Jill MacLean's Blog

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an American journalist and award-winning non-fiction writer. The Water
Dancer, about slavery in the 1850s, is his debut novel, and it has it all: momentum, density, a
host of interesting and well-developed characters, an impressive level of research that never
intrudes itself as such, and a moving love story.

Although physical abuse is not disregarded, the novel dwells on what it means inwardly to be
one of the Tasked, those men, women and children who are bought and sold like bales of
tobacco. They must, daily, bury their longing to keep the fruits of their work, to own land, to
marry in the assurance of having their children grow at their sides. A tasked man dare not feel
like a man. A tasked woman knows her body is not her own to bestow. And, daily, the Tasked
live with loss, their families wrenched apart on the auction block (I couldn’t help thinking of the
indigenous children in Canada’s residential schools, torn from their homes to fulfill racist
governmental policies).

Coates made the risky literary choice of grounding the novel in the supernatural – and, in my
opinion, did so believably, with technical skill, restraint and conviction (I tend to steer away
from magic realism and fantasy). Hiram, through his phenomenal memory for everything and
everyone but his lost mother, the water dancer of the title, carries the seeds of Conduction within
him: the ability to rescue individual slaves by entering the waters of a river and transporting
himself bodily from one place to another on the bridge of memory, on the sheer power of story.
Conduction does not merely function as metaphor (albeit a very strong one). It is the essence of
the novel.

My only caveat with the supernatural element is the possibility of downplaying the very real
terrors and hazards that slaves on the run faced: the underground railroad could not work
miracles and the punishment should you be caught could be horrendous. Yet without
Conduction, would not the novel have lacked the deeply felt, intimate sense of a people whose
oppression engendered, perhaps not always consciously, the communal strength of story, music,
dance, and powerful, subversive memories?

Memory is the consolation of the Tasked, Hiram tells us, for to forget is truly to be enslaved.
Thank you, Ta-Nehisi Coates, for your prodigious work of memory in The Water Dancer.

The post How to Describe the Richness of this Debut Novel? appeared first on Jill Maclean.

Quite simply, I loved this book, which I came across while scrolling through the Coach House catalogue. Dominique Fortier has written a quiet novel, intelligent and multi-layered, its style, paradoxically, both spare and sensuous. She won the Governor General’s Award for French Fiction in 2016 for Au Péril de la Mer, which was translated by Rhonda Mullins as The Island of Books.

The novel moves back and forth between the present-day narrator, an unnamed woman who has lost a talent essential to her, and a fifteenth-century illiterate painter named Éloi, whose life has lost all meaning. Although we learn very little about the woman, she does reveal her long-time fascination with the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel and her pain at being exiled from writing by motherhood; gradually she discloses the abbey’s history, from the long-ago hermits who built two small chapels on a stone mountain in the sea, to the depredations of today’s tour buses. Abbey, mountain, and her own curiosity lure her to write the fragmented novel we are reading.

The characters of the 1400s are more fully fleshed. Éloi has been deprived of any palette but grey: his vibrant young love Anna has died. He is rescued, drunken and penniless, and taken to the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel by his cousin Robert, who manages its daily business under the authority of an ultra-orthodox vicar.

Inexorably as the tides that twice daily liberate Mont Saint-Michel from being an island, Éloi is drawn into the affairs of the abbey; simultaneously, he listens to troubled, wise Robert, a man of faith as the vicar could never be, as Robert considers the disillusions of ageing, as he shows Éloi an ancient manuscript containing heretical knowledge of the heavens, as he grieves the library of precious books that is the abbey’s heart and that the vicar intends to remove.

Does each reader create a different book? Is all of life merely a copy of what has gone before? Must art invent that which has never been seen? The Island of Books raises more questions than it answers – and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

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The following link gives the context for Old Soldiers Never Die by Frank Richards, of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (Parthian Library of Wales, 2016) www.walesartsreview.org/some-words-on-frank-richards/ 

Phil Carradice’s BBC blog, largely biographical, describes how Robert Graves was instrumental in bringing the book to publication. YouTube has an old clip of Richards reading from his book. 

