Iain Britton

be like this – be transitory

a gateway obstacle

to the next apartment

where a sigh escapes in a roll-your-own breath

where a stool takes the sudden shift of my weight

and a late-night monologue

loads

a listener’s request

to practise walking

down a long tunnel

gutted by ancestral burnings

<>

I offer my version

of events as they happen

you aren’t sure about the rain

its coldness

the integers         parenthesised

on your arms               or the inked letters

of a name

tattooed in sunsets

recapitulation is all talk / dredge work / more talk

you’re into the habit of quickly

shutting doors

<>

but who’ll step up         make

altar-suggestions

of stained-glass jabberings reflected on the mount

who’ll request a right

to what I’ve hung drawn and arranged

in every room

<>

a water-colour shoves a church

through my window / monuments

crumble into drunks
xxxxxxxmixed gender
xxxxxxxxxxxxangels in shabby clothes

a crowd xxxxxhacks at the air to get a look in
they knock at places with rooms to let

you pick up another man’s junk

we are witnesses to things as they happen

we make apes of ourselves

leave slag heaps for neighbours
turn our backs on backs

we avoid confrontations

zeroing-in

on the mischievous cackle of a river

______

Iain Britton’s upcoming collection, Druidic Approaches, can be previewed here. It will be published by Lapwing Publications.

Image Copyright: Foomandoonian

Photo credit: Kathy Riley

How can poetry engage with economic and environmental issues? Does it need to? And ought that engagement to be on a formal level too? I am thinking especially here of your reaction to the light-wasting ‘funland’ of Vegas at the beginning of the travelogue ‘Western States (1)’….

Peter Riley: It would be wrong to think of it as a project, as if I’d decided to do something like ‘Tintern Abbey’, plotting the passing of time against natural permanence, but was diverted from this by an awareness of how the Andorran economy works. What began it all was simply that walk, which gave me a route and a shape, a plot for the poem to follow, in which the physical and the intellectual could share the same trajectory. Awareness of the socio-economic reality was thus integral to the first intent. I don’t mean I conceived of the poem as I walked – I never do that – I mean that in the writing I always knew where it was going because I’d already been there. It was going to have, eventually, to go down into that pit. Meanwhile the more diversions the better.

Like Alstonefield it mimics how the mind disports itself when you’re out walking and becomes inventive and acute in new ways because you have escaped from your everyday awareness and have nothing to direct you except the surface of the earth. It gets quite extravagant and talks of chucking poetry, and finds itself quoting parts of lyrics in remote and lost languages. This all belongs within the same area of concern, about what happens to cultures.

There’s a question here of the status of the textual voice, of exactly who makes those remarks in the poem. The separation of authorial and textual voices has now become a commonplace, as in the attempts to defend Larkin as if the poems were written by someone else – that clearly won’t do. The poet’s attitudes and beliefs always deeply inform the poetry, and I think it’s only in lyrical poetry that you can make that separation strongly. All the vagaries in that poem are mine (vagary is a kind of speciality of mine) and the gesture about chucking poetry in the skip is one of them, one of several points throughout which question the wilful venturing stance of the narrative. This renunciation is also contradicted elsewhere and the voice of the poem, whoever’s it is, also mocks itself at times.

The descent into Andorra, Part II of the poem, the reluctant descent into the commercial centre, and the escape from Andorra in the hope of sanity, these are, I think, a vindication of poetry’s power to make a theatre of our condition, which is not to solve it or critique it, but to display the hopes and fears whizzing round the place in a vibrant, engaging language and to make some sort of cohering work out of it all. That’s the hope of it anyway. I don’t know any reason why anyone couldn’t write a poem of personal development (or simply ageing) in relation to an apparent natural constant at any time; the condition is always there, and the constants are there however great the apparent circumstantial transformation, like a place the size of Wales changing from a peasant economy growing tobacco to a tax-evasion haven, and the constants are not just mountains and stars and rivers but also a living human faculty for which I might still be prepared to use the word “soul”.

But to get to your actual question, poetry engages with economic and environmental issues because we live them, personally and intellectually. They are so built into our perception that it hardly seems necessary, sometimes, to mention them, they’re in our breathing. The qualities of the writing, its virtues, are self-sufficient. They offer to be taken up into other areas outside the poem, even into politics, but are not bound to anything except the poem. A “political poem” without writerly qualities defeats its own message. A writerly virtue like “eloquence” is also political; to ask a poem to be eloquent is asking it to recognise certain forms of reality in the human condition, such as our ability to cope with harm and stand above it. It is actually a form of clarity, it means to speak out.

Generally I find it better to leave direct political engagement out of it, or just register the evidence, because I don’t want to step outside the personal earth-theatre in which the poem acts. That’s a theatre of living on earth rather than recommendations for improvement of the arrangements. If it works it’s a total theatre, hinged on the particular. Poetry must be the most inappropriate medium possible for preaching to the world, directly or through linguistic encryptment. It would defeat itself by its very nature because poetry isn’t only sharp and perceptive and incisive, it’s also obliged to be, well, entertaining in some way, or delightful, and always was however serious it got, before modernism. Even Pound recognised this necessity, at first. Or anyway, why should poetry take upon itself a task that prose does so much better?

My remarks about Las Vegas just rehearse what everybody knows really, while registering a stranger’s astonishment. The lack of main verbs, here and in other places, is a habit I seem to have got into which allows me to posit a moral position from a distant platform. I name it, as I think it is, propositionally, without letting the self take hold of it in an active idiom of event and declaration. I like to leave the reader some space around the percept. “Stranger” is exactly my position in a lot of these pieces, including the ones which are entirely at home.

TL: There are many concerns expressed in The Glacial Stairway about the depredations of the market and its effect on various more entrenched, slower-moving, traditional ways of life, with whom the poetic voice frequently aligns itself (‘we share a condition, of/having been betrayed)’. The ‘fiscal paradise’ of Andorra; villages cleared to build hotels – to what extent is The Glacial Stairway a statement of assessment on modernity and its interaction with what we might call ‘pre-modern’ ways of life?

Much of The Glacial Stairway involves non-urban places – in Greece, Italy, Provence – is there a poetics of retreat at work here? If so, how is it different to the way retreat from modernity is traditionally conceived of in nature poetry?

PR: I’ve brought these together because I think they’re the same question. Basically I can’t accept the dichotomy, which assumes the cultural condition of western Europe as central and optimal and to look away from it a “retreat”. Our experiential scope is greater than that. The places I visit are no more “entrenched” than central Manchester, and probably a good deal faster-moving, and they participate in more than the local market. This turns out to be why I went there and what I found. Actually the USA is about the most “primitive” place I’ve been to, in various respects. You don’t evade modernity by going to rural Transylvania, which I do from time to time, it follows you there and it meets you there, it meets you in your separation from what you witness and in your harmonisation with it.

I do think it’s salutary to get to know elsewheres, or at any rate it is for my temperament a necessary venture, perhaps because elsewhere is where I come from, though I recognise that other writers may have no use for it at all. And certainly I’ve been concerned to delineate value in terms which are foreign to us, especially of course in the book of travel sketches, The Dance at Mociu. But my idea is that it’s not a nostalgic exercise, rather a broadening one, that the faculties are exercised to their fullness in a remote Carpathian village as much as anywhere else, the visitor’s as well as the local’s. The sense of time-lapse is inevitable, faced for instance with strip-farming, but you have to understand how the place works within that apparent time-warp, and that nothing there is enviable as such or for its charm, but only as it has been achieved, in for instance the operations of a cohesive local society, all the interlocking functions, and how care is built into the inherited structure and maintained there. And indeed sometimes it’s clear that such achievement is not possible here in those terms, but that then implies the question about what is possible here, by what strategies, or is like a cultural reminder, weighing up gain and loss against what obtains in different conditions. Of course we have lost a great deal, socially, compared with these places, but there are reasons for that, and concomitant gains.

