Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Both my world and literary views were, I will confess, warped by reading The Great Gatsby far too early in life. Fitzgerald's 'spoiled priest' rush to judgment, the notion that one must always remember not everyone has had the same advantages in life, and the obviously untrue concept that life offers 're-dos' have had a profound effect on my life. Luckily I'm open-minded enough to admit when I'm wrong, accept that a re-do at least leads to closure and may be necessary for that reason alone, and have realized that having an opinion is not quite the same thing as being judgmental.

So for many years I have accepted the notion that Zelda was a mistake for F. Scott Fitzgerald, that their marriage contributed mightily to his financial woes and his lack of productivity, and as one of the world's biggest fans of The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon, wished he'd married someone else.

I was, therefore (having read the Nancy Mitford bio of Zelda as well as Zelda's own novel, Save Me the Waltz, many years ago), reluctant to read a novel about Zelda. Luckily for me, the Twitter community of readers convinced me to give Z a try, and I'm grateful.

Update: after posting this review, I got a lovely email from Esther Bochner, senior publicist at Macmillan Audio, asking if I'd like to post an audio clip of Z to my review. I said I'd be delighted - and here it is.

Therese Anne Fowler has made me rethink my attitude to Zelda, and to come to some radically different conclusions about F. Scott Fitzgerald's struggles - and about his ambitions. I had never thought about Zelda in the context of her own era - a time when women had so few options and when smart women were no longer content merely to stand by their men, defer to their opinions and be content to be the 'little woman' or 'the woman behind the man.' Zelda's refusal to be overshadowed by Scott takes on a whole different complexion when viewed in this context, as does her desire to achieve. We'll never have the definitive answer to who was more competitive with whom, but in reading Z I was having stomach-roiling flashbacks to a lot of the lines in Gatsby about being able to redo and rewrite the past, as well as some uncomfortable challenges to my own intellectual status quo.

Among the questions Fowler poses in Z are these: why was it F. Scott Fitzgerald was so very willing to promote Ernest Hemingway's work to his agent, editor and publisher, and yet persistently ensured that the most his wife ever got on her own work was a joint byline? Why wasn't he content to be the best writer he could possibly be rather than acknowledged as the best living American novelist? And why did he persist  in emulating the filthy rich to the point of almost-bankruptcy over and over again, while simultaneously despising them and condemning them morally bankrupt? Why didn't these contradictions occur to him? More important for Zelda, why did he insist the women in his life be content with being nothing but decorative appendages whose sense of self-worth derived solely from that of the men to whom they'd attached themselves?

The genius of this novel is not that it's an unflattering portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but rather that it's finally a fair portrayal of Zelda, a woman caught between a rock and a hard place: her father's social standing (and societal expectations of women in the 1920s) and her husband's overweening ambition. There was little room for Zelda to flourish in that small space. And the fact that she didn't do so isn't really so surprising when you think about it. 

Two by Henning Mankell: The Man Who Smiled and Before the Frost

I'm on a Henning Mankell/Kurt Wallander kick these days but am reading the series in no particular order. I did try to read a non-Wallander Mankell recently and failed in the attempt - it was Depths and I couldn't get past the first five pages. I had similar issues with Before the Frost, but to nowhere near the same degree (more on that subject later).

The Man Who Smiled, first published in 1994 and first translated into English in 2005, is classic Wallander. After shooting a suspect and taking a year-long leave of absence, Wallander has decided to leave the police force entirely. In his time off he's done a lot of brooding, a little travelling (with embarrassing results as a result of his drinking), and finally come to grips with his drinking. Fitter and more stable than he's ever been, he still feels like he's floundering. But returning to police work doesn't seem like the solution, and he's actually in his boss's office, about to sign his retirement paperwork, when he suddenly changes his mind and decides to return to work, convinced that the deaths of a father-son lawyer team are both murders and connected, although the father's death has initially been ruled an accident.

Once again, Wallander's attention to detail and his creative approach to crime and problem-solving makes him the man you want for the job. A visit to the scene of the accident and the discovery of a chair leg by Wallander turns out to be just the clue that cracks the case and leads to Wallander's successfully wiping the smile off the face of The Man Who Smiled. To say more would be giving too much away, unfortunately. But part of what makes Wallander such a richly developed character is his angst, and there's lots of angst here, as he continues to attempt to be a good son, a good father, and to have a life as well as a career. While a minor character, Wallander's father is never dull, and the predicament he gets himself into in The Man Who Smiled is rather comical. So much of Wallander pere's character is revealed when he gets arrested for getting into a fist fight at the liquor store (he took a number, didn't notice when his number was called, tried to jump the queue and insist it was his turn, and punched out both the next person in line and the clerk - oh and failed to pay the taxi driver for the trip to the liquor store as well). All while claiming he had every right to defend himself. It's these moments of black comedy that make Mankell such a compelling writer and Wallander such a fascinating character - because who hasn't had to deal with parental-generated embarrassment at one point or another? And why does it always come at a time when work is at its most frantic and demanding?