What greater contrast from Undersong than a memoir written by a poorly educated, working-class, twice-decorated Welshman who chose never to rise above the rank of private (the lowest rank in the British army)? A professional soldier, he arrived in France on the 10th of August 1914 and left after the Armistice, having fought in almost every major campaign on the Western Front: the disastrous retreat at Loos (“a bloody balls-up”), the battles at Ypres, the final offensive in March 1918. He was never wounded. He was a signaler for a good portion of that time, a highly dangerous occupation, yet refused any claims to heroism. One by one, he lost his pals.

This is not a literary book: relying on memory throughout, he called pushing a pen “a wearisome occupation.” His style is matter-of-fact and anecdotal. And it is this very lack of theatricality that magnifies the impact of, for instance, the third battle of Ypres in Polygon Wood. He and his trench-mates cook their bacon and brew tea on a smokeless fire, savouring what might be their last breakfast. Advancing through heavy bombardment and bursting shells, the ground rocking and heaving, Richards couldn’t stop to help a shrieking, badly wounded German, even though he was (it doesn’t have to be a contradiction in terms) a humane soldier. As machine-guns rattled around them, “…we did some wonderful jumping and hopping…how we were not riddled is a mystery.” Howitzers pitched to the ground. Men were blown into the air. In the midst of it all, a mate of Richards stole rations from the dead and “we all had a muck in.”

He put faces to slaughter – to the unimaginable – with such economy that at times I had to put the book down.

Gradually his character emerges. Straight from the Cuinchy trenches, unshaven and unwashed, he was driven to be awarded his DCM in a brigadier’s car, and as the sentries saluted, Richards loftily ordered the apoplectic sergeant to dismiss the guard; I’m sure this little episode meant as much to him as his medal. Although he held in contempt officers who never went near the front, any officer with guts won his respect (including Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon). When he revisited the grave of a good friend who’d died three years earlier, he carefully tidied up the nettles and poppies around the wooden cross. He was an expert scrounger of everything from firewood to puttees to rum. After a night spent in a shell hole half full of water, shamming dead and surrounded by Germans, he admitted to being “in a state.” He helped retrieve the wounded. He detailed an escapade that was not to his credit. He hoped for a clean, quick death. 

His health suffered during those long four years; and in the final chapter, back home, unemployed and with a pitiful pension, shillings less than dodgers received, he was understandably, if not lastingly, bitter. 

So many appallingly graphic images in this book. Who can blame Richards for scrounging rum and getting properly drunk with his trench-mates? “It made us merry and helped us to forget.”

Old Soldiers Never Die shows that he did not forget.

The post Why another memoir about trench warfare? This one is written by a private. appeared first on Jill Maclean.

There are many laudatory reviews of Canadian author Kathleen Winter’s Undersong (Alfred A.
Knopf Canada, 2021), a novel rife with famous names, yet unassumingly presented through a
handyman’s eyes. The following link presents an interview with her: https://www.cecescott.com/index.php/author-spotlights/item/128-cece-chats-with-kathleen-winter-author-of-undersong Oh, and I’ve abbreviated this blog compared to the previous two, in an effort to avoid spoilers.

I find myself wondering, having read Undersong, what Dorothy Wordsworth would have made
of me writing a blog about her. Not much, I suspect. Website and Facebook postings for
increased traffic and more publicity? Even, perhaps, for financial gain? Such aims, she would
conclude, are too similar to her brother William’s: I have the world too much with me: I risk
obliterating the undersong of leaves and birds, wind and rippling water.

Dorothy’s world was very much with me as I savoured this wonderfully engaging novel.
Kathleen Winter’s choice of James Dixon, a (fictional) handyman who worked for the
Wordsworth family for nearly forty years, was inspired, as was the way this complicated,
capable, self-doubting man emerged from the page. He is the lowest of the low, well-acquainted
with the oakum cellar of the workhouse. Yet he is also heir to his mam’s second sight and
consequently understands (as William does not) how Dorothy can become one with a rose petal,
a stratum of rock, a blackberry’s multi-mirrored sweetness. To James, she is “a dark slip of night
shot with starlight,” no more able to enter the tame world than he could enter the world of
privilege.

