Review: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I guess it’s a good sign when Flanagan takes a title from something like a Zen koan. His 2013 “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” is one of the great novels of the 21st Century and this, his second from 1997, is awfully good as well.

After “Narrow Road” and his most recent, the almost as extraordinary First Person, I resolved to read all the Flanagan I could get a hold of. The intervening two were less impressive. His first, Death of a River Guide, had some gorgeous moments, but it seemed to me to take too long to get going an to depend too much on the gimmick of a dying man’s life flashing before his eyes. His fourth, The Unknown Terrorist, seemed to me a post 9/11 novel (inflected by Flanagan’s Tasmanian sense of being on the very edge of the civilized world) without the bite or enduring quality of, say, DeLillo.

So that left two extraordinary novels and two I had reason to admire but not fully appreciate.

This one tips the scales back toward my deep Flanagan admiration – deep enough to have him on my private, no-one-else-cares list of potential Nobel laureates. It’s less ambitious than Narrow Road, and it has nowhere near the psychological games of First Person, but it may be more achingly beautiful than either.

This opens with the unthinkable – Maria Buloh walks into the Tasmanian winter determined never to come home again, and she leaves her three-year-old daughter Sonja alone with her husband, Bojan. The two, daughter and father, are deeply broken people, neither knowing how to love the other. They have fleeting moments of joy, but the bulk of their life together is sordid and disappointed. Bojan drinks, he hits her, and he cannot allow himself to heal from his wife’s abandonment.

Much of the power here comes from what I think may be a Flanagan trademark: the ability to reveal increasingly complicated depths to the characters and situations he’s established. While we might feel inclined to blame Maria for the family’s troubles, we come eventually to see how her despair is shaped by her brutal childhood in World War II. (SPOILER: late in the novel we learn that she was forced to witness the murder of her father, who was assisting partisans fighting the Nazis, and was then raped alongside her mother and sister…all while just 14 years old.)

Bojan seems indifferent to Sonja’s welfare and happiness. He makes her wait in cars outside bars when he drinks, and he forces her to keep house – and pretend to ignore his beating of her – while she’s still a child. Yet Bojan too is haunted by the war-time of his own childhood. He has no patience for religion, for instance, determining that any God that could allow the SS the free rein it had in Yugoslavia could not be a beneficent deity.

Flanagan establishes that despair as the baseline rhythm of the novel, but then he somehow presents glimpses of potential happiness above it. In one heartbreaking stretch, Bojan opens himself up to a new love, with a woman named Jean who has an apple orchard, but he doesn’t know how to ask Sonja if she’d approve of his remarrying, and she doesn’t know how to say it’s something she’d desperately want. Each denies the other something that might have saved each, but the scent of apples lingers, and Sonja never forgets the harvest song.

Eventually, the most important of those potential change-everything possibilities is Sonja’s pregnancy. Flanagan gives us the novel in strands, in a series of chapters from Sonja’s childhood in the 1950s and a separate series from 1989 and 1990. In the latter, Sonja has returned to the Tasmania of her childhood. She’s determined at first to see her father and then have an abortion, but she can’t bring herself to go through with it. She has no hope for the future, no imagined joy, but some kernel of the need to survive keeps pushing her.

(SPOILER:) There’s no climactic moment of change, no instant of redemption, but Flanagan lets us feel the callouses soften. No power on earth can undo the trauma of war-time Europe, and nothing can erase the pain of Sonja’s childhood, but the prospect of a new life, a generation that might live without such shadows, inspires everyone to be a better self. If you don’t read this, it will sound clichéd to (DOUBLE-SPOILER) say that Bojan eventually uses his carpentry skills to make a cradle and other infant furniture for the new baby, a child Sonja names Maria after her mother – whom we learn only at the end has not run away but killed herself.)

If you do read this, though, that emotional payoff, tricky as it may sound, is authentic and moving.

