monstrous personalities, capable of inflicting great cruelty on their wives, children, lovers, friends and families: Raymond Carver almost killed his wife and was resentful of his own children, Tennessee Williams once defecated in a university hallway, John Cheever projected his closeted homosexuality into rage against his wife.

The book is rich with analysis of the works of fiction these writers produced as well as their non-fiction articles and memoirs. But she is no literary snob, relishing the opportunity to join a tour group visiting Hemingway’s home and museum in Key West or do a Tennessee Williams walk in New Orleans or enjoy meals with retired farmers on her train journeys.

The conclusions she reaches about these writers are not surprising – that they drank to deaden the pain of their childhood, their parents, their sexuality, their broken-ness, their perceived and real failures, while writing was a way to try to become whole again.

None,  apart from John Cheever, managed to stop drinking though they all tried. None lived into old age and two – Berryman and Hemingway –  died at their own hand.

But ultimately it is the journey that Laing takes you on through the minds and immense body of work of these giants of fiction that is the real joy

Not the destination.

Links:
An interview with the author, Olivia Laing  (Buzzfeed)
A review of The Trip to Echo Springs by The Times Literary Supplement
Olivia Laing’s personal website