Despite James’s care of Dorothy, he maintains the privacy of his own small hut; and he subdues
rage and scorn that all three Wordsworths remain wilfully ignorant of the suffering caused by
land enclosure, brutal lead mines and cloth mills. Dorothy, in particular, will not allow the harsh
reality of starving beggars to disturb her paradisiacal home; one serpent there is more than
enough.

On the day she dies, in 1855, James tells her story to the bees who shelter in the old sycamore,
whose honeycombs are stolen from them as Dorothy’s words have been stolen from her.
Complex motives and depths enrich the telling, as James leads us through kindness, betrayal,
collusion, penance, deception, pain raw as a “rain of nails.” William does not come off well in
Winter’s novel. Abandoned by his youthful talent, enticed by fame, hedged in by very real
financial insecurity, his behaviour towards his intuitive, sensitive and highly intelligent sister
seems indefensible.

From beginning to end, I was spell-bound by this book, by its pitch-perfect voice, its gorgeous
prose and, yes, its undersong.

The post Do you agree that “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…”? appeared first on Jill Maclean.

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, by the Canadian-American author Rivka Galchen, is an historical novel that is all-too relevant for our modern world. There are several excellent reviews of the novel (Harper Perennial, 2021) and I recommend the following link for an interview with the author: www.guernicamag.com/rivka-galchen

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch was, for me, both a fascinating and a disturbing read. Set in Germany in the early 1600s, it is based on the actual documents for the trial of Katharina Kepler (mother of the astronomer Johannes Kepler), who in 1618 was accused of being a witch. New research claims that over 14,000 witch trials ended in death in Germany, Switzerland and northeastern France. Whether you view this as scapegoating for the climate disasters of the Little Ice Age or as part of the power-struggle between Catholicism and the newly established Protestantism was of no matter to those accused, tortured and executed.

Because it isn’t difficult to see the contemporary relevance of Katharina’s story, the occasional anachronisms, like “okay” and “mom,” seemed unnecessary to me. Social media can be our platforms for greed, envy and misdirected anger: we’ve simply speeded up the process. And in our society, as in Katharina’s, misogyny runs rampant.

Katharina is an independent, clever, outspoken and intrusive woman, “a woman of substance” who strides about her beloved village of Leonberg in a manner unbecoming to a widow. She is generous with her herbal concoctions; she prefers children and animals to adults; she is reputed to have ridden a goat backwards.

She stands out from the herd and the herd turns on her. The glazier’s wife Ursula begins the campaign, which soon burgeons into that deadly mindset, “Everyone knows she’s a witch.” Although Katharina adheres stubbornly to her belief that reason and truth will conquer malicious gossip and unfounded accusations, she’s imprisoned and brought to trial.

The novel does not dwell on Katharina’s suffering, which becomes all the more potent for being left to our imaginations. How does she sleep in her prison cell, burdened by an iron ankle brace that’s chained to the wall? Was she given a blanket during the bitterly cold winter? How could she not have dwelt on the multiple threats of thumbscrew and rack and death by fire? Her daughter Greta brings her food, but her house and lands in Leonberg are seized to pay for her imprisonment. Her good friend Simon defects as her guardian. In court, she’s querulous and impenitent, although she’s been told that tears and repentance – for crimes she has not committed – could stave off execution.

Galchen brings to vivid life the daily rounds of ordinary citizens (there is one delightful scene near the end of the book about the seventeenth-century Frankfurt book fair); she also gives us memorable characters ranging from Ursula’s pure nastiness to Greta’s pure goodness, and she writes sentences that blew me away. Simon, for instance, says of Katharina, “the rough breeze of her blew into the dying embers of me.”

