Author: paleoutlaw

Jon Mcgregor: This Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone like You

1. Jon McGregor is  a young (36), highly thought of British writer, author of three successful and critically acclaimed novels, the first of which, “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things” was long listed for the Booker Prize before winning the Betty Trask and a Somerset Maugham Award.
2. This is his first short story collection. Most of the 30 have been published before. “Wires” was the runner up for the 2011 BBC National Short Story Award; “ If It Keeps on Raining” was runner up in 2010; an early version of “In Winter, the Sky” appeared in Granta magazine in 2002, “Which reminded her, Later” in Granta in 2007.
3. In April 2010, interestingly, he wrote a lengthy piece, “A Long Way Back”, for the Guardian on a TV film about a trip back to Ireland by a group of elderly homeless Irish emigrants  resident in Nottingham.
4. The stories vary widely in length from thirty pages to one line. The unifying element is Lincolnshire, one of England’s largest counties,  located on the east coast,  rural, agricultural and sparsely populated. It’s  quite flat topography and proneness  to flooding  present some distinctive  landscapes and skyscapes.
5. Some of the stories reflect  the title, i.e. something unusual or unexpected happening to ordinary people. Others concern or involve people who are , in some way, not  ordinary. There are examples of eccentricity, alienation, violence (actual and hinted at), helplessness and regret. Flooding occurs as a theme in several stories, both the threat and the result. Three stories in particular stand apart from the rest, in language and tone, either directly or indirectly pointing  to a terrible event , a war or occurrence of apocalyptic magnitude.
6.  Well worth looking at also are two pieces on You Tube, one featuring an interview with the author, the other  him reading  one of the gems in the book, “We were Just Driving Around.” His website is also quite entertaining and his piece on the book  features some interactive elements (maps, photos of the stories’ locations).

Some Analysis and Comments

1.  The shortest story, “Fleeing Complexity” comprises one line: “The fire spread quicker than the little bastard was expecting.” Per the author, it is about a boy setting fire to a barn, and hints at unforeseen and possibly tragic consequences. Understating, or just hinting at events never touched on  characterises a number of the stories.
2. “Wires” has been the subject of much critical acclaim. A sugar beet crashes through the windscreen of a young woman’s car on the motorway. She reaches the hard shoulder where two apparent Good Samaritan motorists in a battered blue van tell her what a narrow escape she has had and tell her they have phoned the police. She is persuaded to leave the car and cross the barrier and climb the embankment (“it’s safer”). While waiting she broods on her relationship with her boyfriend, finally deciding to end it and moves to retrieve her phone from the car. But her arm is held tight by one of the two men, while the other waits, looking tense, beside some nearby trees. The sense of menace is palpable.
3. “If It keeps on Raining” is also highly regarded. An eccentric lives on a river bank. He is obsessed with the prospect of flooding, whether from the river  after rain or after a biblical deluge which never stops. He has survivalist aspirations and is building a tree house and plans a raft in preparation for the coming catastrophe. He is the laughing stock of the boat club, at the recollection of which he shows flashes of an inner brooding violence. But he remains convinced in his belief of what is coming. A much shorter story in the collection, “The Cleaning,” deals with the practical aspect of attempting to clean up after a major flood.
4. “In Winter The Sky” – my personal favourite – has been rewritten for the book. A young farmer, decades before, accidentally knocked down and killed a pedestrian late at night. He buried the body, which is not found for years. After it is discovered, he has a conversation with his wife. He tells her that “They needed to bring things out into the open and deal with the consequences and stop trying to hide what it was doing to them both.”

Thus the narrative, which occupies the left hand pages of the story. But the facing pages consist of poems – her poems – with language scored out (final drafts  or finished). As well as presenting highly evocative and haunting images of  rural Lincolnshire, they flesh out the story. They form a continuous whole with phrases lifted from or associated with the facing narrative. We learn that he blames her – it would not have happened had he not been returning from a date with  her – that  they are haunted by his memory of the man’s arms lifted skyward when he was hit, that the event has corroded their relationship.