Sadly, Before the Frost, published in 2002 and translated in 2004, is far less satisfying. The angry, confused, unstable and much-worried-about Linda Wallander has decided as she approaches 30 to join the police force and has just finished her training at the police academy. She's waiting to join the Ystad police force when her friend Anna disappears. She's staying temporarily at her father's apartment, and, having always been an elusive and shadowy character both to her father and in the other Wallander mysteries, I was excited to find out more about her. Unfortunately, this one doesn't really work, because Linda just isn't a developed or empathetic character. She persists in intruding her concern about her missing friend into her father's current investigation, and while it turns out she's not wrong to do so, there are some really implausible scenes in this novel (the one where she throws an ashtray at her father's head and the willingness of the Ystad police force to let her trail along and insert herself into their interviews is also a little hard to swallow). Sadly we get little of Kurt's perspective on the investigation, and as a result the examination of cult mentality and behaviour suffers as a result.

Luckily I can circle back and read some of the others in the Wallander series I haven't got to yet, because while Linda Wallander is definitely her father's daughter, she just doesn't work as a character. In trying to figure out why, I've concluded it's not because Mankell's trying to write from a female point of view, it's because what makes Kurt Wallander work as a character can't be superimposed onto a woman half his age who hasn't experienced the societal and criminal sea change her father has. The impatience and weariness works for Kurt, who's continuing to push himself while trying to cope with the fatigue of middle age. In Linda this manifests as brattiness, an unwillingness to listen and learn. And while that might augur well for character development in future books, I can't foresee it happening. While all the curiously about Linda that's built up over the course of the Kurt Wallander novels is satisfied in Before the Frost, I ended up regretting having been curious. And that's never a good thing when novel-induced.

Being good without faith: review of The Young Atheist's Handbook

This review appeared on Goodreads in July 2012 while this blog was in limbo, but I had always intended to review it here, so here you are - with some additional content:



In his foreword to Alom Shaha's Young Atheist's Handbook, A.C. Grayling talks about the importance of developing a questioning mind. Shaha quotes Ani DiFranco when she asks, 'What if God is just an idea/Someone put in your head?' In The Young Atheist's Handbook, Alom Shaha asks – and answers for himself – the question, 'What if God is just an outmoded concept we no longer require now that we have generated more data about our universe than any one of us can ever hope to successfully process?' And, by implication, he is also asking, 'What will it take for us as a species to accept that no life will be filled with unalloyed joy and good luck, and how can we learn to cope with misfortune without the crutch of religion while remaining good people?' His handbook is an attempt to answer that question on a supremely personal level, although, as he admits freely, it is not precisely a handbook.

Alom takes us on his journey of loss, inconsolable grief, defiance, and ultimately the acceptance of his lack – rather than his loss – of faith. Part of that journey includes an examination of the familial and socio-cultural pressures put on children to accept and observe a faith they are not permitted to question.   Islam may be the most difficult of the world's major religions in this sense, as the form in which it is exported throughout the world often amounts to the prophet's words being repeated and  obeyed without translation, study or debate. (I should hasten to add that I am not an expert on Islam – or on any other religion, although my own defiant and questioning attitude made me, shall we say, an unsuitable candidate for Sunday School).

The Last Summer (of You & Me): Hemingway on estrogen

If Hemingway had decided to write a Harlequin romance, The Last Summer (of You & Me) would probably have been the result. Not having read The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants or any of Ann Brashares' other work (and not having realized this was her first foray into supposedly adult rather than young adult fiction), I was curious about this novel, and recently picked it up in a secondhand bookstore.

While some reviewers find Brashares a 'beautiful writer' I'm afraid I'm going to have to beg to differ. It's bad enough that she treads on territory so well worn as to be dangerously slippery (both the coming of age novel and the most fundamental of plots: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back). She creates characters who manage to be simultaneously 'thin' in the E.M. Forster sense and unlikeable (unless you really have a penchant for young men and women who prefer to passively brood rather than, you know, get the therapy they so obviously need).

Alice and Riley are sisters; Paul is Riley's best friend. They've evolved a Fire Island code as children who spend their summers living next door to each other, vowing that nothing will ever change between them. Inevitably, change does happen, and these characters are singularly ill-suited to coping with it. One thing that doesn't change, however, is their passion for Rice Krispies. I was tempted to calculate the number of bowls of cereal poured and consumed in the course of this novel, but it's the kind of detail no one really needs to know. Someone must have told Ms Brashares that in order to develop characters you must know what they eat for breakfast. Her creative writing instructor must have left out the second half of that idea, which is that while the writer must know this, it is not necessary to communicate it. In fact, it's rarely a good idea to do so. Since I'm hoping those of you reading this review won't be reading the novel, I'll fill you in: the second most popular breakfast food in which these characters indulge (you know, when the cereal box is empty or they're feeling extremely daring) is bacon and egg sandwiches from the local store. All righty then - you needed to know that, didn't you?

Now for some passages for The Last Summer (of You & Me) to give you some idea of the quality of the writing, which I consider mesmerizingly bad.