The story is structured with great skill, written from Katharina’s point of view as well as Simon’s, interwoven with letters written in his mother’s defence by Johannes Kepler (and very unctuous letters they are), as well as the testimonies of accusers and defenders as recorded by an unseen interrogator seemingly indifferent to the outcome of the trial (think Kafka). Each testimony is an encapsulation of character and sometimes infused with genuine humour. But behind the testimonies lurks a dangerous faction: the men [sic] who have taken upon themselves to distinguish between “natural” misfortunes that come from God and unnatural afflictions that are the work of the Devil and hence correctible by whatever means come to hand. Make no mistake. Despite its often witty approach, this novel has a heart of darkness.

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Is one of the pitfalls of being a writer that you read differently?

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read Sarah Perry’s historical novel The Essex Serpent, two-thirds of Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – non-fiction, although parts of it read far more strangely than fiction – and playwright Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, set partly in 1809-1812 and partly in the present.

The Essex Serpent had dazzling reviews. I read it with great pleasure and interest, appreciative of Perry’s skill in imparting nuances of human interchange, her ability to write wonderfully creepy and dark-toned scenes, and her knowledge of the period (1893) – yet I was also aware that I wasn’t carrying the novel around with me (in a metaphorical sense). Why wasn’t I more moved by the various characters, Cora with her dark past and restless energies, the vicar with his rock-solid faith, the surgeon who pushed his skills to the limit, the crusading Martha, the unaffectionate Francis and warm-hearted Stella?

Was I resisting the omniscient narrator, the use of multiple points of view, the abundance of themes? I don’t think so. Do writers tend to read at one remove, alert to noticing, even analyzing, the deployment of exceptional skills? A mixed blessing, if so. Or was something else going on?

Sarah Perry was interviewed at the end of the book and made it clear she wanted Cora and Martha to correct the assumption that Victorian women were “feeble, fainting, fragile” creatures – these two characters thus came with an agenda (my own word), and perhaps for me that agenda got in the way? I asked my extremely well-read friend Mary Jo Anderson about her take on the book. She loved The Essex Serpent. It’s a novel of ideas, she said, a novel about reason at war with faith and with superstition. Not, for her, a “gut-wrenching” read with, say, the emotional power of Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End.

Book talk with good friends: one of the joys of life!

I read Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics shortly after it came out in English in 2015. The first of his lessons was about the general theory of relativity – and for a fraction of a second I got it, I understood what Einstein meant – and then, had you asked me three seconds later, I couldn’t have put words to that flash of comprehension. Never mind. It was there!

So I was delighted to come across Reality Is Not What It Seems, which carries you at greater depth and complexity into certain of those seven questions. Quantum mechanics claims that electrons, photons, even time and space are by nature granular, relational and indeterminate. Each (granular) quantum exists only when it collides (is in relation) with another of its kind, such collisions being unpredictable (indeterminate). In the gaps between such collisions, the quanta do not exist. Spacetime itself does not exist. Obviously on the macro level at which we live, we are not aware of this. The table is a solid table and oh no, I’m late for the dentist. But at the quantum level, the world is in ceaseless fluctuation and the future cannot be predicted.

I had high hopes after Rovelli described how our universe cannot be infinite that he would also clarify a limited universe. What is its boundary, its “edge,” and what’s “outside” it? My hopes were dashed by my own limitations. Einstein claims our three-dimensional universe is finite but has no boundary, his mathematics involving three-sphere geometry and spacetime’s curvature and I simply couldn’t grasp it. I desperately wanted Dr. Rovelli to drop in for tea – or a glass of wine – right there and then, and explain it to me.

However, I’m beguiled by the author’s enthusiasm and his wide knowledge of the classics; Democritus and Dante quite often become our guides. Now I’m about to enter the dark wood of quantum gravity and loop theory. Wish me luck. Plus a sky-high IQ.

Arcadia was our book club’s choice for November. I started it on my Kindle, was discouraged by several pages of what seemed like unredeemed farce, and did something I almost never do – went to the reviews before I finished reading. Brilliant, they said, amazing, dazzling, entirely terrific. Okay. Off to the library to pick up the actual book and begin again.

