All its places were terrible places

Nicola Barker is a really good stylist; her writing is almost always entirely delicious. I've begun to suspect, however, that this writerly delectation is, not a smokescreen exactly because that would require both a certain level of malice aforethought and Barker having any choice in her talent with words (which I doubt), but that it has, in the past, made up for a lot.

The problem is this: This is the fourth of Barker's books I've read (the previous being Darkmans, Heading Inland, and Five Miles From Outer Hope) and I've noticed something I wish I hadn't noticed - her books are really rather thin on plot. There is plot in all of them, of course, but it is loose, vague, and generally repeated in each (well, the four above) book. It goes something like this: Create several very strange and unique characters, preferably alienated from family/society/friends in some deep way, and then throw them together in unlikely and awkward circumstances and watch what happens.

What happens will be, without fail, hilarious, disturbing, touching, and enjoyable to read about - except that after you've read four, you won't remember any of the characters' names, much of what they did or said, or even in which book they did their doing and saying. If there's an exception, it's Darkmans, but that may primarily be because that was the first Barker novel I read; it would also be, in part, because of the evil, supernatural jester, which is an unusual sort of thing for her.

This is a serious problem, as far as I'm concerned, for a novelist who seems interested in dealing primarily with "human muck"* rather than, say, dazzling philosophical flights of fancy which may or may not be inspired by mind-altering drugs (yes, I am currently reading one of Murakami's "weird" books). If it's the muck you're interested in, Barker, it simply won't do for your pieces of muck to be so interchangeable and ultimately forgettable.

To engage with Wide Open specifically: It was, of course, very well written, but perhaps not quite as well written as the previous three on my Barker list. It was also rather obvious in its thesis statement, if you will. On page 5, we meet the novel's protagonists, Ronny and James, who have come together in the most Barkeresque of ways (James has been spending his time on an overpass waving at passing cars, and Ronny has been driving by him every day for 3 weeks; one day, James is not waving and Ronny pulls over to check if he's alright). Ronny considers James and notices some important details:

Ronny studied him. He seemed very young but his face was not a very young face. It was lined, vertically, and not in the places normal faces creased and wrinkled. It was as though he'd only just woken up from a hard sleep but his face hadn't shaken it, hadn't hurled off its sheets and its blankets yet to get on with the business of living.

He seemed ludicrously pliant and tractable, but singular. He seemed...Ronny shuddered at the thought...he seemed wide, wide open. But you couldn't survive that way. Not in this world. Not for long. Ronny knew it.

In fact he prided himself on being shut right up. Like an oyster. Like a tomb. Like a beach-hut in winter; all bolted, all boarded. Like the bright lips of an old wound. Resolutely sealed.

Aha! What we have as our unifying theme for the misfits we will meet in this novel is the ability, or lack thereof, to clam up and protect oneself and the consequences resulting therefrom. This would be more than fine if Barker, in the midst of all her really good writing, didn't throw in the exact phrase "wide open" every time something crucial occurred. I found this especially irksome because when her writing is obtuse it's not usually obtuse about the emotional repercussions of what's happening (it is, sometimes, obtuse about what is literally happening), so why such clarification would ever be required, I really can't think. Someone didn't trust us to get what she was doing; I hope it wasn't her.

All that said, I mostly really enjoyed Wide Open, but clearly, I need to wait at least a year before I read another of Barker's novels. You probably don't believe me so here's part of a section, seemingly rather innocuous and not related at all to the primary characters introduced above, but which I think may be the best moment in the novel. It's really good; it's excruciating. To me, it epitomizes what Barker can do; I can guarantee that I won't forget this scene, even if I am likely to forget the character who features in it. Why will I forget her? Because how she reacts her isn't a necessary result of everything else we know about her - because we know almost nothing about her.

