Michael C. Boxall's Blog

There's an intelligence and humanity about John Lanchester's novels which make them profoundly satisfying. Even when the central character is a murderous monster, Lanchester portrays him with such erudition and verbal dexterity—including, but not limited to, cadenza flourishes of 176-or-more-word sentences—that I could no more stop reading than take my eyes off a high-wire walker. They can be funny, too: the rich but incompetent banker-father's Christmas in hell, at which he is left alone to look after two infants dumped on him by his vengeful wife, is a masterpiece of droll humour. I read all four of them within the space of ten days.

The banker-father appears in Capital, the most recent and the one which got me started. A sprawling 527-pager, its sweep and London setting and variegated cast of characters summon up the ghost of Dickens. It's not so much a novel as a series of interlinked stories, held together by Pepys Road, the spine from which narratives poke like mismatched ribs. There's a sulphurous whiff of Hugo or Balzac or Dostoyevsky in the underlying theme: money. In Capital it appears and disappears in large part by luck. Property owners in Pepys Road are propelled willy-nilly to vertiginous riches by the rocket-like rise of house prices, from thousands of pounds to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions and multiple millions—an experience Lanchester likens to “being in a casino at which you are a guaranteed winner.” In a casino the only guaranteed winner is the casino itself. In the wider world it’s banks, which Lanchester thinks are the same thing.

For everyone else money is unpredictable in its ebbs and flows. The Polish builder who discovers half a million pounds behind a false wall wrestles with his conscience over whether to keep it, only to find it worthless. The young African soccer genius whose contract promises wealth beyond imagining loses it when he breaks a leg. The banker and his wife live comfortably beyond their means until the Isfahan is whipped away from under their well-shod feet.

Lanchester grew up partly in Hong Kong, and Fragrant Harbour tells of that city’s rise to wealth through the characters he writes about. Again, there are stories within the story, and its eventual shape is not quite what you might expect from the beginning. Why does that bitchy English journalist, drawn so well in her own words —“Not for nothing was the HQ of Jardines, a skyscraper with hundreds of porthole-like windows, known as the Palace of a Thousand Arseholes. If you worked for Wo, people would occasionally try to needle you at parties, until they saw clear evidence that you simply didn’t give a shit”—disappear from view for two hundred pages? Lanchester is clearly not the product of a writers’ workshop.

His skill and extensive savoir manger won him the Hawthornden Prize for his first novel, The Debt to Pleasure. The gift for getting characters to reveal themselves through their words had already reached dazzling heights. Tarquin Winot would be insufferable in the flesh; on the page he is mesmerising. Carapaced in snobbery, he looks down at the world with exquisite contempt. He is eating his way across France toward… what? Something nasty, that’s clear from the start. What unfortunate ends so many of the people around him have met. Winot is an artist, of a very peculiar sort. The epitome of archness, he could well be homosexual. Yet apart from eavesdropping on a pair of newlyweds, he shows little interest in sex of any kind. Not like his late brother, who was himself an artist and also a womaniser.

As would be Mr Phillips, given the chance. Mr Phillips is the eponymous hero of Lanchester’s second novel, another solitary odyssey. But while Winot has a destination, albeit veiled, Mr Phillips is trying to avoid something, not reach it. He, too, has had the rug pulled out from under him. On Friday his boss in the accounting department told him he’d lost his job (“not necessary to serve out full notice period … sense of gloom on these occasions … fresh fields and pastures new… better for all concerned …”).

Mr Phillips hasn’t told Mrs Phillips yet. We can only imagine what his weekend was like. But on Monday morning he puts on his suit and picks up his briefcase, as he has done for thirty years, and takes the train toward the City. He wanders around numbed by shock and taking refuge in sums, as befits a now ex-accountant. Sex is the first shelter, not having it but figuring out the likelihood of having it. Or of other people having it. Hard on the heels of sex comes death, computations of time taken to hit the water from various bridges. He doesn’t whine, or consciously brood over what has happened. He is somewhat comforted by the first person he meets, a publisher of pornographic magazines who has been in the same situation himself, “sacked for being drunk, for being chronically late, for being lazy, and then for planning to nick personnel and set up my own company—which was justified, incidentally. But then so were all the others.”