Perseverance paid off. Stoppard dances among fractals, chaos theory, the second law of thermodynamics, Lord Byron, landscape gardening, two gunshots, and the pretensions of modern-day academics. Reason clashes with emotion, the Classical temperament with the Romantic, the present misinterprets the past, and the universe, like the steam engine, loses heat as I turn the pages (although sex – the attraction that Newton neglected to include – does not). To top it all off, Stoppard is intelligently and deliciously witty.

Was part of my initial problem the very obvious fact that a play is written to be acted and that accomplished acting adds other dimensions to the work (remember Hamlet in an earlier blog?). As to the writers-as-readers question, I’ve added even more margin notes to Francine Prose’s wonderful Reading Like a Writer, a book I highly recommend.

A December hodge-podge: an historical novel that immerses me in another time, a play that plays with time, and a physicist’s ruminations that upset our notions of time…I love the way seemingly indeterminate reading (of seemingly solid books) can come together – can be relational, can carry me far beyond the bounds of the quotidian. Dare I say, into parallel universes?

May you be surrounded by books over the holidays.

The post Playing With Time: The Essex Serpent, Reality is Not What it Seems & Arcadia appeared first on Jill Maclean.

If The Dream of Scipio stirred me up, Days Without End almost wrecked me…what is it about a story that seizes you by the throat and won’t let go?

First, a digression. After I heard Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding read in Halifax, I reread The English Patient and then read In the Skin of the Lion – in the wrong order, as it happens. In both books, sentence after sentence stopped me in my tracks. Breath-taking sentences. And the last two sentences of The English Patient create the best ending of any book I’ve ever read (no cheating – you have to read the entire novel for their effect to twist mind and heart).

I next took Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle out of the library, a novel about a 17th century Venetian who was sent as a prisoner to Turkey. The beginning was promising. I read on, but a third the way through the book I gave up because neither the characters nor the premise overly interested me – or would any novel following The English Patient have suffered a similar fate? (I’m deliberately saving Linda Spalding’s Governor-General’s winning novel The Purchase for later).

Then at St. Mary’s University Library – with its leafy wall of plants, its comfortable chairs and air of spaciousness – on a shelf near the jigsaw puzzle table (another very human touch), I found the latest novel by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry, Days Without End. I’d read Annie Dunne and remembered liking it very much; this one, rather to my surprise, was set in America.

The first sentence grabbed my attention. By the end of the first paragraph I knew I was in the hands of a master, and nothing in the book caused me to change my opinion. The first-person narrator, Thomas McNulty, leaves behind the famine-dead of his family in Ireland, where he and his kin were considered Nothing by those who could have given succour but did not: knowledge seared into his brain and inseparable from the slaughter that as an army trooper he perpetrates on “the enemy,” be they Indian or Rebel. Yet he is no simplistically, righteously angry young man.

One of the novel’s strengths for me is how Sebastian Barry parses the varying behaviours of that collective entity called “an army,” both off-duty and in battle. Others are the abundance of strikingly delineated characters: Handsome John Cole, Mr. Noone, the major, Starling Carlton, Lige Magan, Caught-His-Horse-First, and Winona; as well as Barry’s sure touch with events that circle back to their inevitable consequences. Yet another is the delicately drawn relationship between John Cole and “wren-sized” Thomas (or Thomasina), which was, so I read in an interview, inspired by Barry’s gay son Toby. But it’s the voice that took an axe to any hope I might have had of remaining aloof to Thomas and his fate.

He is seventeen at the beginning of the story, forty by the time it ends, and his voice is, I believe, what gives the novel its enormous power. As in The English Patient, sentence after sentence leaps from the page. He is semi-educated, Biblically literate, fair-minded, loyal, capable of savagery and humour in the same hour, and acute in his judgements to the point of wisdom, (though he would deny that). While my preference would be to fill the page with quotes, all I can do is suggest you read his story yourself and revel in his outer and inner world and his experiences, some funny, some tender, many horrific. History, that amorphous entity, is given voice by one man, a man complete in his humanity and in his lapses to complete inhumanity, a man who longs for a longer span of years than he has as yet achieved, in the company of those beloved by him.