'She was only twenty-one. A virgin until two weeks ago, and he wanted to attach himself to her physically, mentally, emotionally every minute of every day, for now and ever. Of course it was too much. He was right to be suspicious of himself. He'd know that when he finally opened up to her, he would blast out like a fire hose, destroying everything in his path: every spark, every tender thing.'

Is it just me, or did you too burst out laughing when you got to the phrase 'blast out like a fire hose'? (I'm sparing you the sex scenes which precede this passage - you're welcome.)

'And though she rarely saw Paul wearing layers and walking in winter light, she began to suspect that the similarity between this man and Paul did not stop with his walk. She looked at the man's hand, the one that wasn't involved with the blond woman's arm, and she knew the hand. She knew the fingers. Her body, badly attached as it was, would have whimpered if she hadn't caught it in time. Her breath shuddered. Her heart mismanaged its work of beating.'

Hmmm. Women are blonde, men are blond. What was it to which her body was badly attached - I seem to have missed that. Oh yes - because it's not there. Body whimpering - there's an indelible image. Isn't there a TV series called The Ghost Whimperer?

'He wished he hadn't let himself have that thought. He knew it was a trick. He knew it at the time, but he'd done it anyway. He'd spent his life girding himself against that very trick, and he'd gone right ahead and fallen for it.... A part of him wanted her to call on the phone just so he could tell her off properly. He imagined she would try that emasculating strategy of wanting to be friends again. She'd already ripped him apart; he wasn't going to let her pick through the bits to see which ones she still wanted. He wouldn't give her the opportunity to assuage her guilt by being friends with him. But anyway, he didn't get to tell her off because she didn't call.'

Ahem. Fiction editor asleep at the wheel here? At this point I've completely forgotten what the tricky thought (outlined in the paragraph immediately preceding this one) was: oh yes, that rather than sell his Fire Island summer home, he should keep it for Alice. But wait, the house has only recently been signed over to Paul. And yet he's been thinking he should keep it for Alice his entire life? Now I'm confused.

'There was a familiar feeling he knew he could feel right now. It opened in front of him like a hallway, beckoning him to walk down it. He could resent her for her beauty. He could feel threatened by her again. He could be threatened by the fact that Alice had already won the adoration of two little girls who now lived in his house. His path in life was not exactly original. Who could live next to Alice and not fall in love with her? And she, being so easily loved, did she really need his, too? What could she want with it? What did he have to offer?'

His hot bod, obviously, as we learn a few pages later:

'He looked impatient for her return. He grabbed her up as soon as she'd tiptoed back into the room and with ardent determination, he finished the job of undressing her. He lay her on the couch and made love to her with a solemn face and a joyful body.'

I'm pretty sure he laid her on the couch and then got laid, but why quibble about grammar when you have phrases like 'ardent determination' and 'a solemn face and a joyful body' to savage?

Apparently Warner Bros. has bought the movie rights to this novel and it looks like it's scheduled for release sometime in 2011. I'm not surprised the script has already had to be rewritten twice. Making silk purses out of sow's ears isn't an easy task. Still, the movie might be worth watching just for the sake of the soundtrack. Personally I'm dying to hear the score that'll accompany those solemn face/joyful body sex scenes.

Dangerously good: a review of Carole Enahoro's Doing Dangerously Well

The jacket blurb describes Carole Enahoro's debut novel, Doing Dangerously Well, beautifully: 'An irresistibly dark comedy about disaster capitalism, cutthroat office politics, vicious sibling rivalry, hapless do-gooderism and the corporatization of water...'

When the Kainji Dam in Nigeria – yet another miracle of engineering built in the 1960s – bursts, more than a million Nigerians are killed, hydroelectric supply is threatened, and the collateral damage is incalculable as water-borne disease and water shortages sweep across the country. (Interesting to note how very brief the Wikipedia entry on this dam is, and of course, to note that it's only ever operated at two thirds capacity, with only eight of 12 turbines installed. Ahem.) Even more interesting is this 1999 report on the condition of the Kainji Dam – including the priceless comment that rather than repair the dam to avoid catastrophe, Nigeria has chosen to build more dams instead.

With the failure of the dam providing the opportunity for disaster capitalism (surely as old a concept and as inevitable a practise as war, crop failure, flash floods and plagues of locusts themselves), the scene is set for Enahoro to introduce the other elements: office politics, sibling rivalry, do-gooderism and the debate re resource exploitation versus fundamental human rights.

She does so skillfully, setting up two parallel tracks of sibling rivalry that continue throughout the novel. The Glass sisters (no relation or homage to Salinger's Glass family), Barbara and Mary, couldn't be more different – although they're both brittle in their very different ways. Mary – the 'successful' daughter – is a member of middle management at TransAqua Corp., where she specializes in water rights acquisition. As Associate Director of Sales, she's buttoned down (to put it mildly), a wearer of 'air hostess' suits, verging on the anorexic, and eaten alive by the stress of trying to outdo – and replace - her boss. Barbara's a 'soft skills' facilitator eking out a living building solidarity among groups, making herself obnoxious by being disruptive in her yoga classes, and concocting ever more garish 'Third Worlder' outfits (you know the type: hat from Tibet, jacket from Guatemala, skirt from India, earrings from Nepal, necklace from Bolivia). 'Though a committed vegetarian whenever possible, Barbara had a soft spot for Rare Heritage, a well-meaning group who preserved breeds that farming giants had made almost extinct. As humane farmers, she supported them philosophically and therefore continued to slog along with them, despite their lack of solidarity.'

