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In ‘House of Names’, Irish writer Colm Tóibín has novelized the first two episodes of the Classical Greek legend of the House of Atreus, which, along with individual treatments from Sophocles and Euripides, reaches its fullest realization in Aeschylus’s magisterial dramatic trilogy, ‘The Oresteia’.

The Oresteia is more dramatic poetry than poetic drama à la Shakespeare and Marlowe. Rich, dense, contemplative, repetitive, with all the bloody action taking place offstage, it is far removed from modern tastes in story-telling. So why has Tóibín written this?

The novel as an art form can do anything, but largely maintains cultural prestige amongst all the varied competing media through doing one thing no other art form can: internal monologue or the rendering of individual consciousness. Aeschylus amplifies and deepens his mythical source material but doesn’t radically transform it. However, Tóibín must do this if he is going to write a novel. Figures must become characters, have modern psychological motivations and feelings. Just look at the oft mentioned pickle John Milton gets into with Paradise Lost, with almighty God a narcissistic control freak and Satan a subversively glamorous underdog. Myths, the Greek myths especially, are time-worn fabulous tales, and also often illustrate subliminal drives and desires, one of their key fascinations for Freud. But the collective unconsciousness is not the individual consciousness. Tóibín must bring Clytemnestra, Orestes, Electra etc. to full fictional life.

Then there’s the problem with the Gods. Basically they don’t exist which is a bind for a realistic narrative, and in fact Tóibín continually fudges the equivocal area between acting because of what the Gods have ordained or out of one’s volition. If Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter because Artemis commands it and the whole impetus of the Trojan War hangs on his anguished decision, is it fair for Clytemnestra to personally judge and damn him for a crime he desperately did not want to commit? Or, would you murder your mother if she murdered your father? Probably not. Probably you’d need something more, something like Agamemnon was facing. And so on.  Tóibín valiantly tries to flesh all this out but the cracks are evident.

However, there is much to admire, to begin with, our idea of Greece itself, which is conditioned by the Classical myths and their various interpretations, especially the Iliad and the Odyssey. In our dreamings of the Classical landscape, objects and sensations have a primary boldness: sun, sea, sky, blood, love, hate, revenge. There is a relish of life, positive and negative, that we feel we have lost in modern life. Tóibín captures this ‘relish’ superbly, transporting us right back there, sans anachronisms.

Then there’s the tightly written prose which reads like a translation, seemingly flat and affectless, but holding us close and flaring up brilliantly when it needs to. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is an especial standout. Throughout, dealing both with minor figures and with the main protagonists, Tóibín shows an empathy and identification with marginalized and powerless individuals, a psychology particularly well realized.

But of course, those main protagonists do each have their moment of Power, shown here in all its realpolitik ferocity. Also, the necessity of living with Power with the concomitant paranoia and suspicion necessary for survival, the Palace intrigues, the whispering corridors, the competing truths.

Tóibín dispenses with the Classical chorus, collapses the time period of the Trojan war, and in the central section of the novel, invents a story for Orestes in his period of exile. Clytemnestra and Electra are presented vividly in first person, but for some reason Tóibín adopts the third for Orestes tale which reads something like a cross between a boys-own-adventure and certain passages from Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps he wanted to vary the pace, but when Orestes eventually returns home Tóibín seems uncertain what to do with him. Orestes dilly-dallies before committing his crime and seems half-hearted about the whole business, as though he has been fooled into an outrageous act for others’ political purposes, to be damned by them for doing so. Here, crucially for me, Tóibín leaves out one of the most affecting passages in Aeschylus when Clytemnestra pleads with Orestes not to murder his own mother who gave him suckle etc. Orestes lacks agency as a character, we don’t know why he acts, he doesn’t know why he acts, and the consequences are left in the air.

Aeschylus has a clear purpose in the Oresteia: to affirm the necessity of a civil court of judgment; only by mutually consented code of law can a society emerge from the barbarism of an eye for an eye. The Gods cannot provide for man; man must provide for man. By ignoring the last part of the trilogy, where Orestes is pursued by the Furies (his conscience?) and finally brought to judgment, Tóibín leaves his story dangling. Orestes is sidelined by others and there is no real conclusion to all that has occurred, just a sequence of brutal killings seemingly without proper purpose or motive.