As for “nature” I take it as obvious that exposure to the raw details of the bionosphere is good for you and it would be silly to think otherwise. Air water and distance, plants, stones, birds, weather and all the rest of it. Tremendous ranges of imagery, the imagination liberated as the feet and lungs are, and entirely modern. I’m actually not interested in it until the human spirit is manifest, and sometimes you can see the place as an interactive and shaping force for the self as for the society that lives in it. And I’m happy to indicate the distinctions, the foreign beauties of the place, Mediterranean heat and light etc…I don’t think it’s appropriatory, because the self is seriously caught up in it, and the confrontation stands in a historical process.

Cover art: Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham

TL: There also seems to be quite a lot of anger in the voice, would you say that’s accurate? If so, why, against what?

PR: Do you think so? Compared with the embittered fury which motivates a lot of the young poets I come across in this neck of the woods, I’m Beatrix Potter. Of course there is always a lot to complain about. Especially it has become starkly evident lately that management of the big economy is faulty, and has been for a long time. In fact the quality of life of half the population of the earth is currently being reduced because of the acts of a bunch of gangsters who gambled recklessly with the global economy and helped themselves to untold billions of public money, only to be patted on the back and told not to worry by the various politicians whose job is to arrange for their populations to foot the bill. You realise this when you travel around on the other side of Europe and find that there too almost everybody has been affected, everything is cut back, everybody’s ambitions have been curtailed, quite apart from all those who suffer actual hardship as a direct result.

Yes there is some anger, which is, or should be, directed towards injustices and despoliations which could have been prevented. I get particularly angry about the refusal of the British radical left to engage in practical politics, thus leaving the door open for the far right to walk into power, and look where that’s got us. There is also a lot of regret, which I look on as a larger condition, less specific, something that everyone knows and if they say not I don’t believe them. Anger doesn’t easily produce hope, but on the other hand regret goes hand-in-hand with nostalgia, so you have to be careful.

Beyond what’s in the news, there is a kind of modern melancholy which I think is essential to our condition; without it we’d just be in torpor. And I think there are complicated reasons for that which are to do with industrialisation and population levels and logistics but extend further. Senses of belonging and continuity became problematic, since at least the 18th Century, and the social structure has suffered distortions which seem to be getting worse. A lot of poetical militancy might just be an attempt to evade a resigned sadness which is our reality. But of course I grew up through the crazy and idealistic 1960s, and when you remember the serious dreams that lurked among all that nonsense, and the hopes given rise to, you get a sense of reversal, that societal time is going backwards: re-entrenchment of class system, return of all the authoritarian and militaristic structures, immense divisiveness, government completely out of touch with the realities of living here, really not a clue, just waving big sticks at us, and the police out of control again, and so on. You can’t dismiss regret with all this going on, and my generation did come out of their twenties thinking things were improving in a steady and irrevocable way and could only go on like that. That is, moving into a more and more egalitarian society. Then someone comes along and sets the whole machine into reverse. But to me it is a large issue, and specific temporal conditions have to be weighed against personal and nostalgic forms of regret. There may be forms of regret or melancholy which are existential. The Elizabethans thought so.

TL: A word that recurs with different senses and in different contexts throughout The Glacial Stairway is ‘structure’. It seems the poet is constantly trying to read things encountered structurally – the ‘unreal structure’ of credit finance, the indecisive and lonely world ‘An elite or egalitarian structure’ – what is the significance of connecting these sorts of political and social structures with structure as an organisational principle in your poetry?

PR: I don’t really do organisational principles. The poem grows from a starting-point, which may be a first line, or a title, or a quotation, or a vague picture or image field or the memory of a place, or a sense of a possible tone, a possible weighting, with a feeling that any of these might lead on to somewhere, might reveal something. And from there it grows and finds its form, which is sometimes determined by the intuitive construction of what becomes the first stanza, say it’s a six-line one I might go on writing six-line stanzas for the rest of the poem, though there are no rules in this. I never start from a message that I want to deliver; the message is discovered in the working through of the poem’s materials. And it ends when it’s reached somewhere which consummates the issue or which releases the inhering message preferably in a quite dramatic or rhythmically decisive gesture, though there are also codas sometimes. I used to be involved in improvised music as a listener, reviewer and occasional impresario. There structure is, of course, a non-existent entity until it’s all over. But there are structures all round us, from garden sheds to governmental systems and they’re not all constructed the same way. I look upon my intuitive structuring as a suitable process for a certain kind of fairly modest poetical production, quite disconnected from other structurings, justified as it leads to or is faithful to trustworthy perceptions of the world. That would include a sense of our failure, sometimes nothing else. And indeed I don’t think political, economic or social structures are necessarily wrong in themselves, but only as they fail us, which they often do.

Or to put it differently, in fact to contradict myself, what I’m interested in is how we evade structures. That is, we get by, in the most daunting conditions short of actual warfare. The structures are like mountains and in their shadows we build bars and gardens, both full of lights and music.

TL: It is common in what some people call ‘experimental’ poetics to focus on process, and in The Glacial Stairway there are several pieces whose formal structure are concerned with expressing time and/or distance in a graphical or systematic way (especially the walk-poem ‘King’s Cross to SOAS’). How did you arrive at such methods, and what do you think they can do that more traditional verse can’t?

PR: As above, the notion of a possible trajectory carries with it the sense of an appropriate disposition of the writing on the page and the previsioning of that is part of the initial impulse. The type of emotion, even the type of thought involved in, say, ‘Shining Cliff’ is so different from that of ‘King’s Cross to SOAS’ (though they may share the same kind of message in the end) that they demand different formats. I guess I work between two extremes – the natural obscurity of song, and the open telling of narrative. The two versions of ‘Western States’ at the end of the book stretch this contrast as far out as possible, expanding the distance between them to a maximum, while covering the same ground. I wouldn’t call it a system I don’t think. If it works the form and the content guide each other through the text.

These procedures are all quite closely related to traditional genres I think. The short poems or sets of them embrace the meaning of that abused word “lyric”, the more expansive pieces recall traditional narrative writing in prose or verse, and of course ‘Aria with Small Lights’, like a lot of other pieces in the past, apes traditional procedure closely and irreverently in its not-quite-strict end-rhyming. Like agreeing to a discipline and then occasionally playing truant. I’m very fond of traditional verse and sometimes like to have the poem look like it, in regular sections on the page, even when there are no traditional metrics at work. The forms and appearance of poems have a lot to say in themselves. A sense of stability is just as important to me as disruption. In fact neither makes sense without the other.

TL: The Glacial Stairway includes some versions of poems by the 8th Century Chinese poet Li Ho, having reached this form through several translations and re-workings by 20th Century scholars. In what ways can translation be a poetic act?

PR: I guess that in poetry translation is a kind of collaboration but one which can embrace contrariety, especially when the original author has been dead for half a millennium. I take something not only not by me but also, in this case, quite alien in many ways to what my poetry normally does, with all that languorous aristocratic beauty, and make it at least partly mine, by working on small details. To realise points in it which I can recognise as my sense harmonising with something very far away, and so to come to terms with it. Thus emphasising, for instance, Li Ho’s lamenting of the servile and deprived condition of the palace women. A claim is made that those aristocratic forms of beauty are now open to the commoner as a right. It takes a lot of work and concentration over a long period of time. Some of the most unreadable poetry books I’ve ever seen are the “collected poems” of major foreign poets ruthlessly translated into English as if the translator is a kind of postal worker. Sometimes made worse by a grim determination to represent the metrics of the original.

TL: When The Literateur interviewed Sean Bonney, we began one question with a quotation from your Alstonefield – ‘I could go South, / to the heart of smooth success [. . . ] And come back up here three times a year /for humanity’ – and really, I’d like to ask you a similar question about the existence (or not) of a north/south divide in British poetry, but differently accented. How do you think your writing might have been different had you stayed in the north?