The language of the  poems merits mention. It is strong, lyrical, describing the sky, seriatim, in  different seasons, the landscape, the topography, some waterway names, the effects of flooding (again the flood theme), and the sky’s aspect during different times of the day. The final image is of “the great ship of Ely Cathedral just visible across the water.”

1. “Which reminded her, Later”, and its associated story, “Years of This, Now” tell of a vicar’s wife, frustrated in her own career and stuck with the downside of her husband’s job (vocation). A sponging house “guest” marks a type of watershed. When, in the second story, the vicar has suffered a  major stroke, the wife, with the prospect before her of decades as a carer, decides – she is off.
2. Several stories feature people who are not ordinary. A woman seeks her father’s coat in a lost property office, but there is something strange about her, in “She was looking for this Coat”. An oddball has a phobia about finding a chick in an egg in the story of the same name. It eventually costs him his marriage. In “French Tea” another eccentric  sits in a café babbling senselessly about how to make, or not make, a good cup of tea.
3. Some stories feature bereavement, actual and threatened. “That colour” concerns someone coming to terms with his partner’s creeping Alzheimers. In “Airshow” a widowed grandfather, coming from the funeral, is riven and distracted by his loss. In ”The Singing” a bereaved woman is coming to terms with the hollow emptiness of life, “with so many things to be done and no one now to do them for.” In “Vessel “ a newly widowed woman faces unwanted and disturbing approaches from a male acquaintance. In the grimly repetitive “The Remains” a man is haunted by the failure to locate the long missing body of his loved one, wife, partner or daughter. Her remains “have yet to be found”.
4. Loneliness is explored, passim.  In “Close” a spinster has a near miss with romance on holiday in Japan –or was it all just in the mind? In “Looking up Vagina” a lonely schoolboy, who doesn’t fit in and is bullied in consequence, is perceptive enough to realise (or deluded enough to fantasize)that his destiny is above and beyond his yobbish schoolmates. In “New York” the lonely and alienated existence of migrant workers everywhere is touched on through an account of migrant agricultural labourers from Eastern Europe– a current feature in rural England – awaiting collection after work.
5. Violence, in different manifestations, is another recurring theme. “Keeping Watch over the Sheep” features an estranged father trying to access the nativity play featuring his young daughter. He is a known and marked man. Led away in handcuffs, he is unreconciled to reality. He cannot understand why his daughter is reduced to tears by his antics or where his marriage went wrong, though he does concede that “breaking things had never helped.”
6. In “Dig a Hole” – a two paragraph story – there has beenviolence and a man has been hurt. In “Thoughtful”, another two paragraph story, there is violence aggravated by drink. In “What happened to Mr Davison”, something serious, perhaps tragic, has happened to a landowner after four people took the law into their own hands; a mechanical digger is involved. While chastened by the outcome, the four do not regret their original action.
7. “We Wave and Call” encapsulates the book’s title. Truly this isn’t the sort of thing that happens to someone like the person featured. A youth is on holiday, possibly in Croatia, with friends, and is swimming and snorkelling. His friends want to leave, but he is enjoying the warm sea, just floating, and tells them he will catch up in a minute. He continues to soak up the sun lazily. Then he realises time has passed, and sets out for shore. But the current has carried him. It is much further than he thought. He begins to panic, but reassures himself that he can make it and thinks about his friends, the apartment, drinking beer, and how he will describe his close shave to those back in England. Meanwhile , and despite his efforts, he is drifting farther away, towards the next bay; “sometimes it happens like this.”
8. “I’ll buy you a Shovel” sees two ex-cons, casually employed, plot and carry out a minor theft  on the fringe of a wedding party. One of the longest stories in the book, we are introduced to several of the pair’s traits and life history, with minor acts of physical violence carried out on each other, fuelled by drink. An undertone of sexual menace obtains (one at least appears a sexual predator). The action takes place over a week in which RAF jets are repeatedly using the nearby sands for bombing practice, growing in intensity, with,  in consequence, the two judging the big one to be imminent.
9. Three stories are markedly different from the rest. Do they reflect the author’s political views? They  concern war or civil strife or preparations for or the aftermath of an apocalyptic event of some sort. There have already been hints elsewhere , as in  “Shovel”  “I remember there was a hill”, a very short story, sets the scene. A small village seems deserted, devoid of life, as if in the wake of a neutron bomb. The public phone rings. It is answered. Shortly afterwards two planes fly over. An explosion is heard, then silence.
10. “The Last Ditch” is difficult to read. It is very much tongue-in cheek and is not, properly speaking, a story at all. It is, rather, couched as a briefing note for an in-house meeting  of military/intelligence officials tasked with  planning for  self-sustaining mini communities to withstand/survive  major societal breakdown. The note goes into considerable and quite boring detail regarding defences, natural and otherwise, food, waste disposal, energy, medicines, reserves and weaponry.

