Friday 28 June 2013

Will Wiles, Care of Wooden Floors (Harper Press, 2012)

As you can tell at once from the date of its publication, Care of Wooden Floors is a new acquisition, post-dating our Edinburgh-Manchester move.  I had seen the novel on display in bookshops and been drawn to its title; then a Twitter exchange between Gregory and the author, Will Wiles, led to its purchase and arrival in our home.

Despite the fact that I was busy with events in London while I was reading this book, I finished it in about a week.  It's a relatively short novel at just under 300 pages, but length doesn't really have much to do with how quickly I read a book.  It can take hours just to get through the first chapter of something less absorbing, or just denser in style and content.  Care of Wooden Floors, in short, is one of those novels which, once you've started, you've just got to finish, and quickly.  If you share my sense of humour, you'll also be laughing out loud, even in a public place.  Or perhaps especially so, if you enjoy making displays of mild exhibitionism.  

The protagonist, whose name we never learn, has travelled to an also-nameless East European city to house-sit for his old university friend, Oskar.  Oskar's relationship with his Californian wife, Laura, has unravelled; he has been called to Los Angeles to finalise arrangements for their divorce and, nervous about leaving his flat and cats unattended, asks his friend (whom I will call X for clarity) to help him out.  Our hero arrives to find that the flat which is to be his home - and responsibility - for the next few weeks is a haven of pristine, monochrome minimalism.  On the kitchen table is a letter from the absent host giving useful details of how to look after the cats (including a request to prevent them from sitting on the white leather sofa), when the cleaner will visit and, most importantly, what to do if anything should happen to the pale wooden floors of French oak which Oskar has had laid throughout and whose importance to him he is at pains to emphasise.  None of this sounds too difficult, despite the fact that the cats are already on the sofa, and X looks forward finally to having the space and time to work on his novel.  Writing copy for London borough councils on recycling and parking regulations leaves him little time for more literary ventures, and he is convinced that the words will flow in his new environment.  What could possibly go wrong?  Everything and anything, of course, as the set-up in the first chapter makes clear, and it does.  As X's stay lengthens, he begins to feel micro-managed by the peremptory notes from Oskar which confront him at every turn, and a rebellious spirit sets in.  X, we soon discover, also has a close relationship with alcohol, and, predictably enough, booze and minimalism don't mix.

Along the way we learn something of X and Oskar's relationship during their student days and since, including Oskar's fruitless quest to make undergraduates understand the importance of using coasters and the disasterous dinner party at which X is first introduced to Laura, his friend's soon-to-be ex-wife.  X reflects on these incidents while wandering aimlessly around the city that Oskar has made his home and where he composes and conducts classical music for the local orchestra.  Wiles conveys a powerful sense of the dislocation of being in an unfamiliar city, which he accentuates by not disclosing which city it is, if indeed it is a real place and not a fictional construct.  X tries and fails to make the place give up its secrets, encountering only menacing dogs in canal-side wastelands, impenetrable concrete behemoths and hard-drinking locals who entice him into lap-dancing clubs.  The book jacket tells us that Wiles is an "architecture and design journalist", and this comes as no surprise - he knows his Modernism from his Brutalism, and uses this knowledge to create a strong sense of space and place, both in Oskar's exquisitely-maintained apartment and its murkier environs.

Oskar, in X's words, is a man who has "fought entropy to a standstill and forced it to accept his terms".  X, on the other hand, "signed an armistice" with the same long ago, as the wine stains and cigarette burns which decorate his basement flat in Clapham testify.  Care of Wooden Floors weighs these two positions in the balance, asking whether it is in fact possible for human beings to fight the natural slide of objects and events into chaos, and win.  The answer - it isn't - is not perhaps a surprise, but the twists and turns of events which reveal this conclusion have an exhilarating, even a bravura quality to them.  We think we are watching disaster unfold and are enjoying our gasps of horror at each new development, but in the end disaster is not quite where we, X, Oskar, and his wife arrive.  One of the cats and the cleaner, on the other hand - well, perhaps it's best to pretend that some things never happened.     