PR: I love the north of England. Apart from the hills, there’s a sense of personal openness and directness, no-nonsense, no frills, and determined and cheerful resourcefulness in comparative poverty. I suppose when it comes to the reality that’s all folklore – what you actually get is the same conditions as anywhere else. But northern hard-headed straightforwardness is a healthy fiction to cultivate as an antidote to the cryptic mannerisms of the southern poetry gangs.

Actually I don’t know any reason why my poetry would necessarily be any different if I’d stayed in the north (and it wasn’t very far north, really, just up beyond the Midlands). I trust I’d still know what was going on in poetry from Cornwall to Orkney if not further, and after all there are no barriers to this information for those who are interested. Where you live makes a difference, perhaps, at that formative stage when poets band together in exclusive groups, but all you can do after that is break it up, you have to; the only people who want the categories you create to become part of history are the academics. In the late 1960s I was in touch with people from the north who wrote a plain-speaking socialistic poetry virtually without figuration of any kind, which they probably thought was “northern” and to some degree they might have been right. But they erected a wall round this poetry, fed it to each other exclusively, turned their backs on alternatives, and we never heard from them again. I think this was a pity. There were possibilities of interaction which were closed. Groupings I knew in the south-east did exactly the same thing.

TL: One of the poems in The Glacial Stairway features the line ‘forgive me if I write badly’. A slightly facetious question, but since the text suggests it – what, do you think, does it mean to write badly, if anything?

PR: All over the poetry world people are throwing around the words “good” and “bad” and nobody hardly ever has a shadow of an aesthetic belief to support those judgements. Normally it’s gut reaction, opportunism, or surrender to endorsed attitudes, conformity to established procedures – and this happens at the “innovative” end of the spectrum as much as anywhere else. Occasionally it’s political, but the attempts I’ve seen to state an aesthetic basis for evaluating poetry have mostly been pathetic. “Poetry is a kind of magic” and so forth. Or the most abstruse philosophical critiques can be seen to be founded on pre-determined aesthetic choices. Most poets, let’s face it, make judgements which support their own poetry. In the commercialist zones, but not only there, were are told not merely what is “good” but also what is “best”, and we are told it again and again. And the prizes and the appointments repeat it. The cast of this theatre of the superlative constantly changes, but the sales-talk doesn’t and hasn’t for at least 40 years. Poets are elevated ridiculously in a quest for heroic achievement which I think is neurotic. Poets are not in fact all that much better than one another. But it’s not only in the big publicity routines, it’s also in the avant-garde claques. The poet Douglas Oliver once suggested that superlatives should be avoided completely in talking about poetry.

Personally I look for a “poetic” quality in the writing. Poetry is after all what I am mainly interested in; so for me it is its own objective. But whatever that quality is, which may well involve certain echoic, historical tones, I’d want to see it as an active force, I’d want to recognise the world in it. And a balance of forces. But the important thing is perhaps that there’s no knowing where you’re going to find this, or how it may be disguised.

Yossarian Slept Here by Erica Heller
Vintage, Paperback, 288 pages,
ISBN 9780099570080, £8.99

Chris Woolfrey

It takes until page of 127 a 272-page book on the life of Joseph Heller for his daughter to admit that she ‘cannot offer any true and complete accounting of my father’s life and times, especially the good times, circa Catch-22…’. Because Erica Heller attempts the ambitious task of combining a memoir with a biography Yossarian Slept Here loses in good criticism what it gains in readability; too many of the events, and even thoughts of the people about which she is writing (they are people with a relationship to history, not characters, remember) are discussed in an immediate way, as if they were, “happening here and now” rather than being considered part of a reality on which Erica Heller is commenting.

Welcome news then, that even if it is half way through, Heller begins to build her monument to the fallibility of her own memory; as a reader, that final admission, the one that’s always needed to signal a great biography, a proper account of something that really happened, comes tantalisingly close to your grasp. And you really feel it. You really feel as though that level of separation, that critic’s eye which brings with it a well-considered account of a time, people, places, is coming.

But then, here is the sentence in full:

‘I cannot offer any true and complete accounting of my father’s life and times, especially the good times, circa Catch-22, without mentioning that loyal champion of writers and devoted friend to Dad for over thirty years, his Swedish publisher, Per Gedin.’

In Yossarian Slept Here it is a typical sentence: a grand and sweeping concept attached to something relatively pedestrian. That’s no disrespect to Per Gedin. In fact, the relationship between Per Gedin and Joseph Heller, as rendered by Erica Heller, is one of the book’s most interesting threads, exploring in a relatively short space of time what it would be like for a cocksure, arrogant author of an acclaimed bestseller to talk quietly and at length with the man. A man, indeed, who was partially charged with bringing his books to a very different world from the New York meals and meets with the likes of Mario Puzo that was the Heller life.

A life which, despite these opening criticisms, Erica Heller does render very well. After all, she did get a glimpse into the life of arguably one of the 20th century’s most celebrated authors. Who better, for example, to explore the fact that behind the bullish, witty, uncompromising and quick-talking author of Catch-22 there was a man who adoringly wiped the bottom of his beloved dog, Sweeney, regularly brushing his coat and sitting him on his lap like a child? And without his daughter really talking about it, would Heller fans know quite so much about his mother-in-law, a woman who – according to Erica Heller – was so intent that her daughter court the handsome Joseph that she badgered him into it, despite his many adoring female fans, and who was, as the book argues time and again, in many ways like Heller herself?

The narrative has plenty of insightful, funny and poignant moments and anecdotes. Erica Heller, in many ways her father’s child (according to her) seems to have gained some of Joe Heller’s way with words. Her description of her own problems – ‘There is no droll or winsome way for me to write about having cancer. I can only recount what happened and then what happened because of what happened” – are often perceptive, direct. On her father’s interest in mortality in his work, she writes: ‘My father was tone-deaf in most ways, except when it came to whistling past a graveyard. Then he was pitch perfect.’ The chapter on her father’s novel Something Happened is excellent and has the particular feel of somebody who was not only there but also probably in the novel, a novel with ‘years of verbatim conversations in it’, with ‘a dynamic between father and daughter’ that was ‘strikingly familiar’. Called controversial and also his best book, it’s hard to think of a better account of the chapter “My Daughter Is Unhappy” than one by the person it’s probably written about.

Or perhaps she is the worst. While Yossarian Slept Here offers the potential of a tantalisingly intimate account of the Heller lifestyle, it also appears to suffer from the emotional closeness that can cloud the judgement of a person’s character, of interpretations of events. In the book’s opening portion, those about Joseph Heller’s early career and Erica Heller’s childhood, it becomes difficult to separate father Joe’s seeming cruelty from young Erica’s own sensitivity; the bloody-mindedness of the father as portrayed by the daughter, perhaps bloody-minded in her approach to the writing of it.

An admission along those lines is advanced by Erica Heller later in the book but again, the attempt to narrativise the account from the beginning undermines that critical position once it arrives; it’s good that it arrives, but it’s withheld for just a little too long.

Juan Pablo gets acquainted with the Liberian Pygmy Hippos at London Zoo. Photo by Rita Platt

Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos has had quite a year. His first novel Down the Rabbit Hole has been translated into English, French, German, Portuguese and Hungarian, and nominated for 2011′s Guardian First Book Award. Published in the UK by innovative independent press And Other Stories, Adam Thirlwell describes the novel in his introduction as ‘a miniature high-speed experiment with perspective … a deliberate, wild attack on the conventions of literature.’ The Literateur caught up with Juan Pablo in Bloomsbury to talk about language, childhood, drug barons and, perhaps inevitably, hippos.

Interview by Dan Eltringham

The Literateur: Let’s start with the title: it’s an evocative one for Anglophone readers, and I’d like to unpack the resonances a little. ‘Tochtli’ [the book’s young narrator] means ‘rabbit’ in Nahuatl [Aztec language], neatly making the connection with Alice in Wonderland, also concerned with a parallel world and childhood perception. How do you see, then, the relationship between the rabbit hole and Mexico? Is it an alternative mirror image, in the way of Through the Looking Glass?