There are sections also on the type of outside threat such a community could  anticipate as well as one entitled, delicately “Managed Exit”, i.e. the liquidation, voluntary or otherwise, of the community  to avoid capture, enslavement,  torture, rape and extraction of vital information. “Any proposed method must be a) quick, b)low pain/distress where possible, c) non-rescindable, d) enforceable/enactable by others if req.” An addendum makes clear that the controller of the briefing note’s  author is sceptical of much of its content, particularly the last piece,  while taking on board much of the basic intelligence information provided.

The cause of societal breakdown is left unsaid but McGregor points obliquely at an energy supply crisis or some outcome of acute global warming. It is sobering to reflect that someone, somewhere, in the real world may be working on plans along these lines.

1. In the same vein, but an altogether much stronger piece is “Supplementary Notes to the Testimony.” Here Armageddon of some form has taken place, with Britain referred to as “the former UK” and  tracts of  south east England depopulated. Large numbers of British refugees have been living on the Continent, some, ironically – and obviously intentionally placed by the author – in Sangatte, including the “Appellants” who are giving the testimony. After five years in Sangatte they spent eight or nine years in “ a series of displaced persons camps in the Netherlands” before being expelled as “ the draft peace agreement was in force.” The “Notes” – and they are just that – suggest some of the means and routes for refugees to return to the Lincolnshire area, an area much changed in the aftermath of events.
2. The last piece in the book is entitled “Memorial Stone”. It consists solely of lists of place names, presumably in Lincolnshire, grouped by ending. Thus we have places ending in “well”, “ham”, “Bank”, “Steeping”, “ton”, “field”, “worth” grouped. These are followed by “Moore”, “Marsh”, “by”, “try”, “thorpe”, “gate”, “dyke”, “Leake”, “beck”, ”brook”, “bridge”, “ford”, “Ferry”. There is then a group of place names containing the name of a saint; the final two sections are of places ending in “End” and some others. The piece seems designed to be read aloud – there is an attraction to hearing the names read out. I am reminded a little of Seamus Heaney’s “Weather Forecast” poem.
3. Finally, a little gem. “We Were Just Driving Around.” (The clip of the author reading the story is available on You Tube.) A car with young people is driving around,  just driving around. Josh, the driver, is romancing about his plans for a shop making gourmet snacks. He gets slightly carried away trying to answer Tom’s practical objections to locating a business in a rural area (customer base, etc.). The music is loud; his voice is loud. They jolt over a small bridge, driving fast. Josh has a high pitched laugh and the decibel level in the car goes up.  Amanda asks Josh to slow down a bit. “He turned round to ask what she’d said so that must have been how come he never saw the corner.”