Said character is Connie, a small sprightly woman who wades into the craziness fray; in this particular passage, she's trying to herd an obviously sick rabbit that's come into the kitchen back out into the yard, rather than either putting it out of its misery or taking it to a vet:

She dropped the fork, hating herself, and grabbed hold of a kitchen broom. She held just the end of it. Slowly, she edged her way around the table. She swept the bristles along, hoping that their approaching swish would comfort the rabbit and not seem too cruelly random when they eventually made contact with it. The rabbit didn't move. It remained close to the Aga, its nose twitching, its eyes bulging. The broom was soon merely a few feet distant, and then simply inches. Connie's hands began shaking. To prod it! And what if it ran towards her instead of away?

But it did not run. It did not jump. The broom touched it. Connie barely felt the weight of the rabbit before it was moving, and not voluntarily, it was swept along, all stiff and still lolling.

She felt ashamed. Past the table she swept it, past the chairs, the wicker basket, the lines of boots, the galoshes, up to the doorway. But she couldn't push it off the step and out into the darkness. No. There was a small metal rim at the lip of the doorway. The broom, the rabbit, came to a halt here.

"Get out," she said. "Get out."

She gave the broom a harder push. But the rabbit was stiff. It was lost in terror and in blackness. It would not move. All its places were terrible places. (p. 254)

What I've quoted reads as though this torturous refusal to help, in one way or another, a small injured beastie is going to go on forever - and the passage itself goes on for much longer than this quotation shows. Connie eventually lifts the rabbit out the door and closes it. She is small and cruel, yet Barker somehow makes it impossible to despise her because Connie knows she's pathetic, and is appalled by her fear and repugnance (at the rabbit, and then at herself for finding the rabbit repugnant), but still unable to respond differently.

I guess what it comes down to is that Barker is brilliant at creating moments, but not as adept at imaging what comes between those moments, which would allow them to make real and lasting sense. But I will still, eventually, read everything she's written because those moments are worth sifting through the fog for.

*David Mitchell mentioned his increasing interest in "human muck" at that talk I attended a few weeks ago, and cited Marilynne Robinson as one of its greatest devotees and practitioners. He did mention where he borrowed the phrase from but I honestly can't remember.

The Sarazens head without New-gate: It's raining so I may as well begin

Well, sweeties, you asked for it: a feature about being a book-seller and book-store owner. Before I start, maybe you'd like an explanation of this new feature's title? I think that's fair. I'm happy to be starting this new feature but as I always imagined I would, I'll be keeping my actual bookstore completely separate from this blog. I like to think of my shop as non-partisan (how otherwise can I reconcile myself to selling V.C. Andrews novels? *shudder*) and as y'all know, one thing Bookphilia.com is not is non-partisan.

I needed a flash pseudonym, but I wanted one that was clearly associated with book-selling, and so I went back to the Renaissance where booksellers were probably much cooler although less clean than I am. Where you could purchase individual books in 16th- and early 17th-century England (well, London anyway) was printed on their frontispieces (I don't know what happens after that - there be dragons). (Goodness, I don't know much do I?)

And so, the title of this feature comes from the location of where you could have purchased Thomas Kyd's fantastically lurid play The Spanish Tragedy (1615 printing) - at The Sarazens head without New-gate. I found a few other frontispieces with cool name options that I considered - especially Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, sold at The spred Eagle in Paules Church-yeard, ouer against the great North doore; and Webster's The White Devil sold at Thomas Archer's shop in Popes head Pallace, neere the Royall Exchange. In the end, however, I decided on The Spanish Tragedy for two reasons: 1) It figured prominently in my dissertation, and 2) It's got a cool engraving on the cover, which will henceforth be the mascot for this feature (although much smaller):


Speaking of tragedy...
I hadn't planned on blogging today, but what better time to present the inaugural post of The Sarazens head than a Friday that's been so rainy that literally only 3 people have even come into the store? How about a Friday during which I had to cancel an online order because the mouth-breathing previous owners of the store listed the ordered book as in "like new" condition when it's actually full of highlighting and inked in annotations?