In her role as a facilitator, Barbara hopes to bring the group closer together by getting them to do a bold exercise: write down something shocking (not related to farming or animals) that no one knows about them. The results:

• I enjoy the switch of the lash on my bare buttocks.

• I had sex with a contortionist.

• I went to Mexico for a holiday – viva México!

• I once had sex with my brother for a dare.

• I suffer from paranoid schizophrenia and once tried to kill my teacher.

• I am a vegan.

Meanwhile, back in Nigeria, Ogbe Kolo, the Minister of Natural Resources, successfully manipulates the American ambassador to Nigeria via Mary Glass, the army and the media to ensure a successful coup: 'On the preferred date for coups in Nigeria, that is to say the first day of January, Ogbe Kolo acceded to the presidency. Citizens greeted each other with the customary salutation for the New Year: “Happy New Coup.”' Kolo isn't primarily interested in the power of the presidency – he just wants to ensure that as president he can sign away the water rights to and rename the Niger River so he can make a killing on the transaction. Kolo has a dark secret though: his sibling rivalry was so intense he pushed his (sweeter, smarter, better looking) fraternal twin brother into a swimming pool – and then calmly watched him drown.

Devastated by the loss of his entire family in the flooding, Femi Jegede, one of Nigeria's great orators and activists, possessing 'wit and style, backed by strong legal training' who could 'make pounded yam of the most logical argument' and with 'the one gift that makes even the listless adjust their clothing in anticipation ... a beautiful man, with skin as soft as Guinness beer and gentle, transcendent eyes...a very qualitative guy' makes a slow recovery. Eventually he mobilizes himself and the countryside to sabotage the repairs to the Kainji Dam, aided and abetted by Barbara Glass, who's decided she's had enough of having her parents throw her sister Mary's success in her face at every family gathering and has joined an Ottawa-based NGO called Drop of Life, stolen her sister's blueprints for the rebuilding of the Kainji Dam, and headed for Nigeria to foment opposition to the plan.

The scenes of Barbara Glass in Nigeria and the dialogue between Barbara and Femi are some of the most hilarious in the novel, with Barbara spouting Taoist syllogisms and mangling Nigerian pidgin while Femi must surely be contemplating sticking knitting needles in his ear so he no longer has to listen to her.

This is an immensely complicated novel in many ways, with a reasonably large cast of characters, not one of whom plays the straight man role. Its plot is both intricate and intriguing. If you think of Joseph Heller's Something Happened crossed with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and a dash of William Boyd's A Good Man in Africa you begin to get an inkling of its scope. But then you also have to think of films like The Gods Must be Crazy and the amazing documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell and throw them into the mix to get some idea of what Enahoro has achieved with this novel.

It's a brilliant debut – the kind of first novel that leaves you waiting eagerly to discover what Enahoro's going to do next. Whatever it is, I think you're guaranteed it's going to be interesting.

For another (rather churlish and poorly informed, I thought) take on the novel, see this review in the Winnipeg Free Press (ignore the typos in the proper names of the dam and the activist).

And for more info on the Kainji Dam, here's a short documentary:

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of Doing Dangerously Well from Random House Canada.

Solar: Ian McEwan's new novel proves he's still one to watch

From the moment I was first introduced to Ian McEwan’s work back in the early 1980s by my friend Stephanie Ortenzi, I’ve considered him not only one to watch, but one to champion. As one of a handful of British writers whose work I always read and almost always buy (Graham Swift, Julian Barnes and William Boyd are the others on the list), a new Ian McEwan novel is always something to celebrate. So I've been waiting very impatiently for Solar's release for almost a year, since a Brazilian journalist doing a PhD in science communications first told me it was in the works. When I tweeted that I'd read it, my former boss was too impatient to wait for my review and demanded the 140-character version. He's probably already bought it and read it by now, though, since it's been at least three days.

It’s almost time to go back and re-read early McEwan, because he’s not the writer he used to be. That’s actually a neutral/positive statement, not a condemnation. Around the time The Child In Time was published (1987), I saw a televised interview with him in which he described his early work as being ‘dark and inaccessible’ and said that he wanted to change that. He certainly succeeded (that novel won the Whitbread Novel Award). Amsterdam won the Booker Prize, Atonement was shortlisted for the Booker in 2001, and its 2007 film adaptation was nominated for an Academy Award (although I think you’ll be hard pressed to find many who loved the book and also loved the film, again based on an admittedly small and highly subjective sampling).