Assessment

1. There is a certain organic unity about the book, diverse as the stories are. It should sell on the quality of the stories alone. Jon McGregor is clearly a very talented young writer about  whom we will hear much more  He has an older and wiser head on his shoulders than his years. His prose, his eye, his ear are all good. This book will cement his reputation.
2. A good read? Certainly. Enjoyable? Definitely. A page turner?  Certainly the reader’s interest is held. Would I buy it? Yes indeed.

S.F.

23/2

YANKEE DOODLES

Dennis Kennedy, former deputy editor and long-time columnist with the Irish Times, was one of fifteen  journalists chosen to visit the USA in 1963, courtesy of the World Press Institute in Minnesota . Almost 50 years later he has published his reminiscences.

The one year fellowship, designed to increase awareness of the USA among foreign journalists, included a period at Macalester College in Minnesota, a spell working for the Newark News, an extended tour of 20 states and ended with the 1964 Republican Convention which nominated Barry  Goldwater.

The group’s well-connected hosts  also provided icing on the cake  in  the form of corporate access at a high level, including meetings and briefings with major figures from the Sixties, including the owner and founder of Time Magazine (Henry Luce) and Readers’ Digest,  Senators Fulbright and McCarthy, Willy Brandt (then Mayor of Cold War hot spot West Berlin)and Billy Graham.  Governor Wallace of Alabama, segregationist hero,  reminisced  to the Japanese journalist in the group about his part in the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.

It was a memorable, indeed seminal  year. When he arrived in August, JFK was in the White House  and Martin Luther King had just made his famous “I have a dream” speech. Then came the bombshell of Dallas. Amazingly, their hosts got  the group  to Washington, flown on 3 M’s corporate plane, into the White House to view the President’s coffin and to witness the funeral, and even into the empty Oval Office.  Looking back, the author remarks not only on the assassination but on the smooth transfer of power and the first months of the new President, LBJ, who proved far more than the journeyman politician he had appeared.

The book contains a number of  vignettes covering the main events and places visited by Dennis, some amusing, some amazing, and offers a short time capsule of  the USA before  Civil Rights and Vietnam. In Newark he was house guest of  James Joyce and Joyce Joyce, proud Irish Americans. Particularly striking is his account of the US South and the “profoundly shocking” blinkered attitudes on race he encountered among some of the whites he met –many of whom denied there was any racial problem whatever in the South.  The world he describes, including a “Whites Only” municipal drinking fountain in Montgomery,  was  portrayed vividly recently in the film “The Help.”

A different era, certainly. All fifteen journalists were male, unthinkable today. By the end, the USA, though English speaking,  had become for the author “a foreign country with which I had a unique bond.” A sequel, offering comparison based on a return visit today, would  be fascinating.

A gentle book by a gentleman.

July 2012

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Volume 4  The Passage of Power, by Robert Caro

The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s monumental work  “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” is above all the story of the relationship between Johnson and the Kennedys. The book covers the years from 1958 to the end of 1963 and includes Johnson’s 1960 Presidential bid, his acceptance of and unhappy tenure in the Vice Presidency under JFK  and his sudden elevation to the position he lusted after, courtesy of an assassin’s bullets. There is also an extended coda on the first, astonishing, seven weeks of  his presidency.

Lyndon Johnson will  be remembered chiefly for the disastrous war in Vietnam and for succeeding the assassinated President Kennedy. The photo of him being sworn in on Air Force One with Jackie Kennedy  beside him wearing the suit stained with her husband’s blood, is one of the images of the 20^th Century.

Yet there was much more to Johnson.  Arguably, without the monumental civil rights legislation which Johnson, a Southerner,  forced through Congress in 1964, Barack Obama would not now be President. He set up  Medicare, a social landmark, and set out to create what he termed the “Great Society”, involving the eradication of poverty in the USA. This idea foundered on the failure and the cost of Vietnam and he left office a broken man.  Though personally flawed, he remains a  significant figure in US politics.