But why “wrecked”? I was most certainly engaged by the characters in The English Patient, particularly Hana and Kip. But was there a certain dispassion, a coolness to Ondaatje’s writing? I can’t answer that question. Does my reaction to Days Without End say more about myself than about Sebastian Barry or Thomas? Perhaps. Partly. Thomas’s voice – I can’t escape the vortex of that voice. He was unbearably real, he was my son, my lost daughter, I wanted him safe, I couldn’t bear for him to die an untimely death. Whenever I’m reading with full focus and have fallen deep into story, don’t I bring all of myself and my own history to the page?

The question that surfaced in the middle of the night after I’d finished Days Without End is what impelled Thomas at the age of fifty to write down this narrative. A question I had to answer to my own satisfaction.

As will you, should you read Days Without End.

The post Days Without End by Sebastian Barry Almost Wrecked Me appeared first on Jill Maclean.

Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, chose first person for his semi-autobiographical Holocaust novel Fatelessness, published in 1975 as Fateless. In 1944, aged fourteen, he was one of the 440,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, where – warned by one of the Jewish “convicts” – he claimed to be sixteen and was thus saved from instant death. He was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, after which he went back home “like a stray dog.”

His protagonist, Gyuri Koves, is a fourteen-year-old boy rounded up the same year, who also lied about his age, and it is he who tells us his impressions of Budapest, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the labour camp in Zeitz. He is a logically-minded, earnest, naive schoolboy and although one reviewer calls him “callous,” I’m not sure I would agree. The whole book focuses on his step-by-step attempts to make sense of what he sees, to make sense, in effect, of the senseless. He rationalizes, qualifies and justifies, and it is the ironic contrast between his limitations as a reporter and our knowledge of the holocaust that makes the story so chilling.

Fatelessness was thirteen years in the making, each sentence worked and reworked until it was faithful to Gyuri’s particular truth. Given some of the parallels between Gyuri’s imprisonment and Kertész’s, was the choice of first person point of view inevitable? I have no way of knowing.

Gyuri’s choice of details anchors the narrative to his own reality. In Budapest Jews are made to wear yellow stars and “there was a big shortage of yellow fabric, naturally.” Despite over-crowding, thirst and hunger, he has “the consciousness of a goal” on the train trip to Auschwitz. He describes the garden path of red gravel, the cabbage beds, a soldier’s beautifully braided white leather lash – and by dusk, understands the line-ups of the fit and unfit, the gas, the cloying smell of the chimneys which makes him “somewhat queasy;” understands, moreover, that the killing has been going on for years.

He is soon sent on to Buchenwald, where the reception is “less cordial,” and then to the small rural Zeitz labour camp, where he does his best to be a good prisoner and a diligent worker; he is helped in this by an older prisoner, Bandi, who teaches him such dodges as staying near the end of the food line so he gets the sludge in the bottom of the vat. To witness this adolescent boy’s inevitable deterioration because of over-work, starvation and beatings is dreadful: within three months he is “a decrepit old man” unable to free his clogs from the mud or lift a twenty-pound bag of cement.

For reasons unclear to me – perhaps related to the Germans’ knowledge that the war is lost – he is returned to Buchenwald where, in hospital, he recovers. After the camp’s liberation, he makes it back to Budapest, to various encounters with “the ignorant:” strangers and relatives ignorant (and how could they be otherwise?) of what he has been though.

In order to bring us closer to the oppressive routines of camp life, which the prisoners could escape only in their minds or by death, Kertész used a strictly linear time-line, disdaining to focus only on dramatic events, disdaining also to infuse the novel with outrage. He claims that he experienced, at certain times in the camps, happiness of an intensity impossible in ordinary life; claims also that survival is the only possible freedom when you have been robbed of your fate by powers against which you are powerless.