Juan Pablo Villalobos: In Spanish the title is ‘Party in the Lair’ (Fiesta en La Madriguera), something like that, literally. So when Rosalind the translator and the guys at And Other Stories suggested the title Down the Rabbit Hole, my first reaction was, why? Where’s the party? They explained to me that there was this parallelism with Alice in Wonderland, and Tochtli’s a rabbit, and then I started to think… I don’t know if there’s an influence of that book (Alice) on my novel, but I love the book. I started to think that it’s a good idea, because maybe British readers have this connection, and it must be attractive to them.

And yeah, it’s a claustrophobic world, and a trapped world, that in some ways has some relations with Alice in Wonderland, I think. And this style of narrating with some absurd connections between things that seem like they are so far away, but you can connect them, like the French with the Samurais with Mexico with the Liberian Pygmy Hippos – all this stuff together, it’s something like surreal.

Click the jacket image to read The Literateur's review of Down the Rabbit Hole

TL: I want to ask about narrative method, based on a point Nick Lezard makes in his Guardian review of Down the Rabbit Hole. He notes that certain recent novels – the example he gives is Emma Donoghue’s Room – build themselves around a young narrator who is, as Tochtli would say, ‘precocious’. Usually this manifests itself as a precocious knowledge of words, and in many cases the attempt results in ‘the slipping of authorial control, the fumbling of register’; a failure of consistency with what they ‘would’ and ‘wouldn’t’ know. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close might be another such example. This doesn’t occur with Rabbit Hole because, one might argue, the very point is in Tochtli’s misuse or over-application of the complex words he does know.

What is Rabbit Hole doing, or how does it enact your ideas about, the relationship between language and the ways it can both constrain and give freedom to perception in narrative?

JPV: When I started to write the novel I had I think like 90 percent of the plot defined, I was really sure about what I was going to tell. But I wasn’t sure about the tone, about the voice. Then I started to write from Mazatzin’s perspective, who’s the professor, and from Yolcaut’s perspective, and I wasn’t happy. Suddenly it came to me in this magic moment the first sentence of the novel, ‘Some people say I’m precocious’. In Spanish it’s different, because I don’t use the word ‘precoz’ (‘precocious’); I use ‘adelantado’ (‘advanced’). In all the translations I have read they use the word ‘precocious’ and not ‘adelantado’, because it wouldn’t work that way in other languages. I thought that in this sentence was all the tone and the spirit of that voice; then I tried to be convincing and worked a lot correcting it. I wrote the novel in five months, and I kept correcting it for two years, every sentence and every word, and doing apparently simple things, like after a sentence with some difficulties [of consistency] saying, oh, that’s what Youcault told me, so he’s [Tochtli’s] repeating things.

TL: You were correcting it so you could explain everything that was there in Tochtli’s vocabulary?

TL: Yeah, I found this quote by the Mexican writer Juan Villoro. He says, ‘la ficción no trabaja con la mentira sino con lo inverificable’ (‘fiction doesn’t work with a lie but with the unverifiable’) and the writer doesn’t aspire to falsify but ‘ser ciertas de otro modo, a construir una segunda realidad’(‘to be sure in a different way, to build a second reality’). That seems to me applicable to your book…

JPV: Yeah, I agree. I wasn’t worrying about realism, you know? As a writer you create the rules, you say, this is my world and I’m going to play with these rules. And I think the reader enters this world and then you have to walk with him across the pages so he’s never like, oh, what’s happening here?

TL: Do you also have a sense that that is manifested on a more structural level, and not just in terms of words he knows and doesn’t know?

JPV: Yes of course, it has to be with a view of how I perceive literature, and life, of course.

TL: I remember reading in I think El Universal this quote by Juan Gabriel Vásquez: ‘Mis primeros libros no son sobre Colombia porque no entendía mi país y sentía que no podía escribir sobre él. Fue gracias a vivir fuera, a la distancia y al tiempo que pude escribir sobre él.’ (‘My first books weren’t about Colombia because I didn’t understand my country and I felt that I couldn’t write about it. It was thanks to living elsewhere, with distance and time, that I could write about it.’)

You lived in Barcelona for eight years, now Brazil and – correct me if I’m wrong – Down the Rabbit Hole could be said to be a product of no longer living in Mexico. In what way does a certain distance alter the way you see a place, and change the way you are able to write about it?

JPV:  Yes, it’s like that. When I started to write the novel I had [been] I think three years outside Mexico, and the novel for me it’s like a, how to do you say, a ‘reflexión’?

TL: Thought process?

JPV: Yeah, a process of thinking. How do you perceive Mexico after some time living outside? Because your perspective changes, and it’s true, I agree with Juan Gabriel Vásquez because your vision of the country changes. Suddenly you understand some things, and suddenly some things you were doing when you lived there seem really horrible, and you take this distance from the reality. Then when you go there on holiday, or when you talk with your family and friends you have these reactions like, come on, why? You know? It’s shocking.

TL: Can you give an example?

JVP: Well, in family relations, for example, we don’t talk clearly. If I speak to my mother and she has to say something to say to me, she doesn’t say it, she’s like ‘well, because, you know, we are in a difficult time, because maybe’…you know? What’s happening? Just tell me!

TL: So it’s language, again.

JPV: Yeah, it’s language. And I think the novel, in my own personal view, is an exercise in the way Mexicans think about Mexico after we leave.

TL: Do you feel that that gaining of perspective from being farther away is kind of the opposite of Tochtli’s lack of perspective?

JPV: Yeah, and then you can play with that, you know? Doing the opposite. But it’s true, I hadn’t thought like that, but it’s true.

JPV: I wasn’t thinking of writing a narco novel when I started. I first thought of writing about the narcos when I thought: if I create a character, a child who wants a Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus and can have it, who would that be? And maybe twenty years ago it would be the son of a politician, the son of a deputy, or the son of a governor. At that time – 2005, 2006, when I started to write the novel – it was the beginning of all this escalation of violence in Mexico. And obviously this narco culture exists from I think the 70s and 80s, and I started to write because of that.

Sometimes my novel in the bookshops is surrounded by all these other narco novels. I understand that, it’s normal, at the first reading it [seems like] a narco novel. But I think that really it’s a [rite of] passage novel. It’s about learning to deal with reality, and about the loss of innocence. In the beginning I wanted to write about learning the exercise of power. How do you learn the use of power? When you are a child you experiment with how much power you have through your wishes, and you discover it through your parents. It’s a very simple but I think symbolic way to understand the use of power. This boy, who is the son of this drug baron, is having this terrible experience with power, because he can have everything.  He understands that his father can do everything, always says, ‘I can get it’.

In Spanish it’s stronger, ‘Youcault siempre puede’ (‘Youcault always can’). I keep repeating that sentence because it’s like a mantra, the essence of the book.

TL:You know Vásquez’s book also includes a private zoo, and a Hippopotamos that’s fetched from very far away…

JPV: When I presented the book in Barcelona two years ago, a Colombian journalist said to me, ‘ah, you wrote about hippos because of Pablo Escobar’s hippos?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’, and he explained to me that Pablo Esobar [Colombian drug baron] had these hippos that ran away when he was killed, and now they have this terrible health problem in that region because the hippos are free and killing people…I didn’t know, I didn’t.

TL: There’s an essay to be written on hippos in Latin American literature…This next question is perhaps going to overlap with the previous one, but we’ll see how it goes. How does your method of rendering violence, in a literary sense via Tochtli’s blankly innocent descriptions of ways of ‘making corpses’, work to deflate or satirise the obsession with violence in narcoliteratura and narco culture? Or is it doing something else?

JPV: No, I was trying to work with or through humour. Which is difficult, because you never know if you are reaching the objective, or if you’re failing terribly and nobody will laugh. I read a lot of of humouristic literature and I like the humouristic way of understanding life and understanding reality, to satirise and criticise the power and the politicans. Most of the time [when] readers or spectators of film or other kinds of art are faced with some humouristic work, they’re like, oh, it’s funny. Well yeah, it’s funny, but it’s more than funny. It’s another way to approach knowledge. Another approach to reality, to experience of life. So in the tone of Tochtli’s voice I was always thinking of that effect.