Atonement was not, however, the first McEwan novel filmed; Andrew Birkin directed The Cement Garden from the 1978 McEwan work of the same name in 2003. If you read either the novel or the film’s descriptions in the links I’ve provided, you’ll notice how often the words ‘dark’ and ‘murky’ are used. Freud would have had a field day with McEwan’s early works, in which both sensuality and sexuality were simultaneously subterranean and omnipresent. They left you with a vague and disconcerting sense of unease, a feeling that you hadn’t quite understood what he meant but you didn’t really want to delve deeper because it might hurt you at a shockingly profound level of your being. Or at least that’s how I felt – it was mesmerizing but somehow dangerous. Reading early McEwan made me feel like a rather nastily atavistic voyeur, as if I’d been unable to resist reading a trusted friend’s diary, inadvertently ended up peeping through a keyhole, or unintentionally eavesdropped on a conversation with overtones so sinister as to negate all of the guilty pleasures of gossip.

His later work continues to provoke this sense of unease in some, although I’m not sure why. Either I’m acclimatized to it by now, no longer convinced voyeurism is as creepy as I once thought it was, or the nature of his work really has changed in a rather fundamental way.

Certainly in the novels from The Child in Time to On Chesil Beach, McEwan has steadfastly employed a single plot device that’s both valid and fascinating: a single chance but determining moment that alters the course of his characters’ existence irremediably. There’s nothing new about this kind of ‘right place, wrong time’ plot device – and in fact, in Atonement, the discovery of the note that fatally alters the course of two of the main characters’ lives (or does it? because there is an alternate ending) isn’t that dissimilar from the note Angel Clare doesn’t find in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. By On Chesil Beach, however, this plot device had been stretched beyond the breaking point, and that novel was so slight as to be almost negligible, because it was frankly implausible.

So it was obviously time for another change of course (since McEwan is not an Anita Brookner, and has never been content to rewrite the same the novel till he gets it right – and then continue to rewrite its ghostly imitations ever after – and I say that not to be mean to Brookner, whose Hotel du Lac is one of the most perfect short novels I have ever read, almost on par with The Great Gatsby).

Solar is a novel whose central character is a ‘fat, lying bastard of a physicist…a philandering, greedy, rather deceitful sort of man,’ as McEwan himself says in the Little Atoms podcast interview. This is a bit of an understatement – Michael Beard, who wins a Nobel Prize early in his scientific career for what becomes known as the Beard-Einstein Conflation, is a remarkably – an astonishingly – an intrinsically – almost a pathologically deceitful sort of man. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s stealing a colleague’s work, a fellow traveller’s potato chips, cheating on one or another of his five (serially married) wives, or hastily boning up on Milton to impress the first woman he marries, morally Michael Beard has no centre whatsoever – or rather his centre shifts constantly at the whims of his childishly greedy convenience.

And he’s greedy about everything: food, women, money, honours, his own creature comforts. He’s always late – for meetings, conferences, dinners, work. And yet somehow the world is being mean to him when, having overslept, he has to start his day without coffee. Or give a speech before he’s made serious inroads into the smoked salmon sandwiches.

The central paradox of this novel is that Michael Beard is a totally unappealing character by the time we meet him at age 50 – and frankly it’s hard to imagine that there ever was anything appealing about him at all. The beautiful mind in the physics/math sense he may once have possessed is never on display in the novel, and there’s a suggestion that he was a bit of a default, compromise Nobel winner, that his selection as the prize recipient was a highly political choice designed not to upset other candidates who could only be mollified if none of the top contenders for the prize that year won. There are one or two scientists in the novel who buoy him up from time to time and insist that the Beard-Einstein Conflation was – and remains – both a scientifically elegant and significant piece of work. But they’re few and far between. And yet – and yet – somehow he manages to attract not only five wives, but, during the course of his fifth marriage, an astonishing additional 11 lovers in less than five years, not all of which are one-night stands.

While Beard grows older (naturally), fatter (considerably), and balder (slightly) over the course of the novel's nine-year span, his emotional growth is pegged at one ahead, two back. When he's finally trapped into reproduction, he provides for his offspring financially but he still can't quite commit to being faithful to the mother of his child. Nor can he bring himself to abandon the flat of his own that, after several years of his occupation, is undoubtedly a health hazard not only to himself, but probably to all his neighbours as well.

In a pre-publication interview about his new novel, McEwan stated categorically that he hates ‘the comic novel’ and that he finds them strenuous, like being held down and tickled. (It's not clear whether he means he hates reading them or writing them.) The comic elements in Solar are necessary, he says, ‘because the subject matter is climate change. It's so colossal, it's so serious, it's so morally weighted that it could kill a novel, it could drown it, it could melt it - whichever climate change image you want,’ if there weren’t comic elements in the novel. He was only two-thirds of the way through writing the novel at that point, however, and while I’m not suggesting his stance on the comic novel has changed, I do think Solar is, in fact, a comic novel. You can’t write a novel in which the central character is, essentially, a buffoon, and also position him as a hero or his actions as heroic. Certainly Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman is a comic novel - and yet it's a serious work of fiction. Don't go by the Wikipedia definition of comic novel either - or if you do, prepare to be astonished to see Evelyn Waugh listed as a 'comic novelist' - Wikipedia is aware that he also wrote Brideshead Revisited, yes?