This is a novel with a small scope – really just a family of two – over a half century. In its way it’s magnificent, and it’s evidence of the skill and gift of the young Flanagan, a writer who’s gone on to write some of the best work going.


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Review: The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy

The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review of Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries

My headline for this review would be “Gulliver in Space.”

Not long ago I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and it disappointed me, among other reasons, because it put so much weight on the “science” half of science-fiction. I felt as if throughout the novel, she was trying to appease the doubters, the critics who question whether ‘speculative literature’ ever has a claim to be taken seriously.

Lem is doing the exact opposite. His space hero, Ijon Tichy, is a goofy stand-in for the free play of imagination. He’s a space explorer who, using technology as ever-changing as the campy Batman of the 1960s, ventures on one silly adventure after another.

The first of the adventures should be more than enough to hook anyone. Tichy is flying through a distant galaxy when he discovers that the equivalent of his space-rudder has jammed. He then finds that, to fix it, he will need a second pair of hands, one to hold the item in place and the other to tighten the wrench. Alone, and in despair, he takes a nap only to be awakened by himself – a version of himself from the future a day in advance. It turns out (with the sort of vague reference to science that LeGuin would have found beneath her) that his ship is approaching the speed of light as it nears a star, and that has put him into a time loop.

Lem might have left us to wonder at his cleverness, but he takes things much further. Tichy at first refuses to trust his future self. Then, when later opportunities arise, he constantly frustrates his efforts to fix the space ship. He gets into fights, ambushes himself, anticipates what he will soon want to do but guesses wrong, and finally forms a kind of parliament of all his future selves on the ship.

Silly as such a story is, though, it’s simultaneously allegorical in at least two dimensions.

The dimension that’s more readily accessible is biting. At the same time as the entire book is a celebration of the capacity of the human imagination (certainly as Lem exercises it), it’s a critique of our capacity to work together to solve our problems. The perpetual bete noir here is bureaucracy, the lumbering ways in which we attempt to order our mutual efforts. The second story for instance, has Tichy appointed as Earth’s delegate to an interstellar association of civilizations. When he arrives, though, the association has to go through a lengthy deliberative process, demanding reports on Earth’s good conduct.

That’s a consistent concern throughout the stories, and it’s easy to imagine Lem drew on frustration with the communism of his Polish childhood. Funny as the perpetual insight is – bureaucracy kills the spirit that makes us human – it clearly has an edge.

The other dimension of allegory here grows out of that notion, but – as I read this 40 years later and a continent away – I’m conscious of missing much of the historical, political, and social import. I sense it, but I feel a little as if I’m hearing someone else’s inside jokes. Even through translation, I recognize the rhythm of a master joke-teller, but I find myself a beat slow. I am aware, always, that this is coming to me second-hand, that I am watching the man perform and then pausing to read the subtitles before I can fully laugh.

You get some wonderful details here – aliens that our dim-witted Tichy mistakes for vending machines, or potatoes that, adrift in space, become predatory and rapacious – but I did find some of the later stories running together. Maybe because I was missing some of the barbs at the ends of the hooks Lem throws out there, I felt as if I’d gotten the best of this before it was over.

Still, I recognize a deep cleverness here. Aware that there are parts of this out of my reach without footnotes, I still enjoy it. This is science fiction as it was first born, as Gulliver’s Travels first showed it can be, and that – even before its other virtues – makes me recommend it.






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Review: Every Single Bone in My Brain

Every Single Bone in My Brain by Aaron Tillman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When the terrific English novelist Howard Jacobson got tired (at last) of being called the “English Philip Roth,” he responded that he preferred to think of himself as the “Jewish Jane Austen.”

It’s no surprise that some of the blurbs for Aaron Tillman’s striking collection, Every Single Bone in My Brain, compare him to Roth, but I think it’s the wrong comparison. Roth’s genius lies in the way he confronts the internal conflict between recognizing the power of the (generally Jewish) intellect while understanding its limitations in the America he comes to discover. (In that light, he’s broadening the insight behind a lot of Saul Bellow. His characters aren’t “merely” intellectuals; they’re “street smart” and yet still challenged by some who can’t accept them fully into our culture.) Roth, in other words, makes Jewish neuroticism three-dimensional, extending it beyond self-referentiality to full-on cultural critique.