So, it's not a great day here, but those happen and it's just part of the deal. Wednesday and Thursday of this week, in contrast, were stellar - yesterday especially was stellar because it was warm and sunny out and everyone was feeling happy and hopeful. Indeed, no weenies at all came into the store yesterday, and there are weenies. Regular weenies. Like the guy who comes in twice a week and who blows his nose and drops his snotty tissue on the floor and never buys anything. Or the super well dressed lady who comes in every few weeks and besides knocking books off shelves and not picking them up, tends to sneer at me when I greet her. The romance of the bookstore wears off pretty quickly - it's still retail, after all!

But there are great people too with whom I have fabulous conversations about books. Sometimes there are even cute boys who buy lots of great books. Are these cute reading boys English majors? If they are, I was born at the wrong time. When I was a student, all the boys studying English at my uni were freaks and weirdos; indeed, there were only two cuties ever, and I married one of them.

Like a squirrel collecting nuts in advance of a very long nuclear winter
When we first took over the store, I couldn't stop stock-piling books that I wanted to read. I felt drunk with the thought that I was living in my own personal library that just happened to contain approximately 30,000 books. I greedily piled those books up...and then did what I always do with stock-piled books I own: I ignored them.

I soon realized that this was not sound business practice and so I slowly began putting them back except for books of which we have multiple copies. My rule now is, if I want to read a book from the store I have to begin reading it as soon as I pick it up. So far, I've read I think 4 books from stock, including The Rachel Papers and The Waves, which you've heard about already.

But I also recently finished two other bookstore books: Nicola Barker's Heading Inland and Cecilia Whitford's Japanese Prints. Heading Inland was quite good - good enough that I was so involved that I didn't realize until I was about halfway through that it was a short story collection and not a novel. The story "Wesley" was by far my favourite; I think it's pretty classic Barker (a good thing).

This book was also everything I hoped Barbara Gowdy's stuff would become after the great promise shown in Mister Sandman and We So Seldom Look on Love. Alas, no. Gowdy, instead of maturing in her portrayal of freaks and weirdos, wrote a Hallmark greeting card about alcoholism called The Romantic and I had to break up with her and deny to my friends that we'd ever even dated.

Cecilia Whitford's Japanese Prints is not normally the sort of book I'd pick up (thank you, bookstore) because it's an art book. It taught me a little about the history of wood block print-making and allowed me to look at lots of pretty pictures.

Discovering it was also a sort of perfect bookstore moment: I was helping a customer look for a particular book in the art section when he saw something else and exclaimed "Oh, that looks interesting!" at the same moment I spotted Japanese Prints and said something similar. We stood next to each other looking at our respective finds in the kind of companionable silence you can only really find in a used bookshop. Or so I imagine. Gawd knows, I don't stand in companionable silence next to others when I'm looking to buy new knickers.

Alright, back to work for bookstore worker bee.

Promises broken and an apology to myself

I know, I know, I indicated that I was going to begin reading longer books, and here I've gone and read a book that was just under 200 pages! But right now, my choices are being seriously circumscribed by our 3 most important (because filled with potentially great novels and the like) bookshelves having been moved away from the wall and emptied so that I can paint the dining room.

Anyway, I'm now going to rescind my apology for reading another short tome because what I read was Nicola Barker's Five Miles From Outer Hope and it was totally kick-ass. You may have noticed that I didn't read and blog on this one within 2 days of beginning it. Dear reader, I did something I've gotten out of the habit of doing since I started graduate school: I very slowly (for me) savoured it instead of gobbling it up like I'm starved for books after not having seen even one in 7 years of exile in a desolate, book-free gulag or something.

Barker's writing is so good I want to invoke clichés to talk about it, like "The writing crackles," "The prose is explosive," and "Barker raises the bar for quality contemporary fiction." Dammit, all these things are true and I don't have the vocabulary or patience to try to find news ways of saying them that don't sound like they were designed to go on the back of the book under the shitty back cover copy.