Kertész survived and Gyuri survived, both of them entering a post-incarceration future, step by step, hour by hour, day by day. Both of them fated to remember. Gyuri, having re-met some of his family in Budapest, feels a readiness “to continue my uncontinuable life.” Such a continuation, Kertész says in his Nobel lecture, will be one in which “…the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense.”

The post Remembrance appeared first on Jill Maclean.

What can art do? And what can it not do?

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone asks both these questions,
with an added dimension – can we make art when loneliness, to the point of extreme isolation, is
the spur?

Laing is a British writer whose books have been published to substantial acclaim. The love affair
that triggered a move to New York City was pulled from under her feet, but she stayed anyway,
learned first-hand the crushing effects of loneliness and shares with us enough of her experience
that, without nullifying her privacy, we understand what drove her to write this book.

The Lonely City is an engaging mix of artists’ biographies, memoir, research and cultural
criticism. Four artists are its main focus. Edward Hopper, an extremely reserved man, painted
loneliness. David Wojnarowicz used his loneliness to reach out to others artistically, sexually
and as an AIDS activist. Andy Warhol’s art, its democratic sameness, gave solace to his phobic
avoidance of touch of any kind, physical or emotional. Henry Darger lived in extreme poverty
and isolation, yet produced hundreds of disturbing paintings and a lengthy memoir, only
discovered after his death.

Laing has viewed the works and dug through the archives of each of these men. She seeks to
define loneliness and understand its causes, and argues against the pathologisation of a chronic
human condition by probing its redemptive value.

Loneliness as lack: lack of companionship, intimacy and meaningful touch. Hopper, a voyeur
who roamed Manhattan in search of subjects that interested him, produced works filled with
unease. The geometry of his buildings is off-kilter, the colours flattened, smothered, oppressive,
the men and women disconnected, both exposed and confined – trapped within themselves,
trapped behind glass. His full attentiveness to human isolation and its underlying despair gives
me the cold shivers, emphasis on cold.

Warhol’s agonising shyness prevented verbal communication, and his belief that he was
“physically abhorrent” blocked him from touch: two means for intimacy. So Warhol reinvented
himself, flaunting his gayness in a homophobic society, making himself into a loner who hid
behind machines among the crowds in the Silver Factory, and embracing Pop Art in silkscreens
that depict soup cans, celebrities and disasters. To what do we pay attention, he asks, and why?
Aren’t manufactured objects lined up on a grocery shelf worth more than a passing glance? What
about the glossy public masks worn by Marilyn and Elvis?

When Laing ventured unmasked into Times Square at Hallowe’en, her vulnerability and sense of
exposure led her to David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud series, isolated men wearing a Rimbaud
mask in settings like the Chelsea Piers, a haunt for gay men in the 70s and 80s where they risked
brutality for brief intimacy and acceptance. Art and sex: the means of escape from solitary
confinement. I was brought to deep admiration of Wojnarowicz – I’d never heard of him before I
read this book – a man unable to verbalise a shameful legacy of physical abuse, rape and near-starvation, but resisting victimhood and society’s taboo of the body (especially the homosexual
body) by his creativity, sociability and sexual openness. His aim, via his films and his strongly-
hued collages and paintings, was to lessen alienation. Lessen, not banish.

On principle, Wojnarowicz was against cruelty or coercion – what would he have made of Henry
Darger’s art, which has been described as sexually sadistic and pedophilic? Laing refutes such
limitations, referring us to the violence in Goya’s art, for example, and to the goodness opposing
evil and indifference in Darger’s luminous, pain-riddled paintings of the war against child
slavery in his imaginary Realm of the Unreal (when I went online, I found them beautiful and
distressing in equal measure). Darger was sent, very young, to a horrifically abusive asylum for
feeble-minded children – need anything more be said?

Countertenor Klaus Nomi; installation artist Zoe Leonard; social media experimenter Josh
Harris; photographer Nan Goldin: all have roles in this absorbing and discomfiting book, as does
– should you think there is too much emphasis on men – female loneliness magnified and
maintained by objectification and “meat-making.” Throughout, Laing enlarged my horizons,
while her refusal to moralise, her curiosity and sheer persistence (Warhol’s 610 sealed boxes!)
are wonderfully consoling.

