Andrew Blackman

In the final part of this series of posts, I’m reviewing stories by Mavis Gallant, V.S. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hal Porter and Chinua Achebe.

Mavis Gallant (Canada) – Orphans’ Progress

According to the introduction, Gallant’s work mostly deals with broken families, and this is no exception: two girls are taken into care because their mother is irresponsible. They go to live with relatives, and then at a school run by nuns, until finally they have forgotten where they came from. At the time it seemed normal – it was the only life they knew, and they didn’t feel neglected. But at the end, passing her old home, “Mildred glanced up, and then back at her book. She had no reason to believe she had seen the place, or would ever again.” This story felt as if it could, and perhaps should, have been a novel. There was a lot happening, and I think it was too much for a short story. It relied on caring about the characters, and this would have been easier over a longer form like the novel.

V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad) – Man-man

Everyone used to think Man-man was crazy, but now the narrator is not so sure. Man-man did eccentric things, and was clever too – he got his dog to leave droppings on people’s clothes and then came by later and was given the clothes, and took them away and sold them. When the dog got run over, he became a prophet, claiming to have seen God, and built up a following. Finally he said he would be crucified, and tied himself to a cross and asked people to stone him. They hesitated, and he encouraged them more, and then finally they did start stoning him, and he started cursing and demanding to be let down again. A humorous story, but also with lots to say about the conflict between human aspirations and reality.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya) – A Meeting in the Dark

I’m referring to Ngugi by the name he now uses, although in this book the story is credited to James Ngugi. It’s about a preacher’s son who is about to go off to university, and is facing a conflict between the new and old, African and European. He’s got his girlfriend pregnant and doesn’t know what to do – she’s been circumcised, which is frowned upon by the British authorities and the Church, so he can’t marry her without offending his preacher father and destroying his own chances for career advancement. I liked the setup, but the ending felt too extreme and sudden – it was clear the character was trapped, but killing his girlfriend felt too dramatic and unrealistic. It was a very short story so it probably just needed to be established more. I liked the issues the story dealt with, though – just the ending was a letdown.

Hal Porter (Australia) – Francis Silver

This one is about the destruction of the romantic ideals of youth. The character’s mother always used to tell him stories about her courtship with Francis Silver before she married his father. It was a familiar part of his childhood, always referred to jokingly by both his mother and father. When his mother dies, he takes her store of postcards from Francis and returns them to him. But Francis can’t remember her – the romance is destroyed, and his mother’s fond memories made to seem ridiculous. He’d even planned to give Francis a lock of his mother’s hair that she’d wanted to give him but never did. But he doesn’t give it to him, and instead burns it. Meanwhile he “had made up an outline of lies to satisfy and comfort my father, for whom I felt the truth, as I saw it, to be of the wrong shape.” I love that line, and the subtle sadness of the story and what it says about the importance we place on memories that are often completely wrong.

Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) – The Sacrificial Egg

This is a very short short story, with quite a powerful ending. Like Ngugi’s story, it deals with the conflict of new and old. Julius is a clerk, and has had a Christian education which he thinks “placed him above such superstitious stuff” as the traditional beliefs of his people. But one night he is out late and hears the night spirit and starts running, and steps on an egg at a crossroads. He realises it is a sacrificial egg, put out by someone trying to get rid of misfortune, and that by stepping on it he has taken the misfortune onto himself. He still struggles to convince himself that he doesn’t believe in all that “superstitious stuff”, but it remains a fact that after he stepped on the egg, a smallpox epidemic hit the town and killed the woman he was going to marry, the woman he was visiting that night.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, Chinua Achebe, commonwealth literature, fiction, Hal Porter, Mavis Gallant, ngugi wa thiong'o, short stories, V.S. Naipaul

Continuing the series, here are my notes on the short stories by Randolph Stow, Janet Frame, Andrew Salkey and Ezekiel Mphahlele.

Randolph Stow (Australia) – Magic

This is based on the ’sulumwoya’ myth of the Trobriand Islands, where incest between a brother and a sister is the supreme sexual taboo. The introduction says he took the myth and added psychological realism and more description of the setting. But I couldn’t see much evidence of either – it felt like a traditional myth. The lust was heavily foreshadowed from the first scene where the girl drinks coconut water and the brother watches as two trickles “flowed down her body, over the brown breasts, to the waistband of her skirt.” I didn’t find the story particularly surprising or new.