The plot in Five Miles From Outer Hope is, in comparison to the complex web of metaphysical and fantastical craziness Barker created in Darkmans, almost non-existent. But her writing is so good that I frankly wouldn't care if there was no plot at all, if indeed there were negative plot (not sure how that would manifest exactly, but you get my point). This one is not story-free, but has a very simple plot beautifully and hilariously executed so if I were given to rating books on this blog I'd give it a 5/5. I don't rate books here that way, however, so you can forget the previous sentence. You are allowed to remember, however, that I will read another Barker novel as soon as I get my hands on one.

And now for something completely different: Last night, hubby and I went to Indigo because he got one of their gift cards for his birthday. I saw a nice and affordable copy of the second of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries, One Corpse Too Many, and it took every molecule of will power I had not to buy it. It hurt me not to buy it. Indeed, I think I owe myself an apology for unduly depriving myself this way. Le sigh.

The Haruki Murakami Syndrome

I recently lost a read-off with my husband and my "punishment" for being too slow on the read was to buy him a book of his choosing at the Bookmark in Charlottetown.

I didn't think the winner, whomever it turned out to be, would actually find anything at the Bookmark though - for, unlike its Book City-esque counterpart in Halifax, the Bookmark in Charlottetown is disturbingly reminiscent of a craptacular old Coles store.

However, hubby surprised me not only by finding something he wanted at the C'town Bookmark but also by choosing a book I've been coveting (but resisting) ever since it first came out in soft cover: Nicola Barker's Darkmans.

I'd been resisting picking up Darkmans entirely because of length considerations - it's over 800 pages long and I just couldn't foresee having the time for it. But there we were, enjoying our sweet east coast vay-cay, and Brook had just forced me to buy it...

Up until last night, when I started to become uneasy about how Darkmans was going to end, I was absolutely loving this novel. The writing is stupendously good; I haven't been blown away by such show-stoppingly amazing writing in a long time (since I last read David Mitchell, I think) and so I was feeling just stupidly happy to be reading this book.

The plot I thought was really good too - original and revelatory enough to be compelling on the one hand and tantalizingly mysterious on the other. Darkmans is a kind of ghost story/history lesson/character study and Barker provided enough connections to keep me engaged but also curious enough about how precisely those connections worked to keep me on delicious tenterhooks.

But then last night, as I realized things were wrapping up, I felt my hold on those connections becoming increasingly tenuous. And tonight, when I did actually finish it, I was left scratching my head and more than once saying (yes, aloud) "What the f*** just happened? What the...? Hey, wait - what?" (Good thing there was only one distrustful but very discreet bunny around to see me talking to myself this way.)

I honestly have no idea what happened at the end of this book. I feel like Barker's editor should have given her a stern talking to or something. Or gotten her drunk and made her sign a contract indicating she'd revise the conclusion to ensure it actually makes sense. But of course, the editor did not do either of these things.

Barker is, I think, displaying all the symptoms of what I'm going to call the Haruki Murakami Syndrome - like Murakami, Barker has mad writing skills and mind-blowing plot ideas that no one can match. Like Murakami, Barker thinks large - there's a hell of a lot going on in this book. Like Murakami, people (editors, award-givers, professional reviewers) think that there is some kind of awesome amazingness hidden in the confusion and that even if they can't figure it out (or maybe because they can't figure it out), other people will - or will take their word for it that the book is brilliant from beginning to end. Like Murakami, Barker, I suspect, is successful enough now that she can get away with anything and rather than mess with his or her meal ticket, her editor just lets her get away with endings that must be defined as pure unadulterated mush (just like the conclusion of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore).

In spite of my disappointment with the conclusion to Darkmans, I'm definitely going to read more of Barker's stuff - writing this good demands more chances.