5 Stars
After finishing J.M.Coetzee’s Disgrace I was reminded of Philip Roth’s Everyman, a novel I had high regard for although one I forgot to include in my recent summary of favourites from 2007. Like Roth’s novel, Disgrace follows an ageing and at first not particularly likeable man as he quenches his sexual thirst, in this case with consequences that totally alter the course of his life. David Lurie is a university professor in Cape Town who, after becoming involved with one of his students, is forced to choose no option but to resign from his post and slips away quietly to lick his wounds on his daughter’s farm. Whilst living there, life takes another dramatic turn when they are both violently attacked in their home, Lurie set fire to and his daughter raped. The novel continues as they attempt to recover from this assault, and its consequences on them, their relationship and their place in the world.
I’ve compared Disgrace to Everyman because the two novels had a similar effect on me. A central character facing up to his middle age and beyond, and a realisation that they will never again be able to charm a young and attractive girl. Coetzee’s Lurie settles for an affair with the plain and unattractive woman he assists at a veterinary hospital, his arrogance accepting this as an ironic fall from grace. But, like Roth’s Everyman, we warm to him because, although already of a certain age, Lurie learns an incredible amount from the events in Disgrace. He doesn’t cast off all of his faults, but I found the book captivating because of this. When, towards the end of the novel, he violently confronts a man he believes to be one of the attackers I found myself supporting his anger. An emotional response, but one a reader can understand which makes Coetzee’s characters live and breathe just that little more distinctly.
Disgrace is written with great clarity and precision. It’s a brief work (as is Everyman) but is rich, multlayered and very profound. Lurie, although specialising as an academic in poetry, is very unpoetic. In my opinion his pursuit of the young student is ungraceful and ill-conceived. It is inevitibly his closer move towards nature, and in particular his relationship with the doomed dogs he deals with at the animal hospital, that brings him to life. And gives this novel its particularly moving ending. My first taste of Coetzee and very impressive, especially in how he manages to make such a brief novel an extremely thought provoking work.
4 Stars
In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.
A recent house guest of ours made the remark that they’d put off reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road because they thought it would be too depressing. I commented that if they found this novel bleak then they should certainly avoid McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Although I made the observation in jest there is a ring of truth to it; Blood Meridian is similar to The Road in how it reveals human behaviour in times of great hardship, but unlike McCarthy’s more recent novel it delivers little hope to the reader.
Blood Meridian takes place in the American west of the 1840s, but it is unlike any other recent fiction set in this period. It does not attempt to redress the balance upended by film and print that previously cast the settlers as heroic and the Indians as villains. In many ways the native Americans are depicted as more brutal and inhuman than ever before. This novel attempts no revisionism because its dialogue is caught in its times, gaining its incredible strength because its voice speaks directly, like an echoing ghost, from that earlier period. There is no benefit of hindsight. Its characters and its readers are caught in the maelstrom of events; there are no heroes or villains and few, if any, of McCarthy’s cast deserve sympathy.
Like The Road, Blood Meridian describes a hell on Earth, but this is no imagined post apocalyptic future, and many of the horrific scenes described could be culled from any point in history. Or even from the present – the persecuted of Blood Meridian die when taking refuge in a church, and a similarly appalling tragedy took place recently in Kenya. Whatever setting McCarthy chooses for his fiction, he tends to make the same conclusions. The world is very similar to any fabled description of hell, with an easy path between the two:
I’d not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. Aye. It’s a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other. And something put them little hooflet markings in the lava flow for I seen them there myself.
The novel follows a young man, known simply as “the kid”, who is drafted into the army but escapes with his life following a massacre by Apaches. He meets and travels with the Glanton Gang, who include a maniacal, murderous and fearsome character known only as “The Judge”. They embark on a scalphunting crusade which descends into a murderous rampage, becoming more brutal than any Indian tribe (and brutality crosses all time – a quote included in the preface notes that the remains of a scalped victim have been dated at 300,000 years). The Glantons encounter the already dead and dying around them; in one scene they find a snake-bitten horse that resembles something disturbingly demonic. Nearby, a man has been shot and lies bleeding to death, singing hymns interspersed with insults to God. The travellers abandon him but they move away slowly, almost hypnotised by the haunting voice.
McCarthy uses the Glanton Gang, who really did live and breathe in the 1840s, for the basis of his fiction, and Judge Holden may or may not have really existed as well, depending on which accounts you choose to believe. He is cast here as demonic and inhuman, both in his actions and his appearance. All-knowing (he teaches his companions to make gunpowder and appears knowledgeable about many subjects), unrepentant (a possible child killer), a bald, seven foot tall albino – I hoped for history’s sake he never did exist and will remain only a horror of literature. For me, Holden held at least one key to the novel – as the opening quote observes, traces of the past will fade and ebb away. The Judge states that the Earth is an anomily in the universe, the only inhabited planet. He collects sketches in his own private diary, but when copying ancient cave paintings he erases the originals. Holden appears to believe that he can selfishly become all knowing and consequently all powerful. The novel puts this delusion in doubt, although ends on a curious note with him still with the upper hand over those who dare to question him.
Why then read Blood Meridian? Like all of McCarthy’s fiction it is very poetic. It is also a novel that works from the sum of its parts. By this I mean that a series of unconnected passages help to build a very strong narrative, one that works its way under the skin. Written in 1985, it is a fascinating precursor to The Road. Thematically very similar, although the later novel is far starker and briefer in content. Blood Meridian casts man, often depicted as naked, at the mercy of the world’s elements and of his own nature.
At times I think we need to address difficult fiction. This is a book that I will have to reread to fully appreciate and understand. But it’s certainly one to share, and for that reason I would recommend it to everyone. But please brace yourselves.
2.5 Stars
David Thewlis is a British actor who has appeared on screen in Mike Leigh’s Naked, the violent thriller Gangster Number 1 with Malcolm McDowell and the ill-fated The Island of Doctor Moreau with Marlon Brando. He also plays Lupin in the Harry Potter series. The Late Hector Kipling is his first novel.
Rather than tackle the acting world, Thewlis takes a look at the British art scene for his debut. Kipling is a successful artist with a life that appears to be close to perfect, although he has a morbid fascination with death. Or rather the fact that there doesn’t appear to be enough of it in his life. But Kipling isn’t careful what he wishes for and death decides to come knocking, and what starts out as a very funny comic novel begins to develop into something far darker.
Hector Kipling’s style is to paint huge portraits, one of his subjects being his former neighbour who committed suicide in strange circumstances. When an eccentric and potentially psychotic man begins to take more than a passing interest in his life things begin to spiral out of control for Kipling. Things will never be the same again for any of the characters in this novel.
Thewlis has an engaging writing style that reminded me of another performer turned author – Alexei Sayle, and where at times this novel looks like it is just going to become another post Nick Hornby slice of life it is full of unexpected and welcome surprises. There’s a good sense of pace and the red herrings and loose ends are tied up satisfyingly. Perhaps at a hundred or so pages less in length to tighten it up this could have been a truly great debut.
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