The destinies of Johnson and the Kennedys became inextricably mixed from 1960 on, though  Johnson and Bobby had actually clashed as early as 1953 and loathed each other. This dislike morphed into lifelong enmity after Bobby’s strenuous attempts to prevent Johnson accepting  JFK’s surprise offer of running mate at the 1960 Democratic convention.

For Johnson, defeated by Kennedy for the nomination,  the decision to accept seemed a win-win one.  While he knew that the Vice Presidency would be minor compared to his role as Senate Majority Leader,  considered by many to be the second most powerful in the USA after the President, he entertained the illusion, wrongly, that he would be able to carve out a meaningful role  as Vice President.  Cynically, he also knew that no southerner had been elected President since 1848 and was well aware of the odds of a Vice President succeeding,  given that one in four US Presidents since Lincoln had died in office or been assassinated!

For the Kennedys also the marriage of convenience offered much.   Caro suggests that JFK never wavered in wanting Johnson, knowing Texas’ 24 electoral votes would be crucial. In retrospect it is doubtful whether Kennedy could have won without Johnson. He was certainly instrumental in carrying Texas (amid suspicions of vote fraud)  and several other key southern states, and helped neutralise much anti – Catholic sentiment.  Bobby’s attempts to keep Johnson off the ticket remain puzzling – the northern Democratic party bosses could live with him – and Caro places this as the origin of one of the great political blood feuds of the century.  Johnson carried his hatred of Bobby  to the grave, hectoring interviewers and well-wishers in his retirement. The feeling was reciprocated.

Johnson endured  years of frustration and powerlessness as Vice President. Derided by the Kennedys and their  White House team ( who mockingly  dubbed him Rufus Cornpone), he was effectively excluded from any  decision making and was reduced to attempting to ingratiate himself by sending gifts to the President, including cattle from his farm and a pony for Caroline. Such, of course, had traditionally been the lot of the Vice President, but Johnson bore the slights badly.

In the defining moment of  the Kennedy Presidency before Dallas – the Cuba Crisis –  Johnson, as a member of the National Security Council, was party to much of the deliberations but initially contributed little. As the Crisis developed, with Bobby insisting on restraint and seeking a diplomatic solution, Johnson’s hawkish views, and his ability to persuade and cajole others, particularly when  the Kennedys were not present, became more pronounced. The Crisis was resolved peacefully and Johnson’s views ignored. Afterwards President Kennedy named three men whom he would  be happy to see succeed him as President; Johnson was not among them.

Then came Dallas, which, with its aftermath,  comprises half the book. By then Johnson was almost an irrelevance; rumours circulated that  he would be dropped from the ticket in 1964. The book has little new to add beyond detailing how rapidly, ruthlessly and  comprehensively Johnson took over. There was the immediate, brutal, phone call to Bobby, the insistence on taking the oath of office before leaving Dallas and that Jackie be beside him when he was sworn in. The domineering  master of the Senate, absent for three years, was back suddenly in a new role. Bobby Kennedy was marginalised malevolently. Caro spares no detail.

Over the next seven weeks there followed the elaboration of  a strategy to unblock Congressional opposition to Kennedy’s reform legislation, stalled and buried deep in Committees. Johnson cleverly used the tactic of JFK’s martyrdom to push matters, side-lining  and silencing Bobby as he did so.  Cautioned about moving too quickly on Civil Rights and other reforms, described to him by his fellow southern advisers  as lost causes, Johnson snarled “What the hell’s the Presidency for?”  Caro describes this as his finest hour. Bobby’s assessment of him was “formidable but flawed, powerful but dangerous”. The years to come bore that out.  Over Vietnam, with no one to rein him in, the outcome was disaster.

A superb, standalone study.

IN THE DARKNESS

Karin Fossum , sometimes called the “ Norwegian Queen of Crime,” is one of Scandinavia’s foremost  crime writers. Her  Inspector Konrad Sejer series first appeared in 1995 and  now runs to ten. Publication in English began in 2002 with “Don’t Look Back”, chronologically second, and now at last we have the book that first introduced Sejer.