Mr Phillips’s family life has not been a roaring success: one Father’s Day he bought himself his own Best Dad in the World mug. He is not particularly heroic in any respect, not particularly determined, not particularly resourceful. Nor, until close to the end, does he appear particularly brave. Is it the suicidal impulse that makes him do something unexpected, take a stand? As with all of Lanchester’s characters, he leaves us with much to ponder.

A wonderfully warm and compassionate writer. I highly recommend all four.

Capital
Fragrant Harbor
Mr. Phillips
The Debt to Pleasure

Contestants have crossed the finishing line, all 558 of you. This was more than I expected. The Great Firewall is my first published novel. It’s not fantasy–well, not that kind of fantasy. Nor is it aimed at the Young Adult market. Or have vampires. Or ripped bodices. But it is timely, this thriller about protesters in Shanghai and their fight against a murderous billionaire property developer. The Great Firewall is as high as ever, as shown by the Chinese expulsion of Melissa Chan, an American reporter who looked too closely into corruption.

The giveaway started slowly, on April 24, and I thought at first I’d be lucky to reach double figures. Gradually but steadily things picked up, and reached a roaring crescendo in the last couple of days. More gratifying than the entry total was the number of people who put the book on their to-read list, all ninety-five of them. It’s a long game, self-publishing. But the road has landmarks, and this was clearly one. Congratulations to the winners, and my thanks to everyone who took part.

Interesting piece in the Atlantic about book reviewing and its purposes.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainm...

It doesn’t have to be a despicable exercise. In fact, it could be entering a golden age with the rebirth of “creative criticism,” a mix of cultural analysis and personal reaction as practised by Geoff Dyer (who is not American, coming from Cheltenham but not a chav) and Nicholson Baker. Maybe Goodreads could split its reviews into two kinds, one buy-this, don’t-buy-that quickies and the other longer, thoughtful pieces.

Every immigrant is first an emigrant, and the process of uprooting from  one's native country leaves an empty place in the heart. Over time it hurts less. But it's always there, like the gap left by a newly-extracted tooth, irresistible to the probing tongue. Hence the immigrant's perpetual question: where, really, is home?

Martin James, the central character in Shane Joseph's The Ulysses Man, is as much a refugee as  an immigrant, driven from his native Sri Lanka by the apparent impossibility of building a decent life there.  Martin is a Burgher, one of a shrinking number of Eurasians stranded by the receding tide of colonial rule. He is brought up to speak English. But English is a dying language in a country shaking off the yoke of colonialism and replacing it with … well, nobody really knows what. But it involves a long period of civil war, and Martin's childhood and youth unfold against explosions of violence.  It is not a happy time. Yet the sights and smells of the world of childhood inevitably become the benchmark against which to compare everything that comes afterward.

Life at home is as turbulent as life outside. His father Victor is a broken man, taking comfort in drink. His mother goes crazy and dashes the family's chances of getting out of the country and starting a new life. "When we were growing up, it was a different world," she tells Martin. "Everyone had a role and a place in society. Your world is harder. It's changing. You must be brave. You must be resilient. You must never give in." He must, in other words, become like Ulysses, fighting to find his way home.

He ends up in Canada and immediately finds that life there throws up its own challenges. He's smart and he works hard, and when he starts selling real estate he begins to make money. But he knows he doesn't really fit in, "drowning his sorrows in a sleazy strip joint, having worked all day with shady immigrant smugglers, slimy businessmen and unprincipled immigrants." When he finds a woman he wants to marry and set up house with, he runs up against Canada's deeply-entrenched clannishness and snobbery.