Again, why has Tóibín written this? There is an obvious correlation between the psychic landscape of ‘House of Names’ and the anguished history of Ireland in the twentieth century. I feel that Tóibín was strongly compelled by the narrative of the House of Atreus, and perhaps thought that by developing and fictionalizing this material, he could gain some insight into his own heritage or somehow contextualize it. But he seems to have embarked upon this adventure without knowing quite where it was going to take him, or needed to take him.

So, we are left with a brilliant vivid narrative but no satisfactory wrap up, great sound and fury signifying nothing very much, which for this reader is a little bit of a letdown.

 

 

Author David Mitchell in his acclaimed novel, ‘Cloud Atlas’, is not shy at giving readers interpretive pointers as to his aims. There is the image of the matryoshka doll; scientist Isaac Sachs muses ‘each shell (the present) encased inside a nest of shells (previous presents) …the doll of now likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be…’. Publisher Timothy Cavendish wishes ‘for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable. To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds’. Finally, we have the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’ of composer Robert Frobisher ‘a sextet for overlapping soloists… each in its own language of key, scale and colour.

We have, more simply, six separate and separated narratives stretching from the 19^th century way into the future and back again. Each is interlinked formally and thematically and the whole shebang is a stunningly virtuosic display of differing storytelling presented in a highly original package. But is it anything much more? Well, once again, possibly because he’s concerned that the peacock’s tail might obscure the bird, or even that there might be just a tail and no bird, Mitchell informs us time and again how all this shows how man is on an ongoing project to wreck the world through blind greed and hubris. This is no news, and frankly, despite all the razzle-dazzle, intellectually ‘Cloud Atlas’ in toto amounts to little more than a bunch of leftie dictums linked by a recurring tattoo.

Not that this particularly matters, for Mitchell is a natural and gifted storyteller plus a whizz with words. Each of the tales are ‘types’ of narrative, presented in the appropriate language: orotund Victorian, hard-boiled detective, sci-fi, whatever. A good deal of the enjoyment of ‘Cloud Atlas’ is letting Mitchell show you what he can do, all the tricks. Inevitably, some things work better than others. Both sci-fi scenarios have big credibility gaps and the second is told in a bizarre inconsistent dialect. Generally speaking, there is a surfeit of jocular overripe prose, and although I didn’t feel this myself, I’m sure many readers will find it all just too much showy entertainment and become irritated by the relentless super-cleverness. Did I mention hubris?

For a big ambitious work there is little character development and psychological depth; Mitchell is too concerned to keep all his balls in the air. The overall abstracted view reminded me of the novels of Paul Auster, with the idea that there is a pattern in the occurrence of events, it’s just that we can’t see it, only glimpse pieces of it. Which makes us hostage not only to our own crazy instincts and drives but something bigger and unknown. Or maybe Mitchell just likes playing meta-fictional tricks as a sort of structural binding. He wouldn’t be the first there.

So, although I enjoyed ‘Cloud Atlas’ hugely and happily recommend it as holiday reading, I wouldn’t be wasting too may neurons pondering its various messages. For me, this was one in which the whole was considerably less than its undeniably brilliant parts.

 

Looking back, Australian author Robert Drewe’s first novel, ‘The Savage Crows’, seems somewhat of an odd debut for a writer whose subsequent career has been largely that of a contemporary social satirist or commentator (‘Our Sunshine’ notably aside). Half this book is contemporary social satire, that is, of the 1970s, and for those who can remember, these mordantly observed scenes are sharp and funny, if inevitably somewhat dated (particularly the portraits of women). The specificity of the detail, much of which would be lost on present readers, makes them feel autobiographical, and since our protagonist, Stephen Crisp, shadows Drewe’s own adolescence and early manhood, one assumes for the most part they are.

What is odd is how Crisp’s story is interspersed, presumably for contrast and comparison, with a freely bowdlerised version of the 1830s journals of George Augustus Robinson, the so-called ‘protector’ of the Tasmanian Aborigines, who with Governor Arthur’s warrant, roamed the State rounding up tribes and individuals prior to them being shipped off to Flinders Island where almost all perished through neglect. The two worlds portrayed here are worlds apart, to put it mildly. Is that the point, or part of it? Are there connections to be made and conclusions to be drawn?