The comic element of Solar with the greatest public appeal (from what I’ve seen to date in reviews and on the internet) is the frozen penis scene, in which Beard is whisked away to a near-Arctic expedition, the lone scientist locked up on an ice-bound ship for a week with a group of artists. Having overslept, Beard leaves the hotel without having had coffee, and somehow having failed to use the bathroom in his rush to catch up the rest of his party heading for the ice-bound ship. During the course of the jostling, several-hour-long snowmobile ride, he’s forced to stop to pee, gets his willy stuck to the zipper of his outdoor gear, and – well – it continues from there, with the angst of his need to pee during the first half of the trip being replaced by the fear throughout the second half that his penis is frozen solid. The culmination of this scene is an understated tube of lip gloss, if you can believe it. As a non-penis owner this segment of the book didn’t really work for me as either realism or comedy, I’m afraid. After all, if you're the kind of man whose wife's lover slaps you rather than punching you, how important can the literal manifestation of your masculinity really be?

An earlier scene in the novel, when Beard is still living with wife number five, knows she's having an affair and is trying to make her jealous, is far funnier than the frozen willy scene.

Far more effective than both, however, is the scene on the train, where Beard, several years later, is rushing to make a speech at a conference. His flight's been delayed, he hasn't eaten (or rather, he hasn't eaten what he wanted to eat), and having grabbed a bag of salt and vinegar chips/crisps at the airport, he becomes convinced his travelling companion on the train from the airport is stealing his treat. Some excerpts from that scene:

‘Right before him on the table, shimmering through his barely parted lashes, were the salt and vinegar crisps… He pulled himself up in his seat and leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands propping his chin for several reflective seconds, gaze fixed on the gaudy wrapper, silver, red and blue, with cartoon animals cavorting below a Union Jack. So childish of him, this infatuation, so weak, so harmful, a microcosm of all past errors and folly, of that impatient way he had of having to have what he wanted instantly. He took the bag in both hands and pulled its neck apart… He lifted clear a single crisp between forefinger and thumb, replaced the bag on the table, and sat back. He was a man to take his pleasures seriously. The trick was to set the fragment on the centre of the tongue and, after a moment’s spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. His theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain…. Inevitably the second crisp was less piquant, less surprising, less penetrating than the first, and it was precisely this shortfall, this sensual disappointment, that prompted the need, familiar to drug addicts, to increase the dose. He would eat two crisps at once.’

The scene continues to a broadly comic climax, and Beard realizes he’s made a fool of himself. Ill-prepared to speak at the conference, he decides to include the crisps anecdote at the end of his speech. And this – at almost precisely the midpoint of the novel – is where things get interesting. Earlier, when one of the artists on the ice-bound ship is talking and makes a basic scientific mistake, Beard has sprung up and corrected him at great length, thus earning the admiration of all the artists on board (he’s the only scientist, and has been engaging with them as little as possible). In contrast to that scene, after his speech on climate change and the artificial photosynthesis solution to energy generation Beard is promoting (and has patented), Mellon, a lecturer in urban studies and folklore, interested in ‘the forms of narrative that climate science has generated … an epic story … with a million authors’ approaches Beard. Mellon – who in Beard’s opinion has a ‘squiffy view of reality’ - asks him where came across the story of the crisps. Beard replies that it’s just happened to him on the train, to which Mellon replies, ‘Come now, Professor Beard. We’re all grown-ups here,’ and proceeds to tell him Beard’s story is a well known tale with many variations (although not yet one involving crisps), included in novels by Jeffrey Archer, Roald Dahl and Douglas Adams amongst others, called ‘The Urban Thief.’

This scene ends shortly after this, but it’s significant, not only because of the juxtaposition of the contrasting reactions of the artist:scientist and scientist:folklorist it sets up. It underscores earlier scenes on the ship when the group – all but Beard almost tragically impaired by their individual and collective guilt about how we’ve wrecked our planet and yet passionately committed not so much to creating a solution but at least to lamenting their grief at the impasse by means of their art – can neither keep the room in which their Arctic outdoor gear is stored organized nor resist the impulse to steal each other’s boots and mittens. In that situation, Beard is the lone voice in the wilderness, trying to tidy the room, observing the rules, carefully placing his own gear on the peg assigned to him.

This is yet another fascinating McEwan novel, a welcome and substantial meal after the insubstantiality (dare I say it? the bag of crisps) of On Chesil Beach, and yet another direction for his work. May he have many more – novels and directions.

For some other reviews of Solar, see The Guardian, The Vancouver Sun, and The Daily Mail. And for a delightful interview with McEwan by Adam Rutherford, download the Little Atoms podcast, in which members of the science community embrace an artist as if he were one of their own. You do, of course, have to let the artist have the last word, however. As McEwan says in that interview, 'I have no interest in science, I'm just intellectually curious....In five years' time I'll know a fraction of what I know now' about climate change science.