Tillman belongs to a different genealogy of Jewish-American writers. His characters are less burdened by a disconnect between inspiration and feeling a full part of American culture than they are by a hunger for some sign in the world that orients their ambition or, even, purpose. That’s more in keeping with the impulses of Malamud who, mildly educated as a Jew, has his characters look for Jewish resonances in the culture around them, secret signs that their jumbled heritage echoes in the startling spaces of America. (For what it’s worth, that’s where Cynthia Ozick picks up; her characters have the same impulse but are much more confident in their knowledge of a Jewish past.)

Tillman explores that sign-hungry impulse across these stories, imagining characters of a newer and younger generation doing much of what Ozick’s Pagan Rabbi was doing. He does so with yet another couple decades of demonstrated Jewish belonging in America. His characters don’t question their deep citizenship or the possibility of their cultural place. It’s a new world, but it’s theirs. In that light, Tillman is not another in that long line of new Roths. Call him, instead, the Jewish Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The opening story, “The Great Salt Desert,” is a great example of that impulse as a young Jewish boy takes off on a wild road-trip adventure with a slightly older woman who’s fallen from her full embrace of Mormonism. Ian is understandably taken by her; she promises liberation from his straitened home life, and she promises a tutorial in sex. As they drive, though, her growing need for a direct sign of her salvation (or permission to return to the fold) proves infectious. He eventually hears what he understands must be “the voice of God,” but it comes by telephone on Cheryl’s terms, and it seems to invite him to continue as her passenger. In the end, when her journey crashes, he finds a more personal sign in “the expanse of this beautiful, petrified stretch” of desert. He’s free again to be himself, which means he free again to be a Jew in a country someone else has helped him discover.

One of the main characters of the excellent “Vacancy” doesn’t quite know she’s looking for signs when she becomes the top celebrant of rock band at her high school. She enjoys the music, sort of, but she isn’t entirely sure why she’s drawn to the guys in it. She thinks it ought to mean something, but she isn’t sure what and, as a reflection of that, she finds herself in complicated relationships with the different musicians.

And those are only the start in a collection that’s often kaleidoscopic, from the great title story to the final “Cross-Eyed Monkey Cabaret.” There are seeming signs at every turn, which gives this philosophical heft, but there are laughs as well. We see the spiritual hunger that animated Malamud and Ozick, but we see as well – yes, I admit we do – the humor that made Roth so much the measuring stick for the Jewish-American writers on whose shoulders Tillman stands.


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Review: The English Patient

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I started this one without having seen the movie but with images of Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas imposed on some of the characters. Then, as I read, I found the prose so hypnotic that – even as I found the story initially bewildering (as I think we are supposed to experience it) – I fell in love with it as a book. Something in the sentences was almost hallucinatory. And I came to be surprised at the thought that anyone could make a movie that would do justice to a book so tied to such language.

And then, as I came to the final third of the book, the story gradually resolved itself, and I fell in love with this in an entirely different way. I did see how you might construct a movie from its material, and I got a clearer sense of how this is simultaneously a great war novel, a great love story, and an impressive post-colonial work.

The title character may be the one who’s burned beyond recognition, but all the central characters are damaged. He, Clifton, and Katherine all fall from the sky, all literally tumble from a great height but metaphorically fall from a delusion of happiness, from a sense that love might save them. Caravaggio, the slightly older British intelligence officer who suspects the patient’s true identity, has been mutilated by his one-time captors. Hana, the young nurse, can’t overcome the trauma of her father’s death. And Kip, the bomb-defuser who threw in with the British against the impulse of his Sikh family, can’t forget how close he’s been to death dozens of times.

