thus bad begins (marias, tr margaret jull costa)

 After finishing Marias’ novel, the third of his I have now read, I sought out some commentary, mostly Anglo-Saxon. There was praise, but there was also criticism. Notably from McCrum in the Guardian, who wrote: “The problem is simple: Thus Bad Begins is far too long. Vanity is the thing that kills successful writers and too much of Marías’s 14th novel reads like a self-conscious parody of earlier work. It is, as Hamlet might say, a bad case of “words, words, words”. So: countless elegant, and serpentine, sentences, sinuous meditative passages mixed with provocative paradoxes, but not enough substance.”

I quote McCrum in order to open up some kind of dialectic between Anglo-Saxon literary trends and, let us say, Hispanic literary trends. Because., and one hopes Marias might agree, it is precisely the words, words, words which lend Thus Bad Begins its remarkable power. The narrative as such is banal, even melodramatic, as the author himself suggests. Literature is made up of banal stories, which are little more than the warp and woof of everyday gossip. A man is cruel to his wife. His wife is unfaithful. Another man, a confidant of the husband, sleeps with the wife. There is nothing new under the sun (or as Marias prefers, beneath the light of the moon). What distinguishes this tawdry story, is the author’s capacity to extort shards of moonlight, which shine through his purple prose, and which reveal that the reason the story has some bearing in his hands is because it tells us something about the banality and the exceptionality of our own lives.

As such McCrum’s vapid criticism seems to gloss over at least one of the most brilliant passages I can recall reading. One where Marias talks about the moon and rumour and Shakespeare. His narrator, whose shallowness as a character within the story is beautifully shadowed by his nagging wisdom as a narrator, recounting the story twenty years later, succeeds in elevating this banal tale to another level altogether. Only, and here’s the rub, it isn’t quite so banal, because this is also a tale about evil, about vile acts, and how we compartmentalise our lives and learn to accept this evil, letting it seep into our everyday normality, even accepting that this evil should be rewarded, both in financial and affective forms. Setting the story in 1980, shortly aft4r the end of Franco’s dictatorship, Marias’ tale highlights the way that those who profited and indeed were permitted to indulge their vices under Franco’s regime were never brought to justice, were never forced to come to terms with their actions. Society turned a blind eye (Muriel, the film producer at the heart of the story, is literally one-eyed), and the perpetrators found a way to carry on doing their thing. The relevance of this scenario echoes today in the country where I am writing; and in the articles upon the release of the novel in the USA, many noted that it came out just as Trump was about to ascend to the presidency. In a world of Epstein and Trump and Manini Rios and Bolsonaro, it’s not just the monsters that need to be taken into account, it’s all those who benefitted from society’s’ reluctance to look evil in the face, to allow it to “get away with it”.

There are other layers of subtlety to the novel. Notably in the way it treats Muriel’s misogyny towards his wife, Beatriz, a misogyny which leads to tragedy. Marias must be aware that this will alienate his female readership. The narrator, De Vere’s, lackadaisical criticism of his boss’ misogyny will also be held against him, not to mention his actions. As such, Marias would appear to be seeking to vilify a whole generation, using a stiletto rather than an axe. De Vere pardons and even effectively condones Muriel’s cruelty, just as Muriel pardons and effectively condones Van Vechten’s vice. The tendrils of fascism reach out and corrupt everything, even the country’s finest sons. It’s a cold-eyed vision, one which is stitched into an Ellroy-ian interperation of power, offered by the remarkable sub-plot of the real life US producer Harry Dean Towers and his relationship with actors such as Herbert Lom and Jack Palance. For anyone of my generation, the extended scene with Herbert Lom is one of the most amusing. unlikely but ultimately plausible scenes you will ever read.

Marias’ novel is not bite-sized. It is vast, sweeping, ambitious. It is composed of a glory of words, words which rush up against the reader like the relentless tide. Words which have the fluency and power of the tide. Thus Bad Begins is a remarkable achievement, a devastating vision of the sweeping infiltration of vile deeds and rumour into the warp and woof of civil society. 

among the lost (emiliano monge)

Perhaps it is easiest to talk about this novel in terms of references. The novel itself quotes Dante’s Inferno, including passages from the poem in italics. The conceit here is the passage of the damned. Dante chronicled a journey through the circles of hell. Monge’s tragic pilgrims are Central Americans, trying to find a passage from their cursed lands to the Eden of the USA. However, they find themselves caught in the brutal trap of Mexico, where they are sold into slavery, or murdered. This summons up the spirit of Cormac McCarthy, another quasi religious writer who saw in the lands south of the Rio Grande a medieval fresco of good versus evil. It is the evil whose story Monge tells. His story is presented through the eyes of the people smugglers, those who treat the pilgrims as cattle to be milched and ultimately butchered. The protagonists are a doomed couple, themselves victims turned oppressors, abused by a trafficking ring run by a cruel, immoral priest. The narrative seeks and perhaps succeeds in engendering sympathy for its unlikely anti-heroes, who find themselves, just like the cargo they traffic, unable to fend off their violent fate. Which perhaps summons up a final point of reference, which is Milton, the poet who placed Satan at the heart of Paradise Lost. 