Why are we ashamed of our unhappiness, failures and loneliness, Laing asks. Why do we hide
our imperfect lives behind masks? Art cannot erase the scars of stigmatisation any more than it
can “fix” life’s undeniable wounds or the brevity of what Wojnarowicz calls our rented bodies.
But it can enlarge our spirits and our understanding, allowing us to befriend ourselves and others.

Sure, I feel lonely at times – is there anyone who doesn’t? This is the book to take off the shelf!

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Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee, which goes by the title The Other Hand in the UK, is
about a very serious subject and at no point as I read it did my eyes glaze over (his phrase).

The brief blurb on the front cover is a ploy a publisher can use only rarely. “We don’t want to
tell you too much about this story,” it says. “It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil
it.” Neither do I. So – no spoilers.

But to give you the background…this admirable and very moving novel is based on the oil wars
in Nigeria, as a result of which a young girl called Little Bee ends up in an immigration detention
centre in England. In a number of interviews with detainees, Cleave discovered the deplorable
conditions in England’s centres, which are managed for profit by private companies – it doesn’t
take much imagination to realize what that means. Those imprisoned have not been accused of
any crime; the effects are psychologically and emotionally harmful, especially for children, and
especially when so many of the detainees are already traumatised and have looming over them
the threat of deportation. Small wonder that Little Bee’s centre has learned to remove the
suicides under cover of night.

I won’t disclose the connection, but Little Bee re-meets Sarah, a sophisticated if apparently
shallow journalist who works in London. The point of view alternates between Little Bee and
Sarah in a way that at first seemed unbalanced because from the beginning I experienced Little
Bee as the heart of the book: stubborn, emotionally intelligent, a survivor filled with rage and
grief and burningly alive. Sarah suffers somewhat in comparison.

The first half of the book, its overall focus on the past, contains two harrowing scenes, the
second of which I could hardly bear to read (not until later was I able to assess the strength and
economy of the writing). If I had a problem at all with the novel it was in then moving to its
second half, more future-oriented, and finding suburban adultery a little less than compelling. I
soon got over this – and was it not, at least partly, the point?

Throughout the book, two worlds collide, the developing world and the developed. The choices
each character makes or has made begin to resound through the pages: principles set against
momentary cowardice or more sustained self-interest. The sheer quality of the narrative forces
me to ask myself awkward questions. How would I behave in similar circumstances? Would I
have the courage to do what was right or would I fail the test?

Chris Cleave’s website (full of writerly gems) discusses the problem of writing a serious book
without the eye-glazing that I mentioned earlier; without, as the Chicago Tribune said in its
review, having any fear of “a dull, worthy novel with a message.” He’s very clear about his aims.
A serious story must be enjoyable, accessible and a compulsive read, with moments of humour
and lightness of touch. In part, such humour, albeit dark, is supplied by Little Bee’s imaginative
strategies for suicide should the men come back: at the Queen’s garden party she’d break a champagne glass or wield a lobster claw, but a little boy’s nursery school stymies her: plastic scissors?

Although the youngest of the characters in Little Bee was based on Cleave’s then four-year-old
son who was fixated on Batman – Goodies versus Baddies – Little Bee moves far beyond such
simplicities. Morally rooted and compassionate, it responds to questions that emerged in my
previous blog about The Dream of Scipio – how do we, no matter what our circumstances, live a
meaningful life? Do we opt for self-protection or do we try to save others? Do we hold our
governments responsible for reprehensible actions in which we as citizens might be complicit?

Weighty themes. But never dull.

Little Bee is a troubling novel because I know that somewhere in the world the worst of the
events Cleave describes are happening right now. It’s also a compulsive and accessible read, just
as he’d hoped. He accomplishes this by bringing into my living room a single refugee along with
her first-world foil – each woman with a story to tell.

Little Bee says it best. “A story is a powerful thing.”

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