In time, what he was running away from catches up with him. Martin, too, becomes an alcoholic. His wife, like his mother, slips into madness. And the outside world is as treacherous as it was in Sri Lanka, snatching away his business in an economic downturn.

Middle-aged, and forever an outsider looking in, he goes back to Sri Lanka to see his dying father. Victor has given up the booze and become reconciled to the fact that his life has, in most ways, been a failure. Out of the wreckage, though, has come some self-awareness. And Barney, Martin's gay brother, after being thrown out of a seminary, is now running an orphanage with his partner. Martin realizes that sometimes the people who stay achieve more than those who leave, despite the unpromising situation.

His most valuable insight, though, is a new understanding of the nature of home. It's not a place. Rather, it's a state of mind: an acceptance of all the different threads that make up an individual life. Where they intersect is the true location of home.

The Ulysses Man is a thoughtful and complex examination of the universal quest to find where we belong. Like the hero of Homer's epic, Martin faces unexpected setbacks and delays in his journey. It is, in some ways, the archetypal story which underlies all stories, this search for our place in the scheme of things. Joseph has dressed it in modern clothes and given it a backdrop of boardrooms and refugee camps. But beneath those things it is timeless. That is the book's strength, and where its value lies.

Storytellers in words and in pictures use different forms but often do similar things. At the outset, it's the easiest elements that cause most problems. How much should be put in and how much can be left to the reader/viewer's imagination? Everything that is present has an effect and contributes to the overall picture. Nothing can be left to chance. Which is not to say that fortuitous accidents cannot reveal unsuspected depths and connections; they can and often do, and their unexpected appearance is one of the joys of any creative undertaking. But in the main, the creator has to keep hold of the reins and not send people off on wild goose chases.

I found a fascinating illustration of the kind of control of meaning which is available to film editors in this clip of Norman Hollyn, an editor and author of The Lean Forward Moment. Writers do exactly the same thing that Hollyn demonstrates. Very useful to see how the process plays out in in another medium.

On Tuesday we went to the opening of the latest show of an artist friend, Hajni Yosifov, at the Silk Purse gallery, by the water's edge in West Vancouver. The moon was full and the air clear and cold, and as we approached through the trees I remembered Henri Rousseau's painting, Carnival Evening, even though the house in that picture is dark and shadowy and the Silk Purse, in comparison, seemed almost an archetype of warmth, a box of welcoming light spilling out into the darkness. I find Hajni's paintings resonate in me more deeply than almost any others I have ever seen. They have an unusual depth and mix the abstract with the representational in a unique and eloquent way. Shadows and ghosts and memories appear in the layers of color, glimpses of things uncovered in the mind of the beholder. Each viewer really does see a different picture. There is something very powerful about them and it always moves me. I feel more human for looking at Hajni's work.

The setting of Maxine Hong Kingston's first novel seems as remote now as the rural China of her two earlier books. In mid-1960s San Francisco the women's movement, gay rights and the lengthening shadow of AIDS were unknown. The city had not yet seen a computer, let alone a cell phone, and instead of tweeting and texting people were forced in those benighted times to meet face to face and talk.

Enter silver-tongued Wittman Ah Sing, just out of Berkeley and drawing his pea jacket closer against the fragrant autumn fog. Tall, skinny Wittman will talk the ears off anybody. He is a man with a vision. He seethes at the dullness engendered by so many people settling for so little. Born to traveling Chinese-American players, he dreams of theater: not genteel, polite, proscenium-arched theater, but the kind of theater that, in Artaud's words, "is as beneficial as the plague, impelling us to see ourselves as we are, making the masks fall and divulging our world's lies, aimlessness and even two-facedness." That such an idea seems even more shocking now than it was in 1987 when Tripmaster Monkey came out is eloquent of how the world has turned–or perhaps failed to turn.