Janet Frame (New Zealand) – Two Sheep and Boy’s Will

Two Sheep is a fable, based on two sheep travelling to the slaughter house. The first sheep knows its fate and the other doesn’t. The first one keeps saying how beautiful everything is, and the second one complains all the time about the heat, the dust, etc. The first one is in denial when he gets to the slaughter house, seeing it as a “pleasant little house” ready for a “seaside holiday”. But then he can deny it no longer, and slumps exhausted in a corner, where he is left for dead by the farmer and escapes.  Then he falls in with another flock, and starts complaining about the heat and dust, and the sheep next to him says how beautiful everything is.

Boy’s Will is a very different story, about a boy, Peter, with a high IQ, who is suffering under the weight of his mother’s and aunt’s expectations. He got interested in storms and began recording them:

“He’ll be a meteorologist”, his mother said, almost destroying his new passion with the weight of her tomorrow.

The pressure makes him rageful, but he finally finds pleasure in the simple act of making a kite and flying it, then patiently repairing it when the wind tears it. I liked both stories in different ways, and was impressed by the wide range of styles used by the same author.

Andrew Salkey (Panama/Jamaica) – Anancy

Salkey uses the traditional Ashanti story of the spider Anancy, but gives it a new form, exploring the fate of the African in the New World (according to the introduction!). Anancy goes on a voyage of self-discovery to the spirit world (symbolising Africa). He fights the ghosts and defeats them, but is finally defeated by his own spirit. Again according to the introduction, it shows the duality of West Indian identity, the West Indian’s inability to defeat the African presence, and they are finally reconciled. To be honest I didn’t get all of that from my first reading, but I can sort of see it now.

Ezekiel Mphahlele (South Africa) – The Living and the Dead

A racist white man, Stoffel Visser, is forced for the first time to see his servant, Jackson, as a human being, when Jackson goes missing. Stoffel speaks to Jackson’s wife, and sees a letter from Jackson’s father with pictures of his family. Finally Jackson turns up, and it turns out he was beaten up and imprisoned for responding to a white man who called him a monkey. Stoffel is forced to confront himself and his views, but quickly becomes angry, and takes refuge in action and duty as an avoidance strategy – “He did not want to think and feel. He wanted to do something.” He concentrates on dispatching a report. “He was a white man, and he must be responsible. To be white and to be responsible were the same thing.” I liked the way the story was constructed, with the initial mystery over Jackson’s disappearance, then the suggestion that Stoffel will have a great epiphany, then the more realistic outcome of restoring normality and avoiding hard questions.

Tomorrow, the final installment of this short story collection: Mavis Gallant, V.S. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hal Porter and Chinua Achebe.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews Andrew Salkey, book review, commonwealth literature, Ezekiel Mphahlele, fiction, Janet Frame, Randolph Stow, short stories

This is a continuation from yesterday’s post, which was becoming too long! Today, I’m reviewing stories by Mordecai Richler, Lee Kok Liang, Wilson Harris, Frank Sargeson and Amos Tutuola.

Mordecai Richler (Canada) – The Summer my Grandmother was Supposed to Die

The story is a narrated by a child, and starts with his grandmother being diagnosed with gangrene and a doctor saying “She won’t last a month.” Gradually she lasts longer and longer, and there are some good observations about how the family is prepared to help for weeks or months, but as it turns into years it’s very different. It was closely observed and witty sometimes, but overall it felt like quite a familiar satire of a Jewish family, and the ending was very flat.

Lee Kok Liang (Malaysia) – When the Saints Go Marching

This was really slow-moving at first, with pages of description of a man driving home, feeling a slight throb at his temples, unlocking the gates, driving up the path, turning off the engine, looking at the back of his hand, etc., etc. I found it quite dull, but it gets better as it goes into why the character feels guilty and tortured on the anniversary of independence, and tells how he kissed his sister-in-law on the day independence was proclaimed, driving her to suicide and his wife to mental illness. He is tortured by his own actions as he looks after his wife and never gets the sons he built the large house for. The disastrous consequences of that one moment felt extreme to me, but perhaps in that time and place it really would have happened like that.

Wilson Harris (Guyana) – Kanaima

The story is infused with death throughout. A group of Indians are travelling from their home village which had been destroyed, but everywhere they go they see death before them in the form of Kanaima, the spirit of death and evil. In the village of Tumatumari they can’t escape it either – they’re warned, but are too tired and have to stop. Kanaima comes that night, bringing death but in an unexpected way. Yet after all that ominous build-up, the story ends on a strangely ambiguous note, as the person who apparently plunged into a waterfall is clinging to a vine. “Kanaima alone knew whether she would reach the cliff top.” It’s a great evocation of a nightmarish world of death and the struggle for survival, and I liked that after the apparent inevitability of death there was unexpected hope.