I confess to having found this mannered novel somewhat discomforting, which is presumably the intention. There is something about the literariness of its tone and ambition which sits awkwardly with the untold stories contained within its pages. Victims remain nameless. Their presence little more than background noise in Monge’s dystopian tableau. They are the bizarre figures in Bosch’s vision of hell, struggling to escape the frame, forever trapped in their anonymity.

the hatred of poetry (ben lerner)

Lerner’s slimline elegant dissection of the problematics of both writing and reading poetry can be devoured in one sitting. Essentially, of course, The Hatred of Poetry is a love letter to poetry. Lerner’s neo-Platonic thesis is that all poetry is measured against an archetypal and fictional idea of ‘poetry’ to which the poet can aspire but never reach. “Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry…” As someone who struggles with the act of reading poetry for altogether different reasons, reasons wrapped up in the relentlessness of modern life, the presence of so much else that needs reading, the lack of space for poetry, (utopian or otherwise), I felt as though there were many aspects of the poetry debate, and the decline of poetry (If such a thing exists) that Lerner skirts around.  Even if the universal Whitmanesque poet appeared (a possibility he challenges), would anyone actually read him/her? How universal can a marginal sport be? The sense of academics shouting at each other in empty rooms perhaps permeates the text; nevertheless it is an engaging, nimble-footed read. Even if it left me wondering whether I shouldn’t have dedicated the time I spent reading the book in reading some actual bloody poetry…

the spark that lit the revolution (robert henderson)

Henderson provides a dogged account of Lenin’s years in London, in the course of which he provides a great overview of the strange half-life of the Russian revolutionary movement. Reading about these insular figures, who had very little interaction with local culture, be it in London, Paris or Geneva, it seems astonishing that they would change the world beyond recognition. The accident of the Russian Revolution or the Marxist inevitability? It’s hard to imagine who might be their contemporary equivalents, or imagine a society which is any way developed or contained within the geopolitics of the modern world succumbing to the kind of revolutionary zeal of Lenin and his contemporaries. Who might now  be sitting in the British Library, seeking to bring about the downfall of political structures as we know it?  

the fallen (carlos manuel álvarez)

 The realities of Cuba, as this blog has noted before, are difficult to decipher. Manuel’s elegant novella tells the story of a family coping with the harsh end of the revolution. Armando, the father, is an honourable son of the revolution who runs a hotel and tries to do so without being corrupt. It doesn’t help that his daughter, Maria, who also works in the hotel, has a small smuggling gig going on. Or that his wife, Mariana, is suffering from epilepsy brought on in the wake of her cancer treatment. Meanwhile, their son is in the barracks, doing his national service. The novel is constructed from five chapters within which each family member has their own section. Assembling the narrative in this mosaic style, Manuel puts together a desperate portrait of a revolution which is eating itself. Out on the edges, events have taken a decidedly Soviet turn, society controlled by petty corruption and secret police. The idealism has long gone, and in its place is a claustrophobic struggle to make ends meet and stay onside. The Fallen makes an effective companion piece to the Havana based Miguel Rey’s Habitat. Dreams of the the twentieth century foundering on the rocks of the twenty first.  

girl, woman, other (bernadine evaristo)

The novel opens at the National Theatre, where Amma is about to have her play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey staged. This is such an engaging idea. It sets up the requisite skewering of the system, one which, as has been much noted over recent weeks, retains its historical prejudices, for all the lip-service paid to change and ‘inclusion’. No wonder people are excited by Evaristo’s novel, which appears to hone in on the pressure points of contemporary London life. Race, gender, ambition all cooking up together in an of-the-moment novel which resonates just as strongly as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, back in the eighties. However, rather like Wolfe’s novel, Girl, Woman, Other, doesn’t quite succeed in skewering the apparent targets. Instead it becomes a gentle, affectionate collection of portraits of various characters whose lives barely overlap. Twelve women have a chapter each, which is supposed to capture their lives, loves, hopes and fears These women are diverse, of different social, racial and intellectual heritages. However, this is not a structure that lends itself to a profound investigation of their lives. Instead we are offered snapshots of contemporary society. Another novel which might be a point of reference is Jonathan Coe’s Brexit fable, Middle England. Similarly to Coe’s book, it feels as though the novel struggles to get beneath the surface of the characters and the issues it broaches. The reader, understanding the structural form of the novel, knows they will be moving on shortly, that their engagement with these characters will never be expected to be overly profound. As such it almost feels at times as though it is bolstering a system as much as questioning it. A perfect candidate for the Booker Prize, one which allows middle class England to be tourists in the more marginal corners of its empire, without really compelling the reader to feel the need to call for any kind of radical change. Amma’s play goes on at the National and it’s a success. Evaristo’s novel is feted. Things can’t be that bad, can they, if the greatest controversy is whether it should have won the prize outright or not? Woman, Girl, Other is an enjoyable read, a welcome window into underrepresented corners of modern UK, but it’s frothiness, which makes it bestseller material, also restricts its potency. 