Against the backdrop of a world war, each glimpses someone to love, someone who seems to offer escape from a conflict so vast that it seems to have no end. And each [SPOILER] is disappointed. One part of wisdom tells everyone in such a world that there is no such thing as safety, no such thing as the privacy that their shared time in a monastery turned hospital turned abandoned outpost might promise. Yet one part of being human means pushing against that doubt, means imagining it might be possible to fly a plane above the clouds and into something like a sunset.

I love the sense of scale here. This is a huge canvas, one as busy as World War II and as vast as the great desert, but its characters are finely drawn within it. Because these people seem so small against it, though, the possibility they find in love is all the more poignant.

I also love the way Ondaatje mines history. Most of the actions are set in what seems a distant past, an inter-war/war-time moment when a whole generation was young. (It was my parents’ generation, so I’ve always felt I’ve known it.) And then, in one of the many gorgeous tremors of the final pages [SPOILER] the fact of the atomic bomb rips that past away and injects the story into a recognizably contemporary moment. Kip, who’s risked his life to defuse so many bombs, can’t forgive the West for such a devastating attack. He can’t even forgive Hana, with the result that he snaps the love they share. They’re just people, after all, just individuals caught up in different forces tearing the world apart. They never really had a chance to be happy; Kip merely acknowledges that and, leaving, rides back into the Sikh world he’s rejected for a time.

I’m looking forward now, a quarter century late, to watching the movie. I’m going to wait a little while, though, to savor a book that’s powerful and so beautiful.


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Review: The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy was formative for me and, while I’m sad to find it holds up a little less well than some others of its time, I still have a fundamental fondness for the idea of her work. She’s one of the real architects of the fantastic, and her vision of linking language to experience was both imaginative on its own terms and a gesture toward some of the literary theory that would come along not too much after.

As I visit her sci-fi, though, I find her much more conventional in that genre. There’s a clever idea here – a man develops the capacity to reshape reality through dreams that he cannot control – but the rest is virtually clichéd. There’s the scientist who wants to use his power for control, and there’s the love interest who comes along just in time to help him resist.

As it is, this feels like classic 1970s science fiction, and that’s disappointing in two directions.

First, this is sci-fi that seems as if it has to answer its potential scientific critics. Instead of accepting a literary creation on its own terms, it offers explanations. (A classic example of the failing is the way George Lucas, having given us a goofy space opera in the original Star Wars, devolved the effective vagueness of ‘the force’ into something determined by ‘midi-chlorians’ measurable in the bloodstream.) I think of William Blake wishing for himself a “four-fold vision” – a mystical experience that would be all-consuming – yet fearing he might instead discover “single vision and Newton’s night,” a line I have always understood as a disappointment in the way science can strip away wonder from the world.

In other words, I respect that science fiction has to be internally consistent, but I think this (and perhaps other examples) are diminished when they seem gratuitously to answer questions that might occur to a critical reader. If LeGuin had written a book exploring euthanasia, I might be interested. I’m bored (or worse) when this book gives us a two-page summation of the argument and then moves onto other issues. It too often feels here as if she is imagining questions she might get from a panel of scientists or ethicists rather than following the narrative thread she’s opened up.

Second, this strikes me as a narcissistic vision, one that parallels what I remember (and what stereotype describes) as part of the zeitgeist of the early 1970s. This gimmick, the capacity for someone to reshape the world through dream, smacks of contemporaneous works like Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Pippin. It reads the experience of one person as tantamount to the experience of the entire world. In some of those others, there’s a naivete that, if it leaves them feeling dated, at least redeems them somewhat. This one, with its attempts to answer science and with LeGuin’s steady narrative hand, feels too polished to be forgiven. She’s simply too much a professional to get away with ham-handed work.

In the end, while I know others have admired this over the years, I think this is as weak an offering as I’ve ever found from LeGuin. I’m sure I’ll revisit her Earthsea work – maybe next time I’ll find I can again overlook its humorlessness – but I expect I’ll stay away from her science fiction.


