Leigh Swinbourne

I first came across Irish writer Claire Keegan’s ‘So Late in the Day’ as a standalone long/short story in the New Yorker. Reading it again (a Christmas present), after so many glowing reviews, I felt a little discomforted finding my original prejudice against this accomplished novella confirmed. Which is, that it is more a polemic than a prose fiction. The unpleasant protagonist, Cathal, a witless misogynist, seems to be set up as a straw man so that Keegan can make probably not inaccurate, but not especially enlightening, observations about the contemporary young Irish male, maybe young males in general. In all fairness, I should set this against her portrayal of the fundamentally decent, brave and tender-hearted middle-aged Bill Furling in her Booker short-listed ‘Small Things Like These’. Perhaps men can improve with age.

Perhaps, but in ‘So Late’ it appears some can hardly get worse. Spelt out clearly for us in the dramatic climax (occurring before a crucial plot point of realisation for the reader), where Cathal’s fiancée, Sabine, thoroughly provoked, gives him both barrels: ‘a good half of men your age just want us to shut up and give you what you want, that you’re spoiled and turn contemptible when things don’t go your way’. Immediately confirmed by Cathal thinking ‘that he would not have minded her shutting up right then and giving him what he wanted’. Which is pretty unlikely as Sabine continues: ‘to some of you we are just c***s…often hear(s) Irish men referring to women in this way, and calling us whores and bitches’. A little later, unsurprisingly, she breaks off the engagement.

Which brings me to the two related problems I have with this story. The first is with Cathal. Here Keegan stacks the deck. Not only is he a misogynist, he is also a skinflint, lazy, mean-minded, ungrateful, spiteful, has a bad diet, and doesn’t wash his hands after peeing. But all this wouldn’t worry me too much if from his experience in the novel, Cathal actually learnt something about himself. Here is a man who stupidly and selfishly throws away a possible chance of life-long happiness. Although he is vaguely depressed at the outcome of events, he appears to have no realisation of how or even that he has caused this. In due time he could quite ineptly repeat it with another woman. So we spend our time through this novella journeying with a man who learns nothing and who seems incapable of learning. There are people like this of course, plenty, but so what? Why is Keegan leading me on to invest in this deadbeat.

And then there is Sabine. Why on earth is she attracted to him? What does she see in Cathal to the point of agreeing to live out her life with him? Throughout, we are mostly inside Cathal’s dull head and we are given little insight into what Sabine is thinking except when she speaks. She willingly enters into a relationship with a man as described above, then agrees to marry him, then she breaks it off. These are weighty matters (the actual story, surely) but they seem to happen inadvertently, offstage, as do (coyly?) any sexual relations.

However, the writing of all this, the presentation, organisation of material, is masterly. Wikipedia tells me that Keegan won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, and it is this Anglo/Irish writer that came most to mind as an influence. Keegan has mastered Trevor’s pared plain prose that packs in a Henry James sentence. With deft observations we quickly gain a clear portrait of Cathal. The placing of narrative detail and gradual exposure, the build-up, is all subtly managed so that when we come to the turning point, the realisation of what this particular day is and what is happening, what has happened, it has that effect of revelation that all short story writers strive for.

But still, it is only a revelation of story and not of character. Keegan presents a highly polished surface, but really little more than that. Her great skill becomes a sort of sleight-of-hand. Crucially, psychological depth, and psychological progression, motivation, character growth and insight are not given and can only be guessed at. With Cathal at the end we are back where we started and none the wiser. And we are not much the wiser with Sabine as well.

In her ‘Small Things Like These’, Keegan gave us a short, but profound and deeply moving experience. With ‘So Late in the Day’, the lack of a like resonance seems incommensurate with her talents.