Nobody's muse: a review of Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag

In 1985, Canada's Minister of Justice John Crosbie ignited a controversy in the House of Commons when he told Liberal MP Sheila Copps to 'quiten down, baby.' Her retort, that she was 'nobody's baby,' became so inextricably linked with her political persona that she used it as the title of her autobiography, which, sadly, seems to be out of print.

Irene America, the iconic protagonist of Louise Erdrich's latest novel, Shadow Tag, would have done well to borrow a little of Ms Copps' feistiness at an earlier age. By the time we encounter her, she's been married to Gil for a decade and a half and is only now picking up the pieces of her abandoned PhD thesis on 19thC 'painter of Native Americana George Catlin.' Gil himself has irritatingly been referred to as a 'Native Edward Hopper' and his work really has only one subject: Irene America 'in all of her incarnations--thin and virginal, a girl, then womanly, pregnant, naked, demurely posed or frankly pornographic.' He is that rarity in North America, an artist capable of supporting a family with his income from painting. As the novel opens, however, Gil is floundering artistically, 'His paintings were hiding from him because Irene was hiding something. He could see it in the opacity of her eyes, the insolence of her flesh, the impatient weariness of her body when she let down her guard. She'd ceased to love him. Her gaze was an airless void.'

The real pornography contained within this novel is not the way Gil paints Irene or the descriptions of the sexual, physical and alcohol abuse in which they both indulge but in his maniacal desire to possess her, to know her, to breathe her living essence as if she were oxygen and he was on life support. Erdrich does a superb job of creating an atmosphere so overwhelmingly smothering that it is absolutely intolerable. It's a good thing she does, because without it she would have written a novel in which both main characters are so hopelessly and disgustingly co-dependent that it might have been unreadable as opposed to just painfully believable. It's possible to muster a modicum of sympathy for and empathy with Irene America though, enough that one can initially forgive her for her treachery, because it's easy to understand how truly mind-bending life with a man like Gil can be.

So initially you're with Irene when, after discovering Gil has been reading her diary, she decides to use the diary as a weapon against him. She starts constructing entries solely for his consumption, paragraphs and pages designed to drive him over the edge - of sexual jealousy and insecurity, of sanity, of alcoholism - while resuming her real journal writing in another volume she stashes in a bank safety deposit box.

As the novel continues, however, and the collateral damage experienced primarily by Gil and Irene's three children becomes apparent (not to mention the increasing nausea one experiences at the damage the two of them inflict on each other), it becomes increasingly difficult to do anything but shake your head in horror. When Irene finally tells Gil she wants a divorce, after a short round of surrealistic marriage counselling (some of the best scenes in the novel), it's impossible to believe that even physical and emotional separation will do much to change the dynamics between this pair. They're opposite sides of the same coin - and this coin has spent most of its life on the railroad tracks being repeatedly run over by self-propelled freight trains.

Gil's initial response to Irene's request for a divorce is to throw a huge surprise party for her. But of course in Gil's ever-more-twisted emotional world, he can't just throw her a party, he has to arrange for Irene's half sister to not only keep her away from the house until the party's due to start, but also has to conscript the half sister to spy on Irene so he can confirm his suspicions that Irene is having an affair.

Of course you can't blame Gil for thinking this, since Irene makes a point of creating journal entries in which she manufactures other lovers and provides convincing details to back up her claim at their first marriage counselling session that Gil isn't, in fact, the father of any of 'their' three children.

This is unexpectedly bleak territory for Erdrich. There is little humour in this novel, and the little there is falls into the bitter, twisted, and black category. It's a departure for her as a novelist, and it's worth celebrating for that. Her portrait of the dissolution of not only a marriage but of both its partners as swiftly and surely as a Kleenex in a torrential downpour, is compelling and tragic, and this time it's not mitigated by the hyperbolic humour and magic realism of my favourite of her novels, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. In writing this review, I realize I've managed to miss Erdrich's previous novel, The Plague of Doves, which sounds almost as bleak as this one. The difference is that Erdrich's not writing a mythical or historical narrative in Shadow Tag - she's written a contemporary and realistic book that ventures into territory occupied by a long tradition of American prose writers stretching from Henry James and Edith Wharton to Richard Ford, via John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and Russell Banks. I couldn't be more delighted to see her stretching, growing and flexing her literary muscle. How many profoundly important books can one woman write? With any luck, we're nowhere near the answer to that question.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

Hertfordshire, you say? The area has far greater significance for me now as I know someone who lives there, but it has been of interest to me since it was the setting for, you know, Pride and Prejudice: The Original (But No Longer the One and Only) by the long-dead but never to be forgotten 18th Century author, Jane Austen.

A prequel to the runaway 2009 bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahme-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls is written by Steve Hockensmith, for whom this is a departure. As he says on his blog (where he worries fans of his debut novel, Holmes on the Range, may wonder at the lack of cowboys - and, presumably - detectives - in his latest novel):

Potential new readers, meet loyal old readers. I think you'll find you have a lot in common. Beyond a fondness for the word "frakkin'," I mean. You like historical novels. You like funny novels. You like novels with a touch of the macabre. You like Raisinets, Air Supply and long walks in the park.