At the beginning I thought that maybe it was not that correct to use that tone to narrate those kinds of things, like talking about dead bodies and how you can kill somebody. And most of the time in narco novels these issues are treated very seriously.

TL: Except perhaps they’re repeated so many times they lose their meaning, I don’t know.

JPV: Yeah, maybe. Literature is about language for me, I work with words, and I can’t imagine working with a transparent style, you know? Like, ‘Salió de casa, y caminó hasta la esquina. Cruzó la calle,  y miró al cielo, pensando…’(‘He left the house and walked to the corner. He crossed the street, looked at the sky, thinking…’). I can’t. I have to find a voice, a tone, a perspective. I think Tochtli’s voice is the reason why the book is being translated and has been, in the case of Great Britain, well-received.

JPV: I like it a lot, I think it’s great. It’s different, obviously. I read the Portugese translation, which is great, and the French translation, which is a really good one too. They are different books. Sometimes translators have to make decisions – [to] work with this word, ‘precocious’ instead of ‘adelantado’. In the case of Portugese it was this huge discussion about using ‘pulcro’, which is the last of the five words [that Tochtli knows]. In English it’s ‘immaculate’. The translator wanted to use ‘impecável’, but ‘pulcro’ exists in Portugese. I said, but why don’t you use ‘pulcro’, it’s the same? [they said] No no, the meaning is different, but it’s the sound of the word I am concerned with. I work a lot with the music of the voice, and that’s why [it was important] to keep repeating all the time, ‘Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus’, ‘Liberian Pygmy hippopotamus’, ‘Liberian Pygmy hippopotamus’.

TL: Did you find you had a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, a lot of going in between with the translators over individual words, a lot of emails exchanged? Or did you just let them get on with it?

JPV: It depends on the translator. For example the German and the Dutch translators, suddenly the translation was ready, and I was like, huh? With Rosalind we had a lot of contact, which was very nice, because she is really observant, she detected some issues and problems that I hadn’t noticed. It was nice as a writer to experiment like this – I believe that the best readers of novels are the translators.

TL: And working with And Other Stories, how was that?

JPV: I have an international rights contract with my Spanish publisher and they received an offer from And Other Stories. From the beginning it was really great to get involved [with And Other Stories] because it’s a small project, about translation, and in a country, in a language that translates so little. They are really amazing. The love for literature and for books, you can feel it still in this project. It’s not like when I go with other huge and big publishers, when you feel this literary system, working. Here I have this impression when I come to Great Britain that we are working in a project where all the people involved love books, love literature, and that we’re doing this because of that.

Down the Rabbit Hole
Juan Pablo Villalobos
And Other Stories, Paperback,
130 pages, ISBN 9781908276001, £10

Annie McDermott

‘Dead people aren’t people, they’re corpses’.  When you live in a palace with your Mexican drug baron father and a maid who cleans bodies off the porch in the morning, it’s important to be clear about things.  Or at least that’s what Tochtli, the child narrator of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, has decided.

This is a novel about trying to make sense of things and getting it wrong. It refracts Mexico’s current troubles with escalating, unpolicable drug-trafficking and violence through the eyes of its young narrator, Tochtli. His father Yolcaut is leader of ‘the most macho gang for at least eight kilometres’ and, ensconced in the family ‘palace’ for his own protection, he unfolds a poignant and funny study of isolation and its effects on a child and his vocabulary. Tochtli tries to keep control of his reality by means of categories.  At night he reads the dictionary, and by day he classifies such experiences as increasingly violent TV news broadcasts and his father’s increasing paranoia according to the words he collects: ‘sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating’.

First published in Spain in 2010, Down the Rabbit Hole has reached the English-speaking world thanks to the refreshing new publishers And Other Stories, a non-profit company that prints titles suggested by its group of subscribers and aims to carry its readers to unexpected new places — places often too new and unexpected for publishing houses more concerned about profit margins to risk.

Tochtli and his father Yolcaut’s palace is a place at once both expected and unexpected.  This miniature novel does not aim to present a detailed portrait of the narcotrafficking life – and indeed a visit to any Mexican bookshop reveals no shortage of works that do.  Instead, it paints its scene with a few bold strokes, in the form of instantly-recognisable narcoclichés: from the caged big cats in the garden to the corrupt politicians and visiting American ‘business partner’ who arrives complete with toupée and cocaine habit, Yolcaut is on the whole a highly conventional drug lord.  Yet the simplicity of the backdrop allows the novel’s extraordinary protagonist to take centre-stage — Tochtli’s voice is what makes the novel such a brilliantly unexpected treatment of its world.

Totchtli is an earnest narrator, keen to tell the truth and even keener to use the correct terminology when he does so. ‘[S]evered heads have gone out of fashion.  Now it’s more human remains that they show on TV. [...] It can be anything apart from heads and hands.  That’s what makes them human remains and not corpses.’

This is how he makes his world manageable — through a framework of categories that recalls the children’s toy with wooden shapes that fit through the correct holes in the lid of a box.

But Tochtli’s tragedy is that not one of the linguistic categories he uses to make sense of this twisted, claustrophobic wonderland is his own.  ‘What I definitely am is macho,’ he tells us — but in the macho/faggot divide, applied by Tochtli to almost everyone he meets (or, more often, watches on TV), we feel the weight of Yolcaut’s jewel-encrusted hand.

‘The other day a man I didn’t know came to our palace and Yolcaut wanted to know if I was macho or not.  The man’s face was covered in blood [...].  But I didn’t say anything, because being macho means you’re not scared and if you are scared you’re a faggot.  I stood there very solemnly while Mitzi and Chichilkuali, who are the guards in our palace, gave him some devastating blows.  The man turned out to be a faggot because he started to scream [...].  The good thing is that I did turn out to be macho and Yolcaut let me go before they turned the faggot into a corpse.’

This is language being used to label and not to describe, as every set of devastating blows reported by an apparently undevastated Tochtli reminds us.  Behaving in this way, language can insulate and exclude: only the bricks that fit the holes make it into the box, and other objects escape unconsidered.  We never know how happy Tochtli is.  We know how he feels about his hat collection, about Samurai (macho) and charro cowboys (not macho enough), but never how he feels about his father’s business, or his father, or his life.

And so his own carefully-collected words do not work for his own pain.  His semi-constant stomach-ache, once diagnosed as a psychosomatic consequence of a motherless childhood by a doctor asked politely by Yolcaut not to return, is neither devastating, pathetic nor sordid: ‘It’s a sharp stab that feels like you’re being electrocuted. Once I stuck a fork in an electric socket and electrocuted my hand a little bit. The stabbing is the same, but in my stomach.’  ‘Normally they’re like cramps, although the worst ones feel like a hole that keeps growing and growing and it’s as if my tummy’s going to explode.’  With personal, direct physical discomfort, his concern for the truth forces him into similes taken from the world and not its dictionaries.

Fortunately, despite spending his time categorising his hat collection (safari hats are ‘like detective hats, which are good for doing investigations, but specialised in animals’) and researching Liberian pygmy hippopotami, Totchli manages to escape being twee, or quirky, or cute.

This is because Villalobos knows that the power of child narrators lies beyond their capacity to shock us with casual sadism — ‘At the moment we’re studying the conquest of Mexico.  It’s a fun topic, with war and blood and dead people’ — or embarrass us with their acceptance — ‘…the land of liberty, fraternity and equality.  Apparently the reason you cut off kings’ heads is to have those things’.  Only in its very rare (in fact, just these two) weaker moments does Tochtli’s narrative fall back on those too-easy ways of affecting the reader.  Normally, he goes beyond into what all the best child narrators do best: logic.

‘The most normal thing to do is cut off the head, although, actually, you can cut anything.  It’s because of the neck.  If we didn’t have a neck it would be different.  It might be normal to cut bodies in half down the middle so as to have two corpses.  But we have a neck and this is a really big temptation.  Especially for French people.’