British writer Olivia Laing’s recent book, ‘The Garden Against Time’, examines that seemingly most innocent of pursuits, creating a garden, in a variety of contexts, thus rooting out some not-so-innocent associations. She and her partner, a retired academic/poet, Ian Patterson, purchase a property in Suffolk, south-east England, with a large neglected plot, designed and established by deceased plant aficionado, Mark Rummary. Laing, herself a gardening guru and practising herbalist, aspires to bring Rummary’s garden back to life. His original was conceived, amongst other matters, as a set of discreet individual spaces, like different rooms in a house, which metaphorically fits Laing’s design throughout this book of sequentially focussing on individual moral, cultural and historical aspects of The Garden, meanwhile incorporating somewhat irrelevant personal memoir.  

                Laing is a modern moralist, keen to anatomise the manifold sins of western capitalist consumerist society along with those rapacious individuals who over time have built this entity and presently enable it. Fine and dandy, but since Privilege is one of Laing’s many bête noires here, I couldn’t help but notice early on and throughout , except for a brief diversion at the end (also allowing that this is largely set in the year of Covid), Laing doesn’t seem to need to do any paid work, and has apparently deep pockets when it comes to re-creating Rummary’s vision, prolifically purchasing flowers, shrubs and trees, importing in topsoil and hiring various tradesmen for tasks big and small. Not that I don’t wish it were myself, I also possess a large garden and one of the many charms of this book, like in shows such as ‘Grand Designs’, is imagining what one might do with one’s own neglected spaces if one had sufficient time and means, like Laing.

                So we progress: through an analysis of the garden as Paradise, referencing poet John Milton, followed by the garden as planned parkland, the 18^th century enclosures with attendant misery and dispossession, referencing poet John Clare, then the far greater misery and horror of the slave trade that financially underpinned many of the aristocratic estates, leading on to the projects of colonisation (particularly pertinent to an Australian reader), then William Morris, the garden as utopia, as societal retreat, etcetera, all absorbingly brought to life with various historical figures. Meanwhile, Laing is herself selecting, planting and building her own little Eden. She cites British filmmaker Derek Jarman as an inspiration, his memoir ‘Modern Nature’, and writer W.G. Sebald, both in moral concerns and narrative form, Laing freely acknowledging Sebald’s influence, noting her part of England is also that which he traversed and contemplated in ‘The Rings of Saturn’.

                Towards the close we have a vivid recounting of a rich American/Italian heiress, Iris Origo, along with her aristo husband, their sympathetic management of a huge estate, La Foce, with its many villages, parks, woodlands, through the period of Mussolini’s rise, World War Two and afterwards. Laing’s point with this particular story, which she hammers home rather insistently, is that despite this couple’s humanitarianism, generosity and even selfless bravery, they always remain blind to the fact that they basically own their villagers, and are unpleasantly surprised when, post-war, these people, for whom they have done so much, nevertheless demand their political rights.

                I mention Laing’s insistence here for it started to get on my nerves, because of the one minor cavil I have with this otherwise excellent book and, I suppose, with the author herself.

                This particular summer of Laing’s, England suffers a mini-drought. Climate change is arraigned as part culprit, but sensibly, any place any time might be subject to a stretch of unusually dry weather. And it seems East Anglia is ‘the driest region of the country’ receiving ‘around half the annual rainfall’. So armed with this foreknowledge, what does Laing do? Plan and plant a totally inappropriate garden for the given landscape, because she wishes to re-create the original ideal of a man she much admires, Rummary, but also because this is the garden that she herself wants to make. So then she watches on in dismay as her dream wilts away. She stands by agonising over whether she should just ‘turn on the tap’, but of course, ecologically principled, as in all matters, she cannot bring herself to do this. So she suffers as her beloved plants suffer.  And then they die.

When rains do eventually arrive, a few perk up, and so Laing indulges in manic bout of replanting. But it seems no obvious lesson has been learnt, which is: if Laing had from the start created a garden that fitted the landscape, was adapted to it, she could then have watched on as her plants and flowers drooped a little in the dry, in the secure knowledge that they would all revive in due course. Because they are natives.  

So it would seem that Laing herself, albeit in a minor way, has also tried to mould a world to how she would wish it to be, a natural human desire, but with inevitably destructive results, a thing that in this instance, like the colonists, like the Italian aristos, even with the best of intentions, she also seems blind to.

About two-thirds into Rohinton Mistry’s ‘A Fine Balance’, around the ‘Golden Mean’ mark, the novel’s four major characters: house-holder and employer, Dina, the two tailors who work for her, Ishvar and Omprakash, and the student who boards with her, Maneck, are all rubbing along amicably, living together, despite background, caste and age differences, absorbing important life-skills and values from one another. But the reader senses that this is the still eye of the hurricane, and the terrible things that have happened up to this point will inevitably strike again from another direction.  Or as Dina says on p. 556 of my copy: ‘Where humans were concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure; and sorrow, for the hopelessness of it all’. Which would stand as a general epitaph for the book.

                Set mostly in Mumbai, then Bombay, during the 1975-77 ‘Emergency’ enacted by Indira Gandhi as a cynical attempt (according to this account) to maintain power and abuse the law at will, Mistry unleashes a six-hundred-page-plus savage roar of moral outrage at the inequities of his homeland, gripping and horrifying, that leaves any reader of any modern democracy, whatever its shortcomings, pretty happy to be living where they are. Mistry’s literary models are Dickens and Tolstoy and the novel attempts an ambitious combination of these writers, breadth and depth tied to a strong social agenda.

                The very first scene clearly references ‘Anna Karenina’, and anyone who has read this novel will unfortunately be able to guess, like me, how Mistry’s novel ends. In Tolstoy, the long connecting line of Anna’s psychology is convincingly drawn; with Mistry you feel there is no such psychological necessity and so his ending feels melodramatically forced.

                Still, ‘A Fine Balance’ is compulsively readable and for the most part very powerful, however, unlike Tolstoy but like Dickens, Mistry is often too close to his material.  Also, he must tell you everything about India that he feels you need to know, and to achieve this he puts his poor two tailors, untouchables from the Chamaar caste, through every conceivable hell possible and a few more besides. The reader is a willing dupe here, because each of the extended episodes is so brilliantly drawn, but towards the end the credibility, and also the coincidences (more Dickens) start to wear thin.

                Ishvar and Om are Mistry’s device/vehicle of satire, and by satire I mean a type of fierce ethical anger reminiscent of Swift. This is an angry book. Mistry is angry at Gandhi (only referred to as the Prime Minister) but he is also angry at India itself. Gandhi is abusing her power, and the various ways this is shown, through the tailors’ ‘adventures’, demonstrates to what extent autocratic arrogance at the top affects those right down on the bottom. A fish rots from the head, but this is the case with any autocracy, not just India. However, the most coruscating section of the novel is when Mistry relates the story of Ishvar and his brother and their father back in their home village. This is well before Gandhi’s time and is not necessarily anything to do with bad governance. It is all about caste. Mistry graphically shows how the whole fabric of Indian society, the way it is rigidly constructed and has been for millennia, is appallingly unjust and cruel.

                So to me, this book seems to be about two slightly different things. One type of injustice is used to effect the other, but their relation is transactional. When the irresponsible commands come from the top the untouchables cop it more than anyone else, but they’re going to cop it anyway because everything is stacked against them already and nobody cares or ever have.

                Dina and Maneck (householder and student) are relatively well-off Parsis (as is Mistry), theoretically outside the caste system, but in reality no-one is, and partly as a result, they also suffer tales of woe. But also partly not as a result, and Mistry cannot help laying on the tragedies with a trowel. Bad things happen to these other two because of India, and also bad things just happen to them, over and over. And so many bad things happen to so many good people in this novel that you begin to lose sense of bad things happening because of India and bad things happening because of bad luck, and the latter starts to weaken the effect of the former. Which is a pity.

                Because Mistry has a great story to tell and a great reason for telling it and loads of talent. Like India, like Dickens, like Tolstoy, ‘A Fine Balance’ is bursting at the seams with life, characters, incident, colour, adventures. In my mid-twenties I lived for a year in India a little after this period and this novel brought it all back, the incredible energy and vibrancy of the place, its cruelties and its kindnesses. Am I sounding melodramatic? Difficult to write about such a country without being so. In India all the life is larger than life. And also it is necessary that bad leaders are called out and unjust systems exposed. If the whole shebang is somewhat contrived and the prose occasionally a shade purple, well these are forgivable defects compared to the importance of what Mistry so graphically presents to us here.

Norwegian writer Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize for literature, and although this is awarded for a body of work, there seemed to be a general feeling amongst commentators that it was his magnum opus, ‘Septology’, that gave him that push over the line. Fosse has been working on this novel on and off for decades, parts of it already published, but despite weighing in at over seven hundred pages, and regularly referred to as ‘profound’ and ‘monumental’, Septology proves to be a relatively breezy read. This is largely because for a novel of its length, it doesn’t contain the usual commensurate amount of detail for the reader to absorb, and this is largely because Fosse, or his character, Asle, repeats himself continually throughout. He is man fixated on a limited number of ‘things’, with his mind correspondingly looping around connected sets of circuitries.

The entire book is Asle’s monologue, one very long sentence in fact, but again this is not difficult to read, with the straightforward speech and the repetitions, and of course one wonders why Fosse chose this form. What I think he is trying to do here is to cast a sort of spell upon the reader, a spell of a particular voice, and at times this works well, but at other times it just becomes boring, particularly towards the end when this reader had heard more than enough from this one man. Not that Asle is speaking to anyone. This is an interior monologue, an old man’s reckoning with his life, related, with long flashbacks, over three days preceding Christmas while he is struggling to finish what becomes his final painting, an abstract oil of St. Andrews Cross. 

There are two Asles: our protagonist, a successful artist, who at a certain point gives up drinking so he can fulfill his creative potential, and a second Asle living in nearby town, who persists in his drinking until it destroys his art and life. The path not taken. Fosse plays these two off against one another and I feel one of strengths of the novel is the intricate patterning involved here. Names, personalities and events reflect one another in the two lives and Fosse effectively employs this, along with the repetitions, as a sort of binding mechanism for his long rambling narrative. The two Asles are like Siamese twins. Asle One knows things about Asle Two that, logically speaking, he couldn’t really know unless he also lived that life. And I think, with this, and much else, the coincidences, mirroring etc. you have to take it as it comes. The pay-off for the reader is the building up of a unity of mood, of atmosphere, of a certain world and world view.

So then what’s it all about? Art and the artist, a portrait and explication of genius, and with this I feel Fosse is less successful, indulging himself too often in shop-worn Romantic myths. Asle is an idiot savant, an unwitting channel for the divine, updated here to an ingenuous hippy (a figure physically described like the author is himself) Asle is a one-off, an intuitive spirit, disclaiming rationalism, traditions, who is led by instinct and blind inspiration (even in meeting his wife we have, on both sides, love at first sight).

All this seems an unlikely career path for any artist, particularly in the modern era. Where is his context, where are his antecedents? His only personal referent throughout is Meister Eckhart, an obscure medieval religious philosopher. Norway’s most acclaimed artist, Edvard Munch, is never mentioned, even though Asle seems to paint a lot like him. The considerable religious and artistic philosophising is often insightful, but just as often wincingly banal. Generally speaking, there is far too much faux profundity, pop psychology and odd repetitive motes that don’t lead anywhere. And increasingly, incantation stands in for depth.

Furthermore, we have the flip side of the unity above mentioned: Asle’s world is one with no humour, no irony, no playfulness, intellectual or otherwise. Characters, with notable the exception of the narrator, and to some extent his fisherman friend, Asleik, are two dimensional, with little depth or complexity.

To sum up, although I found Septology, certainly to begin with, absorbing and compelling, as I kept on, the artist’s creative authenticity, or lack thereof, along with the repetitions, finally became a problem for me. You could perhaps look upon the whole shebang as one giant fable, some potent myth for our times, but for this interpretation to succeed Fosse would need to seriously condense and cut, two writerly virtues that I suspect he disdains.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1950 novel, ‘The Family Moskat’, written in Yiddish by the then resident New Yorker, presents the unfolding passions and dramas of a society of Jews living in Warsaw the first thirty-nine years of the twentieth century. Lengthy, but totally absorbing, we are drawn into this complex and rich world, its ancient traditions, knowing it is shortly to be wiped out. Singer’s aim here, and his triumph, is to convey some idea of what this enormity might mean.

Our guide through the Moskat maze is, for the most part, one Asa Heshel Bannet, passionate, contrary, moody, sexually magnetic, much like the protagonists of Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, etc. fascinating because they are always doing, but perhaps not all that likeable or admirable. Asa is a disturbing, disruptive force within the family, but he is not alone in this. From the powerful old patriarch Meshulam Moskat right through to the relatively powerless young women, distinctive and forceful personalities abound.

In a Paris Review interview Singer remarked that he was not a fan of Thomas Mann, but ‘Buddenbrooks’ is the novel that stands squarely behind this one.  As with ‘Buddenbrooks’, we observe a generational decline and fall: a diminution, decay, even corruption, of moral matters and the disciplines and rules of behaviour that underpin and define the extended family structure.

Not being Jewish myself, much here was new to me. What I found most interesting was how complete this society was and how vital. Somebody remarks somewhere how it has survived with its customs and beliefs virtually intact for a thousand years, and within a different, often hostile, milieu. But not for long.

We know how it ends, but the characters don’t, and here is the key. We quickly see, despite all the differences, how much these people are like us, bumbling along with life and loves and losses as best they can, making it up as they go. Even viewing their actions through the dramatic irony of our terrible fore-knowledge we can’t help but emote and sympathise, live their lives with them, and perhaps our sympathies expand through this fore-knowledge.

Singer arrived in New York in 1935 at age thirty-one and stayed. He did not experience the Holocaust first hand. Although Yiddish was his first language, obviously by the time he came to write this work, he could have employed English, as did Saul Bellow, another Yiddisher. A larger audience, and why choose to write in a patois probably doomed to perish beyond a generation? Singer closely monitored his English translations (this was his first book published in English), but never did them himself. We’ll assume his decision is a political act as well as one of solidarity.

I also wondered whether writing in Yiddish he felt more naturally close to some of the literary traditions of that language, particularly its folk and parable idioms. Time and again Singer quotes traditional Jewish sayings and proverbs. Also many of his characters, although realistic, seem to have stepped out of a fable, or only one remove from that. Which gives the ‘whole’ a bit of a ‘lost world’ feeling that fits in with his overall purpose. And there is the underlying spiritualism. This world of his is contained within its Judaism, as it is in Bellow, but unlike Bellow, here we are always aware of the non-Jewish world outside and around, the powers that really control and determine matters. The Jews are finally dependent on the grace of others, which is no assured thing.

It could perhaps be charged against ‘The Family Moskat’ that Singer sacrifices depth for scope. He certainly employs a broad canvas, but I found the characters sharply etched. We never lose sight of who is who and where they fit. A remarkable achievement, in fact a great and deeply moving work.

I came to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘A Death in the Family’ and ‘A Man in Love’, after reading his brilliant essay collection, ‘In the Land of the Cyclops’. For me the novels came in a definite second to the essays and I’ll stop at this point with his mammoth six volume ‘My Struggle’.

What these two memoirs/novels (which together comprise a collective), read like, is a novelist’s first draft, which from Knausgaard’s account of writing them, is more-or-less what they are. So there is some excellent writing, and not so excellent, with many cliché weeds spotting the literary lawn, mundanities jostling with profundities, and all up an apparently intentionally undisciplined wild and rambling gallimaufry of language and life, at which Knausgaard’s editors presumably either tore their hair out or shrugged their shoulders. On instruction, one presumes.

Seemingly distrustful of fiction’s careful and prissy ‘manipulations’, Knausgaard throws selectivity out of the window, thus allowing almost everything else to rush in, such as page after page of windy philosophising with no clear relation to theme and character, plus numerous tell-all incidents, mostly from adolescence, that although maybe interesting in their own right, have little purpose or place in his overall design. Knausgaard boldly wants to convey the taste and texture of a whole life lived, the good the bad the ugly the forgettable, and in this he largely succeeds, but one inescapable correlative is that everything becomes flattened out, so that events that do hold the most meaning and drama are leached of these to a disproportionate extent.

His two literary mentors, whom he cites, are Dostoevsky and Proust. Now Dostoevsky’s novels, like Knausgaard’s, are long and discursive, but this is a fictional feint, as the Russian writer choses his subsidiary stories and characters with great skill so that they always in some way reflect back on his main themes, as does his characters’ philosophising. Knausgaard might argue that this is the worn falsity of fiction, and does, and also doesn’t, but anyway seems to have forgotten or ignored the critical commonplace that high fiction’s ‘falsities’ serve to highlight how certain truths in life have more importance and value than others, which is actually the way we experience life, not necessarily from day-to-day, but in retrospect. And of course, Knausgaard himself is broadly selective, he can’t literally show everything. Nevertheless, in these overblown overwritten volumes, if about a third had hit the cutting room floor, the two really compelling stories he needs to tell, that of his father’s death and its aftermath, and that of the birth of his first child as a climax of his love, which occurring centrally in each novel balance one another beautifully, would shine out with far greater power and clarity. As would his overriding theme which is the conjunction of these: the corrosion of wonder in the world as we age.

To my mind Knausgaard never seems quite to grasp that, despite all his rationalisations and protestations, he is really writing fiction not memoir. Proust presents his long work, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ as memoir, but makes no bones about the fact that he is really writing a novel. One result being that we have a succession of brilliantly constructed characters, such as Swann and Charlus and Madame Verdurin, whom Marcel closely ‘observes’ and so we watch them grow and develop, interact etc. In Knausgaard’s volumes, we only really have a clear grasp of one character, himself, presumably because he refuses to enter into fiction’s ‘false’ realisation of centres of consciousness aside from his own. These are people I know, so how can I possibly present them in that way? Well Proust does, and because Knausgaard doesn’t or refuses to, means that towards the end of one thousand plus pages we are tiring of what appears to be an overweening narcissism and solipsism. Even his beloved wife, Linda, shown in scattered first-hand impressions, and his best friend Geir (the same), seem minor figures in the drama of his interior life, which I doubt is actually the case (well, one hopes). Geir is allowed a full-length rave towards the end of ‘A Man in Love’, but still, it’s all about Knausgaard.

Time and again Knausgaard discusses the role of structure in art, only to seemingly ignore it in practice. It is interesting that, going back about a decade and inspiring much since, the two most hyped up literary ‘events’ have been ‘My Struggle’ and Elena Ferrante ‘s ‘Neapolitan Quartet’. Both works have been praised well above their worth with better less-celebrated novels published during this time. Because, in different ways, they are both ‘sensational’ ―Ferrante’s mysterious ‘anonymity’ and Knausgaard’s brave, scandalous ‘honesty’― and publishers can make much mileage out of these, and do so partly by praising the content. Here, to a certain extent, we readers are dupes of publishers’ carry-on, and not just readers. Many good writers also seem to have lost their collective judgements in the publicity adrenalin rush of literary celebrity. So amongst the pages of puff quotes that preface Knausgaard’s books we have, for example, this by Jonathan Lethem, a writer whom I admire: ‘A living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery’. Quite.

If you don’t have a day job, or kids, and are by nature patient and indulgent, read these volumes, read beyond the two that I have, read the lot, for there are many fine things to be found I’m sure. However, also consider, it could be more worth your while to wait for the liposuctioned omnibus edition that Knausgaard will no doubt be encouraged to essay down the track, or indeed, the Readers Digest condensed version where somebody else will be employed to do the necessary hard yards on his prose, work that he himself, presently, disdains.