 

   

   








       

Saturday 27 April 2013

Mark Cocker, Crow Country (Jonathan Cape, 2007)


As I noted back in the summer, this blog has strayed somewhat from its original purpose.  Crow Country, however, is one of the books which I took from Edinburgh to Manchester as part of my project of reading the books I already own.  As some followers of this blog will know, Gregory and I have now moved again, this time to the Quaker Community in the beautiful Peak District (see www.quakercommunity.org.uk - as you can tell, hyperlinks are still beyond me).  The eponymous books travelled with us, but have now been joined by many more of their fellows.  We have more space in our new living quarters, and - surprise, surprise - Gregory has filled a certain amount of it with books.  Finally he has fulfilled a life-long dream of having bookshelves made of planks laid on bricks, in the manner of a French intellectual or somesuch.  The bricks were liberated from the bike shed adjacent to our previous home, where they had evidently been sitting in piles since the flats were built, and the planks were foraged from the considerable collection here at the community.  The resulting shelves, I have to say, look great, and the joy of my husband was well worth the labour of transporting the bricks by van and wheelbarrow.  

Despite this expansion of their numbers, my efforts to keep dipping into the original selection of about 150 books continue - and so to Crow CountryThe inscription on the flyleaf tells me that it was a present from Gregory's sister and brother-in-law for Christmas 2007, shortly after its publication.  G was deeply impressed by it and spoke of it often, usually when flocks of rooks or jackdaws flew overhead while we were out walking.  Finally I have picked it up myself.

Cocker first got interested in corvids - as the genus is called - when he moved with his family from Norwich to the countryside outside it.  The ubiquity of the birds didn't put him off, and as he began to track their movements around the Yare Valley his attraction increased, almost to the point of obsession.  Cocker's attempts to understand these most commonplace yet symbolically potent birds took him the length and breadth of the UK and through the pages of countless texts on the subject.  Yet the image that remains from his book, for me, is of the author himself leaving his house at dusk, crossing the fields, searching for the right spot in which to station himself and waiting for the magical moment of the birds' departure for the nightly roost.  There's so much fascinating detail in this book, and so much wonderful writing, that it's hard to choose an exemplary passage.  This one, however, describing the dusk flight of a group of rooks and jackdaws, gives some flavour of the simplicity and intricacy that characterises Cocker's prose:

It begins almost casually.  A single concentrated stream of birds breaks for the trees, the stands of trees that have remained almost unnoticed until this point.  Inconsequential while the drama built all around them, the woods known as Buckenham Carrs have grown steadily darker with the onset of night.  Now that they have moved centre stage they have become a brooding cavity in the landscape.  The birds pour into the airspace above it in ever-growing numbers, and they mount the air until there are so many and the accompanying calls are so loud that I instinctively search for marine images to convey both the sea roar of sounds and the blurry underwater shapes of the flock.  It becomes a gyroscope of tightly packed fish roiling and twisted by the tide; it has the loose transparent fluidity of a jellyfish, or the globular formlessness of an amoeba - one that spreads for a kilometre and a half across the heavens.  (p. 4)

I read Crow Country while spending a week in the tiny Gloucestershire village where my father spends most of his time.  I found myself choosing to go out for walks at around five or six o'clock in the afternoon: prime roosting time.  I've often complained about people who stop and start when they walk - I prefer to keep the rhythm of my stride going, and get irritated if I can't do so - but on these excursions I found myself pausing, listening out for the crows, trying to work out where they were coming from and where they were going, distinguishing between rooks and jackdaws by their shape and call.  None of this can be done whilst on the move - I had to stand still and pay attention.   As I stopped for some minutes by a tree that was obviously a roost, picking out the different sounds emanating from it, I reflected that this was how Mark Cocker must have stood, gleaning the material for passages on the variety of the birds’ calls and how they reflect their mood.  I’ve known the Coln Valley for twenty-two years, since I was twelve, but now it was becoming legible, alive: the birds were more than background noise, the landscape more than a pleasant backdrop to my own exercise-induced musings.  Perhaps the greatest gift of nature writers like Cocker is their habit of patient observation, the time they've spent honing the quality of their attention.  Gregory is also a close observer of the natural world, and the most frequent recipient of my exhortations to just keep moving, but as I stood by that tree I had a glimpse of that elusive thing: the inner life of one’s partner.  He would stand just like this, I thought, watching and listening, and this is what it feels like. 

Nature writers sharpen our awareness of everything around us; and perhaps there's no true environmental witness without this kind of attention.  Books like Cocker's invite us to slow down enough to learn to read the natural world, and from there to understand the smallness of our place in it.  Through them, the intelligence of other species becomes observable, as pattern layers itself on pattern and the infinite richness of life reveals itself.  The same is true of the kind of environmental witness based on bringing care and attentiveness to everyday actions: being sufficiently present not to over-fill the kettle or let it boil longer than it needs to, or any other of the endless ways in which we can try not to take up quite so much space in the world.  Can we slow down enough, then, to minimise the damage we do?  Time, it turns out, is the currency of a slower, greener, more satisfying world.  Time to spend with each other, so we don’t need to consume to fill the gaps in our lives.  Time to grow vegetables and then cook them from scratch, time to make bread, time to gather and chop wood.  Time to go for a walk and appreciate what's out there.  Time to read.