Frank Sargeson (New Zealand) – A Man and His Wife

The language here is plain and unadorned – Sargeson was reacting against “the formal language of the English novelists”. It’s a bit reminiscent of dirty realism, although it was written earlier. The story is of a man during the slump when times were hard. His roommate has split from his wife and is really close to his dog, but then the dog gets run over and he gets a bird, and again he spends all his time with it and lavishes affection on it. He leaves the cage open so the bird can get exercise, and one day he leaves the window open too, saying the bird loves him too much to fly away. It flies away. He goes back to his wife.

I’ve still got the wife, he said. Yes, I said. The wife never let me down, he said. No, I said. It was all I could think of to say.

There’s a real lack of human relationships in the story, and the relationships with the dog and the bird are clearly substitutes. Even the narrator and his roommate don’t communicate really. Very spare and bleak, with some dark humour.

Amos Tutuola (Nigeria) – The Complete Gentleman

Tutuola bases his stories in Yoruba myths and legends, and this story had that feeling, although there were some modern details like petrol drums and bombers. The narrator is following a quest, to find the daughter of the head of the town. He discovers that she went off with someone who looked like a complete gentleman, with the finest clothes and so on. But as the gentleman left the town, he returned the clothes he’d rented from people along the way, and then returning body parts, until eventually all that was left was a skull. It’s a real morality tale, with the morals spelled out in sub-headings for those who missed them, e.g. “Do Not Follow Unknown Man’s Beauty”. I liked the bizarreness of the story, though, and it was well told.

More to follow tomorrow: Randolph Stow, Janet Frame, Andrew Salkey and Ezekiel Mphahlele.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews amos tutuola, book review, commonwealth literature, fiction, frank sargeson, lee kok liang, mordecai richler, wilson harris

There are some excellent stories in here, from big names like V.S. Naipaul, Patrick White,  George Lamming, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (although this book is so old he is credited as James Ngugi, his birth name which he rejected as a sign of colonial influence). Also some good ones from writers I didn’t know, like R.K. Narayan from India and Amos Tutuola from Nigeria.

The editors, Anna Rutherford and Donald Hannah, have also provided for each of the 18 stories a couple of pages of introduction giving background about the author and a context for the story, often linking it to others in the collection and to the rest of the author’s work, which I really liked. I made notes on each of the stories – a lot of detail, I know, but pick and choose the ones you’re interested in. I just wanted to remember the stories, because I don’t own a copy of the book. I’ve split them over several posts, so this is part 1 – R.K. Narayan, Patrick White, George Lamming and Peter Cowan.

R.K. Narayan (India) – A Horse and Two Goats

This story draws a lot of humour from the conflict of incompatible cultures, as an American tourist tries to buy a statue of a horse from an old man in a small Indian village. There is complete misunderstanding throughout, as they have no common language. The old man thinks the tourist is a police officer because of his khaki clothes, and the tourist assumes the old man owns the statue when in fact he’s just watching his goats. The tourist’s conversation is all about money, ownership and practicalities, while the old man’s replies are about tradition and spirituality. There’s also a contrast of wealth – the old man’s lifelong dream is to sell his goats to raise 20 rupees with which to start a small shop selling nuts and sweets; the tourist easily pulls out 120 rupees from his wallet to buy the statue. The horse means different things to each of them – for the old man it will become an avatar to redeem the good people at the end of the world; to the tourist it’s a commodity to be bought. And to the young people in the village, they are “hardly aware of its existence.” Really enjoyed this one.

Patrick White (Australia) – Down at the Dump

According to the introduction, White wanted to explore the narrowness of Australian suburbia, but not to be completely critical – he wanted also to show the “extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of such people”. The snooty Hogbens look down on their neighbours the Whalleys, who scour dumps for goods to use or sell. The central action is the funeral of Mrs Hogben’s sister Daise, who was shameful in the eyes of society but was actually practising Christ’s message of love, especially for the downtrodden – she took in a man she met at the showground who was down on his luck, and was ridiculed for spending time with a “scabby deadbeat” and “a Roman Catholic for extra value”. The Hogbens’ daughter Meg meets Lum Whalley at the dump, which is next to the cemetery, and they kiss. She wants to explore and discover life as her aunt Daise did, not be content with the narrow, judgmental world of her parents, which is mercilessly evoked through little details like having to clean her shoes every five minutes even though they immediately get dusty again, or to put plastic over the pixies in the garden to protect them from the rain – it’s all about surface appearances, whereas Daise and Meg are looking for something deeper and more true, even if socially unacceptable.

George Lamming (Barbados) – A Wedding in Spring

Again the comedy here is from a clash of cultures, although there’s also a serious undertone and a sadness to it, as the characters are Barbadians in England, displaced from their familiar culture and trying to mimic English customs. The lack of a cultural anchor or authority is clear – Beresford and his sister Flo argue over the marriage of Beresford to an Englishwoman, and constantly try to guess what their mother would do or want them to do. They seem adrift and far from the certainties of home. There’s some slapstick comedy, for example Beresford’s friend Knickerbocker ripping his trousers, but there’s also the sadness of living in an alien culture, trying to do the right thing but not knowing how or having the money. The friendships with the people from “back home” are strong, despite the arguments, but English people, even the bride, are virtually absent – although the wedding is central to the story, the bride is only mentioned once in passing.

Peter Cowan (Australia) – The Tractor

This is similar to White’s story in its criticism of Australian suburbia, but Cowan has no interest in finding mystery or poetry – suburbia in this story is a definitively negative thing, seeming to have a life of its own, swallowing up the land for no reason other than to give developers a tax break. It’s a relentless invasion – a hermit puts up a fight, and a developer’s wife helps him, but it feels hopeless. The wife, Ann, tries to argue against her husband, but he just says “You can’t stop progress.” She calls it “The unanswerable answer” and says “So we must all conform”. I liked the feeling evoked in this story, and how the land and suburbia seemed like characters of their own, beyond the human characters who were all pretty powerless in the end.

That’s it for now – more to follow tomorrow, with notes on Mordecai Richler, Lee Kok Liang, Wilson Harris, Frank Sargeson and Amos Tutuola.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, commonwealth literature, fiction, george lamming, patrick white, peter cowan, r.k. narayan, short stories

I liked the premise of this book. It’s set in 1983 against the backdrop of the Grenadian revolution, and is basically a love story, with a lot of complications due to the family backgrounds of Ramona and Fabian and also the turbulent political events. I like this combination of personal and political, and the plot moved nicely along, allowing the discussion of political events and racial prejudice.

What I thought didn’t work so well was that a lot of the major plot points relied on large coincidences. Ramona and Fabian get together based on a chance encounter on a street corner, and then it just so happens that Fabian’s mother had jilted Ramona’s father years ago, and so we get to hear their story too. Later in the book, when Ramona has been kidnapped, Fabian’s estranged great-grandfather (who is looking for a way to win back Fabian’s approval) just happens to be in the same hospital ward as her kidnapper and to overhear him mumbling to himself about Ramona’s precise location.

Of course coincidences do happen in real life. And perhaps in a small island like Grenada things like this are more likely than in the large countries I’ve always lived in. But still, coincidences in fiction often ring false for me. Perhaps it’s because I write fiction myself, and I know how hard it can be to arrange the plot so that particular characters have a plausible reason to meet and interact as you want them to. It can take weeks or months of thinking and rewriting to get it to happen. Having them characters just happen to turn up in the same room feels like a bit of a cheat.

Perhaps it was also that the book was quite short, just 115 pages, and so the events happened very fast. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with coincidences in themselves – they just needed more time to be set them up and established in the reader’s mind. Overall this was certainly a good read, and gave an interesting insight into a fascinating moment in history. It felt as if with an additional hundred pages to flesh out the characters and make the fast-moving plot more believable, it could have been a really excellent book, but as it stands it was, for me, enjoyable but not spectacular.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, grenada, grenadian revolution, october all over

“We all need some time to ourselves – just a few minutes a day to get reacquainted with the one who’s been there since the beginning.”

- seen in Starbuck’s, Muswell Hill

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

So it seems that due to a procedural anomaly, a whole year’s worth of novels missed out on being considered for the Booker Prize. This is being remedied by a retroactive award, with a shortlist of novels from 1970 being drawn up by three judges and then a public vote to decide the winner.

I think this is interesting – partly for a window onto a year’s writing (lots of names I recognise, but not a single book I’ve read), but also for raising questions of how we judge literature. I bet that a lot of people, like me, haven’t read any of the books, and probably won’t have read them before the votes are cast. So what will the votes be based on? Names, probably – liking other Ruth Rendell novels so assuming this one was probably good. Or perhaps they’ve read one, and will vote for that one. I’d imagine that the number of people who have read every book on the shortlist and can choose between them all on an equal basis is very small. It’s different from previous public votes, like the Best of the Booker, where you were voting for a range of high-profile books across 40 years, and there was a better chance of having actually read them. So it will be interesting to see how it works out. The choice will almost certainly be different from what it would have been had the prize actually been awarded in 1970 through the usual process.

I am happy of course for the writers too, to get some long-overdue recognition. I do feel a little sorry for those who experienced the excitement of seeing their name on the shortlist, allowed their thoughts to wander to how they would spend the £50,000 cheque that a Booker winner receives, and then saw this at the bottom of the announcement: “The winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize will receive a designer bound copy of their novel.” Hmm. Giving someone a copy of their own book is not the best prize in the world. It’s certainly not £50,000. But I suppose the real prize is the recognition, and also the nice boost to royalties from readers rediscovering your work.

Andrew Blackman Literary news lost booker, man booker prize

I’m a bit behind the times – this actually happened at the end of last year. But wanted to let you know that my debut novel On the Holloway Road has been digitised and is available as an eBook download, for those of you who are into such things.

Personally I prefer the feel of a physical book, although I suspect I’ll be convinced of the merits of electronics readers one day. I certainly like the idea of being able to search an electronic book and instantly find a passage I’m looking for, rather than leafing through page after page trying to find it. Anybody out there tried a Kindle or a Sony reader or any of the others? What are the major benefits?

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road ebook, On the Holloway Road

I got a voucher recently for £75 of free advertising on Google Adwords. I wasn’t really planning to use it, because I think Adwords is quite expensive for someone like me. I don’t exactly do a “hard sell” on this website, so even if I get extra traffic, probably only a small percentage would actually buy my book. I can’t really see how I’d make back my money (apart from of course during the free period, which only lasts a few weeks).

But I just thought I’d ask if anyone has experience of using Adwords, and if it might be useful for me after all? Do let me know if you think I’m missing out.

Andrew Blackman Interesting snippets google adwords for authors

What struck me about these stories is the similarity between traditional folk tales in different parts of the world. I grew up, of course, with British or European stories, whereas these stories are either of Carib or African origin. Yet many of them sounded familiar, not in the specifics but in the general themes — explaining the world and how things came to be the way they are, through stories with animals as characters illustrating different aspects of human behaviour.

What was also interesting about these stories was that the moral was not always clear. The spider Anansi figures heavily in the African-origin stories, and he often tricks the other animals or acts selfishly, taking advantage of their generosity or trust. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. The outcome wasn’t as predictable as I’d expected it to be.

The first few stories are from the Carib people, the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean who gave the region its name but suffered heavily under European colonisation and are now very few in number. They explain the origins of the people, saying they used to live on the moon but saw in the bright procession of worlds around them there was one that looked dull and needed cleaning. So they went down to Earth on cloud chariots to clean it, but got stuck here when the cloud chariots broke loose and floated away. They cried out to Kabo Tano ( the ‘Ancient One’) for help, and he gave them a huge Coomacka Tree with all kinds of fruit and vegetable. Then he ordered them to cut it down, and each one took cuttings from it. “And so, to this day, every Carib has food close to his dwelling.” Then there are stories to explain the animals, for example how the sun-spirit Arawidi created the dog as a companion for humans, molding it out of fish. The part he held in his hand became the nose, and that’s why every dog has a cold nose.

Then the majority of the stories are those the enslaved Africans brought with them to the West Indies from their homelands. Many of them are originally Ashanti tales – in the West African language Twi, the word for spider is “ananse”. The characters in these stories are animals, but with human characteristics, for example living in houses, wearing clothes, talking, paying each other money. Anansi the spider, the central character, is often greedy and selfish, scheming to outwit the other animals, but is portrayed sympathetically – as the weakest animal, he can’t compete physically with the tigers etc, so has to use his wits.

One interesting parallel with the Carib stories was the trajectory of all the animals living together as friends at first, before pulling apart and becoming enemies as a result of some trick. For example in the Carib stories, the reason man needed the dog as a companion was that all the other animals had deserted him after times were hard and he started hunting them to stave off his hunger. In the African stories, Anansi and Tiger used to be friends, but Anansi stole Tiger’s lunch one day and so Tiger retreated deep into the bush and Anansi hid in a tree, safe in his web.

I would be interested to know how this book was put together – what the original sources were, and how much the modern-day author Philip Sherlock adapted them. It was always a question in my mind, particularly when I saw striking parallels with other cultures. For example the character of the Wise Owl appears in both the African and Carib stories, and is of course also familiar from European stories. It’s quite amazing that people in three different corners of the world should see an owl in the same way – reminds me of the parallels I’m seeing in “The Golden Bough”, a massive compilation of myths and traditional beliefs from around the world that I’m reading gradually over several months. For me, this was the most interesting part of these stories. I enjoyed them for themselves and their characters too, but mostly for the unexpected feeling of deep familiarity.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, short stories, west indian folk tales