Where will all this end? It's one thing for Kurosawa to rewrite Lear and film it as Ran - there are cultural translation issues that make it appropriate to do so. But is reworking Jane Austen for the Buffy crowd really such a great idea? Will it satisfy either Buffy/Twilight fans or tried and true Austen fans? Or will there be (more) swooning from the pressure of corsets drawn too tight? (Actually, corsets were a Victorian thing, not a Regency thing - the one character who wears one in Dawn of the Dreadfuls is male - and it's called a truss. Reshaping and restraining blubber is still its chief purpose, however.)

Luckily, Dawn of the Dreadfuls actually has merit as a novel, although I was startled to discover this. It's not that I expected to hate it - I was intensely curious about it and leapt at the chance to get my hands on an advance review copy (ARC) when Raincoast Books, its Canadian distributor, offered them to bloggers via Twitter and the Raincoast blog. (The actual publisher is the quirky Quirk Books and its Quirk Classics series.) I just thought it would be an amusing read-in-one-sitting novel, like Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary and Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

In fact, Dawn of the Dreadfuls isn't as funny as I expected it would be (although there are definitely scenes that will translate to high comedic humour when/if it's filmed - as long as you aren't quite as terrified of zombies as I am - I barely made it through Night of the Living Dead once and don't care to repeat the experience - and ask my cousin how I used to awaken the entire household when we used to watch a 1960s TV show that featured zombies in the middle of the night - of course in that series zombie-killing methodology involved filling their mouths with salt and sewing them shut, and it was the needle through cartilage bit that always got to me, having been taught to sew buttons back on at age three).

The story begins about two weeks before Elizabeth Bennet, second-eldest of the five Longbourn-inhabiting Bennet daughters, is due to 'come out' in society at a local Meryton ball. Eldest sister Jane is already 'out' and has attracted the attention of Lord Lumpley, Netherfield-inhabiting baron (and libertine, according to middle Bennet sister Kitty, whose approach to life is highly analytical and academic in nature - this doesn't mean she's wrong, though). At the funeral of the local pharmacist, however, Meryton residents discover the scourge of the 'dreadfuls' (it's not polite to refer to them as zombies') isn't, in fact, over, despite the great battles of 30 years earlier (known as The Troubles). Relaxation of the burial laws means corpses have been buried in recent years with their heads still attached - and when you encounter one dreadful, it's only a matter of time before you meet a whole lot more of them.

Mr. Bennet was involved in the battles to defeat the dreadfuls 30 years earlier. They were defeated only as a result of intensive training in 'the dreadful arts' and as part of his training, Mr. Bennet has vowed to raise his children as warriors in the Shaolin way. Naturally, as the father of five girls married to Mrs. Bennet, who prevails in domestic matters through sheer volubility, he's broken his vow, and must now scramble to get his daughters trained so they can defend themselves and help put an end to the dreadfuls' scourge. 'Now far too belatedly, we begin your training. It will not be easy. You will be sorely tested. You will cry and bleed. You will face the derision, probably even the condemnation, of your community. Yet you will persevere on behalf of the very souls who now find you so ridiculous...for the dreadful scourge has returned, and once more warriors must walk the green fields of England!'

As the five Bennet girls embark on the path of the warrior, they encounter a variety of men. There is, of course, their 'master' Geoffrey Hawksworth, imported to train them in the warrior arts. There is the single-minded Lord Lumpley, who's managed to come up with a singularly effective method of disposing of the maidens he's ravished when they prove inconvenient (defined as no longer virginal or inconveniently pregnant while unsuitable for marriage), and who begins his days kicking gin bottles and maids out of his capacious (presumably four-poster) bed. There is the handsome but excessively proper Lt. Tindall, who struggles with his admiration for Jane while deploring her newly acquired prowess with the katana as she wields it to separate zombies from their heads. There is the quintessential absent-minded professor, Dr. Keckilpenny, whose inattention to detail and determinedly academic approach is in sharp contrast to Master Hawksworth's single-minded focus on practicalities.

Interestingly, Dawn of the Dreadfuls poses the question some of us have been asking ever since we first read Pride and Prejudice: how on earth did Mr. and Mrs. Bennet ever end up married to each other? Glimmers of an answer appear in the character of Capt. Cannon, who has lost all his limbs during The Troubles and is now wheeled around in a cart by two soldiers appropriately named Right Limb and Left Limb.

For me, Dawn of the Dreadfuls works because it manages to be sufficiently entertaining while actually conveying a substantive message or two, chief of which is, fathers form feminists by insisting they not be restricted by convention. Which is a message we don't hear often enough - although an earlier post on this blog took at look at how another popular (although less literary) series told an earlier generation of young women they could be whatever they wanted to be, avuncular pats on the head notwithstanding. And for more on Jane Austen's relevance to 21st Century women, there's this post.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls will be released to the (hopefully) suspecting public on March 23, 2010. Readers also have a chance to win one of 50 Quirk Classics Prize Packs - details on the contest here.