We’ll start with the Journals. What initially strikes a reader in 2018, or this reader, is that how the way Drewe has treated this material would hardly be possible were he writing the novel today, or more accurately, he would not think to approach his material in this way. Drewe states in his preliminary author’s note: ‘I have allowed myself great freedom of imagination in reconstructing some 19^th century events’. He has; not that anything seems falsified, on the contrary, but in fictionally animating such presently revered historical Aboriginal figures such as Manna-largenner (here Drewe steers close to caricature), and others such as Truganini and Wooraddy (Drewe’s spelling for these), as a middle-class white writer, Drewe is out of line. Even the great Thomas Keneally has recently commented on ‘The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith’ that today he would not write Jimmy’s character ‘from within a black consciousness’. Personally, I find it regrettable that he might look askance, if that’s what he is doing, at such fine work.

But then perhaps we shouldn’t beat our breasts too much about all this, particularly when we recall that throughout history writers have rarely been free to write what they fancy and are usually able to invent creative solutions circumventing various censors. Directly defying the strictures of identity politics might at most incite a social media damning, which would not be pleasant (would future loss of funding be offset by sales?), but it would not send a writer to prison.

Anyway, Drewe’s historical pastiche is done with great skill, and despite much of the grim subject matter, considerable humour. One occasionally knows when reading Robinson and when reading Drewe, but the transitions are seamless. Drewe is presenting these ‘historical’ journals, I believe, with the (now disputed) contention that Australian colonists committed a successful genocide in Tasmania. He wants us to realise this and think on it…

…while we, two centuries later, are living in a materially rich, opportunity ripe, sunny egalitarian democracy. Are we? Maybe we are not, or maybe we are but there is a dark underbelly to it all. Which brings us to the story of Stephen Crisp.

Stephen is not in a good space. First his wife has left him, then his girlfriend, and also he has thrown in a promising career. Why? Because he has become obsessed with Robinson’s Journals and feels the overriding need to write some magnum opus either about the Journals or deriving from them. But his writing is stalled, like his life. The Journals are only inspiring a premature mid-life crisis, but what exactly is this crisis, and what can he do about it? Well, while Stephen never really seems to get to the bottom of his crisis, he does eventually do something about it, providing a catharsis of sorts for himself and some kind of denouement to the novel, which I will leave to readers to pass their own judgements on.

Nevertheless, the oddity persists. Terrible crimes of all stripes were committed in the early years of British settlement; now good ship Australia is sailing breezily on. Again, what is the connection? Is Drewe telling us all to get a conscience, or that Australian life is even more morally vacuous than it appears? Drewe convincingly shows we are modern amnesiacs, materially pre-occupied, and yes of course, few would disagree we should know more about the sins of our past, if only to do some justice for people still affected by them. But the two narrative strands here seem too disparate to make some kind of coherent whole of the novel. We need more guidance from the author, or some kind of bridge.  ‘The Savage Crows’, despite its many qualities, feels incomplete, and Drewe’s overall project here, remains somewhat enigmatic.

On the back cover of T.C.Boyle’s ‘The Terranauts’, fellow American novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, observes: ‘Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges’. That is certainly true of this, his latest literary blockbuster, which kept reminding me of one those crowded jungle canvases by Henri Rousseau. This is Boyle’s fictional take on ‘Biosphere 2’, a closed system experiment from the 1990s in Arizona. In Boyle’s novel, eight ‘Terranauts’, four single women and four single men, are chosen for Ecosphere ll, locked into a theoretically self-sustaining environment complete with lake and jungle and grasslands for two years, to see whether it is possible for a community to live apart from earth.

This is ripe material for Boyle who delights in seeing us behave as evolved (or not so) primates beneath the hypocrisy of our various civilised veneers.  He has been savage with this type of thing in the past, most particularly in ‘Drop City’, for me the best of his novels I have read, where he transports a hippy community to Alaska, but he soft-pedals a bit here, probably mindful of avoiding a clichéd ‘Lord of the Flies’ scenario. It is a remarkably accomplished work technically, particularly in the completeness of what it presents. However I didn’t feel the psychological penetration was quite on par with the imaginative virtuosity of the setting.

If visually I was reminded of Rousseau, in a literary vein, Boyle’s scenario most brought to mind another Frenchman, eighteenth century playwright Pierre de Marivaux, particularly ‘La Dispute’ in which four orphans, two boys and two girls, are raised in isolation and then released into an enclosed Garden of Eden to determine whether man or woman is the more faithful. Marivaux is always placing individuals in controlled artificial environments to see how they react, and Boyle’s novel, away from all the hi-tech stuff, thematically has a very eighteenth century feel, a time when many writers were examining ‘nature versus nurture’, ‘science versus faith’, in any test tube situation that might reveal to us the true nature of humankind, since long-held religious explanations as such were proving increasingly inadequate.