Villalobos has said that he wanted to write a book without moralisations about a subject which has been moralised far too much.  He achieves this through the wide-eyed ruthless reports of his protagonist, whose only ethical conviction is that you have to tell the truth.  When other people moralise about Yolcaut’s business, their judgments enter hand-in-hand with hypocrisy: ‘I had fun listening to Yolcaut and the Governor talking.  But the Governor didn’t.  His face was all red, as if it was going to explode, because I was eating some quesadillas while they had green pozole and talked about their cocaine business.’

Rosalind Harvey’s impressive translation retains the brilliant comic timing of the original – the combination of a peaceful snack of quesadillas with the chat over drug deals here, for example, and the unfazed relation of the politician’s subsequent reappearance when, along with the President, he ‘went on TV to tell all us Mexicans not to worry, to stay calm’.

Down the Rabbit Hole is about power, powerlessness and isolation, which childhood is also about, which crime is also about. Tochtli’s deadpan and diligent acceptance of his seemingly unacceptable reality is tragic without being sentimental, and with suffocating control over his protagonist’s words, Villalobos has created a completely original portrait of someone with absolutely no control at all — and an immaculate and devastating novel.

Signed copies of Down the Rabbit Hole are available at Dulwich Books

The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt
Granta Books, Paperback, 272 pages, ISBN 1847083188
12.99

Chris Woolfrey

Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is a historical novel, in that it’s set in 19th century America, but it is not one in that it doesn’t need to be. Aside from regular, charming and amusing references to the  use of the newly-marketed tooth brush  – and one which the writer, knowing you’re reading in 2011, wants you to be amused by –  the novel could have a contemporary setting. Its conclusion, in which killers Charlie and Eli Sisters reach the gold mining camp of Hermann Kermit Warm, is played out against the backdrop of the Gold Rush and time stamps it after the fact; nothing about the encounter would imply that the novel is as interested in the history as it is with its people.

These are modern characters. As Americans their psyches, particularly that of Eli, whose poetic musings we follow, have more in common with the America of the 21st century than with the 19th century characters that we have come to know through writers like Edgar Allen Poe or Henry James.

Why go to the trouble of setting the novel in the past then? First, it is useful to the plot in that the novel follows the work of two killers with an awesome reputation; two killers who, in an age of federal policing and forensics, could not kill as proficiently and over such a long period of time,  announcing themselves to be such famous killers as often as they do.

That aside, though – and the wandering and easy going life of these killers informs the next point, – the setting does seem to hold a thematic drive. The style of life, flattened to simplicity by De Witt, allows for a certain contemplation of those simple facts, a musing on the layers of meaning shrouded behind this simple life of horses and whiskey and brandy and gunshots.

Because really, that’s what The Sisters Brothers wants to be about: impulse, cause and effect, providence and fate, and their relationship to our actions. When they find a beautiful horse unguarded, for example, Charlie remarks ‘ “You are always harkening back in arguments, but another time is another time and thus irrelevant. Providence brought you that black horse. And what will become of the man who shuns Providence?” ‘ only for Eli to reply ‘“Providence has no place in this discussion. An Indian ate too much and died, that was the source of my good fortune.” ‘

The novel is replete with such exchanges. Of their father Eli asks ‘ “How is it that people go crazy?”’,only to receive the unsatisfying answer, ‘“It’s just a thing that sometimes happens.”’ When early in their journey to assassinate Warm the two set to kill a group they find on the road, the brothers – after their work, it had to be said – bicker about the cause of the victims’ deaths: whether it was Eli’s having them stop at an old witch’s house because of a spider’s bite, the bite of the spider itself, or Eli’s anger at not wanting to stay with the old lady in the first place. Or, perhaps, something more mysterious.

There is a constant building up. The discourse between the two brothers, often funny, belies a constant tug and pull: our relationship with our actions, and that of our actions with the wider world. When Eli takes pity on an orphaned boy and gives him money they’ve taken, Charlie reminds him, ‘“I am against this…You are throwing your money away”’, and it is a familiar sentiment from the tougher brother, once the reader becomes acquainted with these set-pieces. Charlie is a moral absolutist; cause and effect and circumstance are an irrelevancy to him. But the more thoughtful Eli, made more thoughtful by our intrusion into his inner considerations, sees the sense in connecting chains of events, and the novel is full of simple but subtly woven threads of that kind. It is  following  them – their implications as well as origins ­–which makes the novel  most rewarding.

On a very immediate level though, the novel is about murder and money. deWitt, it feels, wants the novel to be more glamorous than it really needs to be, and his lucid prose, often incredible (one of the best descriptions of death you’ll ever read – a man’s face ‘transformed to a ridiculous mask of agony and surprise and, I thought, a degree of insult’) is nonetheless undermined by quick, paragraph long chapters and attempts to hurtle through events in a continuing reminder that, whatever happens, this novel’s focus is finding and killing a man called Hermann Kermit Warm, and perhaps a little less about the character of the men who are hired to kill him.

In that way, the novel lets itself down, and while comparisons with the Coen Brothers have abounded because of the slightly light-hearted approach the novel takes toward inquiry and the geographical similarity of The Sisters Brothers and their critically acclaimed film No Country for Old Men, it is more the shortness of the chapters, the tendency to glide over events at times, which marks the book out as cinematic in some way.

Cinematic here is not a compliment, though. Eli is an interesting character, his exchanges with his brother the most interesting aspects of the novel, and the prose best when it is allowed time to develop.

In truth this would be a better novel at 600 pages than at the 325 it comprises. That’s because the journey, and its detours and philosophical leanings, is far more exciting and thought provoking than the climax of the journey, the meeting with Warm. Then the book seems to move just a little too quickly, like deWitt really did intend their tracking and finding him  to be purely a plot device through which he could utilise these character’s philosophical voices (here the historical setting really is for plot, too, and superficial) so that when they do reach that climax, he wants to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Even so, The Sisters Brothers is a good, entertaining novel. It isn’t a great one, but one that will be remembered from time to time, with a kind of perplexity and fondness.

7 Ways to Kill a Cat
Matías Néspolo
Harvill Secker, Paperback; 246 pages
ISBN: 9781846554506
£12.99

Gordon Weetman

Matías Néspolo comes highly recommended. He was selected by Granta in 2010 as one of their best young Spanish-language novelists, and the cover of his debut novel carries a quote from Javier Cercas along with a special endorsement from PEN. For the most part, the English edition of 7 Ways to Kill a Cat generously fulfils our expectations. It is poppy and offbeat in a way that will please fans of early Irvine Welsh, with the exotic resonance of Paulo Lins’ City of God – albeit minus the latter’s epic intergenerational swoop.

Set in Buenos Aires at the time of Argentina’s financial crash, 7 Ways follows the adventures of a young slum-dweller named Gringo, chronicling his desperate efforts to escape the crime and deprivation of the barrio. Everyone in Buenos Aires is desperate, not only the slum-dwellers, and Gringo’s struggles are mirrored and magnified by the suffering of those around him.

“There’s seven ways to kill a cat,” announces Chueco, the protagonist’s lively but unstable sidekick. “But when it comes down to it, there’s only two ways … In a civilised fashion, or like a fucking savage.” The cat-killing is literal, and at the beginning of the novel it provides Gringo and Chueco with the first meat they have eaten in over a week. As the novel progresses, however, this initial act of violence comes to symbolise the lengths we will go to in order to ensure our own survival.

Chueco is the dark centre of Néspolo’s novel – the motor for much of the action. Constantly scheming, trying to stay one step ahead of the competition, he’s an enigma to even his closest friends. Gringo, by contrast, is cautious by nature. He doesn’t fully trust Chueco, but despite his misgivings he cannot help being drawn into his friend’s increasingly harebrained schemes. After all, they are socios – mates – and mates stick together, even through the most soul-crushing adversity.