Saturday 16 March 2013

John Lanchester, Capital (Faber & Faber, 2012)

Ah, the joy of Christmas - being given books as presents.  I received some wonderful ones this year: Trollope's Barchester Towers (my dad), Jenny Uglow's The Pinecone (fascinating-sounding biography of the nineteenth-century woman who designed a church near Carlisle; Gregory) and John Lanchester's Capital (my brother).

John Lanchester started writing a novel set in the City of London a few years before the financial crash, but what he found there inspired him to turn to non-fiction instead.  The result was Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-one Can Pay (2010), an account of the crisis which I found dismaying and exhilarating in equal measure.  The sheer excitement of discovering exactly what a Credit Default Swap is prevented me from feeling quite as angry as I should have at the way they and other financial instruments were used to undermine the global financial system.  Bailing out the banks has left us all poorer: some missed their bonus for a year, others lost their jobs, others their disability benefit and yet more their access to public libraries and parks.  And yet I found Lanchester's book curiously empowering.  Those of us who are not mathematically minded tend to think that we couldn't possibly understand the complex workings of the financial markets; as it turns out, there were good reasons for keeping us in this subserviant state of ignorance.  Never again, shows Lanchester, need we let anyone pull the wool over our eyes: if we want to know what's going on, who's selling what to whom under what spurious triple-A credit rating and why, we can.  Knowledge may not be power in this instance, but it might inspire us finally to get on with it and take our overdrafts somewhere else.  And that can only be a good thing.

So I was already positively disposed towards John Lanchester - not just for Whoops, but also for Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, his second and third novels.  Set over the course of the year leading up to the financial crisis, Capital zooms in on just one London street.  Pepys Road is London in miniature, a microcosm of a city whose property market has brought rich and poor into uncomfortably close proximity.  Petunia Howe, now 82, is still living in the house at no. 42 bought by her grandfather before it was even built.  Roger and Arabella Yount, by contrast, bought theirs, no. 51, for two and a half million pounds around the turn of the millenium.  The Kamal family live in a flat above the corner shop which services the needs of Pepys Road's diverse community.  Freddy Kamo, a seventeen-year-old football star fresh from his recruitment in Senegal, has just arrived at no. 27 together with his father.  Quentina Mkfesi, an asylum-seeker from Zimbabwe, patrols the streets as a traffic warden, while Bogdan (real name Zbigniew, but that's a bit of a mouthful for Arabella Yount), a builder from Poland, attends to the insatiable hunger in the street for new wet rooms and conservatories.

Pepys Road is fertile territory for a novel about having money, trying to get more of it, and losing it all.  Capital is also about the forces which shape the life of a city and how they intersect with the lives of its inhabitants as they flow in and out, seeking a share of its wealth and opportunity.  From the young footballer totally uncorrupted by his sudden rise to fame to the 40-year-old banker who finds himself in genuine need of his million-pound bonus to sustain his family's lifestyle, Lanchester demonises no-one.  If I have a criticism of Capital, however, it is of its tendency to pit the honest immigrant worker against the over-privileged native.  The builders and traffic wardens gain our sympathy while the bankers and their wives do not.  Nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable novel - one of those big 600-odd-pagers that you can devour in a week, and as such it gives a very particular pleasure.

What else have I been reading?  Some folk will know that we moved once again in January, this time to the Quaker Community in the Peak District, and the upheaval has caused several books to be read without being recorded.  Before Christmas I read a number of books on simplicity, the Quaker testimony and spiritual practice, in preparation for a weekend on decluttering which I was due to facilitate at the community.  I read Alison Moore's Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse and thoroughly recommend it: spare, menacing, impressively taught and easily worth its many accolades which have also brought its publisher, Salt, a well-deserved higher profile.  Since Capital I've read Catherine Fox's novel Angels and Men, an evocative and enjoyable campus novel set among students at a thinly-veiled Durham University.  The richness of its fictional world made me reluctant to start another novel too quickly, and so I've turned to Mark Cocker's Crow Country, which is already making me gaze upwards and try to distinguish between a rook and a jackdaw, and which I'll write about next.