Boyle’s novel progresses through repeated successive monologues of three of the characters, two women and a man. The man, Ramsay Roothoorp, is the most successfully realised, possibly because the character, suave, sardonic, but with a heart, is, we assume (perhaps falsely) close to that of the author. His eventual partner, Dawn Chapman, described on the inside flap as a ‘naïve beauty’, carries the burden of the narrative; her actions determine the course of the novel. However her two crucial decisions, particularly the latter, seem to me not sufficiently grounded in her psychology; I couldn’t see why it was essential for her to do these things, so we sense the thumb of the author on the scales. The third, Linda Ryu, is the least successful, except if we’re prepared to accept she’s unpredictable and contradictory even to herself. She’s outside the dome, serving largely as a foil and plot device.

Nevertheless, these things aside, ‘The Terranauts’ is brilliant, superbly written, cleverly paced, a great read. Boyle is strongest as a satirist, and this set-up gives this talent full reign. You may not weep, but you’ll certainly laugh; Boyle sends up everything possible about late twentieth century American middle-class consumerists, all the desires and fears and foibles, self-deceptions and  pretensions, it is a tour-de-force of observation and wit. And really, if we don’t quite have the depth here to match, there’s plenty of compensating enjoyments.

 

 

 

Alex Miller’s ‘Landscape of Farewell’ is the second in a loose trilogy of novels set in outback Queensland,  following ‘Journey to the Stone Country’ and preceding ‘Coal Creek’. The novel opens about as far from the outback you can get, in Hamburg, where a retired German Professor of medieval history, Max Otto, is planning suicide, largely through grief at the recent death of his wife. He has a last guest lecture to deliver on ‘The Persistence of the Phenomenon of Massacre’, an obviously fraught topic for a German citizen of the twentieth century. The lecture is a failure, we are not told why, and Max is challenged and saved by Vita (get it?) McLelland, a visiting aboriginal academic from Sydney University who takes him under her expansive wing and invites him to a reciprocal conference down under. She has plans for Max, again it is not clear why.

 

Vita, with all her exotic new world plumage, is a stereotype (‘fierce and uneasy lights flickered within the depths of her dark eyes’) and after playing her decisive plot role, gradually fades from the scene. To be replaced by her uncle Dougald, whom Max joins for a sabbatical up in Northern Queensland, where Miller himself worked as a jackaroo in his youth. The ‘difference’ for Max of this remote landscape is powerfully evoked.

 

Max is worried about what his father did during the war and his own persistent refusal to ask. Dougald needs a sympathetic scribe to memorialise the epic of his ancestor passed down through the male line, his great grandfather, the chief Gnapun, who prosecuted a massacre of white settlers. The two men from vastly different backgrounds, but with overlapping pre-occupations, connect beautifully: the subtle depiction of their maturing relationship is for me the highlight of the novel. Both, through one another, move towards a kind of closure to their life concerns; Max by articulating an empathetic formulation of a mass killing unconnected to his own background, and Dougald with Max’s emotional support being able to journey back to his ancestral lands and Gnapun’s grave.

 

But what does it all mean? Largely through Max, Miller continually links the Europe/Australia dichotomies. Max feels he needs to ‘face up to a denial in his own life concerning his country’s history’. Time and again he baldly states Miller’s thesis: ‘I know myself to be implicated in the guilt of both my species and my parents’. And this is only at page twenty.

 

A more thematic deployment of the issues is worked through a portrait of Max’s uncle with whom he spent a lonely farmhand apprenticeship during the war. Like Dougald, the uncle has a ‘blood relationship’ to his land. Unlike Dougald, he is a sinister figure, a loner, slightly mad and obsessed, a type that might well support an extreme nationalism such as Hitler’s.

 

The parallels continue to stack up: apology, denial, reparation, silence. The cumulative effect of all this is that after a while everything Max says explicitly or implicitly about World War Two we take as a given truth of white Australia’s relationship with black.

 

About two thirds of the way through, Miller presents the massacre as seen through Gnapun’s eyes in an extraordinary prose poem, which has an effect a bit like the slow movement of a classical concerto, a stretch of lyric beauty between much busyness, except the subject here is a horror. By inverting our customary idea of whites massacring blacks, it throws the moral ramifications of ‘tribal’ killing into a more objective relief. Embedded in a contemporary realistic narrative, the passage reads like a mini ‘epic’, Miller here, in a kind of literary reconciliation, employing sustained Biblical and Homeric rhetoric in the context of aboriginal folklore.