Fossum is different.  A published poet at 20, she has worked as a nurse and in drug rehabilitation, and is noted for her empathy with the perpetrators as well as the victims of crime. Her books are thought provoking and often explore a  particular theme. Here, for example she examines the notion of prostitution as a career choice. Her style is understated and deceptively simple but compelling.

She tends to base her stories in small rural communities rather than the big city and the crimes are, relatively, uncomplicated but often with unforeseen consequences and a surprise twist in the end. She views many of those involved as ordinary people pushed over the edge.

July 2012

Her detectives play somewhat of a subsidiary role, with little focus on their private lives and thoughts except in so far as they advance the plot. In Sejer there is none of the brooding male detective encountered in  Nesbo or Mankel, or closer to home.  Indeed Fossum has said of Sejer that he is not intended to be a major character but is “in the book because he has a job to do.”

Originally entitled “Eva’s Eyes”, most of the book is told through the  eyes of an artist, Eva Magnus. Walking by the river with her daughter they see a body floating to the surface. He is identified as a man missing for months, throughout the Norwegian winter, for whom the trail has gone cold. He went missing around the same time as the murder  of a prostitute, still unsolved, but efforts to link the two have proved fruitless.

Following a break Sejer finds the common thread and begins to put the pieces together. For all her dismissiveness of him, he emerges in these pages as formidable and worldly-wise.

PHANTOM

Harry Hole is back, a detective in the classic hard boiled mode, world weary, flawed,  but with a passion for justice. Harry is also Norwegian, and his creator, Jo Nesbo, stakes a claim to being the  best crime writer to emerge from Scandinavia. The comparisons are with Henning Mankel and Wallender rather than Stieg Larsson. The only tattoos in evidence in this, the ninth in the Harry Hole series, are those on the Russian criminals Harry encounters.

Jo Nesbo is himself an interesting character. A promising footballer, he played with the current Norwegian champions Molde before  his dreams of playing for Spurs were shattered  together  with his cruciate ligaments. After graduation, he became a stockbroker and financial analyst and along the way founded a successful rock band, Di Derre. Burn out, and a trip to Australia prompted a lifestyle change and the first Harry Hole novel appeared in 1997 (the O is pronounced like the U in Una). His reputation has grown with each book.  The last, The Leopard, was a best seller here and  in the UK and another (The Snowman) is being made into a film directed by Martin Scorsese.

In Phantom , Harry has returned to Oslo after three years in Hong Kong. His alcoholism has been tamed and he is still the formidable dogged investigator of old. No longer a policeman, he is back to investigate a case already closed, that of a junkie killed by another. He reignites his old relationship with the woman of his life and her son, for whom he was the surrogate father. He plunges into the other Oslo, an underworld of drugs and crime, a marked contrast to the city’s prosperous public face.  On the way we get  insights into how the modern drug  supply network operates including a classic account of smuggling by air.

There is a fresh version of heroin on the street – violin – and the addicts are queuing  up for their  fix. It is synthetic, highly potent, and in short supply, controlled by a mysterious new figure on the local scene – “the Man from Dubai.” His dealers wear trademark Arsenal shirts, his enforcers are Russian, his philosophy is simple. You mess with him – you die.  Meanwhile the authorities  are preening themselves over an apparent clean-up of Oslo, with a decline in  drug deaths and a rise in successful police busts of drug pushers. Throw in sex, hints of police and official corruption and you have all the ingredients for a page turner.

As the book progresses, Harry’s demons resurface. His Achilles heel remains drink and “will he won’t he” is a subtext for much of the book, marked also by his encounters with a strange  priest­- like figure, complete with clerical collar, who shares the same flop house hotel Harry uses as a base. But, as the body count mounts and Harry gets close to the truth and to the criminal mastermind there are unpalatable realities to be confronted and faced down. Another winner for Nesbo.

March 2012