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Review: The Mists of Avalon

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Today we remake Spiderman every couple of years. For much of the millennium before that – extending to today – we’ve remade the legends of Arthur and the Round Table. It’s generally the same story, at least in its outlines, but the challenge is to emphasize one or another element, to take material that belongs to all of us and to reframe it with a particular perspective.

When you come to Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, it helps to know the story already. Spoiler, but Guinevere can’t deny her love for Lancelot and that means trouble all around. And the part about the quest for the Holy Grail that destroys the companionship of the knights? Yeah, there’s no avoiding it either.

Traditional authors of the story have done all sorts of things with it, of course. Malory applied it to developing and codifying a code of chivalry which, while it has its virtues, helped lay the foundation for a sexist and puritanical Britain two or three centuries later. T.H. White (with Disney following) emphasized the wonder of the story, turning it into one stream of fantasy that paved the way for the reception of (if not so much the creation of) Tolkien’s world.

Bradley turns out to be powerfully ambitious here. She inserts a clear feminist take on the legends – here, Morgaine (Morgan le Fey) is not evil, but rather the most important representative of the druidical religion that Christianity is displacing. This is not “merely” feminism, though. Instead, it’s a claim for what I’d call syncretism, for the argument that the “enemy” isn’t some form of Satan but rather intolerance of what we cannot understand in our limited human perspective. We get lots of quotes exonerating Christ from the work of extirpating the traditional religion, with the blame going instead to “His priests.” (As such, St. Patrick, here as Patricius, is much more the ‘bad guy’ than Morgaine herself.)

The idea for Bradley, that is, is that we find the best in ourselves as humans when we embrace the good wherever we find it. She’s hardly anti-Christian, yet she embraces the sense that the nature-worshipping druids had important virtues as well. The challenge is always to find a balance, to accept that catechism – the mindless listing of what we ought to believe and how we ought to conduct ourselves – is the enemy of real faith. That’s as true for seeing the power within women as it is in the context of faith.

In a way, then, she offers what may be the most important theological take on the fantastic in the interval between Tolkien and George R.R. Martin. Tolkien (and C.S. Lewis, of course) used fantasy to explore a clear vision of a benign, monotheistic space where evil nonetheless existed. At the other end, Martin has unveiled a world where there is no “true north” of faith, a world where the supernatural is present but a range of god-like figures vie with one another for amoral victory.

It’s fascinating, then, to see Bradley as a middle-ground, as someone intent on using the genre to imagine a space between catechism and amorality. At its best, that’s precisely what her exhaustive take on these legends accomplishes. The Grail of her account, for instance, may or may not be the cup of Christ, but it is clearly something long used in druidical worship that Merlin, that traitor to the druidical cause, has stolen for Christian purposes. It’s not an angel that the knights see holding it but rather Morgaine herself, channeling the powers of the goddess for a brief moment, who sets them off to discover a vision of the holy that they can imagine only within a Christian vocabulary.

As a concept, as a motive for revisiting stories most of us know in one form or another, I love all that. And parts of this, especially the opening pages, are wonderfully done. There’s a reason this was a best-seller when it came out, and there’s a reason it lingers around the edges of the genre’s canon even as Bradley has come to be held to account for a lot of disturbing things from her lifetime.

All that said, though, this can’t entirely escape what seems the original sin of the genre. This is simply too long by at least a third. What works in the first few hundred pages – the scene-setting, tension-building, character-developing work – becomes tedious by the end. We all know what’s going to happen; I’d like to see her get to the parts that matter to her sooner: the collapse of the Round Table as a sign of the failure of syncretism, the trapping of Merlin as simultaneously a feminist reclamation of the goddess and a pyrrhic victory for the druidical cult, and the final vision of Arthur as representing a “Camelot” moment that we can look to for inspiration even as we cannot recreate it.

I’m glad I read this – it came in handy as the semester wound down and I needed something thoughtful and distracting to listen to as I drove to work and walked the dogs – but I’m glad to be finished as well.


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