 

Epics, generally speaking, are not good on moral complexities, a lack abetting their solitary power. Presented in a modern novel, this heroic simplicity, entailing an elision over messy ethical issues, is for me party to a pervasive problem with Miller’s main narrative.

 

Can this massacre, which is basically a territorial dispute, seriously be compared with the Holocaust, and Europe’s long convoluted national and religious enmities? By so strongly linking these two very different scenarios Miller risks a moral reduction, simplification, perhaps even evasion of complex issues. And surely if we are to get any handle on these issues, perhaps move forward in resolving them, we need to be aware of their complexities and also their differences.

 

Max is a wonderfully realised character but I was unconvinced at the close of the novel that he had found through his Australian experience the solutions to his own national dilemmas. He certainly thinks he has, and good luck to him, but I feel the rest of us need more than simple moral ciphers, really platitudes, that here serve to undermine what is otherwise a moving story of personal reckoning.

 

 

 

 

Vladimir Nabokov’s Glory is a somewhat enigmatic piece and readers will take different things from it. Wikipedia tells me that the original Russian title, Podvig, means ‘feat’ or ‘exploit’, and this, in a literal way, matches the novel better that the English title, although Nabokov must have chosen ‘Glory’ when he translated the novel with the help of his son Dimitri in 1971. Glory’s story has much in common with the author’s, although unlike Nabokov’s other autobiographical Russian novel, The Gift, significantly, the hero here, Martin, has no outstanding talents or even any specific drive, and that is partly what the book is about. The central symbol, repeated in a number of guises, is a winding path disappearing into a deep forest.

Martin grows up in St. Petersburg, but flees the Revolution with his mother, firstly to the Crimea, then to Greece, where he is sexually initiated, on to Switzerland, where his mother remarries and settles, and then finally to study at Cambridge where the novel pauses. After Cambridge, south of France working with the peasants, onto Berlin etc. Gradually, through all this, Martin becomes obsessed by a desire or challenge to slip illegally over the Soviet border, although not himself politically engaged in any way.

Nabokov has significant range as a writer; his prismatic personality, his roving intellect, and the incredible trials life imposed upon him. But even in the early Russian novels we have the Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading, the cold amoral King Queen Knave, and this work, naturalistic and engaged. Quite a few of Nabokov’s leading characters we do not like, but we like Martin, and it is important for the impact of this work that we do, that we feel with Martin’s friends and relatives at his fate. Nabokov’s prose is at its descriptive burnished best in Glory, although I always find with his virtuosity the occasionally misplaced word, particularly slang or dialect, that like Joseph Conrad, mark him out as not entirely at ease with the language. Martin experiences the physical world with a ravishing intensity; raw, unmediated adolescence, we’re right back there. And despite everything being seen through Martin’s eyes, all of the secondary characters are rendered in considerable subtlety and depth. The effect of time and place on various developing personalities is particularly well realised.

The original working title for Glory, Romantichevsky vek, ‘Romantic Times’, gave me a cue for my take on this work. What I think Nabokov is doing in Glory is holding up to the light a particular type of Romantic figure. At first I was reminded of Werther, and indeed Goethe’s hapless hero, rock-star popular in the early 19^th century, would be a good example for Martin, but probably a better would be one of Werther’s literary descendants, Pechorin, from A Hero of our Times. My old Anchor paperback edition of this Russian classic is translated by Nabokov who, in his introduction, criticises the work as novelettish but admits a long fascination with it. All these men possess a rootlessness and restlessness alongside their personal charisma and intelligence. None of them can find a fit in the world. Who hasn’t known this at that age? Reading Glory, I immediately felt a strong backward identification with Martin. Nabokov is signalling here the powerful attraction of this type, but also that as a role model it is necessarily a dead end. We all must leave the Martin in us behind, let him fade, regretfully perhaps, if we are to move forward constructively with our lives.

Novels, generally, thrive on variety and contrast; but there are some, like poetry or short stories, where all elements are employed towards a single powerful effect. This latter is the case with Glory, although it is not apparent until the very end. Open ended, in fact, and as I say above, there is a wider stretch of valid interpretive response here than usual. The effect of that is to throw the reader back upon the character of Martin, to focus on his magnetism and desires, which together serve to illustrate for us a significant life lesson.