At the start of the book Wittman is working in a store and has just been demoted from management trainee to clerk in the toy department. "Insert hooks in pegboard. Down again. Up one more time with the bike. The hooks do not meet the frame; if part of the bicycle fits on one hook the rest of it does not fit on any of the others. Down. I have not found right livelihood; this is not my calling. Oh, what a waste of my one and only human life and now-time."

Finding right livelihood is what a lot of Tripmaster Monkey is about. Perhaps that is why Kingston set it when and where she did. San Francisco has always attracted visionaries and seekers of the Grail.  This is the city of Wittman's heroes, the postwar generation whose footsteps echo through the fog–the San Francisco of Ferlinghetti and the City Lights bookshop, of Ginsberg and Snyder and Kerouac, all marching to a different drummer. "If some of us don't live this way, then the work of the world will be in vain," says one old beatnik.  Following their example, Wittman pursues his dreams despite the indifference of those around him, with only his vision and collection of aphorisms to steer by: "Always do the most flamboyant thing … Do something, even if it's wrong … Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path; those people are your people."

In China Men, Kingston's second book, she described how immigrants to the United States falsified identities to trick the Immigration Demons who stood between them and the Gold Mountain. Heir to a thousand ways of throwing dust in the eyes of  bureaucracy, Wittman lists nonexistent potential employers to outwit the Unemployment Department: "If Unemployment were to say, 'We can't find that name in the phone book,' you say, 'You must have looked under Sao. Sao's not his last name. Woo is his last name. We put the last name in front, see?' And if they say they did look under Woo, you say, 'Oh, it must be under Ng. In my dialect we say Ng instead of Woo. Sometimes he goes by Ng. Try looking under Quinto. They came up out of Bolivia.'"

But Wittman's destiny–his right livelihood–is to build on another tradition, San Francisco's tradition of Chinese theater. This is monkey business with a vengeance: taking flags and banners and tumblers and epic battles to talk story and try to right the wrongs done to Chinese Americans for the last hundred years. Wittman wants to be American but Americans want him to be Chinese–or rather, the way they think Chinese out to be. And when he drives through the Sierras, Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man blaring from the radio, he is haunted by the specter of "small towns with separate outskirt Chinese cemeteries full of graves with the dates of young men."

Eventually, San Francisco being the city of dreams, he produces his play–a swirling, jabbing, iridescent tour de force of plague theater. Its main character and setting might be out of Kerouac, but the narrative of Tripmaster Monkey has a distinctly postmodern tang. Images dissolve, stories take unexpected twists and the narrator's comments throw the action into sudden vertiginous relief. The tumult and the pace only deepen the the novel's rich pungency."As in real life, things were happening all over the place. The audience looked left, right, up and down, in and about the round, everywhere, the flies, the wings, all the while hearing reports from off stage. Too much goings-on, they miss some, okay, like life."

From Wittman's appearance in Golden Gate Park, through love affairs, parties, hallucinations and digressions to his final extended monologue, Kingston spins out her tale in a fiery cascade of images and exhortations. "Folk-lore, allegory, religion, history, anti-bureaucratic satire, and pure poetry–such are the singularly diverse elements out of which the book is compounded," Arthur Waley wrote in his introduction to Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey. Tipping her hat to that sixteenth-century classic, Kingston has added a critique of consumerist culture.

I liked Tripmaster Monkey when I first read it, twenty-five years ago. I like it even more now, for its innocence and exuberance. If they seem dated, it's not the book that time has made stale. It's us.

This being Leap Day and tomorrow March 1st, I decided to celebrate by using my last two free days. When my enrolment comes to an end on March 8th I will put The Great Firewall back on Smashwords. I’ll also make it available on Goodreads for the first time. It’s a very long game, self-publishing a novel as an e-book. ButI was heartened by the fortune cookie I picked at lunch last week with a group of Old China Hands: “Your talent will bring joy to many people.”

This being Leap Day and tomorrow March 1st, I decided to celebrate by using my last two free days. When my enrolment comes to an end on March 8th I will put The Great Firewall back on Smashwords. I'll also make it available on Goodreads for the first time. It's a very long game, self-publishing a novel as an e-book. ButI was heartened by the fortune cookie I picked at lunch last week with a group of Old China Hands: "Your talent will bring joy to many people."

[image error]What obscenity does the Candidate hiss in the direction of his assistant a few dumb-struck moments after reading the tweet? Does a muscle start to twitch in the Candidate's smoothly-shaven, Ungaro-scented cheek? Does he feel a rush of panic? Does the assistant mutter the words "shit storm" to the other assistants when he goes back into the beige-painted office the three assistants share with a dusty rubber plant? Has the older female assistant ever been told that when she purses her lips she looks as if she is about to kiss a fish?

Who owns the two offices? Did the last occupant leave of his own accord?

Did the Candidate's candor in conversation with the nominating committee impress them as much as his connections, candor that extended to confession of a youthful flirtation with illicit substances, folly now deeply regretted, lesson learned? Was his candor complete? Did the Candidate himself remember everything that might have caused the nominating committee to exchange glances and jot notes on their yellow legal pads?

Does his wife inform her 23,549 Twitter followers of his candidacy? To whose account has she been instructed to charge the dozen cases of Moet & Chandon she orders in confident expectation of  his eventual victory?

How many times does the Candidate re-read the tweet and search its 127 characters for some hint of a prank, a trick, a sour jest by one of his newly-defeated rivals? Is such a hint forthcoming? Does he whisper to himself as he rubs both eyes with the heels of his hands? Does he entertain thoughts of bribery?

Of murder?

For how long does the Candidate stare out of the window of his rent-free office? For how long does he consider doing what the tweet instructs him to do? What prevents him from doing it? Is the Candidate ambitious? Was it his ambition that persuaded his wife to marry him? Did his wife grow up expecting men to be ambitious as a matter of course? To be powerful?

Do the assistants murmur about the possible nature of the shit storm and its potential consequences for the Candidate? Its potential consequences for them?

Does the Candidate curse as he joins the late-afternoon traffic that crawls out of the city? Does he notice the name at the bottom lefthand corner of the advertisement hoardings? Does he know how many advertisement hoardings in the city bear the same name? Is the name familiar to him? Very familiar?

What memory enables the Candidate to find is way along roads now lined with new developments? Does the memory still cause a throb of excitement?

Does the resident of the apartment whose buzzer the Candidate presses recognize him from the television news, assume he is canvassing,  and seek to engage him in lengthy debate about the importance of establishing bike lanes in the city, a policy the Candidate has made a tactical point of opposing? Does the Candidate assure the resident he cares deeply about the issue, that he has examined it from all sides but will nevertheless examine it further in light of the resident's feelings, feelings the resident has every right to hold and express, such things being the very heart of the democratic process the Candidate holds so dear? Does the Candidate hear himself babble? Does the Candidate, seeking to conceal his haste, trip over a child's scooter as he backs away from the door?

Is the Candidate aware of the smell of leather in his carbon black metallic BMW 650i? Does the Candidate clench his teeth and grip the steering wheel as he sits in the parked car? Does the Candidate take out his iPhone and re-read the tweet again? Does the tweet contain a link? When the Candidate clicks on the link does it lead to a photograph of himself? Was the photograph taken inside the apartment the Candidate is now outside, sitting in the BMW 650i?

Does the photograph show the Candidate on his knees? Is the Candidate naked in the photograph? Is the girl over whom he is bending also naked? Has the girl's pubic hair been trimmed into a single narrow vertical path in the style known as a Landing Strip? Has the lower end of the Landing Strip been shaped like an arrow? Do lines of white powder run down either side of the Landing Strip? What denomination is the rolled-up banknote the Candidate holds between thumb and forefinger? Is the Candidate grinning in the photograph? Is the Candidate grinning now?

