the fraud (zadie smith)

Hard to know how to place The Fraud. It’s a novel about London, about Victorian England, about being a writer, about slavery, about being black in a white world. It’s also about being a Scottish spinster who has a kinky relationship with her cousin and is in a menage a trois with the cousin’s wife. That’s before we get to the narrative spine of the novel, which is the recounting of the factual scandal of the Tichbourne Claimant which shook up Victorian Britain. There’s a lot going as the novel jumps around 40 years of history, looking to land punches left, right and centre. Sometimes they land, but at other times it feels as though the novel’s most urgent themes run the risk of getting lost in the wood of highbrow entertainment, as Smith wrestles with a sickening heritage whilst keeping the reader amused. 

n-w (zadie smith)

I came back to Smith via an article she wrote about Tár, a lucid article which touched on the falsity of the world when you ascend to the stratosphere of fame. I say ‘come back to’, because twenty years or so ago Smith was, for a while, so ubiquitous it was impossible not to be aware of or read her. I recall reading or trying to read White Teeth in the bath in Vauxhall, before giving up on it, disappointed, for one reason or another. Once I walked past her at the perhaps predictable venue of the Frieze Art Fair. I say predictable, because it seemed like the perfect kind of framing for her detached elegance, a post-colonial jewel on the UK map. It felt as though Smith became a representative of the establishment, part of that British literary world that exudes a certain arrogance, the likes of Amis, Rushdie & co. This is what was fascinating about the article in question, which appeared to reflect on the paradox of first world success, the way it affects the relationship between the artist as creator and the artist as producer, or artist vs. product; one of the more insidious cultural crises of capitalism, although of course artists have always flogged their work, or had to weigh up how much energy they should be dedicating to flogging their work.

This is all context for the journey of this reader. Smith comes with baggage, and perhaps for this reason I have, ever since that bath time experience back in the day, shied away from her work. Which brings us to N-W, her fourth book. Firstly, it should be said that it is a fluid, easy read. Secondly that it is structurally playful, essentially comprising three books in one, each with their own chosen register. Thirdly, that it succeeds in representing a vision of post-colonial, diverse, London, with its range of characters, argots, and experiences. The common root of these experiences is the London housing estate where the characters grew up, a place not a million miles away from Gabriel Krauze’s more hard-edged Who They Was. The other side of the literary coin might be Lanchester’s bland Capital. The great modern urban novels (as opposed to the great urban character-driven novels), such as Ulysses or Berlin Alexanderplatz, employ an approach which isn’t afraid of alienating the reader. N-W flirts with this, with its fragmented structure. The third section is composed of 180 sequences, telling the story of Natalie/ Keisha from childhood to motherhood. The first section employs a similar device to describe a more specific temporal moment in her friend, Leah’s midlife crisis. But there’s always a sense of close-cropped control in the text. Even when Natalie goes rogue, and starts responding to personals where couples are looking for a black woman to have sex with, breaking away from her tightly-corseted life/career path, it feels like an aesthetic device, on part of writer and character. The danger is held at arm’s length as they observe the details of the random houses Natalie finds herself visiting.

Strangely, as the bookending sections of Natalie and Leah feel like they have a personal element to it (the philosopher’s hand on the prodigy’s knee, the crisis around motherhood), the section where it feels as though the most visceral content spills over is the central section. This is more classically composed, as the happy-go-lucky Felix spends a fateful day cruising around his London, more extensive than the N-W of the title. Everything in this central sequence feels both more expansive and more nuanced, in particular a vivid and complicated interlude with his over-privileged ex-lover who lives in Soho. The city’s interaction between second-generation immigrant and old money is laid bare, in a manner that succeeds in being ugly and affecting at the same time. Again, this is an entirely personal view, but it feels as though Felix’s peregrinations capture the city in a vertical fashion, where the other sections remain horizontal, skating over the surface of the teeming city, notes from the overground.

Having said all of which, N-W feels like a novel which is seeking to engage, to get in there, to ask what is this city/ country that is being invented, in the light of the history that precedes it and which its characters are caught up in. 

on time and water. (andri snær magnason, tr. lytton smith)

Magnason’s book seeks to instil the reader with an awareness of the perilous course the world is taking as temperatures rise inexorably. His focal point is the worldwide demise of the glaciers, with particular attention to those of his native Iceland and the Himalayas. Magnason writes clearly and passionately about the way in which the vanishing glaciers are part of a trend which is going to have drastic impacts on the natural world and the human world. The book itself is a hotchpotch affair, including two conversations with the Dalai Lama, visits to the coral reefs of the Caribbean and the mountains of Nepal and lengthy reflections on the way the world his grandparents were born into has changed beyond recognition. He speculates about how the world will be in the epoch of his grandchildren, noting how, within the wider scheme of the earth’s timeline, five human generations is a drop in the ocean. The book addresses these issues with clarity and the author’s intentions are clear and honourable, even if the fragmented nature of his book at times means that his argument seems to ebb and flow. Furthermore, On Time and Water only helps to consolidate the thought expressed by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement, that it is only through the writing of fiction and the construction of modern myths that a narrative will emerge whose impact might match the hopes and aspirations Magnason espouses for On Time and Water.

the revenant (d. iñárritu; w. iñárritu & mark l smith)

What a curiously hollow film, from Iñárritu. Spectacular, wrapped up with the most gorgeous wrapping paper ever made, but inside, nothing more than a bauble. There’s a moment towards the beginning when you think that there might something going on in the use of subtitled Pawnee and its depiction of the native American Indians. The Rhee chief delivers a forceful speech to the French militiaman about theft and colonialism which hints at a subtext. Perhaps the Mexican will break through the stereotypes and succeed in inveighing the indigenous population with the protagonism they deserve. But the mute, affected Native Indians remain bit-part players who fulfil their expected roles. Glass’ widow speaks words of pantheistic wisdom; the witchdoctor Indian saves his brutalised body with the use of an effective sauna technique, whilst not being smart enough to outwit the drunken French militia; the Rhee plod along towards their destiny with implacable expressions and an iridescent violence. This review is already giving them more focus than the movie. Had it been made fifty or over twenty five years ago, perhaps the “authenticity” might have impressed, a trick Costner pulled off with Dances With Wolves, but in the end this is no more than another gringo Western, with a lame revenge narrative as its motor. The simplicity plays to the market; you don’t have to think too much whilst watching this movie; it’s a visceral ride. Macho film-making at its least subtle, a point consolidated by the cliched sub-Malick flashback scenes of the dreamy moments when Glass and his bride lived an idyllic life full of arcadian beauty. Like the Native population, women are a marginalised element whose presence in the narrative would only get in the way of men doing their thing. All of this is redeemed to a certain extent by the wonder of Lubezki’s camera. Iñárritu’s erstwhile partner, Arriaga, who wrote a much more complex, intriguing Western, must be smiling ironically to himself, like Moctezuma, at the way the gods distribute their favours.