Néspolo wittily sketches the complex ironies of life in crash-era Argentina. In an early chapter, Gringo and Chueco break into the home of a local small-business owner. They hope to hijack his savings account (anyone in late-1990s Argentina lucky enough to have money either smuggles it out of the country or keeps it stashed beneath their mattress), but instead the hapless burglars discover a cash of outdated banknotes:

They’ve all got lots of zeros and they all bear the face of El Libertador. We stand there, staring at them like idiots. I remember notes like this, and I’m sure Chueco does. A brown one used to buy you a bag of popcorn, for a blue one you could get a bottle of Coke … Pesos ley, they were called back in the late 1970s. They haven’t been in circulation for nearly fifteen years.

Later on, Gringo heads into town with the intention of blowing some ill-gotten loot. The money is burning a hole in his pocket, but he finds it damn near impossible to get rid of. The shops are full of bargains and special offers, owners desperately slashing prices in an attempt to keep their businesses afloat.

Harvill Secker is billing 7 Ways as a cross between documentary and thriller. The book covers similar ground, in terms of pacing and historical content, to the gripping Argentinean heist movie Nine Queens, but in comparison with the film Néspolo’s novel is noticeably lacking in tension. His plot twists, which for the most part can be found crammed into the second half of the book, seem rather shoehorned-in, and all too often the stakes just don’t feel convincing. Gringo’s love interest Yanina appears only fleetingly in the early chapters: in a creepy scene we see Gringo nosing around her bedroom, browsing through her underwear drawer. On p. 139 they have brief and unromantic sex, and from that point onwards Gringo is obsessively focused on rescuing his one true love.

Some of the characters, too, are sketchily drawn and somewhat less than three dimensional. The gang leader El Jetita comes across as an uncomplicated thug, and bar owner Fat Farías is a full-on grotesque. Moreover, there are several characters who feature so tangentially in the action that one wonders whether it might not have been simpler for Néspolo’s editor to excise them, rather than giving the reader yet another nickname and back-story to remember.

7 Ways feels very much like a first-time novel – a warts-and-all debut, and one which may have gone to press just a jot prematurely. However, Néspolo’s prose displays more than enough sparkle and exuberance to override these minor qualms. His writing is electric and palpably youthful, with the promise of weightier, more considered works to come. Likewise, Frank Wynne’s translation is snappy and inventive, mixing Porteño and North American slang to create idiosyncratic gems such as “Whatever you’re jonesing for, loco,” and “hijo-de-fucking-puta”.

Ultimately, as a picaresque narrative, 7 Ways is more about setting than plot. The novel is at its best in those chapters where Gringo is wandering aimlessly around Buenos Aires, bumping into hippyish street vendors and pot-banging protesters whilst trying to avoid milicos (armed police) and glue-sniffing kids. The cover blurb notes that Gringo’s barrio “could be any deprived area” where young men are pushed into violence. Nevertheless, as a portrait of a unique and fascinating time and place, Néspolo’s debut is an enjoyably diverting read.

Halfblood Blues
Esi Edugyan
Serpent’s Tail, Paperback; 343 pages
ISBN 978-1846687754

£10.99

Gordon Weetman

It’s surprising there aren’t more novels about jazz under the Nazis. The contrast between improvised music and fascism provides a powerful ready-made metaphor for the battle between freedom and tyranny: on the one hand, unbound creativity and self-expression; on the other, brutal and monolithic destruction.

Esi Edugyan’s Booker-shortlisted debut takes this juxtaposition as its starting-point. “Think about it,” the narrator declares halfway through the second chapter. “A bunch of German and American kids meeting up in Berlin and Paris between the wars to make all this wild joyful music before the Nazis kick it to pieces.” As ventriloquism goes, this line feels clumsy and transparent – a clear statement of intent on the part of the author. Thankfully, the excitable, sub-Kerouac tone does not persist: what we get over the next three hundred pages is something far more slippery and subversive.

As the title suggests, Half Blood Blues is a novel about race, and about the various ways in which race can be constructed or construed. It follows the adventures of three black musicians in 1930s Europe, a continent shadowed by the threat of war. The protagonist, Sid, and his boyhood friend Chip are American citizens who grew up under Jim Crow laws on the unforgiving streets of Baltimore. Hieronymus (“Hiero”), their German-born band-mate, claims to be the offspring of a Rhineland woman and an African diplomat: “He was a Mischling, a half-breed, but so dark no soul ever like to guess his mama a white Rhinelander.”

Whereas Chip and Hiero are identifiably black, Sid is light enough to pass for white: “Son of two Baltimore quadroons, I come out straight-haired, green-eyed, a right little Spaniard. In Baltimore this given me a softer ride than some. I be lying if I said it ain’t back in Berlin, too.” Of the three main characters, Hiero’s situation is the most precarious: the Nazis have recently revoked his identity papers, along with those of all other black Germans, effectively rendering him stateless, a non-person. Sid comments of Hiero that “if his face wasn’t of the Fatherland, just bout everything else bout him rooted him there right good.” Hiero is trapped: he speaks no language other than German, and without valid papers he has no viable means of escape.

Half Blood Blues opens with Hiero’s abduction by the Gestapo. During a foolhardy night-time excursion through occupied Paris, the malnourished trumpeter is captured in a café while attempting to buy milk. Chip watches the ‘Boots’ lead his friend away: “I stood there … with my hands hanging like strange weights against my thighs, my chest full of something like water. Stood there watching Hiero go.”

After this stomach-churning intro, the action jumps forward five decades. Sid is retired, having long ago given up on jazz, whilst Chip is nearing the end of a lengthy and distinguished music career. By contrast, Hiero has become – somewhat improbably, considering his sparse discography – one of the great lost legends of jazz, on a par with artists like Parker and Coltrane. Sid and Chip are about to return to Berlin for the premiere of a documentary about Hiero’s life. The documentary was financed by a German TV company as part of the national process of vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past. But Sid has his own buried guilt to deal with, and it looks like the past may finally be coming back to haunt him.

On the night before they are due to fly out, Chip turns up on Sid’s doorstep with shocking news: unbeknownst to Sid and the rest of the world, Hiero is alive and hiding in Poland under a pseudonym. Sid seems reluctant to believe him, and even less enthusiastic when Chip suggests they hire a car after the screening and go looking for their former band-mate. It almost feels as though Sid has an ulterior motive for wanting Hiero to stay hidden. In a framing device familiar from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, Edugyan’s novel now divides into two parallel timelines. In one we follow the three characters’ struggles in Nazi-dominated Europe, and in the other we accompany Sid and Chip on their mission to uncover the truth about Hiero’s disappearance.

Half Blood Blues has a blockbuster of a premise, which would transfer impressively to the silver screen. However, there are certain niggling plot issues that any prospective screenwriter would be well advised to address. The lynching that Sid endures at the hands of the documentary maker stretches credibility, with Sid watching in horror as the on-screen Chip accuses him of handing Hiero over to the Nazis. Chip later apologises and claims his words were taken out of context, but considering the fraught nature of the subject matter, why would either man agree to feature in the film without a preliminary viewing?

In the Nazi-era sections of the book, the characters’ actions suffer from a puzzling lack of urgency. Paper-less Hiero is trapped in Europe, but the two Americans don’t seem particularly desperate to leave. If anything, they are more energized by the prospect of meeting up with Louis Armstrong in Paris, and cutting what they hope will be their breakthrough record, than by the need to escape from the Nazis, who have recently declared their music “degenerate.” Perhaps Sid and Chip have simply succumbed to paralysis: vulnerable people have been known to make tragedy inevitable by refusing to admit the terrifying scale of the danger, by clinging desperately to familiar routines until it is too late to let go. However, there is little sense of this in Edugyan’s prose, and the resulting lack of narrative tension leads to long slack passages in the middle chapters of the book.