Does the Candidate remember the name of the girl with the Landing Strip? How many girls of the same name does the Candidate find on Facebook? Sitting in the spicy leather-smelling darkness of the BMW 650i does he look at their photographs on his iPhone and dismiss one because she is black, one because she is too young, another because she is too bulky? How does the Candidate decide between the remaining two, who look similar enough to be sisters? What information does he glean from their Timelines that enables him to assume that only one of them was in the city three years ago?

How frantically does the Candidate tap the message he sends to all the girl's Facebook friends, asking for news of her whereabouts? Does he make the words URGENT REQUEST FOR INFORMATION bold as well as upper case? What thoughts race through the Candidate's mind as he awaits a reply?

How many times has the Candidate looked at his titanium-braceleted watch since receiving the tweet? How oblivious is he to the world outside the car's quiet aromatic interior, to the citizen-cyclist appearing on the sidewalk and shouting something at the BMW 650i as he presses down on one pedal, swings a leg over the saddle and launches himself in the direction of the city?

When an answer comes, is it in a private message visible only to the Candidate and not to be shared? How startled is the Candidate to learn that for the last fourteen months the girl with the Landing Strip has been living incommunicado in a nunnery a few miles from the historic Castilian capital of Burgos?

How short-lived is the Candidate's relief that, given her circumstances, she is unlikely to send the photograph to his wife's 23,549 Twitter followers if he does not withdraw his candidacy by midnight, as threatened in the tweet? How deep is his despair when he realizes that, although she won't send it, someone else will?

Do the Candidate's knuckles whiten as he grips the leather-covered steering wheel of the BMW 650i? Can the Candidate believe that someone intends to destroy him by scandal this early in his career? Has the Candidate himself ever destroyed anyone? Would the Candidate have the guts to raise Cain should political circumstances demand it? The balls?

Does the Candidate mentally run through a list of his enemies? Is it a long list? Longer than it was six months ago? Who on the list is ruthless enough to crush him?

How might the unknown enemy have obtained the photograph? Did it come into the enemy's possession by luck? Did the enemy seek it out? How could the enemy have known it existed?

Does the Candidate stare hopelessly at the names of the Facebook friends of the girl with the Landing Strip as they spin down the screen of his iPhone like cherries on a slot machine?

Does the Candidate stop scrolling and scroll back at the name, James Muldoon? Does the Candidate's jaw drop?

What, in so far as can be ascertained from James Muldoon's Timeline, had been the nature of his relationship with the girl with the Landing Strip? Had it taken place soon after  the Candidate's?

What, again according to his Timeline, is James Muldoon's current occupation? Does James Muldoon ever resent, as bosses' sons sometimes must, being known at work as James Muldoon Junior?

Is James Muldoon—not to be confused with James Muldoon Junior—a frequent subject of conversation after two-generational family dinners at the Candidate's house? Is the Candidate's house actually the Candidate's wife's house?

Has the name Muldoon lately begun to appear on advertising hoardings similar to those bearing the name with which the Candidate is so familiar, not everywhere, not yet, but spreading, like wine spilled on white linen?

When understanding finally dawns upon the Candidate does it come as a hellish epiphany, wreathed in sulphurous light?

How many times does the minute hand circle the face of his titanium-braceleted watch while he ponders his decision?

When the Candidate sends a private message to James Muldoon (Junior) is he persuasive in his argument that he has something of greater long-term value to the Muldoons than the mere ability to remove him, the Candidate? When the Candidate says he knows where the bodies are buried is he speaking figuratively? Does the Candidate foresee future bodies to whose last resting places he will also be privy, and willing to disclose, if left to take office? Does he hint of a possible future alliance between himself and James Muldoon Junior, allowing James Muldoon and the Candidate's wife's father—whose interests the Candidate will, as planned, further assiduously—to enjoy well-deserved retirement?

Is the Candidate shaping up for the job?