don’t look at me like that (diana athill)

Athill’s novel has that quality of feeling eminently autobiographical, without being autobiographical. We know this from the mismatching dates of birth of the protagonist, Meg Bailey, who is 27 when the Suez crisis occurs, and Athill herself, born in 1917. This then begs the question, what is the quality which lends the book this sense of absolute authenticity, which in turn we are inclined to describe as autobiographical? Don’t Look at Me Like That is a relatively slight book, which spans ten years or so. A coming of age story, at the forefront of the narrative is Meg’s affair with Dick, the husband of her best friend, Roxane. Apart from the fact that the author makes her protagonist the betrayer, rather than the betrayed, there’s nothing radical about the subject matter. It’s domestic, kitchen sink, and the milieu of Britain in the fifties, feels of a piece with this. Post-war London is just getting going again, a city where a young woman can carve out a career for herself if she’s resourceful or lucky, a world of bedsits and rented rooms, of shared bottles of wine at the kitchen table, of turbulent, over-intense relationships crying out for air. What marks the novel out, however, is not the description of place or time, acute those these are. It’s the singular modernity of Athill’s heroine. In two senses. On the one hand, in the sense that it’s rare to see the travails and challenges of being a woman seeking to find a place in the world dissected with such clarity. On the other, in Meg’s psychological honesty, transparency. Meg comes to realise that she is attractive, and she also comes to realise that her attractiveness is a tool she can employ, as well as being a burden she needs to carry. Athill traces the entire journey of this young woman’s evolution, with such precision that at times it’s hard not to feel that this is the voice of the author herself speaking. Pinpointing those moments of awareness, such as when she forces herself to cause a scene with Jamil, the Egyptian lodger who is besotted with her, discovering in the process her capacity to be an active rather than a passive protagonist. Meg’s honesty and clarity regarding sex, both the way in which it was viewed by an adolescent girl (as something vaguely unpleasant, a bridge to be crossed) and something she struggled subsequently to enjoy, in spite of various one night stands, also feels revelatory. You don’t get Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather or Rosamond Lehmann tackling this risky topic with such sangfroid. As such, Don’t Look at me Like That feels ahead of its time. As though literature is a progressive event, one that constantly seeks to address the simple issue of living with greater and greater honesty; in that context, Athill’s novel is another step on that journey, one which stretches into the unknown future. 

alpha city (rowland atkinson)

Alpha City is a dissection of London’s growth as a haven for the über-wealthy over the course of the past decade. It casts a cold eye over the property boom and the rise in luxury goods. More than anything, however, the author seeks to emphasise how a surge in consumption within the city actually does very little for the majority of its citizens. Wealth remains trapped in select bubbles. If anything, the insulation of wealth from the day-to-day running of the city means that those with most power feel little need to help develop civic space. Libraries are shut, One-O-Clock clubs are nothing more than inconveniences taking up valuable real-estate, as indeed is any use of space for the public rather than the private good. The book shows how the show-homes and prime real estate are in fact little more than piggy banks for the rich, a way of securing capital. Whilst everything Atkinson says rings true and hits home to the sympathetic reader, there is a slight sense of preaching to the converted. The book might have benefitted from presenting the counter arguments which would be espoused by the likes of Johnson, Hannan and other sundry fanatics of Brexit, in order to bring them down. The current political drift in the UK is to say that the arrival of foreign wealth only confirms London (and, supposedly, the UK’s) importance in the world and justifies the madcap plans that are being instigated. It’s easy to back this argument up with the double argument that the desire of the wealthy to ‘invest’ in London is good both strategically and economically. It never feels as though Alpha City nails this canard in spite of the evidence it collects. It feels like a significant book, but one which perhaps wears its heart too much on its sleeve. To defeat the gangsters, cold, hard, heartless strategies will be needed. Meanwhile the London skyline continues to be debased with toy-town towers just as much as British politics has been by toy-town politicians. The two go hand in hand.