Edugyan is a gifted writer, with a knack for snappy phrases and vivid imagery. Hiero’s trumpet, for example, is “a cheap-looking thing, dented, like a foil-wrapped chocolate been in a pocket too long”. However, Sid’s down-home narration veers dangerously close to cliché, and certain passages betray an uneasy balance between Baltimore street-slang and high-register ‘literary’ writing. Similarly, the musicians’ dialogue poses awkward questions: supposedly they converse in standardised German, or Hochdeutsch, but even Hiero’s speech is littered with jive-talk, an inconsistency Edugyan excuses by claiming that ‘the Kid’ likes to mimic his older band-mates. Yet how would one translate an idiom like “Let’s ankle” while retaining any semblance of grammatical sense?

Despite all its problems, Half Blood Blues remains a compelling read, and the climactic plot-twist is little short of hair-raising. But by this point Edugyan has squandered a good deal of momentum, and, as any great jazz soloist knows, the secret to success is keeping the audience on their toes.

Blooms of Darkness
by Aharon Appelfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green,
Alma Books, paperback, pp 280, ISBN: 978-1-84688-148-0, £12.99

Jane Stewart

Towards the close of Blooms of Darkness, award-winning Israeli writer’s Aharon Appelfeld’s most recent novel to be translated into English, the young protagonist, Hugo, becomes aware that a fellow refugee to whom he speaks, ‘bears a horrible secret within him, and that all of his words and movements are meant only to distract people from his secret’. The man, one of many similar ‘secret-keepers’ newly-emerged from concentration camps who are unable to speak of the horrors they have witnessed, is emblematic of this compelling novel’s preoccupation with the various ways in which painful truths are withheld, and of the many different forms of muteness and silence it explores.

Eleven-year-old Hugo’s accelerated passage into adulthood under the extreme stress of hostilities in Romania during the latter years of World War II, and his move from prepubescent innocence to sexual awareness under the tutelage of a mature woman, are delicately charted. He has managed to elude capture because his mother, unable to find anyone else to look after him when she has to flee yet unable to take him with her, has placed him in the care of Mariana, an old school friend now turned prostitute. Mariana conceals him for months on end inside a large closet in The Residence, the brothel in which she lives and works, and where she entertains German officers just at the other side of the wall from Hugo’s hiding place.

The narrative slips dexterously between present and past tenses, conveying the immediacy of Hugo’s danger and drawing the reader close to the boy’s consciousness as he becomes cocooned within the necessary silence of the closet. An imaginative and intelligent boy, he loves reading and ‘likes to listen to words’, but, during the long, cold, dark hours of solitude in his hiding place, he is unable to turn to the adventure story books and school work his absent mother has sent with him. Instead, he resorts to inventing his own singular form of companionship so that, ‘it isn’t words that speak to him but silence. This is a difficult language, but as soon as one adopts it, no other language will ever be so effective.’

Bereft of companionship, Hugo finds solace in vivid dreams about his family which come to him whilst asleep in his hiding place and in equally vivid ‘enchanted images’ he conjures up of his school friends, Otto and Anna, of his parents and grandparents, and of idyllic family holidays spent in the Carpathian mountains before the euphemistically-named ‘Actions’ against Jewish people began. At moments of extreme danger, as German search parties move ever closer, he attempts to make sense of his precarious position and displacement from his former life by writing letters to his friends and mother in his notebook – letters which are all the more poignant because it is apparent that they will never be read by the intended recipients. Later, as Mariana becomes increasingly repulsed by the demands of her clients, and Hugo’s ‘earlier life slips far away from him’ because he is no longer able to summons visions of his family, they find comfort in each other’s arms.

This masterly book is strangely uplifting, despite its themes and subject matter. These might have proved unremittingly heavy in the hands of a less accomplished author, but Appelfeld, who is widely regarded as one of Israel’s foremost writers about the Holocaust, deploys a simple, direct, pared-down style which succeeds in leavening Blooms of Darkness with optimism. One minor quibble with the British edition under review concerns the failure to edit a few American English expressions which seem at variance with the period and setting, such as ‘marching in place’ instead of ‘marching on the spot’ and the persistent use throughout of ‘closet’ instead of ‘cupboard’. Fortunately, such vestiges of an earlier edition in English published in the United States in 2010 do not detract from the potency of Appelfeld’s narrative or from his haunting exposition of what being Jewish in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s connoted. Shielded by his parents and then by Mariana from the truth about the onslaught against Jews in Romania and elsewhere, Hugo finally comes to understand the grim secret which has been withheld from him, a realisation conceptualised figuratively by Appelfeld, with characteristic luminosity, as ‘(t)he word “Jew”, … a mysterious term, cut off from time and place, hovering above the earth like a little hunted bird.’

Snowdrops
A. D. Miller
Atlantic Books, Paperback; 273Pages
ISBN: 978 1 84887 453 4

Price: £7.99

Janette Currie

Snowdrops: the badness that is already there, always there and very close, but which you somehow manage not to see. The sins the winter hides, sometimes for ever.

The conceit is this: Nick Platt, a lawyer on the wrong side of thirty is ‘three months away from “the big day” ’ and suddenly compelled to tell his fiancé about past indiscretions, about his time in Moscow and ‘how it ended’. Snowdrops is a pre-wedding bouquet of hitherto unspoken truths.

By the time Nick rescues the enigmatic Masha and her sister Katya from a would-be bag-thief on the Metro, he has been ‘lawyering’ in Moscow for four years and is in the final stages of a five-hundred-million-dollar property deal and involved with a ‘spook’ called the ‘Cossack’. The girls introduce Nick to their aunt, Tatiana, who lives in a sought-after city-centre apartment. They want to help her move to a contemporary flat in the suburbs, one ‘with a dishwasher’. Daily, Nick’s neighbour shares concerns for an absent friend: ‘someone has moved into his apartment’, he complains. Resolutely blinkered to the corruption around him, Nick ‘somehow manage(s) not to see’ what is going on and Miller’s finely controlled, restrained seepage of the three interconnected strands propels the book through disco-pumping night-clubs and drunkenness towards its inevitable ending.

Rightly lauded for providing an authentic, insider’s view of modern Russia, Miller is excellent at using the landscape to evoke mood and underscore his theme.

From above you could see the chaos of entangled plots on the other side of the road, and a couple of tough tethered goats, and the glint of a frozen pond somewhere in the trees. Above them the sun was shining vaguely through the milky November sky, old but strong. In April – between the thaw and the jungly green explosion of summer – or in raw mid-October, I bet the same view would have been barren and depressing. But when we stood there all the bits of old tractors and discarded refrigerators, the shoals of empty vodka bottles and dead animals that tend to litter the Russian countryside were invisible, smothered by the annual oblivion of the snow. The snow let you forget the scars and blemishes, like temporary amnesia for a bad conscience.

It’s hard to decide, though, how to read Nick. At face value he’s complicit in everything he does. Are we supposed to disbelieve him? Structured as a confessional, Nick, or, obviously, Old Nick, is more Robert Wringhim than St. Augustine. However, the moral degradation detailed in his overt, self-justifying narrative lacks the complexity of a novel like The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner where the more the narrator admits he knows the more the reader understands his self-delusion.

The main flaw is the lack of ambiguity in the first-person narration, such as when he admits that he felt, ‘every time I took the Metro, as if I was an extra in some paranoid Donald Sutherland film from the seventies’ and writes that he first imagined Masha as ‘the honey trap in a Cold War thriller’: statements which turn out to be true. His narrative, then, reinforces his perception so that we can only watch as he descends to a personal hell of his own making.

Nevertheless, Snowdrops is a strong debut novel from an established journalist and historian. In moments when Nick lifts his eyes to the wider picture we see that Russia isn’t so foreign after all. As the Cossack tells him, we are all the same: ‘ “Strong and weak, power and no power, money money money. It isn’t because of Russia. This is life. My life, Nicholas, and your life also.” ’ With ambitious scope, contemporary themes and plotting tighter than the densely packed snow-drifts piled along Moscow’s streets, it’s easy to understand why Snowdrops is shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker.